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Johann Schmitz * 1904

Münsterstraße 10 (Eimsbüttel, Lokstedt)

HIER WOHNTE
JOHANN SCHMITZ
JG. 1904
VERHAFTET 1937-38,42-44
KZ FUHLSBÜTTEL
KZ NEUENGAMME
ERTRUNKEN 3.5.1945
MS "CAP ARCONA"

Johann Gerhard Schmitz, born on 20.11.1898 in Krefeld, imprisoned several times in the 1930s and 1940s, last in Neuengamme concentration camp, died presumably on 3.5.1945 when the "Cap Arcona" sank.

Münsterstraße 10 (Hospitalstraße 10)

"As far as Schmitz's earlier activities in the company are concerned, he was always diligent and orderly. I respectfully request that permission be given for him to be released for war-related work in the occupied area. The company J. H. Gustav Burmeister is a recognized military enterprise".

With this letter, written on a typewriter, the building contractor Gustav Burmeister, owner of a Lokstedt building and civil engineering firm of the same name, tried in August 1943 to get his former employee Johann Schmitz, who was about to be sent to a concentration camp, released early from prison in order to save his life. The efforts proved futile.

Johann Schmitz was born in Krefeld on the Lower Rhine in 1898, the son of an accountant in a large silk spinning mill, Heinrich Schmitz, and his wife Margarete, née Komp. He grew up with five siblings in - as was later stated in an expert opinion of the "Ermittlungshilfe für Strafrechtspflege" - "orderly circumstances".

After attending a Catholic elementary school, he began an apprenticeship in a car repair shop in 1913. After the repair shop was closed, he completed an apprenticeship as a commercial employee in a cotton spinning mill in Krefeld-Uerdingen. After that, due to a lack of work, there were only temporary jobs as a postal worker at the railroad post office, at the Krefelder Stahlwerke AG and as a representative for colonial goods and tropical fruits for a Dutch company.

Periods of employment alternated with unemployment. At the beginning of 1929 Johann Schmitz went to Hamburg and sailed with interruptions until 1939 as a steward at sea, among others with the company HAPAG. After that, he took jobs in Hamburg as a construction worker and iron weaver and was glad to be able to exchange the hard physical work for work as an auxiliary warehouse manager for the Burmeister building and civil engineering company in Lokstedt in January 1942. At Süderfeldstraße 84, he also performed the written administrative tasks for a forced labor camp for Belgian workers belonging to the company.

Johann Schmitz maintained sexual relations with women and men and first came into conflict with existing laws in 1934 because of his homosexual tendencies. He was fined by the Hamburg District Court for "causing a public nuisance" after he allowed a partner to touch him in a public restroom.

No criminal record has been preserved of his first conviction under § 175 StGB, so this case of "fornication with numerous partners," as it was later called, can only be described in broad terms: Johann Schmitz was imprisoned in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp from May 13 to June 29, 1937, before he was remanded in custody on June 30 to await his trial, which ended on August 27, 1937, at the regional court with a prison sentence of one year and six months. He served the prison term until mid-November 1938 in the men's prison Fuhlsbüttel and was released early on parole.

On September 10, 1942, Johann Schmitz visited the needy institutions at Fischmarkt (today Alter Fischmarkt) and Hopfenmarkt in front of St. Nikolai Church in the afternoon hours. While doing so, he appeared suspicious to a senior criminal investigator in Eisenach, who was "passing over" various public toilets in the city center for homosexuals that afternoon. Like an "agent provocateur", the officer positioned himself at the urinal and Johann Schmitz, looking for a partner, fell into the trap. As a "relevantly" known man, he was immediately arrested and, after a short police detention, was sent to the Hamburg-Stadt remand center on September 12, 1942.

While waiting for his trial, at the end of October 1942, he asked the chief public prosecutor at the district court for "release from custody until the deadline," suggesting that he be assigned either to his previous job, "in a munitions factory," or to the "Eastern Front." It is possible that he had become aware during this time that, as a homosexual, he was threatened with "preventive imprisonment" or other "security measures" in a concentration camp after the end of a third term of imprisonment.

In December 1942, moreover, two "experts" judged his fate. While the "Ermittlungshilfe für Strafrechtspflege" (Investigation Aid for the Administration of Criminal Justice) painted a thoroughly positive picture of him, emphasizing above all his good reputation and diligence at his last place of work, the assessment of the forensic physician Hans Koopmann was written in stereotypical form and ended in a scathing manner: "The criminological prognosis is to be made unfavorably. The tendency to homosexual activity is already quite strongly fixed in the person under investigation. It appears very probable after the previous life ... that he will relapse after serving the expected sentence. Security measures therefore appear necessary." As with many of the homosexuals he "assessed," Koopmann recommended "voluntary emasculation."

In a summary trial before the Hamburg District Court on February 4, 1943, solely on the basis of his confession that he had sought out same-sex partners by showing his genitals and engaging in onanism in various institutions of need, Johann Schmitz was again sentenced to one year and six months in prison under § 175 of the German Penal Code. During the trial, Johann Schmitz declared that he wanted to be "emasculated." Once again, he served the sentence in the men's prison Fuhlsbüttel from March 1, 1943. Apparently, castration was no longer carried out. It is possible that he became aware of the health consequences of such measures, or that there was no longer sufficient surgical capacity at the Central Hospital after bomb damage.

On March 9, 1944, according to references in registration and prisoner files, Johann Schmitz was released via the "Kriminalpolizeileitstelle" (Main Office of the Criminal Investigations) to his last employer Gustav Burmeister at Süderfeldstraße 42, where he intended to take up quarters.

Presumably, however, he did not reach freedom, but was held by the Kripo in the inner-city police prison Hütten until he was sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp on April 28, 1944, under prisoner number 29617, as a "BV (homo)" (the abbreviation in use at the time for a "temporary preventive prisoner"), where he was employed as an unskilled laborer.

His further fate remains uncertain. However, since his effects in the form of a pocket watch and a tiepin are still kept today at the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, it is likely that he, too, was among the approximately 6400 dead of the Neuengamme concentration camp inmates evacuated to the ships "Cap Arcona", "Thielbek" and "Deutschland IV."

Translation by Beate Meyer
Stand: January 2022
© Ulf Bollmann

Quellen: StaH 213-8 (Staatsanwaltschaft Oberlandesgericht – Verwaltung), Abl. 2, 451 a E 1, 1 b; 242-1II (Gefängnisverwaltung II), Ablieferungen 13, 16 und 1998/1; StaH 213-11 (Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Strafsachen), 1647/43; Bundesarchiv, NS 3/1755; Auskunft Dr. Reimer Möller, KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme vom Dezember 2008.