When Anne Prior read Irmgard Kroymann’s name for the first time, she thought she had discovered an anti-fascist resistance fighter, a German heroine. It was 2016. Prior, 67 years old, by profession, bookseller, hobby historian in her free time, was looking in the archive for women from her region who had been persecuted by the Nazis and who had worked to rebuild their country after the war. She had already found two women. A communist and a catholic. Irmgard Kroymann, she thought, could be the third.
The Rheinische Post article in which her name appeared was from 1956 and described Kroymann as a trade union leader and committed citizen. When Jewish gravestones were desecrated at the Dinslaken cemetery, she rounded up 50 young people. “They enthusiastically followed the call of their director, Miss Kroymann, to repair the Israelite burial ground that had been destroyed by the hands of boys,” the newspaper said.
In other articles, Anne Prior found other impressive accounts of Kroymann. She herself was a victim of Nazi persecution, stood there, was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned in a concentration camp, after the war she joined the SPD and the horticultural union, became an honorary judge, member of the German Women’s Council, board member of the North Rhine-Westphalia consumer center and state women’s secretary of the German Federation of Trade Unions. She was known for campaigning for the rights of women and disadvantaged groups. For her services she received the highest orders: Federal Cross of Merit, Federal Cross of Merit First Class, Great Federal Cross of Merit, Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Anne Prior decided to research the life of this remarkable woman in more detail. She is familiar with archive research, the bookseller has been dealing with Nazi history in her home country of North Rhine-Westphalia for 30 years. She started doing this in the early 1990s, she says, after the attacks on dormitories for foreigners in Solingen and Rostock-Lichtenhagen. “I saw the pictures on TV and asked myself: What was it like here in 1938?”
Prior became a volunteer local historian, as is the case in many German cities, but instead of dealing with excavations from the Middle Ages, she researched the 1930s and 1940s, researching how Jews, communists and the mentally ill were persecuted here and were murdered brought to light how the Jewish orphanage in Dinslaken was set on fire in November 1938 and the townspeople watched or took part. Anne Prior was the first to name the perpetrators and collaborators who had been kept secret until then: The mayor “Dr. J.” became Dr. Jahnke, from the police officer who shouted when the Jewish orphanage caught fire, “The Jews don’t get any protection from us,” Dietrich Freikamp.
She wrote her findings in essays and books, founded the Stumbling Stones Association in Dinslaken, the working group “Nazi Murder of Patients” and initiated an exhibition on the children’s transport to Belgium. Anne Prior wears her hair short and her voice sounds clear and decisive on the phone. If she’s angry about something, she says: “That’s all a lie”, if she can’t answer a question: “I didn’t find anything about that.”
“Chronological and factual contradictions”
She found a few things about Irmgard Kroymann, the victim of Nazi persecution. However, not what she had expected. There were inconsistencies, says Anne Prior, she quickly noticed “chronological and factual contradictions”.
The deeper Prior delved into the archives, the more files she found, the greater the contradictions in Kroymann’s biography. “It was like a jigsaw puzzle,” she says, “you put stone by stone together and in the end you don’t know what will come out.” Today she knows that there are two versions of the story. And only one is about a heroine.
The version that Kroymann liked to tell historians and journalists goes something like this: She, the daughter of a social democrat, refused “for political reasons” to supervise forced laborers in a Leipzig munitions factory, only consented in order not to endanger her father, who had been weakened in prison. continued to fight courageously against the Nazis, distributed leaflets for the liberation of the Scholl siblings, was released from the factory because of anti-state statements, fled from the Gestapo, was caught, first came to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp as a prisoner, “in darkness”, then later Christianstadt to the Jewish women’s camp, where she was employed against her will as camp leader. Before she was released on January 3, 1945, her head was shaved. “So everyone can see where you’re from. Hail Hitler!”
Training for concentration camp guards
The files said something like this: Kroymann’s father was not weakened, but supervised forced laborers in a Leipzig munitions factory. Kroymann also worked there as a “sub-camp leader”, but was fired after 23 days because she had stolen food and underwear intended for the forced laborers. In order to look for work, she went to Silesia, where her uncle worked, registered there as usual, completed a course for concentration camp guards in Gross-Rosen and was then deployed in Christianstadt, but was soon fired there as well. Presumably because their superiors found out about the theft in Leipzig. Or she simply disappeared because she suspected that the war would soon be over and it would be better to retreat to the West.
