Papers probaby compiled for an exhibition on the fate of Jews in Vienna during the Nazi era.
Karl Neumann was born into a Jewish family in Picin, Czechoslovakia, 1895. He trained at a business school and after initially working with his brother he went into business on his own in 1933. In 1939 on account of persecution by the Nazis on racial grounds he fled to London.
Lisbeth Perks was born into a Jewish family in Vienna c 1930; came to Great Britain as a refugee, 1939. Whilst bringing up her family she studied pianoforte with Herbert Sumison and Kendall Taylor and gained an associateship of the Royal College of Music. She has taught in many schools and at her own home.
The depositor was the grand-daughter of Feodor Schweitzer, the subject of some of the documents. The family came to Great Britain, 1938-1939. The relationship of the individuals referred to in the earlier documentation to the depositor is unknown. It appears that one of the depositor's ancestors was a court photographer in Berlin in the 1860s.
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.
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.
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.
Frederick (Fritz) Ullstein was the son of Hermann Ullstein, the youngest of the 5 Ullstein brothers, responsible for building up the Ullstein publishing House to become the largest in Europe, prior to compulsory purchase by the Nazis in 1934, on account of the family's Jewish origins. Frederick came to Great Britain in the 1930s, became a farmer, served in the British army during the war and married into the Guiness family. After the war he was involved in claiming back for the Ullstein family what was rightfully theirs. Once the business was back in the hands of members of the Ullstein family, it became evident that for a number of reasons, they were not able to recreate the success, which the firm enjoyed before the Nazi seizure of power. Sustained interest by Axel Springer eventually resulted in the latter's company taking over the firm. Frederick Ullstein became an employee of Aldus Books, based in London.
.Aldus Books, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Doubleday and Co. Inc. of New York, USA Division was run by Wolfgang Foges, who came to Great Britain from Austria to get married in 1936. In Vienna he had edited a fashion magazine. He founded Adprint in Great Britain in 1937. This company created and produced illustrated books, the best known of which were the 120 volumes of the Britain in Pictures series, published in England by Collins, and translated into several languages by the Ministry of Information.
In 1941, Foges had been granted British citizenship for important services to the war effort and soon after his naturalisation he was appointed an honorary advisor to the Colonial Office on books and publications.
In the early 1950s, under the imprint of Rathbone Books, a series of books called The Wonderful World was published in association with Doubleday and Co. Inc. New York. This was the start of many further series of internationally co-produced educational and general knowledge books, written by distinguished British authors. In 1960 Aldus Books was founded.
Peter Kien was born in January 1919 in Warnsdorf, Czechoslovakia, the son of a textile manufacturer, whose business collapsed during the economic crisis of 1929. He began painting whilst a student at the German Realschule in Brünn and continued his schooling in art at the Prague Academy where he studied under Willi Nowak. The situation in Czechoslovakia got steadily worse particularly for Jews after the annexation of Austria in March 1938. During this time he met Ilse Stransky. They married in September 1940. In December 1941 he was deported to Theresienstadt.
In Theresienstadt he met many more artists and writers whilst working in the graphics department. He became increasingly active as a portrait artist and sketcher of fellow inmates. Above all he immersed himself in the theatrical and musical life of the camp.
In July 1942 he was joined by his wife and in January 1943 by his parents. He wrote poetry and several plays and his libretto for the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder der Tod dankt ab which had its premiere in Amsterdam in 1975.
He was sent to Aushwitz on the last transport in October 1944 along with his wife and parents where he was murdered.
Fred Dunston (previously Fritz Deutsch), the depositor, worked in the Youth Aliyah offices and later the Palästinaamt, Vienna (after the former was destroyed during Kristallnacht), and also as youth leader or member of the Elternschaft in the Youth Aliyah centres of Great Engeham Farm, Kent, Braunton and Bydown, Devon.
Youth Aliyah or Aliyat Hanoar, as it was known in Hebrew, was created by Recha Freier, wife of a Berlin Rabbi, in 1932. Combining productive agricultural training with educational and Zionist values it gave many young Jewish children a purpose and occupation during the period of mass unemployment, the result of the breakdown of the German economy.
