Item description
Description
- Title:
- Eyewitness account by Siegfrid Schaefer regarding forced labour
- Summary:
-
Together with a teacher, a factory owner and and artist, the author was sent by the Jewish Employment Office, Berlin, to the railway station Lehrter Bahnhof, where they had to clean the toilets of the incoming trains. Oberinspektor Bandmann did everything to make their task more disgusting. The author was taken ill in consequence of the unbearable nausea and had to spend eight weeks in hospital. After that he worked at the Siemens-Schuckert Works in contact with poisoning material, but there the Jews were not ill-treated; the manager of his department Baumeister would even show them his sympathy, as long as nobody else was near.
In February 1943, the author was arrested and kept in the Rosenstrasse for 8 days. Then the Employment Office sent him to the firm “Edelwald-Gesellschaft”, owner Ernst Schröder, an anti-Nazi who treated his Jewish workers most kindly; moreover he was hiding two Jews in his home for four years, sharing his food rations with them. He was imprisoned for l½ years, because he called a swindle the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (D.A.F.).
- Witness:
- Schaeffer, Siegfried
- Number of pages:
- 4 pieces
- Date(s):
- 1956
- Catalogue ID:
- 105275
- Reference number:
- 1656/3/2/616
- Location:
- Berlin
- Date Range:
- 1939-1945
- Type of Material:
- Eyewitness account