August 31, 2026
Two documents, one family: the Behrens twins
A dossier on Gelsenkirchen says two young people were probably used in the medical experiments at Auschwitz. A list from the camp's dentist says they were.
By Roma Holocaust Memorial Centre
Among the material catalogued this month are two sets of records that were compiled independently, decades apart, by people who were not working together. Read side by side, they close a gap that neither closes alone.
The first is the reconstruction of the Sinti and Lovara families deported from the municipal forced camp on Reginenstraße in Gelsenkirchen on 9 and 10 March 1943 — at least eighty-three people, of whom three lived to see the liberation. It was assembled from municipal registration records, Arolsen Archives files and the research of the historian Stefan Goch. Among the family of Dietrich Behrens, born in Bremen in 1879, it names twins: Frinka and Johann, born 19 April 1921 in Zetel, given the prisoner numbers Z-2381 and Z-2383. Of what happened to them it says only that they were probably victims of the inhumane medical experiments carried out at Auschwitz, and that it can be assumed both were killed.
The second is a single sheet from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Archives. On 16 April 1943 the camp's chief dentist reported that dental models had been taken the previous day from nine pairs of twins held in the so-called Gypsy camp. Each pair is listed by prisoner number and date of birth. The second entry reads: Z-2381 Behrends Frinka, Z-2383 Behrends Johann, born 19.4.21.
The numbers match. The birth date matches. The transport that carried them from Bochum had arrived five weeks earlier, on 13 March. The dossier's "probably" was a historian being careful with an absence of evidence; the dentist's list is the evidence. Frinka and Johann Behrens were twenty-one years old, and they were selected because they were twins.
It is a small correction to make, and it does not change the outcome for anyone. We record it because this is what an archive is for. The persecution of Roma and Sinti was carried out on paper by people who kept good records, and the same habit that made the deportations efficient has left, in fragments across half a dozen institutions, a means of saying precisely who was taken and what was done to them. Those fragments are only useful when somebody puts them next to each other.
Both records are in the collection. If your family came from the Ruhr, or passed through Komárom, or was deported across the Bug, and you hold papers you have never been able to place, we would like to look at them with you.