Siegfried Grossbard was a Jewish refugee from Vienna who eventually became resident in Great Britain, after having spent time as an inmate of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.
This collection contains mostly copy documents from the US legation in Stockholm to the US Department of State and concerns the possibility of saving Hungarian Jews during the Nazi era. The depositor was co-chairman of Brookline, the Holocaust Memorial Committee, based in Massachusetts, USA, and former inmate of Drancy concentration camp.
Wolfgang Loewy, who described himself as a Jew by religion and by origin half-Jewish and half-Christian, left Berlin with his first wife and ended up in an internment camp in Bombay. His brother, Werner, wife and parents went to Shanghai, where they stayed until after the war, after which they went to live in Los Angeles. Wolfgang came to Great Britain after the war.
Alice Fink (née Redlich), was born in Berlin in 1920. She came to England in November 1938 where she did her nurse's training at a hospital in Greenwich. She joined the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad and went to Bergen Belsen with the Jewish Relief Unit in September 1946. She married Hans Finke in June 1948 and moved to Chicago in 1949.
Her family, with whom she communicated via the Red Cross, remained in Berlin until they were deported and ultimately perished in the Holocaust. They were transported at different times. The only reference to the deportations in the correspondence is a Red Cross Telegram reply dated 9 December 1942, signed by her mother and Heinz (brother?), in which they ask Alice whether she informed 'Tante Hedwig' [herself already deported by this time] that her father had gone to Adi's. He had in fact already been deported to the East by this time.
The Dunera, a military transport ship, transported over 2000 internees from the UK to Australia in 1940 and was used to transport German and Austrian immigrants to Australia during this period.
The National Socialists made use of Nuremberg's heritage as the 'Treasure Chest of the German Empire' and in 1927, started holding their party rallies here. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Adolf Hitler made Nuremberg the 'City of the Party Rallies'. Monumental structures, based on plans by Albert Speer, were erected in the Volkspark Dutzendteich, in the south eastern city districts. Until today these bear testimony to the Third Reich's megalomaniacal pretensions. Here, Julius Streicher, the 'Frankenführer' (Franconian Führer), spread his anti-Semitic hate slogans. It was also in this city that the Nazis proclaimed their inhumane 'Nuremberg Racial Laws' in 1935. In Nuremberg more people than anywhere else were killed during the pogrom night of November 9/10, 1938. Nuremberg's Lord Mayor, National Socialist Willy Liebel, proclaimed 'with pride' that 26 Jews had not survived the 'Reichskristallnacht'.
The organisation Neues Leben was a club devoted to nudism, founded February 1930. The movement had been non-political but by the end of March 1933, following difficulties, avowed publicly their support for Hitler. A meeting adopted a change of name to Bund fuer aufartende Lebensfuehrung und Nordische Sittenklarheit (League for racially pure lifestyle and nordic moral clarity), 19 July 1933.
Camp Westerbork was a World War Two concentration camp in Hooghalen, ten kilometers north of Westerbork, in the northeastern Netherlands. Its function during the Second World War was to assemble Dutch Jews for transport to other Nazi concentration camps.
This report was apparently produced by a member of a resistance group asssociated with the camp by the name of Bettleheim. Nothing further is known about him.
Nothing is known about the provenance of these copy letters from a Jewish girl and her aunt to relatives in Great Britain. They are mirror image typescript mimeographed transcriptions, the majority of which are copy letters from Leni, the 12 year old girl. It is apparent from the content that Leni's mother and father died within a short space of time of each other in 1938, both at the relatively early age of 53. Her brother also died at Buchenwald at the age of 18.
During the period of the correspondence Leni stayed with an aunt, Martha and her young cousin, Hansi. Martha was imprisoned for 3 months for maligning the regime and it appears that Leni remained in the house during her absence. Two of the subsequent letters are from Martha in prison. In her last letter Leni mentions that her departure from Austria to the USA is immanent. Martha also expected to leave within the year. Nothing is known of their fate and without even a surname it would be impossible to find out.
At the Second International Conference, which took place in Frankfurt in 1932, 60 Jewish delegates decided to organise a parallel Jewish conference for 1936. The president of the Jewish Conference was Dr M J Karpf, Director of the Graduate School for Jewish Social Work, New York. The central committee for the conference comprised leading figures in the social work field from all over the world. The secretariat was situated in Paris at the offices of the American Joint Distribution Committee. The Third International Conference on Social Work took place in London in July 1936 and was held in conjunction with the International Conference for Jewish Social Work.
