Papers probaby compiled for an exhibition on the fate of Jews in Vienna during the Nazi era.
Fred Dunston (originally Fritz Deutsch) along with his friend Martin Goldenberg became involved in setting up a school to prepare Jewish children in Vienna for emigration to Palestine. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 they started to help organise the Jewish childrens' transports to Great Britain. After a brief spell in the Kitchener Camp for Refugees, near Sandwich, Kent, they worked at Great Engeham Farm, Kent, where many of the children stayed initially before moving on to more permanent accommodation.
After spending a short period as a youth leader at Bydown, Devon, a Hascharah camp for Jewish children preparing for Palestine, Fred went on to manage a smaller centre for older refugees at Braunton, Devon. His time at Braunton was interrupted by a spell of internment on the Isle of Man along with many other German and Austrian Jewish immigrants. The centre closed at the end of 1940.
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.
Karl Neumann was born into a Jewish family in Picin, Czechoslovakia, 1895. He trained at a business school and after initially working with his brother he went into business on his own in 1933. In 1939 on account of persecution by the Nazis on racial grounds he fled to London.
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.
Brissago is a municipality in the district of Locarno in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland. During World War Two it was the site of a camp for refugees and later survivors from Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Chaja Cohn, a former refugee residing in Israel, was responsible for collecting these accounts.
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 papers in this collection document the fate of a Jewish mixed race family in Vienna during the Nazi era. The depositor's father, Alwin Goldschmied, was arrested in April 1938 by the Gestapo and eventually perished in Auschwitz having reached there via Drancy. The daughter, the depositor, Ellinor, came to England in 1939 with the assistance of the Quakers. Maria Goldschmied, the depositor's mother, seems to have spent the majority of the war in a small town called Stiefern with relatives some 90 km from Vienna. In August 1946 she came to England.
Lisbeth Perks was born into a Jewish family in Vienna c 1930; came to Great Britain as a refugee, 1939. Whilst bringing up her family she studied pianoforte with Herbert Sumison and Kendall Taylor and gained an associateship of the Royal College of Music. She has taught in many schools and at her own home.
The depositor was the grand-daughter of Feodor Schweitzer, the subject of some of the documents. The family came to Great Britain, 1938-1939. The relationship of the individuals referred to in the earlier documentation to the depositor is unknown. It appears that one of the depositor's ancestors was a court photographer in Berlin in the 1860s.
Born 1916, Wolfgang Josephs, a German Jew from Berlin, came to Great Britain sometime in the mid 1930s. He was interned as an enemy alien at the outbreak of war and later transported on the 'Dunera' to Hay Internment Camp, Australia. On his return to Great Britain in 1941 he enlisted in the Pioneer Corps, later changing his name to Peter Johnson. He was a military interpreter for the British occupying forces in Germany at Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, May 1945-Oct 1946 where he was involved with the denazification process. Whilst there he also took an interest in the returnees from concentration camps, arranging correspondence between them and their families all over the world. The Wiener Library has a copy of a tape recorded interview with him, the original being produced for the Imperial War Museum, which details his life as an internee in Great Britain and Australia.
'The Hyphen' was founded in 1948 by a group of younger continental Jewish refugees (between the ages of 20 and 35), many of whom were the children of members of the Association of Jewish Refugees, who having settled in Great Britain, found that owing to their similar background and experiences they had interests and problems in common. The group was to have no particular religious or political bias. The intention was to provide cultural, social and welfare activities in a way that would enable them to feel at home in their newly adopted country. The name 'The Hyphen' was chosen because it symbolized the gap between the older generation of refugees who had no intention or desire to integrate into British society, and the ideal of seamless integration which the younger generation aspired to but could not immediately realise.
One of the group's first activities was the setting up of a study and discussion group, which covered topics such as immigration in general, as well as German-Jewish immigration into Britain; German-Jewish history, and British cultural and political topics. Its most popular functions became the social gatherings, dances, and rambles in the Home Counties. 'The Hyphen' never had more than 100 members at one time but there were between 400 and 500 names on its mailing lists. The activities eventually petered out and the group was wound up in 1968. Compared with other German-Jewish institutions it was rather marginal, but for the members it fulfilled a very important function by giving them a sense of belonging during a difficult period of settling in to a new society.
This is believed to be a typescript transcript of an Associated Press telex containing the names on the infamous Nazi Black List, a facsimile copy of which the Wiener Library holds. The list contains the names of all those whom the Nazis regarded as a potential threat to their plans and would therefore be arrested after the successful invasion of Great Britain.
