Concentration Camps in Exile Literature:
The Case of Osthofen
by Alexander Stephan
Translated by Leslie Shouse-Luxern.

Nazi Germany is not one of the common themes in German and Austrian exile literature between 1933 and 1945. Almost without exception, the best exile authors, German and Austrian writers who fled the Nazi domination of their homelands, wrote not about the brown shirts, but rather about biblical figures such as Joseph or about historical personalities like King Henry of France or Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. If at all, Hitler appeared in exile novels and plays disguised in mythological or ancient costume. Often, the Germans cheering Hitler are represented not as villans but as victims of a pact with the devil.

Although these aspects of exile literature are relatively well known, it nevertheless seems strange that precisely the topic that-then as now-was most directly associated with the Nazi state is almost completely absent from exile novels and plays: the so-called camps for protective custody and reeducation, which quickly became known as concentration camps.1

This disinterest was peculiar, because many exile authors, among them Willi Bredel, Klaus Neukrantz, Ludwig Renn, Karl August Wittfogel, and Anna Seghers, had firsthand experiences in concentration camps or had through flight narrowly escaped "protective custody." Further, the disinterest is especially strange, because the new host countries would have paid attention to reports about German concentration camps and thus provided the audience for which the exiles otherwise in their anti-Nazi propaganda strove in vain.

Early in 1933, more than 50 concentration camps could be located on the map of terror in Nazi Germany. Well known were the camps in Dachau, Oranienburg, Hohenstein, Papenburg, Wittmoor, and Sonnenburg. But on this map was also the camp in Osthofen, a community of 5,000 people located on the Hessian Liebfraumilch route, halfway between Worms and Mainz. Most of these started as so-called wild camps, that is, as detention camps for political opponents who could no longer be housed in the regular prisons after the initial wave of arrests in early 1933. They were opened hastily, often by the local police and the local brown shirts, the Sturmabteilungen or SA, without obtaining official approval. However most of the early camps, which often received extensive coverage in the local press, were closed after two or three years. Not one of the camps would become a site for the mass murders that were later committed in places like Auschwitz and Treblinka. Rather, the wild camps were designed to raise among the Nazi party's rank and file confidence that their movement was insurmountable, and also placed opponents, as well as the silent majority, on the defensive, thereby eliminating even the thought of resistance.

In general, those sent to camps like Osthofen were long-time antiNazis, particularly Communists and Social Democrats, a few intellectuals and Jews, and also average citizens who, spontaneously and sometimes under the influence of alcohol, had spoken out against the new Nazi regime and its leaders. To guard the prisoners, the camp staff was recruited from among the local SA, members of the police, and old guard Nazi party members.2

The importance of these early camps for the propaganda efforts of the exiles can best be measured by the reactions of Nazi officials to the many eyewitness and press reports that appeared in German and in translation in France, England, and the United States until the mid1930s. For instance, early in 1934, German consulates in New York and Basel sent Heinz Liepmann's Murder, Made in Germany and a volume compiled by the exiled Bund proletarisch-revolutionarer Schriftsteller, entitled Hirne hinter Stacheldraht (Intellectuals Behind Barbed Wire), to the Foreign Office in Berlin. In the middle of April 1934, the German embassy in Sweden, as part of the propaganda against Gerhart Seger's best seller Konzentrationslager Oranienburg, put in a request with the Foreign Office for 2,000 copies of a brochure with the same name, which the Oranienburg commandant, SA Sturmbannfiihrer Schafer, had written for Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry. In the same month, the Foreign Office received a report from Copenhagen about the reception in the Danish press of Willi Bredel's book on concentration camps, Die Prufung (The Test). More reports arrived during the early 1930s from the German consulate in Bern about Wolfgang Langhoff's Mooroldaten (The Moor Soldiers) and from San Francisco about an evening with Hans Eisler, featuring the Papenburg "Moorsoldatenlied." Other consulates sent information to Berlin concerning accounts written by concentration camp escapees, reports by foreign journalists, and campaigns in support of prominent prisoners such as Ernst Thalmann, Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Mbhsam, and Karl August Wittfogel.3

