A Journey for Life and a Journey for Death: The Meinhardt ... Word - 8385.pdf · For their honeymoon they made a trip to Palestine. ... life. She was married to Gerd Brueckmann, and

__________________________________________________________________________ 1 ס המרכזי להוראת השואה"יד ושם ביה, מרכז המידע אודות השואה

A Journey for Life and a Journey for Death: The Meinhardt's

Albert Michael Meinhardt and Dr. Yehuda Meinhardt

February 2010 This article is dedicated to the memory of our grandparents, Franz Meinhardt and Margarethe Meinhardt (nee Löwenthal), who perished 1942 in the Holocaust, as well to our parents Gerd Meinhardt and Käte Meinhardt (nee Luft), who succeeded to escape Nazi Germany in 1939 and found shelter in Chile, where they could begin a new life. Be their memory blessed (Z.L.).

Pay respect to your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, because if one of them would not have existed, you yourself would not exist…. (Simple logistics from Käte Meinhardt) Copyright © 2010 by Albert Michael Meinhardt and Dr. Yehuda Meinhardt, All rights reserved and no part of this article may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, without written permission by the authors. Enquires should be addressed to one of the authors: [email protected] .

Disclaimer: The copyright holders mentioned above are responsible for the content of this article. Yad Vashem’s Online Holocaust Resource Center is merely hosting this item in its database and bares no responsibility for its content.


Content 1. Should we leave the country? ……..….5 2. Some anecdotes about life in Schwedt ….……10 3. The “Reichskristallnacht” in Schwedt ….……13 4. On board the “Leipzig” ….…… 22 5. On board the “Peru” ….…….25 6. Arrival in Chile …….….26 7. First steps in the new country …….….29 8. News from Europe …….….32 9. Again in Chile ……….49 10. Life goes on ……….51 11. Schwedt after the war ...…….53 12. Some historical facts about the Holocaust (Shoa) …….….55 13. The Korherr report ……….62 14. The Perpetrators ……….65 15. Acknowledgments ……….67 16. Appendix: Abbreviations used in the text ……….68


1. Should we leave the country? Our mother Käte Luft, the daughter of Elise Laqueur (1873-1939) and Arthur Luft (1861- 1930), was born in Breslau in 1910 and grew up there. In early 1938 she met our father, Gerd Meinhardt (1903-1975) in Berlin. He was introduced to her while visiting a girl friend in Berlin. They soon fell in love with each other and decided to marry quickly. There were bad times for Jews in Germany. In Germany the Nazi government had already been in power for 5 years, and every day brought new restrictions and distresses to their lives. Their wedding took place in Breslau on 7 April 1938. After a civil marriage at the "Standesamt" (the registry office), a short ceremony, officiated by Rabbi Vogelstein was held at the synagogue. Only a few relatives attended, mother’s mother Elise, her two brothers Franz and Herbert Luft, her twin sister Trude, with husband Werner (they were expecting a baby one month later) and a few other relatives. From father’s town of Schwedt nobody could be present. After the wedding our parents moved to Schwedt on the Oder, where our father’s family had been living for generations. Schwedt is located in the northeastern corner of the Brandenburg Province in Prussia. Today the river Oder defines the border to Poland. In Schwedt they resided in the house of our grandparents Franz M. (1877- 1942) and Margarethe Meinhardt (nee Loewenthal) (1880- 1942). They lived on second floor of the house, grandparents lived in the first floor and on the ground floor was the office of Grandfather’s firm. The address was Flinkenberg 6. So our mother lived under the same roof with her mother-in-law, but she was kindly received by her, and by all the Meinhardt Clan, who constituted almost half of the near 100 Jews living in Schwedt.


Document 1: Copy of the marriage certificates of the registry office and from the Rabbi Dr.Vogelstein in Breslau.


