Walls: Resisting the Third Reich One Womans Story

by Hiltgunt Zassenhaus

Overview

Walls is the story of how a young German woman, acting alone with the cooperation of a handful of other individuals in wartime Germany, brought sustenance and hope to thousands of political prisoners of the Third Reich.

"When so many of us seem crippled by the numbness we see in our own society, Walls reminds us of the power of individual conscience." — The Nation

"I want my friends to read this book. I want to fix them with a glittering eye, à la Ancient Mariner, and force them to sit down and start reading. How else can they learn that a book about wartime Germany and concentration camp horror can be enthralling, inspiring and even possess charm." — Pamela Marsh, Christian Science Monitor

"The autobiography of Hiltgunt Zassenhaus pierced through the malaise and oppressive apathy of our society to affect me more profoundly than I recall a book ever having done before." — Genesis II

"The suspenseful and dramatic story of one courageous woman's bold deception of the Gestapo." — Book-of-the-Month Club News

"This book releases its own inspiriting energies. In times that call for courage, ever more courage, Walls will remind any human heart of its own worst dangers and its best possibilities." — National Catholic News Service

"... set down in cool reflection but charged with inescapable emotion..." — The New Yorker

Product Details

BN ID:	2940162512370
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	04/18/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	756 KB

About the Author

Hiltgunt Margret Zassenhaus (1916-2004) was born in Hamburg. Her father, a historian and school principal, lost his job when the Nazis came to power in 1933. A bicycling trip to Denmark in 1933 led Zassenhaus to decide to study Scandinavian languages. She graduated from the University of Hamburg with a degree in Norwegian and Danish in 1939. In 1940, she got a job as an interpreter, censoring the mail, but she resigned in 1942 to start her medical studies in Hamburg. Later that year, the Hamburg prosecutor asked her to censor letters to and from Norwegian prisoners in Hamburg-area prisons. She first refused, but was further pressured and accepted on condition that she would work independently. Instead of censoring the mail, she added messages urging the recipients to send food or warm clothing.

Assigned by the Department of Justice to interpret for and watch Norwegian priests visiting political prisoners, Zassenhaus instead began smuggling food, medicine, and writing materials to the prisoners, protected by the belief of the prison authorities that given her position, she was also informing the Gestapo. At the end of the war, the prisoners were moved to various prisons all over Germany; Zassenhaus created her own records to track some 1,200 Scandinavian prisoners in 52 prisons across Germany. Her records, passed to the Red Cross after Zassenhaus learned that all political prisoners were to be killed on “Day X”, helped save the lives of these prisoners who were evacuated to Scandinavia in 1945.

In 1947 Zassenhaus was smuggled into Denmark in a fish truck even though Germans were prohibited from entering the country. The Danish parliament later legitimized her immigration. She continued her medical studies at the University of Bergen, and graduated as a physician from the University of Copenhagen. She emigrated to Baltimore in 1952, where she completed her internship and residency at City Hospital and opened her medical office in 1954, practicing as a physician thereafter.

Zassenhaus is the only German decorated with the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav (1963) for her activities during World War II. She also received the Medal of Honor from the Norwegian and Danish Red Crosses (1948), the Danish Order of the Dannebrog (1964), the German Bundesverdienstkreuz (1969), and the British Cross of the Order of Merit. In 1974, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by two members of the Norwegian Parliament who had been prisoners of war in Nazi Germany.