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Baeumler spoke about childhood during Nazi Regime
BY ELIZABETH ENKE
STATESMAN STAFF WRITER
ISSUE: 78/29
“Seventy-five years and three months ago, Hitler came to power in Germany. The Nazis caused death and destruction. Fifty-million dead. I am not a Holocaust survivor. I am not a Jew. I have been an American citizen for almost 50 years. I was born in Nuremberg and lived there for the first third of my life.” Standing room was the only thing to be had in the Weber Music Hall on Tuesday afternoon, where Mrs. Leonore Baeumler was welcomed by the UMD and Duluth community to speak about her childhood during the time of Nazi Germany.
This year marks the 63rd anniversary of the liberation of concentration camps. Mayor Don Ness officially declared the days of April 27-March 4 the “Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust in the City of Duluth.” Even though Baeumler was not Jewish, she still experienced the detriment of the Nazi Regime as a young girl. Nuremberg was highly connected to the Nazi party. It was where all their meetings were held. Additionally, it was there where the racial laws were proclaimed and international war crime trials conducted.
Two weeks after Nazis became in control, the first concentration camps emerged in Munich, Germany. These camps were designated for “persons that needed to be in protective custody,” stated Baeumler. Baeumler still remembers that “peculiar smell in the air” over a hillside cutoff by barbed wired. “It was there where bodies were incinerated, the ashes were already gone when we walked over and looked at it after war,” she said.
As a youth growing up in Germany, Baeumler was forced to fall accustom to the “Nazi spirit.” They had to wear uniforms with the swastika blatantly shown, attend meetings where songs and parades were performed promote the regime and schoolbooks had been changed to conform to Hitler’s views. “I did what I had to do,” said Baeumler. “I complied, I had no choice.”
Junior Jess Stinson said, “It was nice to see the perspective from someone who wasn’t Jewish, but German, and how she had to conform to the Nazis. It’s such a huge part of our history.” It was then that Baeumler realized she needed to start becoming aware of what she said and who she said it to. “One could not trust one’s neighbor or fellow worker, and family might even denounce each other and maybe not even for political reasons,” said Baeumler. “People turned against each other, and the political power gained from it.”
In 1944, the government had created an organization that evacuated children to places that were safe from bombings taking place. Baeumler was relocated to a school in Czechoslovakia, where she and other classmates stayed for a year. “If we had stayed three more days, we would have encountered army,” said Baeumler. “We probably wouldn’t have made it home.”
Baeumler had kept all of the letters she had sent to her parents, and ironically, displayed a sense of light-heartedness while reading some of those memoirs.
On April 18, 1945 around 8 a.m., the U.S. Army appeared with tanks and trucks. The mayor and president stood in road and waved a white cloth to surrender, remembers Baeumler. “My father and I stood at roadside, my father told me to say, in my very best English, that we welcome the Americans, and we were very glad the war was over and thank you.”
“Total war had brought total defeat and total destruction. Life in Germany changed not just for me and my parents, but forever; I was six years old,” said Baeumler.