For their honeymoon they made a trip to Palestine. They arrived by train at the port of Trieste in Italy, and embarked on board of the ship "Gerusalemme". Four days later, they arrived in Haifa in British Palestine. On leaving the ship they and their baggage was thoroughly checked for weapons by the British Mandatory Police. Heavy disturbances between Jews and Arabs had broken out since 1936 and the Mandatory Government tried to keep order and security in the country. The British authorities requested a security deposit of 500 PP (Palestine Pounds) to insure that they would leave the country after the visit. The immigration of Jews to Palestine was strictly regulated by the government and only people having the "Certificate" (of immigration) could enter the country to stay. They had a nice time visiting relatives and touring and sightseeing the country. First of all they visited father’s sister Anneliese Meinhardt who had left Germany already in 1935, because she could no longer bear the Nazi discriminations imposed on her life. She was married to Gerd Brueckmann, and they had no children. They lived in a kind of "City Kibbutz", a community of German Jews, which shared all their income and distributed the money according to the needs of each member. They didn’t live in one place, but lived very poorly in different rented flats. Father was shocked at seeing the conditions in which his sister lived. A few months after this visit, Anneliese divorced Gerd and soon married Alfred Neugarten, a soldier of the International Brigades in Spain who brought a small boy with him, Ken, as he was later called. In 1939 the Neugarten’s emigrated to Australia, accepting special visa granted by the Australian Government for Jews in Palestine. In Australia, years later in 1942, they had twins, Frank and Gwendoline (today Anne). Until today all their descendants live in Australia. The "City Kibbutz" didn’t last long and was dissolved after a couple of years.


Gerd Brueckmann was killed in action during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. The other relatives was our mothers favorite Uncle Ludwig Laqueur and his two sons Heinz and Wolfgang, already married but at the time without children, and other cousins who had arrived earlier in Palestine. They all belong to our mother’s side family. The Laqueur family had descended from Reb Dovid Lazarus Laqueur who in about 1800 was the rabbi of the small Jewish community in the village of Staedtel in Upper Silesia. Later generations moved to the cities of Brieg, Oels and Festenberg in Silesia and later to Breslau, the capital of Silesia. All the relatives in Palestine advised our parents not to return to Germany, to renounce the deposit and to stay illegally in Palestine. Father couldn’t imagine that. He thought his place was with his parents in Schwedt, and mother also wanted to return to her family in Germany. So they traveled back to Germany. At the end of May 1938 mother’s twin sister Trude’s baby was born, it was a girl called Marianne. Back in Schwedt our father helped our grandfather to manage his business of growing and processing tobacco. The region of Schwedt, called Uckermark, was the northern most region in the world where tobacco grows. During the 17 and 18 centuries the Prussian Kings settled French Protestant refugees, the Huguenots, who introduced the tobacco industry to the area. Later Protestant refugees expelled by Empress Maria-Theresia from Austria and some Jewish families, such as our ancestors, came to the region. Grandfather was the owner of several fields around Schwedt in which the tobacco plants were grown. After harvesting the leaves they were dried in a big storage shed until they were "ripe" i.e. not too wet and not too dry. Then they were pressed to bales and sent to the customers, the tobacco industries in Bremen and Hamburg.


Document 2: The logo of the business letters of grandfather in Schwedt Photo 1: Grandfather Franz Meinhardt in the centre, one of his barn houses.

During 1938 grandfather lost all his fields. The Nazi authorities forced him to sell them to Arians (Arianization). The little money he got for the fields was deposited in a frozen account. From this account he was allowed to take out a small amount monthly. He decided to sell the big storage shed, where his firm was located, to a good business and personal Christian friend from Bremen ( the Senator Rasch.). This was done in anticipation of the forced Arianization. Both parties agreed that, if the times should change, grandfather could buy back his firm. The agreement was made orally without any written record. The money paid for the firm was also deposited into the frozen account.


