Landmesser & Eckler Family
Though never officially an intermarried pair, Irma Eckler and August Landmesser offer a story equally as tragic- one of forbidden love and orphaned children.
August Landmesser was born May 24, 1910. Although the Landmesser family had Jewish ancestors, German courts determined his family name and lineage to be “Aryan” German. August followed his family members on his mother’s side in joining the NSDAP in 1931, hoping that membership would secure him employment. He was a member until 1935.
Irma Eckler was the descendant of Sephardic Jews. Her mother, Friedrike Sophie Horneburg, married Arthur Eckler on March 24, 1905 and moved to Hamburg with him after their marriage. By June of 1913, Irma was born in Hamburg, the third daughter to her parents. In April of 1931, Friedrike Eckler and her daughters were baptized into the Protestant faith, as Jewish individuals living in Hamburg were experiencing instances of violent anti-Semitism; shops were vandalized, shop owners were threatened, and there was a growing anticipation of synagogue disruptions and a Hamburg pogrom. At this point, Friedrike and Arthur had been separated for an unspecified but lengthy span of time. In December 1931, their marriage officially ended in divorce. On March 22, 1932, Friedrike Eckler married the non-Jewish Ernst Graumann. Irma’s sisters, Herta and Lilly, also married non-Jews. Since Friedrike, Herta, and Lilly all had children within the “privileged mixed-marriages”, relative safety saved the families from separation and persecution under the Third Reich.
August Landmesser and Irma Eckler met in October of 1934. When they decided to marry in August of 1935, they were prohibited under Nazi law: Irma was Jewish (even though the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor was not put into full effect until September of that year). Despite this, August and Irma lived together and had two daughters; Ingrid (born October 1935) and Irene (born August 1937). In September 1937, August was arrested and released after a month as a warning from the Reich to break off the relationship. When Irma and August remained together anyway, they were both arrested in July 1938. As an “Aryan” man, August was sent to serve two and a half years in penal service, and afterwards in the German Army, where he is thought to have died in service. Irma was deported to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. In 1942, Hamburg Social Services was notified of her death. With the arrests of their parents, Ingrid and Irene were separated. Ingrid was sent to live with her Jewish grandmother who was intermarried. Irene, on the other hand, was sent from a Jewish orphanage to Protestant foster parents, and thereafter to a different intermarried couple (musician Erwin Proskauer and his wife). Due to Irene’s birth year (1937), she was considered “full Jew” under the Nuremburg Laws; Ingrid, as the older sister born prior to July 1936, was considered “mixed” or “Mischling”. When the Wannsee Conference in 1942 further cemented the persecution and extermination of Jewish individuals in the Third Reich, Irene was sent, once again, from her foster parents to reside at a Jewish orphanage. Irene barely escaped deportation to Auschwitz, which was most likely the fate of the rest of the Jewish orphans where she was. She was taken from the deportation line by a woman who recognized her. The woman took Irene to Austria for a short period of time. Afterwards, she was returned to her foster parents in Hamburg and later taken to Brandenburg by her foster mother for the remainder of the war. In 1945, Ingrid and Irene were able to meet again in a press service for the “Emergency community of those affected by the Nuremburg Laws”. Later in life, Irene began the undertaking of uncovering her family’s history. She outlined her findings and notations in the monograph A Family Torn Apart by “Rassenschande”: Political Persecution in the Third Reich, released January 1, 1998.
Written by Carmelina Moersch