My second birthday

‘The day has come to an end, - this 29 April, for the rest of my life I shall celebrate it as my second birthday, as the day that my life was given back to me.’ So wrote Edgar Kupfer, inmate of Dachau concentration camp, in a secret diary on the day American troops liberated the camp. Kupfer died 30 years ago today.

Kupfer was born in Koberwitz, Germany, in 1906, the son of an estate manager. He studied in Bonn, Regensburg and Stuttgart, but when his parents were divorced he left school to support his mother and sister by taking unskilled jobs. Disappointed in love, Kupfer left Germany for Italy and France. He undertook a variety of jobs over the next 15 years, including journalism (for which he used the pen name Kupfer-Koberwitz), and weaving (in Paris), From 1937, he worked in a travel company on the island of Ischia. In September 1940, he was expelled from Italy, to Innsbruck, for disparaging the Nazi regime and Italian fascism. There, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp - for the duration of the Second World War. From November 1942, be was given the role of clerk in a satellite camp, one that provided slave labour for an armaments factory. Once in this position, he was able to keep a diary secretly recording camp life on tiny slips of paper which he hid among administration papers. Later, he buried the diary.

Despite nearly being consumed by typhus, Kupfer survived his imprisonment at Dachau and was liberated along with 67,000 other prisoners by US forces on 29 April 2945. A week later, he led the Americans to the location of his diaries (some of which had sustained water damage), and two years later they were used as important evidence during the Nuremberg Trials. After the war and until the late 1950s, Kupfer lived in Chicago, but then he moved back to Europe to reside in a village on Sardinia. In 1986 he returned to Germany, first living with friends and then in a nursing home near Stuttgart. Apart from writing about Dachau, he also published poems and essays on vegetarianism. He died on 7 July 1991. Further information can be found online at Wikipedia.

Kupfer’s diaries were first serialised in the journal Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte under the title Als Haftling in Dachau. In 1954, Kupfer donated the diaries to the University of Chicago. They were published in German in the 1990s as Dachauer Tagebücher: die Aufzeichnungen des Häftlings 24814. No translations into English appear to have been published, nor can I find any substantial extracts online. More information about the diaries, though, can be found at the Mother Jones and Passport-collector websites, as well as in David Chrisinger’s article for The New York Times (most readily available here). Several websites quote an English translation of one entry, the one made by Kupfer on 29 April 1945, liberation day. The following is as found at the Birkbeck, University of London website . 

29 April 1945
‘While I’m writing there are big explosions nearby.

A very unpleasant, but apparently true, bit of news: it’s said that there’s still a whole company of SS in the camp, but no Wehrmacht. So we rejoiced too soon and are now in danger twice over: partly from the SS and partly from the war that is now raging around us. […]

Suddenly, there are shouts outside and people running about: “The Americans have arrived, they’re in the camp, yes, yes, they’re on the roll call square!”

Everybody starts moving. The sick leave their beds, those who are nearly well and the nursing staff run out into the block street, jump out of the windows, climb over the partition walls. Everybody is running to the roll call square. One can hear people shouting hurray from a long way off. They’re shouts of joy. People keep running around. The sick have excited, ecstatic faces. “They’ve arrived, we’re free, free!” […]

Hardly any violence has occurred, although we had always thought it might. Everybody’s feelings of joy were evidently stronger than their feelings of hatred […].

So, as far as the majority is concerned, what happened to the hatred, the burning hatred that everybody believed that they felt inside them? Joy trumped all that and … hatred is probably a sign of powerlessness, but now we are no longer powerless. But the fact that we are not behaving as the SS would have behaved, that’s only as it should be, but … it’s still a good thing.

The day has come to an end, this 29 April, - for the rest of my life I shall celebrate it as my second birthday, as the day that my life was given back to me.’