Otto Busse (resistance fighter)

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Otto Busse (born September 23, 1901 in Gillandwirszen near Tilsit ; † March 6, 1980 ) was a German resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Otto Busse worked in Tilsit as a freelance painter and varnisher. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he joined the NSDAP out of opportunism under membership number 2,388,182 . When the persecution of Jews in Germany intensified in 1935, he resigned from the party in protest. From then on he was cut as a craftsman and excluded from public contracts. His wish to emigrate to the USA was not approved. In June 1939 he was asked again to join the party, which he did. In 1940 he was given membership number 8,479,145. When war broke out in 1939, Busse was drafted into the police reserve. His superior was the later head of civil administration in the Białystok district, Friedrich Brix . In March 1943 he resigned from the gendarmerie and went to the occupied Polish Białystok as a master painter with his wife and a fifteen-year-old son . With his painting business he handled civil and military administration orders in the Białystok District . He initially employed forty Jewish workers with work permits and after the Białystok ghetto was liquidated in August 1943, only Germans and Poles . The way the German occupying power dealt with the Polish population and with the ghettoized Jewish population prompted him to offer personal resistance. Other reasons were his Christian faith and the fact that his brother was imprisoned in Tilsit as a Nazi opponent.

When in 1943 Busse wanted to commandeer an apartment for his workers, he met Chaika Grossman and Chasia Bielicka , who were living with a Polish family with forged Aryan evidence . Grossman and Bielicka were mainly used in the courier service in the Jewish resistance . Bielicka got a job as an office clerk at Busse . After she revealed to him that she was a Jew with false papers, he continued to help her. As a result, Busse made himself available to the Jewish and Polish underground movements and procured weapons, warm clothing and medicine at his own expense. Circulars against the National Socialists were written on his typewriter . Busse was brought together by Grossman with the German textile manufacturer Arthur Schade, who also offered resistance. Together with two other Germans, Beneschek and Bolle, they were viewed by the partisan brigade, which had been under Soviet leadership from the beginning of 1944, as a German cell that was supposed to get news. When the front approached Białystok in 1944, they parted ways.

Despite all violence - our resistance fighter Otto Busse
Busse house in Nes Ammim

Busse was drafted into the Wehrmacht and was taken prisoner by the Soviets . Since the NKVD people refused to acknowledge his cooperation with Polish and Soviet underground fighters, he was only released from forced labor in the Kiev region in November 1949 .

Now that his hometown had been annexed by the Soviet Union , Busse went to Darmstadt , where he found a job at the Henschel & Ropertz department store. At the end of the 1950s he was able to locate Chaika Grossman and Chasia Bielicka through the Israeli aid organization Sochnut and, at their invitation, traveled to Israel for the first time in November 1961 . Busse was headstrong in many respects, for example he refused to establish diplomatic relations between Israel and the Federal Republic in 1965 and took a position in the Six Day War against Israel; Nevertheless, Grossman, who became a Knesset MP for the Mapam in 1969 , was patient with him. Since he saw himself being bullied in Germany as an “un-German friend of the Jews”, he moved in 1969 with his second wife Erna, whom he married in 1951, to the kibbutz settlement of Nes Ammim, founded by Dutch Protestants in 1949 in the northern district of Israel . On April 23, 1970, Busse was honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations and was allowed to plant a tree in Jerusalem . The Federal Republic of Germany then awarded him the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon . Former partisans put a memorial plaque on the "Busse-Haus" in Nes Ammim .

Otto and Erna Busse returned to Germany in 1972 for health reasons. The Israeli association Ness-Ammim granted him an additional pension.

literature

  • Avraham Barkai : Otto Busse: A German "Righteous" in Bialystok , in: Marion Kaplan, Beate Meyer (Ed.): Jüdische Welten. Jews in Germany from the 18th Century to the Present . Festschrift for Monika Richarz , Wallstein, Göttingen 2005 ISBN 3-89244-888-4 pp. 248-268
  • Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka : My way as a resistance fighter , dtv, Munich 2008
  • Chaika Grossman: The Underground Army. The Jewish resistance in Białystok. An autobiographical report . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-11598-1 .
  • Lemma Otto Busse , in: Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations: Germans and Austrians . Edited by Israel Gutman et al. Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-900-7 , p. 81f

Web links

  • Otto Busse , with Nes Ammim. Text from October 16, 1961

Individual evidence

  1. a b Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations - Germans and Austrians
  2. a b c d e f g h Avraham Barkai: Otto Busse: A German "Gerechter" in Bialystok , 2005, pp. 248–268
  3. Chaika Grossman in the English Wikipedia: en: Haika Grossman
  4. Schade lived in Moscow and Pößneck after the war and was posthumously honored as Righteous Among the Nations in 1995. (Barkai, p. 260)
  5. Otto Busse on the website of Yad Vashem (English)