Walter Frankenstein

In January 2025, a team from the European Parliament travelled to Stockholm to interview Holocaust survivor Walter Frankenstein. At 100 years old, Frankenstein was still passionately fighting to get his message across: help people in need.

Frankenstein, his wife Leonie and their two children Peter-Uri and Michael were among the few survivors of the genocide of Jews in the Second World War. Surviving the war was a near-miraculous feat, only possible with the help of, as Walter said, ‘good people … and a lot of luck.’

Walter Frankenstein passed away on 21 April 2025.

Walter Frankenstein was born in 1924 to a Jewish family in Flatow, West Prussia. In 1936, when he was no longer permitted to attend public school there, his uncle found him a place in the Auerbach Orphanage in Berlin, where he met his future wife Leonie.

As Nazi oppression prevented him from fulfilling his dream of becoming an architect, in 1938, Walter Frankenstein began training to be a mason at the Jewish Community’s school of architecture and construction crafts. Beginning in 1941, he was enlisted into forced labour and repeatedly threatened with deportation.

Forced labour

In 1941, the Nazis shut down the Jewish construction school. Walter and two of his teachers were employed as construction workers by the Jewish Community, which was under the control of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). The Gestapo deployed the construction workers for its own purposes. One day, Walter was ordered to work on the premises of the Judenreferat, the department responsible for ‘Jewish affairs and evacuation’. ‘One speck and you’re in Auschwitz tomorrow,’ the SS officer threatened Walter as he plastered one of the rooms. Walter did not know who the man was. It was only when he left the room and turned around to read the name on the door that he realised it was Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for the deportation and extermination of Europe’s Jews.

Leonie and Walter wanted to get married. As Walter was 17, their guardians signed the papers. On 20 February 1942, they married in a civil ceremony in Berlin with their closest family members present.

Leonie became pregnant shortly after the wedding. Peter-Uri was born in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin on 20 January 1943. He was circumcised against his parents’ wishes; Leonie and Walter feared that it would make their child identifiable as Jewish.

‘Fabrikaktion’ and going underground

At the beginning of 1943, around 15 000 Jews were still working as forced labourers in Berlin, including Walter and Leonie. The Nazi leadership’s goal was to make Berlin ‘free of Jews’. For this reason, the Jewish forced labourers still active were to be replaced by prisoners of war, among others. They were to be arrested in the factories (in German: ‘Fabrik’) during working hours.

The ‘Fabrikaktion’ began on 27 February 1943. The day after it started, Leonie and five-week-old Peter-Uri were picked up from their home in one of the notorious trucks and taken to an assembly point. In the queue that formed there, Leonie stayed at the front with eight women who had restitution certificates from the Gestapo - Walter had such a certificate too, but she had left it at home. The marshal on duty let the eight women go. Leonie asked what she should do, to which he replied: ‘You shouldn’t ask such stupid questions’. Leonie seized the opportunity and went home. In the meantime, Walter had arrived home to find a sealed door. When he heard what had happened, he rushed to the assembly point where he was told that Leonie had gone home. The situation for the young family was becoming more and more dangerous.

Walter had gone to work as usual but none of his colleagues were there. They had been collected for deportation the night before. The Frankenstein family was lucky: they had just moved house and had not yet officially changed their address. While the official disappeared into the building to find out what to do with Walter, he quickly ran off and rushed home. Leonie and Peter-Uri travelled to Leonie’s mother in Leipzig, and Walter followed a few days later.

Walter’s mother Martha was assigned to forced labour too. On 1 March 1943, she was captured at her workplace and deported to Auschwitz from Grunewald station.

Leipzig

Living illegally meant coping with the constant threat to their lives. They were often very lucky.

Walter did not dare stay in Leipzig for too long. He could not live in the apartment with the family and stayed at the workshop of an old left-wing carpenter, Mr Koch. As a young man seemingly fit for military service, it was easy to generate mistrust, and when the first rumours began to circulate in the neighbourhood, Walter returned to Berlin.

Leonie’s mother Beate Rosner married her second husband Theodor Kranz, a Gentile and a leftist, in the mid-1920s. She felt reasonably secure, being married to an ‘Aryan’. However, in August 1943, a woman queuing behind Beate at the post office denounced her because her Postausweis (the card required to collect post) was missing the middle name ‘Sara’, which was mandatory for Jews. Beate was ordered to report to the police station herself where she was accused of ‘concealment of racial background’ and taken into custody. When the Gestapo took over, she was taken to Auschwitz on 6 November 1943, where she died on 3 January 1944.

