Calmeyer Hans

Calmeyer, Hans Georg Dr. Hans Calmeyer, the son of a judge, was known in his native city of Osnabrück as an eminent lawyer. Unidentified with any particular political party, he ran a private practice with only two employees, one of whom was a Jewish woman. When the NSDAP rose to power in January 1933, Calmeyer was forbidden to practice because of suspicion of being “politically unreliable” and engaging in “communist intrigues” (Umtriebe). After a time he was permitted to resume his practice. In May 1940, during the German invasion of the Netherlands, Calmeyer was serving in the army. Proficient in Dutch, he was detailed to air force intelligence in Breda. Dr. Stuler, director of the Department of the Interior of the Generalkommissariat für Verwaltung und Justiz, who also hailed from Osnabrück, summoned him to The Hague and offered him a position as head of one of his departments. Following the German-directed registration of the Jews in Holland (the so-called VO6/41), in the course of which all persons with one or more Jewish grandparents were forced to detail their family connections, the department was flooded with petitions from people contesting their Jewish affiliation. This was in part the result of VO6/41 itself, which included clauses enabling people to prove that they were not of Jewish descent. Calmeyer was assigned to deal with these requests and he realized that it afforded him the – albeit risky – opportunity to help Jews. Calmeyer’s first move to shield his department from hostile interference was the choice of his coworkers. His office workers, including the secretaries in his department, were trustworthy. Calmeyer’s bureau was a singular anti-National Socialist cell within the occupation government. Calmeyer’s second step was the creation of a loophole by which Jews might be assisted in escaping from the German registration trap, according to the German Nuremberg Laws. As soon as the decision became known in Jewish circles, petitions began to arrive at Calmeyer’s department requesting that the status of a parent or a grandparent be changed from Jewish to half-Jewish or even Aryan. Baptismal certificates were readily supplied in applicable cases, and, failing that, experts could forge them relatively easily, copying the special handwriting and using paper that looked about a century old. Such forgeries were in fact produced on a large scale. It goes without saying that the production of genuine-looking “Calmeyer certificates” required considerable archival experience and artistic skill. Calmeyer himself, who was rigorously correct and incorruptible, was never personally involved in any forgeries. His – equally grave – responsibility was to adjudicate requests that he personally knew to be based on insufficient or non-existent evidence. In certain cases, he demanded anthropological examinations, which were performed by Prof. Dr. Hans Weinert of Kiel, a morphologist who invariably produced favorable reports testifying to the non-Jewish physical characteristics of the applicant. Ultimately, Calmeyer’s decision to support a particular request would depend on whether or not a fairly superficial examination might reveal the spuriousness of the claim, thus endangering all his subsequent approvals. Obviously, this was not an objective criterion, apart from the fact that, in the course of time, his judgment became more and more erratic as hostile German bodies, including the SD and the SS, increased their pressure to revoke his authority. The more fanatical and racist Nazis called Calmeyer’s activities Abstammungsschwindel (genealogical fraud) and demanded a case-by-case review of all his approvals. These demands became even more persistent when several so-called “Calmeyer Jews,” among them well-known Jewish personalities, decided to reclaim the possessions they had initially surrendered to the Lippmann-Rosenthal bank. SS General Rauter demanded that Dr. Wimmer appoint a committee on which a Dutch SS member called Ludo ten Cate should also be a member. In the course of the years, ten Cate had assembled a collection of 100,000 file cards containing information on Jewish subjects, including considerable information about the Dutch colony of Surinam. The latter was of particular danger because, since the war had interrupted communications with this Dutch colony, many petitions reaching Calmeyer’s office were based on alleged information from Surinam archives. In March 1944, an order arrived from the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) in Berlin, demanding a closer examination of all Calmeyer’s decisions, and, in August 1944, Zopf, the head of Referat IV B4 at The Hague, required the same. However, the rivalry between Wimmer, himself a rabid antisemite, and Rauter was so intense that these demands were not acted upon. Furthermore, Calmeyer made an effort to protect mixed marriages. Nazi Germany knew the concept of priviligierte Mischehen, mixed Jewish-Aryan couples where either the husband was Aryan or the children had not been brought up in the Jewish faith. Particularly problematic proved to be a collective request on behalf of a large group of Portuguese Jews. If approved, this would have exempted no fewer than 4,304 persons. Several well-known anthropologists, who acted on the assumption that all Portuguese Jews in the Netherlands were descended from Marrano forebears, endorsed this plea. Calmeyer reacted by saying that he had “only a small vessel that would surely sink by accommodating such a large number of passengers.” The overall result of Calmeyer’s interventions was impressive: Out of a total number of 4,787 petitions, he recognized 2,026 as half-Jewish, 873 as Aryans, and rejected 1,868. In analyzing these figures, it should be taken into account that the descendants of those cleared were also exempted from further persecution as Jews. In addition, the petitioners themselves were protected against deportation while their applications were being processed, enabling them, if necessary, to go underground. It is known that secretaries in Calmeyer’s office warned some petitioners as soon as their requests had been turned down, enabling them to disappear from their homes before the German police reached them. The above figures show that 60 percent of all applications were approved – the majority on the basis of clearly fictitious documentation. Consequently, it can be said that at least 3,000 Jewish lives were saved. So secret and discreet were Calmeyer’s machinations that even Lages, the German chief of the Amsterdam police, felt constrained to declare after the war, “to him, Calmeyer’s activities had always been a book with seven seals.” On March 4, 1992, Yad Vashem recognized Dr. Hans G. Calmeyer as Righteous Among the Nations.