Werner Angress

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Tom Angress (2004)

Werner Thomas "Tom" Angress (born June 27, 1920 in Berlin-Westend ; died July 5, 2010 in Berlin ) was a German-American professor of German history . As Ritchie Boy he was involved in the Allied suppression of the German Reich in 1944/45 .

Life

Werner Angress was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, where he attended the Lichterfelde secondary school and was a member of the Jewish youth association Schwarzes Fähnlein . In view of the anti-Semitism under the National Socialists , which had increasingly become a state doctrine , as a result of which the attack had switched to a Jewish school in 1933, the family fled to the Netherlands in 1937 . In 1939 the family decided to emigrate to the USA . Before that, he had trained as a farm worker at the Groß Breesen teaching estate near Breslau in order to survive on a foreign job market. Since the common escape would have exceeded the financial possibilities, Werner Angress was determined as a young, capable man to prepare the emigration of the family, i.e. the parents and his younger brothers.

After two years as an apple picker, Angress joined the US Army with a former school friend in 1941 because he wanted to improve his English . Two years later, the Army of the United States recognized the potential of its German-speaking members and founded a unit that interrogated captured Wehrmacht soldiers and members of the Waffen-SS . This unit consisted mainly of Jewish refugees and immigrants. Her later nicknamed the "Ritchie Boys" referred to their training center Camp Ritchie in Maryland . Angress himself completed the course from August 1943 to January 1944.

As a member of the 82nd Airborne Division on June 6, 1944, Angress took part in the landing of Western Allied troops in Normandy and was captured by German soldiers. The religion label on his identification tag showed a "P" (for "protestant") instead of a "J" (for "jewish"), as he knew the danger of being a Jew if he were captured. Given the failure of the German advance, his imprisonment lasted only a short time. In May 1945, Angress was involved in the liberation of the Wöbbelin concentration camp , which served as the destination camp for the death march from Sachsenhausen . During this time he also learned of the death of his father in Auschwitz , whose hiding place had been discovered in Amsterdam .

In view of the destruction that prevailed in Europe and the ambivalent feelings about his homeland, Angress initially had no desire to return to Germany. He studied and graduated as a historian in the United States, where he lectured at the Universities of Berkeley and New York . Werner Angress was married to Ruth Klüger in the 1950s . And he began to visit Germany more and more often. In 1988 he moved back to Berlin. In 2004 Christian Bauer interviewed Angress for his documentary " The Ritchie Boys ".

On the basis of his interrogations of young members of the Waffen-SS in a prisoner-of-war transit camp near Ludwigslust after the end of the Second World War, Günter Grass attacked during the debate about his secret service with the Waffen-SS and its announcement in his novel “ When peeling the onion " in protection. Above all, he interrogated "seduced fellow travelers", "[h] albe children [...], destined to be burned in the last days of the war."

Publications (selection)

  • Generation between fear and hope. Jewish youth in the Third Reich . 2nd Edition. Christians, Hamburg 1989, ISBN 3-7672-0886-5 .
  • The period of struggle of the KPD 1921–1923. Droste, Düsseldorf 1984, ISBN 3-7700-0278-4 .
  • Always a bit out of the way. Memories of the youth of a Jewish Berliner 1920–1945. Hentrich, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89468-271-X .
  • Returning from Emigration: Living in Germany . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Between Philosemitism and Anti-Semitism: Jews in the Federal Republic (Series: Documents, Texts, Materials of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the TU Berlin). Metropol Verlag, Berlin 1991, pp. 87-98.
  • Werner T. Angress: Emigrant training estate Groß Breesen , in: Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute 10. 1956, pp. 168–187.
  • Werner T. Angress: Generation between fear and hope. Jewish youth in the Third Reich . Christians, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-7672-0886-5 (Hamburg contributions to social and contemporary history. Supplement 2) (with further research literature and extensive documents).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andreas W. Daum: Refugees from Nazi Germany as Historians. Origins and Migrations, Interests and Identities . In: Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan (Eds.): The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians . Berghahn Books, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9 , pp. 19 .
  2. ↑ Dirk Westphal: The fabulous Ritchie Boys . In: Welt am Sonntag , November 22, p. B3. See also: The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names .
  3. ^ Ina Weisse: Contribution from the off. ( Memento from May 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: Der Tagesspiegel , September 5, 2006.
personal data
SURNAME Angress, Werner
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Angress, Werner Thomas (full name); Angress, Tom (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American historian and university professor (German history)
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Westend
DATE OF DEATH 5th July 2010
Place of death Berlin