Willy Brachmann

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Willy Brachmann , born as Wilhelm Brachmann (* December 20, 1903 in Hamburg ; † January 13, 1982 there ), was a German prisoner function in Auschwitz , who campaigned for numerous other inmates and supported them in the fight for survival during the Shoah .

Life

Brachmann came from Hamburg-St. Pauli and grew up in difficult economic circumstances that worsened during the First World War . He was first arrested for theft when he was 14 years old . After finishing school he learned the profession of a painter. As a painter's journeyman, he married Luise Henze in 1926. The couple had a daughter. His wife was sick with tuberculosis , and because of the inadequate welfare benefits, Brachmann continued to improve the family income through theft.

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists Brachmann was in 1933 a member of the Nazi party and found a short time employment with the Nazi People's Welfare (NSV). Because of stolen goods he was on trial in 1934 he had sold a colleague a stolen bicycle. In court he gave the reason for his party membership that he wanted to "get away from all that stuff". As a result, there were repeated prison stays in similar contexts, and Brachmann was finally taken into preventive detention by the police . His wife then filed for divorce.

Prisoner in concentration camps and escape

Brachmann was sent to the Emsland camps in 1938 and from there to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . In August 1940 he was transferred from there with other so-called professional criminals to the main camp of Auschwitz . In Auschwitz he was given prisoner number 3190 and was initially employed as a Kapo in the painter's detachment and then in the same function in the road construction detachment. He was caught "organizing" food for himself and other inmates - which the camp regulations strictly forbade - and locked up in Block 11 in the camp prison (the bunker) as a punishment . Then he was assigned to the punishment company .

In mid-1942 he was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau within the main camp . On the part of the camp SS, he was employed as a Kapo in the so-called Theresienstadt family camp from September 1943 , the majority of whose Jewish prisoners were victims of mass murders in the Holocaust . From March 1944 he held the position of elder in the Theresienstadt family camp and thus held the highest position within the prisoner hierarchy in this section of the camp. His predecessor in this post was Arno Böhm (prisoner no. 8), who was feared by the prisoners , who had been released from the concentration camp in March 1944 and transferred to the Waffen SS at the front. The camp SS selected so-called criminal prisoners as prison functionaries because they expected brutal crackdown on fellow inmates from them. Brachmann, however, helped his subordinate and needy fellow prisoners. For example, he saved the life of a boy from the Theresienstadt family camp in Birkenau, who had performed auxiliary services for him as a "runner" (internal messenger) by helping him to hide before a selection was made in this section of the camp. In the family camp, he also supported the prisoners' resistance movement.

Brachmann had a relationship with two inmate wives in the Theresienstadt family camp: on the one hand with Dinah Gottliebová and on the other hand with the "strikingly beautiful" Lotte Winterová (1922-2010) from Prague. Lotte Winterová was deported with her family to the Theresienstadt ghetto in December 1941 and from there two years later to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. According to the historian Anna Hájková, when prisoner women entered into relationships with prisoner functionaries, this cannot be removed from the context of the camp: the affection of a man who was influential in prison society could improve the chances of survival. Brachmann provided his loved ones with food and clothing and protected them from sexual assault by SS guards.

After the Theresienstadt family camp was liquidated in July 1944, Brachmann was transferred to a satellite camp of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Gleiwitz . After the family camp was closed , the two women Gottliebová and Winterová were sent to other concentration camps for forced labor .

In the course of the war-related evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in mid-January 1945, Brachmann was transported to the Groß-Rosen concentration camp . At the end of March 1945 he managed to escape during a death march to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and to go to Hamburg. Once there, he was able to track down Lotte Winterová in the Tiefstack subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp . Brachmann was able to contact Winterová conspiratorially through the concentration camp guard Anneliese Kohlmann , who in turn had fallen in love with Winterová and with whom the inmate's wife had a relationship. Kohlmann made it possible for Brachmann to send food stamps to Winterová and to meet with her. After the female prisoners were brought from the Tiefstack subcamp to Bergen-Belsen, Kohlmann met Brachmann illegally in Hamburg. To see Lotte Winterová, they both rode their bikes to Bergen-Belsen on April 8, 1945, where they hid near the concentration camp for two days. Brachmann helped Kohlmann smuggle her way into the camp unnoticed at a favorable moment, where she “organized” prisoner clothing. So Kohlmann, disguised as a prisoner, managed to be with Winterová again until the camp was liberated. Why Brachmann and Kohlmann helped each other, although both tried to win Winterová's love, is unclear.

End of the Nazi era and later life

Brachmann stayed in Hamburg and married his divorced wife a second time. When he was arrested again for a theft in 1946, his criminal record was marked “1945 Auschwitz”. In the Second Bergen-Belsen Trial , Brachmann testified in May 1946 in favor of the defendant Kohlmann. During the trial, he stated that Winterová was his fiancée. Brachmann made his living as a painter or caretaker.