The offices of the Jewish Community in Vienna were re-opened having been closed down in the immediate afermath of the German takeover of Austria (1938). The newly restored community organisation devoted a large part of its resources towards planning emigration and social welfare. It also became involved in vocational training. The Jewish Community in Vienna was disbanded on 1 November 1942 and replaced by a council of elders for the Jews of Vienna. The remaining assets of 6.5 million marks were transferred to Prague to be used to finance the Theresienstadt Ghetto. The central office for Jewish emigration was closed down and responsibility for deportations was transferred to a branch of the SS.
This correspondence regarding the history of the Jewish community in Tarnobrzeg, Poland stems from a dispute in which Michael Honey, a descendant of a family from the said community took exception to an article written by Tadeusz Zych, chairman of the Tarnobrzeg Historical Society, which the former regards as anti-Semitic.
Nelly (Elenore) Wolffheim, born 29 March 1879, the second and youngest child from a relatively well to do Jewish family in Berlin; mainly taught privately on account of serious childhood illness; at the end of the 19th century she graduated from 'Pestalozzi-Fröbelhaus', a kindergarten teacher-training school and went on to work in a number of other training schools. Renewed illness meant that she had to spend the following several years in various sanatoriums. In 1914 she opened a private kindergarten in Hallensee, Berlin, which was run according to the philosophy of the Fröbel school, the central idea of which was to treat the school like a large family. In 1921 Nelly Wolffheim suffered another serious set back regarding her health; thereafter she commenced psychoanalysis and after several years of training, she began running the first kindergarten in Germany on the lines of depth psychology; developed an interest in the study of infant sexuality, and was disappointed by the lack of interest shown by anyone else in the field on the subject. She had to stop running the kindergarten again in 1930 on account of her health, but also because she felt too old to work with small children; gives up her publishing activities and discontinues her lecture tours after the Nazi seizure of power, 1933; ran the only remaining Jewish Kindergärtnerinnenseminar, 1934-1939, of which the document in this collection is an account. Emigrated to England, 1939, and lived in Oxford and London; published works again in Germany after the war, in particular her book Kinder aus Konzentrationslagern was well received; died in London, 2 April 1965.
The Wiener Library began collecting eyewitness accounts of people who survived the Holocaust in 1957 as part of a project funded by the Claims Conference. The collection included contemporary documentation from the period. This set comprises accounts that were never included into the main series because they were incomplete.
The Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain (AJR) was founded in the summer of 1941. Up until that point the care of Jewish refugees had mainly been in the hands of the German Jewish Aid Committee, which had hardly any German Jewish representatives. It was this committeee which had organised the rescue operation of those Jews who wanted to enter Britain and which had financially supported those who were unable to earn their own living. The foundation of the AJR marked the wish of the refugees to take the settlement of their problems into their own hands.
The German steamship, the St Louis, left Hamburg with 930 Jewish refugees on board on 13 May 1939. Its passengers had valid immigration visas to Cuba stamped in their passports. When the ship arrived at Havana, the refugees were refused entry. The ship was turned back to Europe, where its passengers, after much negotiation were permitted to land in English and Western European ports. Those caught up by the Nazi invasion ultimately met their deaths a year later in the Holocaust.
The only biographical information is provided by a letter (1302/7) from her uncle, Norbert Wellisch, in which he describes her as 13 and a half years of age, tall and thin, 'prettier than the enclosed picture' (1302/11), intelligent and with a fervent desire to come to Great Britain.
The Reichsbund der Deutschen Beamten (Reich League of German Civil Servants) became the national representative organisation for German Civil Servants from October 1933 and was affiliated to the Nazi party. Although not all members had to be Nazi party members, most were. The head of the organisation was Herman Neef, who had been the head of the predecessor organisation, Deutsche Beamtenbund (German Civil Servants' League). In addition to training and development of members, the organisation also ensured that Civil Servants maintained a Nazi focus.
