Latest news with #Uboats
New York Times
16-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
Walter Frankenstein, 100, Dies; Hid From the Nazis All Over Berlin
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.'
BBC News
12-05-2025
- General
- BBC News
Battle of the Atlantic: 'I was there when the Germans surrendered'
On 14 May 1945, almost a week after Britain and its allies celebrated victory in Europe, Hitler's defeated Atlantic U-boats berthed for the final German submarines – the "U-boat peril" as Churchill had called them - had been the Allies' principal threat at sea during the Battle of the Atlantic, a campaign that raged throughout the that day, the first of the U-boats made their way up the River Foyle to Lisahally in County Londonderry to formally years on, Bert Whoriskey, then just 14, and who watched the surrender, told BBC News NI it is a day he can "never ever forget". 'The war had ended, excitement was second to none' "The war had ended, excitement was second to none, " he said. "There were ships of of all kinds, and at their head a big Navy destroyer, and there they were coming up the Foyle."The U-boats were following, around eight, or 10 of them, and they berthed about 200 yards from our house." Pre-war, Lisahally had been a quiet hamlet on the shores of the River was home to about 20 families, mainly workers at a manure factory, whose homes had been built by the factory owners."All we had was a nice cricket pitch, and a pavilion – that was Lisahally until 1939 when Hitler decided it was time to have a war," Bert months, Lisahally, as well as the city of Derry, and the wider north west of Northern Ireland, would be transformed. Lisahally would become one of the Allies' most strategically important amounts of timber arrived, stretched out across Bert's childhood cricket pitch, along with US Naval Construction Battalions (Seabees).Work began, and continued day and night for months.A huge jetty was built at the "back of our house," he the Royal Air Force oil storage facilities were built nearby, an airfield balloons arrived, surrounding the area to protect it from air strike. 'Lisahally was ready' Never had then nine-year-old Bert "seen anything as big"."When that was all built you just looked at it, Lisahally was ready," said he said, the ships started to arrive."Destroyers, battleships submarines, they all came to refuel and rearm. There was British, Canadian, American, Australian, Dutch. This went on every day for the rest of the war," Bert said. The naval base - shared by the Royal Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy and the United States Navy - was vital to the protection of convoys in the one time, 140 Allied escort ships were based on the River Foyle, and Londonderry was home to Base One Europe, the US Navy's operating base in Northern Battle of Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign of World War than 66,000 Allied merchant seamen, sailors and airmen died, with 175 Allied warships and 5,000 merchant ships destroyed by German U-boats. 'They paid the ultimate price' As months gave way to years, Bert said, "you could see the the price that was being paid for where we are today"."The ships were coming in damaged. They would have let us on every once in a while. The young men who were crewing the ship, you could see in their faces they were terrified," he said."Nearly every day there would be bodies on the jetty, waiting to be taken away. That always comes back into my dreams, the bodies on the jetty getting put into the back of a lorry - people who paid the ultimate price." When victory in Europe finally came, Bert remembers sailors jumping into the Foyle "because they were so excited".A "big announcement" came in the days that followed, he said."They announced the U-boats fighting at our end of the Atlantic were surrendering at Lisahally," he 14 May the first of the U-boats berthed at Lisahally and formally ordered to surrender by Admiral Sir Max Horton, commander-in-chief, Western Approaches."Of all the things that happened, all the things we had seen, this was the biggest of them all," Bert said."We were only young. All we thought was we had spent six years fighting the Germans, and now we were going to see actual real Germans," Bert said. Bert and his pals had to wait until "all the pomp died down"."The first thing we heard was the singing of marching tunes."When we looked at them and I will never forget, they were all very young. Not many of them were even as old as 30."You could tell they were glad the war was over, they knew they had survived."The German submariners were held at the naval base for about a year and Bert and his friends used to go down and look through the fence."One day they were all on their knees in a big line, we thought they were going to be shot," Bert said."What they were doing was pulling the grass out of the ground to make a football pitch – the next day a goalpost was put up."We spent time marching up and down with them. They made us toys at Christmas, they made a toy double decker bus – I had never seen a double decker bus." Derry's strategic importance can not be underestimated, Admiral Lord West of Spithead, the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff from 2002 to 2006, said."It was absolutely crucial and we needed to get our ships and facilities as far to the west as we could," he told BBC Radio Ulster's Good Morning Ulster programme."It was wonderful that we could use the base up in Londonderry which put our ships a bit closer." The U-boats were deliberately sunk - or scuttled - off the coast of Derry and Donegal after the war.A special event to commemorate the city's wartime role is set to take place in Derry's Ebrington Square on 17 May.
