Honoring a 'good German' in the Nazi machinery

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.

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"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 Ben Sijes in an extensive 1967 interview.

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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Yet the temporary rethink is down in large part to the reemergence of one of the people Calmeyer did not save — Femma Fleijsman-Swaalep landed in Auschwitz aged 15 because her parents had wanted to conceal that she was born out of wedlock. Her biological father, a Catholic window cleaner, went to a notary to change the documentation, and repeatedly petitioned Calmeyer.

"Her father tried also in other ways to get her back, by writing personal letters. 'Esteemed Dr. Calmeyer! Help me please … I ask you to permit me a brief hearing in which I can clearly explain my case …  I am ready to do anything if only I might get my child back.' Three times he tried that way to get her safe, but all in vain. She went first to Camp-Westerbork, then Bergen-Belsen, then a prison in Hanover, and on August 6, 1944 she arrived in Auschwitz," says Els van Diggele, who gave the 92-year-old Femma a voice via a book and a documentary.

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Rare working class survivor speaks, at last

For decades, Fleijsman-Swaalep had not told her four children of her period in Nazi captivity, primarily because the memories were far too painful, van Diggele explains. But beyond that, having been torn from her home and school in her early teens, Fleijsman-Swaalep was never truly able to interpret and articulate precisely what had happened to her or why. She converted to Catholicism and had her children baptized, for fear of further persecution.

But late in life, she felt it important to tell her family, who have wholeheartedly embraced this lost chapter of their history and now consider themselves Jews. One son, Ron, tattooed a Star of David and his mother's internment number on his chest. Her children came to Osnabrück calling for the voices of victims to have a place at any future museum concerning Calmeyer. 

"As an historian, I am very happy that we have this voice here. Femma and her family represent the children of all the other window cleaners who did not return," van Diggele says.

By the criteria of the Nuremberg race laws, Calmeyer would have been correct to save an "Aryan" child of Dutch stock, but for whatever reason, Fleijsman-Swaalep was one of the ones he did not help.

Van Diggele's work is part of broader resistance in the Netherlands to Calmeyer's reputation. The Yad Vashem institute has agreed to review its 1992 appraisal of the lawyer, which doesn't surprise van Diggele. 

"I think even Yad Vashem, the institution itself, had severe doubts already in the early 90s. The committee was very divided. There was a group that asked: 'What do we do if, years later, the descendants of people who did get to Auschwitz because of Calmeyer knock on our doors?' And now here we have the children of Femma, who do knock on their doors." 

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'A relatively decent, relatively humane functionary'

Professor Johannes Max Van Ophuijsen was one of the initiators of a petition to Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose government has made €1.7 million ($1.95 million) available for the renovation, urging her to rethink the "Hans Calmeyer Haus" renaming. Signatories include Dutch former Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende and former mayors of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. He says that Osnabrück's growing love affair with its favorite wartime son risks taking on a sinister dimension, and that some local politicians "have staked their reputations" on elevating a local hero to international fame. 

"So long as the locals have their say, they can afford to exploit this figure in a kind of hero worship. Whereas if we get an international audience to look at the case, he doesn't stand a chance. He's not going to be another Schindler. He'll just be a relatively decent, relatively humane functionary in the occupying regime," Van Ophuijsen says. 

The museum is scheduled to open in 2023, with the advisory board dedicated to the topic in Osnabrück this week agreeing to revisit issues like its name at a later date.

'He could not have saved everyone'

Local Christian Democrat politician and Calmeyer biographer Matthias Middelberg was also present. Even though his overall impression of Calmeyer is a positive one, he says he can understand how victims or their relatives would see the issue differently. 

"Yes, I can develop understanding of that, because of course Calmeyer did not save everybody who filed an application," Middelberg tells DW. "He could not reassign everyone, because if he had done that, then it would have become very obvious very quickly."

The research committee tasked by the city with advising on the details of the future exhibition is led by Alfons Krenkmann, a history professor at the University of Leipzig. For Krenkmann, Calmeyer's legacy can only be a mixed bag: "He did a great deal to save Jews, and simultaneously he helped prop up and advance the bureaucracy of the Nazi occupation. That's the ambivalence of this character."

'There is not just black and white'

Politician Middelberg argues that this contradiction is unavoidable, and that it is something Calmeyer shares with other Nazi officials lauded after the war for their efforts to save people from extermination. Berthold Beitz was an oil manager in occupied Poland, who saved many Jews by employing them, but "his oil ensured that the German tanks could keep rolling eastwards." Similarly, Oskar Schindler operated a munitions factory not far from Krakow, also saving Jews by hiring them. Yet he was a Nazi party member directly propping up the war effort. 

For Middelberg, showcasing the ambivalence of characters trying to do good in terrible times should be a core component of any future museum: "He's an example of that, that's why he must feature in the museum. It is important for young people to learn that there is not just black and white."

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Yet critics like Van Ophuijsen worry that the current proposals in Osnabrück envisage too great an emphasis for a local figure best known for his work in another, occupied country.

"All this attention to a citizen, a native of Osnabrück, who didn't spend the war in the city itself, is already somewhat suspect — it sounds like a form of escapism. Certainly, it's diverting attention from what actual Osnabrückers did in Osnabrück during the war. It seems to be sort of an unreal way of educating youth and inspiring civil courage."

Researchers, survivors and other interested parties in Germany, the Netherlands and Israel will now seek to strike the right balance for a future museum in the coming years.