James Theodore Bent; born Baildon, Yorkshire, 1852; educated at Malvern Wells, Repton School and Wadham College Oxford (BA 1875); married 1877 Mabel Virginia Anna, daughter of Robert Hall-Dare. Between 1877 and 1897 the Bents travelled extensively in Greece, Italy, Turkey, Russia, India the Persian Gulf, Central Africa, Abyssinia and the Arabian peninsula. Bent died in London in 1897, from pneumonia following on malarial fever, which developed after his return from Aden.
Publications: Theodore Bent:The Life of Garibaldi, 1881; The Cyclades, or Life amomg the Insular Greeks, 1885; The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, 1892; The Sacred City of the Ethiopians, 1893; articles in the Archaeological Journal, the Journal of Hellenic Studies, the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. Mabel Bent: Southern Arabia, 1900 (contains extensive material from Theodore Bent's journals).
Arnold Hugh Jones was educated at New College Oxford. He was reader in ancient history from 1929 to 1934 at the Egyptian University of Cairo before returning to Oxford. He was appointed professor of ancient history at University College London in 1946 and then at Cambridge five years later. Among Jones' books were A History of Abyssinia (1935), Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (1948) and Athenian Democracy (1957).
George Qvist was born in 1910 and educated at Quintin School and University College Hospital, London (MB, BS, 1933). He was appointed Surgical Registrar at the Royal Free Hospital, London, (RFH), 1939-1941. During World War Two he served as a Surgeon in the Emergency Medical Service, 1941-1944, and as a Lt Col (Surgical Specialist) in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in Europe and the Middle East, 1944-1946. He returned to the RFH as Surgeon, 1946-1961 and Senior Surgeon, 1961-1975 and acted as Surgical Tutor at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, 1946-1975. He also held Consultant posts at Willesden General Hospital, 1956-1975 and the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital, 1950-1975. He was a member of Court of Examiners, Royal College of Surgeons, 1951-1957. He married Frances Valerie Gardner, Consultant Physician, RFH in 1958. He was appointed a Fellow of University College London, in 1975 and died in 1981. Publications: Surgical Diagnosis, 1977, various papers on surgical subjects.
Frances Valerie Gardner was born in 1913 and educated at Headington School, Oxford, Westfield College London (BSc, 1935) and the London (Royal Free Hospital) School of Medicine for Women (MB, BS 1940, MD 1943). She was appointed Medical Registrar, at the Royal Free Hospital, 1943-1945; MRCP 1943; Clinical Assistant, Nuffield Department of Medicine, Oxford, 1945-1946, Fellow in Medicine, Harvard University, USA, 1946 and Consultant Physician at the RFH, 1946-1978. She also held consultant posts at the Hospital for Women, Soho Square, London, the Mothers' Hospital, London, and the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital. FRCP 1952; She married George Qvist, Consultant Surgeon, RFH, in 1958. She served as Dean of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine (RFHSM), 1962-1975 and President, RFHSM, 1979-1989. She was Chairman, of the London/Riyadh Universities Medical Faculty Committee, 1966. She was awarded the DBE 1975 and FRCS 1983. Publications: Papers on cardiovascular and other medical subjects in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet and the British Heart Journal.
The central themes of the collection are the views of Judge N W Rogers, a virulent anti-semite, who believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that the financial world was controlled by international Jewry. He sent one of his pamphlets and two others of a similar nature to Hugo Valentin in Sweden, with a letter in which he reasserts his antisemitic arguments. Evidently, they had already corresponded although it is not clear why. In addition there is correspondence between the Jewish Central Information Office and Valentin. Whilst little is known about Rogers, save for the fact that he had published a number of antisemitic tracts, the following information on Valentin was taken from Encyclopoedia Judaica.
Hugo Maurice Valentin, 1888-1963, was a historian and Zionist leader. Born in Sweden, Valentin first served as a teacher of history at a high school in Falun, but in 1930 was appointed lecturer and in 1948 professor at the University of Uppsala. Topics: European/ Prussian history and history of Jews in Sweden. In 1925 he became a Zionist, and from then on dedicated himself passionately to spreading Zionism to Swedish Jews. He became president and later honorary president of the Zionist Federation. He died suddenly preparing an argument against an anti-Zionist in a Stockholm radio station.