Max Gottschalk was the American Joint Distribution Committee's (JDC's) trust representative in pre-war Belgium. Born in Liege in 1889, he became a social scientist, joining the Institute of Sociology of the Free University of Brussels as a research professor in 1923, he later became Government Commissioner for Unemployment and President of the Social Security Board of Belgium. As President of the Belgian Committee for Refugees from Nazi Germany, he was instrumental in the rescue of the passengers of the ship 'St Louis', that was sent back from Cuba and finally permitted to land in Antwerp in July 1939. He got out of Belgium in 1940, emigrating to America and became the president of HICEM, the Jewish migration organisation.
Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 into a cultured and assimilated middle class Jewish family, and died in Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 26. 'Life or Theatre?' is the name she gave to a sequence of nearly 800 gouaches she produced between 1940 and 1942. Subtitled 'a play with music', it combines images, texts and musical references to recreate a life scarred both by family tragedy and Nazi persecution, yet interspersed with moments of intense happiness and love.
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.
Josa Morgan-Ruffner née Lederer was born in 1910 to Professor Lederer, a famous surgeon and Baroness Zenetti of Venice. She was Roman Catholic; studied for the theatre with Professor Arndt of the famous Burgtheater; married the star of stage and screen, playwright and wit, Paul Morgan, beloved by pre-war Berlin. She joined him when he was under contract in Hollywood to MGM. When they returned, Hitler rose to power. Paul Morgan's Theater der Komiker was taken away and they left for Vienna.
Josa started broadcasting about her American experiences and wrote regularly in the Sunday edition of Das Wiener Journal.
In 1938 Paul Morgan was arrested and sent to Dachau then Buchenwald where he was killed (according to Josa) by special orders of Hitler who could not forgive him for ridiculing him.
Josa was imprisoned in 1940 by the French as the holder of a German passport and taken to a concentration camp in the Pyrenees.
In 1944 she married Mr Joseph Ruffner III and became an American citizen. Later became estranged from him living in Munich and London.
The actor Paul Morgan was born as Paul Morgenstern. He belonged to the great theatre actors of his time. He appeared at the Simplicissimus in 1914 and founded together with Kurt Robitschek and Max Hansen the Berliner Kabarett der Komiker.
As an established theatre actor he dared to make first steps in the new and disapproved-of medium, film. To his early movies belong Der Herr ohne Wohnung, Die Reise um die Erde in 80 Tagen as well as Fritz Lang's successful productions Halbblut and Die Spinnen.
In the 1920's there followed other very successful movies, among them Die Herrin der Welt, Kurfürstendamm, Hedda Gabler, Die Brüder Schellenberg, Wehe, wenn sie losgelassen, Der Stolz der Kompagnie, Venus im Frack, Casanova und Moral.
Morgan gained in popularity in the 1930s. He played in the following years in numerous movies like Nur Du, Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel-Takt, Menschen hinter Gittern, Casanova wider Willen and Ich und die Kaiserin.
Paul Morgan also made a name as an author of musicals besides his acting activity. He wrote among others the musical Axel vor des Himmels Tor, with which Zarah Leander launched her career.
The threat from National Socialism in Germany was underestimated by Paul Morgan for a long time. He was one of the first victims of the union of Austria to the German Reich in 1938 and was arrested on charges of possession of a letter of Gustav Stresemann (see copy at 1336/1/2). The real reason for his arrest was his Jewish roots.
Paul Morgan was deported to Dachau and arrived at the prison camp together with other Viennese in May. Paul Morgan was later transported to Buchenwald where he died of pneumonia, which he contracted during an inhuman punishment drill in one of the coldest winters in Europe.
The Reverend Wernham was one time parish priest at Christ Church, Forest Hill, in which parish there was also a German church. The latter's pastor, for a short time before the war, had been Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Reverend Wernham has been associated with Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who helped rescue a number of German clergy of Jewish extraction.
Two Czech Torah scrolls were given to the Northwood and Pinner Synagogue from the towns of Kolin and Trebon. It was decided to research the history and background to these scrolls. The content of this collection is the result of that research.
The author of this letter, Jella Caro, was the sister-in-law of the depositor's grandmother. She was 77 years old at the time of writing and lived to the age of 100. She was over 90 years old before she received any compensation for her suffering. In the letter she describes the deleterious effect on her health of 3 years in Terezin. Freezing cold and alone at an address in post-war Vienna, which functioned as a home for Jewish returnees, she describes how pleased she is to hear from her (unidentified) relatives and asks after them.
This copy letter in Yiddish with English translation was addressed to the father of the depositor, and describes the fate of the depositor's mother, who survived the Warsaw ghetto only to be murdered at Majdanek.
