Cammerer Josef

Cammerer, Josef Sebastian Cammerer was born in Munich into a family of jurists. A man of multifaceted accomplishments – equally at home in the world of science, technology, and theology, he studied at the Munich Technological Institute and served for four years as an officer in World War I. He was seriously wounded in 1916 and subsequently reassigned to a rear echelon, a Bavarian garrison replacement infantry company in Munich. It was there that he met, in December 1917, a Jewish volunteer, Gertrud Fröhlich. The 23-year-old university student was the daughter of Jewish pharmacists Bernhard and Rosa Fröhlich from Beuthen in Upper Silesia (today Bytom in Poland). Cammerer and Fröhlich took to each other at once and became close friends. The contact between them was not severed even after the end of World War I, when Cammerer, prompted by his professional career, settled in Köln and then in Berlin and got married. Gertrud herself married a Jewish chemist, Walter Lustig. After Hitler’s rise to power, Cammerer moved to Munich, where he established a small scientific laboratory at Leutstetten, on the outskirts of the city. In 1938-39, he set up a larger scientific research laboratory on a secluded and densely wooded lot in Tutzing, on the shores of the picturesque Lake Starnberger. Walter Lustig was arrested for the first time in late 1938, in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938. He was sent to the notorious Dachau concentration camp, where he remained imprisoned for some excruciating weeks. In November 1939, he was arrested for the second time and incarcerated in the Stadelheim jail. After his release the Lustigs had to vacate their own apartment and were relocated to an overcrowded Jewish apartment house in Munich, which was owned by Gertrud’s father. In the autumn of 1939, Dr. Cammerer had been drafted into the army as an infantry battalion adjutant on the western front. In April 1940, he was discharged from military service in order to devote himself to research regarding the refrigeration of buildings needed for food storage for the civilian population. Since his research was considered so important for the war effort, Cammerer was able to forestall the entry of outsiders – especially local Nazi party functionaries – into his Tutzing laboratory. He was thus in a position to receive his Jewish friends unobserved. However, as the trips to Tutzing became more and more risky, in November 1940, Cammerer rented rooms for a smaller facility in Munich. This enabled him to claim the Lustigs as auxiliary forces – ostensibly “for especially unpleasant chemical works” – that protected them from the harsh conditions of the forced-labor service mandatory for the Jewish population. In the middle of 1941, he conducted personal negotiations with the Office of Aryanization of the Gauleiter to secure permission for the continued employment of the Jewish couple, whose health had greatly deteriorated. Walter Lustig died in September 1941, and was buried in the Jewish North Cemetery of Munich. His health had suffered irreparable damage during his imprisonment in Dachau and Stadelheim. After Walter’s death, Gertrud, who was also gravely ill, continued to spend the daytime hours at the Munich laboratory. The deportation of the Jews of Munich to the extermination camps in the East was already proceeding rapidly, and there came a time when, in Munich, Cammerer could no longer protect his ailing friend from deportation. Thus, he decided to remove her to his secluded Tutzing facility. By then, she was already critically ill. The medical care that she had been receiving in the overcrowded conditions of the Jewish apartment house was anything but adequate, and Cammerer could not afford to call upon qualified medical doctors for fear that they would both be denounced. Gertrud passed away on February 11, 1942. With the help of an old trusted friend, Cammerer buried Gertrud in his winter garden, a small hall in the house that had three doors leading to the garden outside. In the coming months, Cammerer began to explore the possibility of transferring the remains of his friend to the Jewish cemetery in Munich. On sounding out the non-Jewish family that was responsible for the gardening in the cemetery, he discovered that the Schörghofers*, both father and son, were staunch opponents of National Socialism. Cammerer conferred with the Schörghofers, and together they decided to transfer the remains during the cooler season of the year. In October 1943, he disinterred the corpse with the help of Karl Schörghofer, Jr, and transported it, in the dead of the night, in his car to the Jewish cemetery. There Karl Schörghofer, Sr. had already prepared a grave at the side of Walter Lustig. After the end of the war, Cammerer duly notified the Munich Jewish Community and the Civil Register of Tutzing of the privately executed burial and obtained an official inheritance certificate for Gertrud Lustig and her parents. He sent this to Gertrud’s brother, Dr. Hans Fröhlich, in New York. He also had the graves of the Lustig and Fröhlich families in the Jewish North Cemetery beautifully arranged and adorned with tombstones and greenery, all of which he maintained at his own expense over the years. Cammerer, by now divorced, decided to devote himself to an ecclesiastical career, which culminated in his ordainment as a Catholic priest in 1962. On July 8, 1969, Yad Vashem recognized Josef Sebastian Cammerer as Righteous Among the Nations.