This collection of family papers consists primarily of letters from the Jewish parents, Franz and Hertha Kuhn in Berlin, to their daughter, Hannele or Hannah, who had managed to find refuge in Great Britain, having come out on one of the Kindertransporte in 1939. The letters give a very moving account of the trials and tribulations of a very close-knit, loving family split asunder by the Nazis and ultimately condemned to death.
Otto Bondy was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, 5 Aug 1892. He served in the First World War with distinction. He completed his engineering studies in Vienna in 1921 and went to Berlin to become an assistant to the Professor of Engineering structures, German industry (c 1926-1931). He emigrated to London, c 1933 and died in Surrey, May 1986.
Lodz ghetto or the Ghetto Litzmannstadt was the second-largest ghetto established for Jews and Roma in German-occupied Poland. It was originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews but the ghetto became a major industrial centre, providing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany. Because of its remarkable productivity, the ghetto managed to survive until August 1944, when the remaining population was transported to Auschwitz. It was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated.
The Inow family were a Jewish family from Wuppertal, North Rhine Westfalia. The two daughters, Renate and Margalit escaped Nazi Germany to Great Britain and Sweden respectively, whilst their parents remained and were eventually deported to the Lodz Ghetto where they were killed.
Walter Richard Rudolf Hess was born April 26, 1894 and became was a prominent figure in Nazi Germany, acting as Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party. On the eve of war with the Soviet Union, he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom, but instead was arrested. He was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life internment at Spandau Prison, where he remained until his death in 1987 as a result of strangulation by an electrical cord. The official cause of death was recorded as suicide.
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.
On June 10, 1940, the Gestapo took control of Terezín (Theresienstadt), a fortress, built in 1780-1790 in what is now the Czech Republic, and set up prison in the Small Fortress (Kleine Festung). By 24 November 1941, the Main Fortress (große Festung, ie the town Theresienstadt) was turned into a walled ghetto. The function of Theresienstadt was to provide a front for the extermination operation of Jews. To the outside it was presented by the Nazis as a model Jewish settlement, but in reality it was a concentration camp.
Theresienstadt was also used as a transit camp for European Jews en route to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Dr. Siegfried Seidl, an SS colonel, served as the first camp commandant in 1941. Seidl oversaw the labour of 342 young men, known as the Aufbaukommando, who converted the fortress into a concentration camp. Although the Aufbaukommando were promised that they and their families would be spared transport, eventually all were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943, for Sonderbehandlung, or gassing without selection.
Malines (Mechelen) concentration camp was situated in a former barracks by the river in the city of the same name in Belgium. It was appropriated by the Germans in 1942 to serve as an assembly camp for all the Jews of Belgium and other 'undesirable' groups. The camp was divided into several groups including those to be deported; nationals of neutral countries or Germany's allies; borderline cases (ie mixed race); political prisoners and, in the final stages of the camp's existence, Gypsies.
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.
Dr. Eugen Gerstenmaier was one of the founding fathers of the Federal Republic of Germany. A leading Christian Democrat during its first twenty years, he was president of the Bundestag from 1954-1969. A Protestant theologian, he came into conflict with Nazism in the 1930s and was among those arrested in the wake of an aborted attempt on the life of Hitler in 1944.
Gerstenmaier was born in Kirchenheim near Stuttgart, on August 25 1906. He left school at 14 and worked for 8 years as a clerk before embarking on studies in philosophy and theology at Tübungen University. His first clash with Nazism came in 1934 when he was arrested while still a student. His continued opposition to the regime cost him a teaching post at Berlin University two years later, and he turned to work in the Evangelical Church.
His post in the Church's foreign department enabled him to travel and make contact with various churchmen abroad during World War Two, and this later enabled him to accelerate the return of many POWs.
During the war he became a member of the Evangelical resistance group led by Graf Moltke which was involved in plotting against Hitler. After the failure of the assassination attempt on Hitler in June, 1944, Gerstenmaier was arrested and sentenced to seven years' hard labour, but was rescued by the advancing American army.
In the aftermath of the war he devoted his energies to the Evangelisches Hilfswerk, which, under his leadership, became a powerful Protestant welfare organisation in Germany. As an expert in church social work he also became the German delegate to the Ecumenical Church Council of Churches in Geneva.
With his election to the founding session of the Bundestag in 1949, however, he flung himself into the nascent political life of the new republic. He was a senior figure in the Christian Democrat Union and in 1954 became the first elected President (speaker) of the Bundestag. In January 1969 he resigned from the presidency. He died on 13 March 1986.
