Busse Otto

Busse, Otto Born in Gillandwirszen in East Prussia, Otto Busse was the youngest of seven brothers. He showed little inclination for the traditional family pursuit as a farmer and, after various ups and downs, decided to study to be a master painter. After establishing his own independent business, like so many other master craftsmen in the 1930s, he joined the ranks of the NSDAP. However, in 1935, he left the party out of revulsion for its anti-Jewish policy – only to join it again, in June 1939, under pressure of the Kreisleiter (Nazi regional chief). After the outbreak of war, the 38-year-old Busse was not drafted into the army but was assigned to a police reserve unit on the German-Polish border. His commander was Landrat (district administrator) Dr. Brix, who later became chief of civil defense in Bialystok. When Busse was discharged from the gendarmerie in March 1943, he followed his former reserve commander all the way to Bialystok in eastern Poland, where he set up a paint workshop. As a member of the Nazi party who supposedly was contributing to the national effort of economic reconstruction, he enjoyed special protection in occupied Poland. His main task consisted of renovating hospitals and apartments vacated by Jewish residents. For this purpose he could employ local Poles and had access to forced Jewish labor from the ghetto. One day, as the master painter was looking for suitable rooms for his expanding labor force, he came to inspect an apartment where two girls were staying. In the friendly conversation that developed, Busse offered the German-speaking girls secretarial work in his business. As he was to find out later, the two girls – Chasia Bilitzka from Grodno and Chaika Grossman from Bialystok – were in fact Jewish and belonged to the leadership of a Jewish underground organization. It was through them that Busse gained his first insight into the horrors of the extermination campaign that the Nazis were waging against the Jewish people. Heresolved to adopt the cause of the victims against their oppressors. As a German employer, he could save the lives of some of the doomed by claiming them as his workers. That saved them – at least in the short run – from being included in the transports to the death camps. He gradually also became involved in the full ambit of Jewish resistance activity. He obtained pistols for the resistance fighters, supplied them with warm clothing and medicines – all at his own expense. At one time he even participated in a meeting of partisans in the woods. He placed his office and his own typewriter at the disposal of those who printed anti-fascist leaflets. He let the Jewish underground organization use his apartment as a temporary hiding place for weapons to be delivered to partisans in the woods. As the front drew nearer, in the second half of 1944, Busse had to leave Bialystok and return to Germany. Having been drafted at the last minute into military service, he was captured by the Russians and held some five years after the war in a POW camp in Kiev. After his release from captivity and his return to the Federal Republic, Busse kept thinking of his Jewish friends from Bialystok. In 1958, the Jewish Agency was able to locate Chasia Bilitzka and Chaika Grossman living in Israel. The renewed contact with the Jewish survivors culminated in Busse’s decision to live in Nes Ammim, a settlement in Western Galilee, founded by German and Dutch Christians. However, he kept returning to Germany for prolonged visits. When he was taken ill in 1978, Grossman, an esteemed leader of the Jewish resistance movement in Poland and a prominent Knesset member, broke her vow and came to visit Busse in Germany. He died in Germany in 1980. On June 25, 1968, Yad Vashem recognized Otto Busse as Righteous Among the Nations.