Gert Schramm

Gert Schramm (28 November 1928 – 18 April 2016) was a German survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was the youngest of six black prisoners. He was the son of a German woman and an African-American father and was arrested in violation of Nazi racial purity laws.

Early years Schramm was born to Marianne Schramm and Jack Brankson, an engineer from an American steel company who was in Thuringia on a contract. Schramm grew up in Witterda and Bad Langensalza. After graduating from the Volksschule, he worked as a helper in a car repair shop. According to the Nuremberg Laws, he was denied the right to any vocational training as a Mischling ersten Grades, (mixed race of the first grade). He was also living evidence of illegal interracial "incest" that carried a death penalty for his father and himself.

Schramm was put in with the political prisoners, a decision he credits with saving his life. He was forced to work in a stone quarry where the survival rate of prisoners was very low. Every day, ten to fifteen men were carried out, dead.

After 1945 After the liberation of Buchenwald and the end of the Second World War, Schramm returned to his mother in Bad Langensalza. He then worked at the Wismut uranium mine in the Soviet occupation zone. From 1956 to 1964, he worked in Essen in a coal mine, but he then chose to move to East Germany, three years after the construction of the Berlin Wall. There, he worked at the Barnimer Busgesellschaft (Barnim Bus Company) in Eberswalde, Brandenburg, and resumed his education, becoming a certified mechanic and, later, a Meister.

He became a shop foreman and department head, went to work at a civil engineering combine, where he worked his way up to department head of the vehicle fleet at the Eberswalde civil engineering combine. With the help of another former Buchenwald prisoner, Hermann Axen, who had been one of a group of Communist prisoners who protected Schramm, he started his own business in 1985, "Schramms Reisen," a taxi company now run by his son.