Wherever he can, Otto Herrmann, as camp elder at the
Niederorschel satellite camp, stands up for his fellow prisoners. He is a man of action: in the 1920s, as an early member of the KPD, he took part in street fights against right-wing extremists. At the outbreak of war, the Gestapo sent the trained electrician to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Among the communists there, he was something of an outsider. In Niederorschel, he did not shy away from conflict with the SS. When the SS evacuated the camp in April 1945, he encouraged the prisoners. After the liberation, he remained politically active. In 1948, however, he resigned from the SED and worked as a janitor thereafter. He was posthumously honored as a “Righteous Among the Nations.”
