The following text is not a historical study. It is a retelling of the witness’s life story based on the memories recorded in the interview. The story was processed by external collaborators of the Memory of Nations. In some cases, the short biography draws on documents made available by the Security Forces Archives, State District Archives, National Archives, or other institutions. These are used merely to complement the witness’s testimony. The referenced pages of such files are saved in the Documents section.

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Heiderose Gläß (* 1951)

• she was born in 1951 in Aue as Heiderose Schneider

• she started school in 1957

• after the second grade, she got sent to a special school with an advanced Russian language program

• after the 10th grade, she studied to become a primary school teacher

• worked in the Erzgebirge, and later in Thuringia as a teacher

• moved to Kiev for 3,5 years because her husband had to work there

• birth of her first child

• after the return to Germany, she became a middle school teacher and taught Russian, first in Thuringia and later in Saxony

• birth of the second child

• completed a course at an official party school and became an instructor for schools for four years

• after the German reunification, Gläß participated in an occupational re-training to become a business data processing specialist

• since she didn’t find a job in business informatics, she worked as a social education worker instead, focussing on late repatriates from the Soviet Union as well as welfare recipients

• worked as campaign manager for the PDS party in north-eastern Saxony

• member of the Landtag (regional parliament) of Saxony from 2009 until 2014, focussed on equal opportunities

• became a pensioner soon after leaving the Landtag

We spoke to Heiderose Gläß, née Schneider, who was born in 1951 in Aue, a small town in the mountains Erzgebirge. She spoke to us about her parents’ life and her father’s persecution during the Nazi regime.

Her parents, Alfred Schneider and Hedwig Herzig were born in 1908 and 1912 respectively in Silesia which was a part of the German Empire back then. Alfred Schneider was a miner who grew up in poverty. Already as a child, he was confronted with class differences and social injustice which motivated him to join a social democratic youth group for the working class, called “Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterjugend”. At 20 years-old, Alfred Schneider became a member of the Social Democratic Party and joined the “Reichsbanner”, an organisation within the party that provided security during party events and demonstrations. This was common practice in the Weimar Republic, with the SA being the infamous security organisation of the NSDAP. So during events of the Social Democratic and sometimes also the Communist Party, the members of the Reichsbanner worked as security guards in case members of the SA would show up and try to disturb the event. Apart from his involvement in the Social Democratic Party, Alfred Schneider was also active in the miners’ union. This form of political activism lasted until 1933, when the National Socialist seized power and prohibited oppositional parties as well as all unions. After that, Alfred Schneider tried to smuggle in newspapers and pamphlets and distribute them amongst his colleagues in the mine. Unfortunately, one of them tipped off the authorities about Alfred Schneider’s activities.

One morning, the Gestapo stood in front of the house where Alfred Schneider lived with his wife and parents-in-law. First, the Gestapo visited one of his neighbours, which gave him and his wife enough time to burn all pamphlets and rid themselves from the evidence. An hour later, the Gestapo knocked on their door and searched the apartment but could not find any incriminating objects or writings. Still, they took Alfred Schneider with them and brought him to the police station in the nearby town of Waldenburg. There he was interrogated for a few days and whenever his statements contradicted those of other comrades, he was beaten bloody with a bull’s pizzle. The day after his arrest, the Gestapo sent Hedwig Schneider her husband’s bloody underwear with the demand to bring fresh undergarments to the police station.

After the interrogation, Alfred Schneider was confined in pre-trial custody in Breslau in February of 1934. His trial was set for December but was then postponed to January of 1935. Alongside 89 others, Alfred Schneider was charged with high treason. Twenty of them got prison sentences, including Alfred Schneider sentenced to one and a half years in prison. He started serving his sentence in the prison in Görlitz but got later transferred to Lichtenburg where one of the earliest concentration camps had been installed in an old castle. Around thirty to fifty prisoners shared a hall where they slept on plank beds and straw mattresses. They were forced to work in a market garden and in workshops while suffering abuse at the hands of the SS-guards.

