Hermann Höllenreiner

Hermann Höllenreiner, known all his life as Mano, was born on 19 October 1933 in Hagen, Westphalia, into a Sinti family of carriers and horse dealers. His parents were Johann Baptist and Margarete Höllenreiner, and he had a sister, Josefine, known as Lilli. He spent his childhood and youth largely in Munich.

As the Nazi regime stepped up its persecution of the Sinti and Roma, his parents were forbidden to travel the country with their covered wagon and their horses were confiscated. In 1940 his father was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and stationed in Lenggries in the Isar valley, and the family moved there with him. Like most Sinti soldiers, he was later dismissed from the army on "racial grounds"; back in Munich he was made to do forced labour, paving the Giesinger Berg road on the east bank of the Isar.

In March 1943 the Gestapo took the family from their beds early one morning and deported them, together with much of their extended family, from Munich to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Mano was nine. He recalled the journey in a cattle wagon as lasting eight days, with 40 people in one wagon and some dying on the way. At Birkenau the Sinti and Roma were held in the so-called "Gypsy family camp", in former horse stables, and on 16 March 1943 he was tattooed with the prisoner number Z 3526.

He described hunger, disease and roll calls in which prisoners stood barefoot in the snow, and told Bayerischer Rundfunk that the camp doctor Josef Mengele had carried out experiments on him, with injections and blankets full of typhus lice. Before the SS murdered the camp's remaining prisoners in the gas chambers on the night of 2 to 3 August 1944, the family was transferred to other camps, as former Wehrmacht soldiers and prisoners judged fit for work were moved out. Mano was held in the men's camp at Ravensbrück and then at Sachsenhausen, where he was alone, without his parents. More than 100 of his relatives were murdered by the Nazis.

When the SS cleared Sachsenhausen at the end of the war, the exhausted, traumatised boy escaped and was picked up by freed French prisoners, who took him with them to France. In Paris he was placed for a time in a psychiatric institution and then with foster families; he had lost track of his name and origins, and kept quiet for fear his German background would be discovered. He was identified only through the number tattooed on his arm, with the help of tracing services, and in December 1946 he returned to his parents and sister in Munich, who had also survived.

For decades he did not speak publicly about what had happened. In 2004 he described his childhood under Nazi rule for the first time in an interview with Bayerischer Rundfunk. The writer Anja Tuckermann retold his life in the 2008 documentary book for young readers "Mano. Der Junge, der nicht wusste, wo er war", after which he appeared regularly as a contemporary witness, speaking especially to young people in schools. He was a delegate of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma and of the Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma, and campaigned for the equal treatment of Sinti and Roma and against right-wing extremism.

Höllenreiner married Else, with whom he spent 70 years, and they had a daughter, Carol. The couple lived in Mettenheim, near Mühldorf am Inn and some 80 kilometres east of Munich, where the family ran an antiques business. In a 2018 interview with Deutsche Welle the couple described continuing prejudice against Sinti in the town, and Else Höllenreiner spoke of the nightmares that still haunted her husband. Photographs of him showing his Auschwitz tattoo to the former federal presidents Christian Wulff and Joachim Gauck hung in their home.

Mano Höllenreiner died on Friday 16 October 2026 in Mühldorf am Inn, three days before his 93rd birthday. His family told Bayerischer Rundfunk that he died after a long illness, surrounded by his family and cared for to the end by his daughter Carol and his wife Else. BR24 reported his death on 18 October 2026.

Höllenreiner was one of the last survivors of the Auschwitz "Gypsy family camp" able to bear witness in person. In later life he was widely honoured: he received the Federal Cross of Merit in February 2013 for his educational work, presented by the Bavarian culture minister Ludwig Spaenle, was invited to the Bavarian Landtag as a guest of honour, and in January 2020 accompanied Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. His story, told in Anja Tuckermann's book "Mano", and his many talks in schools and at memorials, particularly in Mühldorf, where the Nazis had run a concentration subcamp, remain part of German remembrance of the genocide of the Sinti and Roma.