Gert Schramm (28 November 1928 in Erfurt, Thuringia – 18 April 2016 in Eberswalde) was a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was the youngest of six black prisoners.
[1] He was the son of a German woman and an African-American father and was arrested in violation of Nazi racial purity laws.
During one visit in 1941, he was arrested for violation of Nazi racial laws and sent to Auschwitz, where he apparently died, there being no further trace of him.
Schramm once saw a prisoner, a young Jew from Leipzig named Wolfgang Kohn, get stomped to death by an SS guard, simply because he had moved during roll call.
[2][3] Schramm was one of the prisoners left at the camp, a better chance of surviving than those made to leave in the death marches.
[5] After the liberation of Buchenwald and the end of the Second World War, Schramm returned to his mother in Bad Langensalza.
From 1956 to 1964, he worked in Essen in a coal mine, but he then chose to move to East Germany, three years after the construction of the Berlin Wall.