Frieda Trabitz, married name Drews, received the embroidery “From far away I greet you!” as a birthday present from a fellow prisoner in Sachsenhausen Soviet special camp in 1949.
Frieda Trabitz was one of more than 120 former concentration camp guards who were persecuted by the occupying power after 1945 and imprisoned in the Soviet special camp Sachsenhausen. She donated the exhibit to the memorial in 1999.
Frieda Trabitz, born in 1923, was arrested in October 1945 by the NKVD Operative Group Bernburg, in her hometown of Staßfurt. From May 1943 to May 1945, Trabitz had worked as a guard in the Zwodau concentration camp, a subcamp of Flossenbürg and Ravensbrück, as well as in the two main camps. For example, according to an entry in the labor service records of Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, dated July 24, 1943, she guarded a work detail of 20 “protective custody prisoners” who left the concentration camp during the day for outdoor work.
In June 1946, a Soviet military tribunal of a Red Army division sentenced Frieda Trabitz to ten years in prison.
In 1948, after the dissolution of the special camp in Torgau, she was admitted to the military hospital of Sachsenhausen special camp with tuberculosis. For her birthday in 1949, another patient there, to whom she had secretly given some of her scarce food ration, embroidered this greeting. When the Soviet special camp Sachsenhausen was closed, she was transferred to the GDR women’s prison in Hoheneck in February 1950. She was also imprisoned in Waldheim for a time, before being released from Hoheneck at the end of October 1955. Frieda Trabitz left the GDR in 1956.
Frieda Drews visited the memorial in the 1990s. She trivialized her work as a concentration camp guard. In 1997, she falsely claimed that she had been imprisoned by the Soviets because she had beaten a “Russian lover”. This is a derogatory term for a German woman who had a relationship with a Soviet soldier after the Second World War.
