A Man is More Than his Death

 Who was Hermann Karrasch?

Update: A helpful member of the German Genealogy group has pointed out the occupation of Hermann on his Haflingskarte is actually Scheidemueller - sawmill operator. This makes a lot more sense than tailor, which was my incorrect interpretation based on a typo on the card (Schneider). There is also a Hermann Karrasch living in Konigsberg in 1935 who is a carpenter/joiner. So this is a better possible match for my Hermann. Thanks Carolina!

In a previous blog, I started investigating my Opa's (Horst Werner Karrasch) parents. I discovered, that contrary to the oral family history, my great grandfather Hermann Karrasch was not shot down over Russia, but died in KZ Mauthausen (https://onlyliarsfam.blogspot.com/2024/11/adventures-in-genealogy.html). This opened up a large research avenue for me, because concentration camps often produced vast amounts of documentation. Here is what I knew from Ancestry records:

1. Hermann Karrasch was born 21 December 1897 in Bolleinein.
2. His prisoner number was 19829
3. He was German and arrested under the pretext of Sicherungsverwahrung (SV - security detention)
4. He died on 23 March, 1945 at subcamp St Valentin as a result of a Fliegerangriff (Air attack)

Immediately after finding this information, my next port of call was Arolsen Archives. A search of the online archive revealed the same document as is available on Ancestry - Hermann's Haftlingskarte. Sadly, unlike many other records, Hermann's contained no physical descriptions. However, Arolsen's records contained an extra page. This showed his profession as Schneidermueller (tailor) with a strikethrough and then indicated he was trained as a Metalarbeiter (metal worker) between 8 September, 1944 and 24 October 1944. His camp records show that he entered subcamp Gross Ramming on 25 August 1944 and was transferred to subcamp St Valentin on 8 September, 1944 (where he began training as a metal worker). 

Hermann Karrasch Haftlingskarte side 1

Hermann Karrasch Haftlingskarte side 2

After this, I emailed Arolsen asking them to conduct a deeper search of their holdings. There, they managed to find a number of documents pertaining to his time in Mauthausen and its subcamps. One was a more detailed Haftlingskarte with several additional details, including Hermann's marital status, number of children and arresting agency by whom he was entered into Mauthausen (the Kripo Konigsberg). This card also lists his professions again, Schneidermueller and a mystery numerical code, which may align to Metalarbeiter, per his other card.

Hermann Karrasch Haftlingskarte 

They also gave me a detailed analysis of his persecution pathway, based on their documents. The timeline is as follows:

1. 17 December, 1942. Admitted to Mauthausen concentration camp by the criminal police Konigsberg.
2. 14 January, 1943. Transported to labour command Gross-Ramming.
3. 8 September, 1944. Transported to labour command St Valentin.
4. 23 March 1945. Died at 1pm in St Valentin. Cause of death, "buried by masses of earth during enemy air raid"

This left me with several questions and lines of follow up enquiry. For one thing, the occupations listed puzzled me. Per my Opa's oral testimony his father Hermann was a grazier. Was this true? Or had his father been a tailor?

"My father and his father (my grandfather) were graziers. They managed a large estate." Horst Werner Karrasch, oral testimony 1990.

I also knew almost nothing about Mauthausen or its subcamps, or the SV arrest category. So I started emailing with two noted experts on Mauthausen and "green" prisoners (Stefan Wolfinger and Andreas Kranebitter). From them I learned a lot. Firstly, Mauthausen was a level 3 death camp. This meant that the average survival duration for prisoners here was very short. Jewish prisoners had the shortest survival time, with Russian POWs also faring very poorly. Early inmates, with the oldest prisoner numbers tended to live longer, as they often served as Kapos or prison functionaries. Finally, older prisoners died sooner as they were not fit enough for the back breaking labour of Mauthausen. Survival time could be improved by getting a better work assignment. If you were assigned to the massive quarry at the main camp, your survival time was numbered in months. Prisoners were forced to carry 25-50kg slabs of stone up the immense staircase. Prisoners often slipped and were crushed by other prisoners and the weight of their stones. SS men would also push men off the edge a cliff adjacent to the stairs. They called it "the parachute jump". 

