Rudolf Dörrier, born in 1899, was a bookseller who had been living in Berlin since 1926. He married Lilly Wassmund, who came from a Jewish family. Since at least the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the lives of the couple and their daughter Vera, born in 1933, were overshadowed by the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies. As the Dörriers’ marriage was considered a “privileged mixed marriage,” Rudolf, Lily, and their young daughter were initially spared some of the compulsory measures. However, Rudolf Dörrier found himself under increasing pressure to file for divorce from his wife.
After a brief stint of military service in 1939-40, he found further employment at the Julius Springer scientific publishing house.
In May 1944, he faced the threat of being deployed to the Eastern Front. Instead, Rudolf Dörrier was assigned to the Totenkopf Battalion of the guard units at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he served as an SS-Unterscharführer. The circumstances surrounding this assignment remain unclear. In February 1945, he was dishonorably discharged from his unit. He witnessed the end of the war and the liberation together with his wife and daughter in Pankow.
From 1949 until his retirement in October 1965, Rudolf Dörrier headed the Pankow district library and, at the same time, founded the district’s local history archive, which he continued to oversee voluntarily in his retirement until 1989.
In 1986, the Ministry of Culture of the GDR conferred him the title “Museum Councilor.” Further honors and awards followed. In 2000, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Rudolf Dörrier passed away on December 7, 2002 at the age of 103. Between 2004 and 2020, the elementary school in Rosenthal was named the “Rudolf-Dörrier-School.”
It was not until 2017 that his membership in the concentration camp guard units became public knowledge. Rudolf Dörrier never publicly disclosed this part of his biography.
