– Updated Version (Aug 27, 16:50 GMT +2) : including Rick Landmans memories of his father –
I stood in awe as I looked down at the brown lederhosen, which had been carefully placed in my hands. My gloved hands touched the matured leather. I could see by look and experience that this pair of German traditional clothing had been devotedly worn and looked after neatly as well. What I held in hands was the Lederhosen of Henry Landman. His son Rick, a dear friend, had told me about this special piece of clothing. Now Mrs. Müller, the deputy director of the Jewish Museum Augsburg Schwaben had especially brought it from the archives for me to see as I visited the museum on this hot August afternoon.
I was moved to tears, because it not only made me feel close to Rick, but held an important artefact of history in my hands. If the Lederhosen could speak, they would tell the hurtful, but ever so strong story of Henry Landman.
Rick Landman writes about this difficult chapter in his fathers life via Facebook:
The Gestapo arrested my dad on the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938) at 5 am while he was still in bed. When he got up he put on his Lederhosen and when he reached Dachau he turned them in. They put them in a brown paper bag with his Dachau Number on it. When he was later released they returned them to him to be able to go home. His father who was released earlier was able to get him a Temporary Transit visit to get to London. He was 18 and too old for the Kindertansport.
Rick Landman, via Facebook
On April 15, 1939, my dad as an unaccompanied teenager made his way to London and he either took the Lederhosen with him, or packed them in the lift that he sent to NYC the week before.
Growing up in NYC I remember my dad wearing them while doing the gardening. [If you check out my COMMENTS] you can see a photo of my dad trying on the Lederhosen before we sent them to the Museum, and a photo of me wearing my Lederhosen in the Catskills when I was a child.
Henry had been arrested in this very traditional German clothing I held in my hands many years later in Augsburg. At his release he was handed all his belongings back, which included the Lederhosen. Henry emigrated to the U.S. just in time and returned six years later in the very different clothing of a US-Soldier to Germany to liberate the Jewish people.
Father like son, Rick is a very inspiring person. On his website he gives touching insights in to his biography. For the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau he wrote for the „Gedächtnisbuch für Häftlinge des KZ Dachau“ about his late fathers experience as a liberator of Dachau:
[…] In 1945, the town of Dachau had one major road with a few side streets off to the sides. When he arrived the street was full of people shouting, eating, looting, and running around either in exuberance of their new freedom or fear of what will happen next. Colonel Porter gave him a jeep, and while riding down the street, a woman in a long black dress jumped into the middle of the street waving her hands trying to get my father’s attention. His jeep stopped and my father hopped out in his U.S. Army uniform, carrying his rifle and went up to her asked her what she wanted. Her face showed a combination of urgency and fear, but she calmed down and motioned him to go with her into a small house with a bakery on the ground floor. She wanted to get off the street before she would tell him why she was so frantic. When inside, she explained that someone was hiding downstairs who wanted to surrender directly to an American soldier. She said that she just wanted him out of her house and didn’t know what to do.
The man who ran into her store was still wearing his S.S. uniform and was more afraid of the newly liberated concentration camp prisoners than he was of the U.S. Army. My father went down a spiral staircase pointing his rifle as he slowly descended, and there hovering in the corner, was probably a former Captain in charge of the S.S. officers at Dachau Concentration Camp. When the Nazi officer saw my father, he stood up and saluted him with an American salute and he said that he wanted to surrender to an American, and be away from the mob of former inmates. The whole thing was so bizarre to my father who could still remember being in Dachau as an inmate. Even if this man was not the same Captain as in 1938, the thought of my father being the savior of an S.S. officer was quite ironic. In retrospect, my father wondered if the Captain was actually the son of the screaming woman, and she tricked him into saving her son.
My father didn’t explain who he was and why he spoke German and just let them wonder if all of the U.S. soldiers were as conversant as he. The Captain walked upstairs with his hands over his head, and then my father and the other soldier who was watching the jeep put the Captain on the hood of the jeep and told him to hold on to the metal bar that was attached to the front bumper. This bar was the latest invention of the Americans to try to keep them from being decapitated. The Germans would tie a thin wire around a tree on one side of the street and then cross the street and tie it to another tree, hoping that the American soldiers in the convertible jeeps would ride by and have their heads sliced off.
My father didn’t have to worry this day about any decapitation. In addition to the outreaching metal stick, he had a Nazi officer in the front who would feel any wire before they would. As my father drove down the main street of Dachau with this prominent Nazi on the hood, he remembered that six years earlier he was released from Dachau and was told that he better get out of Germany, because the next time he ended up in that camp, he wouldn’t be getting out alive. Now six years later, he was an American soldier saving the life of a man in charge of all that killing.
Rick Landman, https://www.gedaechtnisbuch.org/henry-heinz-landman-and-70/
Such remarkable and moving experiences – I do not know, how Henry was able to see it all through. Both, the Lederhose I was allowed to see on this remarkable day in August, and the jacket of Henry Landman´s uniform, are in the safe keeping of the Jewish Museum Augsburg Schwaben as an important reminder of history. While this part of history is well documented thanks to the Landman family, Rick and I want to work on reconciling the broken past of our Franconian home town.
You have to meet him! He’s only a few miles away in Manhattan. What a delight it would be, to connect two of my favourite people and maybe someday have both of you with us here in Germany as we try to reconcile history through friendship and important lessons of the past for a brighter future.
Miriam Gross 