Rolf Joseph (December 11, 1920 – November 28, 2012) was a witness and person persecuted by the
Nazi regime
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
. He grew up with his brother in Berlin, having a typical childhood of school and soccer-playing until the persecution of the Jews began in the 1930s. His first initiation was when a schoolteacher began wearing a
Sturmabteilung
The (; SA; literally "Storm Detachment (military), Detachment") was the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a significant role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Its primary purposes were providing pro ...
(SA) uniform and began beating Jewish schoolchildren. Rolf left school at the age of 14 and began to work as a carpenter's apprentice. When
forced labor
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence including death, or other forms of e ...
was inflicted on Jewish men, he worked at
IG Farben
Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (), commonly known as IG Farben (German for 'IG Dyestuffs'), was a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate. Formed in 1925 from a merger of six chemical companies— BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa ...
. He was also forced to make equipment and uniforms for the ''
Wehrmacht
The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the ''Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previou ...
'' (Nazi armed forces). On November 10, 1938, he saw and was afraid by the devastation of
Kristallnacht
() or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung, (SA) paramilitary and Schutzstaffel, (SS) paramilitary forces along ...
(Night of Broken Glass) to Jewish businesses and synagogues.
After his parents were taken from their home to
concentration camp
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simp ...
s, Rolf and his brother Alfred went into hiding, only possessing what they could carry. After some months, they were taken in by
Marie Burde
Marie Gertrud Anna Burde, nicknamed Mieze (June 9, 1892 – July 12, 1963), was a German rag-and-bone woman who hid three young Jewish men during the Nazi Germany, Nazi era, thus saving their lives. Burde and the men first lived together in Burde ...
, who fed them and sheltered them in her apartment. She had few possessions, but she fed them and a friend Arthur Fordanski from her rationed food and what discarded vegetables that she picked up from the weekly markets. They kept warm from the many newspapers that were stacked up in her apartment.
Rolf was subject to severe beatings from the Gestapo that left him with lifelong
epileptic seizures
An epileptic seizure, informally known as a seizure, is a period of symptoms due to abnormally excessive or neural oscillation, synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. Outward effects vary from uncontrolled shaking movements involving much o ...
. He escaped during a train ride to
Auschwitz concentration camp and later by jumping out of a hospital building. After Berlin was bombed in 1943, Burde and the three young men went to live on a plot of land that she owned outside of Berlin. They build a crude shelter and then lived there until Burde was assigned a room. Rolf stayed hidden until the
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian language, Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist R ...
entered the city in 1945. His brother Alfred had been captured and was held in a concentration camp until the end of the war. Burde and Fordanski survived the war. His large family did not, except for the wife of one of Rolf's cousins.
After the war, Rolf met with schoolchildren to tell them his war-time story. He received the
Federal Cross of Merit
The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (german: Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or , BVO) is the only federal decoration of Germany. It is awarded for special achievements in political, economic, cultural, intellect ...
(Bundesverdienstkreuz) in 2002 for his commitment.
Early life
Joseph came from a religious Jewish family, the son of the textile salesman Hermann Joseph and his wife Recha, in the
Kreuzberg
Kreuzberg () is a district of Berlin, Germany. It is part of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg borough located south of Mitte. During the Cold War era, it was one of the poorest areas of West Berlin, but since German reunification in 1990 it ha ...
district of
Berlin
Berlin is Capital of Germany, the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and List of cities in Germany by population, by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European U ...
.
His brother Alfred, one year younger than Rolf, was nicknamed "kleene keule" (small club). Rolf grew up with him in the
Moritzplatz
Moritzplatz is a Berlin U-Bahn station located on the line.
Peter Behrens constructed this unusual subway station in Berlin in 1928. It was closed briefly in 1945, and between 1961 and 1990 it was the last station in West Berlin, after which t ...
and
Wedding
A wedding is a ceremony where two people are united in marriage. Wedding traditions and customs vary greatly between cultures, ethnic groups, religions, countries, and social classes. Most wedding ceremonies involve an exchange of marriage ...
districts of Berlin.
The boys were interested in soccer. They were persecuted due to Nazi
pogrom
A pogrom () is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian ...
s before the war. Their family had trouble surviving and buying enough food to eat due to high inflation. Rolf and Alfred participated in Habonim (what became the
Habonim Dror
Habonim Dror ( he, הַבּוֹנִים דְּרוֹר, "the builders–freedom") is the evolution of two Jewish Labour Zionist youth movements that merged in 1982.
Habonim ( he, הַבּוֹנִים, "the builders") was founded in 1929 in the ...
