Fleischeuer, Adèle Jan “Gerard”, born 25-02-1889 te Oirsbeek, Netherlands,
two months before Adolf Hitler,
as the son of tanner Frans Lambert Willibrordus Fleischeuer and Félicité America. After primary school he attended the gymnasium at the Episcopal College of St. Joseph in Sittard. He went on foot to Sittard and back and therefore had to get up at five in the morning. Gerard further trained in the tanning profession. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he was mobilized as a conscript soldier and served in the grenadier infantry regiment
for 2.5 years under serial number 7862 LL, stationed with the Coast Guard.



The 34-year-old tanner Gerard Fleischeuer married on 25-07-1923 in Oirsbeek
to the 33-year-old teacher Philomèna Catharina Bettonville. She was born on 16-03-1890 in Kanne (Belgium) as the daughter of farmer Guillaume Bettonville and Maria Petronella Hubertina Hulsen. Philomèna was a teacher at the primary school in Oirsbeek from 1922 to 1924. The couple had five children and lived in the stately house with stepped gable at Dorpstraat 5.
This house was built in 1905 by pastor emeritus van Ottersum, Jacobus America, uncle and brother. from his mother.


His father Frans Lambert, as a colonel and his uncle, brother of the father Pieter Felix Fleischeuer, as a major were very involved in the militia of Oirsbeek. Of course he had inherited the gunner’s gene from them. Gerard joined the militia in 1906 at the age of 17 and soon gained an officer rank within the militia. The militia has not had a general for 39 years, the reason for this is unclear. In 1914 just before the First World War he was appointed general
at the age of 25 and paid the highest deposit of fl. 2.40.

Gerard Fleischeuer was a fierce opponent of the nazidom from the rise in Germany and the Netherlands. For example, in January 1943 he was approached by rector Voesten from Heerlen of the National aid for people in hiding (L.O.)
to have people in hiding. Despite their five children, on 15-02-1943, ten Jewish people in hiding were placed with them. Eight names of them are still known, namely: The Max Wolff couple with daughter Diny from Sittard, Nannia de Keizer from Utrecht, mrs. Goedhart with daughter Yvonne from Roermond, Mr Schepp with daughter Emma from Maastricht and a mother with her three-year-old son. The people in hiding stayed on the top floor. It went well for ten months, until the case was betrayed by infiltration of collaborators in the resistance group. Fleischeuer was arrested by the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo).
under command of SS Brigadeführer, later Kommandant of Einsatzgruppe B. Erich Naumann.
The ten arrested Jews have never been heard of again. Two days after his arrest on 8-11-1943, the NSB mayor of Oirsbeek Willem Henkens (from The Hague) had the NSB commissioner of the Province of Limburg, Count Max. de Marchant et d’Ansembourg from Amstenrade, know by letter that Gerard Fleischeuer had been arrested in the evenings of 16-11-1943. Gerard was deported to the infamous prison in Scheveningen (Oranje Hotel).
The ten people in hiding were taken to Westerbork on 17 November and from there to German extermination camps. Gerard Fleischeuer arrived at the Vught concentration camp
without trial around Christmas 1943 and at the end of May 1944 he was deported along with hundreds of fellow countrymen to Dachau near Munich, the oldest concentration camp of the Nazis. Due to his experience as a civil servant and organizational talent, he would have worked in the camp administration for some time. Later he ended up in the outer camp “Aussenlager” Allach near Dachau where he was employed in the factory of the Bayerische Motor Werke AG (BMW), which mainly produced aircraft engines.





Death and burial ground of Fleischeuer, Adèle Jan “Gerard”.


After almost a year and a half of captivity and forced labor in various camps, 56-year-old Gerard Fleischeuer died on Maundy Thursday, 29-03-1945 at 22.30 as “ Prisoner of the concentration camp Dachau, with tattoo Nr. 69035 “. This while the US military was on its liberating advance. Between 1941 and 1945 there were more than 2000 Dutch people in Dachau concentration camp.
Usually the dead in the concentration camps were cremated, but with the American liberation army approaching, this was already stopped at Dachau in January 1945 and also because of a lack of fuel. The corpses were buried in ordered mass graves on the Leitenberg at Dachau, and good records were kept so that subsequent location and identification would be possible. In 1959 the investigation started with the help of Bureau Gravendienst of the Ministry of Defense. After his daughter Felicie (Fé) traveled several times to Dachau to identify her father, reburial was possible in the Netherlands. 

Fleischeuer was reburied in the plot at the general cemetery on the Tongerseweg in Maastricht in Section R number 19B.
On 19-09-1946 the widow P.C. Fleischeuer-Bettonville a letter from Queen Wilhelmina
in which she sincerely condemns the loss of her husband. 



