Robert T. Odeman

Name Robert T. Odeman Date of Birth November 30, 1904 Place of Birth Hamburg, Germany Born Martin Hoyer, Robert took Robert T. Odeman as his stage name when he began a professional career as an actor and musician. In 1922, when he was 17-year-old, Robert got to know his first great love, the architecture student Martin Ulrich Eppendorf, called Muli (in the above picture Muli is at the left and Robert at thr right). For ten years, until the death of Muli, they shared a close relationship. At the beginning of the Third Reich, Robert Odemann worked as musical director at the Neues Theater in Hamburg. 1933 - 1939: In 1935 Robert opened a cabaret in Hamburg. One year later the Nazis shut it down, charging that it was politically subversive. Robert then moved to Berlin where he developed a close relationship with a male friend. After the arrest of this friend from whom the Gestapo was able to extract a confession about a homosexual relationship with Robert, in November 1937 Robert was arrested under paragraph 175 of the Nazi-revised criminal code, which outlawed homosexuality, and in June 1938 he was sentenced to 27 months in prison. 1940 - 1944: Robert was released from prison in 1940 but remained under police surveillance, and the Reichsmusikkammer - a Nazi-organ controlling German artists - banned him from pursuing his career. They monitored his correspondence with a half-Jewish friend in Munich and with friends abroad. Only five months later, in July 1940, Heinrich Himmler gave the order to send convicted homosexuals into concentration camps directly after they had served their sentence. When, despite his engagement with a lesbian cabaret artist, Robert was arrested again under paragraph 175 in November 1942, this order became his fate. This time the Gestapo put him into Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he was assigned an office job as a Blockschreiber (writer of his barrack) in Sachsenhausen - a job that increased his chances for survival considerably compared to the clinker factory. As a Blockschreiber, Odemann had access to the prisoner's files and was able to help others by letting "disappear" index cards from endangered inmates. He also performed as a cabaret artist in the camp and thus helped to strengthen the survival will of his fellow detainees. During the death march, in order to evacuate the camp Sachsenhausen, towards the Baltic in April 1945, 40-year-old Robert escaped with two other "175ers," and survived After the war, Robert returned to Berlin, where he worked as a writer and composer. A classical pianist, Robert gave concerts throughout Europe, but a hand injury tragically ended his concert career. He died in 1985. Notes -