Nazi victims in Hamburg:Sergio had to remain a child forever

Tatiana and Andra Bucci survived Auschwitz. From there, her cousin Sergio de Simone was sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp. On the night of April 20th, 1945, he was killed with 19 other children in the Bullenhuser Damm subcamp.

by Stefanie Grossmann

The Bucci sisters keep alive the memory of the fate of the young victims. In the summer of 1943, Tatiana and Andra Bucci spent carefree days with their cousin Sergio de Simone in their house in Fiume, Italy. At this point, the children have no idea of ​​the horrific crimes committed by the Nazis in World War II. And they don't know that they are Jews. "What does it mean for a child to be Jewish. We only realized that when we arrived at the camp," says Andra Bucci in the docu-drama "Nazi Hunters - Journey into Darkness". On March 29, 1944, the family of eight was arrested and deported. On April 4, the children arrive with their family members at the gates of the concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. At that time, the tracks did not yet lead to the camp.

Tatiana Bucci:"I Thought My Mom Was Dead"

The situation upon arrival at the camp is chaotic, dramatic scenes play out:family members are separated, they call out to each other, often it is the last time. Concentration camp guards monitor the chaos with growling dogs. After the girls got their tattoos - Andra number 76483, Tatiana number 76484 - mother Mira makes the sisters promise:"Don't forget your names." She instructs the girls to say good night to each other every night and call each other by name. Then follows the separation from the mother, from grandmother Rosa and Aunt Gisella, Sergio de Simone's mother. Andra and Tatiana were just four and six years old at the time. The three children are taken to "barrack number one", where camp doctor Josef Mengele also selects his experimental victims. "When I didn't see our mother anymore, I thought she was dead. I don't remember that I cried. I imagined her on the piles of corpses that we saw every day. They weren't far from our barracks," she recalls himself Tatiana Bucci.

"We have built a protective wall around us"

The everyday life of the children in the camp is determined by the cold, being in mud and snow, many dead bodies and the constantly smoking chimney. It was a life that wasn't life. The sisters recall that no one hugged them. So they give each other support and try to come to terms with the inhuman conditions:"We built a protective wall around us. We had to do this to survive, to be able to accept everything:the absence of the mother, the hunger, the Thirst. This wall helped us survive, survive the terrible," said Tatiana Bucci. The fact that the two sisters survived is probably due to the coincidence of looking like twins despite their different ages. At that time, twin research was considered the most modern method in the field of biomedicine.

Perfidious promise:Sergio's longing is too great

The SS doctor Mengele in Auschwitz is known for his inhuman experiments on twins. But Tatiana and Andra are spared. Also because they meet a "Blockowa" from the women's barracks in the camp who is well disposed towards them. This block warden provides the girls with food and clothing. One day, when an SS officer entered the children's barracks at Mengele's behest and asked the children:"Who wants to see his mother? Let him step forward," Andra and Tatiana were warned. The day before, the "Blockowa" had inoculated them to behave very quietly.

They also tell cousin Sergio about it, but his longing for his mother is too great. "Me," exclaims the seven-year-old enthusiastically. Like Sergio, another 19 children are lured with the emotional but perfidious question - ten girls and ten boys between the ages of six and twelve fall for the false promise of seeing their mother again. "I can't imagine it other than that he left smiling happily, believing he was going to his mother," recalls Tatiana Bucci. Instead he walked towards a horrible death.

On the train from Auschwitz to the Neuengamme concentration camp

On November 27, 1944, Sergio and the other children boarded a passenger car in Auschwitz. Its destination:the Neuengamme concentration camp in the Hamburg district of the same name. They arrive there two days after departure. They are cared for, among others, by the Dutch inmate nurse Anton Hölzl and the French professor Gabriel Florence. The two try to replace the children's parents as much as possible. Unlike the SS doctor Kurt Heissmeyer, who is working on a treatment method against tuberculosis and the - long disproved - the theory that infected people form antibodies. In Neuengamme he had already carried out experiments with tuberculosis bacteria on up to 100 concentration camp prisoners - without success. Therefore he has now requested 20 children in Auschwitz as "corresponding material".

Brutal and nonsensical:Heissmeyer's experiments on children

In Neuengamme, Heissmeyer's 20 children become new victims of extremely painful, brutal and more than questionable experiments. The children's chests are cut and a bacterial solution is introduced into the wound. As a result, Sergio and the other children develop a high fever, and the bacteria further weaken their already emaciated bodies. But the experiments continue mercilessly:The children are inserted tubes into the trachea up to the lungs, in order to introduce a bacterial solution there as well. The result is heavy bleeding and injuries. Finally, the concentration camp doctors operate on the children's lymph nodes on both sides - all under local anesthesia only. A terrible martyrdom. In addition, without any "effect":As with the Russian prisoners, no antibodies are formed in the children either.

