Dedicated to the dead of Dachau: The secret diaries of Edgar Kupfer
How one man risked his life to record the truth about Dachau
Eighty-five years ago today, on 11 November 1940, the Gestapo took Edgar Kupfer to Dachau concentration camp. Over the next five years, this globetrotter, esthete, and man of letters would carefully observe everyday life there and secretly document it at great risk to himself. He hid his notes in the floor of a materials store and was able to recover them in 1945. His manuscript runs to nearly two thousand pages and is one of the most important personal accounts of the Nazi crimes committed during day-to-day life in a concentration camp. He dedicated it to the dead of Dachau. The Arolsen Archives holds documents which help trace his years in the concentration camp and his life afterwards.
“The distant barracks glinted green through the barbed wire. Even from afar you could see that everything was kept scrupulously clean, there was not the smallest piece of paper laying around anywhere. But above it all loomed something merciless, something terrible, something ice cold, which was frightening. Never before in my life had I found an environment so unconditionally merciless, dangerous, and hostile,” Edgar Kupfer wrote on a scrap of paper in the fall of 1942 – secretly, while hiding behind a mountain of folders and crates in the administrative office of a screw factory.
The 36-year-old Edgar was supposed to set up a card file for the factory, so he had access to office supplies. He seized the opportunity and dared to write down for the first time what he had experienced on the day he arrived in Dachau. Upon learning that Edgar was a writer, a fellow prisoner told him on that first day: “Keep your ears and eyes open, comrade, and maybe you’ll make it, maybe you’ll come through and taste freedom again, and when you’ve taken everything in, maybe you can write it then, the book about Dachau.”
A restless but loving family
Edgar Kupfer was born on April 24, 1906, on the Koberwitz estate near Breslau (now Wrocław). His father was the estate manager but he soon lost his job. He subsequently took a job as a salesman in Bonn and then in the district of Harz, where Edgar’s sister, Irma, was born. Edgar had a loving relationship with his parents and his sister. The family had more moves ahead of it.
In the years that followed, Edgar attended school in Regensburg and Stuttgart. He graduated from secondary school in Stuttgart at the start of the 1920s and then worked in agriculture, administration, and in a bank. He wrote poems on the side and published his first newspaper articles under the name Kupfer-Koberwitz.
Pacifism andworldlinesswere his “crimes”
It was in this period that Edgar acknowledged that he was gay, which shattered his relationship with his parents. He started to travel, lived in Capri, and spent a long time in Venice and Austria. He earned money by occasionally working as a waiter or concierge, and he was exposed to new ways of living and thinking. He became a staunch vegetarian, and he eventually settled in his new adopted home of Paris.
Meanwhile, the Nazis had come to power in Germany. Their inflammatory, warmongering rhetoric was alien to Edgar. He did not consider himself a political person, but he firmly rejected violence, as he later stated in a questionnaire for the International Refugee Organization (IRO)to justify why he had emigrated to Paris in 1934. He tried to get by in the city by working as an assistant in a textile company, but he fell ill and hoped to recuperate in southern Europe.
In 1937, he took a job as a tour guide on the Italian island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples. He put his writing experience to use producing advertising to help boost tourism in the area. He was popular with the locals. “Fascism was dominant there, but the population was entirely against it,” he later wrote to explain why he had moved there. He felt very comfortable there and spoke out “openly against Hitler’s government and against the war (which was being planned at the time).”
Deportation to Dachau
In June 1940, Mussolini’s Italy joined Germany in waging war against France and Great Britain. The situation grew more perilous for Edgar. At the start of September 1940, he was expelled from Italy under a German-Italian extradition agreement for having made anti-fascist statements. The Gestapo were already waiting for him at the Brenner Pass. After being interrogated in Innsbruck and Munich, he was deported on 11 November 1940 to Dachau concentration camp.
Documents associated with Edgar Kupfer in Dachau
He was initially assigned to a work detail on the “plantation” which had to harvest and clean vegetables. On the first day, it was chili peppers. “At the sight of the small red fruits, I had to think of my Ischia, where they dangled so beautifully and smiling in the sun,” he wrote later. On the third day he was already reassigned to his first clerical position.
