Helmut Spanglet

Location 
Damaschkestr. 22
Historical name
Küstriner Str. 10
District
Charlottenburg
Stone was laid
07 April 2022
Born
1923 in Berlin
Deportation
on 14 December 1942 to Auschwitz
Murdered
in Auschwitz

The events and emotions surrounding our family's history, deportation and deaths were not talked about after the War therefore our limited knowledge and understanding today is extremely precious.

They existed and they are not forgotten. This is why we wanted to see our grandparents, Manes and Sara Spanglet , and our uncle Helmut Spanglet remembered in Stolpersteine outside their last known “voluntary” address.

Manes Spanglet was born in November 1883 in Jaswin, Galicia. Sara Spanglet was born Sara (Salome) Pufeles in Krakow in 1890. In 1915 the two married in Berlin and settled in Wilmersdorf, Prinzregentenstrasse. Manes was an electrical engineer and co-owned a small factory called Spanglet and Müller. Sara was a housewife. They had three children Heinz -Günther (b.1917), Helmut (b.1923) and Gisela (b.1925). According to information from the Arolsen Archive a "Standesamt I, Berlin Halensee" document confirms that they were deported to Minsk on the “V-th” (5th) Transport on 14th November 1941 to Minsk. No more German official documents are known related to these three people remembered with Stolpersteine.

Helmut Spanglet (born 1923) was 19 when he died - but we do not know how and where he died. We do know he was separated from his parents where they lived in Küstriner Strasse 10 (Damaschkestrasse 22 today) in 1941 and was living in the Jugendheim in Rosenthaler Strasse when he was listed on the "Transportliste" of the "Geheime Staatspolizei" and deported on a train headed for Auschwitz on December 14th 1942.

Helmut was the older brother of Gisela Spanglet born 1925 (later Gisela Eisner) who was taken to England on the first Kindertransport in November 1938. Helmut was also the younger brother of Heinz-Günther Spanglet born 1917 (later Stephen Patrick Dale). As a 17-year-old Stephen was harassed by the Gestapo for anti-Nazi activity and forced for the first time to leave Berlin in 1934. He went to Hamburg to join the German Merchant Navy. Although forbidden to live in Berlin, a few years later he was picked up on return to Berlin and detained in Sachsenhausen. After his release he was able to leave Germany to join his sister Gisela by then living in England. Gisela, a minor, had been fostered in a Christian family with teenage children. The English authorities shipped Heinz-Günther to Australia to be interned as an enemy alien.

We are aware from correspondence in 1939 between Dr Vera Lachmann, the headmistress of the Jüdische Privatschule in Grunewald, and her former pupil Gisela Spanglet that attempts were made to obtain an agricultural work permit for Helmut with the intention to secure his escape to England.

When the War ended Helmut's siblings Gisela and Stephen presumed their brother Helmut and parents Manes and Sara did not survive. They went on to make England their home and raise their own families there.