'Hero or Nazi War Criminal? Hans Calmeyer's Legacy Debated'; Saved More Jews Than Oskar Schindler
Last edited Mon Jul 20, 2020, 07:22 AM - Edit history (3)
'Hero or Nazi war criminal? 'Good German' Hans Calmeyer's legacy debated.' Hans Calmeyer's hometown is grappling with how to memorialize a former Nazi functionary with an "ambivalent" wartime past. To some, he saved more Jews than Oskar Schindler; to others, he signed death warrants. DW, July 18, 2020.
Hans Georg Calmeyer is a rare thing. A former functionary in the Nazi regime posthumously honored by Israel's national Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. A man lauded in some quarters for having saved more lives from within the Nazi wartime machinery than the renowned factory-owner Oskar Schindler. Yet to the four children of Dutch Auschwitz survivor Femma Fleijsman-Swaalep, he's a "war criminal just like all the others."
A lawyer without party affiliation in the early part of the Nazi era, who gently riled the establishment by defending the occasional communist or left-winger, Calmeyer later sought work as a jurist for Hitler's occupying forces in the Netherlands. He was put in charge of a small team processing appeals from people contesting their classification as Jews under the Nazis' Nuremberg race laws. According to Yad Vashem, he accepted more than half of these pleas — even a few that were rather ambivalent— thus saving at least 3,000 people from deportation to concentration and extermination camps. He received the Righteous Among the Nations award reserved for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust.
[Read more: Holocaust remembrance, 75 years on]
"In the case of Calmeyer, it is rather speculative that he took personal risks," Dutch historian and journalist Els van Diggele tells DW. "But there is definitely one risk he did not want to take: losing his comfortable job in The Hague." Deceased in 1972, Calmeyer said before his death that he and his colleagues knew the full extent of the Nazis' "final solution" — that rejecting appeals was effectively a death sentence. It tortured him at night, and having decided over life and death that way made him feel like a murderer, he told Dutch historian and journalist Els van Diggele tells DW.
The 'Hans Calmeyer House'? In Calmeyer's hometown of Osnabrück in northwest Germany, plans have been put on hold to convert the Villa Schlikker building, formerly the city's Nazi HQ, known locally as the brown house (as in the brownshirts). Naming the so-called peace laboratory the Hans Calmeyer Haus, in particular, is on hold. "It would be a big plus point for Osnabrück if the house were given this name," says the deputy chairman of the local Calmeyer-Initiative lobby group, Joachim Castan. "If we were to put Germany's most successful saver of Jews into the former Nazi party headquarters, that would be a good twist in history."...
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https://www.dw.com/en/hero-or-nazi-war-criminal-good-german-hans-calmeyers-legacy-debated/a-54197408
[Read more: Albert Speer and the myth of 'the good Nazi']
*'Auschwitz- Birkenau, '4 Out of 10 German Students Don't Know What It Was.' DW, 2017
https://www.dw.com/en/auschwitz-birkenau-4-out-of-10-german-students-dont-know-what-it-was/a-40734980