Henry Birnbrey
“We must be vigilant anytime injustice occurs anywhere and do all we can to eradicate these injustices and make the world realize and appreciate the value of each human life.”
—Henry Birnbrey
Born: November 29, 1923
City of birth: Dortmund
They lived in Dortmund, Germany, where Edmund had a textile business and a small commissary for a labor union. They considered themselves patriotic Germans. Edmund had fought in World War I and had been awarded for his bravery. Jennie had lost three brothers, her first husband, and a child in the “great war.” Edmund was hard-working, politically involved and had joined the Reichsbanner, the elite corps of the Social Democratic Party. Jennie was very intellectual; in addition to speaking German, she was fluent in Greek, Latin and French. She could always be found with a book in her hand.
The family lived comfortably in a spacious apartment downtown, with all the “modern” conveniences (electricity, hot water, central heating). They employed a housekeeper, Margaret, who was treated like part of the family. Henry used to play with all the children in the neighborhood. On weekends, the family went for hikes and attended services at the local reform synagogue.
Henry attended a very good, local, Jewish school, where he received both a secular and religious education.
Core to the Nazi Party’s ideology was the ludicrous belief that the downturn in German’s economy and international standing was caused by its Jewish citizens. Jews made up less than one percent of the German population, and most German Jews were patriotic Germans. Yet, the Nazis led major propaganda campaigns aimed at portraying Jews as evil, blaming them for the economic problems of Germany – problems actually caused by a crushing defeat in World War I, bad economic policies that led to a severe depression, hyperinflation, and political infighting. Public attitudes towards Jews became increasingly harsh and laws aimed at restricting the freedoms of Jewish citizens followed soon after.
Books by Jewish authors, as well as other writers whose views conflicted with Nazi ideology, were burned in the streets. Antisemitic propaganda posters and placards and posters appeared on every street corner.
In 1935, the Birnbreys’ landlady decided that she no longer wanted to rent to Jewish tenants, and overnight the family was forced to move out. They quickly found a new home in a tiny, rundown studio apartment. Many of the non-Jewish children in the neighborhood began to only play with Henry secretly at night, most stopped playing with their Jewish neighbors altogether. Non-Jewish citizens were no longer allowed to work for Jewish citizens, and the family’s housekeeper had to be dismissed.
When he stood trial, the customer testified on Edmund’s behalf, but the judge felt torn. Though he didn’t think Edmund had done anything wrong, he felt his own job would be at risk if he did not punish this innocent Jewish man. He told Edmund to stay away from the town, so that the locals would believe that the judge had sent Edmund to a concentration camp. Edmund was forced to close his business.
Edmund and Jennie feared that the atmosphere of antisemitism and hate was only going to get worse and began applying for visas. While there were no restrictions against leaving Germany in the mid-1930s, there was no place to go. The family applied for immigration visas for several Latin American countries, Palestine, and the United states. No other country in the world was eager to take Jewish refugees.
The next day, Henry’s parents put him on a train to Stuttgart, Germany where the American Consulate was located. Doctors examined him to make sure he met the strict code of good health required by the United States immigration law. Then they sent him to Hamburg, where he was joined by other children in similar circumstances. They were brought to the US in April 1938.
The Birmingham Chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women sponsored Henry’s immigration, so he was initially brought, by train, to Birmingham, Alabama. But Henry, a young boy separated from his family and trying to navigate a new language, a new culture, and a new place, proved too much for his initial host parent to handle. In January 1939, he was sent to a new foster family in Atlanta, GA. His foster mother, Fannie Asman, already a mother of two, treated Henry as her own son, and Henry found a home in the Jewish community of Atlanta.
On the night of November 9, 1938, a wave of violence erupted in Germany. Riots and pogroms against Jewish citizens took place in cities across the nation. 267 synagogues were burned to the ground, including the one where Henry had become a Bar Mitzvah. Almost 8,000 Jewish businesses were looted and destroyed. 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up by the SS and Gestapo and taken to concentration camps, just because they were Jewish. Mobs roamed the streets, beating up Jews and forcing them to perform humiliating acts. 91 Jewish people were murdered. By the next day, the streets were covered in broken glass, and the event became known as Kristallnacht. Night of Crystal.
Many weeks after Kristallnacht, Henry received a letter from his mother telling him that his father, Edmund, had been arrested by the Gestapo on Kristallnacht. He was beaten severely by the police (simply for being Jewish), and then released. His body was so broken by the attack that he required medical attention, but no hospital would even admit him immediately following the attack. Several weeks later he died from his wounds.