), the Jewish youth movement.
Rolf's school teacher began wearing a
Sturmabteilung
The (; SA; literally "Storm Detachment (military), Detachment") was the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a significant role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Its primary purposes were providing pro ...
(SA) uniform and began beating Jewish students. Rolf stopped attending school
at the age of fourteen and entered an apprenticeship as a carpenter.
He was unable to say that he was Jewish, though.

Rolf Joseph traveled to the
Ostbahnhof (Berlin East), where he attended a vocational school, on November 10, 1938, when he saw that devastation of
Kristallnacht
() or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung, (SA) paramilitary and Schutzstaffel, (SS) paramilitary forces along ...
(Night of Broken Glass) that began the previous night. Jewish shops and synagogues were targeted, with windows broken, and buildings set on fire by some Berliners and the SA.
The boys asked their patriotic father to leave Germany, but he was loyal to the country that he fought for in
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...
and received the
Iron Cross
The Iron Cross (german: link=no, Eisernes Kreuz, , abbreviated EK) was a military decoration in the Kingdom of Prussia, and later in the German Empire (1871–1918) and Nazi Germany (1933–1945). King Frederick William III of Prussia e ...
. Alfred, Rolf, and their father were then subject to
forced labor
Forced labour, or unfree labour, is any work relation, especially in modern or early modern history, in which people are employed against their will with the threat of destitution, detention, violence including death, or other forms of e ...
.
Rolf was assigned to work at
IG Farben
Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (), commonly known as IG Farben (German for 'IG Dyestuffs'), was a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate. Formed in 1925 from a merger of six chemical companies— BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa ...
in
Lichtenberg
Lichtenberg () is the eleventh borough of Berlin, Germany. In Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it absorbed the former borough of Hohenschönhausen.
Overview
The district contains the Tierpark Berlin in Friedrichsfelde, the larger of Berlin' ...
,
and Alfred and his father worked constructing tracks. The men worked 12 hours a day. Rolf also made equipment for the ''
Wehrmacht
The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the ''Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previou ...
'' (Nazi armed forces) in a carpentry shop in the
Pankow
Pankow () is the most populous and the second-largest borough by area of Berlin. In Berlin's 2001 administrative reform, it was merged with the former boroughs of Prenzlauer Berg and Weißensee; the resulting borough retained the name Pankow. ...
district of Berlin.
Rolf was able to return to his job with the help of a master carpenter.
World War II
Jews were persecuted by
Hitler
Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and the ...
before the war. Rolf, who had worked in a factory making military uniforms, thought that war might make things easier for him. He said of that time, "When war was declared we were happy. We felt that it was our only possibility of regaining our freedom, because it was unbearable how Hitler was treating us during this time."
Family
Since both of his parents had a lot of siblings, Joseph came from a large family of 60 people.
Joseph had witnessed his parents being deported in June 1942 and subsequently went into hiding, as did his brother Alfred (1921-2014).
Their only possessions were what they could carry and they did not have
ration cards
A ration stamp, ration coupon or ration card is a stamp or card issued by a government to allow the holder to obtain food or other commodities that are in short supply during wartime or in other emergency situations when rationing is in forc ...
or money.
Of the Jews who hid in Berlin during the war, they needed money and false identification, as well as help from non-Jewish Berliners to find shelter and get food on an ongoing basis. Only about 1,500 people survived living underground in Berlin during the war.
Rolf and Alfred
The brothers hid in train station bathrooms and the forest, evading Nazi soldiers, for about four months.
In 1943, an acquaintance of Joseph's mother recommended they ask
Marie Burde
Marie Gertrud Anna Burde, nicknamed Mieze (June 9, 1892 – July 12, 1963), was a German rag-and-bone woman who hid three young Jewish men during the Nazi Germany, Nazi era, thus saving their lives. Burde and the men first lived together in Burde ...
, for help, as she had been known to help other Jews.
Burde took them, along with Arthur Fordanski, a friend of Alfred's, into her basement apartment in
Berliner Wedding district,
an area that was inhabited by working-class people.
The brothers' mother had left 2000 Reichsmarks with a neighbor for the brothers with which they could buy food on the black market.
In addition, since Marie Burde was a vegetarian,
she was able to give the meat she was able to buy with her food stamps to the men.
Burde also picked up vegetables that had been thrown out at the weekly markets.
The stacks of newspapers served as a place for the men to sleep
and helped to insulate them in winter.
According to Joseph, she was highly intelligent and spoke several languages.
