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.
Josef Mueller was born in 1910, the 18th of 19 children of David and Rosa Mueller in Mosbach, Baden Wuerttemberg. After school he trained as a bookbinder and picture frame-maker, in which trade he worked, interspersed with periods of unemployment, until he joined the SS in 1936, where he commenced working full-time for the organisation in Heidelberg. He married Rosa Krauss on 22 March 1937 and they had 2 children. He joined the Waffen SS in September 1939. After sustaining an injury fighting in Russia, he was sent to work for the Chief of Police in Cracow, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Krueger. He was involved with 'resettling' Jews and became commandant of the work camps at Plaszow. It was during this period that he committed war crimes.
On 5 March 1944 he was captured by the Russians near Lublinca. He stayed in various POW camps in Nowosibirsk, Moscow and Stalinowgorsk. According to the embassy of the USSR in West Germany, he was sentenced to 25 years hard labour in 1949 for 'Crimes against the Soviet people during the war by Fascist Germany'. On 14 October 1955 he was released and he returned to Germany, where he lived with his family in Limbach, until re-arrest by the German authorities in 1960. He was tried and convicted of murder, incitement and accessory to murder on numerous counts, in August 1961. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but released on parole in November 1970.
Wilhelm Rosenbaum was born in 1915 and was found guilty of multiple murders whilst in charge of the police training school at Bad Rabka, Poland. He received 16 life sentences at his trial in Hamburg in 1968, but was released shortly after on the grounds of ill health.
Cecil Roth (1899-1970), Jewish historian and editor in chief of the Encyclopedia Judaica, was born in London, saw active service in the British infantry in 1918 before entering Merton College, Oxford, obtaining his doctorate in 1925. He trained as an historian with a special interest in Italy, his first major work being The Last Florentine Republic. He was reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford from 1939-1964. When he retired in 1964 he settled in Jerusalem, taking up a visiting professorship at Bar-Ilan University.
Walter Gordon was a Jewish doctor from Hildesheim, Lower Saxony.Max Nelki was a Jewish resident of Hamburg during the 1930s, who was sentenced to 2 years for race defilement and spent some time in a concentration camp; found refuge in Shanghai; and returned to Hamburg after the war.
The slave labour camp at Moerfelden-Walldorf, 30km south of Frankfurt, housed mostly Jewish women prisoners, who worked either on preparing the ground for building Frankfurt airport or for the company Züblin und Cie AG. It was open from 2 November 1943 to 26 March 1945.
The SS (Schutzstaffel) was founded in 1925 with the object of protecting the Nazi Perty leader, Adolf Hitler. By 1936, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the SS had assumed responsiblity for all police and security matters throughout the Third Reich.
Wolfram Sievers, who became the Reichsgeschäftsführer der Forschungsgemeinschaft Deutschen Ahnenerbe (the Director of the Society for Research into the Spiritual Roots of Germany's Ancestral Heritage), was born in 1905 the son of an evangelical church musician in Hildesheim. His Gymnasium schooling was aborted not, as he claimed on the witness stand at the Nuremberg Trials, because he had to find a practical occupation on account of the difficulties caused by the separation of his parents, but, as he states in his SS- Personalfragebogen, because of his desire to be more actively involved in the 'deutsch-völkisch' Schutz und Trutzbund. Thus demonstrating from early on his fascination for German ethnicity and pre-Christian culture.
Sievers was a witness at the first Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and was himself convicted of being a war criminal on account of his involvement in experimentation on concentration camp prisoners. He was executed on 2 June 1948.
Nothing is known about H. Loebl. Josephine Winter was a Jewish immigrant to Great Britain from Vienna.
The Central Information Bureau for Jewish War Sufferers in the Far East was founded in 1917 by Sam Mason, a special delegate sent by the Hebrew Immigrant Society (better known as HIAS) in New York. Its function was to deal with the problem of refugees attempting to reach America (and other countries) from the Far East. The main office was established in Harbin, China, but branches were also set up in Yokohama, Japan, and Vladivostok on the eastern seaboard of the Soviet Union. Though the Bureau continued to deal with the problems of victims of the 1914-1918 First World War until the late 1920's, it changed its official name to The Far Eastern Central Information Bureau in 1923 and took its cable address 'DALJEWCIB' which became the organisation's name in everyday use. At this time Meir Birman became involved in the Bureau's work and was to manage it until its dissolution some 25 years later. Connected with HIAS since 1918, the Bureau worked in very close co-operation with the umbrella Jewish refugee organization HICEM (the amalgamation of HIAS, JCA and the Emigre organisation of Berlin). From 1938, the numbers of German, Austrian and other central European Jews, including Polish and Czechoslovakians, requesting asylum grew drastically. With the Japanese occupation of northern China in the early 1930s, the situation of the Jews in Harbin deteriorated, until, in September 1939, the Bureau moved its head office to Shanghai. At that time Shanghai remained one of the few places, which refugees could enter without a visa. Throughout 1939 and 1940, Jews continued to flood into Shanghai, until with the outbreak of the Pacific War some 18,000 Jewish refugees reached Shanghai, of which about 8,000 originated from Germany and about 4,000 from Austria. At the end of the Pacific War in August 1945 the Bureau formed part of the world-wide chain of organisations trying to trace other Jewish refugees in order to place the Shanghai refugees in secure countries. This work continued for a number of years after the war ended.
