Mohamed Helmy

Berlin memorial plaque in Berlin-Moabit (Krefelder Strasse 7)

Mohamed Helmy , also Mo (h) d Helmy ( Arabic محمد حلمي, DMG Muḥammad Ḥalmī , Hebrew מוחמד חילמי, born July 25, 1901 in Khartoum ; died January 10, 1982 in Berlin ) was an Egyptian-German doctor who made it possible for several Jews and other persecuted people to survive in hiding in Berlin during the Nazi era .

In 2013 he was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem , as the only Egyptian among around 70 Muslims to date.

life and work

Helmy was the son of an Egyptian major Said Helmy from a well-being family of officers and his mother Amisa. In 1922 he went to the University of Berlin to study medicine . After passing the medical state examination in 1929 and obtaining a license to practice medicine in 1931, he worked at the Moabit Hospital , where around two thirds of the doctors were Jewish. In December 1937, he completed his residency training for internists and was in the same year doctorate .

After the seizure of power of the Nazis , the Jewish doctors were released on 1 April 1933 abused and sometimes killed. According to the National Socialist race theory, Helmy was Hamitic (descendant of Ham , a son of Noah ) and thus defined as a "non-Aryan", but was allowed to continue practicing as a senior physician until June 30, 1937. Unlike Jews, Arabs were not persecuted, only marriage to an “Aryan” German was prohibited.

In October 1939, after the German invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War , Helmy was interned with other Egyptian compatriots for a few months. Because Egypt was in fact subject to the British protectorate , the Nazi regime wanted to use the Egyptians as bargaining chip for an exchange of prisoners with Great Britain. Since the Nazi regime was also urgently interested in good relations with the Arab world, she was released again in early May 1940. Helmy just had to report to the Gestapo regularly .

In 1941 he was hired to represent a German doctor who had been called up and was given his own practice. Here Helmy took in a 17-year-old Romanian-Jewish girl, Anna Boros. As a Romanian citizen, the Nazi authorities announced that she was to be deported to her country of origin in March 1942 and was massively endangered by her Jewish origins. The first deportation train from Berlin to the Litzmannstadt ghetto had already left Grunewald on October 18, 1941. She had asked the Romanian consulate in Berlin how she wrote after the war: "The officer advised me not to go to Romania under any circumstances, because I would never get there and I would be certain of death." This was the occasion for Anna Boros, in the illegality to go - just as her grandmother and her uncle a few days earlier.

Although he was at risk and exposing himself further by taking the step, Helmy decided to help. Anna's mother, Julie Wehr, was initially protected from deportation by marrying a non-Jewish German. When the Gestapo was looking for 17-year-old Anna, her mother declared that she had left. This was not believed, the mother was arrested and Helmy's apartment was also searched. Anna Boros: “He cleverly avoided all investigations by the Gestapo. Several times, Dr. During this time Helmy met acquaintances for a few days if there was any danger, and I was then considered his niece from Dresden. When the danger was over, I returned to the arbor. ”The doctor also helped Anna's mother, her stepfather Georg Wehr and her grandmother Cecilie Rudnik. He treated her medically, provided her with food and medicine. He found accommodation for his grandmother in Frieda Szturmann's apartment . For over a year this woman hid and protected Anna's grandmother and shared her rations with her. Irena Steinfeld: "[...] and when he came under investigation again, it got tricky." In 1944 the Wehrs were arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. They revealed that the doctor had helped them and had hidden Anna. Helmy reacted immediately, took Anna to Frieda Szturmann and showed the police a letter from Anna, from which it emerged that she was staying with her aunt in Dessau. The whole family survived the Shoah .

Grave of Mod Helmy in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Westend

Anna Boros wrote after her rescue: “What Dr. Helmy did for me, was selfless and I will always be grateful to him for that. ”She went to New York , married and was then called Anna Gutmann. After the liberation from National Socialism, Helmy practiced as a general practitioner in Berlin until the end of his life . He married his long-time fiancée Emmy Anna Auguste Ernst (1916–1998) on June 4, 1945. The couple remained childless. In 1962 he was recognized as a hero by the Berlin Senate .