Gurs was a major internment camp in France, near Oloron-Sainte-Marie, 80 kilometers from the Spanish border. Established in 1939 to absorb Republican refugees from Spain, Gurs later served as a concentration camp for Jews from France and refugees from other countries. While under the administration of Vichy France (1940-1942) most non-Jewish prisoners were released and approximately 2000 Jews were permitted to emigrate. In 1941 Gurs held some 15,000 prisoners. The camp was controlled by the Germans from 1942 to 1944, during which time several thousand inmates were deported to extermination camps in Poland. An unknown number succeeded in escaping and reaching Spain or hiding in Southern France. Gurs was liberated in the summer of 1944.
This collection of documentation was generated as a result of the efforts made by the former mayor of Wertheim, Karl-Josef Scheuermann, to trace the fate of the town's Jewish population, to organise a gathering of survivors and to erect a memorial. Included is a memoir of former Jewish residents.
Maurice Heiber founded an organisation to save Jewish children in Belgium. He worked both for the Judenrat (Jewish Council) in Belgium's children's department (AJB) and for the Committee for the Defense of Belgian Jews (CDJ) as a special emissary. He managed the children's department for the CDJ, 1942. Heiber transferred a copy of the card index containing the names of all 'official' Jews from the AJB to the CDJ and visited these homes with persuasive proposals for hiding children.
The subject of the two letters at 13/18/1-2 was the paternal aunt of Herbert Engel's wife. The author of the account at 13/18/3 was Herbert Engel's great uncle. During the period of the latter (April 1945) Engel, then 6, was staying with his mother and 2 year old sister with relatives in the Harz mountains, having been evacuated from their home in Köln.
The correspondence and papers in this collection were generated by staff at the Wiener Library in an effort to identify the provenance and significance of two beer tankards which were deposited at the Wiener Library in memory of Leslie Simon Scott, formerly Ludwig Simon Schutz, of Berlin. The tankards were manufactured by the firm of Kerzilius of Cologne Ehrfeld.
Philipp Manes was born in Neuwied in the Rhineland on Aug 1875. His family had lived in Neuwied for a long time, but his parents and he moved to Berlin via Luxembourg, when he was a boy of eleven. Manes became a fur trader. Until 1942 he lived in a small apartment in the centre of Berlin with his wife and his family. His four children all managed to leave Germany before the war broke out. In 1942, he was forced to work for a few months as a labourer in a Berlin factory. In July 1942 he was sent to Theresienstadt together with his wife Gertrud. In October 1944 they were both sent 'east' with the last transport and they both died in Auschwitz.
During his years in the ghetto of Theresienstadt he was in charge of the Orientation Service, a unit of elderly men originally set up to help prisoners who had lost their way in the maze of the camp, to ensure their safe return to their assigned quarters. Over time the service expanded and added various other service functions to its duties.
It was in his capacity as head of the Orientation Service, that Manes created the lecture series, at one time also called Leisure Time Bureau, in fact the most amazing cultural feast. This united what must have been the educated elite of the camp in over 500 events. Topics of lectures covered most academic disciplines, from religion and history to the arts and sciences. Play readings often by professional actors and singers, especially the productions of Nathan the Wise, had their audiences spellbound. Variety evenings were staged to celebrate the New Year and special events. The names of lecturers and participants read like a Who's Who of the camp. They include Leo Baeck (who spoke at the 500th event), Victor and Fritz Janowitz, and many others.
The Reunion of the Kindertransporte (ROK) was an organisation that facilitated reunions and communication between former child survivors of Nazi persecution who managed to escape Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia via organised transports for mainly Jewish children prior to the outbreak of Germany's invasion of Poland. The genesis of the group began as an idea by Bertha Leverton - a 'Kind' herself - to organise a reunion in 1989, marking 50 years since the arrival of the first Kindertransport to Britain.
The 50th anniversary of the Kindertransports was held in Jun, 1989 in Harwich, England, site of the reception centre where boats carrying the children from the Hook of Holland first reached Britain. Although no precise statistical records exist in this collection, the reunion was attended by hundreds of Kinder from various countries, though mainly from the US, Israel, and Britain. The event received enormous media attention and launched the story of the Kindertransports into public consciousness on an international scale.
The Axis occupation of Greece during World War Two began Apr 1941 following the German and Italian invasion of Greece, together with Bulgarian forces. It lasted until the German withdrawal from the mainland, Oct 1944. In some cases however, such as in Crete and other islands, German garrisons remained in control until May-Jun 1945.
