"Ludmilla," An Opera On The Porch Of Hell

Albert Konrad Gemmeker, The Man Who Smiled Jews Into Poland

-by Toon Janssen

Recently the libretto and music of the opera Ludmilla was found, part of Ida Simons’ legacy. Simons was a pianist who played in it during World War II. The opera was composed and performed by Jewish artists only, in a Nazi concentration camp in the Netherlands, to entertain both staff, guards and prisoners alike. The apparently light opera parody had a bitter core, with many double meanings, and turned out to be a fatal act of resistance. Ludmilla was staged only once, was banned right afterwards, and all Jews involved were deported, most of them to Nazi camps, never to be heard from again.

DWT Amsterdam correspondent Toon Janssen became highly fascinated by the subject and got to the bottom of it.  

Today, approximately 40,000 Jews live in the Netherlands, most of them in   Amsterdam, one of the capitals and once known as “Dutch Jerusalem.” The diaspora history started small-scale, back in Roman times, but it was not until the end of the 16th century that large groups arrived— Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, fleeing the Inquisition, who were not without means and had trade contacts. Frequent anti-Jewish pogroms over long series of years greatly strengthened the diaspora. When the 30 Years War raged in Europe in the 17th century, the persecution really took off and German and Central European Ashkenazi Jews, people who were much less well-off, moved to the Netherlands, among other places. After the Nazis came to power in early 1930s Germany, introducing the infamous race laws causing Jews to lose their civil rights, an immense flow of refugees started, again also towards the Netherlands, not the best choice as things unfolded. The German annexation of Austria and the infamous Kristal Nacht in 1938 led to widespread panic, causing an even bigger exodus. Among the ordinary citizens there were many very talented people migrating— entrepreneurs, scientists, musicians, dramatists and so on.

The Holocaust, the Nazi project to eradicate all European Jews for good, took place during the Second World War. It was largely successful, in just a few years the Nazis had around six million deaths on their conscience. That included mass murder of Dutch Jews. Of the estimated 140,000 Jewish inhabitants in 1940 more than 100,000 were murdered, most in extermination camps elsewhere, and starved to death or died from diseases and exhaustion. Most Dutch people stayed on the sidelines; some revolted but many saw no other way out and resigned. Only a small minority took in and hid Jewish people, imperiling their own lives, while others, traitors, assisted the Germans in finding and arresting Holland's Jews.

For the vast majority of Dutch Jews their last moments on Dutch soil was Camp Westerbork, a transit camp that began its existence in 1939 as temporary home to Jews who fled from Hitler’s genocidal regime, but had no friends or family in Holland to vouch for them. The refugees were allowed limited freedom of movement on camp grounds, and initially lived under seemingly tolerable but very poor conditions. On the first of July 1942 that all changed, the refugee camp was turned into a transit camp by Nazi SS wgo brought large numbers of Dutch Jews, gypsies and Sintis as well to the camp. Two weeks later deportations began and cattle trains left the camp on a daily basis, to the death camps in primarily in Poland. The SS demonstrated their extreme cruelty by leaving the assemblage of the deportation lists in the hands of Jews themselves— the Dutch Jewish Council in Amsterdam and the German Jews who had been rounded up and interred in the camp. The German Jews, some of whom were kapos, had a role in deciding who would be disposed of, while they, as German speakers, being higher in the pecking order, were treated better by SS than the Dutch. They received better housing, and managed temporarily to keep friends and family off the damned lists. Tensions between the internally divided Jews left its marks on day-to-day camp life as a result. 

As a transit camp, Westerbork was organized differently from other Nazi internment centers, with almost no corpses lying around, no smoking chimneys and gassing, no medical experiments or SS guards patrolling with dogs. Instead, the camp was set up like a miniature town, with a café, canteen, registry, kindergarten, offices, workshops and a fully equipped hospital. Some people said Westerbork was ‘Hitler’s gift to the Jews,’ and the Nazis mainly tried  to give it the appearance of a normal place of residence, of a small-scale parallel society in which Jews played sports, went shopping, went to work and even dealt with the farmers outside. The ins and outs of daily life were actually captured in a unique film, the Westerborkfilm, by the German Jew Rudolf Breslauer. It features, among other things, the Roma girl Settela Steinbach, on her fatal train ride to Auschwitz. Camp commander in charge at that moment, Albert Konrad Gemmeker, initially ordered Breslauer to take only passport photos of the prisoners but later commissioned him to also record daily life on film. Let Westerbork be a quiet and peaceful place, let it be a temporary mini-society, as format for the final solution of the Jewish problem, the Nazis might have thought, with just a bit of patience the gas chambers elsewhere would do the real job. That they did, for millions of poor souls. In the end, Rudolf Breslauer’s life came to an abrupt end, murdered somewhere in Central Europe in 1945, after being separated from his wife and two sons who the Germans had gassed in Auschwitz.

