Drossel Paul & Elfriede ; Son: Heinz

Kunze, Frieda Frieda Kunze, who had been born in 1894 in Berlin, was for many years the office supervisor of the Berlin Jewish lawyer, Dr. Georg Martin Fontheim, as well as a close family friend. The relationship continued even after November 1938, when the last remaining Jewish lawyers had been banned from practicing law. Kunze continued to visit the Fontheims as late as 1941 and 1942, even though social contact between Germans and Jews was strictly forbidden. Kunze owned a modest summer house in the village of Senzig, a few miles southeast of Berlin. After the two Fontheim parents and their daughter, Eva Irene, were arrested by the Gestapo on December 24, 1942, the son, Ernst Fontheim, contacted Kunze. He asked her if he could rent her cottage in Senzig as a hideout together with another Jewish family, Jack and Lucie Hass and their daughter Margot. Kunze, in complete disregard to the enormous risk to herself, spontaneously agreed. Ernst Fontheim and his friends paid her a nominal price of 50 Marks per month, considerably below the market value for such a property in the suburbs, safely away from the ever-intensifying air raids. Ernst Fontheim and the Hass family were equipped with forged papers identifying them as Hesse. They pretended to be one family and told their neighbors that they had moved away from Berlin in order to escape the air raids. They were able to purchase food on the black market by availing themselves of various hidden assets and “black accounts.” They lived in the cottage from January 30, 1943 to March 27, 1945, when they had to move away because of a denunciation. On January 12, 1999, Yad Vashem recognized Frieda Kunze as Righteous Among the Nations. Drossel, Paul Drossel, Elfriede Drossel, Heinz In the last weeks of the war, Paul (b. 1880) and Elfriede Drossel (b. 1892), an elderly retired couple, were living in the village of Senzig, near Berlin. Their wounded officer son, Heinz (b. 1916) had been sent home on sickleave and was staying with them. Late in the evening of March 26, 1945, Heinz was approached by Ernst Fontheim, the neighbor renting the nearby summer house, which belonged to Frieda Kunze*. The neighbor confessed to him that he and the three other residents – his friend Margot, and her parents Jack and Lucie Hass – were in fact Jews in hiding. They had just received information that they had been betrayed and were at a loss as to what they should do. Heinz Drossel and his parents, who were also let into the secret, did not waste a minute. Mrs. Drossel, who chided her neighbors for not telling her sooner that they were Jewish, brought them a large basket packed with food. The Drossels also offered to store many of their Jewish neighbors’ belongings in a shed behind their own house. The next morning Heinz took the two men, Ernst Fontheim and Jack Hass, to his room in Berlin-Tempelhof. He introduced them to the German refugee family who was living in the apartment as good friends of his who had been bombed out and had lost everything. A few days later Jack Hass found an alternative hideout, together with his wife and daughter; however, Ernst Fontheim remained in the room until the end of the war. They subsequently learned that the Gestapo had come looking for them one day after they had left the cottage in Senzig. On January 12, 1999, Yad Vashem recognized Paul and Elfriede Drossel and their son, Heinz Drossel, as Righteous Among the Nations.