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How a mystery document left by my grandfather took me deep into the history of Nazi Germany

The form appeared to have once been diligently completed in pencil but then subsequently rubbed out, the contents now illegible. Could this really be what I think it is?

May 01, 2019
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Going through my recently departed grandfather’s belongings was never going to be a casual experience, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for the concentration camp report form. The top of the page proudly displays the name “Gas Chamber Firm Dr. Breymesser & Co.”—which operated, it is stated, in the Austrian camps of Strasshof, Graz, and Marburg.

Growing incredulity was accompanied by a sense of impending nausea as I read through column headings including “hour of gassing” and “number of people.” The form appeared to have once been diligently completed in pencil but then subsequently rubbed out, the contents now illegible. Could this really be what I think it is?

Having no scholarly experience of the minutiae of the Nazi machinery of death, I felt compelled to do some research. Googling the key terms on the form resulted in a dead end by way of many holocaust-denying websites that kept referring to an article on fumigation co-authored by a certain H. Breymesser.

As I thought the form might be of broader historical interest, and because I clearly needed expert help, I got in touch with the Wiener Library, a Holocaust archive in London, about donating the form.

A preliminary investigation has revealed that the company was probably involved in the disinfection of clothing using Zyklon B in camps such as Strasshof, which was used as a transit camp for forced labourers. Although innocent of gassing people, it seems that Dr Breymesser had no scruples about profiting from the Nazi labour camp system.

Further research threw up a Vienna-based firm by the name of Breymesser & Co., advertising its specialist services in fumigation which, according to its website at the time of writing, it has provided to clients for “more than 70 years.”

Upon confronting the firm, I was informed that there is no evidence in the company records or in official Austrian registers to indicate any links with “Dr. Breymesser & Co.” I was thanked for pointing out a “typographical error” on the website: apparently, the firm was founded in the 1970s and the text will be changed accordingly. I still don’t know quite what to think of that.

I have no idea, either, how my grandfather managed to lay his hands on the form. His wartime biography is fascinating and troubling, but not because he was a Nazi of any sort. Born 1926 into a peasant family with a smallholding in rural northern Bavaria, he was drafted into military training as a teenager during the waning years of the War.

Captured by the Red Army while stationed in Czechia, he became a prisoner of war at age 18 and, without ever having seen active service, was shipped off east for four and a half years of hard labour in the Soviet Union. Only on New Year’s Eve 1949 did he return home to a new country, eventually becoming a teacher, marrying my grandmother, and settling down to a comfortable post-war existence.

However he obtained the form, the main question is: why did he keep it? I suspect because he wanted to have a hard piece of evidence for the horrors of the Nazi regime. One of his favourite rants concerned the failures of denazification: he was rightly bitter at the fact that he had to play the sacrificial lamb in Russia for a war that was in no way his, only to come back to a West Germany in which many old Nazis did rather well out of the general post-war amnesia.

The form caught me completely off guard, contributing a note of surrealism to the already absurd process of sorting through the belongings of a dead loved one. In general, his house was a temple to post-war middle-class life, dominated by expensive Persian rugs, frilly curtains, golden ornaments, and the brown-beige-orange tones so in vogue during the 70s. As is typical of the generation that felt the privations of war, my grandfather had a tendency to hoard. Highlights included six computers, two dozen USB memory sticks, mountains of decades-old bank statements, and a Lufthansa ticket to America from 1985. The result was twenty-five carloads of random objects to give away, four trailers of paper recycling, and one giant skip of landfill—and that’s excluding the furniture.

Aside from the raw grief and tediousness of it all, the exercise of clearing out the house brought with it an unexpected swing of emotional extremes. I laughed, I cried, I felt extremely proud—as well as supremely embarrassed—over the few days in which I excavated my grandfather’s life. When someone passes away suddenly, the things they leave behind can yield an unintentionally full portrait of their life—perhaps fuller than their family might wish.

A poignant find was the very first postcard he sent home from Russian captivity through the Red Cross. Dated 25 November 1945, which brought his family the first signs of survival after a year of uncertainty. “Hopefully we can see each other again at home quite soon,” he writes. On the same day, to the visceral horror of my mother, we stumbled across a large number of highly explicit photographic nudes of my grandfather, some artistic and some not-so-artistic—and all on projector slides, no less!—that must have been taken in the 60s or 70s. Whoever said that generation was prudish?

One of the things we didn’t throw away is my grandfather’s collection of poems. He was a passionate amateur poet and had a real knack for writing in the local Bavarian dialect. Some of the poems are political, some work through his wartime experiences, others are just plain silly.

My current favourite, adapted from a well-known line by Goethe, unfortunately doesn’t lend itself to a good English translation as it relies on German-language wordplay, but might be rendered something like this:

Ah, I remember those glorious days,

When all my members were still flexible,

Except one.

But those times they’ll never come back.

By now all my members are stiff,

Except one.

Lord, you have taken my strength,

May you also finally rid me of these stupid ideas!