The Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany, under the overall administration of the Schutzstaffel (SS).
The Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany, under the overall administration of the Schutzstaffel (SS).
Born 1907; member of the Nazi party, 1925; leader of the Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Studentenbund (NSDStB, National Socialist German Students' League), 1928; Reichsjugendführer (youth leader) in the Nazi party, 1931; head of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) and given an SA rank of Gruppenführer, 1933; state secretary, 1936; organized the evacuation of 5 million children from cities threatened by Allied bombing, 1940; joined the army and served in France, 1940; Governor of the Reichsgau, Vienna, 1940-1945, responsible for moving Jews from Vienna to concentration camps in Poland; found guilty, 1 Oct 1946, of 'crimes against humanity' for his deportation of the Viennese Jews. He was sentenced and served 20 years as a prisoner in Spandau Prison; released 1966; died 1974.
The Nazis encountered a problem with treating Germans of mixed Jewish parentage, in particular what to do with Mischlinge 1 Grades (with two Jewish grandparents) who had already been serving in the Jugenddienst. Whilst the latter group were now regarded as having an unacceptable level of Jewish blood, many had already served the Third Reich and many more were due to once they reached the right age. The solution was apparently to create an intermediate stage in which Mischlinge 1 Grades were to be put on permanent standby (Bereitstellung) but would never actually be called up for service. The official response to potential complainants was to be a statement to the effect that the demands of war had created a shortfall amongst Jugenddienst leaders, and they were therefore unable to take on more people.
Alfred Wiener was a German Jew, born, 1885; trained as an Arabist; Middle East, 1909-1911; fought in the First World War, winning the Iron Cross 2nd Class; high-ranking official in the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, CV), 1919; created the Büro Wilhelmstrasse of the CV, which documented Nazi activities and issued anti-Nazi materials; fled to Amsterdam, 1933; founded the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO, later the Weiner Library), 1933; In 1939 he and the JCIO transferred to London; USA, 1939-1945; returned to London in 1945 to transform the JCIO into a library and centre for the scholarly study of the Nazi era. Died 1964.
Sophie Cahn was a German Jewish refugee. Her father, Emanuel Cahn, died in Theresienstadt concentration camp, 1942. His children emigrated to Canada, USA, UK, and Israel.
Ernst Cohn-Wiener was a Jewish German born in Tilsit (East Prusia), 1882; education: Bromberg (now Bydgoszcz) Gymnasium-Abitur (A levels) 1902; art history, archaeology and philosophy at Berlin and Heidelberg Universities; PhD 1907; left Germany 1933 because of racial persecution; England, 1933; India, 1934; USA, 1939; published numerous works initially on medieval European art and later oriental and Indian art; died, New York, 1941.
For biographical information on Dr Maurice Laserson see Wiener Library Biographical news-cuttings section (G15).
The restitution claim by Marie Rosenberg was rejected by the Entschädigungsamt, Berlin, on the grounds that the last known address of the wholesale livestock business, of which she was part owner, and on which the claim was based, was in the Russian zone of Berlin.
Marie Rosenberg (née Marcus) was born on 19 January 1889. Her husband, Louis, died in 1927. They had two children, Rolf Moritz (later Stanley Sloane) and Ruth. It is assumed that the family is Jewish, though there is no evidence of this. She appears to have left Germany shortly after 15 Dec 1939. The destination is not clear, but subsequent, post-war documentation reveals that she was resident in London and that she remained there until at least 1955 but no later than 1962, during which time she was in New York, living close to her son. The fate of her daughter is not known, beyond the fact that by 1937 she was married to someone by the name of Schmey. The fate of the family after 3 Apr 1962 (the date of the Entschädigungsamt's rejection of her restitution claim) is not known.
Selmar Biener was born into a Jewish family in Magdeburg in 1906. Her brother, David, was born in 1904. The two of them entered into a business partnership in Magdeburg in 1935, an electrical components wholesalers. David had already worked at their parents' firm, also in Magdeburg, but having demonstrated 'an outstanding business sense' it was decided to start out on their own. In 1937 David went to Holland and from there to Palestine. Nothing is known of his fate after this period. Selmar came to London sometime before Oct 1942. The parents remained in Magdeburg. Their fate is not known.
