Stumbling block for Walter Schirokauer

Walter Schirokauer was born on February 19, 1924 as the only son of Hans and Maria Schirokauer. However, his parents divorced just a few years after his birth and Walter grew up with his mother in Offenbach, who raised him in the Catholic faith. His father left Germany because of his Jewish faith and was only rarely in contact with his son.

Walter Schirokauer went to the Leibniz School, at that time an all-boys school called the Hindenburg School. He graduated from there in 1942, despite the anti-Semitic regulations on the education of Jews and half-Jews.

After graduating, he began working as a merchant, but was arrested by the Darmstadt Gestapo at the end of 1942 and only released a month later, in January 1943. Barely two months later, he was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo in Offenbach. He spends six weeks in custody in Darmstadt and is taken from there to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he is treated relatively privileged and allowed to write and receive (monitored) letters and parcels. On May 5, 1944, he was transported to Buchenwald concentration camp.

In the files documenting his imprisonment, he is listed as a political prisoner, although there is no evidence of this, which suggests that his Jewish ancestry was the real reason for his imprisonment.

On August 31, 1944, Walter Schirokauer died in Buchenwald, allegedly from injuries sustained in an air raid that hit the factory where he was forced to work.

Source: Leibnizschule Offenbach