The Vienna born Austrian Jewess, Elise Steiner emigrated to Great Britain on 26 November 1938, where she attended school in Southampton. Her parents and her younger brother Leo, were transported to Kovno on 23 November 1941, where they died 6 days later, probably part of the action which took place in the ghetto on that date in which 10,000 inhabitants were murdered.
Little is known about Alfred Pavel Peres save for the fact that he was an international lawyer and that he helped Eduard Benes get visas for political liberals. He was a member of the Deutsch-demokratischen Freiheitspartei.
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 Internationale Auschwitz Komitee was founded in 1952 by former inmates of the death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, with the following aims: to bear witness to the crimes of the Nazis in the camp; to fight for compensation for former inmates and their families; to work with the Auschwitz Museum to preserve the site of the camp as a permanent memorial. It became involved in the gathering of statements and testimony against former camp guards and other Nazi personnel. Many of the witnesses who provided testimony later took part in the 'Frankfurt Trial' of perpetrators at Auschwitz.
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.
After the German surrender the small fortress was used as an internment camp for ethnic Germans. The first prisoners arrived on the May 10, 1945. On February 29, 1948 the last German prisoners were released and the camp was officially closed. In the first phase of the camp lasting until July 1945 mortality was high due to diseases, malnutrition and incidents of simple outright murder. Commander of the camp in that period was Stanislav Franc, who had been a prisoner of the camp under the Nazis since 1944. He was guided by a spirit of revenge and tolerated any mistreatment of the prisonsers by the guards.
In July 1945 the camp shifted under the control of the Czech ministry for domestic affairs. The new commander appointed was Otakar Kálal. From 1946 on the inmates were gradually transferred to Germany and Terezín more and more turned into a hub for the forced migration of Germans from the Czech lands into Germany proper.
The Austrian branch of the SS developed in 1934 as a covert force to influence the Anschluss with Germany which would occur in 1938. The early Austrian SS was led by Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Arthur Seyss-Inquart. The Austrian SS was technically under the command of the German SS and Heinrich Himmler but acted independently concerning Austrian affairs.
Austrian SS men served under the same manner as the Allgemeine-SS but operated as an underground organisation, in particular after 1936 when the Austrian government declared the SS an illegal organisation. The Austrian SS used the same rank system as the regular SS, but rarely used uniforms or identifying insignia. Photographic evidence indicates that Austrian SS men typically would wear a swastika armband on civilian clothes, and then only at secret SS meetings.
After 1938, when Austria was annexed by Germany, the Austrian SS was completely incorporated into the regular SS. Most of the Austrian SS was folded into Oberabschnitt Donau with a new concentration camp at Mauthausen opened under the authority of the SS Death's Head units.
The Pottlitzers were a German Jewish family which settled in Great Britain just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Mr and Mrs Elsztajn were Polish Jews living in Belgium. They were arrested in 1943 and transported to Malines. Mrs Elsztajn describes how people feared Commandant Schmidt of Malines and Breendonck. They were taken to Auschwitz where she was experimented on by Dr Carl Clauberg and with him were doctors Goebbels, Weber, Wirtz and Samuel, a German Jew, who tried his best for them, but was killed before Auschwitz was evacuated because he knew the secrets of Block 10 which housed women used in experiments. On 18 January 1945 they were evacuated from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück on foot in the extreme cold, then to Malchow towards Leipzig-Taucha on trains under continuous bombardment. On 25 April 1945 they were liberated by the Americans and Mrs Elsztajn was repatriated by plane to Belgium where she was reunited with her daughter.
Kathe Cahn-Hepner and Mrs Jacobs-Hepner, the depositors of this collection, are the daughters of Fritz and Leonie Cahn, German Jews who spent the war years in Switzerland. The depositors provided brief notes about most of the correspondents, many of whom perished in the Holocaust.
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. Its main function was to provide support to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Displaced Persons camps mostly throughout Germany.
Dachau was a Nazi German concentration camp, and the first one opened in Germany, located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 miles) northwest of Munich in southern Germany.
Opened on 22 March 1933, the Dachau concentration camp was the first regular concentration camp established by the coalition government of National Socialist (Nazi) NSDAP party and the Catholic Zentrum party (dissolved at 6 July 1933). Heinrich Himmler, in his capacity as police president of Munich, officially described the camp as 'the first concentration camp for political prisoners.'
Dachau served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi concentration camps that followed. Its basic organisation, camp layout as well as the plan for the buildings were developed by Kommandant Theodor Eicke and were applied to all later camps. He had a separate secure camp near the command centre, which consisted of living quarters, administration, and army camps. Eicke himself became the chief inspector for all concentration camps, responsible for establishing the others according to his model.
In total, over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries were housed in Dachau of which nearly one-third were Jews. 25,613 prisoners are believed to have died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its subcamps, primarily from disease, malnutrition and suicide.
Grete Salus, nee Gronner, was born in 1910 in Böhmisch-Trübau, today Ceská Trebová, Czech Republic. After schooling she studied at a dance school in Dresden. She moved to Prague with her husband, Dr Fritz Salus, with whom she married in 1934, and taught dance. They were both deported first to Theresienstadt, 1942, then to Auschwitz, 1944. Fritz was murdered shortly after arrival in Auschwitz as Grete discovered after her liberation. She was taken along with 500 other women to Oederan in Saxony, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg, where the women were forced into slave labour in the armaments and and building industries. She was evacuated in April 1945 and returned by train to Theresienstadt, where along with 17,000 other survivors she was liberated by the Red Army.