Berlin orders the killing of 20 children on Bullenhuser Damm

When British troops approached the city of Hamburg towards the end of the war, the pressure on the SS to cover up the crime against the children increased. Finally, Heinrich Himmler gave the order from Berlin to "dissolve the Heissmeyer department" - and to get rid of the children. dr Alfred Trzebinski, SS garrison doctor in Neuengamme, receives the order from the concentration camp commander, Max Pauly, to kill the children. On April 20th they will be taken to the school at Bullenhuser Damm, a satellite camp of Neuengamme. Again under the pretense of being handed over to their parents.

Death by the rope:"Hung on the wall like pictures"

In the basement of the building, Alfred Trzebinski first injected the children with morphine under the pretext of a typhoid vaccination, "so that they then slept," Trzebinski later explained on oath when questioned about the course of events. Then the deputy head of the concentration camp, Johann Frahm, lends a hand:one child after the other he hangs them - a noose around their necks - on two hooks in the boiler room. He hangs on some of the small bodies with his whole weight. Frahm later admits that he and others put a rope around the children's necks. "They were then hung on hooks like pictures on the wall," he says. He had assumed that the children were already dead by then, since SS garrison doctor Trzebinski had previously injected the children with morphine, Frahm said later in the main trial against the concentration camp staff.

And Alfred Trzebinski later testified:"During my time in the concentration camp I saw a lot of human suffering and was also to some extent dulled, but I've never seen children hanged." In addition to the 20 children, their four carers and a number of Russian concentration camp prisoners also died. Their corpses are cremated in the crematorium.

WCIU around Freud tracks down perpetrators

At the end of April 1945, the British put together a team of investigators to track down German war criminals and bring them to justice:the "War Crimes Investigation Unit" (WCIU), to which Anton Walter Freud also belonged. The grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud investigates those responsible for the Neuengamme concentration camp - and in the process discovers the fate of the 20 children. He manages to track down and arrest Alfred Trzebinski. The doctor initially denies everything, but Freud's investigators are getting closer and closer to the cruel truth - also through statements by former prisoners. In 1946 the war criminals were tried in Hamburg's Curio House. Commander Max Pauly, Alfred Trzebinski and other SS henchmen such as Johann Frahm are sentenced to death in the Neuengamme trial - not least because of the murder of 20 children in the basement of the school on Bullenhuser Damm. All are executed in Hamelin prison in October 1946.

Kurt Heissmeyer practiced in the GDR until his arrest

At first there was no trace of Kurt Heissmeyer. He worked undisturbed as a doctor in Magdeburg until 1963. Only after reports in the West German press did the GDR authorities arrest him. In April 1964, at the trial, Heissmeyer testified:"Today I am aware that I committed a crime against humanity with these experiments on the children, because the children were completely defenseless." According to his "fascist convictions" he did not see the Jewish children as full human beings. On June 30, 1966 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the district court of Magdeburg and finally died of heart failure in Bautzen prison in 1967.

Tatiana and Andra Bucci survive the Holocaust

Unlike cousin Sergio, Andra and Tatiana Bucci are lucky - like 70 other children from Auschwitz, they survive the Nazi martyrdom. After the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Russians, the sisters first went to a children's home in Prague, and then in March 1946 to the south of England - to Lingfield House. Sir Benjamin Drage's estate serves as a home for children liberated from Nazi camps. Educators and psychologists like Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, take care of the children traumatized by the Holocaust. There they were in the land of toys - like in a fairy tale, says Tatiana Bucci in retrospect. Mother Mira also survived the Holocaust and returned to Italy, while the father returned home after being a prisoner of war in Africa. International tracing services track them down, and in December 1946 Andra and Tatiana are finally able to hug their parents again.

Tatiana Bucci:"Keeping the memory alive in particular"

"My aunt always said:'Sergio is so pretty, someone will have taken him away and raised him at the end of the war. One day there will be a knock at our door, I will go and open the door and there he will be.' Hope helped to live on," says Andra Bucci. It was only many years later that the sisters found out about Sergio's fate from the "Stern" journalist Günther Schwarberg.

During research, Schwarberg was able to identify most of the children and find their relatives. Even today, Tatiana and Andra Bucci regularly visit Auschwitz with their students:"For the few of us who are still able to talk about it, it is a duty to keep the memory alive, this memory in particular" - also of their cousin, says Tatiana Bucci. "We were lucky enough to be able to grow up. To get married. To become mothers. To become grandmothers. Sergio had to remain a child forever," says Tatiana Bucci, looking back on her life.