Gert Krell

Fritz Bauer was born in Stuttgart in 1903, where he went to the same Grammar School as Fred Uhlmann. (On Fred Uhlmann see our blog “Reunion”.) They actually knew each other; both became members of a very small minority in the Weimar Republic: lawyers who were genuine supporters of Germany’s first democracy. Both worked with Kurt Schumacher, the legendary Social Democrat who survived a decade of Nazi imprisonment and became the first party leader of the West German SPD and Adenauer’s rival. For some time in 1933, Fritz Bauer and Kurt Schumacher were in the same KZ.

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Gert Krell

Fritz Bauer, Fighter for Human Rights and a New Germany (part 1)

Fritz Bauer (1903-1968) has always been one of post-war Germany’s most important lawyers, but for quite a long time he was not remembered well (and certainly not remembered fondly by many). That seems to have changed somewhat during the last 15 years. In the mid-1990s, the Fritz-Bauer-Institute was founded in Frankfurt on Main to do research on and to document the Holocaust and its effects until today. For example, the Institute has a complete documentation of the Auschwitz Trial. In 2009, a large and wonderful biography by Irmtraud Wojak was published (see photo); and in 2010 a documentary film released: Fritz Bauer – Tod auf Raten/Death by Installments. It is a very good film, but I think my heading is more appropriate.

Before I tell you more about Fritz Bauer’s life, his achievements and failures, I want to give you an idea of the person and his character. In a short article, one of the very few in which he talks at some length about himself, he starts off with a story from his childhood. When he was eleven years old, one of his teachers asked him what he would like to become. He painted a large plate with his name and the term “Oberstaatsanwalt” (chief public prosecutor) on it. He did not really know then what a public prosecutor was, except that it meant something like a better lawyer. He adds that even today (i.e. in 1955), he would prefer the term “Rechtsanwalt” (lawyer, literally a representative of the law) instead of “Staatsanwalt” (public prosecutor, literally a representative of the state). Fritz Bauer was well aware of the fateful German tradition in the law profession to support the state, any state, and any laws decreed by it. He feels a lawyer should support the rights of man and their social existence, even against the state, certainly against a despotic state.

The major reason behind these early ideas about his vocation was an unpleasant experience in his very first days in elementary school. He had won a box in a contest, but after school some of his classmates attacked him. At some time, they started screaming: “you and you parents, you have murdered Jesus Christ.” When his mother consoled him and told him about the historical background, he was still unhappy; not only about the unjust attack against him but also about Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. Policemen (who later turned into lawyers) would prevent all this. Reflecting on his event, he wrote:

“I still have this childhood experience clearly in front of my eyes, as if it happened yesterday. The harm and disappointment which this young school beginner suffered, his still vague rebellion against injustice wherever it occurs, his determination to resist and his daydream about a better, a good world, have “developed along my life”, to use Goethe’s basic words.”

Fritz Bauer ends his article with a distinction between two different kinds of lawyers, the law and order lawyer, and the freedom and liberty lawyer. He had found this distinction in an introduction into the law by Gustav Radbruch, a professor whom the Nazis dismissed in 1933 because he was a Social Democrat: “’These (freedom) lawyers are the outposts of the constitutional state against our innate penchant for the police state. For us, constitutional state is not only a political, but also a cultural term. It means preserving freedom against order, life against reason, chance against rule, richness against system.’ I had underlined these words heavily; I knew where I wanted to belong (Fritz Bauer, Im Kampf um des Menschen Rechte/Fighting for the Rights of Man; from the internet – my translation).”

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Gert Krell

Memorials at Hanau’s Main Cemetery

On Sunday, we went to Hanau. It was my first trip with a navigator, so it was no problem to find the “Hauptfriedhof” there. The weather was beautiful: very cold, but nine hours sunshine; we haven’t had that for long time. The atmosphere at Hanau’s main cemetery, a very long and spacious rectangle, was serene and peaceful, even bright. With the help of a notice board, which listed famous Hanovians and the places of their graves, we found the memorial stone for Elisabeth Schmitz. It is even more beautiful than I had thought, so I made the new photograph which you can see in part 1. (Mr. Gailus’ book only has a black and white picture of it.)

