Herbert Hane: Abstract | Full Story | Images and Artifacts

Herbert Hane is a second generation Holocaust survivor.

Hane’s father and grandfather, aunt, cousins and some distant relatives were survivors. All endured the pain and fear of living in Germany under the Nazis. Some more distant relatives were murdered by them. The Hanes’ story is unusual because Herbert and his brothers are half-Jewish and their family lived under Nazi rule until the end of the war.

Hane was born in 1935 in the small town of Lollar, near the university town of Giessen in the German state of Hesse. At first e lived with his Jewish grandparents in a three-story house on Main Street. His father, a German Jew, Louis Hane (1910-1978), survived the Holocaust because he was married to a Christian woman.

The same year as Hane’s birth, the Nazis announced new rules to exclude German Jews from Reich citizenship. These Nuremberg Laws also prohibited Jews from marrying or having sexual relations with “persons of German or related blood." However, a "Jew" was not defined as someone with certain religious beliefs. The Nazis were racist so they defined Jews as people who had three or more Jewish grandparents. This then included those who were not practicing Judaism and Christian converts with Jewish grandparents.

By 1938, Germans had gradually taken away all rights for Jews, says Hane. Indeed, besides Jews having lost their citizenship; the German government had forced all Jews to register their property; Jewish workers could only do the most menial jobs, and Jewish business owners were forced to relinquish or sell their businesses to Nazis. Jewish attorneys were no longer allowed to practice law, teachers could not teach in German schools, and Jewish doctors could not treat non-Jews.

Like everyone in Germany, Jews were required to carry identity cards; however, the government added identification marks to Jewish cards by printing a red "J" on them and adding new middle names for anyone without a recognizably "Jewish" first name. So "Israel" was added to the men’s cards and "Sara" to women’s. This was done to so that Jews were easily identified.

Since Hane and his two brothers had two Jewish grandparents, they were considered half-Jewish, or “Mischling,” which meant persons of mixed blood. They were not considered Jews unless they belonged to the Jewish religious community. They were also stripped of German citizenship and discriminated against also, in certain respects, for example they were barred from getting an education above elementary school.

The story that follows details some of Hane’s and his family’s experiences during the war and is told primarily in his own words. The narrative is written from an oral interview conducted with him at the Severna Park Library on September 15, 2008. Definitions and explanations appear in italics.

My grandfather had a retail oil and grease business. He supplied gas stations with oil and his main customers were farmers who needed grease for hay wagons and farm machinery as cars and trucks were still rare at that time. My father graduated high school, which was unusual in those days because it was not free. He also attended a year of business school and then was an intern for a year at an oil company in the large city of Frankfurt before he began working for his father as an outside salesman. [Politically,] my father and grandfather were active Social Democrats. (This is one of the parties still in Germany now. It is like the British Labor Party. )

Already in 1933, my father was sent to a concentration camp. He was falsely accused by his immediate neighbor. He was active politically and occasionally wrote some poetry. The neighbor had heard that an anti-Nazi poem had been written by someone in the town and he thought my father was the author. He turned him into the SA, the Brown Shirts (also known as Storm Troopers). So one day, [the Storm Troopers] came to our house with fixed bayonets. My mom was holding a baby in her arms [Hane’s older brother] and she told them that he was out of town. When he came home from his business trip, he had no idea what they wanted him for as he had not done anything illegal. So the next day he went to their headquarters in nearby Giessen to clear his name.

He drove there and didn’t come back home. They had arrested him. My grandfather and mother had to go to the SA headquarters to find out what had happened to him. They were told that he had been sent to a concentration camp for political prisoners. The camp’s name was Osthofen.

He was in that camp for three weeks. (Osthofen Concentration Camp was one of the first camps in Germany. It’s a museum now. Hane has donated items to it for display.) He also said that the food wasn’t that bad. He was even allowed visitors, his wife and sister-in-law had to see him by walking up to the barbed wire. The prisoners were also visited by Quaker men (who brought the prisoners small care packages). This church was committed then, as it is now, to non-violence and the relief of victims.

