The 15th of September 1935, Nuremberg, Germany. The Nazi regime announces the so-called Nuremberg
Laws, which among other things ban future intermarriages and sexual relations between
Jews and people “of German or related blood” as the Nazis believe that such relationships
are dangerous because they lead to “mixed race” children. According to the Nazi regime,
these children and their descendants undermine the purity of the German race and the individuals
caught breaching these laws are to be arrested and sent to concentration camps.
7 years later in 1942, there is a Nazi officer at Auschwitz who violates the Nuremberg
Laws by falling in love with a Slovak Jewish prisoner. This officer’s name is Franz Wunsch.
Franz Wunsch was born on the 21st of March 1922 in Drasenhofen in Austria. He held a deep and
virulent hatred for Jews and in 1940, 2 years after the Annexation of Austria
to the German Reich, he joined the SS. The Second World War began on the 1st of
September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The last operational Polish unit
surrendered on the 6th of October. The German occupation of Poland was
exceptionally brutal. The Nazis considered Poles to be racially inferior and they
launched a campaign of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture and
to reduce the Poles to a leaderless population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters.
In May 1940, around 60 km west of Krakow, the Germans established Auschwitz concentration
camp. The direct reason for the establishment of the camp was the fact that mass arrests
of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of existing "local" prisons.
When Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Franz Wunsch was sent
to fight on the Eastern Front. Due to harsh weather and fierce resistance,
fighting on the eastern Front was an incredibly challenging and brutal
experience for German soldiers. Whilst on the front, Wunsch suffered a knee
injury and afterwards was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he worked as a guard.
A center for the extermination of the Jews became Birkenau which was the largest of the more than
40 camps and sub-camps which made up the Auschwitz complex. It was divided into ten
sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences and was patrolled by SS guards,
including—after 1942—SS dog handlers. During its three years of operation,
it had a range of functions. When construction began in October 1941, it was supposed to be
a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a branch of Auschwitz in March 1942,
and served at the same time as a center for the extermination of the Jews. In its final phase,
from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were concentrated
before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.
At Auschwitz, the process of selection and murder was carefully planned and organized. When a
train stopped at the platform, the arrivals were lined up into two columns – men and boys in one,
women and girls in the other. The SS physicians such as Josef Mengele performed the selection.
The only criterion was the appearance of the prisoners, whose fate, for labor or for death,
was determined at will. The SS personnel – when supervising the loading of prisoners who were
to be transported in cars to the gas chambers – often behaved inhumanly, and tortured the incoming
prisoners in a cruel way, beating the women, the men and the children with a stick or with a cane
while forcing them into the cars. The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what
awaited them. They were told that they were being sent to the camp where work was waiting for them,
but first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe. They were then told politely to hang their
clothes on the hooks, take a shower and were even promised they would be provided with soup
and tea or coffee. However, they were taken into the gas chambers and after the doors were shut,
SS men dropped Zyklon B pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber.
The victims were dead within 20 minutes. Johann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw gassings,
testified that the shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the
opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives. After the victims were murdered,
their gold teeth were extracted, and women’s hair was shorn by the Sonderkommando which were groups
of Jews forced to work in the crematorium. The bodies were hauled to the crematorium furnaces
for incineration, the bones were pulverized, and the ashes were scattered in the fields.
Franz Wunsch took part in the selections thus deciding which Jews would go to the gas chambers
to die and which would live to work as slave laborers. He accompanied them to their death,
deceived them as to their true fate and forced them into the gas chambers, viciously beating
them if necessary. He would also drop in the Zyklon B pellets that murdered the victims
once the gas chamber’s door was closed. On 21 March 1942 at noon there was a
birthday party on behalf of Franz Wunsch, who was celebrating his 20th birthday, and Rita, a Kapo,
walked round the barracks looking for a performer to sing. A certain Helena Citrónová, a young
Jewish female prisoner from Slovakia, volunteered to sing because she hoped it would save her life.
Helena was one of the first 1,000 women and girls from Slovakia who arrived at Auschwitz in 1942,
during the construction of the extermination camp. According to a census of the 15th of December
1940, there were 89,000 Jews in Slovakia at that time. In March 1942, the Slovak State
signed an agreement with Germany that permitted the deportation of the Slovak Jews and between
March and October 1942, some 58,000 Slovak Jews were concentrated in indigenously established
labor and concentration camps—mainly in the camps Sereď, Nováky, and Vyhne. The Slovak authorities
then transported the Jews to the border of the Government General or the German Reich and turned
them over to German SS and police. One of the main forces behind the deportation of Slovak Jews
to Nazi concentration camps in German occupied Poland was the Slovak Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka.
Virtually all the deported Slovak Jews were killed in Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor,
and other locations in German-occupied Poland. Only 300 of them survived. Among them were
Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba who escaped from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 and compiled the
first detailed report on operations there for general dissemination in the west.
Jews who were not deported were granted a presidential exception as they were
crucial for the war economy. During Jozef Tiso’s presidency, the Slovak State paid Germany 500
Reichsmarks for every deported Jew for, what they called "retraining and accommodation".
In total the Slovak State paid Nazi Germany 10 million Reichsmarks for murdering its
citizens - the Slovak Jews - in Nazi death camps. Among them were Helena Citrónová’s parents who
died in Auschwitz gas chamber and her brother who while attempting to escape the camp, was killed on
an electrified fence, his face and hands pressed up and immobilized against the barbed wire.
