Brigitte Alexander – her smile lives on
Fritz Solmitz is sitting in the grass. He is holding his little daughter Brigitte in his arms, who is smiling playfully at the camera. Next to the photo from 1929, the year Brigitte was born, the photo shows an exhibit where Fritz's pocket watch is displayed in a glass case. Underneath the watch are tiny notes written on cigarette paper—Fritz Solmitz's secret writings from his imprisonment in the Fuhlsbüttel Concentration Camp. In them, the Doctor of Law, Social Democrat, and editor secretly described the torture he suffered in the concentration camp. Coming from a Jewish family, he became the target of the guards' vicious antisemitism and was subjected to agonizing abuse. His notes end on the evening before his death on September 19, 1933.
To this day, the story of Fritz Solmitz continues to move many people. Some of them also had the opportunity to meet his daughter Brigitte Alexander. For almost twenty years, she repeatedly visited Hamburg from the USA to remember her father. She brought family members with her so that the family history would not be forgotten.
We have received the sad news that Brigitte Alexander passed away on November 6, 2025, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. We will miss her. Our thoughts are with her children and her family.
We knew Brigitte Alexander as a warm-hearted and intelligent woman who was deeply committed to keeping alive the memory of the prisoners of the Fuhlsbüttel Concentration Camp and who was passionate about passing on this history to young people. It is thanks to her that her father's pocket watch was returned to Hamburg. After her husband's death, her mother Karoline Solmitz fled to the USA with her children in 1938. The family found a new home in Pennsylvania. Karoline Solmitz talked a lot to her children about their father, but hardly ever about the crimes committed against him. It was not until 1958, when Brigitte Alexander was almost 30 years old, that her mother showed her her father's secret notes from the Fuhlsbüttel Concentration Camp – a great shock for Brigitte Alexander. It did not get any easier for the family when, four years later, they had to witness the deputy commander of the Fuhlsbüttel Concentration Camp, Willi Dusenschön, being acquitted of murder charges – “due to lack of evidence,” as the verdict stated. The trial had focused on the crimes committed against Fritz Solmitz, meticulously documented in his own notes.
And yet despite this, in 1987, the family made Fritz Solmitz's pocket watch and notes available to the newly established Fuhlsbüttel Memorial. Then, in 2000, Brigitte Alexander began traveling to Hamburg every year to visit the memorial.
“Why do I remember?” Brigitte Alexander asked rhetorically in a speech she gave in Fuhlsbüttel in 2012. "Because I want to know who I am. Personal identity is a person's greatest asset. Proof of this high value is the fact that people have always been willing to die to preserve their identity. And that includes many who died in Fuhlsbüttel. (...) I was fortunate to have a father who understood and was able to fulfil the needs and wishes of a small child, and for that I am very grateful. He helped shape my personality and has been with me throughout my life."
For many years, Brigitte Alexander stood by the Fuhlsbüttel Memorial. The smile on her childhood photo can still be seen there.
If you would like to know more about Brigitte Alexander: Holocaust in Hamburg: Contemporary witness B. Alexander tells her story | FINK.HAMBURG