Lodz ghetto or the Ghetto Litzmannstadt was the second-largest ghetto established for Jews and Roma in German-occupied Poland. It was originally intended as a temporary gathering point for Jews but the ghetto became a major industrial centre, providing much needed supplies for Nazi Germany. Because of its remarkable productivity, the ghetto managed to survive until Aug 1944, when the remaining population was transported to Auschwitz. It was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated.
Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who had run a Jewish orphanage before the war, was appointed 'Elder of the Jews' by the Nazis in 1939. He was a man of extraordinary energy and determination, who turned the ghetto into a hive of industry in the vain hope of securing the survival of most of its inhabitants by making them economically too valuable to the German war effort to be murdered. To achieve this aim, he agreed to the introduction and enforcement of a ruthless system of labour exploitation, a permanent state of hunger for most of his workers, and the creation of an utterly degraded class of Jewish collaborators and slave drivers. Having been responsible for the deportation of thousands of ghetto inmates to their deaths - which earned him the label 'collaborator' - Rumkowski was deported with his family to Auschwitz on 30 August 1944, where they were all murdered.
The Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (SD-RfSS, Security Service) was primarily the intelligence service of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Nazi Party. It was the first Nazi Party intelligence organisation to be established and was often considered a 'sister organization' with the Gestapo.
Lehrstrasse Prison was a prison in Berlin.
Einsatzgruppen (Special task forces) were paramilitary groups formed by Heinrich Himmler and operated by the SS before and during World War Two. They operated in the territories captured by the German armies during the invasion of the Soviet Union. Their principal task was to implement Hitler's 'final solution of the Jewish question' in the conquered territories.
The author, Rolf Pakuscher, was the nephew of Frank Martin (formerly Martin F Salomon), a former Pioneers Corps comrade of the depositor. Pakuscher is described as being approximately 30 years of age in 1946, engaged to a young, non-Jewish woman.
The units involved were reserve Police Batallion 93; Police Batallion 322 and Reserve Police Batallion 109.
The Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda or Propagandaministerium) was the Nazi ministry dedicated to enforcing the Nazi ideology in Germany and regulating its culture and society. Founded on March 13 1933 by Adolf Hitler's new National Socialist government, the Ministry was headed by Dr Joseph Goebbels and was responsible for controlling the press and culture of Nazi Germany.
Gerda Meyer (née Stein) left Prague by plane with 19 other Jewish children under the guardianship of Trevor Chadwick , who established a home for refugee children in Swanage, Dorset. Her parents, originally from Karlsbad, write to her from Prague and later (her father) from Lwow (Lemberg). Whilst his fate is not known - he was last heard of by Gerda in June 1940 in Lemberg, he is said to have died in a Russian camp near Moscow, her mother, Erna, died at Auschwitz.
Dr Erich Springer was born in Mariánské Láznĕ, in 1908; he attended secondary school in that town and in Planá, studied medicine in Prague, graduating in 1933. He then worked as surgeon at the clinic of Professor Schloffer. He was deported to Terezin in Transport AK II with a thousand able bodied persons on 4 December 1941 in Terezin from Prague, which included another 15 medical doctors. He was given the task of medical supervision of the women's barracks. After liberation in 1945 he returned from Terezin and became head physician at the Rumburk hospital, director of the District Institute of National health, and regional surgeon. He has received numerous rewards for his work.
Dr Walter Feuereisen was the Chief Medical Officer of the Jewish Kultusgemeinde, Prague, who later became a specialist in tropical medicine and the chief medical officer for the Jewish community in Prague.
Dr Bela Berend was born in Budapest, 12 January 1911, the son of Adolf Presser and Regina Máriás. As a young Rabbi he was regarded as a non-conformist, anti-assimilationist, Zionist who, later with the threat of deportations, advocated emigration as the way to save the Hungarian Jewish population.
His role on the Hungarian Jewish Council brought him into contact with elements of the extreme, anti-Semitic Hungarian Right, in particular Zoltán Boznyák, who, paradoxically, shared the same desire to remove Hungary's Jewish population. This association resulted in his becoming one of the most controversial figures in the Hungarian Holocaust.