We also discovered signposts pointing to a field of graves for forced laborers. It is in a corner at the cemetery’s far end. Close to 300 people are buried there. Some graves have tombstones, others have very small nameplates only; some are anonymous mass graves. From the dates on the inscriptions, we learned that most of the forced laborers had died very young, at 18, 19 or in their early twenties! A large number died on March 19, 1945, the day when Hanau was almost completely destroyed in an air-raid. (Elisabeth Schmitz’ house was the only one in her street which remained standing, essentially unscathed.) Most of Hanau’s regular inhabitants had already left the city and moved to the countryside.

As you can see, the field looks plain and unattended. But there was, at one place, a wreath from the city of Hanau which must have been laid down recently. The memorial plate, which the city put up on the inside of the wall at the entrance in 1996, has the following inscription:

During the National Socialist terror, more than 10.000 human beings were deported as forced laborers to Hanau between 1942-1945. Women and men from Poland, the Soviet Republics, Belgium, the Netherlands and France were interned in 38 camps in our city. Many of them were tortured to death through hard work, hunger and violence, or seriously injured for the rest of their lives. We remember these victims of the criminal Nazi rule in mourning and shame. Hanau in the Year 1996, The Town Council

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Gert Krell

Elisabeth Schmitz, a Protesting Protestant (part 3)

Elisabeth Schmitz

I wish, Elisabeth Schmitz’ memorandum of 1935/36 on the situation of the “non-Aryans” was compulsory reading in all German schools. Just take the first three pages on “The Agitation of Public Opinion”. Try to think of the vilest racist statement you can imagine. You will find that Schmitz’ quotations of public addresses, not only by leading Nazi figures but by common professional organizations such as regional chapters of physicians (!), will surpass it in their ugliness, perversion, and violence against the Jews and “Aryan” Germans close to them.

In vivid detail, she discusses the separation of “Aryans” and Jews and the latter’s increasing discrimination and persecution; the burdens which the Nazis and their supporters bring on friends, lovers, married couples and their children or their trusted nannies, on old couples and the guardians they have relied on for years, and above all on “non-Aryans”. She is particularly concerned about the pain inflicted on the children, although she never had children of her own. Imagine how much it hurts, when a girl or a boy has to walk behind in the distance and alone during an excursion of his or her class, just because he or she is Jewish.

And she lists the material threats to the everyday lives of hundreds and thousands of Germans no longer considered part of the community or nation. This is her comment on the exclusion of Jewish Germans from the big nationwide welfare program in late 1935:
(…) after one has robbed the Jews of their positions, employment, income, a major part of their means to exist at all; after one has deprived them even of their honour; after their pauperization, violently brought about, has made terribly fast progress – one tells them, right before the onset of winter, that one has withdrawn help from their poor and poorest, forcing them to build a new huge organisation out of thin air (Gailus, p. 240, my translation).

Even the Jewish soldiers who had fought in World War I are no longer spared. To prove their worth to their country, the “Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten” (Association of Jewish Front-line Soldiers) publishes, in 1935, “Letters from the Front of Jewish Soldiers Killed in Battle”. In one of these letters, a Jewish soldier who gave his life out of love for his German Fatherland had complained about the anti-Semitic slander even then: “What more do they want than our blood? May they use the blood shed by our fellow Jews for further racial studies; the enemy’s bullets don’t bother to make such distinctions, thank God!”

Elisabeth Schmitz concludes that there was a “cold pogrom” going on in Germany:

As the examples show, it is not an exaggeration if one talks about the attempt to annihilate Jewry in Germany. They have said from the beginning, they did not need a Bartholomew’s Day Massacre; they had “other methods”. (…) We need to understand that hundreds, perhaps many more human lives have already become victims of this persecution. (…) It has been reported that at the beginning someone in Sweden used these devastating words: “The Germans have a new God, whose name is Race, and they bring him human sacrifice.” – Who can dare deny this? (Gailus, p. 237-238)

And to all this she adds the desperation about her Church, which either supports the regime or keeps silent:
In humane terms, the guilt that all this could happen, in front of the eyes of the Christians, will weigh on the Christians of Germany, for all times and with all nations and not least with our own future generations as witnesses (Gailus, p. 241-242).

She wrote this sentence in 1935, several years before the “real” holocaust!

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Gert Krell

Elisabeth Schmitz, a Protesting Protestant – Part 2

Elisabeth Schmitz was born into a typical Wilhelminian upper middle class family: Protestant, conservative and patriarchal, a family in which “Bildung” (education and culture) was considered a central achievement. She went to one of the first grammar schools for girls and also to university. She studied German literature, History and Theology in Berlin and became closely acquainted and friends with the family of the famous liberal Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack.