He always said he wasn’t treated that badly; otherwise, he would probably have wanted to leave the country as soon as he had the chance. My father and some others were sent to the commander’s mother’s house where they were told to work in the garden. She asked them how they were treated. They told her not badly, and she mentioned that she had told her son to treat the prisoners well.

In 1936, my grandfather, who was a World War I vet, and had received the Iron Cross, was not allowed to run his oil business anymore because he had been active in the Social Democratic party. Since he couldn’t have oil delivered to his own business anymore, it was fortunate that he was on friendly terms with the local auto dealership owner, who agreed to order the oil and grease in his name so that my grandfather could still stay in business. At least he could serve those customers who were not prejudiced against him.

[That same year,] my father also lost his salesman’s licenses because of his political activity. This meant he could no longer work even for his own father. We had relatives who were cattle merchants and even they could no longer stay in business.

It so happened that in the city of Hanover, in northern Germany they didn’t have a law as yet about Jews losing their sales licenses; so, my father was able to work for a Dutch oil company there. As the territory he was assigned was in northern Germany, my father decided to move us to Berlin. [Hane’s youngest brother was born there in 1942.]

The company was probably owned by Jews, but I’m guessing, because the Nazis accused this company of stock fraud. Before the trial, however, the company left Germany in 1938 so my father lost this job too.

So in order to earn a living, my father had to register with the employment office which of course was run by the Nazis. When he went there, they told him that, as a Jew—and he knew this already— he had to do heavy labor like ditch digging. He was given a choice of working as a garbage collector or being a helper at a construction site. Since my father was a businessman, he didn’t want to collect garbage because the neighbors would see him; so, he picked construction work.

He went to work for Siemens, which is known as the German General Electric. They had a construction division which was building a factory for building planes. My father was assigned there to work as a helper mixing sand and cement. It was not slave labor; but, it was forced labor. My father only had business clothes to wear and he didn’t want to ruin his shoes. He was almost six feet tall and had played soccer and tennis. He took the cleats off of his soccer shoes and wore those with his business suit jacket to the work site.

Now, Berliners, have a sarcastic sense of humor. When my father walked up to the foreman he told the other workers: ‘Look who’s coming now, it’s the typical construction worker.’

For a week, my father shoveled and mixed cement and sand because they had no automated machinery. Then, he was called into the director’s office and my father thought he was in trouble. The boss was dressed in a suit and a tie and there was a swastika emblem on his lapel. He had looked up my father’s papers and he knew my father had completed business school and asked him why he hadn’t applied for an office job. My father said, ‘I’m Jewish. I can’t.’
My father had noticed the swastika; but, the director said, ‘I only wear that so they don’t ask me to join the party.’ My father got the job in the office; answering phones and doing paper work.

By this time, in 1938, there were more and more laws against Jews; we couldn’t have a car, a telephone or a radio. When my father heard a about that last edict, he crated our radio up and sent it to my Christian grandmother as she didn’t have one. I also remember my father telling me about an elderly Jewish man who had a great big radio. He didn’t want the Nazis to have it so when he went to turn it at the police station, he pretended he tripped and smashed it on the floor.

Around 1939, my grandfather, Albert Kahn, was also arrested. He spent three weeks in Buchwald, a concentration camp near Weimar, where he was treated very badly. When he was released, he visited us in Berlin. I still remember how shook up he was. We didn’t have safety razors back then; we only had straight edge razors; and my father had to shave my grandfather because his hand shook so much. The [Nazis] wanted to scare him into leaving the country and they wanted to take over his large house.

They still made it hard for him to leave since they would not let him sell his house for a fair prize but made him sell it for much less. He never even received any money for it since the proceeds had to be put into a frozen bank account. He finally fled on the last ship leaving Italy going to Brazil in 1940.

