Johanna Krause (Holocaust survivor)

Johanna Krause (born October 23, 1907 in Dresden ; † June 13, 2001 there ) was a German Holocaust survivor.

Krause was born out of wedlock to a Hungarian Jew and a German factory owner in Dresden in 1907 and was persecuted by National Socialism and a survivor of the Shoah . She was also persecuted by the GDR dictatorship. With the help of civil rights activist, author and filmmaker Freya Klier , who also comes from Dresden, she successfully completed her legal rehabilitation shortly before the end of her life.

Life

She grew up with her single mother in poor conditions in Dresden and received help ( zedaka ) from the Jewish community. She completed her apprenticeship as a saleswoman and worked in this profession until she became self-employed and used a printing press to print the magazine Spartakus , among other things . After taking power in 1933, she was arrested for “insulting the leader”.

She secretly married the German artist Max Krause in Czechoslovakia and was re-imprisoned with her husband in 1935 for violating the Nazi Nuremberg race laws. In 1936 the couple were convicted of racial disgrace .

She was expelled as a " half-Jew " in what was then the Czechoslovak Republic. After an initial - unsuccessful - expulsion attempt, the German police officer Herbert Ossmann accompanying her tried to murder her by pushing her into the Elbe. The night before the second attempt at deportation, the German police officer and the innkeeper at the border restaurant tried to rape her . The second attempt to expel her also failed because she persuaded her companion to bring her to Dresden.

After the German occupation (" smashing the rest of the Czech Republic "), Johanna Krause was obliged to do forced labor at large clothes presses. When her advanced pregnancy became known, she had to endure a forced abortion by German doctors in the eighth month, during which she was simultaneously forcibly sterilized . Then she was deported to three German concentration camps. One of them was the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944 , where she mistakenly received a red triangle instead of a Jewish star and identified her as a political prisoner and thus saved her from being exterminated in the gas chambers . Due to this coincidence and her typhoid disease shortly before the end of the war, she survived z. B. an SS shooting operation near Kladrau . She was liberated by members of the US armed forces, had to spend several months in a hospital and returned to Dresden.

Krause found her husband Max again and lived with him in Dresden, where they helped rebuild the GDR. Her mother was murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp . From the beginning of May 1946, the Krause couple ran the Eisenacher Hof restaurant in Striesen for more than ten years , which was popular with artists and party circles alike. In her restaurant, she identified the former German SS officer Herbert Ossmann, who had raped and tried to murder her during the Nazi era, as the SED party secretary: “I saw everything that I had in my hands, the glasses and that Dishes, down on his lap [...] I recognized the man who wanted to kill me. "

The unsuccessful attempt to prosecute and rehabilitate in a GDR court was followed by anti-Semitic attacks. She was imprisoned together with her husband in the same prison in which she had already been put during the Nazi dictatorship for "insulting the leader" and for racial disgrace. The couple lost the operating license for the restaurant. Herbert Ossmann, who later “apparently worked for the Soviet secret service”, made a career as a functionary of the GDR unity party SED and operated Johanna Krause's exclusion from the SED.

In 2000 Krause was honored with the Peace Prize of the Dresden AnStiftung . She was an active member of Dresden's Jewish community . In 2001 Johanna Krause died at the age of 93.

Works

• Persecuted twice: a woman from Dresden tells the story . Recorded by Carolyn Gammon and Christiane Hemker. 2nd Edition. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-936411-42-5 .

documentary

After the fall of the Berlin Wall , Freya Klier worked on the life story and in 1996 published the documentary Johanna - a Dresden ballad for the MDR . The 30-minute long documentary film from 1996 describes the two persecution of the German citizen of Jewish descent during the Nazi dictatorship and the GDR dictatorship. In the course of the making of the documentary and Krause's rehabilitation, the autobiography followed. Together with the Canadian writer Carolyn Gammon and Christiane Hemker, tape reports were created that were published as a book.

Web links

• Literature by Johanna Krause in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Johanna Krause: Persecuted twice: a Dresden Jewess tells . Recorded by Carolyn Gammon and Christiane Hemker. 2nd Edition. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-936411-42-5 , p. 44 .
2. ↑ Carolyn Gammon: Johanna Krause: "As a child, I was a Zille figure." In: ravensbrückblätter 27 (2008) 106. March 2008, accessed March 20, 2014 . 
3. ^ Johanna Krause: Persecuted twice: a Dresden Jewess tells . Recorded by Carolyn Gammon and Christiane Hemker. 2nd Edition. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-936411-42-5 , p. 51-56 .
4. ^ Johanna Krause: Persecuted twice: a Dresden Jewess tells . Recorded by Carolyn Gammon and Christiane Hemker. 2nd Edition. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-936411-42-5 , p. 152 .
5. ^ ^{A b} Marlies Emmerich: Reunion with the tormentor. In: Berliner Zeitung . June 25, 2008, accessed March 20, 2014 .