Mauthausen quarry, stairs of death, taken between 1942-1944

The best chance of survival a prisoner had was to get a relatively better work assignment. As such, prisoners would often lie about their work back home to improve their odds of survival. Although it was possible that Hermann actually had been a tailor and metal worker, it was also possible he lied to increase his chances of survival. And if that was the case, it seemed to have worked. He survived almost until liberation on May 5, 1945. He was achingly close to having gotten home to his family. 

Hermann spent much of his time at St Valentin subcamp. Here, prisoners worked on mass production for the arms industry and were responsible for the building and maintenance of the tank test track. Whilst there remains little but the foundations of the camp today, the factories that were in operation remain.

Aerial shot of current location of St. Valentin (circled in red)

I decided to order Stefan Wolfinger's book Das KZ-Aussenlager St. Valentin for further information, after it was recommended to me by the Mauthausen memorial staff. While I waited for this book to arrive, I chanced upon another lucky find. Ancestry pointed me to a World War 1 causality list for a Hermann Karrasch. Zooming in on this record, I was able to see that this was in fact my Hermann Karrasch born in Bolleinen and reportedly lightly wounded.

WW1 injury listing - Hermann Karrasch

I knew that military records from East Prussia for this period were scarce, but I decided to email Bundesarchiv anyway. I gave them the information that I had...and I waited. About three months later, I got an email back. To my immense luck, they had located duplicate hospitalisation records for Hermann Karrasch. And to my even better luck, these records contained the names of Hermann's parents, something I had no records for. Recall that the oral testimony of my Opa listed his grandparents as Horst Werner Karrasch (allegedly a grazier) and Elspeth Weisskopf. If you had read any of my previous posts, you may not be surprised to learn that only some of this information was accurate.

Hermann Karrasch WW1 record 1

Herman Karrasch WW1 record 2

Now my German is okay, but interpreting war records is beyond my skills, so I once again enlisted the help of my cousin Rainer, who very kindly provided me with the translations and context I needed. The gist of the records were that firstly Hermann served as a Gemeiner in 2 Garde Regiment zu Fuß 3. Komp.(anie). This was a Prussian Regiment. In March 1918, he was hospitalised with gas poisoning. Secondly, he was a pilot at Flieger Beob.(achter) Schule West - Flight Observer School West. In October 1918, he was hospitalised for inflammation of the right foot. But far more interestingly for my purposes, his parents were Johann Karrasch, profession "Eigenkaetner" and Eva Grybowski both living in Bolleinen, not Horst Werner Karrach and Elspeth Weisskopf. According to Rainer, Eigenkaetner was a term used in the former areas of East Prussia and generally referred to a person who owned a small plot of land and worked for a Gutsherr (lord of a manor) in exchange for this land. This occupation tracks with my Opa's oral history. Further, it may explain why he said his father Hermann was a pilot - he was, just not in World War 2. Hermann's occupation was only listed as Arbeiter - worker - which didn't help me that much. To this day, I haven't yet been able to identify what Gut, if any, was near to Bolleinen.

This was a real win though. I had pushed my tree back one more generation, although finding anything on Johann Karrasch and Eva Grybowski has proven impossible. More importantly, I had some colour to build out the story of Hermann Karrasch's life, beyond his terrible death. So I returned to investigating why someone might have been imprisoned as a "green" and what it meant.

Per Arolsen Archives, "People who were arrested by the Kripo (police criminal investigation department) as “criminals” or “anti-social elements” on account of supposed or actual socially deviant behavior were categorized as “preventive detention” prisoners." 

These people have long been denied recognition as victims of the Nazi regime and there has been a long standing social stigma against this category of prisoner because of their categorisation by the Nazi's. However, many arrests were made on this pretext to imprison anyone the Nazi's thought likely to be trouble, including political dissidents and people they predicted would commit crimes in the future. From 1937, the Kripo were able to detain in concentration camps thousands of people who had never been convicted of a crime. The process of being arrested for "preventative detention" was not subject to judicial review.