Hedwig, Pauline and Sabina Beck were Czech sisters. Hedwig and Pauline emigrated to France during World War Two. Sabina Bauml (née Beck) was transported to Auschwitz with her son in January 1944.
Frank Henley (formerly Otto Lichtenstein) came to England from Cologne on the Kindertransport, Dec 1938.
The Comité de defense de Juifs (Committee for Jewish Defence, CJD) worked with the national resistance movement and was the largest Jewish defence movement in Belgium during World War Two. The organisation hid Jews, fought as partisans, forged identity papers and food ration tickets, obtained funds and set up escape routes. In the cultural realm, CJD distributed information and propaganda material, established a lending library, and maintained a Jewish press, printing in Yiddish, French and Flemish.
Rudolf Beck owned a removals business in Vienna. His contacts enabled him to ship many of his possessions to the USA during World War Two. Ferdinand Beck is the son of Rudolf.
Ernst Fraenkel was a Jewish Professor of Economics and Social History, who was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia; served as an officer in the German army in the First World War; was a representative of the Silesian provincial Landtag in the 1930s; secretary of the Gesellschaft für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin; emigrated to UK in 1939; returned to Germany in 1947 and became Director of the Institut für Wirtschafts und Sozialgeschichte at University of Frankfurt a. M.; died Frankfurt, 1971.
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Karl Schreiner and his wife Katharina, from Trier, were resisters of the Nazi regime. Karl was a lawyer, he was forced to retire from his post Sep 1935 for being 'politically unreliable' and Katharina was imprisoned in 1942 for 4 months for making inflammatory remarks against the state.
Hans von Dohnanyi was a Jewish 'Mischling', a term used during the Third Reich for a person deemed to have partial Jewish ancestry. He was born in Vienna, Jan 1902 and was a lawyer from 1929-1938. He worked in the Reichsjustizministerium, 1938 and as Reichsgerichtsrat at the Reichsgericht, Leipzig, 1939-1943. Whilst he was head of the political section of the Abwehr des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht he was implicated in the resistance movement and on 5 Apr 1943 was arrested, and is reported to have died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 8 Apr 1945.
Heinrich Richard Albrecht Kraschutski, was commander in the German navy, 1914-1918, becoming a prominent figure in the pacifist movement in Germany after the First World War, and co-editor of the pacifist weekly, Das Andere Deutschland, the publication of which was regarded as particularly pernicious and treacherous by the Reichswehr because of its disclosures of violations of the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. He went to Majorca and together with a small group of other anti-Nazi refugees opened a little workshop of arts and crafts at Palma. When the Franco coup succeeded in Majorca the Royal Navy brought most anti-Nazi exiles to safety but local German Nazis managed to prevent the rescue of Kraschutski, who was forbidden by the Spanish police from embarking. After 1940 any trace of Kraschutski was lost until early 1944 when he was discovered to be in a Spanish jail.
The Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP (AO) was an umbrella organisation of Nazi party groups abroad, founded in 1930 on the initiative of Bruno Fricke, from Paraguay, and Gregor Strasser, who at the time was in charge of the Nazi Party organisation in Germany. In May 1933 Ernst Wilhelm Bohle became its director. The organisation provided Nazi Party members abroad with political and ideological instructional propaganda material; it also organised travel in the Reich and set up sister-city arrangements. Although the AO proclaimed its strict non-intervention in the affairs of host countries, it used its connections for espionage and political pressure.
The Nazi party disseminated information to the regional and area offices such as NSDAP Westfalen-Nord.
Max Landenberger and his wife Frieda owned a house at Burgschmietstrasse 12, Nürnberg, which was mortgaged for RM 40,000. In Nov1938 Max was arrested and sent to Dachau. Frieda was forced to go to the 'Brown House', the Nazi Headquarters, where she was made to sign a contract for the sale of their house to Gauleiter Hölz for the sum of RM 4,000. This they achieved by making her do physical exercises for several hours to break her will to resist. Her husband also signed the contract after his release from Dachau. The 'purchase price' of RM 4,000 was never paid.
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Siegfried Rotholz was a German Jew and former resident of Berlin, who was transported to Australia on the HMT DUNERA.
