Muehlhof Fritz

Mühlhof, Fritz Fritz Mühlhof was born in Hagen/Westphalia, in 1902. During World War II, he commanded the factory guard at Rakow near Czestochowa in Poland. As such, he supported the activities of the Jewish underground (the Z.O.B.) and allowed its leaders to move freely between the labor camp at Rakow and the outside world. At the time of the liquidation of the small ghetto of Czestochowa, in June 1943, he entered the burning ghetto with a small group of Jews, ostensibly to remove furniture and equipment. In fact, he transferred patients from the Jewish hospital to Rakow, where he later employed them. When the SS entered the ghetto, they could not find any Jews in the hospital, because Mühlhof had managed to remove all of them, thus saving their lives. He also removed from the ghetto two Jewish boys who were slated for extermination. During the selection he transferred them first to Rakow and, from there, to the Hasag labor camp, where they were able to survive. When one of the Ukrainian guards beat a Jew in his presence, he intervened and hit the Nazi henchman with his rifle butt. In the wake of this incident, the Ukrainian security guards treated the Jewish laborers with more caution and consideration. Mühlhof regularly bought medicines for the Jews working in the factory and organized collections so as to buy bread to supplement the starvation rations that were officially allotted to Jewish workers. However, rumors of Mühlhof’s humane and friendly attitude to the Jews reached the Gestapo. As a result of a denunciation, he was removed from his work at Rakow and sent to the Russian front. After the war Mühlhof settled behind the Iron Curtain in the former German Democratic Republic. Two Jewish resistance fighters, Ignaz Jakobson and Zwi-Henrik Wiernik, testified about his noble and heroic help to Jews. In 1985, Jakobson visited Mühlhof’s widow and daughter in the GDR and had a memorial plaque erected in his honor at the site of his grave. On September21, 1978, Yad Vashem recognized Fritz Mühlhof as Righteous Among the Nations.