Circumstances in late 1938 Europe meant that it became imperative to send Jewish children abroad. Auslandhascharah was the overseas version of Youth Aliyah where children and young people were trained with a view to eventually emigrating to Palestine. England was added to the list of countries and the London office soon became the busiest, reflecting the popularity of Great Britain as a destination.
Funding of the centres came from the British Council of the Young Pioneer Movement for Palestine (Hachsharath Hanoar), whose executive committee comprised Mrs Israel M. Sieff, Mrs Norman Laski, Mr M. Schattner and Mrs Lola Hahn-Warburg.
Great Engeham Farm, Kent, was received as a gift as a result of an advertisement in the London Times. It opened in June 1939 and a total of 134 children and 30 chalutzim lived there rent free. It served primarily as a transit camp for between 300 and 350 children aged 13-16.
Bydown, Devon, was founded by a group from Great Engeham Farm who were forced to move there in November 1939 when Kent was designated off-limits to aliens. Its headmaster was Dr. Fridolin M. Friedmann, a former headmaster of the Landschulheim of Caputh, near Berlin. It closed at the beginning of October 1941 when the lease ran out.
The agricultural training centre at Braunton, Devon, was a collaborative project between Youth Aliyah, Hechaluz and the British Council of the Young Pioneer Movement for Palestine. The accommodation housed 30 people who engaged in farm work. The centre existed between March and December 1940.
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.
This collection was apparently created by George Burger whilst living in Austria and Hungary.
Ruth Balint (née Neumann) was born in Berlin in 1926. She was sent to school in Schöneiche, Brandenburg, where she was one of very few Jewish children. In 1938 she was sent to a Jewish school in Berlin. Shortly after her father's return from 3 months in a concentration camp, in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, he wrote to a relative in Newcastle, Kurt Banski, a furniture maker, with regard to looking after Ruth. Ruth came to England circa July 1939 on the Kindertransport. She spent the following 5 years with an English Methodist family in Kendall, Lake District. She remained in contact with the family for the rest of their lives. Ruth died in 2000.
During the war years Ruth received the letters in this collection from her parents, who were eventually deported to Warsaw, then Treblinka in 1942 and grandparents to Theresienstadt in the same year. The only indication of concern about their predicament, which Ruth discerned in the letters after a re-reading of them many years later, was the occasional enquiry regarding news of relatives who had managed to flee to South America, and who had promised to help them also to emigrate.
The donor, A Dunitz, was instrumental in bringing about the creation of a memorial to the Jews who were deported by the Nazis, by persuading the various Greek authoritities to cooperate. He was also responsible for finding all the names of the individuals. The names on this list correspond with those on the memorial. The memorial was erected in 2001.
Isidore Kirchner was Jewish; born in 1856 in Loslau, Upper Silesia; attended school in Pless and became a licensed medical practitioner in Berlin 1883.
Sir Otto Kahn-Freund was born 17 November 1900 in Frankfurt am Main and was professor of comparative law, University of Oxford. He was born in Frankfurt am Main of Jewish parents and educated at the Goethe-Gymnasium there and Frankfurt University. He became judge of the Berlin labour court, 1929. Dismissed by the Nazis in 1933, he fled to London and became a student at the London School of Economics. He became an assistant lecturer in law there in 1936 and Professor in 1951. He was called to the bar (Middle Temple) in 1936. He became a British citizen in 1940.
He was appointed Professor of Comparative Law, University of Oxford, and fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford in 1964 and elected FBA in 1965. He became an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple in 1969 and a QC in 1972. He was knighted in 1976.
He played an important part in the establishment of labour law as an independent area of legal study, and was a member of the Royal Commission on Reform of Trade Unions and Employers' Associations, 1965. Kahn-Freund died in 1979.