In 1946 he was tried for war crimes by the newly installed communist government, where he faced accusations of collusion with the Gestapo, stealing Jewish property and collaborating with the extreme right. After appeals he was finally exonerated and settled in the United States, where he changed his name to Albert B Belton. However, despite the court's final ruling he faced numerous accusations and libels over the course of the next few decades.
He was also a witness in war crimes trials and referred to in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, 1961. He was an ardent Zionist and defender of the state of Israel.
Charles Joseph Singer (MA, DM, D.Litt.,Hon D.Sc., FRCP), born 2 Nov 1876, London; studied University College London, and from 1896-1899 studied zoology at Oxford, graduating BA, BCh.; qualified from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School MRCS LRCP, 1903. He gained other degrees honours during his career: MA MD; FRCP; Honorary DSc. From 1904-1908 Singer held various posts in England and abroad, including Sussex County Hospital; Brighton; Government House, Singapore; Abyssinia (Medical Officer to exhibition); Malta and Salonica, where he trained during the First World War when he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Singer held various posts throughout his career: Registrar to the Cancer Hospital, London; Physician to the Dreadnought Hospital; Lecturer in the history of medicine at University College London, as well as work abroad including Visiting Professor at University of California, Berkeley.
This collection comprises two deposits whose relationship to each other is not known. The first consists of correspondence and reports concerning participants in two famous acts of protest during the Third Reich: the Rosenstrasse Protest in which the (mostly) Aryan partners of a specially segregated group of Jewish prisoners protested at their detention by the Nazis in a former welfare office for the Jewish community in Berlin, 1943; Das Sovjet-Paradies Aktion in which 500 Jews and Germans were arrested, half of whom were subsequently executed for sabotaging an exhibition by the Nazis designed to pour scorn and ridicule on the Soviet Union, 1942.
This first deposit came from Annelore Leber, the former wife of the pre-1933 SPD MP, Julius Leber, who was tortured and murdered by the Nazis in the aftermath of the plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. It was donated to the Wiener Library after a meeting between Annelore Leber and Alfred Wiener in Berlin in 1958. The material, which consists mainly of personal accounts of participants, was collated as a result of an advertisement put out in the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung der Juden in Deutschland, 18 February 1955, asking for eye witness testimonies of these events.
The custodial history of the second deposit is unknown. It consists of transcripts of interrogations of former Nazi military and officials and interviews with anti-Nazi German citizens, by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) Morale Division, June-July 1945. The object of the questioning was to ascertain the morale of the population in the wake of sustained Allied bombing raids.
The Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland was founded in 1933 and became the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden in 1935, and later the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland in 1939. It came into being shortly after the Nazi seizure of power as the successor to the Reichsvertretung der jüdischen Landesverbände, a loose federation of Jewish organisations in Germany. Its main objective was to deal with the serious problems facing German Jewry from the new, antisemitic regime.
Rabbi Leo Baeck was elected president, and the driving force in the organisation was its chief executive officer, Otto Hirsch. The organisation's activities were to include all aspects of the internal life of the Jews of Germany, and it was to act as their representative before the authorities as well as Jewish organisations abroad. Its main spheres of operation, conducted through the Zentralausschuss der Deutschen Juden für Hilfe und Aufbau (Central Committee of German Jews for aid and reconstruction) were education, vocational training, support for the needy, economic assistance, and emigration.
The Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland (Jewish Aid in Germany) was an organisation established by German Jews in 1901 to engage in social welfare and educational activities among needy Jews. It remained in operation until 1941, and during the Nazi period it assisted German Jews trying to emigrate.
After World War One, the Hilfsverein concentrated its efforts on Jewish refugees from eastern Europe who were stranded in Germany while trying to emigrate overseas.
The help that the Hilfsverein was able to give encompassed all aspects of emigration; up-to-date information, based on reports received from hundreds of contacts abroad; vocational counselling, technical arrangements, bureaucratic formalities and financial advice. When the Hilfsverein began to assist Jewish emigration from Germany, a clear division of responsibility was made between it and the Jewish Agency. The latter, through the Palastina-Amt, dealt exclusively with emigration to Palestine, while the Hilfsverein dealt with emigration elsewhere.
The Hilfsverein continued to function as an independent agency until 1939, when it became a section of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland. In 1941, when emigration was prohibited altogether, that section also went out of existence.
