Liberation Day – Konrad, Victor and Johannes

On May 5, 1945, Konrad Wolf wrote to his mother Else, the wife of the doctor and dramatist Friedrich Wolf, in Moscow: “Dear Meni, … You simply cannot imagine how much work we have had since our attack on Berlin. As I write this letter, we are already far western Berlin, and we will soon be expecting the meeting with the Allies. ”Friedrich Wolf’s family with the sons had fled to the Soviet Union in front of the Nazis. In the attack of Hitler Germany, the sons Markus and Konrad reported to the Red Army. Konrad was assigned to the political department of the 47th army in order to call up the soldiers of the Wehrmacht as a front officer on the loudspeaker, to escape the fascist crimes and to be captured in order to survive. In his film »I was nineteen« The later famous director described his experiences, and in his war diary “But I saw myself, that was the war,” he reported on the last days of the war in the Havelland.

Konrad Wolf’s unit freed the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and came to Premnitz, where the courageous use of a resistance group of communists and social democrats prevented senseless defense by the “Volkssturm”. Adolf Rapsch, a member of the KPD before the Nazis took place, courageously went towards the Soviet soldiers and reached the place without a fight. However, the legendary victory celebration described in “I was nineteen” took place in the director house of the local IG color plant and not, as suggested in the film, in the Sanssouci Castle. Previously, on April 26, 1945, the 47th army soldiers freed the Rathenow concentration camp. The guards from German SS men and Ukrainian fascists of this concentration camp in Sachsenhausen had fled in panic. Mason Victor Berthe from Robecq in France and the chemistry student Johannes Marten Los from Amsterdam were among the freed.

In the First World War, Victor had fought the Imperial German Army as a lieutenant. When the Wehrmacht came home in 1940 and built its occupation regime, the population oppressed, persecuted political opponents and deported the Jews in extermination camp, he organized and commanded a network of resistance groups in Robecq and Béthune. The Gestapo set in Spitzel and tracked down the rescues. Victor and his fellow fighters were arrested on December 10, 1943, to the Vaught concentration camp in the Netherlands, at S’Hhertogenbush southeast of Amsterdam, delayed and then sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then to the Rathenow outdoor camp in September 1944. The then 46-year-old bricklayer, like his fellow inmates and several hundred foreign forced laborers, had to work for the German armaments industry, the Arado aircraft works.

The working and living conditions were inhuman. The Rathenow Arado plant also appears in a report by the camp commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß. A fifth of the prisoners died there every month. Mismuring and torture were commonplace. The son of the Belgian Communist Party, Joseph Jacquemotte, was also tortured to death here; On ice -cold, frosty night, he had to stand naked in the open air and was repeatedly watered by his tormentors with water. In the documents of Sachsenhausen, the cause of death is mentioned “bilateral pneumonia”. From October 1943 to May 1945, 19 deaths have been demonstrated in the Rathenower concentration camp, the number of unreported cases remains open. Victor was lucky that he was able to return to Robecq on July 26th. In 1961 he was honored with the cross of the volunteers for France from 1939–1945 and appointed the knight of the French Legion of Honor.

“You just can’t imagine how much work we have had since our attack on Berlin.”

Konrad Wolf in a letter in May 1945

Johannes Maarten Los studied chemistry at the University of Amsterdam when the Wehrmacht marched into the Netherlands and Belgium in 1940, disregarding the neutrality of both countries. He formed an illegal group with 23 fellow students. The young people explored Wehrmacht departures at Amsterdam-Schipol Airport to send them to London of the Air Force. However, attacks by the British Air Force failed to materialize. This was obviously due to the initial hope of the British Prime Minister and Minister of War Winston Churchill, to steer the Nazi war machine to the east, to the Soviet Union. Johannes and his friends were disappointed, could not understand that.

Meanwhile, the German occupying powers had built its terrorist regime and started with the persecution and destruction of all resistance as well as the arrest and deportation of the Jews to the extermination camp with the help of Dutch collaborators. At the indication of her professor, the resistance group around Johannes tried to hide Jewish fellow citizens. They got safe quarters in southern Holland, food and papers. Johannes soon turned out to be a skillful counterfeit of passports. The students also printed food cards and organized escape routes. Ultimately, they also got into the catch of the Gestapo. The group flew through betrayal. It was GestaPochef Klaus Barbie, the later infamous “butcher of Lyon” who carried out the interrogations in Lille. Johannes and his colleagues were also deported to the Vaugth concentration camp, then to Sachsenhausen and finally to the Rathenow outdoor camp. Johannes was the only one from his resistance group who experienced the liberation from fascism. Returned back home, he took up his studies and became a professor of chemistry at the University of Amsterdam. In 1990 he received the honor from the Central Israeli Memorial Yad Vashem as a “just among the peoples”. Decades later, his daughter visited the sites of her father’s former suffering in Sachsenhausen and Rathenow. Victor Berthe’s granddaughter did the same in October last year.

But what became of the perpetrators? The grandson of Johannes Los, Jovan Bilbija, gained insight into the criminal file of the SS undercut guide Otto Friedrich Wilhelm Schultz, born on July 18, 1895 in Neuenkirchen. The warehouse leader of the Rathenow concentration camp in front of the Soviet troops fled the west in April in April. The Americans handed him over to the Dutch authorities who put him in court. In January 1949, Schultz was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison as a particularly sadistic, merciless SS man who also showed no remorse. This was brazenly appealed. And had success. His prison sentence was initially reduced to four years and after a pardon act by Queen Juliane for another year. As early as November 1950, Schultz was able to move to the Federal Republic as a freelance man.

Dieter Seeger, born in 1934, lives in Rathenow, where the retired teacher is traveling as a local historian.