Leopold Engleitner
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Leopold Engleitner, born on July 23, 1905, is a Holocaust survivor, the subject of a documentary, and speaks publicly on his experiences with other survivors.
Engleiter grew up in the Austrian imperial city of Bad Ischl. He studied the Bible intensively in the 1930s and became baptized as one of Jehovah's Witnesses in 1932. During the period prior to World War II he faced religious intolerance, even persecution from his immediate surrounding and the Austrian authorities, then under the influence of Nazi Germany. When Adolf Hitler occupied Austria in 1938, Leopold Engleitner’s religion, ideologies, and his conscientious objection to serving in the Army came into conflict with those of the Nazis.
On the 4 April 1939 he was arrested in Bad Ischl by the Gestapo and taken to Linz and Wels for remand. From the 9 October 1939 till 15 July 1943 he was imprisoned in the concentration camps Buchenwald, Niederhagen and Ravensbrueck. In Niederhagen he rejected a proposal to renounce his beliefs, even though that would have led to his release. Despite brutal and inhumane treatment his will – to stand for fair principles and to refuse the military service – was unbroken. In July 1943 he was released from the concentration camp under the condition that he would agree to be a lifelong slave laborer on a farm.
After his return to Austria, he worked on a farm in St. Wolfgang. Three weeks before the war was over, on the 17 April 1945, he received his enlistment to the German army, whereupon he fled to the mountains of Salzkammergut. He hid there in an alpine cabin and in a cave for weeks and was hunted by the Nazis, but was never found.
On the 5 May, 1945, Engleitner was finally able to return home, and he continued working on the farm in St. Wolfgang as a slave laborer. When in 1946 he tried to leave the farm, his request was rejected by the labor bureau of Bad Ischl with the argument his slave labor duty from the Nazi occupation was still valid. Only after an intervention of the US occupying power was he released from that duty in April 1946.
In the years after the war, Leopold Engleitner continued to face isolation and intolerance, and only after the author and film producer Bernhard Rammerstorfer documented his life in 1999 in the book and documentary film “Nein statt ja und Amen,” did the larger public become aware of him. Engleitner and Rammerstorfer held lectures at universities, schools and memorials in Germany, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and the USA.
In 2004 the book and the film were translated into an English version, called Unbroken Will, and were presented in the US with a tour including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Columbia University in New York and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
In 2006, Engleitner and Rammerstorfer made a second tour through the United States. They gave lectures in Washington, D.C., (at Georgetown University and Library of Congress), New York (at Columbia University), Chicago (at Harold Washington College), Skokie (for the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois), Palo Alto, in the San Franciso Bay area (Stanford University) and Los Angeles (at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust).
This is how he became an international symbol for bravery, tolerance, and fair principles. Today Leopold Engleitner is the oldest survivor of the concentration camps Buchenwald Niederhagen and Ravensbrück.
In 2005 Rammerstorfer released a new biography and DVD “Nein statt Ja und Amen – 100 Jahre ungebrochener Wille”. The book also contains a short biography of the German conscientious objector Joachim Eschers. Eschers was detained between 1937 and 1945 in several different prisons and in the concentration camps Sachsenhausen, Niederhagen and Buchenwald. In KZ Buchenwald he was servant to the former French government members Georges Mandel and Léon Blum, who the Germans kept as hostages.
The Austrian president, Heinz Fischer, described in his preface the book as "a milestone in the correspondence about the horror of Nazism." Further prefaces were written by the founder of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service Andreas Maislinger, “Franz Jägerstätter and Leopold Engleitner” and Walter Manoschek, from the University of Vienna, “ what engagement is capable of”.
