Fredy Hirsch
- Jewish Gay Man Brutally Murdered by Nazis at Auschwitz. Holocaust & Theresienstadt

19 October 2022

Category: Nazi Victims

Fredy Hirsch was born on the 11th of February 1916 in Aachen. Fredy was a Jew and in 1931 he took over the leadership of the scouting branch of the local Aachen Jewish youth association. One year later he participated in founding the Aachen branch of the Jewish Scouting Association of Germany. The Jewish community of Aachen was well-integrated and there was little antisemitism. However, this changed in 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. Because of the growing antisemitism, 300,000 Jews fled from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939.

On the 15th of September 1935 the Nazi regime announced the Nuremberg Laws or Nuremberg Race Laws which were the legal basis for the racist anti-Jewish policy in Germany. Hirsch’s situation was even more complicated because he was also a homosexual man. In June 1935 the Nazis revised Paragraph 175, which was the statute of the German criminal code that banned sexual relations between men In November 1935 Fredy Hirsch moved from Nazi Germany to Czechoslovakia. In Brno he also met his life partner, the medical student Jan Mautner.

Things changed for the worse in Czechoslovakia in late summer 1938, when Hitler annexed the Sudetenland where the ethnic German population of Czechoslovakia lived. On the 15th of March 1939, less than 6 months after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the remaining Czech parts of Czechoslovakia establishing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Immediately after the Nazis occupied the whole country, they passed new anti-Jewish laws, which were designed to exclude Jews from society and restrict their livelihood.

From August 1940 onwards, Jewish children were banned from attending public and private schools. From November 1940, new laws, decrees, guidelines, and regulations increasingly restricted the civil and human rights of Jews in the protectorate. However, there was still an oasis of fun and hope in a desert of oppression, where Jewish children of Prague could meet and forget all restrictions and suffering in Hagibor meaning “ Hero” in Hebrew. It was a playground which consisted of tennis courts, volleyball courts or running track, where Jewish children could play games and participate in competitions. All of this was organized by Fredy Hirsch whom the children adored.

First to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz

In November 1941, Reinhard Heydrich established the Theresienstadt Ghetto. The first transport of Czech Jews arrived in the same month. Fredy Hirsch was sent to Theresienstadt in early December 1941 and was appointed head of the children and youth department of the Jewish Ghetto. Fredy insisted on maintaining discipline, regular exercise and strict hygiene in order to maximize their chances of survival. In September 1943 Fredy Hirsch was sent to Auschwitz.

The Jews from Theresienstadt were placed into B II b family camp, called Theresienstadt family camp Auschwitz, established on the 8th of September 1943. It was one of the nine camps built by the Germans in the Birkenau subcamp of Auschwitz and about 18,000 Jews deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto were placed there between 1943 and 1944. Because Fredy was charismatic and spoke German as well as the Nazis and knew how to talk to them, he once again managed to arrange better conditions for the children including the creation of the Children’s Block.

Hirsch had managed to convince the camp’s commander to allow this Children’s block, claiming it would keep the children busy, while their parents had to perform forced labor. Hirsch was also able to obtain some additional food for the children. He arranged for the Children’s Block to be heated and the roll calls for children to be held indoors. In February 1944, the Auschwitz resistance movement decoded the meaning of “SB6” which was a cryptic abbreviation for the “special treatment 6 “meaning “murder in the gas chamber after 6 months”. The Jews to be killed were the ones who came in September transport together with Fredy Hirsch.

But some of the Jews decided to make an uprising. However, the uprising did not take place. Fredy and 3,800 men, women and children from the September transport were loaded onto trucks and driven to the gas chambers where they found their death. There were many tears shed for Fredy Hirsch.

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