Frieda Szturmann died in 1962, Mohammed Helmy in 1982 at the age of 80. He was buried in the state's own cemetery in Heerstraße in the Charlottenburg district in today's Berlin-Westend district (grave location: II-Ur 7-184).

A memorial plaque was unveiled in his honor on July 4, 2014 in front of his former home at Krefelder Straße 7 in Berlin-Moabit .

Righteous among the peoples

On March 18, 2013, Mohammed Helmy and Frieda Szturmann were posthumously recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations . He is the first Arab to receive this award. The reason was: “Despite his own persecution by the National Socialists, Helmy spoke out against the prevailing politics and risked his life for his Jewish friends.” Yad Vashem does not see this as a political decision, emphasized Irena Steinfeldt. An independent commission decides on the honor, which is awarded exclusively for personal merit. Among the around 25,000 award winners so far ( as of November 2013 ), 88 were Muslims , mostly Albanians . The decision nevertheless attracted worldwide attention.

The award was triggered by research by the Berlin doctor Karsten Mülder on Helmy's life story. He had come to know it by chance. The owner of the house in Krefelder Strasse 7, where Mülder set up his practice, lived in the apartment above with Helmy. Mülder forwarded his research to Yad Vashem.

In a ceremony on January 20, 2015 in Berlin, the Israeli ambassador, Yakov Hadas-Handelsman , presented the Yad Vashem certificates and medals to the descendants of Frieda Szturmann and Max Naujocks , who also received the award.

The award for Mohamed Helmy could not initially be handed over. An Egyptian diplomat paid tribute to “the noble deeds of Helmy” in Israel, but was unable to accept the medal on his behalf. The certificate and medal are only given to the rescuer himself or to family members, because every rescuer acted out of his own conviction and not on behalf of a government. A distant relative in Cairo refused to accept the award despite respecting Judaism and Jews. "If any other country offered to honor Helmy, we would have been happy with it," said the great-niece, "but not from Israel." "If any other country would honor him - we would be happy," said one nephew and one Helmy's great-nephew in Cairo to the author Ronen Steinke , who researched Helmy's life story. “Helmy helped everyone, regardless of their religion. Now Israel wants to honor him specifically for helping Jews. That doesn't do justice to his attitude and his life's work. "

Yad Vashem regretted this decision and continued to look for family members to present the award. On October 26, 2017, the honor was finally presented posthumously to Helmy's great-nephew Nasser Kotby in Berlin. The honor consists of a certificate of honor and a medal adorned with a quote from the Mishnah tractate Sanhedrin :

"Whoever saves a human life has saved a whole world, as it were."

- Compare Sura 5:32

publication

• Mohd Helmy: About the occurrence of sterile pus in the urinary bladder in real (renal) anuria , Berlin, 1937, DNB 570704618 , OCLC 699518618 (Medical dissertation University of Berlin 1937, 23 pages).

literature

• Ronen Steinke : The Muslim and the Jewess. The story of a rescue in Berlin . Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-8270-1351-4 .
• Igal Avidan / Helmut Kuhn : Mod Helmy. How an Arab doctor in Berlin saved Jews from the Gestapo. dtv, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-423-28146-1 .

Web links

• Dr. Mohamed Helmy and Frieda Szturmann - Rescued by an Egyptian in Berlin on the website of Yad Vashem