Joseph Langland, was born in 1917; educated at University of Iowa gaining a bachelor's degree, 1940 and a master's degree, 1941; was a soldier in the US Army in World War Two, stationed close to Buchenwald shortly after its liberation. He became a poet and published poems including two about Buchenwald and one about Hiroshima. Langland died in 2007.
Jonni Hirsch was a Jewish 'Mischling', a term used during the Third Reich for a person deemed to have partial Jewish ancestry. He and certain members on the Jewish side family were from Kiel. These papers are evidence of the way in which the lives of Jews in a German city became ever more difficult as a consequence of growing antisemitism. The Hirsch family was an old established Jewish family emanating from Denmark. Jonni Hirsch's grandfather, Wolf Hirsch, was president of the local Jewish community and instrumental in the building of a Kiel synagogue. Jonni Hirsch was imprisoned on 12 November 1938, 2 days after Kristallnacht, and described as a Jew. Little is know about the family after 1938, however in 1957 Jonni Hirsch lived in Kiel and it is believed that his earlier home in Fischerstr was bombed during the war.
Little information exists regarding the administrative history of this collection, although there is a note at the beginning of the list which states that it is by no means comprehensive and that it was created from names discovered in an unidentified card index, the facts of whose deaths were corroborated. The note also states that it was far more difficult to find the names of those doctors who committed suicide or were murdered in the early years of the Nazi era.
Little is known about the family beyond the following details:
Sophie Scharvogel, grandmother of E Ohly, was born on 24 Dec 1859 in Mainz; was transported to Terezin on 1942 and died there, 16 Nov 1942. She was the widow of Professor J J Scharvogel.
Karl Traumann writes from Gurs concentration camp in the French Pyrenees, Feb 1941. He was a patent lawyer from Karlsruhe, first cousin of Gertrud Ohly and nephew of Sophie Scharvogel, born Mannheim c1880, died at Gurs in 1942. He had a brother, Ernst, living in the US at the time.
Lotte Pariser, writes from Terezin in May and June 1944, born on 7 Sep 1885, transported to Terezin on 6 Jun 1942, evacuated to Auschwitz to 28 Oct 1944.
Anna Ansbacher, a friend of Sophie Scharvogel, was one of the lucky few to have been sent to Switzerland in exchange for lorries.
E E Ohly came to Great Britain in 1945 to join his father, who had returned to Britain in 1934. Since he was half Jewish he could no longer work in his profession as a sculptor in Germany. As he was born in Great Britain he was able to escape. E Ohly left Germany in 1934 for school in Switzerland and lived there until 1945. His mother, Gertrud, being half Jewish, survived World War Two and died in Munich on 20 March 1951.
Siegfried Grossbard was a Jewish refugee from Vienna who eventually became resident in Great Britain, after having spent time as an inmate of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps.
This collection contains mostly copy documents from the US legation in Stockholm to the US Department of State and concerns the possibility of saving Hungarian Jews during the Nazi era. The depositor was co-chairman of Brookline, the Holocaust Memorial Committee, based in Massachusetts, USA, and former inmate of Drancy concentration camp.
Eric Walters-Kohn was born in Vienna in 1906; incarcerated in Dachau and Buchenwald, and came to Great Britain in 1939. Many of his family members died in the Holocaust including his mother.
Wolfgang Josephs, a German Jew from Berlin, came to Great Britain sometime in the mid 1930s. He was interned as an enemy alien at the outbreak of war and later transported on the 'Dunera' to Hay Internment Camp, Australia. On his return to Great Britain in 1941 he enlisted in the Pioneer Corps, later changing his name to Peter Johnson. He was a military interpreter for the British occupying forces in Germany at Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, May 1945-Oct 1946 where he was involved with the denazification process. Whilst there he also took an interest in the returnees from concentration camps, arranging correspondence between them and their families all over the world. The Wiener Library has a copy of a tape recorded interview with him, the original being produced for the Imperial War Museum, which details his life as an internee in Great Britain and Australia.
'The Hyphen' was founded in 1948 by a group of younger continental Jewish refugees (between the ages of 20 and 35), many of whom were the children of members of the Association of Jewish Refugees, who having settled in Great Britain, found that owing to their similar background and experiences they had interests and problems in common. The group was to have no particular religious or political bias. The intention was to provide cultural, social and welfare activities in a way that would enable them to feel at home in their newly adopted country. The name 'The Hyphen' was chosen because it symbolized the gap between the older generation of refugees who had no intention or desire to integrate into British society, and the ideal of seamless integration which the younger generation aspired to but could not immediately realise.