The list of contemporary publications about Nazi concentration camps could easily be extended, but hardly any novels or plays can be found. Yet this is not the place to ponder why so many exile authors wrote about historic topics rather than about events affecting them more directly. Perhaps the daily brutalities in the political confrontations toward the end of the Weimar Republic had dulled the sensitivities of victims and perpetrators; perhaps the novelists and playwrights had not yet gained the necessary distance from political events to contest the proprietary interests of reporters and journalists; or, perhaps they just felt ill at ease writing about events without firsthand knowledge. Whatever the reasons, only one novel, Anna Seghers's The Seventh Cross, provided a serious literary treatment of the concentration camps before 1945.4

Not only the exiles, but also historians of the exile period have paid surprisingly little attention to the wild camps. For instance, none of the existing studies of Anna Seghers's life and works contain information about Osthofen Concentration Camp, which, after all, was the locale for a good portion of Seghers's most successful book, The Seventh Cross.5 Only a few years ago, even documentation centers dealing with resistance or associations of survivors knew little more about Osthofen than its name, although it had been in 1933 the first concentration camp officially established in the then state of Hessen. And of course, the older citizens of Osthofen, now located in the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate, who still remember "their" concentration camp, as well as the bureaucrats in local and state administrative offices, prefer to let the abused and beaten rest quietly.6 Yet if one is willing to dig a little in the appropriate archives about Osthofen and about Anna Seghers, then one can unearth a plethora of interesting facts and thus gain significant insight into the creative process of one of the most prominent exile authors. This process can be described by a combination of the terms subjective and authentic, made popular by Anna Seghers's student Christa Wolf in the German Democratic Republic.7

Let us start with the objective part, the actual and thus authentic camp of Osthofen. According to reports in the contemporaneous local press, the concentration camp at Osthofen was established in March 1933, immediately after the Reichstag fire. Shortly thereafter, regional newspapers, such as the Wormser Zeitung and the Mainzer Tageszeitung, published the first illustrated reports about Osthofen. The journalists were brought to the concentration camp in a "fashionable Benz-Mercedes personally driven by Police Commissioner jost."8 In their reports, Osthofen was presented as an "educational and reformatory institution," in which dissidents, such as "degenerate Marxists," were "re-trained to become respectable human beings."9 As reported in the Wormser Zeitung, the camp's "proudest mission" was "to prove to the detainees that the National Socialists were not escaped madmen, murderers, or devourers of proletarians."10 Further, "rumors of abuse and ill treatment of political detainees" spread "by irresponsible elements"11 remained unconfirmed, and no complaints about food and living conditions were brought to the attention of the visitors. Conversations with inmates "confirmed" the opinion of the journalists "that former opponents of the National Socialist movement could be easily converted to the mission of National Socialism in a benevolent manner, through humaneness and generosity, rather than through harshness and reprisals; for example, this is the case in the Osthofen Concentration Camp and, probably, in a 11 other concentration camps."12

Shortly after the initial reports, on I May 1933, a Hessian government circular officially reported the "establishment of a concentration camp at Osthofen ... for the Republic of Hessen ... relevant to ... the implementation of the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, issued on 28 February 1933."13 Dr. Werner Best, Commissioner of Police in Hessen, signed the letter as the responsible official. Karl Heinrich d'Angelo from Osthofen, a former member of the Landtag, was named as camp commandant. He had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1925 and, as the owner of a publishing house, produced propaganda material for the Nazi movement. In short, according to a subsequent evaluation by his superiors in Dachau, d'Angelo was an "ideal SS leader."14 Further press reports indicated that in Osthofen, as in most wild camps, only opponents of the regime from the local provinces of Hessen and Starkenburg were detained. Among the few exceptions was the socialist Reichstag deputy Carlo Mierendorff, who passed through the Osthofen camp in early 1933.15

The following quotes from the Mainzcr Tageszeitung and the Oppenheim district newspaper, Landskrone, which reported regularly about the "Operations of the Nazi Party" under the heading "From the Rhine Front," provide a better sense of both the camp and its inmates:

