Adam Bieber: Compassion in Concentration Camps

Adam Bieber (1897–1963), a stonemason in Flossenbürg, displayed exceptional compassion in a horrifying place. Bieber was a member of the church council of the Lutheran parish in Flossenbürg and was appointed lay assistant in 1941.

He worked in Flossenbürg’s granite industry all his life. During World War II, he was assigned to work in the SS’s own German Earth and Stone Works in Flossenbürg concentration camp as an instructor and trained concentration camp inmates to be stonemasons.

One of the inmates assigned to Bieber was an eighteen-year old Polish high school student, Kazimierz Recki. Recki had been arrested together with other Poles in Lukow in October of 1940. After a brief period in Auschwitz, he was transported to Flossenbürg concentration camp on January 23, 1941. Most of them were shot to death by the SS in the ensuing months.

At a gathering of former inmates invited to Flossenbürg in 1997, Kazimierz Recki related that he and a few others owed their survival to Adam Bieber. Recki wrote about Bieber (calling him “Bebel”) with deep gratitude in a letter of January 16, 1997:

I worked as a stonemason in Hall III. Every hall had civilian instructors. Bebel was the name of the instructor in our Hall III. He was always undemanding and very decent guy. … Next to me two young inmates … cut their own stone. End of July, aforementioned comrades were unexpectedly absent. I knew that both had been shot yesterday evening.

Meister Bebel arrives: Where are the two? Has something happened? he asks. Yesterday, they were both shot, I answer. For heaven’s sake! That can’t be, he says. ... In his face I notice horror, anger and anxiety. This fact, this image is unforgettable. I know that Master Bebel, worried and outraged, immediately reported his remark in his own works. As a result of this report, the stonemasons were saved.

On September 13, 1941 all of the inmates, who had been arrested in Lukow, were shot to death. For the first time, the stonemasons stayed alive and that is why I am alive to this day. ... I think that we still living stonemasons, we should thank Meister Bebel for our lives. With great honor I mention his name, which cannot be forgotten. (H. Sörgel, Kirchengemeinde, 168)