The Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, 2000, brought together presidents, prime ministers and other high-ranking ministers and officials from 40 countries to discuss how to keep Holocaust remembrance alive; the lessons to be drawn; and how best to pass on the knowledge of the fact to future generations.
This collection of correspondence and papers relates to the experience of a former Jewish pupil of a secondary school in Stade, Lower Saxony. The papers relate to three separate projects: an invitation by the city of Stade to Dinah Ruth Curtis, the former school pupil, along with all other surviving Jewish former residents of the city for a special reunion; a request by a historian at the city archives for biographical information relating to her persecution by the Nazis and a request by her former school to contribute material towards an exhibition on the subject of girls' education in Stade to mark the 125th anniversary of the school.
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).
Edith Stein was born in October 12, 1891 and was a German philosopher, a Carmelite nun, martyr, and saint of the Catholic Church, who died at Auschwitz. In 1922, she converted to Christianity from Judaism, was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church and was received into the Discalced Carmelite Order in 1934. She was canonized as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (her Carmelite monastic name) by Pope John Paul II in 1998; however, she is still often referred to, and churches named for her as, Saint Edith Stein. Stein died August 9, 1942.
The depositor is her niece.
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.
Ruth Dina Curtis was born into an orthodox Jewish family in 1920 in North Germany. Her father was a banker who provided services for the farming community in Stade. The advent of the Nazis in 1933 brought discrimination, a move to Hamburg and ultimately death and separation. Ruth’s parents (Adolf and Therese Heidemann) were deported by the SS from Hamburg to Riga in December 1941, whereupon they ‘disappeared’ presumed murdered having been unable to obtain visas for the United States due to the strict quota system. Aged 19 Ruth was granted an entry permit for the UK and arrived in August 1939.
This notebook had been the property of Kitty Fehr, sister of the depositor, who collected it and smuggled it to Great Britain as a 15 year old girl in 1939. She added a few more during the war in England.
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.
This collection contains papers relating to Hans Schwarz, founder of the organisation Komitee Ehemaliger Politischer Gefangener, and general secretary of its successor, Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes.
Hans Schwarz was born in Vienna in 1904. He had already been imprisoned well before 1933 along with Bruno Kreisky and other Austrian Marxists. He was a political prisoner in Dachau from 1934-1944 and from October 1944 to April 1945 in Neuengamme. A committed opponent of the Nazis, he was a member of illegal prisoner organisations in both concentration camps. He died in 1970.
Markus Gruenebaum, the grandfather of the depositor, died on 11 December 1912 age 89.
This letter is from a former friend of Philip Manes and his wife, addressed to Eva Manes and written in 1957. For the main Manes collection see WL document collection 1346.
Kartell Conventus is the generic name for German Jewish student fraternities which were established in the 1880s as a result of increasing anti-Semitism. After the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933 and the annexation of Austria in 1938 these fraternities were banned. However after the war many former members joined re-formed student fraternities in their adopted countries. These new organisations produced newsletters and held regular meetings.
Unzer Styme (Our Voice) was a monthly paper written in Yiddish and published by the Central Committee for Liberated Jews in the British Zone betwen 1945 and 1947. The articles covered here are contained in issues held at the Wiener Library.
Esther Brunstein, the author is a survivor of Bergen Belsen.
The copies of correspondence from Harold Fraser in Hamburg, provide an insight into the economic, social and political conditions of that city and of Germany in general covering the period of rampant inflation, record unemployment and the polarisation of political parties. Mention is made in the first letter of the strong presence in Germany of their competitor J. Henry Schroeder, another London- based merchant bank. The two companies happened to merge in 1962, now both have been subsumed under Citigroup, the European and American bank.
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.
Eleanor Hess was born in Munich on 20 December 1923 into a middle class Jewish family. Her father, Julius, was a cavalry officer in the First World War. He died in 1932. Eleanor came to Great Britain with her mother, Trude, in 1939. Her brother, Herbert, emigrated to Brazil where he spent the rest of his life. For a brief period Eleanor went to live with her brother in the early 1950s. She died in London c1999.
This collection of family papers consists primarily of letters from the Jewish parents, Franz and Hertha Kuhn in Berlin, to their daughter, Hannele or Hannah, who had managed to find refuge in Great Britain, having come out on one of the Kindertransporte in 1939. The letters give a very moving account of the trials and tribulations of a very close-knit, loving family split asunder by the Nazis and ultimately condemned to death.
Otto Bondy was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, 5 Aug 1892. He served in the First World War with distinction. He completed his engineering studies in Vienna in 1921 and went to Berlin to become an assistant to the Professor of Engineering structures, German industry (c 1926-1931). He emigrated to London, c 1933 and died in Surrey, May 1986.
Joyce Rozendaal Haldinstein, born in Norfolk, the daughter of a Jewish businessman, met and married a Dutch national and was caught up in the turmoil visited upon the Netherlands when the Germans invaded during World War Two.
