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Siegfried Rotholz was a German Jew and former resident of Berlin, who was transported to Australia on the HMT DUNERA.

HMT DUNERA was a British passenger ship built as a troop transport in the late 1930s. On 10 Jul 1940 the Dunera left Liverpool with men classed as enemy aliens, who were considered a risk to British security. Although many of the internees had in fact fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution, they were considered to have been German agents, potentially helping to plan the invasion of Britain. Included were 2,036 Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany, 451 German and Italian prisoners of war and others including the survivors of the Arandora Star disaster. They were taken to Australia for internment in the rural towns of Hay, New South Wales and Tatura, Victoria Australia. The ship had a maximum capacity of 1,500 - including crew - however on this voyage there were 2,542 transportees. The resultant condition has been described as 'inhumane', the transportees were also subjected to ill-treatment and theft by the 309 poorly trained British guards on board. On arrival in Sydney, the first Australian on board was medical army officer Alan Frost. He was appalled and his subsequent report led to the court martial of the army officer-in-charge, Lieutenant-Colonel William Scott.

The Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad was formed in 1943 by the Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association and under the auspices and financial responsibility of the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation.

Bendix , Otto , 1878-1943

Otto Bendix was born in Wilmersdorf, Berlin, 1878, of Jewish heritage. He married a non-Jew and was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp on one of the 'old people's transports' on 3 October 1942, where he died on 8 January 1943.

Mayor of Kusel

Otto Weil was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp on 24 Jun 1938 and released on 10 August 1939.

Regent's Park School

The Regent's Park School was founded by Dr Bruno Schindler and his wife, Alma in 1933, mainly for Jewish refugee children from Germany. It was the aim of the Schindlers to make the children as independent as possible as they knew that a number of them would probably never see their parents again. There was a strong emphasis on Judaism and Dr Schindler made it a rule that every Friday evening he would give a talk about the history of the Jews and Judaism. There were also many discussion groups on a variety of subjects led by the matron of the school. The aim of the school was thus to encourage independent thinking, an ability to act independently and a feeling that, despite adversity, it was possible for all to achieve the kind of life and standard of living from which most of the children had come. The fact that the school produced an exceptionally large number of men and women in the professions is testimony to this.

Wittig , Karl , fl 1939-1950

During World War Two, Karl Wittig was a political prisoner in a number of Nazi concentration camps including Sachsenhausen. In the early 1950s Wittig was a key witness in the trial of Otto John, head of the West German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz), 1950-1954. John was found guilty of spying for the communists as a result of Wittig's evidence.

Hauser , Rita , fl 1941-1990

Rita Hauser was interned on the Isle of Man at Port St Mary and attended 'Y' Camp school, 1941.

The Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief was founded in the early months of 1933 by a group of Anglo-Jewish community leaders, in response to the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on a political platform of anti-Semitism. Among the founders were Anthony de Rothschild, Leonard G. Montefiore and Otto Schiff. The fund has been through many name changes in its lifetime. It started out as the Central British Fund for German Jewry, then became part of the new Council for German Jewry in 1936 along with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the American United Palestine Appeal. On the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 the fund changed its name to the Central Council for Jewish Refugees, and in 1944 changed again to the Central British Fund for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation. After many years as the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief, the organisation is now known as World Jewish Relief. The Fund's mission, according to its Memorandum of Association, was 'to relieve or assist Jewish Refugees in any part of the world in such manner and on such terms and conditions (if any) as may be thought fit'. In this work the fund was aided by various organisations, including the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC) which was founded by Otto Schiff in 1933, the Children's Refugee Movement (established by the JRC and the Inter-Aid Committee), and the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, which was established in 1943 and financed by the Central Council for Jewish Refugees (as the Central British Fund (CBF) was then known).

The Hay internment camp was located outside of the town of Hay in the Riverina district of southern New South Wales. It was constructed in 1940. The first arrivals were 2036 Jewish internees from Nazi Germany and Austria - mostly professionals who had simply fled for their lives - along with 451 German and Italian POWs. They were transported from England on-board the HMT Dunera, and they became known as 'the Dunera Boys,' which was applied, in particular to the Jewish refugees.

The refugees (and POWs) were transported to Hay via train and then placed in the camps behind barbed wire. They remained active, holding physical education courses and concerts, teaching the children and printing their own money.

Oppenheim family

Dorrith Sim (née Oppenheim) came to England on the Kindertransport, 26 July 1939. Her parents worked for the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, c 1943, they were eventually pronounced verschollen in Auschwitz. Julius Oppenheim was the grandfather of Dorrith.

