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This story is part of “The Last Survivors,” originally published Jan. 8, 2016. Lowens died in 2017.
Before veteran character actor Curt Lowens became a go-to player of Nazis across stage and screen — from Dr. Josef Mengele in the play The Deputy on Broadway to an SS general on Wonder Woman on CBS — he was Curt Loewenstein, a Polish teen living with his parents in Berlin, his bar mitzvah postponed when the synagogue burned down during Kristallnacht in November 1938. The family nearly fled to England by way of Holland, but the Reich conquered the Dutch days before they were set to leave, and the Loewensteins were soon swept into the Westerbork concentration camp.
“I remember distinctly the reading of the [deportation] lists on Monday night, the crying and many times screaming and separation of family of who was on the cattle car on Tuesday morning at 1 a.m.,” says Lowens, now 90. Fortunately, his family had paperwork indicating that they were not to be deported yet, which brought them a release. Soon the son took on a new identity as a small-town teacher named Ben Joosten, joining a three-person cell of the Dutch resistance that would, in time, be credited with saving 123 lives by delivering Jewish children (and a few adults) to families who hid them.
By V-E Day, he had rescued and found safe shelter for two downed American airmen who had landed in a nearby field — he received a commendation from Gen. Eisenhower — and, as an interpreter for the advancing British Army, helped place Karl Donitz (Hitler’s designated successor as president) and key minister Albert Speer under house arrest. “My sanity turned around,” observes Lowens, recalling “the Gestapo knocking on doors,” whereas by liberation, “I now knocked on doors.”
In time, he turned to Hollywood, bringing his wartime experience with him, whether when telling Oscar-winning director Robert Wise (The Sound of Music, West Side Story) during his successful audition for The Hindenburg that he’d witnessed the airship over Berlin — “He says, ‘You did? Sit down, tell me about it!’ ” — or in performing Nazi roles. “As a survivor, they now serve the memory of what some of them did or didn’t do, the horror of eliminating the millions,” he says. “I am lucky to be here and tell you some of the story.”
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