In 1942 Gemmeker (1907-1982, born in Germany) was appointed Oberstormfuhrer of Westerbork , commander in charge. This brought a certain degree of order and regularity there, due to his strict policy, since as the traditions report, there was little resistance. He was a capricious and erratic man who wanted to be popular, was known as gentleman-Nazi, who handed out nice jobs among the inmates, allowed people marry each other, and is the one who gave permission for inmates to buy fresh food from local farmers. He was keen on organizing sports competitions and arranged, being a great lover of culture, cabaret and revue performances, as well as musicals, concerts, theater plays and colorful evenings. He had the best actors and singers at his disposal, imprisoned Jewish artists and German Jewish refugees of all trades, who tried to avoid deportation by performing as best as they could. In the end most failed to do so however, since Gemmeker’s rule was responsible for the deportation of at least 80,000 persons. Almost every day he waved goodbye the trains to the east personally, with a subtle gesture with the hand, as Breslauer’s film shows. Most Jews, those who did or did not end up in camps to be gassed, remained anonymous. Some of them, relevant to this DWT-post, I really want to give an extra platform here.

Erich Ziegler for example, was born on the third of January 1900 in Berlin, where he led a fairly unspectacular life as a bandmaster until 1933. Ostracized as a Jew in the Nazi state he left for the Netherlands, where he joined the migrant theater group Theater of Celebrities to become a famous entertainer. During German occupation, Ziegler was arrested though, on December 2, 1942. Soon after, Westerbork became his destiny, where he participated in variety programs of the Gruppe Buhne Lager Westerbork company, performing comedy events in barack number 9. Together with Jewish fellow artists Willy Rosen and Max Ehrlich he had managed to win commander Gemmeker over to the idea of starting the theater group. Ziegler was liberated from the camp in 1945 on April 12th; how lucky he was, and stayed in the Netherlands to work as musical director and composer, till his death December 24, 1948.

Willy Rosen was born in Magdeburg July 18th, 1894. In addition to being comedian, he also composed music and wrote lyrics. Actually, Willy was one of the best German entertainers of the 1920s. After the power change by the National Socialists Rosen was no longer allowed to perform, due to his Jewish roots. He left for the Netherlands in 1937, to end up in Theater of Celebrities, in which many migrant Jews came to play, including, as we saw, Ziegler. But by 1942 however, all theater shows with Jews in them were banned, whereupon Willy was deported to the East. Once at Westerbork he also joined Gruppe Buhne Lager Westerbork. With the end of war looming, and while the Germans cleared the camp to erase their tracks, his train left for Theresienstadt. A temporary intermezzo however, Rosen was gassed with Zyclone B.

Max Ehrlich

Early 1943 Max Ehrlich, a 1892 Berlin-born Jewish cabaret artist and comedian, very successful in the 1920s as actor and film director, was also imprisoned in the Dutch camp. Under the Nazi government he also could no longer work and live in Germany. In the Netherlands he joined Ehrlich and Rosen in Theater of Celebrities, in which he directed plays, until he got arrested. In Westerbork he worked with fellow prisoners on a series of theater productions with sketches and songs, to perform them under the name Gruppe Buhne Lager Westerbork , as mentioned above. Culture adept Gemmeker gave permission for the company, hoping shows would distract prisoners and keep them quiet, to impress foreign visitors and entertain the camp staff. The cabaret however, was also a source of controversy. Dutch prisoners in particular were suspicious of the German-born Jewish actors and artists, and their motives to avoid the train rides. Max Ehrlich’s train however, had Auschwitz as its destination, September 4, 1944.  

Ironically, under leadership of Gemmeker, who headed the camp from October 1942 to April 1945, cultural life flourished. The leaders of most cultural activities, as mentioned before, Max Ehrlich (director), Willy Rosen (lyrics, libretto) and Erich Ziegler (music), composed six original revues during his rule. Westerbork at a certain moment housed a chamber music ensemble, a choir and a 30-40 person symphony orchestra that included some of Holland’s most talented musicians. It became the site of world-class cabaret, and it was said that the ‘entire post-war arena’ of the renowned Amsterdam Concert Hall was there. Along with the three founders of Gruppe Buhne numerous musicians, dancers and actors were on stage, and a staff of up to 50 people worked on lightning, costumes and set design. The extravagant productions were often staged for the pleasure of the SS, in their language and without any political topics, but not exclusively for them; internees also attended. The cabaret was generally light-hearted, humorous and often sexually explicit, with young girls swinging their legs to the rhythm of jazz. Many inmates were revolted, but most could not resist the allure of a night of laughter, music and, most of all, forgetting. Sadly, the shows were performed on the wooden boards of an old synagogue of the nearby city of Assen, used for stage construction. Although the popularity of the cabaret, with increasing success, did not guarantee survival, even if all performances were done in exchange for reprieved deportation. The artists played for reason of simple survival, and hoped that way to be excluded from transport. Meanwhile trains drove back and forth, full on the outward journey and empty on the way back. 

