Ruegemer Eduard

Rügemer, Eduard Eduard Rügemer, a major in the Wehrmacht, was the head of the HKP (the military car repair workshop) in Tarnopol, West Galicia (today Ukraine), where some 300 Jews from the ghetto had to perform forced labor. Rügemer was in his late 50s when he arrived in Tarnopol in the second half of 1941. From the very beginning, he treated the Jews with great kindness and tried to alleviate their situation wherever he could. In their joint testimony of January 1949, Lazar and Ida Haller said that the Jews in the ghetto envied the workers of the HKP because of the good conditions they enjoyed and the excellent treatment they received from Eduard Rügemer. They went on to describe how he protected them during roundups in the ghetto and that he even clashed with the SS officers who wanted to take his Jewish workers during executions. Rügemer continued to protect the workers after the remaining Jews of the ghetto were taken to a camp. He made sure that they were put in a special barrack and that they could continue to work in his facility. When in July 1943 the camp was liquidated, Rügemer warned the Jews. He helped some ten to twelve Jews escape by taking them in his car to a rural area and the forests. Another thirteen Jews found refuge in his private home. In this he was helped by his housekeeper, Irene Gut Opdyke (recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 1982). When two soldiers spotted the Jews in Rügemer’s home, he arranged for those soldiers to be sent to the front so they could not reveal the secret. In 1944, as the front drew near and Rügemer had to leave Tarnopol, he helped the Jews that had been hiding in his home build a bunker in the woods, where they stayed until the liberation. Others were taken by Irene Gut, who helped them survive the last months of war. Franciska Willner, who with her husband, Marian, was saved by Rügemer, described the fatherly attitude of their rescuer: “Mr. Rügemer not only saved our lives,” she wrote in 1949, “but during this entire terrible period proved to be the only humane person among beasts. This is especially admirable since he as fully aware of the danger he was running.” After the war Rügemer returned to his native Nuremberg. Some of the survivors reached the DP camps in Germany. They turned to the Jewish Central Committee in Munich, wrote testimonies on their rescuer’s behalf, and asked for help in finding him. The correspondence that ensued between Eduard Rügemer and the Jews he rescued is preserved in a file located in the Yad Vashem archive. Rügemer’s letter to the Willners, who had described him as a father, was signed: “Dziadzio” (grandpa in Polish). Among the Jews hiding in the forest were Lazar Haller and his wife, Ida, who was pregnant. Their son, Roman, was born in the forest in May 1944. Roman Haller told Yad Vashem that when Rügemer returned to Nuremberg after the war, he was rejected by his family, and that after the Hallers moved to Munich, they invited him to stay with them. Rügemer soon became the grandfather Roman never had, and he would call him “Zajde” (grandfather in Yiddish). In an interview in 2009 Roman Haller said: “I loved him. We used to walk down the streets together. He would hold my hand.” On December 24, 2012, Yad Vashem recognized Eduard Rügemer as Righteous Among the Nations.