Resistance in occupied foreign countries – persecution and punishment in Munich

Resistance against the Nazi regime was a phenomenon that occurred in many forms across all parts of the continent ruled by Germany. The regime responded to this defiance with particular harshness, punishing all forms of opposition and denial with ruthless violence. However, the resistance activities on the one hand and the persecution and disciplinary measures on the other often took place at different locations, in many cases far apart from each other. This was how Munich became a center of repression of the resistance that took place elsewhere.

This phenomenon is illustrated by the fate of the 190 Dutch women who were transferred from Ravensbrück concentration camp to Munich in October 1944. Most of them had been imprisoned in Herzogenbusch concentration camp (also known as ‘Kamp Vught’, around 50 km south of Utrecht) as punishment for their resistance activities. The camp was evacuated at the beginning of September 1944 as the Allied troops advanced. Only a few of the women were freed. The remaining female prisoners were deported to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp on September 6, 1944, from where many of them were transferred to other locations to carry out forced labor.
On October 12, 1944, the 190 Dutch women arrived in Munich in company with 60 other women from countries such as France, Belgium, Slovenia, Poland, Russia and Czechoslovakia. Among them were Dutch Jews who had managed to conceal their origins. Their destination was an external work detail of Dachau Concentration Camp located in Munich-Giesing, where they were to be deployed as forced laborers for Agfa (Aktien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation). Agfa was a part of the I.G. Farben AG industrial conglomerate and operated the Agfa camera production facility on what is now Tegernseer Landstraße. During the last months of the war, almost 500 female concentration camp inmates were put to work there producing components for V-1 and V-2 rockets and fuses for anti-aircraft shells. The Dutch women were housed in the empty rooms of a new building erected nearby. The area was fenced off with barbed wire and overlooked by four watchtowers. Waffen-SS member and Dachau camp guard Kurt Konrad Stirnweis was the camp leader.

The life story of Kiky Heinsius is typical of what happened to these women. This text is to some degree the legacy of a group of Dutch women, whose fate in Munich has now been forgotten. Kiky Heinsius was born in Amsterdam on April 12, 1921. During the economic crisis of the 1930s, Kiky’s father, a diamond worker, was frequently out of work. Her mother supplemented the family’s income by working as a domestic help. Her parents, who had close ties with the Social Democratic Workers’ Party and were active members of the workers’ education movement, believed in the importance of a good education for their children. Kiky worked hard at school. She developed a great love of literature and—unlike most workers’ children—attended secondary school and obtained a university entrance qualification at the end of the 1930s. During the occupation, sentiment in the Heinsius household was strongly anti-German.

Kiky’s participation in the resistance movement was the outcome of her personal contacts with Jewish people and her willingness to help friends in need. She started out by shopping in stores that were forbidden to Jews, but as the anti-Jewish measures intensified, so too did her resistance activities. Kiky felt the direct impact of these measures in 1941, when her best friend Rudolf (Rudy) Richter was arrested in Amsterdam in June during a raid that was described as a reprisal; he was taken to Mauthausen with other young Jewish men and died there on August 31, 1941. When another Jewish friend, Leendert (Leo) Zwart from Harderwijk, was ordered to report to a work camp in 1942, he and Kiky went into hiding. However, Leo Zwart was arrested on the street on November 6, 1942 and deported via Westerbork transit camp to Auschwitz, where he was murdered on February 28, 1943. The police had now set their sights on Kiky. Her apartment was searched and she was interrogated by the SD but allowed to go free. Kiky then temporarily ceased her illegal activities for fear of discovery but resumed them at the beginning of 1943: the young Jew Siegfried (Sieg) Goldsteen had escaped from a penal camp and was looking for somewhere to hide. Kiky first took him to her apartment and later found him accommodation with other conspirators. During the ensuing period, she stepped up the help she offered to Jews in hiding at great personal risk, hiding them in her apartment, working with other ‘silent helpers’ and acting as a courier. During the night of February 1/2, 1944, Kiky’s apartment was searched. Kiky and Sieg were arrested when it was discovered that Sieg was a Jew. Kiky was taken to Vught Concentration Camp, sent from there to Ravensbrück and later deployed at the Agfa camera production facility in Munich as a forced laborer.

The everyday lives of the women sent to Munich were shaped by the effort to preserve a minimum of personal dignity and quality of life in a hostile environment despite monotonous and exhausting forced labor. One particular threat was posed by the massive air raids mounted by the Allied bomber squadrons. During the daytime raids, the women were locked into the factory; they were denied access to the air raid shelters but were able to take refuge in the factory basement. At night, the only protection available to them was the basement of their accommodation. What stands out—and testifies to the women’s understanding of themselves as resistance fighters—is their solidarity and collective rebellion against their oppressive living and working conditions. In January 1945, the women went on strike because of the inadequate food supplies and ever-increasing demands made of them—a rare example of courage and solidarity in view of the potentially deadly repression to which they were subject. They could not have known that with the end of the war drawing near, the SS camp leaders had little power left to discipline the striking women apart from punishment roll calls and interrogations.

After the production shutdown on April 23, 1945 and with the American troops approaching, the leaders of Dachau Concentration Camp evacuated the women at the end of April 1945 and gave their camp leader Stirnweis the order to march towards Innsbruck. However, thanks to Stirnweis' level-headed and humane attitude, the women only had to march for two days before being liberated by American soldiers at Walserhof in Wolfratshausen on April 30, 1945.