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Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day last weekend, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) and Artists 4 Israel unveiled a street mural in Dortmund, Germany, honoring the late “Righteous Among the Nations” hero Werner Krumme.
The mural was painted on the side of a Dortmund youth center by artist Julian Schimanski, known as “Mister Oreo 39.”
Similar “Righteous Among the Nations” murals have gone up in recent years in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal;Â Patras, Greece; New York City; and Los Angeles, California.
Krumme, born in Dortmund in 1909, married a Jewish woman, Ruth Haas, shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933, and they were both arrested in Breslau in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz after it was discovered that they were planning to help Ruth’s sisters flee Germany.
While at Auschwitz, Krumme was designated as a “prisoner-functionary,” and he manipulated selection lists to secure the placement of numerous Jewish prisoners in the infirmary or work detachments to protect them from execution in the gas chambers.
While his wife did perish at Auschwitz, Krumme survived the war, and he lived in Munich — where he was active in fighting neo-Nazism and far-right extremism — until he passed away in 1972.
This past November, Dortmund hosted the 2023 European Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism, organized by CAM. The summit featured a temporary mural display outside Dortmund’s City Hall paying homage to the late Paul Hirsch, the city’s first and so far only Jewish mayor.
For more information on the “Righteous Among the Nations” Global Mural Project, please visit: artists4israel.org/righteous