2. Some Anecdotes about life in Schwedt and Breslau. - A night in a Hotel - In 1935 the "Nuremberg Laws" (Nürnberger Gesetze) took effect. The laws prohibited any love contact between Jews and Aryans. Offenders found contravening these laws were punished severely. Father had a girl friend in Schwedt, G. D. She was not Jewish. They wanted to have some private time for themselves. In Schwedt this was impossible, everybody knew everyone. They traveled in father’s car to the nearby district center (Kreisstadt) Angermünde. Gisela Meinhardt, a cousin of my father, lent to G.D. her "Ausweis", (identity card). They looked more or less alike. They arrived in Angermünde and parked the car just in front of the hotel. In the hotel father and G.D. registered as the married couple Meinhardt. They stayed overnight. The hotel was just in front of the market place (Marktplatz). The next morning a big demonstration of Nazi SA was being held in front of the hotel. The square was full of SA men carrying flags. Loud military music sounded from loudspeakers. Father’s car was the only vehicle standing there in the middle of the demonstration. Father didn’t dare to go out and take the car. G.D. didn’t know how to drive a car and had no drivers license. He gave G.D. the keys and explained her how to start the engine without moving the car. G.D. did as asked and started the engine. Immediately some SA men approached and said, "Fräulein, move the car away, it is a disturbance!” G.D. said that she forgot her bag in the hotel and asked the men to move the car to the rear side of the hotel. So they did, leaving the keys in the car. Father and his girlfriend then left the hotel through the back way, got into the car and drove away. They laughed at having used the Nazis to avoid a dangerous


situation. (This story was told by father and confirmed some years ago by Gisela Meinhardt in Florida. It happened sometime during 1937). - A trip by train - On a Sunday Mother and two girlfriends made an excursion to the "Zobten", a mountain not so far from Breslau in Middle-Silesia. It was a beautiful place to take walks, and could be easily reached by train. Late afternoon they were on the way back by train to Breslau. At a station on the way, suddenly a bunch of SA men boarded the train. They were loud, impolite and mostly drunk. They began to molest the girls, thinking that they were Aryan girls. Mother shouted loud, "I am Jewish, leave us in peace!” They didn´t believe that, "das sagen Sie doch nur so!" (You only say that to cheat us). Luckily the men left the train a few stations later. Mother, with her clear blue eyes, did not to correspond with the Nazi stereotype of a Jew. It demonstrates how wrong those stereotypes are. (The trip happened in 1936/1937, told to us by our mother).


Photo 2: Schwedt in 1935, a poster showing Jews to be undesirable in town.


3. The "Reichskristallnacht" in Schwedt. The night of 9 November 1938 was the nation-wide pogrom, called the "Kristallnacht”, because of the destruction of crystals/windows. In Schwedt SA Nazis entered Jewish homes and looted them. The small synagogue was looted and the furniture destroyed. Later a heavy vehicle rammed the synagogue walls and parts of the building collapsed, but they didn’t burn it, neighboring buildings were to close. The "Mikveh" (the ritual bath) was filled up with rubbish so that it couldn’t be used anymore. (*1) Grandfather’s house was spared. The next morning grandfather, father and all male relatives were arrested and brought to the small prison in the police station in Schwedt. Policemen from the nearby district center came to arrest the Jewish inhabitants of the city. Did any of the few local policemen refuse to arrest their neighbors, whom they knew to be honest citizens? Father later wondered about that. Grandfather could not understand what was going on. "What have I done?" he would ask over and over. He could not conceive of being imprisoned for no reason whatsoever. A few days later, grandfather together with the older men were released. In the meantime the younger men like father had been transported to the Moabit prison in Berlin. There they were very badly treated. After a week they were sent to the concentration camp, (KZ) Sachsenhausen near Oranienburg, north of Berlin. There, father stayed until the first days of February 1939. In the archives of Yad V’shem we found that his prisoner number was 13698. Sachsenhausen was already known to be a very unpleasant place. (*1) - Information about the "Kristallnacht" in Schwedt was given by Karin Herms.