Lodz ghetto or the Ghetto Litzmannstadt was the second-largest ghetto established for Jews and Roma in German-occupied Poland. It was originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews but the ghetto became a major industrial centre, providing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany. Because of its remarkable productivity, the ghetto managed to survive until August 1944, when the remaining population was transported to Auschwitz. It was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated.
Heinz and Lucie Frank were the parents of the depositor's husband. Heinz Frank was a lawyer and the family lived in Cologne. The family was affected by the rise of the Nazis. The Frank family had originated in Holland where there remained some distant cousins. So Heinz and Lucie Frank, with their sons, Hermann and Hans (now John), transferred to Amsterdam. Hermann had just received his doctorate in dentistry. Despite all his efforts the best he could achieve was to work clandestinely in a friendly dental practice. In 1936 he came to England. Hans left Holland only after the occupation, and with the help of the underground, made his way to Portugal and then, via a year or more in Cuba, to the USA.
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.
The Inow family were a Jewish family from Wuppertal, North Rhine Westfalia. The two daughters, Renate and Margalit escaped Nazi Germany to Great Britain and Sweden respectively, whilst their parents remained and were eventually deported to the Lodz Ghetto where they were killed.
Walter Richard Rudolf Hess was born April 26, 1894 and became was a prominent figure in Nazi Germany, acting as Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party. On the eve of war with the Soviet Union, he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom, but instead was arrested. He was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life internment at Spandau Prison, where he remained until his death in 1987 as a result of strangulation by an electrical cord. The official cause of death was recorded as suicide.
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.
Leon Goldenberg was born in 1864 in Czernowitz in Bukowina into a Jewish family. He entered the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1886 and died in Vienna in 1920.
This collection consists mainly of correspondence from friends and acquaintances of Valerie and Andrea Wolffenstein, two sisters of Jewish origins, who converted to Christianity and who managed to survive the war in hiding in Germany. Valerie and Andrea Wolffenstein were both born in Berlin, in 1891 and 1897 respectively. Valerie trained as a painter and worked as a secretary for Reichskunstwart, Dr Edwin Redslob; from 1931 for the writer and film director, Eberhard Frowein; and after a period of unemployment, for Dr Paul Zucker, architect and art historian. There followed a period of forced labour with the company Zeiss-Ikon, and from January 1943 she lived in hiding until liberation by the Americans at the end of the war. Since which time she lived with her sister in Munich.
Andrea studied music at the Berlin Hochschule and taught piano from 1924, until she was forbidden to teach aryan children. Thereafter she spent a short time as a music teacher at the Jewish Goldschmidt-Schule. She then worked as a forced labourer for the armaments manufacturer, Scherb und Schwer, until going underground with her sister.
During World War Two, Traunstein, Bavaria, was the site of a subcamp of Dachau concentration camp. In 1946 it became a displaced persons camp housing Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. In 1997 the City archive of Traunstein put on an exhibition about the camp entitled Ein Leben aufs Neu. Juedische Displaced Persons auf deutschem Boden, 1945-1948.
This collection consists of transcripts of interviews conducted for the TV programme 'The Hidden Jews of Berlin'. The programme was made by Kessler Productions in conjunction with Darlow Smithson Productions for the Secret History series on Channel 4. It was transmitted on 17 August 1999. The producer was Peter Kessler, the director was Clara Glynn, and the executive producer was John Smithson.
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.
This collection documents the experiences of a Jewish family in Vienna and Budapest during the Nazi era. One of the correspondents, Mitzi, was a close friend of the depositor's mother in Vienna, where they were both born before 1900. When the war began she, her husband, Lutz, and their daughter, Eva, were living in Budapest. After the war the family emigrated to Israel. The Schlesinger family had emigrated to Great Britain, but the two families remained in contact for 40 years. The depositor provided the translation.
Esther Pauline Lloyd was born in London in 1906 of Jewish parentage. She later married a non-Jew, having relinquished her Jewish identity and brought their children up as nominal Christians, which, according to an entry in her diary, she later regretted. Having been deported from Jersey without her family by the occupying Germans in February 1943, she later managed to successfully appeal the decision and was released in April 1944 and allowed to return to Jersey.
The Wiener Library collated this material about former Nazis who found refuge in a number of Arab countries in the Middle East including Syria and Egypt, some of whom became involved in those countries' intelligence services.
The Comité voor Bijzondere Joodsche Belangen (the Committee for Special Jewish Affairs) was founded in Spring 1933 by Dr David Cohen with the object of bringing together all the various Jewish interest groups to co-ordinate protest activities against the persecution of Jews in Germany and to deal with the burgeoning refugee problem. Out of this organisation was born a second, the Comité voor Joodsche Vluechtlingen (the Committee for Jewish Refugees), which was responsible for the day to day running of the relief effort in Amsterdam. Its remit grew to include assisting Jewish refugees nationwide and representing their interests to the government.
