Miss Blanche: 'The Lady Magician' uses magic to survive Nazi experiments

This is the amazing survival story of Miss Blanche (aka Ruth Iris Wachsmann) who was one of the leading female magicians in pre-war Europe. An expert manipulator, she headlined in venues across the continent, until war intervened...

Ruth Iris Wachsmann was a German Jew. Born in Berlin on 1 September 1910, she first trained as a ballerina. In her mid-teens, after seeing a performance by Austro-Hungarian magician Larette (Cornelius Hauer), she switched from dancing to magic. Wachsmann became Larette's student, and she learned the art of manipulation. She could manipulate billiard balls and playing cards, but showed special aptitude for cigarette manipulation.

Miss Blanche, performing cigarette manipulation, 1936

(Source: Artefake)

Inspired by a brand of cigarettes designed to appeal to female smokers by the Rotterdam-based Vittoria Egyptian Cigarette Company, she adopted the stage name Miss Blanche. Larette was sponsored by Miss Blanche cigarettes and helped promote Wachsmann as another act to market the brand. 

Promotion card for Amsterdam-based Larette, with an advert for Miss Blanche cigarettes on the reverse

(Source: Quicker Than the Eye, Potter & Potter Auctions)

Adopting an androgynous look - short, boyish hair and a tailcoat costume - Wachsmann's act included manipulation, the Chinese rings, tricks with cards and ropes, producing glasses of beer from an empty barrel, and a final production of Japanese banners and paper flowers. 

Miss Blanche's beer from an empty barrel prop

(Source: German Magic Foundation, by kind permission)

Often billed as 'The Lady Magician' or 'The Only Beautiful Lady Magician', she was one of few female magicians able to produce and vanish lit cigarettes. "Combined with her charming personality, and her unique sweet way of presentation, every performance of hers is a delightful sight worth seeing," said Austrian magician Ottokar Fischer.

Miss Blanche (Ruth Iris Wachsmann)

(Source: Artefake)

With Larette as her excellent mentor and teacher, Wachsmann emerged as a successful magician. Able to present her act in Dutch, English, French, German and Italian, she toured throughout Europe. Eventually, becoming a headliner, she came to be regarded as the 'Premier Lady Magician' on the continent. She played top venues like the 'Pik-Bar' in Zagreb, Schiefe Laterne Kabarett in Vienna, and the Moulin Rouge in Budapest. While touring Yugoslavia, Wachsmann was called on to perform for Peter II on his fifteenth birthday. And she was accepted into the Magischer Zirkel von Deutschland (The Magic Circle of Germany). 

Promotional advert for Miss Blanche

(Source: Artefake)

After the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, life became increasingly difficult for the half a million Jews living there. The persecution of Jews became an official Nazi policy. In 1935 and 1936, the pace of anti-Semitic persecution sped up. About 60% of Jews emigrated, many after they were banned from holding professional jobs. Wachsmann was kicked out of the Magischer Zirkel and in 1939 fled from Germany.

She settled in the Netherlands and got onto the entertainment circuit there. A review of one of her performances at the Kurhaus Caberet in Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague, appeared in The Magic Wand periodical in October that year:

"Attired in male evening dress, this lady magician opened with lighted cigarette manipulation, the item being presented with elegant moves and good misdirection. The Chinese Rings followed and then the production of beer from a barrel. This last had an amusing termination for, finally, two huge glasses were filled with the beverage and a spectator was invited to enter into a drinking competition with the performer. Miss Blanche won easily. An amusing little turn, very well received."

On 24 January 1940, Ruth married another German-Jewish émigré, Marcus Wolf Teitz, in The Hague. Born in Berlin in 1888, Teitz was an established actor and cabaret performer who appeared professionally as Max Peltini. Contemporary Dutch newspapers had billed him as a cabaretier and humourist before the war. Like Wachsmann, he had left Germany after the Nazis came to power, arriving in the Netherlands in 1933. The two performers now tried to make a living in an increasingly uncertain European entertainment world, while apparently hoping eventually to reach the United States.

But, in May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands and the couple's situation worsened. Bookings for all performers, magicians or not, Jewish or not, were becoming few and far between as the war progressed. Once over-crowded, night clubs and theatres were emptying. Now the patrons frequenting the clubs were German soldiers, and many Dutch performers did not want to entertain the enemy. Restrictions on Jewish performers would have denied Wachsmann the scraps of bookings that were still available. Now under the name Ruth Wolf, she dyed her hair blond to look less Jewish. 

Max Peltini (Marcus Teitz)

(Source: Artefake)

As their occupation progressed, the Nazis imposed arduous rules on Jews and concentrated them in ghettos. Earning a living as a magician became extremely difficult and she eventually found other work, as a social worker, probably working for the Dutch Jewish Council.

