Heinz Drossel
5 May 2022 – Over the last 5 years I have been involved in a film project that has been the most challenging of my career: a deep dive into the political uses of genocide and massacre, as seen through the life of Jacques Semelin, one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject. Here is the first trailer we did a few years ago:
The movie has changed a bit to reflect what I have learned from the Ukraine War (most of you have followed my team coverage of that war), and was delayed due to COVID. And, the irony. After eighty years, the site of a mass execution of Jews in Ukraine by the Nazis was just about to be commemorated. Then Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine.
And the movie has brought me full circle. When I became involved in war crime investigation work about 15 years years ago, I was introduced to Jacques’ work. My mentors told me he was the seminal authority on massacre and genocide. This work has involved 100+ hours of interview time with Jacques plus numerous other genocide authorities, and allowed me unfettered access to the two Holocaust memorials in Paris, the Holocaust memorial in Washington DC, a trip to the death camp at Auschwitz, and an upcoming trip to Yad Vashem. But it also includes study of the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. What started as one film has now resulted in one major film, plus several collateral videos.
That work has also included the collection of 1,000s of stories, most of which are impossible to include in the films but I share in this series of posts. Here is one:
4th May 1945 was the day the 28-year-old lieutenant of infantry was sentenced to death. One year later, on 4th May 1946, he married a woman whose life he had saved.
Heinz Drossel was born in 1916 in Berlin. His parents were devout Catholics and Heinz never forgot what his father told him at his first communion: “Always stay human, my son, and decent, even in hard times, and even when it demands sacrifices.”
After his degree in law at university, Drossel was banned from taking up a profession because he refused to join the Nazi party NSDAP. Instead he was drafted into the army in November 1939.
On home leave in 1942, Heinz Drossel spotted a woman who tried to jump from a bridge in Berlin. She was obviously terrified by his uniform but he managed to gain her trust. Marianne Hirschfeld revealed that she was Jewish. Drossel gave her money and helped her to go into hiding.
On another home leave in February 1945 Drossel visited his parents in Senzig near Berlin, where a Jewish family hid in the house next door. They were desperate as a neighbour had denounced them. Drossel gave them the key to his flat in Berlin and a pistol. When Gestapo arrived the next day, the Jews had escaped successfully.
Only a few months later, back at the front, lieutenant Drossel refused to sent his men on a suicide mission. Sentenced to death he survived thanks to the total surrender of the German army only four days later. Drossel became a POW of the Soviets, but was released only a few months later.
Back in the ruins of Berlin, Drossel accidentally ran into Marianne Hirschfeld again, the young Jewish woman who had survived in hiding. They married. Heinz Drossel later became a judge and president of the Social Court in Freiburg.
After his retirement and the death of his beloved wife Marianne in 1985, Drossel started to tour schools to tell young people about the Nazi regime. He always closed his lectures with the words his father had told him back in the 1920s: “Always stay human and decent!”
In 1999 Yad Vashem awarded Heinz Drossel and his parents Paul & Elfriede as Righteous Among the Nations. In 2001 he was awarded with the Cross of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany, in 2004 with the Wallenberg Medal of the University of Michigan. Heinz Drossel died 2008, at age 91.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, honors the rescuers and helpers who courageously defied the Nazi regime as the “Righteous among the Nations”.