Professor R S [Dicky] Clymo. Member of Botany Department at Westfield College 1961-1983, moved to Queen Mary College 1983, remained with Queen Mary and Westfield College after the merger and became, Dean of Faculty 1988-1991 and Head of School 1991-1995.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isidore Kirchner was Jewish; born in 1856 in Loslau, Upper Silesia; attended school in Pless and became a licensed medical practitioner in Berlin 1883.
Sir Otto Kahn-Freund was born 17 November 1900 in Frankfurt am Main and was professor of comparative law, University of Oxford. He was born in Frankfurt am Main of Jewish parents and educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium there and Frankfurt University. He became judge of the Berlin labour court, 1929. Dismissed by the Nazis in 1933, he fled to London and became a student at the London School of Economics. He became an assistant lecturer in law there in 1936 and Professor in 1951. He was called to the bar (Middle Temple) in 1936. He became a British citizen in 1940.
He was appointed Professor of Comparative Law, University of Oxford, and fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford in 1964 and elected FBA in 1965. He became an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple in 1969 and a QC in 1972. He was knighted in 1976.
He played an important part in the establishment of labour law as an independent area of legal study, and was a member of the Royal Commission on Reform of Trade Unions and Employers' Associations, 1965. Kahn-Freund died in 1979.
Felix Langer was born in Bruenn, Moravia (Brno, Czec Republic) on 18 June, 1889. He studied law and political science at the university of Vienna; was a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War One; and was a director of relief work for prisoners of war in Siberia at the end of the war. Between 1920 and 1933 he worked as a journalist and writer in Berlin. He was an author of stage and radio plays and film scripts. He was also a contributor to Berliner Tageblatt, among other papers. He emigrated to Bruenn in 1933 where he was a regular contributor to a number of newspapers. In 1939 he emigrated to Great Britain where he became an active member of Club 43, and wrote a number of books, including his best known, Stepping Stones to Peace, (London, 1942). Langer died in London, 1980.
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.
A handwritten comment on the third page indicates that the leaflet was dropped by the RAF in 1943 or 1944.
Helmut Strauss was born in Othfresen, Lower Saxony, Germany in 1919.
These statements of Deputy Secretary Stuart Eizenstadt and Ambassador Ernst Sucharipa were delivered on the occasion of the conclusion of negotiations about a comprehensive compensation package for property aryanised during the Nazi era in Austria.
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.
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.
Juedische Winterhilfe (Jewish winter aid) was a Jewish organisation activated in the autumn of 1935 by the National Representation (Reichsvertretung) and the Central Committee of German Jews for Relief and Reconstruction to help needy Jews get through the winter, by providing food, medicines, and heating assistance. Winter Aid had been a general German enterprise during the winter of 1931/32, but Jews were excluded after the Nuremberg Laws, prompting Jewish organisations to establish the Jewish equivalent. Juedische Winterhilfe funded its activities by means of donations from Jews in Germany and elsewhere.
The Dresner family were a Jewish family resident in Leipzig during the Nazi era, some of whose members perished in the Holocaust, others escaping to Great Britain.
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer, commonly known as Albert Speer, was born 19 March 1905, was an architect, author and high-ranking Nazi German government official, sometimes called the first architect of the Third Reich.
Speer was Hitler's chief architect before becoming his Minister for Armaments during the war. He reformed Germany's war production to the extent that it continued to increase for over a year despite increasingly intensive Allied bombing. After the war, he was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for his role in the Third Reich. He was the only senior Nazi figure to admit guilt and express remorse. Following his release in 1966, he became an author, writing two bestselling autobiographical works, and a third about the Third Reich. His two autobiographical works, Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: the Secret Diaries detailed his often close personal relationship with German dictator Adolf Hitler, and have provided readers and historians with an unequalled personal view inside the workings of the Third Reich. Speer died of natural causes in 1981, in London, England.
Selig Hecht, American biophysicist, was born in Glogow, Austria (now Poland) in 1892. He moved to the United States in 1898 and graduated from the College of the City of New York (BS, 1913) and from Harvard (PhD, 1917). After organising the laboratory of biophysics at Columbia University, he was Professor of Biophysics there from 1926. He pioneered the application of physiochemical principles to sensory physiology and is known for his determination of minimal quantal requirements at the threshold of vision and for his successful laboratory regeneration of visual purple. An advocate of popular scientific education, he wrote Explaining the Atom, 1947 and died in the same year.