Dr. Käthe Spiegel was the daughter of the Professor of Public Law at the German University of Prague, and for many years senate member of the Parliament of Czechoslovakia, Dr. Ludwig Spiegel. She trained as a historian and librarian and worked as her father's secretary. She also worked for a number of other mostly student organisations in Prague. Letters of reference suggest that she probably emigrated to Great Britain in 1939.
This microfilm collection consists of material gathered in Vilnius, Lithuania, by a group of refugee Polish-Jewish writers and journalists, who formed a committee to collect evidence on the conditions of Jews in Poland under German occupation.
Stalag VIII B Lamsdorf (now Lambinowice in Silesia) also known as Kommando E562, became a part of the Auschwitz/Monowitz concentration camp complex. It was opened in 1939 to house Polish prisoners from the German September 1939 offensive. Later approximately 100,000 prisoners from Australia, Belgium, Great Britain, Canada, France, Greece, New Zealand, Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the United States passed through this camp. In 1941 a separate camp, Stalag VIII-F was set up close by to house the Soviet prisoners. In 1943, the Lamsdorf camp was split up, and many of the prisoners (and Arbeitskommandos) were transferred to two new base camps Stalag VIII-C Sagan and Stalag VIII-D Teschen (modern Èeský Tìšín). The base camp at Lamsdorf was renumbered Stalag 344. The Soviet Army reached the camp 17 March 1945.
Interradio AG was a holding company comprising numerous German-owned foreign broadcasting stations and was owned in equal share by the Nazi Foreign Affairs Department and the Propaganda Ministry. On 22 October 1941 it was merged with the Nazi radio monitoring service 'Seehaus' (named after the building in Berlin where it was located).
The NS Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude, the National Socialist Organisation Strength through Joy, came under the aegis of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the national German labour organization. All members of the DAF were also members of the KdF, and as basically any worker was a part of the DAF, so too were they in the Kraft durch Freude. The KdF was essentially designed for the purpose of providing organised leisure for the German work force. The DAF calculated that the work year contained 8,760 hours of which only 2,100 were spent working, 2,920 hours spent sleeping, leaving 3,740 hours of free time. Thus the driving concept behind the KdF was organised 'relaxation for the collection of strength for more work.'
The KdF strived to achieve this goal of organised leisure by providing activities such as trips, cruises, concerts, and cultural activities for German workers. These events were specifically directed towards the working class, and it was through the KdF that the NSDAP hoped to bring to the 'common man' the pleasures once reserved only for the rich.
The Brussels Relief Committee was an organisation set up by the American Government to provide food aid to the people of Brussels during World War Two. Members include Mr Vhitlock, Honorary President and Millard K Shaler.
The NSDAP/AO was the Foreign Organisation of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). The party members who lived outside the German Reich were pooled in this special NSDAP department. On May 1 1931 the new organisational unit was founded on the initiative of Reich Organisation Leader (Reichsorganisationsleiter) Gregor Strasser and its management was assigned to Dr Hans Nieland. But Nieland resigned from office already on May 8, 1933, because he had become head of the Hamburg police authorities in the meantime and later on a member of the Hamburg provincial government. Ernst Wilhelm Bohle was appointed director of the 'AO', that served as 43rd Gau of the NSDAP.
NSDAP Local Groups (Ortsgruppen) comprised 25 party comrades at least, so called Stützpunkte (bases) had 5 members or more. Furthermore, big Local Groups could be partitioned into Blocs (Blöcke).
Ideological training and uniform orientation of all party members in the interest of the German nation were the principal tasks of NSDAP/AO. Only Imperial Germans (Reichsdeutsche) with a German passport could become members of the AO. Persons of German descent, so called ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), who possessed the nationality of the country in which they lived, were refused access to the Nazi Party.
Jüdische Nachrichten (Jewish News), was founded by the Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund (Swiss Association of Jewish Communities), Zürich, as its press office in 1936, to confront Nazism but also to address growing anti-semitism in Switzerland. To this end it produced news bulletins in German and French and distributed them to numerous editorial offices throughout Switzerland.
Under the leadership of Dr. Benjamin Sagalowitz (1938-1964) JUNA amassed a large archive of documentation concerning the Holocaust and the fate of Jewish refugees and other related subjects. Parts of this archive were used to create the three dossiers in this collection.