Kraemer Walter

Krämer, Walter Walter Krämer was born in 1892 in Siegen/Westphalia. He was incarcerated by the Nazis as a political prisoner from the day of his arrest, on February 28, 1933, until his death. Although he had never received any formal medical education, Krämer – a qualified locksmith by profession – in the course of his long incarceration in Nazi camps, had managed to acquire considerable medical expertise. He was so talented that he was even able to perform complicated surgical operations. In 1938, he became a nurse in the Buchenwald concentration camp and, in mid-1939, was appointed head of the prisoners’ sick-barracks. His reputation as a “doctor” was such that he was even asked to operate on high-ranking SS officers, including Camp Commandant Karl Koch. Krämer used his influence over the SS staff, and especially the SS camp doctor, as leverage for alleviating the prisoners’ lot. At that time Buchenwald was divided into a “big camp“, where the political prisoners were held, and a “small camp,” where mainly Jews and Russians were interned. The conditions in the small camp were even more appalling than in Buchenwald as a whole. The Jewish and Russian prisoners were worked to death in the nearby stone quarry, exposed to sub-zero temperatures without warm clothing, and subsisted on starvation diets. On top of that, any sort of medical care was denied them. Krämer, in direct defiance of the orders, would often steal into the small camp in order to help the Jewish and Russian prisoners. One of Krämer’s Jewish patients was 17-year-old Artur Radvansky from Prague, who had contracted gangrene as a result of untreated frostbite. Krämer, who had arrived in the small camp together with prisoners who were removing corpses, had Radvansky moved on a stretcher to the big camp and operated on him that same night without using any anesthetics. On another occasion he cured Radvansky of an infection he had developed as a result of a brutal flogging punishment. AnotherBuchenwald survivor, Yaakov Silberstein, testified that Krämer had crawled into the small camp in the middle of the night in order to treat him with medicines against typhus. In September or October 1941, a group of captured Soviet officers, some of them Jewish, were brought to Buchenwald. Krämer refused to carry out the order of the SS camp doctor to issue medical certificates to the effect that the officers were suffering from tuberculosis. He was fully aware that these certificates could be used as a pretext for killing the prisoners. As a punitive measure, he was transferred to an outer work commando and, a few days later, was shot to death by the SS guards, allegedly “while trying to escape.” On October 20, 1999, Yad Vashem recognized Walter Krämer as Righteous Among the Nations.