My father worked the office job for Siemens for almost 3 years until early 1941 and another new law was issued. [That law stated that] Jews no longer were allowed work together with Gentiles. They could be supervised by them but could not work with them, as my father had. He then again had to do forced labor unloading railroad cars for Siemens. That was a dirty back braking job that he luckily got out of by turning in some Gentile foremen that he observed turning in fraudulent time card for work they had not performed. The foremen were docked their pay but he was fired as a whistle blower.

So my father headed back to the employment office, by this time to an office just for Jews which was run by the SS, the Black Shirts, had been set up. He had to go see the head of the office, who was a SS officer. This, of course really shook him up. This guy is looking over his work dossier, a folder of all of the documents of my father’s work history, he asks my father that he was surprised that he had taken common laborer’s job back in 1938 when he was not actually forced to do so. My father told him that he needed work to support his wife and two sons. The SS officer said: “I respect you for that and I’ll do you a favor”, and he gave my father another office job in a factory that was manufacturing leather goods and uniforms for the German army. His duties were ordering the raw materials.

In Berlin, there was a big housing shortage. We lived in a furnished room that we had sub-let. A lot of Jews were sent east—that’s a euphemism for deported and killed—so we didn’t have ghettos like there were in Poland and other German occupied countries. Reinhard Heydrich, the number 2 man of the SS, said we don’t need them in Germany because the gentiles will watch the Jews for us.

I remember that when I was 4, I was invited to a birthday party across the street. My mother dropped me off and they were just about to bring in the cake (they still had cake even though there was a war) and they told me to leave. I must have said something [about being in a Jewish preschool], but I don’t remember what it was.

Jews did have to live in housing set aside for them as Jewish houses. We were except from this because my father was in a mixed marriage and I and my brothers were brought up Christian. The Nazis called that a “privileged” status. In 1942 we were able to get a larger apartment in what had formerly been a Jewish house because by this time almost all of the Jews not in mixed marriages had been evacuated to the east.

One day, I was in the street and a kid was yelling at me, ‘you Jew, you Jew.’ I was baptized and we went to the Catholic Church so I wasn’t sure why he was yelling that. He said I was a Jew because I lived in a Jew house. It bothered me that he called me that, but I didn’t believe him.
This was because at that time I didn’t know that my father was Jewish. It was too dangerous to talk about it. I didn’t know until 1943, when I was 8, and we went to live with my Christian grandmother in my home town.

My father had that job [in the factory] until 1943. His Gentile boss was good to him. I remember we all went on an employee outing which included a boat trip. For Christmas, he received a leather attaché case and my mother a handbag.

But, on February 27, 1943 [Joseph] Goebbels (one of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle; he served as the Reich’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda 1933-1945) planned to have a birthday present for Hitler in April. The present was to make Berlin free of Jews; to cleanse Berlin of Jews. I was 7 (and born in April so almost 8).

On that date my father went to work. He worked a half-day every Saturday. But on that Saturday, he didn’t come home.

In the morning he was in the office when he got a phone call from the factory gate guard. Even before the Nazis, the factories had fences around them; they were very protective and security-minded. They always had a civilian guard at the gate. [Well,] this gate guard was friendly with my father. He called him on the office phone and told him, ‘Go out the back way and come to the gate house immediately.’ So, my father goes to him and sees that three trucks with SS men had pulled into the factory parking lot. They are holding rifles with bayonets and the gate guard told him: “They are there to arrest all of the Jews, so take my uniform jacket; my address is in the pocket. You can go to my apartment and I’ll hide you.”

My father was worried about what would become his wife and his boys; but, he also felt that this fellow was risking his own life for him. So he didn’t take him up on his offer. He went back to the office and was rounded up with the others.

This factory had a big cafeteria and that’s where all the workers had to assemble and the SS were calling out their names. My father’s name wasn’t called and the SS officer in charge asked my father why his name wasn’t on the list? My father didn’t know why. He knew he was given some favorable treatment because he was in a mixed marriage, but so were most of the Jews who were working there. He was arrested along with all the others. Later he found out that his boss had left his name off the list because he thought they would all arrest at home and he had tried to protect my father from being arrested.