On 21 March 1942 at Auschwitz, Helena sang the birthday song for Wunsch with passion as she
believed it might be the last time she would ever get to sing. When Helena was done singing
Wunsch came up to her and asked her: ”please, sing the song again”. Helena later recalled she
would look up with tears in her eyes and see a uniform and think “God where are the eyes of a
murderer? These are the eyes of a human being.” Helena returned to work in the “Canada” warehouse,
sorting the possessions of murdered Jews. It was so named because Canada was thought to be a
country of great riches. Inmates’ possessions were taken from them upon arrival and brought there.
The items were sorted and sent back to Germany, although some were stolen by SS guards. Working at
Canada warehouse was one of the few sought-after jobs at Auschwitz because the prisoners received
food and got water and they could grow their hair out and they were not beaten.
As one of the SS personnel responsible for overseeing the sorting tasks in Canada warehouses,
Wunsch would visit Helena often and he was gentle, kind and protective.
He would bring her extra food and clothing and turned over his own food rations to her.
When Helena was infected with typhus, he would hide her and nurse her back to health. He made
sure she was well-fed and would even give her the gifts of food that his mother had sent him. Wunsch
would help save the lives of her fellow prisoners risking his own life with his superiors in the SS.
Sometimes he passed her notes saying 'I fell in love with you'.
Helena later recalled “ I thought I'd rather be dead than be involved with an SS man.”
Helena despised the Nazis not only because of what they did to
Jews but also because she lost her parents and brother at Auschwitz.
However, overtime Helena started to develop some affection for Wunsch in return. A
turning point came when Wunsch was able to help Helena’s sister Róžika, a mom-of-two,
who was transported to Auschwitz from Slovakia with her nine-year-old daughter and newborn son.
Helena heard about their arrival and ran to the crematorium where she feared they would be killed.
She hysterically told the guards that she wanted to die with them. But a friend had alerted Wunsch,
who rushed to the scene just as Josef Mengele, the notorious SS physician known as “The Angel
of Death,” decided which of the prisoners would live or die. When Wunsch came to the crematorium,
he began to violently beat Helena for the crime of violating curfew. While he was beating her,
he secretly whispered to her: "Tell me quickly what your sister's name is before
I'm too late." Helena replied, "You won't be able to. She came with two little children."
Wunsch ten told her: "Children, that's different. Children can't live here."
Immediately after he ran to the crematorium to find Helena’s sister Róžika.
While Wunsch was able to save Róžika by saying that she worked for him in Canada warehouse,
he could do nothing for her children. They were murdered in the gas chamber.
The romance between Helena and Franz secretly continued and Helena was once interrogated and
tortured about their relationship. However, she refused to confirm its existence. She
knew that if she revealed the existence of the relationship, they both would be
executed. She would later say: “ There were moments where I forgot that I was a Jew and
that he was not a Jew and, honestly, in the end I loved him. But it could not be realistic.”
The precise nature of their romance that lasted until the final evacuation of Auschwitz
in January 1945 has never been made clear but according to some witnesses it was not sexual.
According to Bat-Sheva Daga, a Holocaust survivor,
the couple never had sex. As Daga later recalled, inmates slept in bunks stacked
on top of each other in rows of three and it would have been impossible. Equally out of the
question was the chance of Citrónová visiting the officers’ quarters without being caught.
After the war, a former Auschwitz female prisoner said about Wunsch: “He didn't do anything bad to
us, but he was sadistic towards men. Until he met Helena, he hit and kicked women too but
afterwards it was enough for him to beat only men. He often beat them with a stick that he carried
with him. Helena had a positive influence on him and she tried to make him behave not so cruelly”.
However, after the war one Holocaust survivor testified that during the
Jewish revolt in Auschwitz, that occurred on October 7, 1944, Wunsch,
without mercy, shot a 20-year-old Greek Jew.
The relationship ended in January 1945 as the Soviet Army was approaching Auschwitz. During
their last conversation, Franz told her: ‘Take care, Helena, you’ll make it. I’ve loved you so
much’. Then they kissed long and intimately. On January 27, 1945, the Soviet army entered
Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz and liberated about seven thousand prisoners, most of whom were
ill and dying. One of the prisoners liberated by the Red Army from the camp was Helena Citrónová.
However, for the next 27 years she and Franz Wunsch did not see each other.
After the war Helena married a Zionist activist, moved together to Israel and had two
children. Wunsch searched for Helena for years, but Helena avoided the letters that he wrote her.
Wunsch then settled in Austria, got married and started his own family.
In 1972, Franz Wunsch, then 50 years old, was put on trial for war crimes and Helena, then a married
woman and mother of two, came to testify on his behalf after having received a desperately written
request from his wife. She travelled to Vienna despite threats from Jewish rights activists
because she considered it her duty to outline the good things that he had done at Auschwitz
but she also confirmed that she had witnessed him committing crimes against other prisoners.
In court, Helena spoke slowly, without emotion and she did not even look at Wunsch.
However, when it came to her sister Róžika's children,
she could not continue - the words caught in her throat. At that moment Wunsch started to
cry and later repented. He said he had not killed anyone and regretted having beaten the prisoners.
Despite what the judge called “overwhelming evidence of guilt” in the participation of mass
murder, Wunsch was acquitted on all counts. He and Helena never saw each other again.
Helena Citrónová was 84 years old when she died on 4 June 2007 in Tel Aviv in Israel.
Franz Wunsch died of natural causes on 23 February 2009. He was 86 years years old.
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