For many years, nothing was known about Willy Blum, who was murdered at the age of 16 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. His name was on a list next to the crossed-out name of Stefan Jerzy Zweig (1941–2024), who became world-famous as the ‘Buchenwald child’ through the novel ‘Naked Among Wolves’ by the writer Bruno Apitz (1900–1971).
Family and Early Childhood
According to his birth certificate, Willy Blum was born on 13 July 1928 in the small Harz town of Rübeland, Germany, as the eighth of ten children of the marionette theatre owner Aloysius (Aloys) Blum (1891–1982) and Antonie (Toni) Blum, née Richter (1893–1968).1Unless otherwise stated, the information is taken from Leo, Das Kind auf der Liste. The family was registered with the police in Wolfenbüttel at this time. Rübeland was a stop on the travelling theatre’s tour through the surrounding towns and communities.
In the 19th and first half of the 20th century, there were many travelling puppet theatres in Germany. The operators travelled to the venues in caravans, set up their stages in inns and community halls and performed fairy tales for the children and romantic historical dramas for the adults. However, the repertoire of the Blums’ theatre also included Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and the folk play ‘Dr Faustus zu Wittenberg’, adapted for the puppet stage. The travelling theatres were family businesses. The parents operated the puppets together with their older sons and daughters. After the performances, they sang, danced and played music together in the so-called ‘Nachspiele’. The younger children distributed the programme leaflets around the village. During the few weeks that the theatre remained at one venue, the children went to school there.
Rudolf Blum, the youngest son of the family, was born in Dresden in 1934. For the next four years until 1938, the family lived and wintered in the suburb of Laubegast. In the city’s address book, Aloys Blum presented himself as the owner of a puppet theatre. Willy Blum started school in Dresden.
Move to Hoyerswerda
In 1938, the Blums moved from Dresden to Hoyerswerda. This allowed them to avoid the growing persecution of Sinti and Roma by the Nazi authorities for the time being and continue to run their puppet theatre. At this time, the first municipal detention camps had already been set up and larger cities refused to issue business licences for travelling theatres and amusement rides. In Hoyerswerda, Willy and, from 1941, Rudolf Blum went to the boys’ school, while their sister Dora (1930–2014) attended primary school. Willy Blum was confirmed in the Catholic church in Hoyerswerda in 1942. His two older brothers—Willy Richter (born 1916), who still had his mother’s maiden name, and Hugo Blum (1920–1978)—were drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939/40.
Immobilisation and Arrest
In February 1942, Aloys Blum’s licence to trade was revoked. The family was ‘immobilised’: they were no longer allowed to leave Hoyerswerda. This meant they lost their livelihood. Despite being ‘immobilised’, Aloys Blum travelled to Berlin. In his 1954 application for compensation, he explained that he had spoken to ‘the Ministry’—presumably he meant the Ministry of Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), which was in charge of the Reich Chamber of Culture and its Puppetry Section. There he was refused a trade licence ‘for racial reasons’. In April 1942, Willy Richter and Hugo Blum were expelled from the Wehrmacht. They returned to Hoyerswerda and had to perform forced labour there, as did their adult sisters. Two months later, on 8 June 1942, Aloys Blum was arrested after the family tried to flee Germany. After two months in custody in Hoyerswerda, he was sent to Cottbus police prison and from there on a group transport to Auschwitz, where he was registered as an inmate on 7 August 1942. His family members were no longer allowed to live in their caravan. They were sent to a shanty town on the outskirts of the city.
Deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau
On 3 or 4 March 1943, police surrounded the barracks where Toni Blum lived, crammed in with her children and grandchildren. They were only allowed to take the bare essentials with them. They were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau with many other Sinti via a prison in Breslau. Hugo Blum, who had fled Hoyerswerda after his father’s arrest and hidden for several months with his uncle Julius Richter (1879–unknown), was also arrested in a raid and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau after serving a prison sentence. The only Blum daughter who had escaped arrest (only her surname ‘Betzla’ is known) was also able to go into hiding with a relative of the Richter family.
The two young sons of Anna (1919–unknown) and Therese Blum (1921–2019) died in the cruel conditions in the so-called ‘Gypsy family camp’ in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The surviving files of the SS Hygiene Institute at Auschwitz show that at least four of Willy Blum’s siblings were subjected to medical experiments.
Ravensbrück and Buchenwald
At the beginning of August 1944, Aloys Blum and his two young sons Willy and Rudolf were transferred from Auschwitz to Buchenwald concentration camp. Toni Blum was sent to Ravensbrück with her daughters Anna, Therese, Liesbeth (1923–1999), Elli (1924–2020) and Dora, as well as her adult sons Willy Richter and Hugo Blum. While Anna, Therese and Liesbeth were moved from there to the Graslitz satellite camp, Toni, Elli and Dora remained in the main camp. Hugo Blum and Willy Richter were forcibly sterilised in the Ravensbrück men’s camp. Their mother Toni Blum, who was already fifty years old at the time, suffered the same fate and was never to recover from this brutal procedure.