The Trade Union Centre for German Workers in Great Britain (TUCGWGB) was founded just before the outbreak of the Second World War, but did not begin its work in earnest until the release of many of the German exiles, who were interned at the outbreak of war. The chairman of the TUCGWGB, Hans Gottfurcht, had for many years been an active trade unionist in Germany, where he helped establish a number of illegal trade unions under the Nazis. The establishment of the TUCGWGB was regarded as necessary because of the particular situation brought about by the large influx of refugees and exiles. Whereas it would normally have been expected for these new arrivals to join existing British trade unions (which they did as well), there was always a sense that their stay in Great Britain would only ever be temporary, and that they needed a representative organisation that would reflect their particular interests. After the war and the demise of the TUCGWGB, Hans Gottfurcht went on to become a pivotal figure as liaison between the newly formed Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund and the occupying British authorities.
Julius Bloch was born in Bruehl/Baden in June 1877. He became a member of the Jewish Gemeindevorstand in Pforzheim, Baden Wuertemberg, in 1923; member of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, Frankfurt/ Main, where he was also chairman of the Jewish welfare committee and head of the regional office for the Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland. He was responsible for rationalisng the provision of welfare to Jews in Frankfurt by centralising the numerous smaller organisations into one large organisation. By May 1938 he was living in London. In 1946 he was deputy of the New Liberal Congregation, London. He died in London in 1956.
The Centro di Documentazione sui Bibelforscher, Centre for the Documentaion of Jehovah's Witnesses, is based in Italy and has no affiliation to any religious denomination.
A handwritten comment on the third page indicates that the leaflet was dropped by the RAF in 1943 or 1944.
World Media Forum is a platform for the discussion of a variety of international news topics attended by members of the world's media and held (annually ?) in different parts of the world. This particular event was held in Zurich in 1999.
Unknown
Juedische Winterhilfe (Jewish winter aid) was a Jewish organisation activated in the autumn of 1935 by the National Representation (Reichsvertretung) and the Central Committee of German Jews for Relief and Reconstruction to help needy Jews get through the winter, by providing food, medicines, and heating assistance. Winter Aid had been a general German enterprise during the winter of 1931/32, but Jews were excluded after the Nuremberg Laws, prompting Jewish organisations to establish the Jewish equivalent. Juedische Winterhilfe funded its activities by means of donations from Jews in Germany and elsewhere.
This notebook had been the property of Kitty Fehr, sister of the depositor, who collected it and smuggled it to Great Britain as a 15 year old girl in 1939. She added a few more during the war in England.
Unzer Styme (Our Voice) was a monthly paper written in Yiddish and published by the Central Committee for Liberated Jews in the British Zone betwen 1945 and 1947. The articles covered here are contained in issues held at the Wiener Library.
Esther Brunstein, the author is a survivor of Bergen Belsen.
Joyce Rozendaal Haldinstein, born in Norfolk, the daughter of a Jewish businessman, met and married a Dutch national and was caught up in the turmoil visited upon the Netherlands when the Germans invaded during World War Two.
Leon Goldenberg was born in 1864 in Czernowitz in Bukowina into a Jewish family. He entered the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1886 and died in Vienna in 1920.
This collection consists of transcripts of interviews conducted for the TV programme 'The Hidden Jews of Berlin'. The programme was made by Kessler Productions in conjunction with Darlow Smithson Productions for the Secret History series on Channel 4. It was transmitted on 17 August 1999. The producer was Peter Kessler, the director was Clara Glynn, and the executive producer was John Smithson.
The Comité voor Bijzondere Joodsche Belangen (the Committee for Special Jewish Affairs) was founded in Spring 1933 by Dr David Cohen with the object of bringing together all the various Jewish interest groups to co-ordinate protest activities against the persecution of Jews in Germany and to deal with the burgeoning refugee problem. Out of this organisation was born a second, the Comité voor Joodsche Vluechtlingen (the Committee for Jewish Refugees), which was responsible for the day to day running of the relief effort in Amsterdam. Its remit grew to include assisting Jewish refugees nationwide and representing their interests to the government.
The Conference on the problem of Jewish refugees was held in Evian, France, on the shore of Lake Geneva, in July 1938. Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed this international conference in the wake of Germany's annexation of Austria in March 1938, which substantially exacerbated the refugee problem. Delegates from 32 countries gathered from 6 to 15 July 1938. As the sessions proceeded, delegate after delegate excused his country from accepting additional refugees. The Evian Conference failed in its primary objective - to find safe haven for the Jews of Nazi Germany. Even the establishment of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees just before the conference adjourned was unable to make a difference.