The persecution took its toll in another way. On 22 April 1942, Marcus Teitz took an overdose of sleeping tablets. He fell into a coma and developed pneumonia, dying five days later in a hospital at Zeist, aged fifty-four. A surviving police report records that Teitz had repeatedly told his doctor that he dreaded what the future might bring; he slept badly and had been taking sleeping medication. He had not, as later accounts of Miss Blanche’s life sometimes claimed, been arrested and killed in a Polish concentration camp.

Ruth was therefore already a widow while the persecution of Dutch Jews intensified during 1942 and 1943. Her career as Miss Blanche had largely disappeared with the restrictions imposed upon Jewish performers, and she turned to other work. Seventeen months after Teitz’s death, her own turn came.

Before deportation Wachsmann passed through Westerbork, the transit camp in the north-east Netherlands through which the German occupation authorities channelled more than 100,000 Jews, Roma and Sinti towards concentration and extermination camps in the east. Exactly how long Ruth spent there remains unclear, but her onward transport is securely documented. On 14 September 1943, Ruth Teitz-Wachsmann was placed aboard a train bound for Auschwitz.

Auschwitz I concentration camp entrance

(Source: Creative Commons)

As the war developed, the Nazis constructed three main camps at Auschwitz, along with many sub-camps. Auschwitz I was originally established to imprison Polish political prisoners and later used as a concentration camp. Auschwitz II-Birkenau was primarily an extermination camp. Auschwitz III was mainly a slave labour camp.

Wachsmann was allocated to Auschwitz I. She has put into an accommodation block (Block 10) reserved for women on which medical experiments were carried out. S.S. physicians working at the camp included gynecologist Professor Dr. Carl Clauberg, who developed a method of non-surgical sterilisation. From April 1943 to May 1944, he treated several hundred female prisoners, mostly Jewish, with chemical irritants. Some of them died during the experiments, while others were put to death so their bodies could be autopsied to examine the effectiveness of the chemicals. Those who survived were left with permanent injuries.

Block 10 at Auschwitz I concentration camp (present day)

(Source: Author)

Later accounts of Wachsmann’s imprisonment say that her captors discovered that the woman they knew as Ruth Teitz-Wachsmann had once been the professional magician Miss Blanche. She was then required to perform for SS personnel and German visitors. In a place where the smallest advantage could matter, her unusual skill reportedly brought occasional food and a degree of favourable treatment. The story has been repeated in subsequent magic histories and forms part of a documentary now being developed about her life, although Wachsmann’s own contemporary account of these performances has yet to be located.

If the surviving account is correct, the circumstances were a brutal inversion of her pre-war career. The cigarette manipulations, cards and other sleights that had once won applause in European theatres were now being performed at the demand of men belonging to the organisation that imprisoned her. Magic could not make Auschwitz safe, but it may have made its performer temporarily useful.

In some small way, Wachsmann's experience in World War Two mirrored that of her mentor, Larette. During World War One, as a conscript in the Austro-Hungarian army, the Russians captured him. While a prisoner, he performed magic to boost the morale of his fellow captives and entertain guards to earn food and privileges.

Female prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp

(Source: Creative Commons)

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centres. Over 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives there.

Wachsmann survived some sixteen months at Auschwitz. When Soviet troops reached the camp in January 1945 she was severely malnourished; Hannes Höller’s later biographical account records that she weighed only 65 lb — about 29 kg — when freed. Höller-European-Jewish-Magicians-1933-1945.pdf Whatever part her conjuring had played in securing occasional advantages, survival at Auschwitz depended upon many contingencies beyond her control. Miss Blanche had nevertheless survived a camp in which more than a million people were murdered.

She returned to the Netherlands and started to rebuild her life. In 1949, Wachsmann remarried and became Mrs Ruth Neumann. With her new husband, she emigrated to the United States in 1956, and magic gradually disappeared from her life. 

Ruth Neumann (nee Wachsmann), skilled lady magician and Holocaust survivor, died in April 1989, aged 78.

Miss Blanche poster (1930s?)

(Source:  Archive of Ritsko van Vliet. Notes by Van Vliet about Miss Blanche. Box 26, cover Miss Blanche. Allard Pierson Theater Collection)

Larette (Cornelius Hauer) was also a Jew. Unlike his student, Larette did not survive Nazi Germany's anti-Semitic persecutions. On 14 May 1943, fearing he was about to be arrested by the Gestapo secret police, Larette shot himself. The German magic magazine, Magie, reported that he died "after an Allied bombing raid on Amsterdam". 

Related article: 'Dutch magician deported to extermination camp', tells the wartime story of card magician Louis Lam.  Blog link.

Related article: 'Hungarian magician, Dr. Laszlo Rothbart survives Nazi concentration camp'.  Blog link.

Research supported by The Good Magic Award 2021 from The Good Thinking Society 

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