One of the group's first activities was the setting up of a study and discussion group, which covered topics such as immigration in general, as well as German-Jewish immigration into Britain; German-Jewish history, and British cultural and political topics. Its most popular functions became the social gatherings, dances, and rambles in the Home Counties. 'The Hyphen' never had more than 100 members at any one time but there were between 400 and 500 names on its mailing lists. The activities eventually petered out and the group was wound up in 1968. Compared with other German-Jewish institutions it was rather marginal, but for the members it fulfilled a very important function by giving them a sense of belonging during a difficult period of settling in to a new society.
Alice Fink (née Redlich), was born in Berlin in 1920. She came to England in November 1938 where she did her nurse's training at a hospital in Greenwich. She joined the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad and went to Bergen Belsen with the Jewish Relief Unit in September 1946. She married Hans Finke in June 1948 and moved to Chicago in 1949.
Her family, with whom she communicated via the Red Cross, remained in Berlin until they were deported and ultimately perished in the Holocaust. They were transported at different times. The only reference to the deportations in the correspondence is a Red Cross Telegram reply dated 9 December 1942, signed by her mother and Heinz (brother?), in which they ask Alice whether she informed 'Tante Hedwig' [herself already deported by this time] that her father had gone to Adi's. He had in fact already been deported to the East by this time.
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 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 Warburg family is a German-Jewish family of bankers. The Warburgs moved from Bologna to Warburg in Germany in the 16th century before moving to Altona, near Hamburg in the 17th century. Their first known ancestor was Simon von Cassel, who died c 1566. They took their surname from the city of Warburg. The brothers Moses Marcus Warburg and Gerson Warburg founded the M M Warburg and Co banking company in 1798 that is still in existence. Moses Warburg's great-great grandson, Siegmund George Warburg, founded investment bank S G Warburg & Co in London in 1946. Siegmund's second cousin, Eric Warburg, founded Warburg Pincus in New York in 1938. Eric Warburg's son Max Warburg is currently one of the three partners of M M Warburg & Co.
The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials (more formally, the Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT)) were a series of twelve US military tribunals for war crimes against surviving members of the military, political, and economical leadership of Nazi Germany, held in Nuremberg after World War Two, 1946-1949 following the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials proceedings were instigated as a result of the promulgation of the Allied Control Council's 'Law No. 10', 20 Dec 1945. This law empowered the commanding officers of the four zones of occupation to conduct criminal trials on charges of aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership of an organisation carrying out such crimes. There were 12 trials, held between Dec 1946 and Apr 1949. 177 people were tried, including representatives of the leadership of the Reich ministries, the Wehrmacht, industrial concerns, and the legal and medical establishments. The cases were as follows: 1) Medical Case; 2) Milch Case; 3) Justice Case; 4) Pohl Case 5) Flick Case; 6) IG Farben Case; 7) Hostage Case; 8) RuSHA Case; 9) Einsatzgruppen Case; 10) Krupp Case; 11) Ministries Case; 12) High Command Case.
Josef Weisz was born near Köln in 1893, emigrated to the Netherlands in 1933; was arrested and sent to Westerbork in January 1942; sent to Bergen Belsen in January 1944; liberated on 10 April 1945.
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.
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.
Gertrud Wilmersdörfe born 1915 Oberpfalz, Bavaria, an anti-Nazi and Jewess was convicted in 1934 of anti-Nazi activities in Frankfurt am Main along with 3 other co-defendants at a trial in Kassel and sentenced to 4 months imprisonment.
This correspondence regarding the history of the Jewish community in Tarnobrzeg, Poland stems from a dispute in which Michael Honey, a descendant of a family from the said community took exception to an article written by Tadeusz Zych, chairman of the Tarnobrzeg Historical Society, which the former regards as anti-Semitic.
The panopticon prison at Breda, North Brabant, housed the only German war criminals ever to be imprisoned in the Netherlands for their war crimes during the Second World War. They were known as the 'Breda Four (and later three)'. They were Willy Paul Franz Lages who was released in 1966 due to serious illness, Joseph Johann Kotälla who died in prison in 1979, Ferdinand Hugo aus der Fünten and Franz Fischer who both were released in 1989.
Unknown.