Camp badges including Green

In 2018, Frank Nonnenmacher initiated a petition to have Green and Black prisoners officially recognised as victims of the Nazi regime. And he had a personal reason for doing so. His uncle, Ernst was sent to Flossenbürg and Sachsenhausen concentration camps after serving a prison sentence as an "asocial and unfit for military service". It was only in 2020 that the Bundestag  accepted a motion put forward by the SPD and CDU/CSU for prisoners labeled “career criminals” and “anti-social elements” to be recognized as victims of Nazi tyranny and for public commemoration to focus more on the injustice done to them. Nonetheless, there are no new programs of compensation, and for many victims like Ernst Nonnemacher, who died in 1989, this action was far too late. He rarely spoke of his ordeal, ashamed like many others who wore the stigma. This certainly explains why my great grandmother Anna Marie Engel would have lied to my Opa about the circumstances of her husband's death. Whether my Opa knew the truth or not is another mystery lost to time. 

Regarding the official explanation given for Hermann's arrest, Arolsen Archives informs me that no documents exist in their holdings. So it seems likely speculation is all I will ever have. Perhaps he was a dissident? Perhaps he was in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or perhaps he was in prison and then later transferred to Mauthausen? There's just no way to chase down this information.

But cousin Rainer found another interesting tidbit for me. In a Konigsberg address book from 1935, he found a Hermann Karrasch living on Tuchmacherstrasse, whose profession was...a tailor. There isn't enough information to know if this is my Hermann, but it could certainly help explain why he and his family aren't listed in the Bolleinen Ortsplan, and why he was transferred to Mauthausen by the Kripo Konigsberg. Tantalising.

After all this research, all that was really left was to dig into the exact circumstances of Hermann's death. And there is actually a lot of material on it. Per Arolsen, Hermann and eleven other men were killed in an air raid on 23 March, 1945 at 1pm. Each of them deserves their own story, and I have been trying to find out as much as I can about them. For some, like Shimon Kraus born 22/1/1910 in Tarnow, I have found some details. For others, like Fjodor Karnauchov born 11/8/1915 in Gorolewska, I can find nothing beyond this page.

Death records for the twelve prisoners who died March 23, 1945 at St. Valentin

 

There are several other pages that record each of these deaths. The Nazi regime was ruthless with its record keeping. But it is Stefan Wolfinger's book on St. Valentin that provides the most insight. I got absolute chills reading this passage so I will quote it in its entirety here. 

"The decisive blow came during the attack on the plant on March 25, 1945. 157 B-24 planes of the US 15th Air Force dropped bombs on the plant and the station area and also hit the concentration camp: the damage was enormous: only two of the nine factory halls remained in tact. It is said that 16 people died in the factory during this attack. Twelve prisoners were killed in the concentration camp. The dead concentration camp prisoners were buried in a bomb crater behind the kitchen." Das KZ-Aussenlager St. Valentin, pg. 144.

To read about the exact death of your great grandparent in a book is mind blowing. This information was part of Hanscarl von Posern's testimony during his trial in Dachau. A former prisoner of St. Valentin drew a sketch of the camp, which shows where the crater would have been, behind the kitchen and to the left of the trenches (mentioned in another prisoner's testimony). But Hermann wasn't to remain there permanently. A footnote in the book states that "at the end of the war, these dead prisoners were dug up and reburied by the Russian army." So Hermann's final resting place remains unknown. 

St. Valentin sketch

The journey of discovering Hermann's life was a long one involving multiple information sources (Bundesarchiv, Arolsen Archives, Ancestry) and was considerably enriched by corresponding with some very helpful academics and buying the fabulous book Das KZ-Aussenlager St. Valentin. It also allowed me to build out the details of my great grandfather's life beyond the two and a bit terrible years that were documented in the Mauthausen files. Thanks to this, I have been able to contribute a biography for Hermann in The Room of Names memorial (https://raumdernamen.mauthausen-memorial.org/?id=4&p=28846&L=1). So many memorialised there have only a name, a date of birth and a date of death, but these people are so much more than their deaths. It has been my great privilege to ensure that my great-grandfather is at least is remembered for his life. 
 

Next time, we will move to the other side of my mother's family, the Hoffmann family. And there is plenty of mystery there too.