Osthofen, 3 April 1933
Several days ago, approximately 70 Marxists and Communists from Worms and the surrounding area were transported here under heavy escort by the police and auxiliary police in order to maintain public security and order.... On Saturday, and especially on Sunday afternoon, a mass migration to the concentration camp began. Mothers, fathers, and wives, accompanied by children, arrived very upset, filled with lies from Worms indicating that the inmates were starving, that they had been beaten and kicked, and that their wounds were not even dressed.... How disappointed all the visitors were during visitation hours, which are held daily from 2:00 until 5:00 P.M.!... The inmates were tidy and had enough to eat; many declared they had never had that much to eat at home. Now even those fighters for Moscow begin to realize ... that the nasty Nazis are really not that bad, but rather Germans, who in every way possess human feelings.... In the afternoon, the concentration camp received an unexpected visit by a high official. Gauleiter and party member von Coden from Karnten [Austria] with his Adjutant, a Prince from Karnten, paid a visit.... The inmates received another disappointment. Once again the nasty Nazi revealed himself as a generous philanthropist opening the hateful hearts of many, who had not heard such pleasant, entertaining words in their entire lives.16

Dienheim, 6 May 1933
Heinrich Lohmann taken from here to Osthofen Concentration Camp. Lohmann had torn down a swastika flag during the May Day celebration and showed his "sympathy" for the national government by shouting Red-Front slogans.

Schorsheim, 8 May 1933
To re-educate him! The laborer Matthes, a local resident, was taken into custody by the auxiliary police and transported to Osthofen Concentra- tion Camp. Matthes had "honorably" distinguished himself last year, especially during an attack by the Reichsbanner against NSDAP members. He, too, will soon realize how grave his mistake was!17

Nackenheim, 14 August 1933
A total of 11 Social Democrats arrested by the constabulary and immediately brought to Osthofen by a special detachment. A huge crowd of people had assembled at the market place in front of the town hall. They expressed their satisfaction at the deportation of the Marxists with lively applause.18

It cannot be assumed that Anna Seghers knew about Best's circular or that she was acquainted with Best's career or that of the camp commandant d'Angelo. But we do know of the intensity with which she collected documentary material in her Paris exile while working on The Seventh Cross.19 Whenever possible, she interviewed escapees from concentration camps, went on information-gathering trips to the Saarland and to Switzerland, and solicited information on the resistance against the Nazis through the Communist Party's illegal network. She also analyzed reports on the campaign to free Mierendorff and on the public mood in Germany, which were prepared by her secretary, Lore Wolf, who worked in the Saar aiding refugees. Apparently, loose ties still existed between Anna Seghers and her mother, who lived in Mainz until she was deported to an extermination camp shortly before the end of the war. And a woman by the name of Katarina Schulz, a longtime domestic in the Seghers-Radvanyi household, still tells everyone who wants to hear how, until the Gestapo caught up with her, she regularly traveled back and forth between Germany and France in the mid-1930s to care for Anna Seghers's children or to help with the fruit harvest.20

Nevertheless, it would definitely be wrong to search too far for authentic models for the plot and the characters of The Seventh Cross. No documentation exists that prisoners ever succeeded in a mass escape from Osthofen, although here and there an inmate used his leave from camp never to return. Georg Heisler, the main character in the novel, is not, as is occasionally speculated, identical with a lawyer from Mainz who is said to have climbed over the camp fence while his girlfriend sat waiting to drive him to the nearby French border. Nor would the model for Heisler be the Communist functionary Hans Beimler, who described his escape from Dachau in an eyewitness account published worldwide.21 And surely those seven crosses, used in the novel to torture to death the recaptured escapees, did not exist in Osthofen or in any of the wild camps, although these camps were certainly not devoid of brutalities.

However, such superficial, documentary authenticity is beside the point. The Seventh Cross was and is not successful just because this or that fact coincides with the actual occurrences in Osthofen; but rather because Anna Seghers, through the subjective medium of literature, transforms authentic material into a story that not only paints an exact picture of Germany in the mid-1930s, but also takes a stand on the human condition of our time. Or stated differently, by choosing the form of a novel, Anna Seghers lifts the camp theme above the daily routine of eyewitness accounts, such as those by Beimler, Bredel, Langhoff, Wittfogel, Gerhart Seger, and Paul Massing.