In any case, says Anne Prior, it can be ruled out that Kroymann was a prisoner in a concentration camp and was pursued by the Gestapo. For the bookseller, one thing is certain: the highly honored trade unionist was neither a victim nor a resistance fighter, but a liar. She has bent her life legend “anti-fascist” because it fit better into the new time and probably also to the role in which she liked to see herself. It’s a well-known phenomenon of dictatorships: there are millions of perpetrators and followers, but afterwards they all only want to have been victims.
When researching the archives about the Nazi era, she often came across biographical information “that couldn’t be right,” says Anne Prior, but with Kroymann there were a lot of discrepancies, the trade unionist also contradicted herself in her stories.
Prior still can’t believe “that everyone believed their story, that nobody was suspicious”. She was particularly outraged that the concentration camp guard equated herself with Jewish women, with which details she embellished her lies, that she even filed an application for compensation with the compensation office. The application was rejected, Kroymann had missed deadlines and had not signed the declaration of consent with which the office wanted to obtain further information.
Anne Prior is a bookseller and has been dealing with Nazi history in her home country of North Rhine-Westphalia for 30 years.Private
Prior wrote down what she found out about Kroymann and offered her article to a historical journal at the Ruhr University in Bochum. She was rejected, the text did not meet scientific standards, it said. Prior was disappointed but not surprised. She often encountered rejection with these topics, she says, and relates how her grandmother said to her when she was 13: “It’s over now, we won’t talk about it anymore.” edge occurred. How she only found out “all this” in 1976, when the Majdanek trial took place in front of the district court in Düsseldorf, and how she realized for the first time “how many perpetrators still live in Germany”. How, as a bookseller, she repeatedly recommended books about the Nazi era to her customers and heard the same sentence over and over again: But it’s slow enough now.
The bookseller researches against the void, against forgetting, still wants to understand how it happened. “It takes strength to look into this abyss,” she says. There are not many who have this power to keep researching and asking the question again and again: How could it happen? And what does that have to do with us today?
A call from Götz Aly
The Berlin historian Götz Aly is one of these people. For decades he has been researching euthanasia, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. His new book is called “Unser Nationalsozialismus” (Our National Socialism) and deals with these questions: Why did so many perfectly normal, morally sound-seeming Germans follow the political program of national socialism from 1932 to 1945? All the lyrics and essays in Aly’s new book are by himself except for one. It is entitled: “A camp guard mimics the concentration camp victim”. It’s from Anne Prior.
She laughs proudly as she talks about it. Her phone rang, Götz Aly was on it and asked if the text about the trade unionist had already been published. Aly says he reviewed Prior’s paper six years ago in an anonymous process and wrote, “I was very impressed by the work.” He recommended publication and revision of the text, to no avail. He later recognized from a footnote who had written the essay, a woman he had never heard of. He found her number on the Internet, called, and when he heard that her text had still not been published, he decided to publish it himself.
There it is now, the unmasking of Irmgard Kroymann, between a Holocaust memorial speech in which Götz Aly reported to the members of the Thuringian state parliament about Sergeant Werner Viehweg from a social democratic family, who was involved in mass murders in the Ukraine during World War II, and an article about Aly’s homosexual uncle Otto Schellhass, who was not called up by the Wehrmacht because they found him “simply too gay”.
From the Kroymann story, Aly says, one can learn how “faithful admiration” tempts people to turn a blind eye to apparent contradictions. He praises Anne Prior for her “excellent study”, with which she was able to conclusively prove the self-transformation of a Nazi perpetrator into an alleged Nazi victim, which is “certainly not very rare in Germany”. He estimates that there are still tens of thousands of such biographies in Germany.
Irmgard Kroymann did not live to see her exposed. She died in Mülheim an der Ruhr in 2005 as a heroine of German history and an icon of anti-fascist resistance. Anne Prior is now retired, but still works part-time as a bookseller and continues to research victim biographies, true and false. On Tuesday, January 31, she will present the book “Unser Nationalsozialismus” together with Götz Aly in the Duisburg State Archives and will talk about Irmgard Kroymann’s unmasking.
On February 2nd at 8 p.m. Jens Bisky will speak with Götz Aly in Berlin about his new book “Our National Socialism. Speeches in contemporary Germany”: Pfefferberg-Theater, Schönhauser Allee 176. Admission 14 euros, pre-order at: 030 939358555.
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