Max Windmüller

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Max Windmüller , called "Cor" ( February 7, 1920 in Emden , East Friesland - April 21, 1945 near Winklarn (Upper Palatinate) ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism . After he and his parents had to flee the National Socialists to the Netherlands because of their Jewish origins , he joined the Westerweel group there and saved the lives of many Jewish children and young people. The members of the Westerweel group organized identification documents, hiding places and escape routes, especially for German-Jewish children and young people who had fled Nazi Germany . In this group, Jews and members of other faith communities worked together to save the Jewish persecuted. Such cooperation was not a given in the Netherlands either. Around 100 young Jews were personally smuggled into freedom by Windmüller, the entire Westerweel group saved 393 Jews. In July 1944, a secret meeting in Paris was stormed by the Gestapo . Windmüller and other members of the Jewish resistance were arrested. After interrogation and torture in the Gestapo headquarters, they were detained in the Drancy camp . Shortly before the liberation of the camp by Allied troops, Windmüller was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp on the last transport from occupied France . On April 21, 1945 he was shot by an SS member on a death march .

Life

childhood

Max Windmüller's ancestors had lived in Germany for more than 200 years. Max was born on February 7, 1920 as the son of the butcher and cattle dealer Moritz Windmüller and Jette Windmüller, nee. Seligmann, born and had four siblings. His parents gave him the first name Max after his father's brother, who died in the First World War . From 1926 to 1933 he attended the Jewish elementary school near the synagogue in Emden. In his senior year at school he became a member of the Socialist Workers' Youth . Shortly after the takeover of power, the family came into the focus of the National Socialists. During the boycott they organized of all Jewish shops in Emden, an SA troop visited the family's home and demanded that the business permit be issued .

Escape to the Netherlands

After the German authorities in Emden had stripped the father of the business basis , the family fled to the Netherlands in 1933 . The escape took the family via Delfzijl to Beilen to a sister of their mother. From there it went on to Groningen . Here Windmüller and his brother Isaak joined a group of children and young people's Aliyah that organized the emigration of young people to Palestine . Isaac became the leader of this group, and Max completed agricultural training on a farm near Assen in preparation for emigrating to Palestine . Shortly before the beginning of the war in 1939, his brother Isaak fled to Palestine on the ship Dora , which was bringing illegal emigrants there.

Max, who was already on board, was persuaded by Rue Cohen , the organizer of the training for Palestine pioneers, to go ashore again; He was supposed to continue building up the child and youth Aliyah and to accommodate young Jews from Germany and Austria as part of the Hachschara for training for Palestine on Dutch farms. During this time, Max met his future fiancée Metta Lande from Vienna in a home of the youth Alija in Loosdrecht .

In 1940 the neutral Netherlands was invaded and occupied by the German Wehrmacht . Now the Jews living there were also exposed to persecution by the National Socialists. Taken by the German occupiers caught and in the - in 1941 it came for the Jews in the Netherlands to a traumatic event, when 900 Jews - all of them young people Mauthausen deported were. Almost all of them had been murdered in Mauthausen by the end of September. The German occupation authorities threatened anyone who did not follow their orders with deportation to Mauthausen.

Faced with this danger, many of the young people willing to emigrate prepared for a life underground . They were supported by Dutch helpers. Windmüller met his future fiancée Metta Lande, a Jewish woman who had fled from Vienna . In July 1942, the National Socialists began mass deportations from the Netherlands; Tens of thousands of Jews were brought to the Westerbork transit camp , from where weekly transports to the Auschwitz and Sobibor extermination camps left. Among the deportees were Windmüller's mother and his brother Salomon along with their wife and their child, who was only a few weeks old.

Westerweel group

Joop Westerweel

During this time, Windmüller and his younger brother Emil hid in various places in the Netherlands, including for 13 months in attics in Amsterdam and Haarlem . He joined the Westerweel group , whose leader was the staunch pacifist Joop Westerweel . This group had dedicated itself to the organization of hiding places and identity papers for Jewish refugees in the Netherlands. On August 14, 1942, the Amsterdam Jewish Council learned of the planned deportation of all children and young people and their tutors. The group around Windmüller was informed about this in good time by Erika Blüth . On August 16, 1942, more than thirty Jewish youths disappeared from a Deventer Vereniging home in Loosdrecht - three days after the leaders of the Palestine Pioneers learned that the “children” were to be picked up and taken to the so-called Westerbork Jewish transit camp. We managed to find “hiding addresses” for all of them at short notice. Windmüller, however, was caught by the Gestapo for the first time and taken to the Westerbork transit camp, but was able to escape in a laundry cart after just two days. He went into hiding with Frans and Henny Gerritsen in Haarlem, where his brother Emil was also hidden with up to ten "Onderduikers" (people in hiding). Here was one of the centers of the Dutch underground. Frans was a graphic artist and was able to forge the urgently needed passports, ration cards, marching orders and other documents in cooperation with resistance people in the local government. Windmüller received new papers, was now officially called Cornelius Andringa and called himself Cor. In 1943 the resistance group around Joop Westerweel, Menachem Pinkhof , Joachim Simon and Max Windmüller made contact with other Jewish groups, the Jewish Agency and the Joint (American Joint Distribution Committee) via Belgium and France . Windmüller and his group organized escape routes to the unoccupied south of France and across the Pyrenees to Spain .