It is in the sense of such "subjective authenticity" that the composition and the sociopolitical profiles of the inmates in the novel's camp are authentic. Thus, in the book we find a wide range of incongruous prisoners: a staunch Communist functionary, a circus artist who fell into the hands of the SA more or less by accident, a narrow-minded farmer who will not accept Nazi reforms, a laborer who "shot off his mouth while dead drunk,"22 and an otherwise innocent middle-class citizen guilty of a minor currency violation. "A young riverman" from the neighboring town of Liebach, who "openly cursed the camp," is "locked up ... for several weeks so he could see for himself what was going on there ,;23 other prisoners had fallen victim to denunciations and mistaken identities. The main figure of the novel, George Heisler, appears to be a multidimensional and, therefore, authentic character. In contrast to the real Communist functionary Hans Beimler, Heisler is less the typical resistance fighter usually portrayed in antifascist literature than the unreliable loner and deserter common in Anna Seghers's works, from her early tales through the exile novel Transit.

By the same token, Seghers's Nazi characters are also realistic. Surviving archival records show that the SS Sturmbannfuhrer and camp commandant of Osthofen Karl d'Angelo continued his "career" in other Nazi institutions, just as did Zillich in the novel: in the Dachau Concentration Camp, as director of the Police Academy in Pretsch, and as Chief of Police in Cuxhafen and Heilbronn. Like Zillich, d'Angelo committed suicide in 1945 when the hunters themselves became the prey.24 Dr. Werner Best, who reserved for himself the power to make decisions about almost all aspects of camp administration, from receiving new prisoners to procuring supplies and organizing camp tours for journalists, came from a middle-class family, just as did Fahrenberg in the novel. While Fahrenberg was known as the "conqueror of . . . Seeligenstadt,"25 Best made a name for himself in 1931-1932 as the coauthor of the so-called Boxheim Documents, in which high-ranking Nazi functionaries set forth guidelines for terror after seizing power.26

Anna Seghers could not have foreseen that in contrast to Fahrenberg, the failed law student, Best would make a career for himself first in the Hessian judicial system, then under Heydrich in the SS Security Service and the Reich's Security Police.27 "Loss of power," the "most fearful of punishments"28 for Fahrenberg in the novel, was no problem for Best-not even after 1945. Although the SS Brigadefuhrer and Ministerialdirektor was sentenced to death as a war criminal in Denmark in 1948, he was soon pardoned. Subsequently, Best held a major position at the Stinnes Company as a corporate lawyer. Proceedings regarding his participation in the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia were dropped in the late 1960s due to lack of evidence. Until recently, Best lived in a large West German city as a respected citizen.29

