Who we are
Hedwig Ebel - Employed for one day
Lifetime: 1904-1974
Employed as: Unskilled worker
Employment at the plant: 1940
Grounds for discrimination/persecution: Jewish [by faith]
Fate: Termination of employment; survived
The words “non-Aryan” [in German: nichtarisch] are inscribed at the bottom of the yellowed personnel card. They are placed in parentheses, almost as an incidental note; looking back, their addition apparently as a matter of course reads as even clearer justification. It explains why the then 36-year-old Hedwig Ebel was dismissed on April 19, 1940 – curiously, just one day after she had been hired. For one day, Hedwig Ebel worked at the Ludwigshafen plant, specifically in the dispatch department for synthetic tanning agents (Building Lu 283).
Her personnel card comes from a file named “Unskilled workers 1900–1966,” so it can be assumed that Hedwig Ebel was employed as such a worker, despite having attended a commercial school and presumably completed a business apprenticeship. There is no photo attached to the personnel card. In this respect, too, her identity remains obscured.
BASF’s archive records generally contain little information about their unskilled workers from this period – a personnel card at most. More extensive personnel files were only kept for salaried employees.
But how did she survive?
Less than a year after her abrupt dismissal, in October 1941, in the midst of all the risks posed by the Nazi regime and the war, Hedwig Ebel gave birth to a son. She did not have a husband. Hedwig Ebel did not convert and continued to officially identify as Jewish. It is still unclear where she lived following her dismissal and how she managed to survive as a Jew during this time, avoiding incarceration and deportation. All we know is that she survived. The civil register in Ludwigshafen reveals that she lived there in the early 1950s. Hedwig Ebel died on February 4, 1974 in the nearby town of Rockenhausen.
Among “unskilled workers” (a category used by the Nazis and to which she assigned herself), Hedwig Ebel is the only Jewish individual employed at the I.G. Farben plants in Ludwigshafen/Oppau to have been identified to date.