After that, letters from Henry’s mother became more infrequent. All her life, she had suffered from chronic digestive problems, and with no source of income and increasingly scarce food rations she could not maintain her specialized diet. In September 1939, Henry’s uncle wrote to him, informing Henry that his mother had died.
As the years wore on, he continued to hear from distant relatives horror stories about the fate of Jews in Europe. Though he occasionally met with other orphaned children from Germany in Atlanta, most of his fellow classmates and neighbors had little idea what life was like in Europe during the early years of World War II and the Holocaust.
While he waited on the appeal’s decision, he continued his education, graduating from high school and then continuing to Georgia State University to study accounting.
In June 1943, his appeal was approved, and he became a US citizen. He was admitted to the US army, where he received his US citizenship, and left his studies. He was inducted at Fort McPherson, a base in Atlanta, and then went to basic training in Virginia with an anti-aircraft division. He was initially offered an opportunity to be an interpreter for the army but declined the opportunity for two reasons: one, he didn’t think his German language skills had evolved past an 8th grade level, and two, his bitterness towards the Nazis for his parents’ deaths left him eager to join an active combat unit.
On February 12, 1944 Henry was shipped out to Europe as part of the 30th Infantry Division. Initially he came to England and was charged with destroying enemy aircraft.
On D4, the 30th Infantry Division of the US army landed on Omaha beach. By that point, the beach was strewn with the bodies of those killed in battle. Henry’s battalion was assigned to land at the beach and join the battlegrounds at St. Lo, a city located at a strategic crossroad about six miles from the initial landing beach. The fighting at the beach was so intense, that they would not arrive at St. Lo until the end of July.
In Herleen, Henry’s unit discovered that the city’s synagogue had been vandalized by the Nazi forces and turned into a stable. As they were in the city on a Friday, they were able to clean it up and hold a Shabbat service, which was attended by Jewish allied troops, as well as the few Jewish civilians who had managed to stay hidden until liberation.
In December, Henry’s division participated in defending against the last major German offensive campaign in the Battle of the Bulge. Henry was wounded but was able to continue with his unit as they continued their own offensive push into Germany.
Though Henry began the war as a section commander of a half-track vehicle armed with anti-aircraft weaponry, his German language skills made him useful as a forward observer and as an interrogator for enemy POWs, and he was transferred to the counter-intelligence corps.
As Henry opened the cars, he described his emotions as “… the most helpless feeling I ever had in my life. I didn’t have anything to give them, no way to help them.” Henry was the only Jewish person in his unit, and the only one who spoke German or Yiddish, but the prisoners were left too weak and bewildered to be able to share their stories in detail. But they called out to the soldiers “Ich bin a Yid.” I am a Jew.
One of the children on that train, Mordechai Weisskopf, spoke of that moment: “The joy that seized us at the sight of the American tank is indescribable. Suddenly, from, nonhuman slaves, we were transformed into free people. It was very thrilling, unforgettable. We saw American soldiers, and one of them shouted in Yiddish, his eyes overflowing with tears, ‘I am a Jew, too.’ There was an outburst of joy that is hard to describe.”
As the war was winding down, the Nazis began to fear that their war-time actions would be considered crimes against humanity by allied troops and they would be held accountable. The Nazis decided to increase the killing of concentration camp prisoners and to move as many prisoners as possible away from the allied front. In time, it would be discovered that the train had originated from the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and had been originally scheduled to take the prisoners to Theresienstadt, another concentration camp. The train had left Bergen-Belson on April 7th, laden with Jewish prisoners from Hungary, Holland, Poland, Greece, and Slovakia. When the SS troops guarding them heard the distant fire of the allied troops, they chose to abandon the train in an open field. Rather than releasing the people from the cars, they left them to suffer and die horrible, painful deaths.
Magdeburg had been the site of a forced labor camp, where approximately 13,000 slave laborers were made to produce synthetic petroleum products for the use of the Nazi military. By the time Henry arrived, the camp was empty, but evidence of the brutality inflicted could be seen for miles around.
The road to Magdeburg was a nightmarish sight. In a continuing effort to empty concentration camps, the Nazis had led forced marches of prisoners away from the camps. The prisoners, starving and weak from long abuse, were in no shape for a physically intensive march, and many died from exhaustion and starvation. SS troops, wary of being caught by allies with prisoners who could act as witnesses against them, would often shoot the prisoners in their charge before fleeing. The ditches along the road to Magdeburg were filled with the corpses of concentration camp prisoners, murdered just before their liberators were to arrive.