The Reunion of the Kindertransporte (ROK) was an organisation that facilitated reunions and communication between former child survivors of the Holocaust who managed to escape Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia via organized transports for mainly Jewish children prior to the outbreak of Germany's invasion of Poland. The genesis of the group began as an idea by Bertha Leverton - a 'Kinder' herself - to organise a reunion in 1989, marking 50 years since the arrival of the first Kindertransport to Britain.
The 50th anniversary of the Kindertransports was held in June, 1989 in Harwich, England, site of the reception centre where boats carrying the children from the Hook of Holland first reached Britain. Although no precise statistical records exist in this collection, the reunion was attended by hundreds of 'Kinder' from various countries, though mainly from the US, Israel, and Britain. The event received enormous media attention and launched the story of the Kindertransports into public consciousness on an international scale.
Archibald Ramsay, son of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Ramsay, born in Scotland on 4th May, 1894. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst Military College, he joined the Coldstream Guards in 1913. During the First World War he served in France (1914-1916) and at the War Office (1917-1918).
Ramsay married the eldest daughter of 14th Viscount Gormanstan, and the widow of Lord Ninian Crichton-Stuart, the son of the 3rd Marquess of Bute. After their marriage the couple lived in Kellie Castle near Arbroath.
A member of the Conservative Party, Ramsay was elected to the House of Commons in 1931. Over the next few years he developed extreme right-wing political views. A strongly religious man, he became convinced that the Russian Revolution was the start of an international Communist plot to take over the world.
In 1935 two secret agents from Nazi Germany established the anti-Semetic Nordic League. The organization was initially known as the White Knights of Britain or the Hooded Men. Ramsay soon emerged as the leader of this organization. The Nordic League was primarily an upper-middle-class association as opposed to the British Union of Fascists that mainly attracted people from the working class.
The Nordic League described itself as an association of race conscious Britons and being at the service of those patriotic bodies known to be engaged in exposing and frustrating the Jewish stranglehold on our Nordic realm. In Nazi Germany the Nordic League was seen as the British branch of international Nazism.
During the Spanish Civil War he was a leading supporter of General Francisco Franco and his Nationalist Army. In 1937 he formed the United Christian Front, an organization that intended to confront the widespread attack upon the Christian verities which emantes from Moscow, and which is revealing itself in a literary and educational campaign of great intensity.
Ramsay became the unofficial leader of the extreme right in Britain. His close associates Admiral Barry Domville, Nesta Webster, Mary Allen, Oswald Mosley, John Becket, William Joyce, A K Chesterton, Arthur Bryant, Major-General John Fuller, Thomas Moore, John Moore-Brabazon, and Henry Drummond Wolff.
In the House of Commons Ramsay was the main critic of having Jews in the government. In 1938 he began a campaign to have Leslie Hore-Belisha sacked as Secretary of War. In one speech on 27th April he warned that Hore-Belisha will lead us to war with our blood-brothers of the Nordic race in order to make way for a Bolshevised Europe.
In May 1939 Ramsay founded a secret society called the Right Club. This was an attempt to unify all the different right-wing groups in Britain. Or in the leader's words of co-ordinating the work of all the patriotic societies. In his autobiography, The Nameless War, Ramsay argued: The main object of the Right Club was to oppose and expose the activities of Organized Jewry, in the light of the evidence which came into my possession in 1938. Our first objective was to clear the Conservative Party of Jewish influence, and the character of our membership and meetings were strictly in keeping with this objective.
Members of the Right Club included William Joyce, Anna Wolkoff, Joan Miller, A. K. Chesterton, Francis Yeats-Brown, E. H. Cole, Lord Redesdale, Duke of Wellington, Aubrey Lees, John Stourton, Thomas Hunter, Samuel Chapman, Ernest Bennett, Charles Kerr, John MacKie, James Edmondson, Mavis Tate, Marquess of Graham, Margaret Bothamley, Earl of Galloway, H. T. Mills, Richard Findlay and Serrocold Skeels.
He was interned under Defence Regulation 18B and joined other right-wing extremists such as Oswald Mosley and Admiral Nikolai Wolkoff in Brixton Prison. Released after the war, Archibald Ramsay died on 11th March, 1955.