The camp held several thousands of prisoners. After the "Kristallnacht" some 6,000 Jews were added and crowded the Jewish part of the camp. Other prisoners were criminals, political opponents to Hitler, like Social-Democrats, Communists and others, Jehovah Witnesses, and some Catholic and Protestant clergymen. Each group had a different color triangular tag attached to their prison clothes. There was a strict hierarchical order between the prisoners, the criminals being on the highest level, harassing the other prisoners, and the "Novemberjuden" (the Jews detained after the November pogrom) with their yellow tag being on the lowest level, and having to bear most of the suffering. Father didn’t talk much about his time there. Every day people after mistreatment were killed or died It was a cold winter; they did hard but useless work and had to stand for hours in "Appells", (morning and evening calls). (*2) Some bad news arrived from Breslau. Mother’s brothers, Franz and Herbert and her brother-in law, Werner, had been arrested and transported to the KZ Buchenwald. Trude went to the house of her parents-in-law with her baby Marianne. Within one month Franz, Herbert and Werner were released from Buchenwald at different times. The first released brought news about those still imprisoned. At least that they were still alive. At that point mother realized that it was really high time to leave Germany. Prisoners having a visa to another country and the necessary travel papers, would be free to go immediately. So mother started to queue up at the different consulates in Berlin to apply for a visa. People standing in the queues told a lot of gossip about their experiences requesting for a visa for different countries, and this produced more confusion and uncertainties for mother. (*2) "Sachsenhausen", VEB Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1981.


Schwedt was about 70 miles from Berlin, so daily she traveled to request a visa and returned every evening. She applied for almost all countries. She did not care which country would accept her as long as it was out of Europe. But visas were not easy to come by; most countries had restrictions and quotas for accepting immigrants. Some accepted only people with certain skills or professions; others asked for perfect health or imposed restrictions on the age of the applicants. For the USA you got a waiting number and had to mention a person who would guarantee your maintenance in the US, called the Affidavit. Our family didn’t have such a guarantor. England didn’t receive any more Jewish refugees. England had received some of the 10,000 Jewish children in the last months in so called "Kindertransports", children travelling alone without their parents. (From Schwedt relatives, only 2 children were sent from Hattingen on "Kindertransport", Hans Joachim Markes, then 13 years old and his sister Brigitte (Gitta) Markes, then 11 years old, and today Gitta Rossi – Zalmons lives in South-Africa. The Markes children were the grandchildren of Hugo Meinhardt, a cousin of grandfather. In England the children were sent to boarding school. Their parents Dr. Leo Markes, a dentist in Hattingen, (he had fought during WW1 and had received the Iron Cross) and his wife Hilda (Meinhardt). Leo and Hilda Markes stayed in Germany and were taken to Theresenstadt and then later in1943/44 were killed in Auschwitz. Through the English Embassy you could apply for a visa to a British colony. The governors of those colonies could decide if they accepted Jewish refugees. Kenya accepted a few, India refused to accept them, only later in 1940, on request of Jahawrahl Nehru, India accepted some Jewish refugees from Poland. Canada, Australia, South Africa and New-Zealand were independent countries in the British


Empire and had their own regulations and restrictions to accept Jewish refugees. Anyway, she applied for visa in all those British countries, filling out lots of application forms and waiting for a reply. The replies were all negative. She also applied for visa for Latin- American countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina. The result was similar, mostly a negative reply, or in the best case annotation on a waiting list. Surprisingly she got a visa for the British crown colony of Trinidad and Tobago. The visa was granted through the British embassy, being Britain the colonial administrator of those islands in the Caribbean. This visa seemed to be a "Scheinvisum", a dummy visa to present it to the authorities to get father released from Sachsenhausen. But it didn’t help a bit, because all the other necessary documents and procedures to leave the country had to be done and that took weeks. Mother went to the different consulates in Berlin, accompanied by Lisbeth Meinhardt, the wife of Kurt Meinhardt, another cousin of grandfather Franz. Kurt was the youngest of grandfather’s generation. He had participated in World War I as a German soldier. He was only detained a few days in Schwedt after the "Kristallnacht" and decided to leave the country as soon as possible with his wife and two daughters Gisela and Ruth. He had a big 38" caliber revolver which he had brought back from the war. Our father Gerd had a small 22" weapon in his house, which was not registered. Father had bought this weapon to protect himself from the frequent assaults that happened on the roads in Germany during the first 30ths years. He often traveled by car to visit the customers of his father’s firm in Bremen and Hamburg. He never made use of it and we don’t know if he really knew how to use it properly. Weapons from Jews had to be delivered to the authorities. If weapons were found