Since the Soviet Union had not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, the Nazis claimed they had no obligation to treat Red Army POWs humanely. Furthermore, the Nazi’s racist ideology maintained that those of Slavic ethnicity were “subhuman,” and therefore deserving of particularly harsh treatment. Unlike American or British POWs, Soviet POWs received very small food rations and were often sentenced to forced labor. Also, unlike their American and British counterparts, Soviet POWs were not always welcomed back by their home country. Most Soviet POWs were accused of collaboration by Soviet authorities and sent to Soviet forced-labor camps upon repatriation.
When the SS discovered US troops were advancing, they decided to evacuate the camp, sending prisoners to other concentration camps, either through brutal marches that claimed many lives or on severely crowded box car trains. When damaged rails forced one of the trains to deboard in the town of Gardelegen, the SS guards recruited local townspeople to force over 1,000 prisoners into a large barn and burn them alive.
By the time Henry’s unit arrived, Mittelbau-Dora was empty, but there were rumors that some of the leading scientists who had overseen the V-2 rocket production were hiding nearby, including Dr. Wernher von Braun, the “father of rocket science.”
Henry was among those credited for the arrest of these scientists, including Walther J. Reidl, who later became Dr. von Braun’s assistant. Although their work had been dependent on slave laborers and many held high-level SS officer positions, very few of these men were ever tried for their war crimes. In fact, many were given US citizenship to contribute to the US army’s development of ballistic missiles under an initiative called Operation Paperclip.
Shortly after Thanksgiving, Henry received his orders to return home.
For his brave service, Henry was awarded the following medals: Victory Medal World War II, European-African-Middle Eastern Theatre Ribbon with six bronze battle stars, Purple Heart, and Belgian Fourragere.
After the war ended, Henry searched the globe for any surviving family members. Through advertisements on a popular Israeli radio station, Kol Yisrael, he was able to find three distant cousins who had survived. Nearly all of his once-extensive family were murdered in the Shoah.
A few years after opening his first business, Henry met the editor of a small-town newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama, Rebecca (Ricky) Kresses, and instantly fell in love. Ricky gave up her position with the paper to marry Henry in the spring of 1951, although she continued to write community newsletters and plays. Henry and Ricky had four children, adopted two more children of a cousin trapped in Cuba during Castro’s regime, and were happily married until her death in 1988. In 1990, Henry married Shirlye Kaufman, a small business owner, and the two spent their retirement years traveling, volunteering in their community, and spending time with their many grandchildren.
Henry was always very involved in non-profit organizations, serving on the boards of many organizations, including the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, the Zionist Organization of America, the American Joint Distribution Committee, the Hebrew Academy, Congregation Beth El, and United Way. One of his earliest board positions was on the Southern Regional Council, one of the first organizations to combat segregation in the South. The group held integrated board meetings and worked with the city to employ the first African-American police officer in Atlanta.
Henry visited Germany several times to find out more about his family history, and erect gravestones for his parents. He has always been shocked by the incredible detail of the Nazi’s records of the Holocaust. There are records of his relatives’ dates of birth, the exact time and place of their arrests, the identification numbers of the trucks and trains that carried them away from their homes, the names of detention centers and how long they were kept there, and, for most, the time, place, and cause of their deaths.
The Holocaust is the most documented mass crime in human history, yet there are many who seek to deny the truth of this history, usually motviated by antisemitism.
To combat denial, Henry has told his story to audiences across the world for decades, including to German audiences. Henry has said: “I find it difficult to speak to German audiences, because no one wants to accept that their fathers and grandfathers had been a part of this, and thereby murderers. But in all fairness, I want to point out that in the last several years, German is doing more to speak about the Holocaust and building more memorials than any country on Earth. Perhaps it took a new generation to be able to recognize the crimes of their ancestors.”
Name in US: Heinz Birnbrey
Married Name: Manuela Bornstein
Parents’ Names: Edmund and Jennie Birnbrey
Spouse(s) Name(s): Rebecca (Ricky) Kresses, Shirlye Kaufman
Children’s Name: Judy, Eddie, David, and Anita
Date of Birth: November 29, 1923
City of Birth: Dortmund
Country of Birth: Germany
Religous Identity (Pre-war): Jewish
Religous Identity (Post-war): Jewish
Year Immigrated: Red Army/ 1933
Ship to US: SS Hansa
Georgia City of Residence: Atlanta, GA