Rolf, who was said to have been tortured several times by authorities,
was arrested at a Wehrmacht checkpoint one day, having waited some time before venturing out of the apartment. He was questioned by the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one or ...
about his brother
and who was sheltering him, and even with severe abuse, he would not answer their question. (The beatings that he received from the Gestapo were so severe that they triggered
epileptic seizures
An epileptic seizure, informally known as a seizure, is a period of symptoms due to abnormally excessive or neural oscillation, synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. Outward effects vary from uncontrolled shaking movements involving much o ...
for the rest of his life.
) Rolf escaped custody twice. On one occasion he was taken to
Grosse Hamburger Strasse
The Grosse Hamburger Strasse, also Große Hamburger Straße, located in the Mitte district of Berlin, has been an important site for Jewish Berliners. There was a school for boys, an old age home, and a cemetery operated by the Jewish community be ...
, a deportation collection site, and then put on a train for the
Auschwitz concentration camp, but he escaped by jumping off the train.
He was captured again and then he jumped from a window at the Jewish Hospital. Rolf made it back to Burde's apartment, where Fordanski and his brother had remained.
When a neighbor asked about the young men, the story was that they were Burde's nephews. The police came to the apartment to investigate.
After the house at Tegeler Straße 13 was destroyed by a
bombing raid
Strategic bombing is a military strategy used in total war with the goal of defeating the enemy by destroying its morale, its economic ability to produce and transport materiel to the theatres of military operations, or both. It is a systematica ...
in the fall of 1943, the men and Burde went to Schönow near Bernau to a lot she owned there, where they built a rough shelter
in the spring of 1944.
Burde was allotted a room in Berlin, they moved back.
Having been outed by friends, Alfred was arrested in Berlin in August 1944 and taken to the
Sachsenhausen
Sachsenhausen () or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners ...
concentration camp and then to
Bergen-Belsen
Bergen-Belsen , or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentra ...
.
After the war
Alfred survived the camps and reunited with his brother after the war.
Fordanski survived. Rolf had waited until April 1945 when the
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian language, Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist R ...
came through the area. Together the brothers later supported Marie Burde,
who lived in East Berlin after the war, where she died in 1963.
All of Alfred and Rolf's direct family members died at Auschwitz. Only the brothers and Lydia, the wife of a cousin, survived
The Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
.
His parents died at Auschwitz, after they were imprisoned at
Theresienstadt
Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ( German-occupied Czechoslovakia). Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination camp ...
.
The brothers remained close, feeling each other's pain after the war and worried about each other. After decades of freedom, Rolf continued to have an automatic
fight-or-flight reflex, fearing that he was being followed.
Marriage
After the war, Joseph married Lydia, a German Jew who had survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. Apart from Alfred, none of his family survived. In 1991, Lydia Joseph died in a car accident after 46 years of marriage. He married a second time and lived with his wife Ursel Sikora in Berlin-Charlottenburg,
where he died on November 28, 2012.
Later years and death
Rolf Joseph retired in 1983 after 28 years as a manager at the German wagon and machine factory at Eichborndamm (Deutsche Waggon-und Maschinenfabrik am Eichborndamm). Since then he has regularly visited schools and told the young people his personal story of survival and also his memories of Marie Burde.
He prayed regularly at the
Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue
The Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue, german: Synagoge Pestalozzistraße, italic=no, is a liberal synagogue in the German capital Berlin, at 14–15 Pestalozzistraße, in the Bezirk of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf.
History
The synagogue was com ...
.

For his commitment, he was awarded the
Federal Cross of Merit
The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (german: Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or , BVO) is the only federal decoration of Germany. It is awarded for special achievements in political, economic, cultural, intellect ...
(Bundesverdienstkreuz) in 2002.
He died on November 29, 2012, and Alfred died less than two years later on April 11, 2014.
Notes
References
Sources
* ''Translated using translate.google''
Further reading
* Fabian Herbst, Dorothea Ludwig, Samira Sangkohl, Pia Sösemann, Simon Strauß und Simon Warnach: ''„Ich muss weitermachen – die Geschichte des Herrn Joseph“,''
'I Must Go On - The story of Mr. Joseph''Berlin, 2007.
* Tina Hüttl, Alexander Meschnig: ''Uns kriegt ihr nicht: Wie jüdische Kinder versteckt überlebten.''
'You won't get us: How Jewish children survived in hiding''Piper, 2013.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Joseph, Rolf
1920 births
2012 deaths
Holocaust survivors
Witnesses to The Holocaust
Recipients of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
20th-century German people
People from Berlin