Walter Frankenstein, 100, Dies; Hid From the Nazis All Over Berlin

New York Times

16-05-2025

For more than two years, Walter Frankenstein and his small family were among the estimated 6,500 human U-boats in Berlin — Jews trying to elude Nazis by figuratively hiding like submarines. They took refuge in bombed-out buildings, cars, forests, craters, brothels or wherever they could survive for another day or week.
One morning in 1944, after sleeping in the shell of a building, Mr. Frankenstein was riding a train when a military policeman demanded to see his identification. Years later, in an interview with the Jewish Museum Berlin, Mr. Frankenstein recalled that he told the officer, in a fake foreign accent, that he was a forced laborer and had left his papers in his work clothing.
When the officer insisted on calling his employer, Mr. Frankenstein felt he had no choice but to admit that he was a Jew, although he risked being deported to Auschwitz. But the officer did not report him. Instead, he told Mr. Frankenstein: 'Get lost. I'm not looking for Jews; I'm looking for deserters.'
That episode illustrated the daily threat faced by Jews in hiding — sometimes in plain sight — during the Holocaust, and the luck that kept some of them alive.
'The average U-boat changed locations on average one dozen times during the war,' Richard N. Lutjens Jr., a professor of modern German history at Texas Tech University and the author of 'Submerged on the Surface: The Not-So-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945' (2019), said in an email. 'They had to. The constant air raids and suspicious neighbors meant that one would rarely stay in one place for too long.'
Mr. Frankenstein, who was one of about 1,700 such U-boats who survived the war, died on April 21 in Stockholm, where he had lived since 1956. He was 100.
His death was confirmed by Klaus Hillenbrand, the journalist who turned an article he wrote about the Frankenstein family for a German newspaper into the 2008 book 'Nicht Mit Uns' (the title means 'Not With Us').
Mr. Frankenstein was born on June 30, 1924, in Flatow, Germany (now Zlotow, Poland). His father, Max, owned a general store that his mother, Martha (Fein) Frankenstein, ran after her husband died in 1929. The family lived above the store.
Like other Jewish businesses, the family's store was boycotted; someone also fired bullets into it. The strangulation of Jewish life under Nazi rule meant that Jews were banned from public schools; when Walter was expelled from his school in Flatow, his mother sent him to live at the Baruch Auerbach Orphanage for Jewish Boys and Girls in Berlin, where he could attend a Jewish school.
The orphanage, he later said, was a haven for some 200 children and teenagers. 'We lived there as if on a small, sheltered island,' he told the Jewish Museum. 'We didn't have much experience with persecution until the pogrom of 'Reichskristallnacht' in 1938.'
During the Nazis' coordinated antisemitic violence on Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, storm troopers burst into the orphanage, bent on burning the building down. But Walter and three other boys managed to persuade them not to set fire to the orphanage because neighboring buildings might also go up in flames.
The Nazis turned their attention to the synagogue next door, where they extinguished the eternal flame at the altar and opened the gas valve, hoping to cause an explosion. When the boys smelled gas, they turned off the valve and flung open the windows.
Later that night, Walter and the other boys went up to the roof of the orphanage to survey the damage wrought by the Nazis. The destruction, which had occurred throughout Germany and Austria, led to the deaths of at least 91 Jews, as well as fires at thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues.
'Then we knew: The synagogues were burning,' Mr. Frankenstein told The Associated Press in 2018. 'The next morning, when I had to go to school, there was sparkling, broken glass everywhere on the streets.'
He met his future wife, Leonie Rosner, at the orphanage, and they left together in 1941, subletting a room in Berlin. They married in 1942; Walter, who was only 17, needed his mother's permission.
To support themselves, he worked as a mason in Berlin, which brought him into contact with Adolf Eichmann, a pivotal architect of the Final Solution, who threatened him as he did plastering work in Eichmann's official residence.
'One speck and you're in Auschwitz tomorrow,' he recalled Eichmann saying.
Mr. Frankenstein's time underground began in February 1943, when he showed up for a forced labor assignment. After a Gestapo official told him that the other Jewish workers had been deported the night before, Mr. Frankenstein fled, ripping off the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear. He went into hiding with his wife and their son, Peter-Uri, who had been born the month before.
For the next two years and two months, the family — which grew with the birth of a second son, Michael, in September 1944 — eluded the Nazis. At one point, Leonie and Peter-Uri escaped to a farm in Briesenhorst, hundreds of miles away, near the Baltic Sea. He took refuge in an opera house, various theaters, abandoned cars and the home of a Christian woman.
In the days before the war ended, the four Frankensteins lived in a subway station that had been converted into a bunker.
'I lay on a plank bed with a straw mattress on it, put the children on it, and there we stayed until liberation,' Mr. Frankenstein told the historian Barbara Schieb for an essay included in the 2009 book 'Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation,' edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon and Chana Schütz. 'We had no water, no food, nothing.'
After the war, Mr. Frankenstein helped smuggle Jews into the British Mandate for Palestine, when legal immigration channels became limited. His wife and children sailed there in late 1945; he left in October 1946, but did not arrive until June 1947, because he was detained by British authorities in Cyprus.
Mr. Frankenstein worked as a mason and tiler before being drafted to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He later started a company that installed irrigation systems on kibbutzim.
In 1956, after nearly a decade of enduring the high temperatures and life without electricity, the family moved to Stockholm, where Mr. Frankenstein earned a civil engineering degree. He went on to work as an engineer for a company that built nuclear power plants.
Ms. Frankenstein died in 2009, and their son Michael died in 2024. Mr. Frankenstein is survived by their son Peter-Uri and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In later life, the Frankensteins regularly visited Germany, where Mr. Frankenstein spoke at schools and museums. In 2014, at his initiative, a memorial was installed on the facade of the building that had housed the Auerbach Orphanage. The same year, he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his role in Holocaust remembrance.
Mr. Hillenbrand, Mr. Frankenstein's biographer, wrote in an email that 'keeping the memory about the Shoah was a mission for him.'
After Mr. Frankenstein received the Order of Merit, he often carried it with him in its small blue case, along with the yellow star he had been forced to wear many years before, identifying him as a Jew.
'The first one marked me,' he often said. 'The second one honored me.'