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.
The Jewish Relief Unit was the operational arm of the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, which was formed in 1943 by the Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association and under the auspices and financial responsibility of the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation. This organisation, which was based in Great Britain, provided support and assistance of all kinds to Jewish Displaced Persons in the aftermath of the war in Germany.
Ruth Balint (née Neumann) was born in Berlin in 1926. She was sent to school in Schöneiche, Brandenburg, where she was one of very few Jewish children. In 1938 she was sent to a Jewish school in Berlin. Shortly after her father's return from 3 months in a concentration camp, in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, he wrote to a relative in Newcastle, Kurt Banski, a furniture maker, with regard to looking after Ruth. Ruth came to England circa July 1939 on the Kindertransport. She spent the following 5 years with an English Methodist family in Kendall, Lake District. She remained in contact with the family for the rest of their lives. Ruth died in 2000.
During the war years Ruth received the letters in this collection from her parents, who were eventually deported to Warsaw, then Treblinka in 1942 and grandparents to Theresienstadt in the same year. The only indication of concern about their predicament, which Ruth discerned in the letters after a re-reading of them many years later, was the occasional enquiry regarding news of relatives who had managed to flee to South America, and who had promised to help them also to emigrate.
Amon Lepold Goeth (1908-1946), SS officer, born in Vienna; joined the National Socialist Party in 1932; joined the SS, 1940, where he rose to the rank of Hauptsturmführer. Goeth was assigned to the headquarters of the SS Command and to the Lublin police. Subsequently he was transferred to Krakow, where he was in charge of liquidating the ghettos and labour camps at Szebnie, Bochnia, Tarnow, and Krakow, amongst other places. From February 1943 to September 1944 Goeth commanded the concentration camp at Plaszow, near Krakow. After the war he was extradited to Poland at the request of the Polish authorities and tried before the Polish Supreme Court on a charge of committing mass murder during the liquidation of the ghettos at Szebnie camp and Plaszow. He was sentenced to death and executed in Krakow, 1946.
Julius Jung, a German Jewish immigrant to Great Britain, who was an active member of a number of committees and organisations which catered to the needs of the Jewish community. In particular, he was Honorary Secretary of the B'nai B'rith Care Committee for Refugee Children (see 1410/3410, 3509, 3423 for minutes of the hostel committee meetings). As a member of the University of London Jewish Students' Union, he was also involved in assisting German Jewish academics and students who had been excluded from universities on racial grounds in 1931-1932. In addition he was secretary of the Jewish Friends Food Fund.
This collection of correspondence and cuttings documents Reg Freeson's persistent efforts to establish the truth about the fate of Josef Mengele, the notorious SS doctor who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of prisoners at Auschwitz. In particular, Freeson attempts to find out whether a body exhumed from a grave in Brazil in 1985 was in fact that of Mengele, as alleged. The responses he receives from the German, Israeli and American authorities are inconclusive.
Josef Mengele (March 15, 1911- February 7, 1979) was a German SS officer and a physician in the German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He gained notoriety chiefly for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced labourer, and for performing human experiments on camp inmates, amongst whom Mengele was known as the Angel of Death.
After the war, he first hid in Austria under an assumed name, then escaped and lived in South America, first in Argentina (until 1959) and finally in Brazil, in the cities of Serra Negra, Moji das Cruzes, and then died in Bertioga, where he drowned in the sea after suffering a stroke. His identity was confirmed by forensic experts from UNICAMP (Campinas University) using DNA testing on his remains.
Esterwege prison camp was first established along with two others (Boergemoor and Neusustrum) in the Emsland region of Lower Saxony in June 1933 by the Prussian Interior Ministry. In April 1934, Esterwege became a concentration camp. Heinrich Himmler, as Reichsfuehrer SS and head of the Gestapo, reorganised the Prussian concentration camp sytem and installed a new commandant and guards from the SA and SS. Throughout the 1930s it served as a camp for political prisoners, Jehovah Witnesses, Jews and intellectuals. In 1936 many of the prisoners were transferred to Sachsenhausen and from January 1937 the camp was taken over by the Reichsjustizministerium and became the 7th prison camp in Emsland.
From 1940 it became increasingly used for army deserters and the like. Conditions deteriorated throughout the war, many prisoners dying from illnesses and overwork. From May 1943 it started to take in resistance fighters from foriegn lands. By the end of the war it was first used temporarily by the British occupying forces as a Displaced Persons Camp for Russians and later as an internment camp for war criminals.
Robert Miller (formerly Marx), came to Great Britain in 1937 to attend school. His parents, Ludwig and Regina, left in 1939, the father having been incarcerated at Dachau in November 1938, from where he was released on the understanding that he would leave Germany for the USA, where a distant cousin of the mother had given an affidavit of support. It was on the strength of this that they received British (6 month) transit visas. The war stopped all further migration so their US visas were never acted upon. The whole family became naturalised British citizens in 1947, but in 1952 economic circumstances forced Ludwig and Regina to return to Germany whilst Robert remained in Great Britain.
Little is known about the family save for their birth details and the following information gleaned from Franz Mendelsohn's cv dated c 1934. He was born in Breslau, 7 Jan 1899, the son of the lawyer, notary and Justizrat, Salo Mendelsohn. Franz studied law in Freiburg, taking his final examination on 15 Mar 1924 from which date he worked as a lawyer at the regional court at Breslau in a practice with his father until the latter's death in 1929. Then he carried on the practice on his own until 31 May 1933 on which date his right to practise law was withdrawn on account of his Jewish origins. He then worked voluntarily for half a year in a shipping company to gain experience in business and at the same time at the legal protection department of the Breslau synagogue community. He married Charlotte Fraenkel in 1925.
