Hiltgunt Zassenhaus died 20 years ago today (November 20, 2004), age 88, in Baltimore, MD. Born in Hamburg, Germany, Zassenhaus was employed by the Nazi regime throughout World War II, including by the feared Department of Justice.
Despite that, she is the only German ever to be awarded Norway’s Order of St. Olav, given as “a reward for distinguished services rendered to Norway and mankind.” (Odd Nansen also received this award, in 1970.) What’s more, the Norwegian Government in 1974 nominated Zassenhaus for the Nobel Peace Prize.
What did Zassenhaus do to deserve such recognition?
Early in life Zassenhaus made a fateful decision: to study Scandinavian languages in college. This initially led to a cushy job—official interpreter to the Court of Hamburg. But when World War II erupted, Hiltgunt was pressed into service of a much different character: to read—and censor—letters from the Jewish inhabitants of Polish ghettos to their friends and relatives in Scandinavia. Rather than ripping up letters pleading for food (as per her Gestapo instructions), she often added her own requests in the margins of the letters, for food and/or clothing, and then secretly smuggled the letters out of the country through a friend.
Later, Zassenhaus decided she could play a more important role as a physician, and began to study medicine. Yet again she was reluctantly pressed into service by the German Justice Department, this time to accompany clergy from the Norwegian Seamen’s Church, who were permitted to visit Scandinavian prisoners. Her task was once again to censor each meeting, and especially to ensure that no prayers or sermons were uttered during the visit. Again, rather than follow orders, Zassenhaus soon began to secretly smuggle food, medicines, and writing materials into the prisons—right under the jailers’ noses. Risking certain death with each visit, yet laden with a bulging suitcase, Hiltgunt bluffed her way past suspicious prison authorities who were even more fearful that, given her position in the Justice Department, she might well be a secret Gestapo agent herself, sent to spy on them.
As helpful as Hiltgunt’s actions were, she had one additional, even more critical, role to play. As Scandinavian prisoners were shunted from prison to prison, Zassenhaus, having developed personal relationships with many of them, insisted on visiting her charges wherever they were relocated. To keep track of all these movements (involving 52 different prisons), Zassenhaus developed a detailed card system for each prisoner, tracking their every move.
In the spring of 1945, Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross (and a personal friend of Odd Nansen’s) negotiated permission with Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to gather all Scandinavian prisoners at one camp—Neuengamme—a concentration camp located near the Danish border—with the ultimate goal of repatriating them safely home as soon as possible. This effort, dubbed the “White Buses” operation for the white-painted Red Cross buses involved, suffered from one serious obstacle—no one in the Swedish Red Cross had any idea where all the Scandinavian prisoners were located.
The solution to this dilemma could be found in Zassenhaus’s card tracking system. As she later wrote: “[W]henever a prisoner could not be located, my file gave the answer.”
In fact, in his diary entry for Saturday, April 7, 1945, Odd Nansen writes about how the Swedish Red Cross has been collecting all the Norwegian prisoners in Europe at Neuengamme. One such prisoner, a friend of Nansen’s named Leif Poulsson, has just arrived, in terrible physical shape. Nansen describes Poulsson’s harrowing journey:
“Since [being at Natzweiler, a notorious camp] he had been in several camps and suffered with others, until at last he landed in a camp south of Stuttgart. . . . This was the worst of all the camps he had been in. There everyone was starving. The camp was so tucked away that the Swedes would scarcely have found it if the Norwegian seamen’s pastor in Hamburg hadn’t been so indefatigable in tracing the Norwegians who were hidden away there. At last he found it out, and the Swedish relief commission came at the eleventh hour.”
Now, how did the Norwegian Seamen’s pastor in Hamburg possibly know where Poulsson and other Norwegians were being kept? Hiltgunt Zassenhaus.
Despite all the dangers Hiltgunt faced in providing aid and comfort to her prisoners, she never flinched, and never wavered from her conviction that her cause was just. She once remarked:
“[E]ven in the most desperate circumstances we as individuals can make choices. This is what humanity is about: we must never cease to listen to our conscience. It guides us toward serving life, then we are on the right course.”
After the war, Zassenhaus completed her medical studies, emigrated to the U.S. in 1952, and in 1954 opened a medical practice in Baltimore. She became a U.S. citizen in 1957. In addition to the many awards already noted, she received the Danish Red Cross Medal and the Cross of the Order of Merit, West Germany’s highest civilian award. Her incredible story is fully told in her memoir: Walls: Resisting the Third Reich—One Woman’s Story.
As noted, Zassenhaus died on November 20, 2004. On her grave is inscribed (from I Corinthians 13:8): Die Liebe gibt nicht auf [Love never fails].
Portions of this blog first appeared in 2016 and 2020.