Julius Kühl came from a Chassidic family in Poland from where he moved to Switzerland in early childhood. He completed his doctorate on Polish-Swiss trade relations in the summer of 1939 at the University of Bern. From 1938 until the end of the war he was employed by the Polish Consular service, Bern. Thanks to a sympathetic head of Consular service, Alexander Lados, a non-Jew, and with the use of the diplomatic pouch, Kühl was able to circumvent state censorship enabling news about the murder of Jews to reach America and to facilitate communication between Jewish relief organisations in their attempts to rescue Jews.
In 1949 he moved to America with his Swiss-born wife and 2 children where he eventually became a property developer.
During the course of his war-time activities he formed close ties with a number of individuals and organisations intent on rescuing Europe's Jews. There follows a brief description of two of those organisations which feature most prominently in this collection.
The Hilfsverein für jüdische Flüchtlinge im Shanghai (Aid Organisation for Jewish refugees in Shanghai)(HIJEFS) was founded by Recha Sternbuch and her husband, Isaac, in 1941, with the objective of assisting rabbinical students who had fled to the Far East. It soon expanded its activities to include the provision of passports to non-religious Jews from many European countries and changed its name to Hilfsverein für jüdische Flüchtlinge im Ausland (Aid Organisation for Jewish Refugees Abroad).
Va'ad Hahatsala (Rescue Committe) was established in 1939 and was based in the USA at the offices of its parent body, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States. It was an emergency committee formed initially to provide financial support to more than 20 Talmudic academies which had left Poland for Lithuania. It continued to provide relief throughout the war to Jews all over Europe. It had offices in Montreux, Switzerland. Both Julius Kühl and Isaac Sternbuch were on the committee.
Nothing is known about the author of these diaries.
Walter Rauff was a professional naval officer until 1937 when he began working for the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (security service) in which service he became head of the technical affairs section of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security main office). In this capacity, during 1941 and 1942 he supervised the outfitting and despatch of some 20 gas vans in which at least 200,000 people were murdered. Rauff left Berlin to lead an SD Einsatzkommando in Tunis in late 1942. He became district SS und Polizeiführer (SS and police leader) for Northern Italy in September 1943. After the war, having escaped from a prisoner of war camp he eventually settled in Chile where he managed to evade extradition and died in 1984.
Ella Mayer was born in a village in the Rhine Palatinate in 1908, the daughter of a kosher butcher in a small Jewish community. In 1932 both Ella and her sister were brought to England to stay with an English uncle, who had lived in London since before the First World War. Having already met Ben Courts, on the threat of enforced return to Germany, due to the immanent expiry of her visa, they married and she made London her permanent home.
Walter Raschkow, was a German Jewish architect. His wife Emma was non-Jewish. Their daughter, Ingeborg-Maria Raschkow (later Mayer) went to England throughout World War Two whilst her parents remained in Stuttgart.
Jacobs was a Major in the Civil Defence Forces during World War Two.
The papers in this collection relate to the trial of six Danish Nazis for anti-semitic libel, in Copenhagen, 1937. The defendants include Ernst Lemvigh Müller, Niels Olsen, editor of the National-Socialistiks Maanedhaefte, Aag Henning Andersen, Nannestad Møoller, Valdemar Jensen, editor of Stormen and Betty Henning. The longest sentence was 80 days.
Heinz Werner Löwenstein emigrated to South Africa in 1935. He became a sergeant in the South African Army [1941]; saw action in North Africa, 1942; Italian prisoner of war, Oct 1942; repatriated, Apr 1943.
In 1929 Dr Paul Plaut, a psychiatrist and child delinquency expert in Berlin, published a book, Die Psychologie der produktiven Persönlichkeit. In preparation he sent questionnaires to about 400 prominent scientists and artists in Germany and Austria asking for their views and experiences.
Hans Heinrich Lammers (1879-1962), was a career civil servant, who joined the Nazi party in 1932 and was appointed by Hitler to chief of the Chancery on 30 January 1933, and promoted to Reichsminister on 26 November 1937. After 1941, the power and influence that Lammers was used to wielding passed increasingly to Martin Bormann.
Thomas Cook (Thomas Cook and Son Ltd) ran a freight forwarding and storage business in Lisbon. During World War Two Portugal was neutral and Jews and others escaped there (often through Spain) en route to the USA and other places of refuge. Jews in Europe, intending to leave would have sent their belongings to Thomas Cook, Lisbon, as it was an internationally trusted firm, with offices around the world. In 1940 it was owned by Companie de Wagons-Lits, based in Brussels, but was later sequestrated by the British Government.
