Hilde Berger (resistance fighter)

Hilde Berger (born June 13, 1914 in Berlin ; † November 17, 2011 in the United States ), later Hilde Berger-Olsen, was a resistance fighter against National Socialism and secretary to Oskar Schindler .

Life

The daughter of a Jewish tailor from Poland initially joined a Zionist youth organization before 1933 . She then became a member of the Trotskyist Left Opposition of the KPD and, after the NSDAP came to power, was illegally active in Berlin for its successor organization, the IKD . Shortly after the arrest of her younger brother Hans Berger in autumn 1935, who served as the Reich courier of the IKD, she was arrested by the Gestapo in early 1936 as part of the break-up of the Berlin IKD group and held in a penitentiary until May 1939 .

The members of the IKD foreign leadership Walter Held and Josef Weber tried in vain to organize the trip to Great Britain or Norway or a Nansen passport for Hilde Berger, who was particularly vulnerable as a stateless Jew , and instead was deported to Poland. After the German invasion of Poland , Hilde Berger was initially deported to Poland and lived in or near Boryslaw . There she became an employee of Berthold Beitz and was protected until he was no longer active there. Then she did not come to Auschwitz , but to the Plaszow concentration camp near Cracow. A little later she got the opportunity to work there in Oskar Schindler's Krakow armaments factory. There she was involved in drawing up the list of prisoners who were allowed to be taken to the newly built subcamp Brünnlitz .

After the end of the Second World War , Berger moved to the USA , where he married the former bodyguard Trotsky , Alex Olsen , and lived for a long time in New York, where she worked in 1995 for the documentary Blissful in New York made by Yoash Tatari . The regulars' table of the emigrants was interviewed. After Alex Olsen's death, she moved to Denver, Colorado. She passed away in 2011.

literature

• Peter Berens: Trotskyists against Hitler. Neuer ISP-Verlag, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-89900-121-1 (especially p. 142 and 196)
• Marcel Bois: Hilde Berger (1914–2011). A Jewish communist against Hitler and Stalin , in: Gisela Notz (Hrsg.): Wegbereiterinnen. Famous, well-known and unjustly forgotten women from history, Neu-Ulm 2018, p. 370f.  
• Reinhard Hesse (Ed.): I put myself on Schindler's list. The story of Hilde and Rose Berger. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8379-2273-8 (with a foreword by Berthold Beitz)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hilde Olsen on deathfigures.com
2. ↑ Bernd Schmalhausen : Berthold Beitz in the Third Reich. Human in inhuman times , 1991 and personal information from Hilde Berger
3. ↑ Testimony of the witness Be. in the trial against Fritz Hildebrand , at: LG Bremen, May 6, 1953 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. X, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1973, No. 355 pp. 661–703 Mass and individual shootings of Jews in Eastern Galicia: shooting of around 700 Jews from the remaining ghetto and labor camp in Tarnopol (May 1943); about 170 Jewish women, girls and children of a work detachment of the Drohobycz camp (June 1943); of about 550 Jewish workers from two work details of the Drohobycz camp (August 1943); of about 300 Jews who went into hiding in the Boryslaw camp in order to evade the 'resettlement actions' (February 1943) and of 80 small Jewish children from Boryslaw (spring 1944). Individual shooting of a rabbi, as well as four Jews who were picked up again after trying to escape from KL Boryslaw - some in possession of firearms - and a Jewish couple who accused the defendant of lying about the fate of the Jews. ( Memento of the original from March 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ http://www1.yadvashem.org/righteous/bycountry/germany/pdf/P.41_44_11.pdf , Hilde Berger's name is on p. 1
5. ^ Eva Pfister: Review of Steffen Mensching: Jacobs Leiter. dradio.de, July 23, 2003
6. ↑ Preface. ( Memento from January 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) sbg.ac.at
7. ↑ The film series "made at East Coast". ( Memento of the original from October 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. herden.de  
8. ↑ Review by: Dorothee Lottmann-Kaeseler. Title: "I wrote myself on Schindler's list" ( Memento of the original from October 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. psychosozial-verlag.de