Schwarzheide concentration camp, 50 km north of Dresden, a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen, was established in July 1944 initially to house 1000 Jewish slave labourers who were to work in the Braunkohlen-Benzinwerkes (Brabag) nearby. Such was the importance of this factory to the German war effort that it had been bombed on several occasions and for the whole of June 1944 was completely put out of action. Once the complex had recovered from this last assault, preparations were made to transfer inmates from Auschwitz, who had all lost their families in the aftermath of the liquidation of the so-called 'Familienlager' in Theresienstadt. Several inmates from Sachsenhausen had been sent over to fill posts of responsibility to administer the camp. It was a brutal regime, in which many inmates were worked to death. In addition many died or were injured as a result of Allied bombing attacks, mainly because they were not evacuated or given protection during air raids.
The Foundation Monumentum Judaicum Lodzense was established in Lodz on 6 November 1995 and registered in 1997. Its founders were the then Municipality of Lodz, Organisation of Former Residents of Lodz in Israel and the World Jews Restitution Organisation. Its main goal is to save the Jewish cemetery at Bracka Street, restoring and preserving the memory of Lodz, the Jewish society and its significant contribution to the city's life and its development. It also encourages the spreading of knowledge about the Holocaust and remembering the fate of its inhabitants.
The donor, A Dunitz, was instrumental in bringing about the creation of a memorial to the Jews who were deported by the Nazis, by persuading the various Greek authoritities to cooperate. He was also responsible for finding all the names of the individuals. The names on this list correspond with those on the memorial. The memorial was erected in 2001.
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.
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 Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Oxford.
Born in Frankfurt am Main of Jewish parents, 1900; educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium and Frankfurt University; Judge of the Berlin labour court, 1929; dismissed by the Nazis, fled to London and became a student at the London School of Economics (LSE), 1933; Assistant Lecturer in Law, LSE, 1936; Professor, 1951; called to the bar (Middle Temple), 1936; British citizen, 1940; Professor of Comparative Law, University of Oxford, and fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, 1964; elected FBA, 1965; honorary bencher of the Middle Temple, 1969; QC, 1972; knighted, 1976; played 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; died 1979.
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.
The Trade Union Centre for German Workers in Great Britain (TUCGWGB) was founded just before the outbreak of the Second World War, but did not begin its work in earnest until the release of many of the German exiles, who were interned at the outbreak of war. The chairman of the TUCGWGB, Hans Gottfurcht, had for many years been an active trade unionist in Germany, where he helped establish a number of illegal trade unions under the Nazis. The establishment of the TUCGWGB was regarded as necessary because of the particular situation brought about by the large influx of refugees and exiles. Whereas it would normally have been expected for these new arrivals to join existing British trade unions (which they did as well), there was always a sense that their stay in Great Britain would only ever be temporary, and that they needed a representative organisation that would reflect their particular interests. After the war and the demise of the TUCGWGB, Hans Gottfurcht went on to become a pivotal figure as liaison between the newly formed Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund and the occupying British authorities.
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.
Arthur Gliksman was the chairman of the Aerztlicher Standesverein der Koenigstadt zu Berlin, the Berlin medical unions.
Julius Bloch was born in Bruehl/Baden in June 1877. He became a member of the Jewish Gemeindevorstand in Pforzheim, Baden Wuertemberg, in 1923; member of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, Frankfurt/ Main, where he was also chairman of the Jewish welfare committee and head of the regional office for the Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland. He was responsible for rationalisng the provision of welfare to Jews in Frankfurt by centralising the numerous smaller organisations into one large organisation. By May 1938 he was living in London. In 1946 he was deputy of the New Liberal Congregation, London. He died in London in 1956.
The principal editor (and probable creator) of this collection, Richard Wolff, is thought to have been one time chairman of the Paulus Bund, a representative organisation for Jewish mixed-race Germans (See Werner Cohn, 'Bearers of a Common Fate? The Non-Aryan Christian Fate-Comrades of the Paulus-Bund, 1933-1939' in Leo Baeck Yearbook XXXIII 1988). He was born in 1886, emigrated in 1938 and since 1947 was a naturalised British citizen. He lived in Nairobi during the mid 1950s. He died 9 March 1985.
Moses Mendelssohn was born in 1729 and was a creative and eclectic thinker whose writings on metaphysics and aesthetics, political theory and theology, together with his Jewish heritage, placed him at the focal point of the German Enlightenment for over three decades. While Mendelssohn found himself at home with a metaphysics derived from writings of Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, he was also one of his age's most accomplished literary critics. His highly regarded pieces on works of Homer and Aesop, Pope and Burke, Maupertuis and Rousseau, to cite only a fraction of his numerous critical essays, appeared in a series of journals that he co-edited with G F Lessing and Friedrich Nicolai. Dubbed The Jewish Luther Mendelssohn also contributed significantly to the life of the Jewish community and letters in Germany, campaigning for Jews' civil rights and translating the Pentateuch and the Psalms into German. Mendelsohn died in 1786.
The Gottstein family were a Jewish family from Rothenburg, Germany
The Centro di Documentazione sui Bibelforscher, Centre for the Documentaion of Jehovah's Witnesses, is based in Italy and has no affiliation to any religious denomination.
Otto F Hutter was a former refugee from Vienna who came to Great Britain as a child on one of the Kindertransporte in 1939.
Nazi antisemitisc propaganda drawing on theJudensau tradition of caricature that sought to dehumanise Jewish people. The tradition dates back to the Middle Ages when images were displayed in churches, public buildings, town gates and town walls. It was later revived by the Nazis.