HMT DUNERA was a British passenger ship built as a troop transport in the late 1930s. On 10 Jul 1940 the Dunera left Liverpool with men classed as enemy aliens, who were considered a risk to British security. Although many of the internees had in fact fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution, they were considered to have been German agents, potentially helping to plan the invasion of Britain. Included were 2,036 Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany, 451 German and Italian prisoners of war and others including the survivors of the Arandora Star disaster. They were taken to Australia for internment in the rural towns of Hay, New South Wales and Tatura, Victoria Australia. The ship had a maximum capacity of 1,500 - including crew - however on this voyage there were 2,542 transportees. The resultant condition has been described as 'inhumane', the transportees were also subjected to ill-treatment and theft by the 309 poorly trained British guards on board. On arrival in Sydney, the first Australian on board was medical army officer Alan Frost. He was appalled and his subsequent report led to the court martial of the army officer-in-charge, Lieutenant-Colonel William Scott.
The Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad 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.
Otto Bendix was born in Wilmersdorf, Berlin, 1878, of Jewish heritage. He married a non-Jew and was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp on one of the 'old people's transports' on 3 October 1942, where he died on 8 January 1943.
Otto Weil was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp on 24 Jun 1938 and released on 10 August 1939.
The Regent's Park School was founded by Dr Bruno Schindler and his wife, Alma in 1933, mainly for Jewish refugee children from Germany. It was the aim of the Schindlers to make the children as independent as possible as they knew that a number of them would probably never see their parents again. There was a strong emphasis on Judaism and Dr Schindler made it a rule that every Friday evening he would give a talk about the history of the Jews and Judaism. There were also many discussion groups on a variety of subjects led by the matron of the school. The aim of the school was thus to encourage independent thinking, an ability to act independently and a feeling that, despite adversity, it was possible for all to achieve the kind of life and standard of living from which most of the children had come. The fact that the school produced an exceptionally large number of men and women in the professions is testimony to this.
During World War Two, Karl Wittig was a political prisoner in a number of Nazi concentration camps including Sachsenhausen. In the early 1950s Wittig was a key witness in the trial of Otto John, head of the West German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz), 1950-1954. John was found guilty of spying for the communists as a result of Wittig's evidence.
Rita Hauser was interned on the Isle of Man at Port St Mary and attended 'Y' Camp school, 1941.
The Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief was founded in the early months of 1933 by a group of Anglo-Jewish community leaders, in response to the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on a political platform of anti-Semitism. Among the founders were Anthony de Rothschild, Leonard G. Montefiore and Otto Schiff. The fund has been through many name changes in its lifetime. It started out as the Central British Fund for German Jewry, then became part of the new Council for German Jewry in 1936 along with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the American United Palestine Appeal. On the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 the fund changed its name to the Central Council for Jewish Refugees, and in 1944 changed again to the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation. After many years as the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief, the organisation is now known as World Jewish Relief. The Fund's mission, according to its Memorandum of Association, was 'to relieve or assist Jewish Refugees in any part of the world in such manner and on such terms and conditions (if any) as may be thought fit'. In this work the fund was aided by various organisations, including the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC) which was founded by Otto Schiff in 1933, the Children's Refugee Movement (established by the JRC and the Inter-Aid Committee), and the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, which was established in 1943 and financed by the Central Council for Jewish Refugees (as the Central British Fund (CBF) was then known).
The Hay internment camp was located outside of the town of Hay in the Riverina district of southern New South Wales. It was constructed in 1940. The first arrivals were 2036 Jewish internees from Nazi Germany and Austria - mostly professionals who had simply fled for their lives - along with 451 German and Italian POWs. They were transported from England on-board the HMT Dunera, and they became known as 'the Dunera Boys,' which was applied, in particular to the Jewish refugees.
The refugees (and POWs) were transported to Hay via train and then placed in the camps behind barbed wire. They remained active, holding physical education courses and concerts, teaching the children and printing their own money.
Dorrith Sim (née Oppenheim) came to England on the Kindertransport, 26 July 1939. Her parents worked for the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, c 1943, they were eventually pronounced verschollen in Auschwitz. Julius Oppenheim was the grandfather of Dorrith.
Otto Ernst Remer was born in Neubrandenburg (Mecklenburg) the son of a judicial officer. He embarked on a military career and by 1935 was made lieutenant. He was wounded several times during World War Two and was highly decorated. Although never a Nazi party member he played an important part in the suppression of the July 1944 conspiracy against Hitler. He was promoted by Hitler, as a result, to major-general on 31 January 1945. After a short period of imprisonment under the Americans after the war, he began working for them as a researcher into the history of the war.