She was a grammar school teacher in Berlin until early 1939. In 1933, she joined the Protestant opposition against the Nazis. She participated in discussion

groups, communicated with a network of liberal friends and exchanged letters with well-known Protestant theologians. In April 1933 (!), e.g., she wrote to Karl Barth:

Among the circle of my closest friends I devastatingly experience the consequences of the persecution of the Jews. To me, the flood of ingratitude, injustice, hatred, lies, bestiality which has hit our Jewish co-nationals, seems such terrible proof of the sin and guilt of the “Christian” side that we ought to be, in a sense quite different from its usual meaning, in the grip of deadly fear of God’s judgement. But the Church is celebrating festivals of victory, celebrates Easter in the “mood of victory which has currently caught our German people” as someone said in a sermon here (…) and as has certainly been said in similar words in thousands of others (quoted in Gailus, p. 84).

A few weeks later, when Barth published his vehement protest against the Protestant Church’s self-transformation into a racio-national Church of the Third Reich, she wrote to him in emphatic agreement:

(…) today we experience, in the Church, a movement of godlessness of dimensions previously unknown (…) It also seems to me that the “blood”-madness is gradually producing an atmosphere of pathology and stifling heat equal to that of the mania against the witches (Gailus, p. 85).

In 1935/36, Schmitz wrote the famous anonymous memorandum (see my part 3). After the November pogroms in 1938, she fell ill and asked for permission to retire early, at the age of 45. In her application, she pointed to her physical and psychological problems and said she had come to the conclusion that she could not represent her subjects any longer in a way which the National Socialist state expected from her. She was lucky; her application was accepted and she even received a (reduced) pension.

When Helmut Gollwitzer gave a courageous sermon of repentance on November 16, 1938 at Berlin-Dahlem, Elisabeth Schmitz sent him a letter of gratitude (she had sent him other letters before the sermon, and it is quite likely that they were a factor in his decision to speak out):

When we remained silent on April 1, 1933, when we remained silent about the “Stürmer” boxes (newspaper boxes with the violently anti-Semitic paper “Der Stürmer”, which were all over Germany, GK), about the satanic inflammatory articles in other papers, about the poison¬ing of the soul of the German people and its youth, about the destruction of lives and marria¬ges through so-called “laws”, about the methods of Buchenwald – here and in thousands of other instances we have become sinners at November 10, 1938. (…) It seems that the Church even this time, when the stones are really screaming, will leave it to the understanding and the courage of the individual minister whether he will say something and what.
(…) Nothing is impossible in this country, we know that. (…) We have seen the annihilation of property, for this purpose the shops had been marked during the summer this year. If one moves to marking people – then a conclusion is near which I do not want to describe more precisely. And nobody will dare say that these orders will not be executed just as promptly, as unscrupulously and obstinately, as maliciously and satanically as the present ones. (…) I am convinced that – should it come to that – with the last Jew Christianity too will disappear from Germany. I cannot prove it, but I believe so (Gailus, p.121-122).

When the Nazis continuously increased their pressure on the Protestant opposition during the war, and when more and more people among her circle of friends and communication were under threat of arrest or even death, Elisabeth Schmitz withdrew to Hanau in 1943, to her parents’ house. She continued to help endangered friends and saved at least one more person from deportation. After the war, she became a teacher again. Although she was known to the relevant authorities as an anti-Fascist, she never spoke about her activities in the Nazi era in public and nobody, neither the Church nor the city of Hanau, cared about them. A single woman all her life and very conservative in her appearance, she had towered thousands, millions of other Protestant Germans in her beliefs and her religious and her general humane thinking, attitude, and actions.

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Gert Krell

Elisabeth Schmitz, a Protesting Protestant (part 1)

This beautiful memorial stone stands in the main cemetery of the city of Hanau, 25 km east of Frankfurt. It is devoted to a brave woman who had been virtually unknown until the end of the 20th century. The stone was erected in 2005, but she had already died in 1977. Last year, an historian published a wonderful biography: Manfred Gailus, Mir aber zerriss es das Herz. Der stille Widerstand der Elisabeth Schmitz, Göttingen 2010 (My Heart Was Torn Apart. The Quiet Resistance of Elisabeth Schmitz). Steven D. Martin, an American theologian, has made a film about “Elisabeth of Berlin”, based on Mr. Gailus’ research (see www.vitalvisuals.com).