Because the concentration camp Lichtenburg was turned into a women’s camp in 1937, the male prisoners had to leave in 1936. Some of them were transferred to the concentration camp Buchenwald, while others got transferred to a new, emerging camp called “Sachsenhausen”. Alfred Schneider got selected for Sachsenhausen because he knew how to work with wood, which was a needed skill for the construction of the camp and its barracks. The three large groups of prisoners in Sachsenhausen were opposition activists, regular criminals and homosexual men.

One of Alfred Schneider’s key memories from his time in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen occurred in November 1936. All prisoners were summoned to the “Appellplatz” for a roll call. There they learned that seven prisoners had managed to escape from the concentration camp. In order to deter the remaining prisoners from escaping, the guards abused and intimidated them during the roll call. Then, they put up seven crosses where they hung up the escaped prisoners once they were recaptured. On the crosses, they were tortured until they died. However, one prisoner escaped successfully and the seventh cross remained vacant, standing as a beacon of hope to all prisoners of Sachsenhausen.

Finally, in 1937, Alfred Schneider was discharged from the concentration camp and allowed to return to his family in Silesia, under the condition that he reported himself three times a week to the local police and once a week to the Gestapo. Still, Alfred Schneider was able to see his wife again who gave birth to their first daughter Liane in 1938. He also returned to his work in the mines where he met many of his old comrades again. However, out of fear of being sent to a concentration camp again, they did not plan any new missions and campaigns.

After his return home, Alfred Schneider received a letter from the government, that he was being charged for his trial as well as his time in pre-trial confinement and in prison. He owed the German state 919 Reichsmark for the accommodation and provisions in prison. His request to be exempt from this payment was denied but he was allowed to pay off his debt in monthly instalments of 5 RM which he would have had to pay until 1949, had the Nazi regime existed that long.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and thus started the Second World War, all (former) political prisoners were excluded from the military draft because they were thought to be “ineligible for military service”. Therefore, Alfred Schneider could continue working in the mine. The only way, in which he had to contribute to the war effort was by working, additionally to his mining job, as a firefighter, in case his hometown was attacked. So when American bombers attacked Silesia in 1941, Alfred Schneider had a few missions as firefighter. Other than that, the war barely affected Alfred Schneider and his family. This changed in 1942 when the tide of the war changed dramatically for Germany. Now, they needed every able-bodied man to fight.

Alfred Schneider was drafted in November of 1942 and sent to Antwerp to complete his basic military training together with other former political prisoners. There, they got prepared to serve in the punishment battalion 999. The training was physically demanding and the living conditions hard. Anyone who tried to escape got shot without warning (?). Yet, Alfred Schneider enjoyed being surrounded by like-minded people with whom he could confer and exchange ideas.

The basic military training lasted until May of 1943. Then they got shipped off to the front in Algiers where Erwin “Desert Fox” Rommel had the command over the German troops. Since Alfred Schneider was serving in a punishment battalion, they got sent to the very front lines as cannon fodder and to dig the trenches. Alfred Schneider remembers this time as being very brutal. The climate was extremely hot, they hardly got enough provisions and he saw his comrades getting shot left and right.

Fortunately, Alfred Schneider’s time in the army came to an end after only a few months when got taken prisoner of war. He was shipped to Texas where he was put in a prisoner-of-war-camp. The American guards quickly realised that Alfred Schneider and his comrades had been political prisoners in a punishment battalion. They therefore received a privileged treatment. In general, Alfred Schneider always stressed how much better his experiences as prisoner of war had been in comparison to his time in German prison and in the concentration camps. The American guards might have been strict but unlike the SS-guards in Germany, they were not brutal. And while the prisoners were still forced to work, their living conditions were humane and sometimes they were even invited to eat at American families’.

 After the capitulation of Germany in 1945, Alfred Schneider got transferred to a prisoner-of-war-camp in France where the living conditions were significantly worse than in Texas, but he got discharged after a few months and sent to the American occupation zone. There, he found work as miner and subsequently filed an application for his family to be allowed to migrate to the American occupation zone, as well. However, his parents-in-law were denied the permit and since his wife was extremely close to her parents, he decided to return to Silesia. This way the family could stay together.