In Germany in 1933, the Protestant faith was divided into 28 churches with 45 million members. On 4 April 1933, Hitler appointed Ludwig Müller as National Bishop to lead all protestants in an all embracing German Christian Church. As a result of the creation of the new German Christian Church, 200 pastors led a breakaway church, the Confessional Church. 7,000 of the 17,000 pastors in Germany joined the church and its leaders included Pastor Martin Niemöller, who felt that the church should be independent of the state.
The Anglo-Jewish Association was a British organisation originally founded for the protection of Jewish rights in developing countries by diplomatic means. Its objectives and activities were patterned after those of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. It was established in 1871 when its first president was Jacob Waley; five Jewish MPs were vice presidents. By 1900 it had 36 branches, 14 in British colonies. In 1871 it was instrumental in securing the creation of the Rumanian Committee and in 1882 collaborated in establishing the Russo-Jewish Committee. From 1881 it cooperated with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the Conjoint Foreign Committee.
The AJA undertook educational work among 'under-developed' Jewish communities, maintaining schools in Baghdad, Aden, Mogador, Jerusalem, and other places. In 1893 it became associated with the direction of the Jewish Colonization Association. As its president, Claude Montefiore condemned the Balfour Declaration. After the Board of Deputies became overwhelmingly Zionist in 1940, the AJA, under Leonard J Stein became a rallying point of non-Zionist sentiment; as a result, ostensibly because it was not a democratically elected body, its representation on the Joint Foreign Committee was reduced and then abolished. After the establishment of the state of Israel it modified its attitude to Zionism. It published the Jewish Monthly (1947-1952), and the AJA Review (1944-1955), which was superseded by the AJA Quarterly.
Doris Winter was forced to discontinue her education at the school where she produced this work as she was Jewish; attended a boarding school in Sweden, 1934-1935; returned to Cologne and realised that she was unable to receive any training or qualifications; went to England and spent the summer in a holiday home for Jewish children from Leeds, April 1936; began nursing training, 1936; after the fall of France in 1940 she was asked to leave the hospital within 24 hours because of her official status as a 'friendly enemy alien'. Fortunately she had already passed her exams.
After a brief period of unemployment she worked at the Lingfield Epileptic Colony, Surrey and also at the Anna Freud nurseries in Hampstead under the American Foster Plan. She became matron of the 54 Camden Road Wartime Day Nursery, which was run by the Ministry of Health and the Board of Education, with the object of releasing women for essential work.
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.
Henry G Plitt [1918-1993] was born in New York City, and graduated from Staunton Military Academy, Virginia; Syracuse University and obtained a law degree from Saint Lawrence University. He practised law for a brief period before volunteering for military service.
He was in the first group of 101st Airborne Division soldiers to jump into Normandy on the night before the invasion to set flares marking landing strips for British glider pilots, and is officially credited with being the first American soldier to touch French ground.
After the war he organized a small group of volunteers, pressed several former Waffen SS officers into service and went around southern Germany and Austria looking for high ranking Nazis. According to him he brought in dozens of men but only Streicher and Ley were noteworthy.
Plitt went to work for Paramount Motion Picture Theater Chain, and in the 1960s and 1970s purchased part of Paramount and other theatre chains to become, for a time, chief executive of the largest theatre chain in the US, Plitt Theaters Inc.. He was also very active in charity work, raising large amounts of money for United Cerebral Palsy, Bar-Ilan University and The Friends of Israeli Defence Forces. Having re-joined the US Army reserves in 1962, he died with the rank of Brigadier General.
The Jewish Infantry Brigade Group was a military formation of the British Army that served in Europe during the Second World War. Although the brigade was formed in 1944, some of its experienced personnel had been employed against the Axis powers in Greece, the Middle East and East Africa. More than 30,000 Palestinian Jews volunteered to serve in the British Armed Forces, 734 of whom died during the war.
The brigade and its predecessors, the Palestine Regiment and the three infantry companies that had formed it, were composed primarily of Middle Eastern Jews. The brigade was nevertheless inclusive to all Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers so that by 1944 over 50 nationalities were represented. Many were refugees displaced from countries that had been occupied or controlled by the Axis powers in Europe and Ethiopia. Volunteers from the United Kingdom, its empire, the Commonwealth, and other 'western democracies' also provided contingents.
Richard H Levy is an historian who wrote 'The Bombing of Auschwitz Revisited: A Critical Analysis' in Holocaust Genocide Studies, Vol 10, No 3, 1996. He also gave a lecture on the subject in 1997 at the Wiener Library.