He took up his residence in Hamburg-Billstedt . In the course of the investigation into the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt , he was questioned as a witness in 1960. During his interrogation, he reported, among other things, on the execution of the camp penalties , expectations of prison functionaries on the part of the camp SS and the mistreatment of concentration camp prisoners. He described the work of the camp elder of the main camp Bruno Brodniewicz (prisoner no. 1) as follows: “Brodniewicz was a beast. He was a king in the camp. What he determined had to be done. "

In April 1967 he went to the Hamburg Reparation Office in order to receive compensation for the incarceration he had suffered in a concentration camp. Since he was considered a criminal prisoner at the time, he was denied compensation and recognition as a Nazi victim. He died in Hamburg in 1982.

The historian Anna Hájková researches Brachmann and is planning a publication about his life. Because he supported Jewish fellow prisoners, she nominated him at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations .

Statements by surviving concentration camp inmates about Brachmann

While Lotte Winterová did not comment on her relationship with Brachmann after her liberation, Dinah Gottliebová gave information about her relationship with Brachmann in Auschwitz in the 1990s: “He put his arms around me and kissed me. I started laughing uncontrollably because all of his molars were missing. He only had front teeth and he reminded me of an Easter bunny. ”She then helped him to get a prosthesis through a prisoner's dentist. She also said: “He was a decent man. He actually loved me, and after a while I loved him too. ”She also testified that Brachmann had organized food for a prisoner woman with reference to his own daughter.

Mischa Grünwald, who came from Prague and was held at the so-called “Theresienstadt Family Camp” of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp as a twelve-year-old boy, testifies that he survived the Holocaust thanks to Brachmann's help. Brachmann would have saved him from being selected and hid him for a few days with Polish dentists in the camp. This is how he escaped the mass murder in the gas chambers. Grünwald characterizes Brachmann as follows: “He was spontaneous, impulsive. If he wanted something, he got it. It saved my life. "

The Auschwitz survivor Anita Lobel reported in 1993 how she was assigned to easier work in the office in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp through Brachmann:

"Our Kapo [...] was called Willi Brachmann. [...] He was Antinazi, he was actually a Hamburger. A friend of mine said: 'You, Anita, there's a hamburger now and it's good. I will tell him that you are not a Czech, but from Hamburg. ' And then I said, 'Don't do it, because I want to stay with you.' [...] She told Willi Brachmann that, and he brought me in: 'Oh, you're a Hamburger Deern? Come here, you don't need to go to the street to fetch the stones or what we had to do there. 'I'll give you paper now and I need someone to write with.' And then he let me write something. "

literature

  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
  • Anna Hájková : Telling the Holocaust in a queer way . In: Jahrbuch Sexualitäten 2018 , published on behalf of the Queer Nations initiative by Janin Afken, Jan Feddersen, Benno Gammerl, Rainer Nicolaysen and Benedikt Wolf, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3293-5 , p. 86ff.
  • Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin Vienna, Ullstein-Verlag, 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Anna Hájková: Willy Brachmann from Billstedt - How a criminal became a savior of the Jews . In: Hamburger Morgenpost from June 5, 2018, pp. 16 and 25.
  2. ^ Anna Hájková: Telling the Holocaust in a queer way . In: Yearbook Sexualities 2018 , p. 102.
  3. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 61.
  4. ↑ a b Andrea Rudorff (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (source collection) Volume 16: The Auschwitz concentration camp 1942–1945 and the time of the death marches 1944/45 . Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-036503-0 , p. 448, fn. 6.
  5. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 55.
  6. ^ Anna Hájková: Telling the Holocaust in a queer way . In: Yearbook Sexualities 2018 , pp. 101f.
  7. ↑ Anna Hájková: A queer relationship in the concentration camp: When a guard fell in love with the Jewish woman Helene Sommer. In: tagesspiegel.de . December 14, 2019, accessed March 10, 2020 .
  8. ^ Anna Hájková: Telling the Holocaust in a queer way . In: Yearbook Sexualities 2018 , p. 102 f.
  9. ^ Anna Hájková: Telling the Holocaust in a queer way . In: Yearbook Sexualities 2018 , p. 104.
  10. ^ Hermann Langbein: People in Auschwitz. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin Vienna, 1980, pp. 26, 38.
  11. ↑ Quoted from Hermann Langbein: People in Auschwitz. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin Vienna, 1980, p. 174.
  12. ↑ Jan Sternberg: The forgotten victims of the Holocaust on www.landeszeitung.de from January 20, 2020.
  13. ↑ Quoted from: Anita Lobel, geb. Landsberger. (pdf, 60 kB) In: offenes-archiv.de. Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial Open Archive, August 15, 2008, accessed on March 10, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Brachmann, Willy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brachmann, Wilhelm (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German prisoner functionary in concentration camps
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH January 13, 1982
Place of death Hamburg