During Alfred Schneider’s time in prison, in the army and in the prisoner-of-war-camp, his wife Hedwig Schneider had to support herself, her infant daughter, as well as her parents and her mother-in-law. Before the Nazis seized the power, Hedwig had been politically active in the Social Democratic Party, where she had met Alfred. After the wedding in 1932, she gave up her profession as kindergarten teacher. Instead, she concentrated on caring for her parents and her mother-in-law as well as cultivating potatoes on a small field. During Alfred’s prison sentence, she had to start working again but was prohibited from being a kindergarten teacher again since her husband was a political prisoner. Instead, she became a cook in the kindergarten and continued growing potatoes to feed her family. In February 1945, the Red Army approached Silesia and most people fled. But Hedwig Schneider remained in Silesia because it was impossible for her to flee with her infant daughter and her elderly parents (Alfred Schneider’s mother had passed away by then). She therefore experienced the Soviet invasion in Silesia but survived it unharmed. In the following months, Hedwig took care of the sick and of refugees. Apart from that she worked as washerwoman for the Soviet commandants which improved her living conditions immensely. She received extra provisions as well as extra firewood to heat her apartment and dry the laundry there. This work continued until the Soviets left in 1946.

In 1947, Alfred Schneider returned home to his family and to his old job in the mines. After only a few weeks, however, the Schneiders were informed that they had to leave Silesia within a week because the territory was now a part of Poland and all Germans had to leave. They were allowed to take as many of their possessions as they could transport themselves. Alfred Schneider and his father-in-law built makeshift hand carts so that they could take as much with them as possible. Whatever dishes they had to leave behind, they hid beneath the floorboards in the attic because they half expected, half hoped that their expulsion was only temporary.

The Schneider family, consisting of Alfred Schneider, his wife, his nine-year-old daughter and his parents-in-law, had to walk to the closest train station where a train waited to transport the displaced people to a reception camp near Riesa, in the Soviet occupation zone. The supply situation in the camp was lacking but they were allowed to leave the camp and foraged the adjacent fields and meadows for food. After living in the reception camp for four weeks, the Schneider family was allowed to chose where in the Soviet occupation zone they wanted to move. And since they came from mountains, they decided to move to the Erzgebirge, being the most similar to their home. They got a small apartment together with the parents-in-law and Alfred Schneider and his father-in-law immediately started to work as miners at the SDAG Wismut.

While Alfred Schneider was quickly promoted to head miner, Hedwig delved into politics. She was voted to the school board of her daughter’s school and in 1948, she was became a municipal councillor, where she served as deputy mayor of Breitenbrunn. When the family moved to Aue in 1950, Hedwig became the regional chairman of the DFD, a women’s organisation, and regional secretary of the “Nationale Front”, an organisation, that organised the cooperation of political parties and mass organisations in the GDR. She was successful in both roles and put in charge of the foundation and organisation of a regional branch of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship.

Since Hedwig Schneider was so involved in local politics, she quickly felt at home in the Erzgebirge and the GDR. For Alfred Schneider, it was more difficult. Because of his declining health, he could no longer work as a miner. He had a few physically less demanding jobs until his disablement in the 1960s. After that, he stayed at home and took care of their children while his wife followed her career in politics. He often expressed how he missed the Silesian dialect and had a picture of a Silesian folkloric mountain spirit, called Rübezahl, on his bedside table. To his children, he talked a lot about Silesia as well as his experiences during the Nazi regime. Alfred Schneider also got involved in education and visited schools to talk to the students about fascism and its dangers, encouraging them to fight against it. Heiderose and her sister Liane grew up in the knowledge that war is something horrific and should never happen again. As children, they sang peace songs and made peace doves and as teenagers, they collected signatures against the Vietnam War. They did all of this based on the conviction that “War is the worst crime there is” and they had to do everything to bring together all people in the world, so that there will be no more wars.