Separate facilities existed for such prisoners, known as “Arbeitserziehungslager,” or work education camps. But in the Danzig area, such prisoners were sent to the Stutthof concentration camp, where instructional prisoners were generally held for about two months. A medical examination report from the camp infirmary notes that Helene Loth was three months pregnant at the time of her imprisonment, and she was released after only four weeks, on April 1, 1943.
Peter Oswald Loth was born on Sept. 2, 1943, less than 20 kilometers from Stutthof, in Tiegenhof, the district seat for the Grosses Werder area. In his court testimony, Loth mentioned a “psychiatric hospital” in that city and said he had been subjected to experiments there as an infant. Historical research has unearthed no evidence of experiments having been conducted at the hospital in Tiegenhof near Danzig.
How did Loth come to believe that he had been abused there for experiments as an infant? Perhaps he had heard of a clinic of the same name in the town of Tiegenhof near Posen, the present-day Polish town of Poznań, located about 250 kilometers (150 miles) to the south. After invading Poland, the Germans took control of the psychiatric hospital there, which became part of the Nazi’s T4 “euthanasia” program. They murdered thousands of people at the facility.
Doubts
And how likely is it that his mother would have been imprisoned in Stutthof again after her ostensible stay in the institution, this time with her newborn son? Her imprisonment at Stutthof before the birth is well-documented, but there are no documents at all suggesting a second detainment there. Indeed, it would seem that there was no second stint in Stutthof at all, and if there was, it must have been for entirely different reasons than those claimed by Loth: His mother couldn’t have been kept there as a Jew, because she wasn’t one.
Whereas Loth was placed in the care of a Polish woman in 1945, his mother made it to the American occupation zone. It was only in 1959 that Loth was able to reunite with his mother in West Germany before emigrating with her to the U.S. In his memoirs, Loth also wrote that the family suffered from racism because his mother married a black GI. He described how the Ku Klux Klan had threatened the family, and how he had also been met with rejection by the black community. He has also publicly forgiven a former clan member.
It appears that Loth later lost contact with his family. His half-sister didn’t contact him to tell him about the death of their mother until 1999. When he made a request in the summer of 2000, the Red Cross did confirm that his mother had been held at Stutthof, but the reference was only to the four-week stay there before his birth. Perhaps Loth was under the false impression that his mother must have been Jewish if she had been imprisoned at Stutthof?
Loth was an evangelical Christian at that time, but from that point on, he believed he had Jewish roots. In 2015, he professed his belief in Judaism and began going by the name Moshe Peter Loth. His attorneys have argued in court that their client’s memories begin at the age of five and that accounts of past events were based primarily on hearsay.
When DER SPIEGEL confronted him with doubts about his stories, Loth stated through his lawyers that he “had spent his whole life searching for his true identity.” On that search, his lawyer stated, “he often only had oral reports available to him.” As such, “not everything can be proved through documents. Unfortunately, many questions are still unanswered. It is difficult to verify the information available to him.”
The lawyer further stated: “So far, he has found no reason to doubt these reports.” This also applies to the discovery of his Jewish roots, the lawyer continued — an “assumption that was not contradicted by the Protestant denomination of his mother and uncle.”
Regarding Loth’s claim that his grandmother was murdered in the gas chamber and he was a victim of medical experiments, his lawyer wrote: “When Mr. Loth made the statements to the Yad Vashem memorial about 15 years ago, he believed that his grandmother had been murdered in the gas chamber. He has since learned that his grandmother was shot on Aug. 10, 1943, in Fürstenwerden near Danzig. Mr. Loth will correct the information provided to the Yad Vashem memorial in the near future. … With regard to the allegation that experiments may have been carried out on him as an infant in Tiegenhof, Mr. Loth refers to scars on the back of his head, the origin of which he cannot explain.”
Icon: Der Spiegel
Article source: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-concentration-camp-victim-who-never-was-a-a7c50dd3-773f-4697-b9c0-e40618a62e9e#ref=rss