And so it continues in this novel: Anna Seghers's characters in and around Mainz correspond in their style and manner to the upperRhenish setting Seghers knew so well from her childhood. Still, her studies of this milieu portray the "normal" life as she sees it juxtaposed with the dangerous, yet exciting existence of the hunter and the hunted.30 Images of the countryside correspond exactly to the map of the area between Mainz and Frankfurt and, at the same time, point beyond their immediate environment to the cyclical movement of nature and human history. Georg Heisler's escape route from Osthofen to Frankfurt can be traced almost step by step 31 ; nevertheless it is more than a documentation, for it also traverses various layers of Nazi society. Views of the Mainz cathedral, which Anna Seghers, the curator's daughter, knew intimately, become transformed into existential statements. The Rhine, which, as archival documents prove, was in fact used by Dutch sailors to bring antifascists to safety, reappears as river and sea images in other texts by Anna Seghers-texts in which persons break out, not from concentration camps, but simply from the confines of their everyday lives to strange, faraway places. Marcel Reich-Ranicki recently declared The Seventh Cross to be a religious novel, but that statement goes beyond acceptable interpretations.32 On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Seghers's skillful blending of authentic material and the subjective treatment of that material explains why The Seventh Cross made a more lasting contribution to concentration camp literature than did the quickly written, hotly debated, but short-lived eyewitness accounts from the early exile years. However, the price Anna Seghers paid for this literary success was certainly not small. First, the relatively long time it took to write the book and the long delay in publishing it could have made the novel outdated. Thus, the American publisher, Little, Brown, who produced the English version in 1942, and MGM film studios, which made the story into an internationally successful movie in 1944-1945, were worried that the public, who were then reading about extermination camps like Auschwitz, could possibly misunderstand The Seventh Cross as an appeal for a "soft peace"-not to mention that already in 1937, the year the novel took place, no camps like Osthofen still existed in Germany. Second, Anna Seghers through the style of her story made it relatively easy for her readers and critics, in both America and postwar Germany, to disregard the authenticity of the concentration camp in favor of the novel's suspense and universally human, timelessly existential themes.33 One American critic stated in 1944 that "it would be too bad if you let the period and subject keep you away, for despite the depressing background it's the chase that counts."34 Another writer seconded this notion in Time Magazine: "George Heisler ... has faith in nobody and in nothing. Only the most rudimentary instinct for self-preservation keeps him moving."35

And yet, no other text about concentration camps by an exile author came as close as did Anna Seghers's subjective-authentic Osthofen book to the "contemplations" of the survivor Jean Amery:

For, God knows, I regarded myself-wrongly, as I see today-as an old, hardened expert on the system, its men, and its methods. A reader of the Neue Weltb~hne and the Neues Tagebuch in times past, well up on the KZ literature of the German emigration from 1933 on, I believed [I could] anticipate what was in store for me. Already in the first days of the Third Reich I had heard of the cellars of the SA barracks on Berlin's General Pape Street. Soon thereafter I had read what to my knowledge was the first German KZ document, the little book Oranienburg by Gerhart Segers. Since that time so many reports by former Gestapo prisoners had reached my ears that I thought there could be nothing new for me in this area. What would take place would then have to be incorporated into the relevant literature, as it were. Prison, interrogation, blows, torture; in the end, most probably death. Thus it was written and thus it would happen.... But does one really know? Only in part.... Nothing really happens as we hope it will, nor as we fear it will. But not because the occurrence, as one says, perhaps "goes beyond the imagination" (it is not a quantitative question), but because it is reality and not fantasy. One can devote an entire life to comparing the imagined and the real, and still never accomplish anything by it.... One comparison would only stand for the other, and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go-round of figurative speech.... If someone wanted to impart his physical pain, he would be forced to inflict it and thereby become a torturer himself.36

NOTES

1. Rolf D. Krause, "KZ-Wirklichkeit und KZ-Darstellung zwischen 1935 und 1940: Zu den autobiographischen KZ-Berichten des Exils," unpublished manuscript, p. 21, lists for the category of fiction only seven titles with no particular literary merit. However, at the same time, the Hamburger Arbeitsstelle fur deutsche Exilliteratur, project "Literatur als Bearbeitungsform der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgungsinstitutionen (KZ, Getto, Gefangnis)," has already identified over 1,000 publications by exiles dealing with Nazi places of incarceration. See also Klaus Drobisch, "Zeitgenossische Berichte i1ber Nazikonzentrationslager 1933- 1939," Jahrbuch fur Geschichte 26 (1982): 103-33.