Windmillers in France

At the end of 1943, Max Windmüller became a liaison for Jews in occupied France under his alias Cor . A whole group of young people worked with him, struggling for their own survival and that of their fellow Jewish fates. In April 1944, Cor was on one of his rescue trips to Holland when a first group of combatants was arrested by the Secret State Police (Gestapo) in his Paris apartment .

Cor and his comrades tried everything to find the whereabouts of those arrested and to free them. His comrade Paula Kaufmann smuggled herself into the Gestapo headquarters in Chinatown as a secretary . The two pretended to be lovers when Max picked them up from work. Paula always came out of headquarters with her boss and thus avoided the controls. She brought out secret documents and blank papers in her pocket. Cor now had an ID as a security officer for the occupied territories in France and, thanks to his freedom of movement, was able to set up escape routes to southern France and across the Pyrenees to Spain. All of them - Jewish refugees, mostly from Austria and Germany, including Max's fiancée Metta Lande - presented themselves to the occupation authorities as Dutch. Tens of thousands of civilian workers - Belgians, Danes, Dutch - were used to build the Atlantic Wall . The Jewish refugees “swam” with these crowds, which were on their way from one job to another. Cors's task was, among other things, to pick up the individual refugees at the so-called green border - at illegal border crossings - and to smuggle them through Belgium to the south of France.

“Kop op!” (Cheer up!) - as some of the rescued remembered later - was the word with which Cor encouraged the young refugees, terrified and humiliated by the terror of the Nazis.

Cor traveled tirelessly between the Netherlands, Belgium, northern France (Paris, Brittany) and southern France (Toulouse, Lyon). In this way he succeeded in smuggling about a hundred young people into freedom. This is how Cor saved his brother Emil. Of the total of 716 young Jews living “on Hajsharah” in the Netherlands, 393 survived through the commitment of the Westerweel group.

In contact with the "Résistance Juive" operating in Vichy France, Cor and his group were involved in an unsuccessful attempt to free captured Chaverim (comrades). They also wanted to connect the “Armée Juive”, which is currently being set up, with the British Secret Intelligence Service . They were deceived: The contact people, called "Lydia" and "Charles", worked as double agents not only for the British secret service, but also for the Gestapo.

arrest

On July 18, 1944, a secret meeting of the Jewish Resistance in the Rue Erlanger in Paris was stormed by the Gestapo after it had been betrayed by the double agent Karl Rebh . Windmüller and other members of the Jewish resistance, u. a. André Amar, Henri Pohoryles , Ernst Appenzeller , César Chamy and Maurice Loebenberg were arrested. The arrest warrant was for high treason, favoring the enemy and espionage. Metta escaped arrest by a happy coincidence. The arrested were taken to the Gestapo headquarters in the Rue de la Pompe , interrogated and also tortured, from which Loebenberg died. The remainder were taken to Drancy Camp via Fresnes Prison. From there, more than 61,000 people - Jews and resistance fighters - were deported to the death camps. From the group around Cor there were also Kurt Reilinger (Nanno), Paula Kaufmann, Alfred Fraenkel (Tzippy), Ernst Hirsch, Ernst Ascher, Gert Sperber, Paul Wolf and from the French group René Kapel, Jacques Lazarus and others.

Buchenwald concentration camp

Buchenwald concentration camp

When the liberation of the camp by Allied troops was imminent, Cor and another 50 people were deported from occupied France on the last transport. Alois Brunner , who had been the head of a special command of the Gestapo in the Drancy camp since July 1943, had a wagon with the inscription: “Jews Terrorists” attached to the train with which he himself fled France. A show trial of the alleged “Jewish world conspiracy” was likely to be staged at a later date. Metta and friends followed the trail of the train in a car to the border in Liège, but could no longer help her fiancé. Although 21 prisoners managed to escape on the way, Cor was not among them. Max Windmüller was registered on August 25, 1944 in Buchenwald concentration camp as a newcomer under the prisoner number 54573 as a stateless Jew, occupation "farm worker". In addition to the yellow triangle for Jewish prisoners, he had to wear the red triangle for political prisoners. On September 20, 1944, Windmüller was sent to a field detachment in Bochum to do forced labor in an armored plate factory owned by Eisen- und Hüttenwerk AG (now part of ThyssenKrupp AG ). He was appointed as a guard over his chamber with 16 fellow prisoners and after a few days asked to treat them more strictly. When he refused, he was assigned to the very hardest work. The food ration consisted of ¾ liter of soup and 200 grams of bread a day. From March 7, 1945, Windmüller was again listed in the Buchenwald camp file.