Eva Noack-Mosse , a Jewess, was born in 1908 in Berlin, the daughter of Max Mosse, professor of medicine. She married a non-Jew, Moritz Noack, in 1934, with whom she lived until she was deported to Theresienstadt in February 1945. Whilst an inmate, she worked as a typist in the statistical office. 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 SS (Schutzstaffel) was founded in 1925 with the object of protecting the Nazi Party leader, Adolf Hitler. By 1936, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the SS had assumed responsiblity for all police and security matters throughout the Third Reich. The Reichsführung SS SD Hauptamt (SS High Command Security Service Main Office) was the internal security branch of the SS.
Carl Schmitt, the controversial and influential political and legal theorist, was born on 11 July 1888 in Plettenberg, Westfalen. He was professor for jurisprudence in Greifswald, 1921; Bonn, 1922-1923; Berlin (Handelshochschule), 1926; Köln, 1933; and again in Berlin, during the Nazi era when he achieved the exalted position of 'Crown Jurist'. During his career as a successful academic and teacher, he became recognised as a fierce critic of the Weimar constitution, which he accused of having weakened the state and of relying on liberalism, which, in his view, was incapable of solving the problems of a modern mass democracy. His loyalty to the Nazi cause had long been suspected by elements within the SS Security Service and his anti- semitism was regarded as opportunistic. As a result of a critical article in the SS periodical Der Schwarze KorpsSchmitt was investigated by the Security Service and subsequently lost most of his prominent offices, and retreated from his position as a leading Nazi jurist, although he retained his post as a professor in Berlin thanks to Göring. He never again dealt with domestic or party politics, but turned his attention to the study of international relations, and soon passed into obscurity. After the war he continued to publish but never held office. He remained a controversial figure, having never been formally charged with complicity with the Nazi regime, nor ever exonerated. He died on 7 April 1985.
According to their own constitution, the World Jewish Congress is a voluntary association of representative Jewish bodies, communities and organisations throughout the world, organised to assure the survival and to foster the unity of the Jewish people. Its origins lie in the immediate aftermath of World War I in the cooperative efforts by Jewish communities around the world in religious, legal, political and relief matters. In the aftermath of World War II the World Jewish Congress played a central role in the creation of Jewish policies with regard to peace treaties, the prosecution and trial of Nazi war criminals and reparations for Holocaust survivors.
Buchenwald concentration camp, one of the largest in Germany with its 130 satellite camps and units, was situated 5 miles north of Weimar in Thüringen. It was established in July 1937 when the first group of 149 mostly political prisoners and criminals was received. Some 238,980 prisoners passed through Buchenwald from 30 countries. 43,005 were killed or perished there.
On the eve of World War Two, the city of Lodz in Poland had a population of 665,000 people of which 34 per cent were Jews. The Jewish population was very active in the industrial sector and the community had a very vibrant cultural life, consisting of sports clubs theatres and newspapers. The Jewish community also produced many renowned authors, artists and poets.
After the German army occupied Lodz on 8 September 1939 there began a campaign of anti-semitic persecution of increasing severity reaching a peak with the creation of the Lodz ghetto, which was officially sealed off from the outside world on 1 May 1940. Thousands were brutalised and hundreds were murdered in the process. The ghetto was only ever conceived of as a temporary measure and ultimately it was planned to rid the city of its entire Jewish population. In the meantime the population of the ghetto, nominally represented by a council of Jewish elders, was forced to live in appalling overcrowded conditions with minimal food and no sanitation. 43,500 people died during the ghetto's existence mostly through starvation and disease.
The deportations, initially to Chelmno, began in January 1942. In total 70,000 inhabitants were sent to their deaths during this first stage. There followed a period of relative quiet when the ghetto became a giant labour camp. The death camp at Chelmno was reopened in June 1944 on the orders of Himmler, who wanted to finally liquidate the ghetto and over 7000 ghetto inmates were murdered in the space of 3 weeks. Another 65,000 Jews were deported to their deaths at Auschwitz during the remainder of 1944. The remaining 1000 Jews at Lodz were liberated by the Russians on 19 January 1945.
