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Christine Bücher (* 1959)

• Dr. Christine Bücher was born in Linnich in 1959

• she went to school in Jülich

• she studied art history, literature and philosophy in Aachen and got her PhD in literature

• she curated exhibitions in numerous museums in Ulm, Dortmund and Dresden and worked as consultant to museums and educational institutions

• now, she works in PR and event management for the memorial Gedenkstätte Bautzner Straße Dresden and gives guided tours in the museum Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr

We spoke to Dr. Christine Bücher, born in 1959 in Linnich in North Rhine-Westphalia about her parents’ and grandparents’ life under National Socialism, as well as the fate of her extended Jewish family.

Her maternal grandfather’s name was Karl Janssen. He grew up during the First World War in Aachen, close to the Belgian border. However, he was still too young to be drafted as soldier and thus survived the war unharmed. After he graduated from high school, he did not complete a compulsory basic military service as it had just been prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles. Instead, Karl Janssen moved to Bonn, where he studied medicine and became a gynaecologist and surgeon. He started as assistant physician in the hospital of Burtscheid, Aachen, and quickly rose to a position as senior physician. This allowed him to finally marry his fiancée Josefa Schnieders in 1931. She gave birth to their first daughter Annemarie the following year.

In 1933, the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) seized power. In consequence, Karl Janssen joined both the party, as well as the SA, the paramilitary wing of the NSDAP. By summer of 1933, all chief physicians in Aachen had joined the Nazi party. With one exception: Hermann Gatersleben, Karl Janssen’s boss. He refused both to join the NSDAP and to perform forced sterilisations on his patients. This meant great financial losses for the hospital, but he did not back down. Hermann Gatersleben and Karl Janssen had a fight and in the mid ‘30s, Karl Janssen moved to Dingelstädt in Thuringia with his young family. There, he worked as chief physician in the local hospital and on the side, he treated patients in a private practice. When the war broke out, Karl Janssen had to catch up on the compulsory basic military service and subsequently got drafted as medic.

During the first two years of the war, Karl Janssen worked in the local reserve military hospital, but in 1941, he was sent to work in the reserve military hospital in Kraków. There, he worked for about two years. This means, that Karl Janssen was in Kraków exactly in the time between the formation and liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto. He must have been aware of the ghetto, but what he made of it is unknown.

In November 1943, Karl Janssen was sent to Lemberg, and later Italy and probably Hungary. He worked no longer in military hospitals but was assigned a troop at the front. Because medics were scarce and valuable, he was always well protected and never in any serious danger. At the end of the war, he was taken prisoner by American forces but he was able to escape and return home to his family in Dingelstädt. There, he was arrested in September 1945 by Red Army soldiers who brought him to Frankfurt (Oder), where he was interrogated. He lived in a transit camp for people who came from the Soviet Union or were brought there. The hygienic conditions were severe which led to epidemics and many deaths. Karl Janssen worked as a doctor in the camp, which probably saved him from being abducted to the Soviet Union as forced labourer. To his family, he wrote letters, in which he tried to justify his involvement with National Socialism, declaring his innocence as mislead follower.

Because medics were scarce in the entire Soviet occupation zone, Josefa Janssen managed to get her husband out of the camp in 1947. However, as he had been involved in the NSDAP and SA, he was banned from working as doctor. The municipal council fought for a year to reinstall him at his old position in the Dingelstädt hospital. After his denazification trial stated that, while he had been a member of the NSDAP and SA, he had not been an active Nazi, Karl Janssen was allowed to continue working as a doctor, even though he was barred from leading positions. However, in the 1960s, a maternity hospital was installed in Dingelstädt and Karl Janssen appointed chief physician. He only stayed in this position for a short while because he passed away in 1964.

By this time, all of his four children had left the GDR and moved to West Germany where they had found better opportunities and job prospects. The eldest daughter, Annemarie Janssen trained to become a nurse and in 1957, she found a job in the hospital of Bardenberg, near Aachen. There she met Gerhard Bücher, who worked as a doctor in the same hospital. They fell in love, got married and started a family. In 1959, their first daughter Christine was born and in 1962, a son followed.

Annemarie Janssen’s husband Gerhard Bücher was born in 1918 in Koslar, a village in West Germany. He graduated from high school in 1937 and, as was custom in Nazi Germany, joined the Reich Labour Service for a year. Afterwards, he began his basic military service but when he contracted an open tuberculosis, he was discharged from the Wehrmacht because of the risk of infection. He returned home to Jülich to recover.

