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OBITUARY Helga Wall-Row obituary Hamburg ‘swing girl’ who survived a brutal Nazi ‘youth education camp’ and later became a model and actress in London

Wednesday March 08 2023, 12.01am, The Times

In 1941, as the war raged elsewhere, 17-year-old Helga Rönn and her friends would enjoy dancing to swing music most nights in the clubs of Hamburg. Unfortunately for them, this style of big band jazz — associated as it was with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie — had been deemed “degenerate jungle music” by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister. Broadcasting it was forbidden and dancing to it was all but banned.

The Swingjugend (swing youth), as the young German fans of swing became known, were soon the subject of a secret report from the Reich Ministry of Justice. According to this report, the “false conception of freedom” of the Swingjugend led them to oppose the Hitler Youth. They liked, moreover, to speak to each other in American English rather than German, because it was considered cooler. The Swingjugend were ironic and flippant in manner; some would even use “Swing Heil” (instead of “Sieg Heil”) as a greeting.

“Swing girls” like Helga preferred to wear their hair long and, in contravention of Goebbels’s ban on German women wearing make-up, they would have their eyebrows pencilled in, lips painted and fingernails lacquered. Gestapo officers came to regard them as the personification of decadence and promiscuity.

Born in Hamburg in 1924, Helga Ellen Marie-Louise Rönn was the daughter of Alfred Rönn, a clerk with a shipping company, and Auguste, a tram conductor. She was home-schooled and, after being approached by Max Reinhardt, the agent who discovered Marlene Dietrich, to audition for a musical, she had aspirations to be a model and actress.

Her father, knowing the dangers of getting on the wrong side of the Nazis, warned her never to write anything compromising in her diary. Being a strong-willed teenager she had ignored him. “We Swingjugend just like partying and music,” she wrote. “Even if seen as subversive by the Gestapo.” When 300 Swingjugend were rounded up in 1941 and forced to cut their long hair, Helga ignored that warning too. The following year she and a group of her Swingjugend friends were arrested and transported to Uckermark, a “youth education camp” for women aged 16 to 21. It was close to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Upon arrival, they were stripped and beaten before being given prison clothes and put to work sawing logs. They survived on watery soup with bread and were allowed one shower a week. As one inmate recalled: “The camp commander was Satan incarnate . . . I was also in Auschwitz, but for me, Uckermark was worse.”

Helga Rönn and her fellow swing girls emerged from Uckermark in late 1944, broken in spirit and in body.

She went home to find Hamburg had been flattened; 37,000 civilians had been killed and 180,000 wounded by the fire-storm created by the RAF and USAF bombs of Operation Gomorrah in July 1943. Her parents had survived by moving out of town.

Within a month of the city’s liberation by the Allies in May 1945, she had conceived a child with Theodor Grethe, a student chemist whose war had been spent in misery on the Eastern Front. They were married in October and their daughter Maren was born in March 1946; but in a session of the Hamburg courts held in private, they were accorded a divorce in July 1946.

Helga had by then taken up with Hugh Wall-Row, a dashing lieutenant in the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards stationed in Hamburg.

When he was “demobbed” early for fraternising with the enemy and for having an affair with a German woman, she departed with him to London, leaving her baby in Hamburg with her parents and Grethe’s. She married Wall-Row in December 1946, aged 22, and moved into a Hampstead flat next to his parents. He went into stockbroking in the City. Their son Anthony was born in 1951. Her daughter Maren, who later joined her in London, also became a model.

Here the next phase of her life began. Helga Wall-Row realised her long-held ambition to be a model and actress. She had a cameo in the 1949 Carol Reed film The Third Man and also modelled for Reveille newspaper, and appeared in numerous fashion magazines. She did a number of photoshoots in her native Germany.

In her forties she went to work for the Inland Revenue in London, but stopped after her son died young in 1984 and her husband died two years later.

She met her third husband, the financial journalist Charles Raw (obituary, December 19, 2022), and married him in 2003. They stayed on in the same flat in Hampstead that she had made her home in 1946. Their shared passion was jazz and swing.

Helga Wall-Row Raw, actress and model, was born on November 30, 1924. She died on February 8, 2023, aged 98