Josef Weiss (contemporary witness)

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The businessman Josef Weiss (born as Joseph W. on May 16, 1893 in Flamersheim ; died on September 12, 1976 in Jerusalem ), nickname "Jupp Weiss", was a German witness of the Nazi persecution of Jews (Holocaust) from the beginning . As a concentration camp prisoner in 1944/45, he was forced to carry out organizational tasks for the concentration camp administration for four months as a prisoner functionary , as a so-called “Jewish elder”, in the so-called star camp , a part of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . He often campaigned successfully for his fellow inmates. After the end of the war, he campaigned to punish the perpetrators and to educate the population about the crimes during the Nazi persecution of Jews.

Life

Josef Weiss was officially registered in the former mayor's office in Cuchenheim on May 19, 1893 as Joseph. His Rhenish nickname was "Jupp" for life. He was the second youngest of nine children. His ancestors come from Holland ( Limburg and Noord-Brabant provinces ), then settled near the Eifel at the beginning of the 18th century. He attended elementary school in Flamersheim and then did an apprenticeship in connection with a commercial college. He found his first job in the Cologne department store Michel & Co in the cathedral city of Cologne, which belonged to his mother's brothers.

A six-year military service followed. During the First World War , Josef Weiss distinguished himself as a fighter at the front, was a sergeant and received the Iron Cross 2nd class (EK II).

As the personnel manager of the Michel company and an administrative specialist, he later also dealt privately with German-Jewish literature and became a staunch Zionist . In 1922 he married the opera singer Erna Falk, well-known in the Rhineland (July 2, 1893 in Krefeld - May 6, 1945 in Tröbitz / Niederlausitz).

He was arrested in 1933 and then fled from the National Socialists to Aerdenhout in Holland, where he took over activities and functions with the Dutch Zionist Association in Haarlem and Hilversum and an aid organization for German emigrants and Jewish refugees and worked as an active escape helper.

From January 29, 1942, he and his family were imprisoned in the " Kamp Westerbork police transit camp ". There he volunteered to look after around 150 young people who had emigrated and set up a kind of camp school for them. As an organizer of Jewish affairs, J. Weiss was able to save lives in Westerbork by forging lists and alleged contacts with the Vatican .

At first it was put back on the " two thousand list ", then on 10/11. January 1944 he was transferred as an “economically valuable Jew” to the “residence” or “exchange camp” in Bergen-Belsen on a Zionist transport. However, he was not on the “ Palestinian list ”.

Weiss was first the second deputy of the corrupt Greek Jewish elder Albala, then from 23 December in his function in the star camp of Bergen-Belsen and was also responsible for the internal camp administration. The archive material in the Netherlands, Germany and Israel shows him to be an undisputed personality.

The Australian writer Hetty E. Verolme characterized “Jupp” Weiss as the “Rock of Gibraltar” because he was committed to the terrorized Jews in the “Star Camp”. "He undertook a lot without, however, becoming daring" (Eli Dasberg). Professor Eberhard Kolb confirmed ". He has rendered outstanding services to the occupants of the Star Camp" Famous was the report by Jupp Weiss about the " Seder -Feier 1945 in the Children's House of Belsen", ie the time in a concentration camp barracks , the was later translated into several languages. This is the celebration on the eve of Passover . In it, the family (or the community) commemorates the exodus from Egypt with a feast .

In April 1945, Josef Weiss left Bergen-Belsen with his wife Erna and about 2,400 other people on a prisoner transport known as the Lost Train for Theresienstadt in the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia . After an almost two-week odyssey through still unoccupied parts of Germany, this train finally stopped near the Brandenburg municipality of Tröbitz , where it was liberated by the Red Army on April 23, 1945 . Erna Weiss also fell victim to a typhus epidemic that raged among the former occupants of the train in Tröbitz after the liberation of the train and cost over 300 lives. On the initiative of Josef Weiß, corpses buried at various stations on the Lost Train were exhumed in 1960. In Wichmannsburg , a district of the municipality of Bienenbüttel in the Uelzen district, Weißhilfe was able to recover the remains of eleven dead. Three dead were then transferred to the Netherlands. The remaining eight dead were buried in the Wichmannsburg war cemetery in the cemetery of St. George's Church .

Even after his liberation, Josef Weiss was still involved in rescue measures. As a former "Jewish elder from Bergen-Belsen" he was a widely accepted and recognized Jewish contemporary witness after the Second World War .

literature

  • Hetty E. Verolme: We children from Bergen-Belsen. Beltz, Weinheim, Basel 2005. ISBN 978-3-407-74202-5
  • Eberhard Kolb: Bergen-Belsen. From “residence camp” to concentration camp 1943–1945. First published in 1962. 5th revised and greatly expanded edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1996, ISBN 3-525-36184-X . 2011 New edition of the 1962 edition by LIT-Verlag Münster
  • Alexandra-Eileen Wenck: Between human trafficking and the “final solution”. The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Schöningh, Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich 2000. ISBN 3-506-77511-1 .
  • Hans-Dieter Arntz : Judaica - Jews in the Voreifel. Euskirchen 1983. ISBN 3-9800787-0-1 .
  • Hans-Dieter Arntz: Josef Weiss, a hero in the time of the Holocaust. In: Yearbook 2008 of the Euskirchen district. Euskirchen, 2007, pp. 78-86.
  • Hans-Dieter Arntz: The last Jewish elder from Bergen-Belsen. Josef Weiss - worthy in an unworthy environment. Helios, Aachen 2012. ISBN 978-3-86933-082-2 .
  • Thomas Rahe : Hear Israel. Jewish religiosity in National Socialist concentration camps. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999. ISBN 3-525-01378-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Dieter Arntz: Jupp Weiss from Flamersheim, the Jewish elder from Bergen-Belsen ( memento from September 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), on www.flamersheim.de, accessed on May 16, 2013. (the text on Weiss is on the website a little further down)
  2. ↑ Michael Jorek: The memorial stone on the cemetery in Wichmannsburg . In: Ev.-luth. St. Georgs-Kirchengemeinde (Hrsg.): St. Georgs-Bote . Wichmannsburg 2020, p. 42-44 .
personal data
SURNAME Weiss, Josef
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weiss, Jupp (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German contemporary witness of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Flamersheim
DATE OF DEATH September 12, 1976
Place of death Jerusalem