Leo Haas

Leo Haas (15 April 1901 – 13 August 1983) was a German painter, graphic artist, draughtsman and caricaturist.

Life Born in Opava, Silesia, Austria-Hungary, Haas studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe from 1919 to 1922 and then in Berlin with Emil Orlik and Willy Jaeckel. He worked from 1926 as a painter, graphic artist, press artist and caricaturist in Vienna and later in his hometown Opava in Czechoslovakia.

After the Nazi Occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Haas, who came from a middle-class Jewish family, was deported to the "Juden-KZ" Nisko, a forced labor camp personally supervised by Adolf Eichmann. Haas was one of the 500 inmates who were then later returned to their home towns.

In late autumn 1942, he and his wife were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he joined the group of artists of Theresienstadt around Bedřich Fritta from Prague. Among other things, they managed to smuggle drawings about the conditions of life in Theresienstadt into neutral foreign countries. In 1944, the Gestapo officers of the concentration camp command and Adolf Eichmann accused them of this in personally conducted interrogations. The artists and their family members were taken to the cells of the Small Fortress prison and later to other concentration camps. Haas was the only painter of Theresienstadt who survived imprisonment. and also to hide the picture book For Tommy on his third birthday in Theresienstadt 22.1.1944 by Bedřich Fritta for his son Tomáš.

On 28 October 1944, Haas became prisoner no. 199 885 in Auschwitz concentration camp. There, too, he managed to draw. On 27 November 1944, Haas was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to the Sonderkommando for Counterfeiting, together with other "specialists" and the note "return undesired". There he was charged with, among other things, forgery of British Stamps.

From 1955, Haas lived in East Berlin, where he worked as a cartoonist for the Neues Deutschland, the Eulenspiegel and other newspapers. a total of 1185 drawings until 1982. For his 70th birthday, DEFA created the documentary .

Haas died in East Berlin at the age of 82 and was buried in the artists' section of the Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde.

Works