In Berlin, where she lived from 1915 up to 1943, Elisabeth Schmitz had been an active member of the “Bekennende Kirche” (Confessing Church), the Protestant minority who resisted identification and total collaboration with the Nazi regime as practiced by the “German Christians”. And she was a minority within this minority. She criticized the BK’s timidity and vacillation, and took a strong stand against its more traditional anti-Judaism and the new racist anti-Semitism which she found even there. And she helped many of her Jewish or “non-Aryan” Protestant friends, supported them, hid them, and assisted them in getting out of Germany.

Never before have I seen such lucidity in the contemporary observation and condemnation of Nazi barbarism as in her letters since 1933 and in her anonymous memorandum of 1935/36, which she had duplicated and sent to a number of people in the Protestant opposition. And rarely has anybody in the Christian Churches, at that time, ever demanded a new, i.e. a truly Christian theology of the relationship between Christians and Jews, as she did. It has taken more than 60 years after the Nazis for such a process of theological recognition and search for commonality to come to fruit.

As a whole, Protestantism, i.e. my Church, failed dismally in the 20th century; it betrayed its own God and its chief “hero”, the Jew Jesus Christ. As a kind of national religion, it was closely allied with the Prussian-German state. It supported not only militant nationalism and war, but later also ethno-national racism and the persecution of religious minorities. Typical of the 1930s, one notorious Protestant built an institute with up to 30 employees who searched parish registers for traces of Jewish, “colored”, Sinti or Turkish “blood” in the genealogy of Protestant families, only to denounce them to the Nazis. He was not taken to account by the Church after the war, he remained its accepted member and employee. To be sure, there was soul-searching, there were public confessions of guilt in and by the Protestant Church, but “sweeping under the carpet – deleting from memory – not talking about ‘that’ – all these remained dominant ways of dealing with its own past (…) between 1950 and 1990 (Gailus 2010, p. 180, my translation)”.

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Gert Krell

Memorial at Dautmergen

Erwin Dold, a humane KZ Commander

“You simply cannot do that to people”. Your quotation from Mina Lautenschlaeger is the simple and basic norm of humanity which some Germans, certainly too few, followed even in the years of organized inhumanity in Germany. (Other brave opponents had more ideological motivations.) You would not believe it, but there even existed one humane commander of a (minor) KZ, which seems a contradiction in terms. I learned about him from a book on non-violent resistance against Hitler which my elder daughter gave me. (She has been active in non-violent civic action groups for years.)

When a French military tribunal tried KZ commanders, command leaders, block leaders, camp elders, and kapos at Rastatt in the French zone on February 1st, 1947 and sentenced 21 of them to death, it also set one man free: Erwin Dold. He was the only one of the 50 accused who had “shown sentiments of humanity” and “broken with the order of terror”.

As an adolescent, Dold had joined the „Hitlerjugend“; at 18 he volunteered for the “Luftwaffe”. His plane was shot down and he was seriously wounded. Later he worked as a military truck driver. In 1944, when the SS sent more of its members to the front and needed replacements in the camps from the Army, he was ordered to join an industrial watch command. He became a member of the staff at Haslach and then a commander at Dautmergen, two of a few dozen small dependencies of the major KZ Natzweiler-Struthof, which were put up in the final phase of the war to support German industry and the war effort.

The situation of the forced laborers was terrible; about half of them died from disease, hunger, exhaustion, neglect or violence, many were deliberately worked to death. Dold was shocked by the mountains of corpses, and when he took over responsibility he considered this, in contrast to the all the other camp commanders, a responsibility towards “his” workers as well. He saw them as other human beings, not different from himself. He stopped sending sick prisoners to work, improved the ratios of bread, worried about better shoes, and had the barracks repaired. He used false papers and orders, supplied workers with army uniforms, and together with them “organized” truckloads of potatoes and (illegally) slaughtered meat. (He was from a small town in the area, and his father helped him with money to pay the farmers and with suggestions for hidden routes.)

When the Gestapo ordered Dold to collect a firing squad to execute 22 Russian prisoners of war (in front of all other prisoners), he refused. Witnesses later confirmed that a shouting match ensued which ended with the sentence: “You will never become a good SS man.” Dold got away with his decision unharmed, but he risked his life every day.