In 1941, Gerhard Bücher moved to Bonn to study medicine. The course of study was influenced and shaped by the racial ideology of National Socialism. Next to the regular syllabus, the students took classes in racial theory and genetics. Even though, he studied medicine, Gerhard Bücher completed a training as paramedic on the side. As such, he worked in his hometown Jülich, where he was present during one of the city’s bombings. He barely escaped with his own life and had to leave Jülich as the military hospital of Jülich lay in ruins. Until the end of the war, Gerhard Bücher worked as paramedic in various reserve military hospitals in West Germany.

In the meantime, Gerhard Bücher’s younger brother Hubert had joined the Wehrmacht in 1941, at 19 years old. After a short basic military training, Hubert Bücher went to Russia with the Army Group North (Heeresgruppe Nord) where the front was quite stable. He was assigned to the artillery as observer and thus did not actively participate in combat. This changed in summer of 1944, when the German troops began retreating towards the Baltic Sea. Hubert Bücher was now posted in close combat and during one of those encounters in early 1945, he was shot in the leg. The army managed to extract him from the front and brought him to the Naval Hospital in Stralsund. In March, he was transferred to Malente, where his leg was amputated. Hubert Bücher stayed there to recover and spent the rest of the war in hospital. He was only released in September 1945 and returned home to his mother in Jülich, evading the fate of a prisoner of war.

In second marriage, Hubert Bücher married Margot Prüfke, who had a Jewish grandmother named Henriette Breuer, née Seligmann. She had married Wilhelm Breuer, who was not Jewish, and together they had three daughters: Elfriede, Luise and Erna. In 1935, Henriette and Wilhelm Breuer got a divorce because Wilhelm had a new girlfriend. So Henriette Breuer moved in with her daughter Luise and Luise’s illegitimate daughter Margot Spielmann. Shortly after, their house was declared a “Jew House” (Judenhaus) and other Jewish families got ghettoised with them there.

In January of 1942, the first deportations from Gelsenkirchen began, where the Breuer family lived. Luise Breuer, who had by now married Curt Totenkopf, decided to flee with her husband and daughter, so that they could evade the deportation. However, they were caught in Alsace and the parents were arrested. Curt Totenkopf was murdered in August in Buchenwald and Luise Totenkopf in November in Auschwitz. The fate of Margot Spielmann remains unknown.

Henriette Breuer got deported in August of 1942 to Theresienstadt Ghetto. In an attempt to save her family’s possessions, Henriette Breuer’s eldest daughter Elfriede decided to move into her mother’s house, the former “Jew House”, in Gelsenkirchen. By now, she had married the non-Jewish Kurt Prüfke, with whom she had a daughter, named Margot Prüfke. Because Kurt Prüfke refused to divorce his Jewish wife, he lost his job and the family lived in poverty. In the mid ‘30s, Elfriede and Kurt Prüfke decided to baptise their daughter, hoping to protect her from discrimination and persecution.

In autumn of 1944, Elfriede Prüfke was deported to a concentration camp in Elben, near Kassel. Most prisoners there were Jewish women, who were married to non-Jewish men and therefore considered “Jewish half-breeds” by the Nazi authorities. Alongside two or three other women, Elfriede Prüfke managed to leave the camp briefly, in order to get a message to her husband, who had no clue where his wife had been brought. After successfully informing their husbands about their whereabouts, the women returned to the camp in Elben. In the following months, their husbands came to visit them, bringing them food and warm clothes, to ensure their wives survival. When the end of the war was imminent, many concentration camps were liquidated by sending the prisoners on Death Marches. However, the women of the Elben camp did not suffer this fate. Allegedly, they stroke a bargain with the camp commander, saying, “We’ll let you go, we won’t report you, if you accommodate us.” So the women stayed in the camp until they were freed by Allied soldiers. Elfriede Prüfke returned to her family in Gelsenkirchen, same as her mother Henriette Breuer, who had survived Theresienstadt Ghetto. After the end of the Second World War, Elfriede Prüfke converted to Judaism and was eventually buried on the Jewish cemetery in Gelsenkirchen, next to her mother.

Her daughter Margot Bücher, née Prüfke, converted to Catholicism, though struggling with the anti-Semitism that was still prevalent. She went regularly to a Catholic women’s group until one of its members claimed, “the Jews” had murdered Christ. In general, Margot Bücher kept quiet about her Jewish ancestry for a long time because she had struggled all her childhood and youth with being “other” and she only wanted to be like everybody else. One of her closest friends was a man of whom she knew that he had been with the SS in Hungary. But she never addressed his Nazi past nor her Jewish relatives because she did not want to jeopardize the friendship. Later, she called it “a friendship with a thousand question marks”.