Christine Bücher

"In 1942, the deportations started in Gelsenkirchen. The first deportation in January. Luise and her daughter Margot were not put on the list. Luise, the daughter of Henriette Breuer, Luise, the sister of Elfriede, got married in the meantime: Curt Totenkopf. Curt Totenkopf is Jewish as well. Curt’s name does not appear on the deportation list in January either. Because they are in danger of being deported the next time, all three decide to flee. They fail and in March ’42, Curt and Luise are arrested in Mühlhausen in Alsace. They are murdered in the course of the year 1942: Luise in November in Auschwitz, Curt in August in Buchenwald. The fate of Margot Spielmann is still unclear, to this day."

"My father has a younger brother, born in February of 1922. This was Uncle Hubert. And Hubert visited the same school as my father: the high school in Jülich. But he did not graduate but dropped out in his second to last school year. By this time, the Second World War had started, his brother was very ill, their father had just passed away. Under these circumstances, my uncle started an apprenticeship at the German National Railway. In 1941, no pardon in 1940, he was examined and the following year, his time in the Wehrmacht begins. After a relatively short training course, he was drafted and was deployed to… well, he joined to the Army Group North and got sent to Russia. He was assigned to the artillery as observer. His job was to adjust the artillery. So he did not participate directly in combat, but was… well, he was an observer. The front was relatively… at the Army Group North was relatively stable, but in the summer of ’44 the rearguard actions started to the West and towards the Baltic Sea, suffering many casualties. In January 1945, my uncle who technically had a completely different job, was posted in close combat in East Prussia. Any my uncle was badly wounded: he was shot clean through his right thighbone. Apparently they succeeded in rescuing him from East Prussia, I assume via the harbour in Pillau. And then he was brought to the Naval Hospital in Stralsund and from there to Malente. And in May, when he was… pardon, March, in March, when he was in Malente, his leg was beyond saving and had to be amputated. I found documents concerning my uncle that state that he was released in September ’45. So because of his injuries, he did not suffer the fate of a prisoner of war. And in autumn ’45, he returned to Jülich, where his mother lived."

"What was it like to study medicine in the time of National Socialism? It was of course shaped by racial ideology. I have my father’s textbook and there are subjects, like racial theory, genetics and so on. But of course also other subjects, because even the National Socialists, as well as the Wehrmacht, needed doctors that could heal people and cure them. The course of study was shortened in the time of National Socialism because they wanted trained doctors as soon as possible. During his studies, my father completed a training course as paramedic in his hometown Jülich. And he was employed repeatedly. And in October of 1944 he experienced a bombing in the reserve military hospital where he was working. And it must have been a life-threatening situation for him. He told my mother and she recently told me that he… well, that he himself almost fell victim to a bombing. This was not the big bombing of Jülich, where 97% of the city were destroyed. It was one of the many earlier bombings."