Dachau concentration camp survivors

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted 1946 poem "First they came ...". The poem exists in many versions; the one featured on the United States Holocaust Memorial reads: "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me."
Niemöller was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and a self-identified antisemite. He became one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches. He opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph. For his opposition to the Nazis' state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution. After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help victims of the Nazis. He turned away from his earlier nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. From the 1950s on, he was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist, and vice-chair of War Resisters' International from 1966 to 1972. He met with Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War and was a committed campaigner for nuclear disarmament.

Hans Mathiesen Lunding (25 February 1899 – 5 April 1984) was a Danish officer, eventing rider, resistance fighter and director of military intelligence in Denmark.

Jean Bernard (13 August 1907 – 1 September 1994) was a Catholic priest from Luxembourg who was imprisoned from May 1941 to August 1942 in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. He was released for nine days in February 1942 and allowed to return to Luxembourg, an episode which he later wrote about in his memoirs of the camp and which was turned into a film.

Roger de Saivre (1908-1964) was a French politician. A supporter of the Révolution nationale, he served as co-Cabinet Secretary to Marshal Philippe Pétain from 1941 to 1942. He was deported to the Dachau concentration camp for his vocal criticisms of the Nazi invaders in 1943. After liberation in 1945, he served as a member of the National Assembly, from 1951 to 1955 representing French Algeria. He was a proponent of the French Empire.

Karl Grönsfelder (18 January 1882 – 20 February 1964) was a Bavarian political activist and politician (KPD).When the Communist party was briefly banned in 1923/24, his activism earned him a period in "protective custody" in June 1924. A longer period of detention followed the Nazi take-over in 1933. After 1945 Grönsfelder returned to political activism, despite being marginalised and expelled (not for the first time) from the Communist Party in 1949.

Hugo Merton (18 November 1879 in Frankfurt am Main – 23 March 1940 in Edinburgh) was a German zoologist.
He studied sciences at the University of Heidelberg. From October 1907 to August 1908, with herpetologist Jean Roux, he conducted scientific investigations in the Aru and Kei Islands. In 1913 he obtained his habilitation at Heidelberg with a dissertation on the flatworm genus Temnocephala. Because of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws imposed by the Nazis, he was forced to relinquish his position as deputy director at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt as well as his professorship at the University of Heidelberg.In 1937, by way of an invitation from Professor F. A. E. Crew, he went to the University of Edinburgh, where he spent time working in the institute of animal genetics. Upon this return to Germany in 1938, he was arrested and imprisoned in the concentration camp at Dachau. During the following year, he was deported to Scotland, where he resumed his work at the university. Due to deteriorated health, he died soon afterwards in March 1940.Organisms with the specific epithet of mertoni are named in his honor, an example being the sea snake species Parahydrophis mertoni. In 1911, Max Carl Wilhelm Weber named the fish species Pseudomugil gertrudae after Merton's wife, Gertrude.

Heinrich Eduard Jacob (7 October 1889 – 25 October 1967) was a German and American journalist and author. Born to a Jewish family in Berlin and raised partly in Vienna, Jacob worked for two decades as a journalist and biographer before the rise to power of the Nazi Party. Interned in the late 1930s in the concentration camps at Dachau and then Buchenwald, he was released through the efforts of his future wife Dora, and emigrated to the United States. There he continued to publish books and contribute to newspapers before returning to Europe after the Second World War. Ill health, aggravated by his experiences in the camps, dogged him in later life, but he continued to publish through to the end of the 1950s. He wrote also under the pen names Henry E. Jacob and Eric Jens Petersen.

Joseph Joos (1878–1965) was a prominent German intellectual and politician. As a Member of Parliament in Weimar, Joseph Joos grew to become one of the leading voices of the Christian Democratic Union in Germany. His convictions led him to become a political prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp from 1941 to 1945. After World War II, Joseph Joos became a close advisor to West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

Wilhelm Heckmann (26 June 1897 – 10 March 1995) was a German concert and easy listening musician. From 1937 to 1945, he was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps in Dachau and Mauthausen. Heckmann founded the first prisoner band in Mauthausen, and was also instrumental in the founding of the large prisoner orchestra there.

Robert Antelme (5 January 1917, Sartène, Corse-du-Sud – 26 October 1990) was a French writer. During the Second World War he was involved in the French Resistance and deported.
In 1939 he married Marguerite Duras. Their child died at birth in 1942. In the same year, Duras met Dionys Mascolo, who became her lover.

Antelme was arrested and deported on 1 July 1944. He was at Buchenwald, then Gandersheim. After the end of the war François Mitterrand found Antelme in a terrible state while visiting the Dachau concentration camp and organised his return to Paris; Mitterrand later reported that he had almost not heard Antelme's soft-voiced call to him. Marguerite Duras looked after Antelme and wrote La Douleur about his return. She divorced him soon after he regained his health, but they remained friends.