Individual evidence

1. ^ Egyptian Doctor Recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem , Yad Vashem press release of September 30, 2013; Retrieved June 20, 2017.
2. ↑ Mohamed Helmy on the Yad Vashem website
3. ↑ ^{a b} First Arab to finally receive Israeli honor as Holocaust hero , Arutz Sheva. October 25, 2017. 
4. ^ Ronen Steinke: Middle East Berlin. In: Jüdische Allgemeine (online). Central Council of Jews in Germany, August 17, 2017, accessed on October 25, 2017 . 
5. ↑ Mod Helmy on Moabit Online , accessed May 26, 2017.
6. ↑ Ronen Steinke: The Muslim and the Jewess. The story of a rescue in Berlin . 2017, p. 24 .
7. ↑ Sabine and Karsten Mülder: Posthumous: Yad Vashem honors a Berlin doctor who helped persecuted people under the Nazi regime. The internist Dr. Mod Helmy - a "Righteous One Among the Nations" . In: KV-Blatt , 12/2013, Kassenärztliche Vereinigung Berlin, pp. 32–33.
8. ↑ Ronen Steinke: The Muslim and the Jewess. The story of a rescue in Berlin . 2017, p. 23-38 .
9. ↑ Ronen Steinke: The Muslim and the Jewess. The story of a rescue in Berlin . 2017, p. 33, 58 .
10. ↑ ^{a b c} Igal Avidan: The courageous Doctor Helmy. Egyptians offered shelter to Jews until the end of World War II . Deutschlandradio Kultur , November 8, 2013, accessed on November 14, 2016.
11. ↑ Ronen Steinke: The Muslim and the Jewess. The story of a rescue in Berlin . 2017, p. 62-63, 67-72 .
12. ↑ List of deportation trains from Berlin from 1941 to 1945 . District Office Berlin-Charlottenburg ; accessed on November 14, 2016.
13. ↑ Christoph Sydow: Muslim Rescuers of Jews: The Forgotten Heroes of the Holocaust Spiegel Online , October 5, 2013; accessed on November 14, 2016.
14. ↑ qantara.de
15. ↑ Mohamed (Mod) Helmy . Short biography on www.gedenkenafeln-in-berlin.de. Retrieved November 26, 2019.
16. ^ Berlin memorial plaque for Mod Helmy , press release from the Senate Chancellery for Cultural Affairs.
17. ↑ Yad Vashem honors Egyptians as “Righteous Among the Nations” haOlam haZeh ; accessed on November 14, 2016.
18. ^ Ofer Aderet: Yad Vashem Names Egyptian First Arab Righteous Among the Nations , Haaretz , September 30, 2013, accessed on November 14, 2016 (English).
19. ^ Cyrille Louis: Pour la première fois, un Arabe est nommé Juste parmi les Nations , Le Figaro , September 30, 2013; Retrieved November 14, 2016 (French).
20. ^ Family of WW2 Arab hero reject Israeli honor. Family not interested in the award by the Holocaust memorial because Egypt-Israel ties remain hostile ( Memento of the original from April 19, 2014 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. . I24news (Tel Aviv), October 20, 2013, accessed November 14, 2016. 
21. ↑ Arab family refuses highest Israeli onderscheiding , Maroc.NL Community, October 25, 2013; Retrieved November 14, 2016 (Dutch).
22. ^ "Righteous Among the Nations": Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial honors two Berliners , BZ , January 14, 2015; accessed on November 14, 2016.
23. ↑ Mohamed Helmy (1901–1982) ( Memento of the original dated November 5, 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. , Jewish Virtual Library; accessed on November 14, 2016. 
24. ^ The Arab Schindler: Family of first ever Arab honored for saving a Jew from Nazis rejects prize ... because they hate Israel , MailOnline , October 21, 2013; accessed on November 14, 2016.
25. ↑ Ronen Steinke: How a Muslim saved a Jew from the Nazis. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved June 8, 2017 . 
26. ↑ A Jewish-Muslim salvation story: First Arab honored as "Righteous Among the Nations". Federal Foreign Office, accessed on November 4, 2017 . 
27. ↑ Sura 5, verse 32 : “For this reason We have prescribed to the children of Isrāʾīl: Whoever kills a human being without (having committed) murder or causing harm to the earth, it is as if he would have killed all people. And whoever keeps it alive is like keeping everyone alive. Our messengers have already come to them with clear evidence. After that, however, many of them truly remained immeasurably on earth. "