The Conference on the problem of Jewish refugees was held in Evian, France, on the shore of Lake Geneva, in July 1938. Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed this international conference in the wake of Germany's annexation of Austria in March 1938, which substantially exacerbated the refugee problem. Delegates from 32 countries gathered from 6 to 15 July 1938. As the sessions proceeded, delegate after delegate excused his country from accepting additional refugees. The Evian Conference failed in its primary objective - to find safe haven for the Jews of Nazi Germany. Even the establishment of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees just before the conference adjourned was unable to make a difference.
On June 10, 1940, the Gestapo took control of Terezín (Theresienstadt), a fortress, built in 1780-1790 in what is now the Czech Republic, and set up prison in the Small Fortress (Kleine Festung). By 24 November 1941, the Main Fortress (große Festung, ie the town Theresienstadt) was turned into a walled ghetto. The function of Theresienstadt was to provide a front for the extermination operation of Jews. To the outside it was presented by the Nazis as a model Jewish settlement, but in reality it was a concentration camp.
Theresienstadt was also used as a transit camp for European Jews en route to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Dr. Siegfried Seidl, an SS colonel, served as the first camp commandant in 1941. Seidl oversaw the labour of 342 young men, known as the Aufbaukommando, who converted the fortress into a concentration camp. Although the Aufbaukommando were promised that they and their families would be spared transport, eventually all were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943, for Sonderbehandlung, or gassing without selection.
Eva Noack-Mosse , a Jewess, was born in 1908 in Berlin, the daughter of Max Mosse, professor of medicine. She married a non-Jew, Moritz Noack, in 1934, with whom she lived until she was deported to Theresienstadt in February 1945. Whilst an inmate, she worked as a typist in the statistical office. On June 10, 1940, the Gestapo took control of Terezín (Theresienstadt), a fortress, built in 1780-1790 in what is now the Czech Republic, and set up prison in the Small Fortress (Kleine Festung. By 24 November 1941, the Main Fortress (große Festung, ie the town Theresienstadt) was turned into a walled ghetto. The function of Theresienstadt was to provide a front for the extermination operation of Jews. To the outside it was presented by the Nazis as a model Jewish settlement, but in reality it was a concentration camp. Theresienstadt was also used as a transit camp for European Jews en route to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.
The SS (Schutzstaffel) was founded in 1925 with the object of protecting the Nazi Party 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. The Reichsführung SS SD Hauptamt (SS High Command Security Service Main Office) was the internal security branch of the SS.
Carl Schmitt, the controversial and influential political and legal theorist, was born on 11 July 1888 in Plettenberg, Westfalen. He was professor for jurisprudence in Greifswald, 1921; Bonn, 1922-1923; Berlin (Handelshochschule), 1926; Köln, 1933; and again in Berlin, during the Nazi era when he achieved the exalted position of 'Crown Jurist'. During his career as a successful academic and teacher, he became recognised as a fierce critic of the Weimar constitution, which he accused of having weakened the state and of relying on liberalism, which, in his view, was incapable of solving the problems of a modern mass democracy. His loyalty to the Nazi cause had long been suspected by elements within the SS Security Service and his anti- semitism was regarded as opportunistic. As a result of a critical article in the SS periodical Der Schwarze KorpsSchmitt was investigated by the Security Service and subsequently lost most of his prominent offices, and retreated from his position as a leading Nazi jurist, although he retained his post as a professor in Berlin thanks to Göring. He never again dealt with domestic or party politics, but turned his attention to the study of international relations, and soon passed into obscurity. After the war he continued to publish but never held office. He remained a controversial figure, having never been formally charged with complicity with the Nazi regime, nor ever exonerated. He died on 7 April 1985.
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.
This material documenting the persecution of Jews in Danzig during the 1930s was donated by two members of the former Danzig Jewish community: Mr Berent, representative of the board of the Jewish community; and Dr Erwin Lichtenstein, representative of the Danzig synagogue community and editor of the independent Danziger Rundschau, who later became a lawyer in Tel Aviv and representative of the circa 1500 strong former Danziger Jewish community in Israel.
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.
Malines (Mechelen) concentration camp was situated in a former barracks by the river in the city of the same name in Belgium. It was appropriated by the Germans in 1942 to serve as an assembly camp for all the Jews of Belgium and other 'undesirable' groups. The camp was divided into several groups including those to be deported; nationals of neutral countries or Germany's allies; borderline cases (ie mixed race); political prisoners and, in the final stages of the camp's existence, Gypsies.
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.
The Hilfsverein für jüdische Studierende, Berlin (aid organisation for Jewish students) was founded in 1841 with the object of assisting poor Jewish students at state secondary schools in Berlin, by providing interest free loans and grants to cover examination costs. It is not known when it ceased functioning.
According to their own constitution, the World Jewish Congress is a voluntary association of representative Jewish bodies, communities and organisations throughout the world, organised to assure the survival and to foster the unity of the Jewish people. Its origins lie in the immediate aftermath of World War I in the cooperative efforts by Jewish communities around the world in religious, legal, political and relief matters. In the aftermath of World War II the World Jewish Congress played a central role in the creation of Jewish policies with regard to peace treaties, the prosecution and trial of Nazi war criminals and reparations for Holocaust survivors.