Home Gebele

After many years in camps, Gebele himself must have been traumatized by his surroundings and everything that had happened to him and what he had witnessed.

But what sort of a person was he in the camp? Did he treat prisoners badly, or did he, as he claimed, try and do his best for them? It is difficult to judge him, considering these were such extraordinary times and circumstances. His style of writing to our eyes is very stiff and old-fashioned, but so passionate. This sudden intense love revived a desperate and lonely man, dead in his emotions, who suddenly, in the midst of this daily hell, found a reason to look forward to the future again due to a chance encounter with Sabine.

There are strange contradictions in his character. The fact that he was so appalled at Dr. Steijns’s appearance is surprising and gives the impression that perhaps he had not seen prisoners as human beings until then. Had he not noticed there were thousands of men and women in the same condition? Perhaps meeting Sabine suddenly opened his eyes to what was really going on?

Initially I read that Gebele was executed a few days after Sabine left, but some digging in the Munich archives with the help of the Mauthausen archivist revealed that he actually went home to Munich, where he died on September 19, 1945, due to circulatory collapse during an operation.

He had obviously been an unwell man for some time, not surprising considering the conditions in the camp. The awfulness of his surroundings must have affected him mentally too. It is clear from his letters that he veered between wild optimism and deep depression. Life after the camps in the normal world would have been very difficult for him. There is no mention anywhere of what happened to his family. Did they keep in touch while he was in the camp? Did he find any of them after returning home? Did he try and contact Sabine through the papers?

His profession is sometimes given as a mechanic, in other documents as clockmaker. Were his stories of being a pilot true or made up? He himself related that his diploma of engineering was rescinded, but gave only a vague explanation why, and it is unclear what he may have lied about. Only one thing seems sure: he was a Berufsverbrecher, a career criminal. He claimed his father was a liqueur manufacturer, but according to official documents, he was variously described as a coachman and a mineral water manufacturer.

Just as I was finishing the manuscript for this book, I suddenly received a reply from the Arolsen Archives to my question asked more than a year before. The papers confirmed he had undergone several operations, some as part of research, including one for a trial of a typhoid vaccine.

His marital state showed he was divorced, and to my amazement, under children it said two.

The Staatsarchiv München also revealed that his wife, Emma Gebele, whom he had claimed to have shot dead, was still very much alive in 1978. Perhaps he did not actually shoot her dead as he had claimed, or perhaps she was his second wife. This would explain his short sentence of three months. His divorce date is unclear, either 1934 or 1941.

The Arolsen papers also showed that Franz Josef Gebele was imprisoned in Mauthausen on May 12, 1941, by the Kripo (criminal police) in Munich. He claimed to have been imprisoned for eleven years. So, where was he before 1941? In Dachau, which was a criminal jail before the war? There don’t seem to be any records about his time before the war.

Sabine herself never mentioned Gebele to me or anyone else as far as I know, until she was interviewed for a book by Dunya Breur and sometime later by my daughter for a work project about the war. To them she mentioned that he had saved her life, but that everything he had told her was nothing but lies. But what were these lies? About his family? His qualifications? His love for her or her love for him?

The first time I came across him was when I found a note in my mother’s archive attached to his letters. On it was also his home address: Victoriastrasse 21–23, Munich.

So many questions to which I have not found any answers.

Whatever the truth, I cannot deny that he did save her life, and also Hetty’s and Dr. Steijns’s and perhaps others’. That is certainly something to be grateful for.

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