When a watchman accused a prisoner of trading with cardboard soles of shoes and took him to the commander, Dold only had his shoes repaired. This prisoner was one of many witnesses who were willing to testify in Dold’s favor; he had more than he needed. Dold also became a witness himself in several trials against war criminals. When he returned to his old home town, he did not talk about his activities and his experience until fifty years later. Opinions about him have remained ambiguous: Some people still see him as a KZ commander first; others believe he was a hero. One thing is beyond doubt: In the camps at Haslach and Dautmergen, there was only one who actively cared for the survival of its prisoners: Erwin Dold. To be sure, there were differences in the degrees of bestiality among the KZ commanders and the watchmen and -women. As far as I know, Dold was the only humane KZ commander. He was an exception.

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Gert Krell

Reflections on Heroism

On December 6, I played Santa Claus again in my younger daughter’s former kindergarten at Frankfurt-Nied, an old working-class area. Today most of the kids in the “Kita Liliput” have an immigration background; typical first names are Ahmed, Ayman, Celine, Idris, Scheballa, or Sidona. Back at the station, I had half an hour, so I walked around a little. I discovered that Nied’s cemetery is very close to the station. The area in front of it is called “Kahn-Platz”. As I later found out, Dr. Karl Kahn, who was a popular physician at Nied, and his wife Jenny committed suicide in 1942, when the day of deportation approached.

The Kahn Square hosts a small memorial, a steel made of sand-stone with an inscription followed by eleven names: “Den Aufrechten, die in den Jahren der Unterdrückung für Freiheit und Menschenwürde ihr Leben gaben.” (To those upright men and women who gave their lives for freedom and human dignity in the years of oppression.) Karl and Jenny Kahn’s names are among them.

The inscription avoids the term hero or heroine. Because of its abuse by nationalist and other ideologies, the term has become tainted almost beyond recognition. Just think of great leaders like Mao Zedong, once the hero of millions of Chinese and of thousands of my fellow students in the West. He seemed to represent the ambition for a better world, for more human dignity on a large scale. Yet he was directly responsible for and deeply involved in the murder and death of millions of other people, among them many who had revered him. Everybody knows Mao, and many still consider him a hero. Yet who in the world knows Tian Jiaying, one of Mao’s secretaries, who was so disgusted with the systematic lying and the betrayal of the original goals of the revolution that he committed suicide!

Or think of the “martyrs” who give their lives for the cause of Islam, wantonly taking those of other human beings; another perversion of the idea of heroism. But recently, I had a chance to get to know a real Muslim hero. The occasion was the Hessian peace prize ceremony a couple of weeks ago, which my wife Irene and I attended. This year’s prize was awarded to Ismail Khatib from Jenin in the West Bank, who had donated the organs of his deceased 12 year old son Ahmed, who had been shot by Israeli soldiers in an accident in the street, to save five children in Israel, one Bedouin, one Druse, and one Jewish (the other two wanted to remain anonymous). Avi Primor, a former Israeli ambassador to Germany, who gave the award speech, asked: Who is a hero? Is he (or she) a conqueror of cities, a victor over the enemy, someone who is killed in battle? Mr. Primor favored a different concept: Heroes are people who show the courage of their convictions. Well, not just any conviction, of course, as we have seen. Honored are those, who – against the odds – honor other human beings, and particularly those who save other people’s lives. (The film “The Heart of Jenin”, a documentary about Ismail Khatib and his story, is available on DVD. It is a wonderful film, sad and encouraging at the same time.)

I would like to present a few examples of what I consider heroes or heroines from the Nazi era and its aftermath. But first I would like to know how you think about this. Who is a hero or a heroine in your mind?

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Gert Krell

Postscript, part 2

Fritz Thyssen risked his life and fortune to protest against Hitler’s dictatorship and the war, after he had first supported the Führer. Others like Oskar Schindler or Berthold Beitz risked their lives to save potential victims from the deadly terror of the Nazis. They were rare exceptions. We may admire their heroism, but as Jan Philipp Reemtsma says in his excellent book, What Would I Have Done?, we cannot expect people to become heroes and risk their lives to save others. We would probably never be heroes in this sense ourselves.

Yet not requiring that we risk our lives to prevent murder does not mean that we may become murderers ourselves: “We must demand from each other (…) that we do not voluntarily participate in crimes, that we do not report people to the police, that we do not destroy their lives. The civilizational catastrophe of the years 1933-1945 was not that so many people bowed to force and tolerated evil. It was the high degree of free-willing contribution to deeds whose amorality was evident (p. 24-25, my translation)”.