Adolf Frankl was born in 1903, the son of a Jewish businessman in Bratislava. Having shown an aptitude for art at an early age, he was discouraged from making a career out of his talent and went to work in his father's business from 1920. He married Renee Nachmias in 1933 and founded his own interior decoration business in 1937. The advent of the Nazis and, in particular, the establishment of the puppet Tiso-regime in Slovakia, resulted in pogroms against the country's Jewish population. Frankl's business was aryanised in 1941 and he was forced to live in a ghetto with his family.
Frankl was sent to Auschwitz in 1944, where he survived. It was only after the war that the full horror began to trouble him in the form of recurrent nightmares. It was suggested that he paint as a way of working through his horrific experiences. The paintings which were used in the exhibition entitled Visionen aus dem Inferno were the result. Material relating to this exhibition is described below.
After the war Frankl lived in Vienna and New York then, from the 1960s, in Germany. He died in 1983.
Markus Gruenebaum, the grandfather of the depositor, died on 11 December 1912 age 89.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing is known about H. Loebl. Josephine Winter was a Jewish immigrant to Great Britain from Vienna.
Ernst Schaefer, born 1891, was a Jewish lawyer employed by Osram, until 30 June 1938, when, by verbal agreement he officially left the employment but was to be retained as an 'adviser' until 30 June 1941. Schaefer came to England in May 1939 shortly after his two daughters (from his second marriage to a non-Jew) arrived on the Kindertransport. His young son and wife remained in Germany.
Richard Korherr was born in Regensburg, 1903, graduated from his academic studies with honours and went on to publish statistical works, which earned him high praise; joined the National Bureau of Statistics, 1928. The Bavarian prime minister appointed him chairman of the board of Reich und Heimat, a government-sponsored society. Korherr's book Geburtenrückgang (Decline in Birth Rate) was well received; Benito Mussolini personally translated the Italian version. The 1936 edition had a foreward by Himmler. Director of the Würzburg municipal bureau of statistics, 1935-1940, and also lectured at the local university. From 1934 he worked concurrently as head of the section of statistics and demographic policy in the headquarters of Rudolf Hess, then deputy Führer. In 1937 and 1938 Korherr published Untergang der alten Kulturvölker (The Demise of the Old Civilized Peoples) and in 1938 an atlas under the title Volk und Raum (People and Space). In May 1937 Korherr joined the Nazi party but he did not become a member of the SA or SS. On 9 December 1940 He was appointed chief inspector of the statistical bureau of the Reichsführer SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei (SS Head and Chief of Police) and of the Reichskommisariat für die Festigung des Deutschen Volkstums (National Commission for the Strengthening of German Folklore), both posts under Himmler. In December he began processing data for the 'Final Solution', a task in which he was assisted by Dr. Erich Simon, a Jew, who was the statistician of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland.
He became known for the 'Korherr Bericht', a detailed statistical report on the deportation of Jews which was updated every 3 months in 1943 and 1944. At his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann stated that the Korherr report had served him in the planning stages of the extermination. Gerald Reitlinger, in his book The Final Solution, describes the report as 'a source of inestimable value... [as it] tallies with so many counter-checks that its honesty may be assumed where counter checks are lacking...'.
After the war Korherr spent some time in the allies' custody but was one of the earliest to be released, and later emerged unscathed from the de-nazification process. He was no doubt helped by the fact that he rescued Erich Simon, the Jewish statistician of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland. An affidavit and correspondence, also in this collection, by the latter supports this. However, Korherr lost his job at the West German finance ministry after publication of the 1962 edition of Reitlinger's book.
Reichsministerium der Justiz (Justice ministry) was one of the ministries of the Third Reich. The Richterbriefe are a series of confidential letters addressed to the Nazi judiciary from the Reichsministerium outlining in detail the stance that should be taken and verdicts, which should be given in numerous case scenarios. They were a method of further controlling and subordinating the judiciary to Nazi ideology. They came about shortly after the appointment of Otto Georg Thierack to the position of Reichsminister der Justiz in August 1942.
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.
The papers relate to the activities of two anti-Nazi activists, Arthur Geissler and Erich Arp, who, at the end of the war, were indicted by a British Military Court for 'the unlawful appropriation of authority' by arresting the former Ortsgruppenleiter Krömer, Elmshorn, Schleswig-Holstein, at gun point.