Berlin

When Walter got back to Berlin, he approached Edith Berlow, the girlfriend of his cousin Kurt Hirschfeldt. She was not Jewish and was active in a resistance group against the Nazi regime. She was hiding her boyfriend Kurt and some other Jews. She found a hiding place for Walter with a friend, Arthur Ketzer. Walter stayed on the premises of Arthur Ketzer’s pharmaceutical factory for approximately eight months until it was destroyed by an air bomb. Walter was able to work informally for various people. His training as a mason was now of great use to him, and he often took on repair work after bombing raids.

Leonie and Peter-Uri left Leipzig shortly after her mother’s arrest and joined Walter in his hiding place on Arthur Ketzer’s factory premises in the autumn of 1943. When the factory was destroyed in early 1944, Arthur suggested that Leonie register as a bombed-out person under a false identity. As a ‘German mother’ with a baby, she had to leave Berlin immediately and was sent to Briesenhorst near Landsberg/Warthe, where they stayed with a farmer’s wife, whose husband and son were in Russia, as well as the woman’s daughter and an old Polish prisoner of war.

Walter remained in Berlin and struggled on. He secured contacts with other people living underground. One of them was Arthur Katz. The Frankenstein and Katz families had been neighbours in Flatow. Arthur Katz knew Sophie Döring, whose husband was a Wehrmacht officer stationed in Poland, and arranged for Walter to live in her bombed-out apartment. In return, Walter fixed the apartment. Sophie Döring also shared the food rations she received from her husband with ‘her two illegals’, Walter and Arthur Katz.

While Leonie was in Briesenhorst, the couple kept in touch via letters, which they picked up at the post office. Around the time of the birth of their second son in autumn 1944, Walter witnessed an arrest at his regular post office and did not dare to pick up his post for several weeks. Leonie found those weeks utterly distressing.

Michael was born on 26 September 1944. Leonie gave birth at a clinic in Landsberg/Warthe, leaving Peter-Uri in the care of the farmer’s wife in Briesenhorst. Due to an infection, Leonie had to stay at the clinic even longer and she constantly thought about the fact that Peter-Uri was circumcised and therefore clearly identifiable as a Jewish child. However, the farmer’s wife never said a word about it.

Meanwhile, Leonie could not remember the correct date of birth of the Christian acquaintance from Leipzig whose name she was using at the clinic, and the registry office kept asking her. When the situation became too dangerous, Leonie decided to join Walter in Berlin in early November 1944.

There was not enough space for the whole family at Sophie Döring’s apartment. Arthur Katz put the family in contact with Mary, a madam of a brothel, who rented out a room to them. They had to pay three hundred marks a month for that room, which was a lot of money. They stayed there until January 1945, when the house burnt down following a bombing raid. Fräulein Dora, a prostitute that Walter recognised, passed by. Leonie confessed to her that they were living illegally, and Fräulein Dora handed them the keys to her apartment where the family stayed until shortly before the end of the war.

At the end of April 1945, when the risk of the house being hit became too high, they went to a public bunker at Kottbusser Tor.

Liberation

On 28 April 1945, Soviet soldiers entered the bunker.

It took some time for Leonie and Walter to get used to the fact that the situation of constant fear for their children and for each other had ended – now an uncertain future lay before them.

Life after the war

After an arduous journey to Israel, where the family lived for several years, they emigrated to Sweden in 1956, where Leonie and Walter would spend the next 53 years of their lives together. As retirees, they regularly went to Germany and, in particular, to Berlin, where they campaigned for the remembrance of the Holocaust.

Leonie died on 19 May 2009. Walter continued their commitment on his own. In 2014, he received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and, in 2017, he received the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin. He passed away on 21 April 2025 at 100 years of age.

During one of his last interviews, which he gave to a team from the European Parliament in January 2025, he emphasised once again:

For as long as I live, I am over 100 years old now, I will strive and be at the ready to give my account of what happened … These days, it is so very important to learn about the past, what it was really like back then, rather than the myths online … These are not myths. This is real life … What is very important to me is that, when I die, this thought should remain: you should help all people who are in need … We are all people and we all come from the same source.