Death march from the Buchenwald concentration camp

Headquarters at the entrance to the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial

On April 3, 1945, the last roll call was made in Buchenwald before the SS camp commandant Hermann Pister . The next day he gave the order to "evacuate" all Jewish prisoners. From April 7 to 10, 1945 - shortly before the arrival of the American army - some of the Jewish prisoners were rounded up in the halls of the German equipment works. Over 10,000 prisoners were set off in several transports to the Flossenbürg concentration camp (near Weiden on the border with German-occupied Czechoslovakia). The first column was supposed to reach its destination on foot, but the prisoners were "on no account allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy". All the prisoners who remained weak were therefore killed or shot by the accompanying SS men. Already on the first kilometer of this death march from Buchenwald to Weimar , 40 prisoners were murdered and brought back to the camp crematorium on the same day . There were 238 victims on the short stretch between Orlamünde and the Bavarian border.

Others were transported to Flossenbürg in open freight cars, including Paul Wolf and Max Windmüller. Because of the advance of the Americans, their column was forced to walk to the Dachau concentration camp . On this death march , too , countless prisoners were left lying down as a result of physical weakness and mistreatment and were beaten to death or shot by the SS. Out of an estimated 4,000 prisoners, only about 300 arrived in Dachau. On the march, Max Windmüller was shot dead by an SS member on April 21, 1945 after he had left the column to rest - exhausted from pneumonia and fever .

Metta Lande, Max Windmüller's fiancée, survived the Holocaust and later moved to Israel.

Commemoration

Monument in the Westerweel Memorial Forest near Haifa

In 1946, Windmüller was posthumously awarded the Médaille de la Résistance . In various places today, the life and resistance struggle of Windmüller is remembered, for example in Yad Vashem . In the Westerweel Memorial Forest, near Haifa , there is a memorial for Joop Westerweel , Max Windmüller and their comrades-in-arms from the Jewish resistance movement, and the house of ghetto fighters in Kibbutz Lochamej haGeta'ot ( Israel ) also honors him as a resistance fighter. There is also a memorial in the former Flossenbürg concentration camp. In Emden , Webergildestrasse (until 1933: Judenstrasse) was renamed Max-Windmüller-Strasse on November 8, 1998, and a stumbling block was laid in October 2012 in honor of Windmüller. In 2015 the Max-Windmüller-Gymnasium Emden was inaugurated in the Früchteburg district .

literature

  • Berrie J. Asscher: Van Mokum naar Jerusalem (1924-1944). Beersheva 1996.
  • Yigael Benjamin: They were our friends. A memorial for the members of the Hachsharot and Helalutz underground in Holland, murdered in the holocaust. Tel Aviv 1990.
  • Jean-Francois Chaigneau: Le dernier Wagon. Paris 1981. ISBN 2-260-00273-0
  • Marianne Claudi, Reinhard Claudi (eds.): Who we have lost. Life stories of Emden Jews. Aurich 1991. ISBN 3-925365-31-1
  • René S. Kapel: Un rabbin dans la tourmente (1940-1944). Center de documentation juive contemporaine, Paris 1986.
  • Anny Latour: The Jewish Resistance in France 1940–1944. Holocaust Library, New York 1981. ISBN 0-89604-026-7
  • Lucien Lazare: La résistance Juive en France. Un combat pour la survie. Paris 2001. ISBN 2-902969-73-2
  • Jacques Lazarus: Les Juifs au combat. Témoignage sur l'activité d'un mouvement de resistance. Center de documentation juive contemporaine CDJC, Paris 1947.
  • Klaus Meyer-Dettum: Max Windmüller (1920–1945). A research. Working group Jews in Emden , Emden 1997, online , edited

Individual references / comments

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Klaus Meyer van Dettum: Max Windmüller, known as Cor - a savior in nonviolent resistance, 1920–1945. In: Max Windmüller Society. Max-Windmüller-Gesellschaft, accessed on February 11, 2020 .
  2. ^ A b Rolf Uphoff: Max Windmüller. City of Emden, accessed on February 11, 2020 .
  3. ^ Working group Jews in Emden (ed.): Max Windmüller (1920–1945) - A research by Klaus Meyer Dettum, Emden 1997, p. 3
  4. ↑ later real name: Henry Paz; Member of the “Organization Juive de Combat”, 1939 teacher in La Guette and La Bourboule. Underground pseudonym: Baloux
  5. ↑ born 1926. As a child in La Guette in 1939, died in Israel in 1974
  6. ↑ In the article about Pierre Brossolette the address of the Gestapo headquarters is given as Avenue Foch No. 84, which is also according to other research is correct. There was an office of the Gestapo in the Rue de la Pompe, but not the headquarters. A list of all Gestapo offices in Paris can be found here
  7. ↑ Emder street names through the ages ( memento from January 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF file; 123 kB), accessed on September 30, 2012.

Web links

This article was added to the list of excellent articles on June 14, 2006 in this version .
personal data
SURNAME Windmüller, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH February 7, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Emden
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1945
Place of death Cham