Otto Ernst Remer was born in Neubrandenburg (Mecklenburg) the son of a judicial officer. He embarked on a military career and by 1935 was made lieutenant. He was wounded several times during World War Two and was highly decorated. Although never a Nazi party member he played an important part in the suppression of the July 1944 conspiracy against Hitler. He was promoted by Hitler, as a result, to major-general on 31 January 1945. After a short period of imprisonment under the Americans after the war, he began working for them as a researcher into the history of the war.

He was expelled from the Deutsche Reichspartei for his extreme views and founded the more extreme Sozialistische Reichspartei. There followed short periods of imprisonment for minor offences in Germany and periods of exile in Egypt and Syria, where he is thought to have established links with the notorious fugitive Nazi war criminal, Alois Brunner. He died in 1997.

Bing family

The Bing family was a German Jewish family from Berlin some of whose members died in the Holocaust and others managed to escape to Great Britain.

Klara Rosenzweig was born in 1890 in Altleiningen, Rheinland Pfalz, and was deported to France from Mannheim in October 1940. She was imprisoned at Gurs in the Basses Pyrenées from 22 October 1940 to 20 Jan 1942. She was then transferred to de Noé in the Haute Garonne until 3 August 1942. From there she was moved to Recebedon and thence to Drancy. Her name appears on the transport list of 'Convoy' No. 18 which left Drancy on 12 August 1942 and arrived at Auschwitz on 14 August 1942. It is assumed that she died very shortly after her arrival. The letter of 16 March 1941 carries a postscript signed by Bert Franck. The transport list of 12 August 1942 includes the name Bertha Franck, born 4 August 1875, Hunfeld, Germany.

Unknown

This typescript report on conditions in Berlin is the product of a conversation with a Jewish woman who left Berlin in the beginning of 1942 and arrived in London in October of that year.

Hugo Rosenstock came from a family of German Jews in Berlin. Having emigrated to Great Britain after the outbreak of World War Two, he was interned on the Isle of Man.

Sandberg family

Waltraut and Ingeborg Sandberg traveled to Great Britain on the Kindertransport.

Werner Rüdenberg, export merchant and sinologist was born in Hanover, November 1881. He married Anni née Pincus. He spent 16 years in Shanghai spread over a 30 year period. He compiled a Chinese/ German dictionary, first published in 1924, with a second edition in 1936. He arrived in Great Britain in 1938 and taught for a few months at the School of Oriental Studies, whilst working on an English/ Chinese dictionary (Shanghai dialect). He received a grant for this work. In 1940 he was interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. He later taught German at Westfield College and continued his merchant activities with China.

The Sekretariat Warburg was a charitable and cultural centre for Hamburg Jews, 1938-1941, whose objective was to assist Jews in Hamburg during the Nazi era and was funded by the Warburg banking family. Robert Solnitz was the head of the organisation.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a literary fraud alleging a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. The writing has been revealed to be originally an antisemitic, and subsequently an anti-Zionist, plagiarism and hoax first published in 1903 in Russian, in Znamya.

Zonder titel

Jersey's Masonic Temple was sacked by the Nazis, 27 Jan 1941 and the Jersey Masonic Temple Co (1920) was forcibly liquidated by the Occupying Powers.

Maria Nermi-Egounoff, opera singer, was born in Budapest in 1899 where she graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy. She was a member of the former Royal Opera House in Budapest, Volksoperhaus in Vienna and Staatopersänger in Germany until 1933. She came to London, December 1937 and married in 1940.

Hermann Maas was an evangelical minister from Heidelberg who, from a very early age had a great interest in the Jewish faith and empathy for the Jewish people. In 1903 he attended the 6th Zionist Congress where he met Theodor Herzl and even before the Nazis came to power he became a member of an organisation which campaigned against antisemitism. During the Nazi era he continued to help persecuted Jews and in 1944 he was deported to France as a slave labourer for these actions. He was the first German citizen to be formally invited to the state of Israel and in 1967 he was awarded the Yad Vashem medal of the 36 Righteous amongst the People of Jerusalem.

Paul and Martha Rosenzweig, came from a village in the Palatinate. They had the same mother, who was Jewish, became a Protestant and died at Auschwitz. The siblings had difficulty obtaining assistance from Jewish organisations because of their Mischling status- in fact Paul spent some time in Dachau. Hermann Maas saved them from Nazi persecution.

Unknown

[Lotte] was a resident of Prague; interned at Theresienstadt concentration camp, Nov 1941-Aug 1945; returned to Prague, 1945; emigrated to Canada, 1947.

Hans Werner Wollenberg passed his final school exam in 1910 and studied medicine at Munich from 1911. The collection includes Wollenberg's account of a journey to Italy, which he had undertaken with a few friends. Later he had to spend a few weeks in hospital in Copenhagen, unable to shake off an infection. In 1912 he apparently lived with his parents and studied at Königsberg. In 1913 he spent a semester at Berlin University, continuing his medical studies and becoming a member of a student corporation.