In Buchenwald, Aloys Blum was separated from his two sons after just a few days and sent to the Dora satellite camp (later the independent Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp), and later from there to Bergen-Belsen. Sixteen-year-old Willy and ten-year-old Rudolf remained behind in Buchenwald. Together with many other children and young peoplepeople—mostly Sinti and Roma—they were crammed into Barrack 47. When the SS wanted to send 200 children from Buchenwald back to Auschwitz to their certain death in September 1944, Rudolf Blum’s name was also on the transport list. Willy Blum is said to have asked to be allowed to accompany his little brother. At any rate, this is suggested by a letter dated 23 September 1944 from SS doctor Dr August Bender (1909–2005), who expressed ‘no reservations‘.2Reprinted in ibid., fig. 14. Original in Arolsen Archives, 1.1.5.1/5340714, camp doctor August Bender, 23 September 1944. On Bender, see Biermanns, Nico. „August Bender“. In: Internetportal Rheinische Geschichte, retrieved at: https://www.rheinische-geschichte.lvr.de/Persoenlichkeiten/august-bender/DE-2086/lido/5f92db8c073bc3.62053386 [accessed: 15/04/2025]. At the last minute, the name of the then three-year-old Stefan Jerzy Zweig, whose rescue was made world-famous by the writer Bruno Apitz in his novel ‘Naked Among Wolves’ (published in 1958 by Mitteldeutscher Verlag. German Democratic Republic), was removed from the list.
Of the 200 children who arrived in Auschwitz on 26 September, only two survived: Rudolf Böhmer (1928–1968) and Alfred Rosenbach (born 1931).3Cf. https://www.buchenwaldbahn.de/namen/boehmer-rudolf-74192.html and https://www.buchenwaldbahn.de/namen/rosenbach-alfred-74100.html [accessed: 15/04/2025]. All the others, including the brothers Rudolf and Willy Blum, were murdered.
Reunion in Hoyerswerda
During the summer of 1945, the members of the Blum family returned to Hoyerswerda from the liberated concentration camps, from death marches or from hiding: apart from Rudolf and Willy Blum, they had all survived. Hoyerswerda was in the Soviet occupation zone. The Blums received a flat from the Soviet commandant’s office and financial support from the local ‘Victims of Fascism’ committee.
Although they were traumatised, ill and weakened by the abuse and deprivation, Aloys and Toni Blum and their children wanted to get back to their old lives as quickly as possible. But their caravan, including the furniture and household effects, as well as the puppets they had been forced to leave behind in the barracks, were no longer there.
In December 1945, the Blums crossed the border into the American occupation zone, where they found help and support from relatives in Bavaria. From 1947, Aloys and Toni Blum, their son Hugo and four of their daughters were back on the road with a small caravan and a marionette theatre. But times had changed and puppetry no longer had a future. In the villages and small towns, there were no more spectators. In 1953, Aloys Blum closed his business. He was 62 years old. As a result of the years of persecution, the couple were no longer able to work and were dependent on state support.
Compensation
As early as 1950, individual members of the Blum family made their first applications for compensation. This marked the beginning of a decades-long battle, during which they had to repeatedly provide new evidence, give meticulous explanations and undergo medical examinations. They were subjected to humiliating allegations and very probably had to pay the lawyers much of the money which they were finally granted after a long back and forth.
Compared to other groups persecuted by the Nazis, the Blums, like many Sinti and Roma in the Federal Republic of Germany, experienced particular discrimination and disadvantage because they were confronted with the disastrous combination of exclusionary clauses in the compensation legislation and racist prejudices on the part of the various claim handlers. As ‘experts’, the compensation offices often consulted criminal police officers who had been involved in the persecution of Sinti and Roma during the Nazi era and had an interest in challenging the credibility of the applicants. This was almost Hugo Blum’s fate when Detective Inspector Georg Geyer (1909–1989), head of the Bavarian police’s ‘Landfahrerstelle’ [travellers’ office] from 1952,4Nerdinger, Die Verfolgung der Sinti und Roma, 252 f. sought to label Blum a ‘criminal’ and thus deny him recognition as a victim of persecution, basing his ‘expert’ assessment on the Nazi files. His forced sterilisation was only recognised as a ‘severe mutilation’ at the end of the 1960s and Hugo Blum was certified as having a 30 per cent reduction in earning capacity.
Commemoration
On 13 July 2018, a memorial plaque was unveiled in Rübeland on the occasion of Willy Blum’s 90th birthday and on the initiative of Dr Christoph Unger from the Rübeland branch of the Harzklub. It is located on the site where the caravans of the showmen and traders used to stand.
The permanent exhibition at the Buchenwald Memorial commemorates the story of Willy and Rudolf Blum. Since 2007, schoolchildren have also been working on a constantly growing individual memorial as part of projects on the ‘Buchenwald Memorial Trail’ by placing the names of the 200 children and young people who were deported to Auschwitz at the end of September 1944 on stones at the site of the old camp railway station. Their biographical data—including that of Willy and Rudolf Blum—can be accessed online via a link placed there.
On 8 March 2024, twelve stumbling stones were laid for the members of the Blum family in front of the house at Laubegaster Ufer 22 in Dresden with the participation of many residents of the Laubegast district. The initiators were the ‘Weiterdenken’ association under the umbrella of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Saxony and the Dresden Stumbling Stones Association.