Bruno Streckenbach, SS Gruppenführer and Generalleutnant der Polizei was born Hamburg, 17 February 1902; head of Gestapo, Hamburg, 1933; Führer der Einsatzgruppe I in Poland and commanding officer of Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst, Cracow, September 1939; joined Waffen SS, 1943; made General, 1944; arrested by the Red Army, 10 May 1945; sentenced to 25 years hard labour, 1952; released October 1955; thereafter he became an office clerk. He was indicted for the murder of at least 1 million people in 1973. The court in Hamburg suspended the proceedings on account of his ill health. Died, 28 October 1977.
Marek Vajsblum was a Polish journalist and author.
Reichsministerium der Justiz (Justice ministry) was one of the ministries of the Third Reich. The Richterbriefe are a series of confidential letters addressed to the Nazi judiciary from the Reichsministerium outlining in detail the stance that should be taken and verdicts, which should be given in numerous case scenarios. They were a method of further controlling and subordinating the judiciary to Nazi ideology. They came about shortly after the appointment of Otto Georg Thierack to the position of Reichsminister der Justiz in August 1942.
Dr. George F.J. Bergmann was a German Jew who enrolled in the French Foreign Legion as a foreign national living in France in 1939. He was later interned in the notorious prison, Hadjerat M'Guil, in French North Africa and later fought for the British in a pioneer corps company. His origins are not known. He emigrated to Australia after the war. Evidently he was a keen mountaineer.
Fritz Zietlow was born 24 August 1900. He was a law student, one of the early Nazi party activists, who became a Nazi party member in July 1925. He served the party as Gaugeschäftsführer (regional organiser) in Kiel and was a member of the Prussian state council from March 1932. After his legal studies in Kiel and Greifswald he began working as an editor on the Schlesischer Zeitung then on Der Angriff. At the end of 1932 he became the chief editor of the official party paper, the Ostfriesischen Tageszeitung.
Despite being regarded as ideal material for a position as lecturer at the Reichspresseschule, and being nominally included on the staff of that organisation in 1937, he never took up the post. It is thought that this may have been because he was fired by Goebbels from his post on Der Angriff for stealing from the petty cash.
Unknown
The origins of the International Tracing Service date back to a 1943 initiative at the Headquarters of the Allied Forces, which enabled the section for International Affairs at the British Red Cross in London to provide this function. Spurred by the need to acquire more precise information about the fate of forced labourers and refugees in Europe, the task was taken over by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces on 15 February 1944. From the end of the war until 30 June 1947 the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration assumed the task of supporting and repatriating millions of non-German refugees. It moved to Bad Arolsen, Germany in January 1946, which was the geographical centre of the 4 occupation zones. On 1 July 1947 the International Refugee Organisation took over the Central Tracing Bureau, which, as of 1 January 1948, under the name International Tracing Service, is still valid today.
Lebensborn (Fount of life), registered association, established in December 1935 within the SS Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Resettlement Main Office- RuSHA). In an extension of the marriage order of 1932, the Lebensborn Statute of September 1936 charged every SS man to produce at least 4 children, whether in or out of wedlock. The children were to come into the world in well-equipped Lebensborn homes, which protected the mothers from the surrounding world. Lebensborn provided birth documents and the child's basic support, and recruited adoptive parents. Financed by compulsory contributions from the RuSHA leadership, by 1944 a total of 13 homes were maintained, in which some 11,000 children were born. Estimates for the number of kidnappings of racially suitable non-aryans vary from several thousand to 200,000.
The papers relate to the activities of two anti-Nazi activists, Arthur Geissler and Erich Arp, who, at the end of the war, were indicted by a British Military Court for 'the unlawful appropriation of authority' by arresting the former Ortsgruppenleiter Krömer, Elmshorn, Schleswig-Holstein, at gun point.
