Werner Dambitsch Collection

Werner Wilhelm Dambitsch was born on June 23, 1913 in Breslau (Wroclaw, Poland), living in the city’s traditional Jewish neighborhood. His father was the textile merchant Felix Dambitsch (1872-1938). His mother, Leontine née Meyer (1889-1945) was born in Grünberg, Silesia (Zielona Gora, Poland.) After her husband’s death in 1938 she was deported to Theresienstadt and then murdered in Auschwitz.

Werner was interested in music from an early age, but he had to acquire his first instrument, a saxophone, with his own earned money. He did this in 1932 at the age of 19 and founded with four friends the ‘Excentric Jazz Orchester’. Under the Nazis, he joined the ‘Arbeitsgemeinschaft jüdischer Künstler’, and the band – Erstes Jüdisches Jazz Orchester (EJO) - became part of the ‘Reichsverband der jüdischen Kulturbünde’. They had their last performance in April of 1938; all five musicians managed to leave Germany – Werner went to New York and the others emigrated to Saigon, Shanghai, Bogota, and Buenos Aires respectively.

Like many other German émigrés, Werner went first to Cuba, before immigrating to Cincinnati, Ohio with the help of an old friend, Bela Klein from Breslau.

In 1940, Werner joined the US Army in order to acquire US citizenship. He then changed his name to Warner W. Danby and was stationed at Camp Ritchie, interrogating German prisoners of war. There he met his wife Karin, née Engels, originally from Switzerland. After the war, Warner Danby went into the tractor business, never to return to music again. He died in New York on Dec. 12, 1983.