2. Michael Denk "Das war Osthofen," in "Die Stadtfarbe ist rot!" Berichte aus der Arbeiter- und Sportgeschichte Morfeldens, ed. Rudi Hechler (Morfelden, 1976), pp. 72-73; Paul Grunewald, KZ Osthofen: Materialien zur Geschichte eines fast vergessencn Konzentrationslagers (Frankfurt, 1979); idem, "Das KZ Osthofen," in Hessen unterm Hakenkreuz: Studien zur Durchsetzung der NSDAP in Hessen, ed. Eike Hennig (Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 490-94; Eike Hennig, "Erg~nzungen des Herausgebers," ibid., pp. 494-505; Anton Maria Keim and Robert Hess, Das KZ Osthofen: Erstes Konzentrationslager im damaligen Volksstaat Hessen, Informationen der Landeszentrale fur politische Bildung Rheinland-Pfalz (Mainz, 1984); Anton Maria Keim, "'Aber weitaus die Mehrzahl zeigte sich sehr vergnugt. . .'Osthofen--das erste nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager in Hessen," Frankfurter Rundschau, 6 Sept. 1984; Heimatgeschichtlicher Wegweiser zu Statten des Widerstandes und der Verfolgung 1933-1945, Vol. 1: Hessen, ed. Studienkreis zur Erforschung und Vermittlung der Geschichte des Widerstandes and Prasidium der Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes- Bund der Antifaschisten (Cologne, 1984), pp. 6, 10,12,19, 21, 32,38-39, 84, 86- 87, 92.

3. Bonn, Politisches Archiv des Auswartigen Amtes, Inland 11 A/B, Akz. 8342,83- 75.

4. Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross (New York, 1987; originally pub. 1942). Quotations follow 1987 reprint. The German text first appeared in Mexico City in 1942 and has been reprinted since then numerous times.

5. Kurt Batt, Anna Scghers: Versuch uber Entwicklung und Werke (Leipzig, 1973), pp. 138-51; Klaus Sauer, Anna Seghers (Munich, 1978), pp. 99-113; Heinz Neugebauer, Anna Scghers: Leben und Werk (Berlin, DDR, 1979; originally publ. 1962), pp. 76-94; Michael Ackermann, Schreiben uber Deutschland im Exil. Iringard Kenn: Nach Mitternacht; Anna Seghcrs: Das siebte Kreuz (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 18-19. Only a few journalistic accounts relate the novel to the actual camp in Osthofen. See, for example, Peter Frey, "'Siebtes Kreuz' und KZ: Literarische Spurensuche," Die Zeit, 11 Apr. 1980; Klaus Sauer and German Werth, "Die Flucht war moglich: Das Konzentrationslager Osthofen und der Roman Das siebte Kreuz von Anna Seghers," unpublished manuscript for Deutschlandfunk, 26 Dec. 1980; and Heinz Neumann, "Zirkelschlag um Westhofen, " Das Magazin 2 (1982): 24- 28,59-60.

6. Attempts to bring the Osthofen camp to public attention have been relatively recent. See, for example, George Heintz, "'Als wdre es erst gestern gewesen': Eine bernerkenswerte Gedenkfeier im ehemaligen 'KZ Osthofen,"' Wormser Zeitung, 13 May 1977 (reprinted in Grilnewald, KZ Osthofen, pp. 75-77); K. Els5sser, "Lernen aus der Geschichte," CFD-Nachrichten 3 (1984): 9; and "An die Spender ftir den Gedenkstein in Osthofen, " letter by the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, Landesbezirk Rheinland-Pfalz, 9 May 1984.

7. Christa Wolf, "Lesen und Schreiben," in C.W., Die Dimension des Autors: Essays und Aufsatze, Reden und Gesprdche, 1959-1985, 2 vols. (Berlin, DDR, 1986), 2:7- 47.

8. "Pressebesuch im Konzentrationslager Osthofen," Wormser Zeitung, 13 Apr. 1933.

9. Grimewald, KZ Osthofen, p. 51.

10. "Pressebesuch," Wormser Zeitung.

11. Heinrich Habermehl, "Fin Brief aus dem Konzentrationslager in Osthofen," Wormser Zeitung, 13 Apr. 1933.

12. "Pressebesuch," Wormser Zeitung. See also the documentation in Grimewald, KZ Osthofen, pp. 54-69; "KZ-rheinhessische Wirklichkeit 1933," in Die Machtergreifung der Nationalsozialisten 1933 in Mainz: Eine Dokumentation, Quellenband zur Ausstellung der Stadt Mainz, Januar bis Marz 1933, ed. Friedrich Schiltz (Mainz, 1983), pp. 37-39, 250-53, 262ff.