Kristallnacht, also known as Reichskristallnacht, Reichspogromnacht, Crystal Night and the Night of the Broken Glass, was a pogrom against Jews throughout Germany, 9 Nov-10 Nov 1938. Jewish homes along with 8,000 Jewish shops were ransacked in numerous German cities, towns and villages as civilians and both the SA (Sturmabteilung) and the SS (Schutzstaffel) destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in shards of glass from broken windows - the origin of the name Night of Broken Glass. Jews were beaten to death. 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps and 1,668 synagogues ransacked, with 267 set on fire.
The administrative history concerning this collection is unknown.
Alice Stern (née Reichmann) was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia 10th October 1902. In 1920 she married Peter Morel in Prague, they had one son Felix, born September 11, 1930. Peter Morel died in 1936. In 1938, anticipating the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Alice Morel took her son to an English boarding school and then returned to Prague intending to go back to England a few weeks later. However the Germans invaded sooner than she expected and she was forced to remain in Prague.
On 31 October 1941 she was transported to Lodz Ghetto on 507 transport. Doctor Felix Eckstein was on the same transport. He was born in Prague on April 18, 1887. In 1942 Dr Eckstein became seriously ill and because he was unable to work he was not entitled to receive any food. However, under the regulations peculiar to Lodz, if one member of a married couple was working he would be allowed to share the rations of his partner and would not be sent to the gas chamber. Alice Morel decided to marry him and on May 5, 1942 the ceremony took place. Dr Eckstein lived for a further eighteen months having shared the meagre rations of his wife.
Alice survived the war and was reunited with her son in Prague in 1945. In 1948 they returned to London where they made their home. In later years Alice assumed the name of Alice Stern. Stern died in London March 4, 1992.
The Left Book Club was a very successful radical left wing group that flourished in Great Britain from the mid 1930s to the beginning of World War Two. It was started in 1936 by the barrister, Stafford Cripps, and publisher Victor Gollancz, with the goal of selling left wing books at very cheap prices. Those who joined agreed to buy at least one book a month for a 6-month period. By 1939 it had 57,000 members and sold about 6 million books. During the war the British Communist Party agitated for an end to war and transformed a number of Left Book Club groups into 'Stop the War' committees. By the end of World War Two there were only 7,000 subscribers and it formally shut down in 1948.
The Jewish Community in Berlin resumed work in December 1945 under Hans-Erich Fabian; in 1949 Heinz Galinski was made chairman of the organisation. The division into an east and west community took place in 1953.
These political flyers were purchased from an antiquarian bookseller in Haarlem, Netherlands. It was the collection of a German Jewish communist, who flew to Palestine around 1936. The antiquarian bought it from his son.
The Jewish Relief Unit was the operational arm of the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, which was formed in 1943 by the Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association and under the auspices and financial responsibility of the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation. This organisation, which was based in Great Britain, provided support and assistance of all kinds to Jewish Displaced Persons in the aftermath of the war in Germany.
The Gottstein family were a Jewish family from Rothenburg, Germany
Otto F Hutter was a former refugee from Vienna who came to Great Britain as a child on one of the Kindertransporte in 1939.
This letter of the school inspector (Bezirksschulrat) of Munich concerning the school-building of the Jewish community (Juedische Kultusgemeinde), written on the 12th of November 1938, to the government of Bavaria/Munich reports the destruction of the school-building caused by a fire in the attached Synagogue.
Considering the date of the letter it can be assumed that the fire was a result of the pogroms on the 9th November 1939. Moreover, the school inspector reports that of six male teachers three are in prison, one is ill and that the whereabouts of the fifth teacher is unclear. Therefore he orders the closure of the school.
The Kulturbund Deutscher Juden, later the Reichsverband der Juedischen Kulturbuende in Deutschland was an organisation engaged in promoting culture and the arts among the Jews of Germany between 1933 and 1941. Its purposes were to enable the Jewish population to maintain the cultural life to which they were accustomed, and to alleviate the distress of the thousands of Jewish theatrical artists and musicians who had been thrown out of their jobs when the Nazis came to power.
The protest meeting to which this flyer refers took place some time in 1938 after Reichskristallnacht, at The Hippodrome, Golders Green. Among those attending were representatives from the Federation of Peace Councils, the Jewish People's Council and the Society of Friends.