Unknown
Nothing is known of the provenance or authorship of this report, which is a digest of details about an international anti-Jewish congress which took place in Belgium.
This miscellaneous collection of reports document the situation of German Jewish refugees in Portugal in the 1930s. Reference is made to the Committee for the Aid of Jewish Refugees and to its founder Augusto d'Esaguy.
Viviani was a Florentine engineer and mathematician: he was elected an Associate Member of the Académie des Sciences in 1699.
George Wallich was born in 1815, the son of the Danish (later naturalised British) botanist Nathaniel Wallich (1786-1854). He qualified M.D. in Edinburgh in 1834 and served in the Indian Medical Service. He also wrote on marine biology. In the latter field he was increasingly convinced that his claims to primacy in various research discoveries were being ignored, and engaged in feuds with various scientific figures of the day. He died in 1899.
Founded by Thomas Holloway (1800-1883), the hospital opened in 1885 as an asylum for the middle and upper classes. It closed in 1981.
Alfred Bostock Hill (1854-1932) was Professor of Hygiene and Public Health at Birmingham University.
The Carr Family were Surgeon Apothecaries, of Gomersal, Birstall, Yorks.
Born, 1825; his father was a partner in Allen and Hanbury's, an old-established Quaker chemist and druggist, Daniel joined the family business in 1841; qualified as a pharmaceutical chemist at the Pharmaceutical Society, 1857; Daniel became devoted to the study of pharmacognosy, or the knowledge of drugs, which at that time meant a close study of their botanical and geographical origins; retired from the family business to concentrate on research, 1870; died, 1875.
Publications: Pharmacographia (1874)
The Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research was formed at the time of the passing of the Cruelty to Animals Act 'when a sudden hindrance was thrown in the way of physiological and pathological investigators' (British Medical Journal, v.2(1594); Jul 18, 1891)
Thomas Graham was born in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and studied medicine at Edinburgh University from 1835 (MD 1838). In 1841 he was appointed an assistant naval surgeon by the Board of Admiralty, serving initially at Melville Hospital, Chatham, then aboard HMS Warspite in home waters, in the Atlantic, American waters, and the Mediterranean between 1841 and 1846. In that year he was commissioned as assistant surgeon of HMS Madagascar, serving mainly in the west of Ireland, where he took a prominent part in assisting the relief of distress during the Famine. In 1849 he was commissioned with the same rank to HMS Hastings, based in Hong Kong, travelling out to meet her aboard the troopship Apollo. In March 1850 he was promoted surgeon, to serve on HMS Phlegethon at Whampoa (now Huangpu), but died a few weeks later on 13 July 1850 from malaria. He is buried on Dane's Island, near Canton (Guangzhou).
Florence Nightingale was born to a wealthy family in 1820. She entered into cottage visiting and nursing early, and from 1844 to 1855 visited hospitals in London and abroad. Returning from an 1849-1850 tour of Egypt she visited the Kaiserswerth Institute for deaconesses and nurses and trained here as a nurse in 1851. In 1853 she became Superintendent of the Hospital for Invalid Gentlewomen in London. In 1855 at the invitation of Sidney Herbert she took a party of nurses to the Crimean War, serving at the hospital in Scutari Barracks and also visiting Balaclava. On her return to the United Kingdom she engaged in a campaign for the sanitary reforms that she had instituted in the Crimea to be accepted as general practice. Her campaigning led to the foundation of the Nightingale School and Home for Nurses at St. Thomas's Hospital, London. She was also involved in campaigning for humanitarian aid during the Franco-Prussian War, for improved sanitation in India, and for cottage hospitals in the United Kingdom. She died in 1910.
Born, 1905; educated, Clare College, Cambridge and St Bartholomew's Hospital, London; Lawrence Scholarship and Gold Medal, St Bartholomew's Hospital, 1933 and 1934; Temple Cross Research Fellow, Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1934-1935; Honorary Consulting Physician, Department of Child Health, St Bartholomew's Hospital; Honorary Consulting Paediatrician, Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital, London; co-founder, The Osler Club, London; President, British Society for Medical History, 1974-1976; President, International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, 1981-1982; died, 20 September 1984.
Manor House Asylum was a private lunatic asylum (metropolitan licensed house) founded by Edward Francis Tuke (c 1776-1846) and continued by the Tuke family. The Asylum moved to Chiswick House in 1893 and was later known as Chiswick House Asylum.
Thomas Baker was Surgeon at St Thomas' Hospital, London.