Education
Calmeyer studied Law in Freiburg, Marburg and Munich.
Calmeyer studied Law in Freiburg, Marburg and Munich.
Later, he opened his law practice in Osnabrück where he enjoyed an excellent reputation as a lawyer In 1933, his license to practice law was revoked because of his activity and leaning towards Communist lines of thought. Ten months later, his license was reinstated.
In 1941, he was active in the Reichs Commissioner" General’ s Office (Reichskommissariat), which was in charge of all occupied districts in the Netherlands.
While there, Calmeyer was appointed Director for the Interior Administration, which handled the Jewish Department, thus enabling Calmeyer, as an administrative lawyer, to clear "racially ambiguous" Jewish cases for the German occupational administration in The Hague. Unlike policy in Germany, people of Jewish descent could rebut being registered as "full blooded Jews" by documenting and proving ancestry through word of mouth and birth certificates to qualify as "half-Jewish", "quarter-Jewish", or of Aryan descent.
Calmeyer described in his own words, how he used his position: "To build a lifeboat." He accepted falsified papers of ancestry which documented the subject person as Arian or "half-Jewish". He also managed to offer hints and advice on various stratagems and excuses.
Despite warnings from the Nazi regime, he persisted in his work.
Approximately 5,700 individuals were designated as doubtful cases through Calmeyer’s office, and at least 3,700 were spared certain death. Yet the decisions on "dubious cases" concerning the remaining 2,000 individuals were the equivalent of a death sentence, as they shared the fate of 140,000 Jews transported by the Germans to various concentration camps for extermination. Seventy-five percent of them died on the way to their final destination.
According to a description of Calmeyer by the German Bundespresident Johannes Rau: "Calmeyer joined the ranks of human beings who helped, but who were also guilty of being caught up in the unjustifiable wrongdoings of the regime".
His work was almost forgotten until a movement to honor him came about during the 1980s. On March 4, 1992, Yad Vashem honored Hans Calmeyer posthumously with the title "A Righteous Manitoba Among Nations".
On January 2, 1995 the town of Osnabrück awarded Calmeyer its highest award posthumously: "The Moesermedaille".
He was a member of the Federation of the National Socialist German Lawyers, but not the Nazi party.
In 1923, as a member of the Reichswehr, he took part in Hitler’s attempted Putsch. In 1940, Calmeyer, serving as a soldier and a member of an aerial defense intelligence unit, took part in the invasion of the Netherlands by the German Army.