Hans Frankenthal (15 July 1926 – 22 December 1999) was a German Jew who was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland in 1943.
Having survived the Holocaust along with his brother Ernst, Frankenthal returned to his home in Germany where he experienced the common disbelief and denial of Nazi war crimes.
Frankenthal eventually put his biography to paper in the 1990s in his book Verweigerte Rückkehr which was published half a year before his death.
After Jewish businesses began to be boycotted following the Nazi Party's seizure of power in 1933, the Frankenthal family was no longer able to properly provide themselves with basic necessities.
Due to attempts to get around the new laws through extensive contacts in the German community, the Frankenthal family received several visits from the SA to investigate their ongoing commercial activities.
The contacts themselves were also running a great risk in that the names of so-called "Traitors to the People and State" were published in the Nazi newspaper Rote Erde ("Red Earth").
In 1937 Max Frankenthal was arrested after allegations from German farmers in Friedeburg that he had attempted to manipulate the weighing scale in order to haggle the price of stock down.
The Jews remaining in Schmallenberg were then forced to sign over the title deeds of their property with the promise that it would bring their husbands and sons back.
Dina Falke stood on the street and asked the SA troopers what the Jews had ever done to them until she was silenced by worried family members.
In addition to the confiscation of their property, the Jewish men had to prove that they would leave the country within several weeks, or face the penalty of returning to the concentration camps, this time with their families.
They implemented Arbeiteinsätze, in which the Jews were forced to work[5] on projects such as digging ditches to hold water for fighting fires in the upcoming war.
As the school in Schmallenberg was now closed to Jewish children,[4] Frankenthal and his brother began attending classes at a workshop in Dortmund where they learnt hand skills, foreign languages and were educated in Zionism.
On 28 February 1943, the construction site manager informed the workers that they would be required to report to the former Jewish school in Dortmund for the checking of their work papers.
Upon their arrival both Hans and his brother Ernst were placed under arrest and then held for several days before being loaded into cattle transport wagons[4] and sent east.
[2] On the second day of the march the group reached Gleiwitz (Gliwice), where they were loaded onto open cattle wagons and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp.
[1][4] The train stopped at Theresienstadt concentration camp,[1] where they were ordered into a new set of barracks shortly before the Soviet Red Army arrived and liberated the inmates.
Despite the now available food, water and basic medical care, many of the freed prisoners died in the days after due to the lasting effects of malnutrition and maltreatment and a typhoid fever epidemic.
[4] After retiring from his work in running a butcher’s shop, he became deputy chairman of the Auschwitz Committee of the FRG and a member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
[13] Ernst's daughter (Hans' niece) Ruth Frankenthal was a life-long campaigner against anti-Semitism and was Chairwoman of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation for several years; she was awarded the German Order of Merit.
This annual prize is awarded to groups, initiatives and institutions that accomplish educational work and awareness training according to the aims of the Auschwitz Committee for the remembrance of the Shoah and against neo-fascist activities.