Erich Ziegler

All cultural activities however, came to a sudden end after the performance in June 1944 of the opera Ludmilla, or Corpses On A Conveyer Belt. The apparently light opera parody had a simple plot: Ludmilla’s father had promised her hand to a candidate he selected, but his daughter had already pledged her heart to someone else. Her real lover was forced to hide the moment her destined partner entered. A skirmish ensued and all the characters were killed, one by one they dropped dead, and the bodies were counted, to the beat of cheerful music. Ludmilla, in its deepest core, was in fact a bitter parody, with numerous double meanings. Even today people wonder why Gemmeker ever allowed references such as ‘plumes of smoke in the east’, which indicated the industrial nature of the ‘mysterious’ murders. Also, the call to go into hiding and the tragic ending in which all die, made Ludmilla a musical act of resistance to the Nazis, including Gemmeker, the man who sat front row. The work was performed only once. Immediately after that first time the Oberstormfuhrer banned it. The company was dissolved ‘due to deteriorating war conditions’, all actors were transported, most of them to transit camp Theresienstadt. Once there however, a temporary stay awaited them, Auschwitz or Treblinka followed. Of the original cast only Erich Ziegler survived.

Herr Gemmeker could be very unpredictable and short-tempered and at those moments he could deal with the prisoners harshly. He insisted on strict policies, ensured more order and regularity, but his ‘war necessary’ rule caused about 80,000 Jews, Sinti and Roma to be deported. He never doubted the anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda and fled, just before the liberation of Westerbork by the Canadians, only to be arrested shortly afterwards. He was detained, ironically in ‘his’ camp, and was interrogated for months. It was not until 1948 that the trials against him began. The court ruled that though he had a consequential share in the treatment of the prisoners, complicity in mass murder could not be proven. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, a disappointingly small sentence, because prosecutors couldn’t prove he knew what awaited the Jews. He simply and consistently denied knowing about genocide, “yes admittedly, indeed there were rumors, but I checked them, they turned out to be based on nothing” and, also according to his own words, he had been told by his superiors to “distrust horror propaganda.”

Because there was no solid evidence for involvement in mass murder, Special Court Assen only charged him with deprivation of liberty of the internees. He was released due to good behavior in April 1951, and minus pre-trial detention served only six years. The then Dutch Minister of the Interior Johan van Maarseveen, a devout Catholic, was politically responsible for his pardon. He released Gemmeker on behalf of Juliana, descendant of the House of Orange and married to German Prince Bernard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, the princess who was about to ascend the Crown and become Queen of the Netherlands.

Gemmeker returned to his hometown, married a woman 21 years his junior, opened a cigar shop and led a retired life of freedom for 31 years. He had three daughters, one of whom gave her child the Jewish name Ruth, to which grandpa responded negatively, whereupon he cut off further contact. Twice the German Justice Department opened new investigations to prove his part in the Holocaust, studies that lasted 17 years. But all in vain, no solid evidence was found; he continued to deny it all the while. “He sat there as if he had to answer for just a simple traffic violation,” his granddaughter once claimed. “He lied flatly and without any guilt; he was masterful at denial. He knew exactly how to respond, knowing they couldn’t deliver the evidence.’’ It helped him enormously he had all camp records destroyed in advance, including personal correspondence, at the end of the war with the Allies in sight. 

Ludmilla fell into oblivion after the war. But not until decades later, when the original score of the opera, text and piano-extract popped up in the estate of Holocaust-survivor Ida Simons (1911-1960).

Besides being a pianist, Simons was also a writer, having survived Westerbork as well as Thersesienstadt, and dying before her time because of what she had gone through. She left behind her memoirs. She drew the phrases “How liberating it is to laugh when you are in fear of death and all human dignity has been taken away” and ”Humor as a colorful lab covering a wound” in her book Bitter Harvest, a funny but slightly cynical semi-autobiography, the proceeds of which she donated to the Red Cross.

Ludmilla was performed again in 1977, for the first time since the sudden ban Gemmeker ordered in 1944, was carried out four years later in Memorial Camp Westerbork, and was played afterwards in various theaters, synagogues and shuls in Holland. Journalist Frank Kromer recently produced a four-part Ludmilla Spotify-podcast. In Frank’s word, “the opera, written in the porch of hell, should never ever be forgotten.”