Fredy Hirsch

Fredy Hirsch (1916-1944), born Alfred Hirsch in Aachen, was a German-Jewish sports teacher and Zionist youth movement leader. After the Nazi rise to power he led Jewish scouting and youth groups in several German cities and later in Prague. Deported to Theresienstadt, he became deputy supervisor of children and organised exercise, hygiene and discipline for them, while he and his assistants kept up clandestine lessons under camp conditions. At the Theresienstadt family camp in Auschwitz II-Birkenau he supervised the children's block. He died there on 8 March 1944, shortly before the family camp was to be liquidated, and accounts differ on whether it was suicide or poisoning.