Papers probaby compiled for an exhibition on the fate of Jews in Vienna during the Nazi era.
The Reichsbund der Deutschen Beamten (Reich League of German Civil Servants) became the national representative organisation for German Civil Servants from October 1933 and was affiliated to the Nazi party. Although not all members had to be Nazi party members, most were. The head of the organisation was Herman Neef, who had been the head of the predecessor organisation, Deutsche Beamtenbund (German Civil Servants' League). In addition to training and development of members, the organisation also ensured that Civil Servants maintained a Nazi focus.
This collection of documentation was generated as a result of the efforts made by the former mayor of Wertheim, Karl-Josef Scheuermann, to trace the fate of the town's Jewish population, to organise a gathering of survivors and to erect a memorial. Included is a memoir of former Jewish residents.
The subject of the two letters at 13/18/1-2 was the paternal aunt of Herbert Engel's wife. The author of the account at 13/18/3 was Herbert Engel's great uncle. During the period of the latter (April 1945) Engel, then 6, was staying with his mother and 2 year old sister with relatives in the Harz mountains, having been evacuated from their home in Köln.
Born 1916, Wolfgang Josephs, a German Jew from Berlin, came to Great Britain sometime in the mid 1930s. He was interned as an enemy alien at the outbreak of war and later transported on the 'Dunera' to Hay Internment Camp, Australia. On his return to Great Britain in 1941 he enlisted in the Pioneer Corps, later changing his name to Peter Johnson. He was a military interpreter for the British occupying forces in Germany at Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, May 1945-Oct 1946 where he was involved with the denazification process. Whilst there he also took an interest in the returnees from concentration camps, arranging correspondence between them and their families all over the world. The Wiener Library has a copy of a tape recorded interview with him, the original being produced for the Imperial War Museum, which details his life as an internee in Great Britain and Australia.
'The Hyphen' was founded in 1948 by a group of younger continental Jewish refugees (between the ages of 20 and 35), many of whom were the children of members of the Association of Jewish Refugees, who having settled in Great Britain, found that owing to their similar background and experiences they had interests and problems in common. The group was to have no particular religious or political bias. The intention was to provide cultural, social and welfare activities in a way that would enable them to feel at home in their newly adopted country. The name 'The Hyphen' was chosen because it symbolized the gap between the older generation of refugees who had no intention or desire to integrate into British society, and the ideal of seamless integration which the younger generation aspired to but could not immediately realise.
One of the group's first activities was the setting up of a study and discussion group, which covered topics such as immigration in general, as well as German-Jewish immigration into Britain; German-Jewish history, and British cultural and political topics. Its most popular functions became the social gatherings, dances, and rambles in the Home Counties. 'The Hyphen' never had more than 100 members at one time but there were between 400 and 500 names on its mailing lists. The activities eventually petered out and the group was wound up in 1968. Compared with other German-Jewish institutions it was rather marginal, but for the members it fulfilled a very important function by giving them a sense of belonging during a difficult period of settling in to a new society.
This is believed to be a typescript transcript of an Associated Press telex containing the names on the infamous Nazi Black List, a facsimile copy of which the Wiener Library holds. The list contains the names of all those whom the Nazis regarded as a potential threat to their plans and would therefore be arrested after the successful invasion of Great Britain.
Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 into a cultured and assimilated middle class Jewish family, and died in Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 26. 'Life or Theatre?' is the name she gave to a sequence of nearly 800 gouaches she produced between 1940 and 1942. Subtitled 'a play with music', it combines images, texts and musical references to recreate a life scarred both by family tragedy and Nazi persecution, yet interspersed with moments of intense happiness and love.
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.
Two Czech Torah scrolls were given to the Northwood and Pinner Synagogue from the towns of Kolin and Trebon. It was decided to research the history and background to these scrolls. The content of this collection is the result of that research.
The author of this letter, Jella Caro, was the sister-in-law of the depositor's grandmother. She was 77 years old at the time of writing and lived to the age of 100. She was over 90 years old before she received any compensation for her suffering. In the letter she describes the deleterious effect on her health of 3 years in Terezin. Freezing cold and alone at an address in post-war Vienna, which functioned as a home for Jewish returnees, she describes how pleased she is to hear from her (unidentified) relatives and asks after them.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.