The author of this eyewitness testimony regarding Kristallnacht, Vincent C Frank, is a family friend of the depositor, W F Jaspert, and is said to be a blood relative of the famous diarist, Anne Frank.
Paul Loebl was an Austrian Jew who spent time in Belgium and in the concentration camps of St Cyprien and Gurs. He died in 1985.
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.
Frederick (Fritz) Ullstein was the son of Hermann Ullstein, the youngest of the 5 Ullstein brothers, responsible for building up the Ullstein publishing House to become the largest in Europe, prior to compulsory purchase by the Nazis in 1934, on account of the family's Jewish origins. Frederick came to Great Britain in the 1930s, became a farmer, served in the British army during the war and married into the Guiness family. After the war he was involved in claiming back for the Ullstein family what was rightfully theirs. Once the business was back in the hands of members of the Ullstein family, it became evident that for a number of reasons, they were not able to recreate the success, which the firm enjoyed before the Nazi seizure of power. Sustained interest by Axel Springer eventually resulted in the latter's company taking over the firm. Frederick Ullstein became an employee of Aldus Books, based in London.
.Aldus Books, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Doubleday and Co. Inc. of New York, USA Division was run by Wolfgang Foges, who came to Great Britain from Austria to get married in 1936. In Vienna he had edited a fashion magazine. He founded Adprint in Great Britain in 1937. This company created and produced illustrated books, the best known of which were the 120 volumes of the Britain in Pictures series, published in England by Collins, and translated into several languages by the Ministry of Information.
In 1941, Foges had been granted British citizenship for important services to the war effort and soon after his naturalisation he was appointed an honorary advisor to the Colonial Office on books and publications.
In the early 1950s, under the imprint of Rathbone Books, a series of books called The Wonderful World was published in association with Doubleday and Co. Inc. New York. This was the start of many further series of internationally co-produced educational and general knowledge books, written by distinguished British authors. In 1960 Aldus Books was founded.
Peter Kien was born in January 1919 in Warnsdorf, Czechoslovakia, the son of a textile manufacturer, whose business collapsed during the economic crisis of 1929. He began painting whilst a student at the German Realschule in Brünn and continued his schooling in art at the Prague Academy where he studied under Willi Nowak. The situation in Czechoslovakia got steadily worse particularly for Jews after the annexation of Austria in March 1938. During this time he met Ilse Stransky. They married in September 1940. In December 1941 he was deported to Theresienstadt.
In Theresienstadt he met many more artists and writers whilst working in the graphics department. He became increasingly active as a portrait artist and sketcher of fellow inmates. Above all he immersed himself in the theatrical and musical life of the camp.
In July 1942 he was joined by his wife and in January 1943 by his parents. He wrote poetry and several plays and his libretto for the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder der Tod dankt ab which had its premiere in Amsterdam in 1975.
He was sent to Aushwitz on the last transport in October 1944 along with his wife and parents where he was murdered.
Walter Finkler was born in 1902 in Vienna where he studied at both a music academy and at a medical institute. Although he terminated his medical training early he had already written a number of scientific papers on a variety of subjects ranging from a study of monkey glands to the sexual behaviour of flies.
He arrived in England at the end of March, 1939, where he spent approximately the first year in the Kitchener Camp for refugees. Later he was interned on the Isle of Man. He was actively involved in the Kitchener Camp orchestra. In 1946 he trained as a food scientist in Manchester where the family lived until 1954 after which the family moved south. Walter died in 1960.
Hansi Finkler was born in 1906 and married Walter in 1927. She arrived in England in early March 1939 where she had several jobs as maid or cook in various parts of the country. Evelyn, born in 1930, had come to England in 1938 where she stayed at the 'Haven' hostel in Camden Town, a home for Jewish refugee children from Europe sponsored by the Lyons family. She was reunited with her mother in the early 1940s and they lived in a bedsit in West London where they did piece work to make ends meet.
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.
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.
The material was presented in the form of a memorial book dedicated to the parents, Isaak David and Martha Teich-Birken, by Martin Teich-Birken. It was originally housed in the Wiener Library series: Unpublished Memoirs No. 4060 [20355]. It was a collaborative effort on the part of the siblings. The original correspondence had remained with sister, Adele. The collection was produced in part as a response to a request from the Freie Universität, Berlin which was collating material for their project: Gedenkbuch- Schicksal der Berliner Juden.
The November Pogrom, 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.
Fred Dunston (previously Fritz Deutsch), the depositor, worked in the Youth Aliyah offices and later the Palästinaamt, Vienna (after the former was destroyed during Kristallnacht), and also as youth leader or member of the Elternschaft in the Youth Aliyah centres of Great Engeham Farm, Kent, Braunton and Bydown, Devon.