She returned to Prague for a few years after the war. In 1949, having given birth to her daughter, Nomi, she emigrated to Israel where she ended up working as a choreographer and gymnastics teacher at a home for orphans from the Holocaust. She died in 1995.
The Information Service of The International Bureau for the Right of Asylum and Aid to Political Refugees was created by the Conférence Internationale pour le Droit d'Asile, held in Paris on June 20-21, 1936. It served as an umbrella organization for all German émigré associations. A major aim of the organisation was to lobby the League of Nations for a more secure refugee status. The organisation's secretary general was Paul Perrin, a left wing deputy, who was also president of the Centre de Liaison des Comités pour le Statut des Immigrés, and one of eight members of a consultative commission, nominated by the French minister of the interior, with the object of screening applicants for refugee status.
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 II 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 Committee for the Care of Children from Camps was a sub-committee of the Jewish Refugees Committee and its expenditure was covered by grants made by the Central British Fund.
The International Refugee Organisation (IRO) was a non-permanent specialised agency of the United Nations. It came into being on 20 Aug 1948. Its functions were previously carried out by a Preparatory Commission (PCIRO), which assumed on 1 Jul 1947 functions formerly exercised by its predecessor organisations: The League of Nations; the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees; the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the allied armies.
The IRO was concerned principally with the repatriation and resettlement of refugees. It also provided for the care and maintenance of refugees in Displaced Persons camps. The objective was to offer sufficient maintenance and care to prevent serious physical and psychological deterioration. In addition it gave legal and political protection, a function normally performed by consulates on behalf of their governments.
Nothing is known about the author. It is assumed that she must have been a pupil at a technical school in Celle, Lower Saxony because the folder in which the project was originally housed is entitled 'Berufschule Celle'. It was created as part of her coursework, as evidenced by the mark 'I/II' awarded by her teacher at the end, and the occasional comments within.
The Internationale Auschwitz Komitee (IAK) was founded in 1952 by former inmates of the death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, with the following aims: to bear witness to the crimes of the Nazis in the camp; to fight for compensation for former inmates and their families; to work with the Auschwitz Museum to preserve the site of the camp as a permanent memorial. The IAK became involved in the gathering of statements and testimony against former camp guards and other Nazi personnel. Many of the witnesses who provided testimony later took part in the 'Frankfurt Trial' of perpetrators at Auschwitz.
Hermann Langbein (1912-1995), secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee was an Austrian who fought in the Spanish Civil War with the International Brigades for the Spanish Republicans against the Nationalists under Francisco Franco. He was interned in France after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and then sent to German concentration camps after the fall of France in 1940. Over the next few years he was imprisoned in several different camps (Dachau, Auschwitz and others). He was among the leadership of the International Resistance groups in the camps he was held in. After 1945 he was General Secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee, and later Secretary of the 'Comite' Internationale des Camps'. Hermann Langbein was among those awarded the Righteous Among the Nations status by Yad Vashem.
The papers in this collection were used for the making of a BBC TV documentary series German History, 1919-1945. They are a set of copies deposited by Rudi Bamber, an interviewee for the programme, in which he describes his experiences of Kristallnacht and, in particular, the murder of his father.
The Holocaust Memorial to the Jews of Vienna, the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial 2000 (also known as Nameless Library) is by Rachel Whiteread (b 1963), located in the centre of the Judenplatz in Vienna. It is a work in cast concrete, with the walls made up of rows of books, with the pages, rather than the spines, turned outward; this can be regarded as a comment on Jews as a 'people of the book' and the Nazi book burnings. On one of the walls is the negative cast of double-doors.
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.
The Reverend Wernham was one time parish priest at Christ Church, Forest Hill, in which parish there was also a German church. The latter's pastor, for a short time before the war, had been Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Reverend Wernham has been associated with Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who helped rescue a number of German clergy of Jewish extraction.
This copy letter in Yiddish with English translation was addressed to the father of the depositor, and describes the fate of the depositor's mother, who survived the Warsaw ghetto only to be murdered at Majdanek.
The author of this eyewitness testimony regarding Kristallnacht, Vincent C Frank, is a family friend of the depositor, W F Jaspert, and is said to be a blood relative of the famous diarist, Anne Frank.
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.
N/A
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sophie Cahn was a German Jewish refugee whose father and mother, died at Minsk, Belarus and Theresienstadt, respectively, having failed to escape the Nazis.
The Rhoden family were a Jewish family from Vienna who came to Great Britain in 1939. The father, Dr Edgar Rhoden was arrested by the State Police (Stapo), Vienna, May 31, 1938 and imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp from where he wrote to his daughter, Eva. There are passport visa stamps for the UK (15 August 1939) and the USA (5 November 1940). Nothing further is known about the family.
The Dokumentationszentrum des Bundes Juedischer Verfolgter des Naziregimes (Documentation Centre for the League of Jews Persecuted by the Nazis) was founded in October 1961 by Simon Wiesenthal with a staff initially of 2 people. Its aims were to identify and evaluate the vast and growing corpus of material on the subject of the Holocaust; to locate witnesses for war crimes trials; to support the judiciary and police authorities through contact with other documentation centres throughout the world in the prosecution of war criminals; and to observe and collect material on neo-Nazi organisations.
Little is known about the subjects of these two facsimile identity card applications, other than the information contained within the documents themselves, namely that Ewa and Henryk Fischler were Polish-Jewish residents of Krakau, and that they had 2 children, Janina and Stanislaw, born in 1930 and 1933 respectively.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.