He was expelled from the Deutsche Reichspartei for his extreme views and founded the more extreme Sozialistische Reichspartei. There followed short periods of imprisonment for minor offences in Germany and periods of exile in Egypt and Syria, where he is thought to have established links with the notorious fugitive Nazi war criminal, Alois Brunner. He died in 1997.
The Bing family was a German Jewish family from Berlin some of whose members died in the Holocaust and others managed to escape to Great Britain.
Klara Rosenzweig was born in 1890 in Altleiningen, Rheinland Pfalz, and was deported to France from Mannheim in October 1940. She was imprisoned at Gurs in the Basses Pyrenées from 22 October 1940 to 20 Jan 1942. She was then transferred to de Noé in the Haute Garonne until 3 August 1942. From there she was moved to Recebedon and thence to Drancy. Her name appears on the transport list of 'Convoy' No. 18 which left Drancy on 12 August 1942 and arrived at Auschwitz on 14 August 1942. It is assumed that she died very shortly after her arrival. The letter of 16 March 1941 carries a postscript signed by Bert Franck. The transport list of 12 August 1942 includes the name Bertha Franck, born 4 August 1875, Hunfeld, Germany.
This typescript report on conditions in Berlin is the product of a conversation with a Jewish woman who left Berlin in the beginning of 1942 and arrived in London in October of that year.
Hugo Rosenstock came from a family of German Jews in Berlin. Having emigrated to Great Britain after the outbreak of World War Two, he was interned on the Isle of Man.
Kurt Sabatsky was District Syndicus of the Centralverein Deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens, who later worked for the Wiener Library.
Waltraut and Ingeborg Sandberg traveled to Great Britain on the Kindertransport.
Werner Rüdenberg, export merchant and sinologist was born in Hanover, November 1881. He married Anni née Pincus. He spent 16 years in Shanghai spread over a 30 year period. He compiled a Chinese/ German dictionary, first published in 1924, with a second edition in 1936. He arrived in Great Britain in 1938 and taught for a few months at the School of Oriental Studies, whilst working on an English/ Chinese dictionary (Shanghai dialect). He received a grant for this work. In 1940 he was interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. He later taught German at Westfield College and continued his merchant activities with China.
The Sekretariat Warburg was a charitable and cultural centre for Hamburg Jews, 1938-1941, whose objective was to assist Jews in Hamburg during the Nazi era and was funded by the Warburg banking family. Robert Solnitz was the head of the organisation.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a literary fraud alleging a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. The writing has been revealed to be originally an antisemitic, and subsequently an anti-Zionist, plagiarism and hoax first published in 1903 in Russian, in Znamya.
Jersey's Masonic Temple was sacked by the Nazis, 27 Jan 1941 and the Jersey Masonic Temple Co (1920) was forcibly liquidated by the Occupying Powers.
Maria Nermi-Egounoff, opera singer, was born in Budapest in 1899 where she graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy. She was a member of the former Royal Opera House in Budapest, Volksoperhaus in Vienna and Staatopersänger in Germany until 1933. She came to London, December 1937 and married in 1940.
Hermann Maas was an evangelical minister from Heidelberg who, from a very early age had a great interest in the Jewish faith and empathy for the Jewish people. In 1903 he attended the 6th Zionist Congress where he met Theodor Herzl and even before the Nazis came to power he became a member of an organisation which campaigned against antisemitism. During the Nazi era he continued to help persecuted Jews and in 1944 he was deported to France as a slave labourer for these actions. He was the first German citizen to be formally invited to the state of Israel and in 1967 he was awarded the Yad Vashem medal of the 36 Righteous amongst the People of Jerusalem.
Paul and Martha Rosenzweig, came from a village in the Palatinate. They had the same mother, who was Jewish, became a Protestant and died at Auschwitz. The siblings had difficulty obtaining assistance from Jewish organisations because of their Mischling status- in fact Paul spent some time in Dachau. Hermann Maas saved them from Nazi persecution.
[Lotte] was a resident of Prague; interned at Theresienstadt concentration camp, Nov 1941-Aug 1945; returned to Prague, 1945; emigrated to Canada, 1947.