Lilli Segal, a German Jew, was born in Berlin in 1913. Segal fled to France after the Nazi seizure of power, where she engaged in illegal courier work to Germany and was finally arrested and deported to Auschwitz.

She managed to escape and fled to Switzerland. In the 1980s and 1990s she was involved in research into the history of Nazi medicine.

Publications: Die Hohenpriester der Vernichtung: Anthropologen, mediziner und Psychiater als Wegbereiter von Selektion und Mord im Dritten (Reich, Dietz Berlin, 1991) and Vom Widerspruch zum Widerstand: Errinerungen einer Tochter aus gutem Hause.

Frank Collins, a German Jew, was born in Mannheim on 8 January 1918. He was interned at Gurs concentration camp, France, from 25 Oct 1940 to 4 August 1941. According to his 'Soldier's Release Book' he was called up for military service with the British army on 24 November 1943, having been listed as a butcher by trade. He was released on 19 March 1948. He was a member of the 2nd Special Air Service Regiment.

After the war he was involved in an operation to bring to justice Nazi war criminals who committed acts of brutality against civilians and members of the SAS at Moussey, France.

Various

Robert Philip Baker-Byrne was born in Berlin in 1910. His father was the owner of the company, Modellhaus Becker, Berlin. In 1936 he and his parents, under increasing pressure from life under the Nazis, came to Great Britain as refugees. Some time later he married and had a daughter. From 1939 until 1944 he was a member of the Pioneer Corps. In 1944 he began working for the British Secret Service and made two lone parachute drops into enemy territory. Whilst on the last mission into the Lübeck area he was apparently captured.

Having survived the war, he worked as an investigator in the investigation section of War Crimes Group, North West Europe. After he left the military he went to Australia (presumably with his family). After a few years he returned to Great Britain where he worked as a sales manager in the 1950s. Nothing further is known about his life nor that of his family.

Unknown

During World War Two, Lingfield Race Course, Surrey, was converted into an internment camp.

Unknown

During 1914-1919 there were two large camps on the Isle of Man at Douglas and Knockaloe near Peel. The first was a requisitioned holiday camp whilst the second was purpose built using prefabricated huts and even had its own railway link. Large numbers of internees were held for up to five years until the camps finally closed in 1919.

In World War Two, camps were located in the Douglas area, Peel, Port Erin/Port St Mary and Ramsey. These held much smaller numbers of people thought dangerous to national security, sometimes only for a few months until the individuals were assessed for potential risk. There were also some political detainees including those held under section 18B of the Defence (General) Regulations. This enabled the Government to imprison those citizens thought to be dangerous to national security without charge, trial or set term.

The Committee for War Foster Children (Commissie voor Oorlogspleegkinderen) was established by the Dutch government on 13 August 1945. The committee's objective was to ensure that the fate of the children orphaned as a result of the war and the Holocaust be secured in the children's best interest. The stance taken by the committee was controversial from the outset.

Jewish groups felt that they were under represented on the Committee given that 84% of the children were Jewish. They argued that Jewish children, instead of being allowed to go to Jewish foster parents, were encouraged to stay with their existing (non- Jewish) foster parents. The committee, determined to be non-denominational, argued that if the children were happy in their adopted, non-Jewish environment, and it could not be proven that they came from orthodox family backgrounds, it would be in their best interests to stay put.

Unknown

Lehnitz was Jewish rest home, children's home, congressional centre and domestic science school and was located within the Berlin region.

Isabella Roth was born in Vienna in 1896, the daughter of Josef Roth a Jewish manufacturer from Gross Wardein, Hungary. She worked as a correspondent for Holz-Handels-Aktien-Gesellschaft, Vienna, where she worked in the Rumanian department as German-Hungarian correspondent. From 1925 until 1938 she worked as typist for the Neue Wiener Tageblatt for Steyrermühl, the newspaper publisher. She came to England in 1939, where, according to her naturalisation certificate, she worked as a typist. Nothing further is known of her life or that of her family.

Benario family

Olga Benario was born into a family of Jewish intellectuals in Munich in 1911. At the age of 16 she was already a member of the Communist party. In 1926 she, along with others, stormed the Berlin-Moabit district gaol in order to free some comrades, later going into hiding. In 1928 she went to Moscow and in 1934 she accompanied the Brazilian revolutionary, Luiz Carlos Prestes (whom she later married), to Brazil where she took part in the resistance to the regime of President Vargas. However, such was the affinity between Hitler and Vargas that once captured, she was deported back to Nazi Germany where she was interned in the concentration camp Lichtenburg. She was gassed in the concentration camp at Bernburg an der Saale in 1943 at the age of 34.