Regional courts (Landgerichte) and the higher, appeal courts (Oberlandgerichte) throughout former West and East Germany conducted some 1800 Nazi war crimes trials involving some 3500 defendants from the end of the Second World War until the modern era.
On January 21, 1981, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of United States of America v. Feodor Federenko (1907-1986). At issue was whether the defendant, Feodor Fedorenko, a seventy-four-year-old Ukrainian-American who during World War Two had served as an armed guard at the infamous Treblinka extermination camp, should have his American citizenship revoked on the basis of this newly discovered fact about his past. The original case, having found in Fedorenko's favour, was successfuly appealed. Fedorenko became the first Nazi war criminal to be deported to the Soviet Union. In a court in Southern Ukraine, June 1986, he was found guilty of treason; voluntarily going over to the side of the Fascist aggressors; taking part in punitive actions against the peaceful population; and mass executions of citizens of many countries. He was sentenced to death in Kiev in 1986.
Boris Tödtli born in 1901 in Kiev of Swiss parents; fought with White armies during Russian Revolution; taken prisoner by the Red Army near the Romanian border in early 1920; Tödtli contracted typhus and was sent to a hospital in Odessa; lived with his parents, until, in January 1922, he joined the ranks of Russian emigration.
With no trade skills, Tödtli wandered from one menial job to another in the 1920s; in 1923 studied photography in Zurich, where he worked for 2 years before moving on to Paris, Geneva, Lausanne and finally, in 1932, to Bern. There he became a dental technician. Until 1933, when he joined Roll's National Front, Tödtli apparently did not engage in any political activity. It was only in that year that he found a home in the Nazi movement and that his bilingual fluency and anti-Semitism made him a useful go-between for Russians and Germans.
When he joined the National Front Tödtli also began to establish contacts with Russian right wing circles. It was probably through these contacts that he first became aware of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Approached by Markov II of Weltdienst in November 1934, to help arrange the defence of the Protocols in court, he immediately appointed himself 'Chief of the Swiss Section of the Russian Imperial Union' and dispatched letters to dozens of right wing exiles asking for their expertise and testimony at the trial. He was unable to persuade witnesses to attend the trial, not least because of the costs involved.
More important for Tödtli, he became so closely associated with the Russian émigrés and the Nazi bureaucracy that in November 1936 the Bern police charged him under Article II of the Swiss Espionage Act of 21 June 1935. In 1937 he was sentenced to two months in prison, which he managed to avoid by fleeing to Germany. However, after the signing of the Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Russians became a political liability for the Third Reich, and in December 1939 Tödtli was extradited to Switzerland, where he was promptly imprisoned. He died during World War Two.
This collection of correspondence and papers relates to the infamous Bern trial of the distributors of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', in particular to the appeal, which took place between 27 October and 1 November 1937, in which the original verdict, convicting the distributors of falsification and plagiarism, was overturned on a legal technicality, although the appellants were not compensated.
The material was originally housed in a folder entitled 'Protokolle Prozess Bern Appellation' (front cover); 'Bern Protokolle Prozess II Instanz' (spine). Their custodial history prior to deposit is unknown. At some point they came into the possession of Hans Jonak von Freyenwald, and were subsequently referred to as the 'Freyenwald Collection at the Wiener Library'.
Jonak von Freyenwald, born 1878 in Vienna; held various civil service posts until retirement in 1922. He worked for the Anti-semitic organisation Weltdienst between 1934 and 1940 in Erfurt, then Frankfurt. Between 1934 and 1937 he worked as an academic assistant for the Swiss defendants and their lawyers in the Bern trial of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'.
The collection was extracted from Polish archives in London. The precise details of the provenance precede each account (or group of accounts).
The Deutsche Arbeitsfront was founded on 10 May 1933 under the patronage of Hitler and directed by Robert Ley, Reichsorganisationsleiter der NSDAP. It soon grew to be a giant bureaucratic machine with a membership of 25 million and staff of 40,000 with a considerable influence within the Nazi regime. Conceived as an alternative to trade unions, it was supposed to be representative of employers and employees alike. It became part of the NSDAP organisation in October 1934, having its base in Berlin and modelling its structure of Gaue and Kreise on the party.