There were not too many activities you had to join to avoid your own death. Desertion was a deadly risk, yes, but refusing to participate in the execution of civilians was not. (A cousin of my mother’s, who was a young soldier in the war, once told me convincingly that he had deliberately always missed his target when he was supposed to shoot at a human being.) If you helped a prisoner to escape, you also risked your life. But you did not, if you refused to become a watchman in a KZ. I do not know, whether a German industrialist in the arms sector could refuse to “employ” KZ prisoners. (Günther Quandt’s initial resistance seems to have resulted more from practical differences with the SS rather than moral doubts.) But I do know that there existed major differences in the ways in which German industry (or German farmers) treated forced labor.

And we must also expect the restoration of the law, admittance of wrong-doing and symbolical as well as material compensation. In this, like almost all other German institutions, German industry has failed again; it has remained widely below minimal standards for much too long. When Berthold Beitz became a senior manager at Krupp after the war, he met with reservations in his new entrepreneurial environment. He was careful not to discuss his humane activities during the war too broadly, because they would have been a painful mirror to his colleagues. This was another cynical dimension of the “cartel of silence” (Norbert Frei, Karrieren im Zwielicht, p. 126).

Footnote 1: Today’s papers write about a comment by the Swedish Queen Sylvia, who is of German origin, on her father’s activities in the Nazi era. (She had denied his involvement, but was later confronted with information about his early membership in the Party and that his business had profited from an “aryanization”.) She is reported to have said: “Why should I comment on something which happened before my birth?”

Footnote 2: The “Jüdische Zeitung” of November 2010 discusses an agreement between Katharina Wagner, who today runs the festivals together with her half-sister, and the Israeli Chamber Orchestra to perform her great-grandfather’s Siegfried Idyll at Bayreuth next year. Ms. Wagner has announced to open the archives for a study which would frankly discuss the relationship between Richard Wagner’s descendants and the Nazis. At last, one might say, but don’t we know more than enough about that already?

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Gert Krell

Postscript, part 1

The famous steel baron Fritz Thyssen (born 1873) had been the German industrialist who supported Hitler most enthusiastically, financially and politically, even before 1933. Early in 1933, he joined the Party and became a deputy in the Reichstag for the NSDAP. Yet Fritz Thyssen also became the only major German industrialist to oppose Hitler openly. His disillusionment began with the so-called Röhm-Putsch in 1934 and its brutal “cleansing” by Hitler and the SS. The Nazis’ pressures on the Catholic Church and the pogroms against the Jews in November 1938 pushed him into opposition against the regime. He talked to friends and to generals about the possibility of bringing Hitler down.

When Fritz Thyssen was summoned to one of the symbolical sessions of the Reichstag on September 1, 1939, which could only mean signing on to the war by acclamation, he cabled to Göring that he could not join the meeting and that he was against the war. Hitler announced that German troops had marched into Poland and added that whoever was against him would be treated as a traitor. The Thyssens knew they had to leave Germany and went to Switzerland.

At the end of September, the Nazis signaled their former model industrialist that he would remain free of punishment if he returned. But Thyssen wrote long letters to Göring and Hitler, in which he called himself a political adversary of National Socialism and stated that he would not come back. He accused Hitler directly: “You are driving Germany into the abyss, and the German people into ruin. Change your course as long as it is still possible. Give the Reich a free parliament, give freedom of conscience, of thought and of speech back to the German people. Provide the required guarantees for a reintroduction of law and order.” (Thomas Rother, Die Thyssens, Frankfurt/New York 2003, p.98, my translation. Note the somewhat strange idea that Hitler had even taken the conscience and the freedom of thought from the Germans.) And Thyssen had his letters published. The Nazis confiscated his assets and renounced his and his wife’s German citizenship.

In 1941, on their way back from Brussels, where Fritz and Amélie Thyssen had visited his mother on her deathbed, they were caught by the Vichy-French police shortly before embarkation to Argentina, and handed over to Nazi-Germany. Göring offered Thyssen to renounce his break and to appeal to the Führer for clemency. When he refused, the Nazis put the Thyssens into a mental asylum and later sent them to Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau. In April 1945, the SS had orders to kill the Thyssens and other prominent prisoners, who had been brought to the village of Villabassa in South Tyrol. A German Army major prevented the executions.

Later the Allies sued Thyssen for his early support of Hitler, and he also had to go through German “de-nazification” procedures. He was in jail for some time, but in the end was acquitted. The British ordered the dismantling of the August Thyssen Hütte in Duisburg, but stopped it in the light of mass protests. The plants were rebuilt. Meanwhile the Thyssens had joined their daughter and son-in-law in Argentina, where Fritz Thyssen died in 1951.

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