Systematic humiliation and dehumanization on a daily basis
Every day on the way to his place of work, he observed the cruelties of the SS guards – and those of his fellow prisoners. “The worse their health was, the more irritable they became […], the more injustice they experienced, the more they behaved [this way] toward their neighbors, the most bestially they were treated, the more brutal they became themselves. I had thought that shared suffering bonded people together, but it divided them.”
Eventually he was placed in solitary confinement and then transferred to Neuengamme concentration camp in January 1941. He had to perform heavy physical labor there. In April he returned on an invalid transport, totally exhausted and weighing just 44 kilograms. Now his prisoner number was 24,814. Fellow prisoners secretly shared their food rations with him. He regained his strength, and in October 1941 he began to work as a forced laborer in the office of the Präzifix screw factory.
More than 1,800 pages
“For two years I lived in the concentration camp without being able to write a single page about our lives. I wouldn’t have dared,” he wrote. But now he took the chance and bravely started to record the dreadful atrocities in Dachau for future generations: “Imagine, here in Dachau – where the barracks and the floors of the rooms must shine like the parquet floor of a salon, where every checked pattern of the beds must be precisely aligned, where you are punished if a button is missing – here, in this order, the corpses are plunked down as if they were rubbish.”
Notesas evidence of crimes against humanity
The longer he was imprisoned, the weaker Edgar felt. He was plagued by heart problems and overcome by a feeling of inner emptiness. Parallel to his “Dachau Book” he wrote poems and kept a personal diary. On 22 September 1943, he noted: “I am often so tired, inwardly and outwardly, that I would like to lie down and die, simply die.” But he hung on and continued to write. On page after page, he documented crime after crime. He eventually produced bales of paper too big to hide in the office. With the help of another prisoner, he buried his notes under the floor of a materials store in the grounds of the concentration camp.
Liberation and recovery of the Dachaubooks
In 1944, the advancing Allies bombed the camp. Edgar’s foot was injured in an air raid in October and he was sent to the sickbay. US troops liberated him there on April 29, 1945, along with 67,000 other prisoners. Just a few days later, on May 5, he led the US official responsible for gathering evidence of Nazi war crimes to the place where he had hidden his papers, and together they recovered the manuscript. It had been damaged by water, but Edgar managed to save it. He dried out the bales of paper and began typing out the text. He stayed in Dachau for a while to do this, but later the US military government sent him to the palace of the Thurn und Taxis family near Regensburg to continue this work.
Edgar wanted to leave Germany as quicky as possible. He felt like a stranger in the country. But he was stuck first in Regensburg and then in Stuttgart. He had no money. Finally he tried to acquire a residence permit in Switzerland and applied for financial support from the Swiss social welfare service. He filled out forms for this multiple times. These are now held by the Arolsen Archives. In 1950, he wrote to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) explaining the reason for his imprisonment in a concentration camp and expressing his desire never to have to live in Germany again: “They were afraid of the free speech of someone who was not afraid.”
Financially difficult postwar years
In 1953, Edgar – now going by the name Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz – emigrated to the USA. He bequeathed the originals of his manuscript to the University of Chicago and kept his head above water with odd jobs again. Excerpts from his notes were published in 1956, but he would never produce any literary work again. “I have not been able to write anything since 1945, and that is probably my greatest suffering – by which I mean it is the symptom of my great suffering, just as if a bird could no longer sing,” Edgar wrote in a letter to a friend in 1960.
Death in despised Germany
He left the USA and sought good fortune again in Italy, this time in Sardinia. But the compensation he eventually received for his concentration camp imprisonment in Germany was far too little to live from, as was the case for other former prisoners. He had to rely on help from friends. In 1984 he returned to Germany, where he spent the last years of his life in a nursing home in Stuttgart. He died there in 1991.
He did not live to see the publication of his complete manuscript in 1997 by the director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial at the time. The “Dachau Diaries” are one of the most important pieces of written evidence about the activities in Dachau concentration camp, the prisoner society, and the camp SS. The original handwritten pages can still be viewed in the University of Chicago Library. The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial holds a copy for research purposes.