Youth Aliyah or Aliyat Hanoar, as it was known in Hebrew, was created by Recha Freier, wife of a Berlin Rabbi, in 1932. Combining productive agricultural training with educational and Zionist values it gave many young Jewish children a purpose and occupation during the period of mass unemployment, the result of the breakdown of the German economy.
Circumstances in late 1938 Europe meant that it became imperative to send Jewish children abroad. Auslandhascharah was the overseas version of Youth Aliyah where children and young people were trained with a view to eventually emigrating to Palestine. England was added to the list of countries and the London office soon became the busiest, reflecting the popularity of Great Britain as a destination.
Funding of the centres came from the British Council of the Young Pioneer Movement for Palestine (Hachsharath Hanoar), whose executive committee comprised Mrs Israel M. Sieff, Mrs Norman Laski, Mr M. Schattner and Mrs Lola Hahn-Warburg.
Great Engeham Farm, Kent, was received as a gift as a result of an advertisement in the London Times. It opened in June 1939 and a total of 134 children and 30 chalutzim lived there rent free. It served primarily as a transit camp for between 300 and 350 children aged 13-16.
Bydown, Devon, was founded by a group from Great Engeham Farm who were forced to move there in November 1939 when Kent was designated off-limits to aliens. Its headmaster was Dr. Fridolin M. Friedmann, a former headmaster of the Landschulheim of Caputh, near Berlin. It closed at the beginning of October 1941 when the lease ran out.
The agricultural training centre at Braunton, Devon, was a collaborative project between Youth Aliyah, Hechaluz and the British Council of the Young Pioneer Movement for Palestine. The accommodation housed 30 people who engaged in farm work. The centre existed between March and December 1940.
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.
Bernhard Reichenbach, 1888-1975, was the son of a Jewish businessman and a protestant teacher; childhood and schooling in Hamburg; later became an actor in Bochum and Hamburg, 1912-1914; studied literature, art history and sociology in Berlin; active in the youth movement and a member of the Freie Studentenschaft, Berlin. As a medical orderly in World War One he won the Ehren Kreuz II Klass. In 1917 he was a founding member of the Unabhängige Sozialistischepartei Deutschlands; co-founder of the Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, and, as a representative of the latter party, he attended the Executive Committee of the Communist International in Moscow, and the third World Congress of the Communist International. He left the KAPD on his return to Berlin and joined the SPD in the beginning of 1925. He continued his activities as a journalist for a number of left-wing periodicals whilst working as a company secretary for a weaving business in Krefeld. After the Nazis came to power he could no longer continue working as a journalist, and after pressure from the police he emigrated to Great Britain.
In 1935 he joined the Labour Party. He was interned on the Isle of Man, 1940-1941, and after his release worked in the field of political instruction of German POWs. From 1944-1948 he edited the British government periodical for German POWs in Great Britain, Die Wochenpost.
He was a member of Club 1943. He became the London correspondent of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk and Westfälische Rundschau. He also worked on Contemporary Review and Socialist Commentary and Welt der Arbeit. He was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz in 1958.
The Political Intelligence Department was established as a secret Foreign Office Department at the outbreak of the Second World War, and provided cover for the Political Warfare Executive, which was formed in August 1941 to undermine enemy morale and resistance by various forms of propaganda. It was constituted by an amalgamation of parts of the European sections of the BBC and of the Foreign Publicity Department of the Ministry of Information with Special Operations 1, part of the Special Operations Executive, which was subordinate to the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Special Operations 1 had itself been preceded by Department EH, which had included a Department of Publicity in Enemy Countries responsible for propaganda by means of leaflets dropped from the air.
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.
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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.
This collection was apparently created by George Burger whilst living in Austria and Hungary.
Gustav Hollaender was the director of the Stern Conservatory, which was founded as the Berlin Conservatory in 1850. In 1936 it was Aryanised and the Hollaender family opened the Jewish Private Music School Hollaender (Juedische Private Musikschule Hollaender) in Berlin Charlottenburg. It became important for the Jewish pupils because they were not allowed into state schools anymore. It had to close in 1938 and the head of the school, Susanne Hollaender was transported to Auschwitz on 29 January 1943.
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.
Primo Levi was born in Italy 1919; chemist; prisoner in Auschwitz, Feb 1944-Jan 1945; wrote a number of memoirs, short stories, poems, and novels, notably If This Is a Man (published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz) documenting Levi's experiences in the Holocaust; died 1987.