The papers in this collection pertain to a competition organised by W Marmorek to create the best English translation of a poem originally written in German concerning life in Buchenwald concentration camp.
Marmorek was originally asked to help out with the translation by a friend and former inmate of Buchenwald. He placed an advertisement in the AJR Newsletter offering a prize for the best translation.
Buchenwald concentration camp, one of the largest in Germany with its 130 satellite camps and units, was situated 5 miles north of Weimar in Thüringen. It was established in July 1937 when the first group of 149 mostly political prisoners and criminals was received. Some 238,980 prisoners passed through Buchenwald from 30 countries. 43,005 were killed or perished there.
This release permit belonged to Erich Marmorek, born Vienna, 1907, architect.
The Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief was founded in the early months of 1933 by a group of Anglo-Jewish community leaders, in response to the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on a political platform of anti-Semitism. Among the founders were Anthony de Rothschild, Leonard G. Montefiore and Otto Schiff.
The fund has been through many name changes in its lifetime. It started out as the Central British Fund for German Jewry, then became part of the new Council for German Jewry in 1936 along with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the American United Palestine Appeal. On the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 the fund changed its name to the Central Council for Jewish Refugees, and in 1944 changed again to the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation. After many years as the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief, the organisation is now known as World Jewish Relief.
The Fund's mission, according to its Memorandum of Association, was 'to relieve or assist Jewish Refugees in any part of the world in such manner and on such terms and conditions (if any) as may be thought fit'. In this work the fund was aided by various organisations, including the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC) which was founded by Otto Schiff in 1933, the Children's Refugee Movement (established by the JRC and the Inter-Aid Committee), and the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, which was established in 1943 and financed by the Central Council for Jewish Refugees (as the Central British Fund (CBF) was then known).
Little is known about the subject of this collection. It appears that Henni Lesley, formerly Lewin, formerly a Jewish resident of Berlin, was at one time imprisoned at Lichtenburg Concentration Camp (1541/1); that she probably emigrated to Great Britain shortly after her release (circa 1938-1939); and that her parents were deported East in March 1943, never to be seen again (1541/4).
Walter Manes was born in Berlin in 1911, one of four children of Philipp and Gertrude Manes, a Jewish family. He managed to escape Nazi Germany through employment opportunities as a musician in Shanghai in 1938 and 1939. He remained with his wife in China until 1948 when he emigrated to USA. (See 1548/1 for an autobiographical account).
Eva Manes was the daughter of Philip Manes, a German Jewish fur-trader, who was transported to Theresienstadt, then Auschwitz where he perished with his wife. See GB 1556 WL 1346 for more background information on the family.
Frank Bright, formerly Frantisek Brichta, was born in Berlin, the son of a Czech Jew. The family moved to Prague just before the Nazis in 1938. They were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp and thence to Auschwitz. Frank remained in Auschwitz only for a short while and survived the Second World War in a small concentration camp in Silesia, KZ Friedland. The rest of the family perished. Frank had relations in London to whom he was sent as a displaced person after the war.
Klappholttal Youth camp, Schleswig-Holstein was founded in 1919 to provide for the spiritual and intellectual as well as the physical needs of young people.
Dr Richard Michels was born in 1873 in Essen and settled in Duesseldorf in 1899. He spent his first few years in Duesseldorf as a ship's doctor on a number of vessels, sailing all over the world. Thus the bulk of this collection contains letters sent to his mother and journals whilst travelling. He came to London in 1939 where he became a doctor specializing in mental disorders and nervous diseases. He made a name for himself by developing the anti-depressant Lubrokal, which was also used for epilepsy. He was married late in life to the famous pianist, Irma Pulvermann, also from Duesseldorf, with whom he visited her home city every year.
Kristallnacht, also known as Reichskristallnacht, Reichspogromnacht, Crystal Night and the Night of the Broken Glass, was a pogrom against Jews throughout Germany, 9-10 November 1938. Jewish homes along with 8,000 Jewish shops were ransacked in numerous German cities, towns and villages as civilians and both the SA (Sturmabteilung) and the SS (Schutzstaffel) destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in shards of glass from broken windows, the origin of the name 'Night of Broken Glass'. Jews were beaten to death, 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps and 1,668 synagogues ransacked, with 267 set on fire.