The troopers and the police took all of the workers to an old, abandoned building. Since my father was big and strong, he was ordered to guard the door. The SS told him that they would shoot him if anyone escaped.

The next morning a man by the name of Scheffler came into the room accompanied by a Gestapo agent (the dreaded secret police). Scheffler was a little like Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who helped save Jews in Poland. He was the owner of a moving business and had connections with the Gestapo. Due to the heavy bombing of Berlin, he needed able bodied workers to move furniture out of the city. He had permission to pick out 10 men who were living in mixed marriages and had children that were raised Christian. My father was one who was selected. Scheffler immediately took them to his company and gave them lots of food, most of which he hadn’t seen since the war had started. The he gave his new workers two hours to be with their families.

My mother found out about the arrest when a gentile worker [from my father’s factory] came to our apartment with the bad news. I still remember that day. My mother became hysterical. She knew many of our friends had been taken away and were never heard from him again.

Later that same year, another edict was issued in Berlin. All school children were to be evacuated to East Prussia (a part of Germany) to be save from the bombing. But, this was not true as most of the school children and their teachers were really sent to Poland and other Slavic countries. My parents said ‘we won’t send you away God knows where.’ And my mother and my brothers and I went back to our home town to live with my grandmother.

My father had to stay in Berlin until the end of the war. He would visit us; but, he actually was restricted to stay in Berlin because he was Jewish; and his job required him to move furniture but also un-detonated bombs after the frequent air raids in Berlin, so he had orders to be always on call.

So he would go AWOL every month anyway and bring a duffel bag with his dirty clothes. He had to travel 250 miles by train. The police and Army MPs would check the trains looking mainly for deserters from the Army and he was Army draft age. His identification card (that all Germans had to carry) had a red ‘J’ for Jewish in on it; but, he turned the card inside out so the J was on the back. His signature included Israel as the middle name [as all male Jews were required to do]. To get around this he put the ID card in a plastic case, and he smeared the plastic over the middle name so it couldn’t be read. Also he would only travel at night because the trains would have very dim light due to the frequent air raids. If the train was crowded, he would sit on his duffel bag in front of the WC (water closet).

One time, his luck almost ran out. There was an air raid so his train was diverted. He had to catch a connecting train in a different train station. [While] in the waiting room, he saw a German MP and a Gestapo agent coming in; the latter was easy to spot in his trench coat. They were looking mainly for deserters from the Army and he was Army draft age. So, he went to the men’s room to try to avoid them. As he was almost six feet tall, they saw him go in. They came in and went to his stall and told him to get out.

He said, ‘wait a minute; I’m not finished yet.’ He was trying to play it cool. As my father was a salesman, he tried to talk his way out. Under the Nuremberg laws all Germans had to show what religion their four grandparents and their parents were. Due to this, even some ministers, priests and nuns were found to be racially Jewish or partly Jewish. My grandfather was only partly Jewish but he was raised Jewish. Even in our town, some people didn’t know that they were partly Jewish. For example there was a dentist who gave a lot of money to the Nazi Party for the Hitler Youth (the Nazi Boy Scouts) then, he found out he was half-Jewish.

My father told the Gestapo agent that when he had tried to get his maternal grandmother’s birth certificate, he was unable to do so. Her nickname was Henchen and my father thought that her real first name was Hannah. Actually it was Sprenz. [Because of this mix-up,] the town hall couldn’t find any records for her which meant that without proof she actually could have been gentile. If she was gentile, my father might only be half-Jewish since his paternal grandfather was gentile. Then he would not be subject to most the anti-Jewish laws. He told them that the Gestapo was still looking into this matter. He was convincing enough for the Gestapo agent to let him go.

During the winter of 1944 in Berlin, he could not find any coal or wood to buy for his stove, so he chopped up his furniture for fuel.

When I think about survivor stories, I think one of the most important aspects is simply luck.
[For example,] my father’s [last] boss, as I mentioned, got him out of detention in 1943 and employed him till the end of the war in his moving business. That was luck. (Actually most of the Jews arrested that day were in mixed marriages. They survived because their Aryan spouses protested in the streets. A book on that subject is called “Resistance of the Heart - Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany” by Nathan Stolzfus).

