Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Lothar Czoßek

Elsteraue, Rehmsdorf, Saxony-Anhalt

As a teenager in Rehmsdorf, Lothar Czoßek saw something that haunts him to this day. Each day on his way to his job apprenticeship as a coppersmith, he saw Jewish slave laborers from the nearby “Wille” camp being marched to work.

“It was 5 in the morning when they left, and about 7 PM when they returned,” says Czoßek, a retired teacher, now 83. Daily, he saw the emaciated prisoners “dragging themselves three kilometers. I can hardly describe their condition.… They worked [all] day and were not able to wash.”

The camp today looks much as it did back then, says Czoßek: Two of the original stone barracks remain; only one was destroyed by air raids. But the big difference today is that the story of the camp and its inmates is known, thanks to Czoßek’s determination.

A schoolteacher since 1959, he returned in 1972 to the subject of the “Wille” camp – a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Today, as local historian of Rehmsdorf in former East Germany, he is largely responsible for recording the camp’s history and for establishing the museum and memorial to the camp’s 5,800 victims.

In addition, he has nurtured contacts with survivors, with whom he has conducted eyewitness interviews. The first survivor returned in 1984 from Hungary, and visited several times since, said Czoßek, whose goal is to ensure that this dark chapter of German history is never forgotten.

Nominator Tibor Horvath, a Romanian-born Jew who survived the Wille camp, recalled how Czoßek (who answers queries to the museum from his home) and his wife, Ingeborg, welcomed him in their home when he revisited the site. “We talked for hours about my experience as slave laborer there, and I found out I was not the first to visit him. Mr. Czoßek has spent more than three decades of hard work to preserve the very sad history of this concentration camp.” Such a meeting would not have been easy before German unification, said Horvath, who had escaped the oppressive regime in Communist Romania and settled in then West Germany, in a town near Frankfurt. He first revisited the Wille camp in the early 1990s.

Since then, Czoßek has organized meetings where Horvath has shared his memories with local pupils and residents, and answered their questions. It is just one of the many ways in which Czoßek has honored survivors and the memory of the dead.

For nominators like Sonja Vansteenkiste-Bilé, who lives in Belgium, the contact with Czoßek also has been lifechanging. Searching for information about her murdered uncle Raphael Bilé, a prisoner at Wille, she came across Czoßek’s name and called him. In October of 2011, she and her husband met with Czoßek in Rehmsdorf. “I was immediately stunned, seeing the work he has devoted for so many years and the results he has achieved,” Vansteenkiste-Bilé said. “He is convinced that victims and their families have the right to know the extent of the horror and the massacre the Nazi regime caused. How better to prevent this happening ever again than to tell the whole truth, despite feeling ashamed of his German forefathers?”

It took decades for Czoßek to achieve his goals. Starting his research in March 1972, Czoßek found little material to go on. There was only one dissertation written about it in 1953, and “not much of this was true,” Czoßek says. “This is one reason why I told the mayor at the time that we absolutely must work on this history.” When American troops had liberated Buchenwald, they took all the documents with them, Czoßek explained. Until those were returned after German unification in 1990, Czoßek had to look in other archives and seek eyewitnesses.

Today, the resulting books, memorial and exhibition in Rehmsdorf tell the story of the Jewish prisoners of the “Wille” satellite camp. From June 1944, the SS transferred prisoners from the nearby Buchenwald camp to work there for the Brown Coal-Petrol-AG (Brabag) fuel production factory, under catastrophic conditions: prisoners suffered lack of food and adequate clothing and were subjected to abuse by guards. Exhausted prisoners were sent back to Buchenwald.

When American troops approached in April 1945, the SS ordered that the camp be evacuated on the night of April 7. To that end, a transport train with ten open coal cars was prepared, in which the 3,000 remaining slave laborers – crammed together and exposed to the unpredictable April weather and ongoing air raids – were to be brought to Theresienstadt. After a “death march” from Reitzenhain, only 1,000 prisoners made it to Theresienstadt; they were liberated on 8 May 1945.

The history of the Wille satellite camp “was not a taboo theme,” said Czoßek. “I got lots of support from all the local institutions.” In 1985, his brochure on the history was disseminated among local residents, in local businesses and schools, correcting the record of history for the first time.

From 1997 to 2010, Czoßek published several works on the topic of “Wille” and other aspects of local history, the first of which was Vernichtung / Auftrag und Vollendung. Dokumentation über das Aussenlager Rehmsdorf des KZ Buchenwald, [Extermination: The command, and its fulfillment. Documenting the Rehmsdorf Satellite Camp of Buchenwald.] “This dark chapter in German history must not be forgotten,” says Czoßek, who frequently visits classrooms and also gives seminars on the local history for the Germany army.

Both Vansteenkiste-Bilé and Horvath have expressed astonishment that a man who is not Jewish has done this work for nearly 30 years, and he is paid by no one. “Without him no one in Rehmsdorf would ever know about the Nazi atrocities to the Jewish people,” Vansteenkiste-Bilé said. “For sure, there would not exist a memorial site or a place to go to for so many families who have lost a father, a brother, a grandfather, an uncle or a great-uncle in Camp Wille.”