13. Darmstadt, Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Abt. G 15 Kreis~mter (Grog-Gerau): Rundschreiben of Staatskommissar fur das Polizeiwesen in Hessen to Kreisamter, staatliche Polizeiamter, and Zentralpolizeistellen, 1 May 1933. See also Frankfurt, Dokumentationsarchiv des Deutschen Widerstandes 1933-1945, Studienkreis zur Erforschung und Vermittlung der Geschichte des deutschen Widerstandes 1933-1945.

14. Berlin Document Center [hereafter cited as BDC], dossier Karl d'Angelo: Personalbericht, 31 Aug. 1935.

15. Carl Zuckmayer, Carlo Mierendorff: Portnit cities deutschen Sozialisten (Berlin, 1947), pp. 33-34; Gerhard Pohl, "In Memoriam Carlo Mierendorff," in Carlo Micrendorff zum 20. Todestag am 4. Dezember 1963 (Darmstadt, 1964), p. 17; Ulrich Schneider, "Carlo Mierendorff-ein hessischer Sozialdemokrat im Kampf gegen den Faschismus," in Hessen vor50 Jahrcn-1933: Naziterror und antifaschistischer Widerstand zwischen Kassel und Bergstraft 1932133, ed. U.S. (Frankfurt, n.d.), p. 194.

16. "'Wider die Lfigen von schlechter Behandlung und Mighandlung': Konzentrationslager Osthofen," Mainzer Tageszeitung, 6 Apr. 1933, reprinted in "KZ-rheinhessische Wirklichkeit 1933," p. 271.

17. Grilnewald, KZ Osthofen, p. 61.

18. Grilnewald, KZ 0sthofen, p. 59.

19. Alexander Stephan, "'. . . ce livre a pour moi une importance speciale.'Das siebte Kreuz: Entstehungs- und Manuskriptgeschichte eines Exilromans, Exil 2 (1985): 12-24.

20. Interview with Katarina Schulz, 6 June 1985.

21. Hans Beimler, lin Mbrderlager Dachau: Vier Wochen in den Hdnden der braunen Banditen (Moscow, 1933).

22. Seghers, Seventh Cross, p. 20.

23. Ibid., p. 76.

24. Grilnewald, KZ Osthofen, pp. 72-73.

25. Seghers, Seventh Cross, p. 9.

26. Anton Maria Keim, "Entwurf einer Diktatur: Die Boxheimer Dokumente, Mainzer Vierte1jahreshefte 4 (1981): 117ff.

27. BDC, dossier Werner Best.

28. Seghers, Seventh Cross, p. 188.

29. Grilnewald, KZ Osthofen, pp. 28-29.

30. Martin Straub, "Heislers Weg in das 'gewohnliche Leben,"' in Erzdhlte Welt, ed. Helmut Brandt and Nodar Kakabadse (Berlin, DDR, 1978), pp. 210-33; idem, "Alltag und Geschichte in Anna Seghers' Roman Das siebte Kreuz: Studien zur Motivgestaltung," Ph.D. diss., University of Jena, 1977.

31. See the accounts by Neumann, "Zirkelschlag um Westhofen"; Frey, "'Siebtes Kreuz' und KZ: Literarische Spurensuche"; and idem, "Frankfurt '33: 'Ein Fangnetz die ganze Stadt,"' Frankfurter Rundschau, 21 Oct. 1981.

32. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, "Anna Seghers: Das siebte Kreuz," in Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 5-15 (unbound text, added to book).

33. Alexander Stephan, "Fin Exilroman als Bestseller. Anna Seghers' 'The Seventh Cross' in den USA: Analyse und Dokumente," Exilforschung 3 (1985): 238-59.

34. Beverly Hills, Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Philip K. Scheuer, "Suspense Filmed in New Way" (unmarked newspaper clipping).

35. Time Magazine, 18 Sept. 1944, p. 92. See also my forthcoming "Anna Seghers' 'The Seventh Cross': Ein Exilroman uer Nazicleutschland als Hollywood-Film, " Exilforschung 6 (1988).

36. Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington, 1980), pp. 24-25, 33.