Bleicher Willy

Bleicher, Willi Willi Bleicher, born in 1907, was the fifth son of a working-class family. Like his father, he studied to become a metal worker at the Daimler automotive factory. As a youngster he joined the ranks of the Communist youth movement and later the German Communist Party (KPD). When, in 1929, a small activist group, opposed to the official line of subservience to Moscow, seceded from the main party, Bleicher became a member of the splinter group, the Communist Party Opposition (KPO). After the Nazi rise to power, the KPO went underground. Bleicher became involved in this underground activity and, at the beginning of 1935, was arrested by the Gestapo. He was tried and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, but, when he completed his sentence, this was extended to an indefinite term of incarceration in concentration camps. It was under these circumstances that Bleicher entered the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. By 1944, the 37-year-old had become the leader of the underground organization of the political prisoners, who, in effect, controlled the internal camp administration. On August 5, 1944, a Polish Jew, Dr. Zacharias Zweig, arrived in the camp together with the only surviving member of his family, his three-year-old son Stefan Jeszy. The incongruous presence of the three-year-old in a concentration camp caused a general sensation. It seemed just a matter of time before the camp authorities would take him away from his father and transport him to Auschwitz, where his fate would be sealed. However, the political prisoners, who took the plight of the Jewish child to heart, resolved to make his survival a living symbol of their will to resist. Bleicher, who worked at the camp’s warehouse, arranged sleeping accommodations for him in one of the storerooms. These were known by the SS guards to be infested with lice and typhus, and thus they shunned them “like the plague.” When the camp administration decided, nonetheless, to deport thethree-year-old and put his name on the list for the transport to Auschwitz, Bleicher bribed the SS physician, and he admitted little Jeszy to the camp hospital. In this way he was withdrawn from the transport and escaped certain death. He was later transferred to the “small camp” in Buchenwald, where another political prisoner, Eugene Waller, watched over him. Both Dr. Zweig and his son survived the war. Bleicher, with other members of the underground movement, were arrested on October 28, 1944, in the wake of a secret memorial service held in honor of murdered KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann (1886-1944). Bleicher was tortured by the Gestapo but eventually managed to make his escape. After the war he became secretary of the metal workers’ trade union in Baden-Württemberg. On May 18, 1965, Yad Vashem recognized Willi Bleicher as Righteous Among the Nations.