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Georg Knaus * 1898

Henriettenstraße 16 (Eimsbüttel, Eimsbüttel)

Verhaftet 1938 - 1939
KZ Fuhlsbüttel
KZ Neuengamme
ermordet

Georg Johann Andreas Knaus, born 17 Oct. 1898, KZ Neuengamme, presumably died on 3 May 1945 in the sinking of the Cap Arcona

Henriettenstrasse 16

"He who never ate his bread under tears and spent joyous nights with beautiful men and champagne, he doesn’t know the heavenly nights.” Georg Knaus wrote these or similarly poetic words in a letter to his 17-year-old lover, the mechanic apprentice Gerhard Kiesel. An acquaintance of his friend of the same age was to deliver the billet-doux to Kiesel. Alas, the message was intercepted; the acquaintance’s mother was "disgusted” by the content and immediately made a report to the police on November 22nd, 1937, denouncing Gerhard Knaus as a homosexual and claiming that her son was under the influence of this man. By writing this letter, an action that by today’s standards would be considered a gross frivolity of a gay man, the fortune of Georg Knaus, born 1898 in Berlin-Kreuzberg, took a fateful turn.

Georg was the son of the engineer Josef Knaus, who worked at the Siemens & Halske Company, and his wife Emma, née Röver. After finishing elementary school, Georg Knaus absolved an apprenticeship as a precision mechanic, was drafted into the navy and took part in a couple of naval battles. After the war, he first was with the security police in Berlin and then worked at Siemens & Halske like his father. Moving to Hamburg in 1924, hoping to find work as a ship’s engineer, he didn’t get the right job immediately. Possibly on account of his unemployment, he became delinquent and was sentenced to four years in prison for conjointly committed attempted robbery, which he partly served until the end of 1927. In 1928, he got a job in his skilled trade with Rapid-Waagenbau-Zentrale in Burchardstrasse 12, a manufacturer of scales, work that he, according to all his references, did very well and with enthusiasm. His last employer, Westdeutsche Toledo Gesellschaft, manufacturer of automatic scales and testing equipment in Cologne-Sülz, for whom he worked in Hamburg as service technician, had given him a decidedly favorable staff report. In October, 1938 and again in April, 1939, W. Paschleben, manager of his employer’s Hamburg branch at Hohe Weide 70, pleaded for Georg Knaus in a letter to the district attorney, also writing to Knaus himself, who was in custody awaiting trial for his homosexuality, in order to give him moral support. To Knaus, he wrote: "In the worst case, I will do everything in my power for you, because, in the short period of our collaboration, I have got to know and appreciate you as good colleague.”

Already during his sojourn in Berlin from 1919 on, Georg Knaus had had contact with a group of homosexual persons, including some "noble celebrities”, as was noted at a later trial, e.g. the "Count of Limburg-Stierum”, "his Excellency von Below” and an "art dealer Lippman" who are said to have danced in the nude with him. Count Alexander Kroupenski, a chamberlain of the Russian Tsar, built him a movie house in Berlin, which led to proceedings for a violation of the law on cinemas against him.
In 1928, at the Marienburg bar in Hamburg, a hang-out for homosexuals, he met Gustav Höllermann, born 1908, called Guschi; Höllermann became Knaus’ first steady partner, with whom he is said to have "actually exchanged wedding-rings” and celebrated "wedding days”. Knaus lived with Höllermann in various subtenant situations up to 1935. Already in 1934, he had met Gerhard Kiesel, then only 14 years old. Kiesel came from a broken home, his parents were divorced, and his mother, who worked in bars in St. Pauli, even during her second marriage, had promiscuous relationships to men, with whom her son didn’t get along. Gerhard had already had homosexual encounters when he met Georg Knaus, who was distinctly his senior. Gerhard regarded Georg as a father figure, who fostered his professional education and got him an apprenticeship as an automotive mechanic.
After learning of the relationship between Georg Knaus and the minor Gerhard Kiesel, the police did extensive research that led to an immediate order of protective custody at KZ Fuhlsbüttel until February 21st following Knaus’ first interrogation at the 24th Commissariat of the Criminal Police on January 17th, 1938. Knaus was released from the ensuing investigative custody following his attorney’s appeal against the order for arrest and released on May 11th, 1938, because the main witness for the prosecution, Gerhard Kiesel, had become entangled in his own contradicting statements. The attorney also complained that Knaus had been mistreated at the KZ Fuhlsbüttel, having a tooth knocked out. The high court therefore acquitted him of the accusation of sodomy in June, 1938. In October, 1939, the acquittal was confirmed by the court of appeals against the prosecutor’s objection.
A second denunciation of Georg Knaus, possibly by a rebuffed female admirer in September, 1938, again led to imprisonment at KZ Fuhlsbüttel following an interrogation on October 17th, 1938. The woman had written to the Gestapo, insinuating Knaus had performed homosexual actions with the son of his landlady at Henriettenstrasse 16.On account of this denunciation, Knaus was detained at KZ Fuhlsbüttel until October 26th, 1938, followed by more than a year of pre-trial confinement until December 18th, 1939. The trial, now conducted by Nicolaus Siemssen, a prosecutor notorious for his relentless pursuit of homosexuals, ended in December, 1939 with a sentence to 18 months in jail for "sodomy in six cases” according to Art. 175 of the penal code. During the proceedings, further incriminating testimony had been brought forth, e.g. that of a rent-boy named Karl Baumgart. The sentence included punishment for Knaus’ alleged offenses dating back to 1928. Knaus initially served his term at the jail in Hamburg-Altona; on January 16th, 1940, he was transferred to the Glasmoor men’s jail. An appeal for clemency filed by his attorney Dr. Alexander Lisch, who had previously acted successfully, was rejected. In spite of the fact that Georg Knaus had no criminal record and, at the end of the trial, had confessed everything, he was not released at the end of his prison term on April 16th, 1940, but turned over to the police. On June 25th, Knaus was committed to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was given the inmate number 25622. According to entries in laboratory test record books at KZ Neuengamme of June 8th and 9th, 1942 and an inmate’s card issued in the fall of 1942 for the "SS Main Industry Administration Office”, he was imprisoned at that Hamburg camp from July 25th, 1940, as "BV HO” – "homosexual professional criminal” with the inmate number 1052, and deployed as an unskilled laborer. As a wrist watch with white leather strap rendered by Georg Knaus at his imprisonment is still kept at the International Red Cross in Bad Arolsen today, it must be assumed that he did not survive imprisonment. Rather, Knaus most likely perished in the sinking of the steamer Cap Arcona in the Baltic Sea, where the Neuengamme prisoners had been evacuated on May 3rd, 1945.

Translated by Peter Hubschmid

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Bernhard Rosenkranz(†) / Ulf Bollmann

Quellen: StaH 213-11 Staatsanwaltschaft Landgericht – Strafsachen, 5301/39, 8012/38 u. 190/40; 213-8 Staatsanwaltschaft Oberlandesgericht – Verwaltung, Abl. 2, 451 a E 1, 1 b u. Abl. 2, 451 a E 1, 1 c; 242-1 II Gefängnisverwaltung II, Ablieferung 13 u. 16; Auskünfte von Dr. Reimer Möller, KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme 2009 und von Monika Liebscher, Archiv Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen vom 1.11.2012; Bundesarchiv Berlin NS 3/1755; Auskunft Rainer Hoffschildt, Hannover; Gottfried Lorenz "...sonst gehst du verschütt", in: "http://www.dr-lo.de/ (abgerufen am 21.11.2012); Rosenkranz/Bollmann/Lorenz, Homosexuellen-Verfolgung, S. 225–226.