At the end of the war, my father who had escaped Allied bombing and finally Russian artillery fire, was interrogated by the Russians when they captured Berlin. The Russian Army had set up headquarters in his apartment building. All the men were questioned and they did not believe that he was Jewish. They told him all Jews had been put into concentration camps by the Nazis. They thought he might be a Nazi or at least a German soldier with forged papers. (Russians had suffered so much at the hands of the Nazis, that they were very suspicious of everyone.) The Communists also were very dense; not much better than the Nazis in that regard even though they were on opposite sides. Again, luckily, one of the other tenants in building was a Czech with whom my father was friendly. He knew that my father wasn’t lying, and he vouched for him. So, the Russians let him go.

During the entire war there still was a Jewish hospital in Berlin. Jews would be notified by the Nazis that they would be ‘deported east.’ And some in order not to go, would have someone they’d break their foot or fake that they had appendicitis. They then would be put in this hospital and when they recovered would be sent east. At the end of the war, this hospital housed a Jewish welfare organization. They had a bulletin board where survivors posted their names asking about the whereabouts of family members. In this manner my father was reunited with two second cousins. They were very young women, who had survived several labor camps. However, during their attempt to reach the west, they became separated and were unable to reach their home town together.

My father ended up stealing a bicycle. [That was how] he left Berlin with just the clothes on his back. He had planned to swim across the Elbe River which at first was the boundary between the Russian part of occupied Germany and the part occupied by the Western Allies. That boundary was moved west, however, because the Western Allies got part of Berlin instead. So as he was trying to get to the American Zone of Germany where we were, the Russians rounded him up with some German ex-soldiers, took the bicycle away, and started to march them all under armed guard toward the east. He realized that he again was in big trouble. He thought that he didn’t survive the Nazis to end up only to be mistreated by the Russians. So when he saw the guards were not very watchful, he jumped into some bushes and ran into the nearby forest. He stayed away from roads and farmhouses until he got near the East/West border. There was no Iron Curtain as yet. (The Iron Curtain was the symbolic and real physical boundary that divided Europe in two after the war ended and remained in place until the Cold War ended in 1991.)

At the boarder he was able to work for a farmer who had fields on the Russian and the British Zone of Germany. The Russians permitted the farmer to harvest his crops on the British side and bring them over to their side. The Russians were not into paper work like the Germans; so, they would just count how many workers went over to the British side and the farmer just needed to bring the same number back over at the end of the day. It so happened that two men, who had wives in the Russian Zone, came to the field. So, my father and another worker, who also wanted to come to the west, traded places. We had no idea where he was for three months. He arrived in our town just as he had left the farmers field.

In 1946, my family spent almost four months in a Displaced Persons camp in Bremen waiting for a ship to take us to the US. They didn’t feed us very well, for example we had beans every other day. We were waiting because there was a stevedore strike and no ships were sailing until the strike was settled. We then arrived in New York on December 13, 1946. We were sponsored by a Jewish Aid organization which also helped us with our expenses for a while. It was wonderful to come to this free country.
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Louis Hane told his son many stories about the war. During his lifetime, he also completed a manuscript in pencil, in German, about his experiences. Herbert Hane donated that document to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He also gave an oral history of his recollections to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. A copy is at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

Herbert Hane lived in New York and since 1964 has been living in Maryland. Since his retirement he has been researching the Holocaust and taught classes on this subject at Anne Arundel Community College and is currently teaching in area senior centers. Hane also speaks publicly about his father’s and his own experiences during the war. In addition, he has been giving one-man presentations of a Jewish-Polish partisan based on the book “Fighting Back.” He also works as a Colonial tour guide in Annapolis, Maryland.

If your group would like to hear Hane’s story, please call him at (410) 544-3244.

Herbert Hane: Abstract | Full Story | Images and Artifacts