Various

Max Sander was a German Jew, born in 1890, who apparently came to Great Britain in 1939. During World War One he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class and the Ehrenkreuz für Frontkämpfer. He is described in various documents as a businessman and there is a photograph of a shop in Hamburg called Nebel und Sander. Sander died in London in 1979.

Unknown

This collection of copies of papers deals with the project of a group called the Langham Committee, whose object was to put to work several hundred German, Austrian and Czech Jewish refugees on the renovation of a dilapidated manor house and grounds, Tythrop House, Leicestershire.

Franz Szell, an exiled Hungarian journalist apparently resident in Tilsit, Lithuania spent more than a year in the archives in Latvia and Estonia researching Alfred Rosenberg's family history with a view to publishing the open letter, 936/1.

Unknown

Paul Dickopf was born in 1910 in Müschenbach in Oberwesterwaldkreis. After studying law and administration he joined the criminal police and later the security service. From September 1942 he went into hiding in Belgium (the circumstances of which are unknown) and later fled to Switzerland where he lived as a refugee until the end of the war. In 1947 he returned to Germany and joined the Federal German Police where he progressed to become head of the Bundeskriminalamt, Wiesbaden, and from 1968 was president of Interpol. Dickopf died in Bonn in 1973.

Hitahadut Olej Germania was founded at the beginning of 1932 with the objective of providing advice and support to would-be emigrés from Germany to Palestine. The character of the organisation changed with the huge increase of emigrants during the great 'Alijah' [1933] after which it became more involved with issues around settlement, and the economic and cultural life of the new immigrants.

The mother organisation, Mifleget ha-Avodah ha-Ziyyonit, was the Socialist Zionist party formed in 1920 by the union of Palestine Workers' Party, Ha-Po'el ha-Za'ir, with a majority of the Ze'irei Zion groups in the Diaspora. The latter groups had been formed in Russia at the beginning of the 20th Century by young Zionists who espoused the views of Ha-Po'el ha-Za'ir and intended to join the party upon their settlement in Erez Israel. The programme of Ze'irei Zion, announced at its second congress in Petrograd, in 1917, postulated the necessity to establish a Jewish labour commonwealth in the land of Israel and redirect the Jewish masses in the Diaspora to productive occupations.

Bruno Weil, was a scholar, lawyer and politician, who in 1926, was elected Vice-President of the Central Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens. In 1935 he was sent by the CV to the USA to develop links with American Jewish organisations. From there he made a trip to South America, the result of which was this series of articles which were later to be published in the CV newspaper. This particular edition was presumably written for the American market, since the reports are in English and are printed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which was, by then, based in New York.

Schindler , Oskar

Oskar Schindler's list documents the Jewish workers who were employed by Schindler at the concentration camp Gross Rosen and the work camp Brünnlitz. Inclusion on the list was a guarantee of safety. The list includes the names of 297 women and 800 men, the women's names being listed alphabetically. The list is thought to be a jumble of inaccuracies, false birth dates, and altered identities. Some of the mistakes are intentional; others apparently resulting from confusion or disinformation, or simply typos.

The Zentralvereinigung österreichische Emigranten was a non-political organisation with no party or religious affiliations, the objective of which was to help all Austrians in exile after the outbreak of war. It was based in Paris and the advisory council comprised Alfred Polgar, Frederike Zweig and Berthe Zückerkandl. Its principal activities were to provide assistance for immigrant internees; to assist their wives and children, many of whom ended up in homes; and to procure residency permits.

Paul Hollander was born in Cologne in 1908. After leaving school he decided to work abroad to improve his language skills. He spent time in London, Rotterdam and France where in 1938 he stumbled into a career in journalism.

At the outbreak of war he volunteered for the French forces but as a German he was immediately interned. His only alternative was to volunteer for the French Foreign Legion where he served for a little under a year as engagé volontaire pour la durée de la guerre. After which time he spent the next two and a half years in various camps including Kenadsa. In the Spring of 1943 he managed to bluff his way out of the camp and arrived in Algiers where he joined the British Alien Company.

Hampstead Garden Suburb Care Committee for Refugee Children has a connection with the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany (British Inter-Aid Committee). Nothing is known about the origin or background of the Hampstead Garden Suburb Care Committee for Refugee Children. The Inter-Aid Committee was founded in March 1936 by agreement between the Central British Fund, Save the Children Fund and the Society of Friends with the special object of looking after Christian Children of Jewish extraction. The Inter-Aid Committee sought out children whose anti-Nazi parents had been arrested or were in danger of incarceration. This committee re-formed under the title of the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany in 1939.

Bollag , Max , fl 1938

Wilhelm Freyhahn was an inmate at Buchenwald concentration camp, until July 1938. Freyhahn was a representative of the Jewish community in Breslau, and guest of Max Bollag.