Otto Buses

Otto Busse He works as a freelance painter and painter in Tilsit. In 1933 he joined the Nazi Party, and when the Nazis intensified the persecution of Jews in Germany in 1935, he left again in protest. Subsequently, he no longer receives public commissions. Under pressure from the National Socialists, he became a member of the Nazi Party again on July 1, 1940.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, buses are incorporated into a police reserve unit in Poland, which he leaves again in March 1943 to take on an assignment from the civil and military administration in Bialystok for painting and renovation work in hospitals and in the apartments of deported Jews. In his painting business, he employs up to 40 Jewish forced laborers from the ghetto. When he hears about the atrocities of the occupying power and the catastrophic conditions, he smuggles food supplies into the ghetto and joins the local resistance. In order to keep his workers’ work permits, which protect them from deportation, he takes on as many assignments as possible.

In August 1943, the ghetto is dissolved. Shortly thereafter, while renovating an apartment, Busse meets the resistance fighters Chaika Grossman and Chasia Bielicka. The friends have been living with a Polish family under false papers since the liquidation of the ghetto. Both work underground as couriers, delivering weapons and important information to partisan fighters hiding in the forests. Busse provides Bielicka with his office and his typewriter for the production of anti-fascist leaflets.

Grossmann makes known buses with textile manufacturer Arthur Schade. Together with Grossmann, Bielicka and other resistance fighters, they support the Polish resistance and the Jewish partisans. At their own expense, Busse supplies weapons, warm clothing and medicine to the forests. He passes on news of impending destruction operations, which he has due to his continued good relations with the German police.

In August 1944, Busse was drafted into the Wehrmacht; at the end of the year he was taken into Soviet captivity and was only released in November 1949.

After his release from captivity, he Otto Busse settled in Darmstadt. In the late 1950s, he made contact with Chasia Bielicka and Chaika Grossman, who were now living in Israel. At their invitation, he visited them in November 1961. In 1969, he moved with his second wife Erna to Moschav Shitufi Nes Ammim, a settlement founded by Dutch Protestants in the north of Israel. Due to health problems, the couple returned to Germany in 1972.

Otto Busse In 1968, Yad Vashem honored him as a „Righteous Among the Nations.“.

Source: Yad Vashem