in a Jewish home, that would cause heavy punishments to the inhabitants. The second night after the "Kristallnacht" mother and Tante Lisbeth went to the bridge over the Oder river, with the weapons hidden in a bag, and threw the weapons into the river. (Remember, all the men were imprisoned at that time).They didn’t want those weapons to fall into the hands of the Nazis- a small symbolic act, that didn’t change much the course of the war. (Kurt, Lisbeth and their 2 daughters finally reached Argentina after a complete odyssey. About that we will tell later). Our father was released from Sachsenhausen even without having a visa. He phoned from the station in Oranienburg and asked mother to pick him up there and not forget to bring a hat to cover his shaved head, so as to avoid the staring glances from people on the train at this "Volksfeind" or enemy of the people. Back in Schwedt father quickly recovered from the hardships of his imprisonment. The quest for a visa was now intensified. Together father and mother went to Berlin to queue in the front of the consulates. In May 1939 finally the Republic of Chile granted a visa. The visa fees were officially USD 40.-, but really they had to pay USD 1000 for each. It was very difficult to get foreign currency in Nazi Germany, because the foreign currency was strictly regulated. Now the family Rasch from Bremen helped immediately. They had accounts in foreign currency to manage the import of tobacco from abroad. They made the needed US currency available and they also suggested opening a secret account in the USA, depositing a certain amount, to have some initial money at the disposal of our parents after leaving Germany. All that money was paid to the family Rasch in RM (Reichsmark). There were still some kind and helpful Germans, who didn’t agree at all with the Nazis. Like the Rasch family.


Years later in Chile, father was informed that the overpaid money for the visa was distributed between the consul, his servants and up to officials of the ministry of foreign relations in Chile. Some people had made money at the expenses of the refugees. But father said: "The corruption didn’t matter to us, the important fact was, that we had the chance to get out of Nazi-Germany". Having the visa in hand our parents felt safer so they didn’t hurry to leave the country. The visa was valid for six months and the nearest relatives could be taken with. So, they tried to convince grandfather and grandmother to go with them, but didn’t succeed. Grandfather said, "I am too old to go, old trees cannot develop roots in another place. I was born here, as our ancestors were, and I’m going to die here. You are young and it’s better for you to leave the country for a few years. Hitler isn’t going to last such a long time". Hitler really didn’t last more than six years. But things happened quite different than he ever could have imagined. In Breslau mother’s twin sister Trude, 15 minutes older than her, and an exact copy of her, (today we would say a natural clone or one-egg twin), went immediately, after her husband and brothers were transported to Buchenwald, to the Brazilian Consulate in the city. Three cousins of Werner, her husband, were in Brazil since 1936. They could give a declaration of guarantee for their cousin, called "chamada" in Portuguese. It took some time to get the visa. When the visa arrived she inserted the names of her brothers as being the closest relatives permitted, even without asking them. First they were a little upset, "what are we going to do in Brazil?” they objected, but finally they agreed to grasp this chance to abandon Germany. At the end of February 1939 all five people, Trude and Werner with baby Marianne, Franz and Herbert were ready to leave Germany. But during March the ships were fully booked there was only two places


on the Italian ship "Conte Grande". So the two brothers traveled via Genoa, Italy, and then to Santos in Brazil. They moved to Sao Paulo and looked for a place to stay for them and their sister’s family. In April Trude, Werner and daughter Marianne followed on the next tour of the "Conte Grande". In May 1939, all five had arrived safely in Sao-Paulo. Logically, Trude asked her twin sister to join the visa, but Käte refused, we don’t know why? Was it that to this Brazilian visa grandfather and grandmother in Schwedt couldn’t be attached? Father intended to go out of the country only with his parents. They were not direct relatives of Trude and Werner and could not be inserted to this visa. (As written above, the Schwedter grandparents finally refused to leave the country). A few words about the "Brazilians". Werner and Trude had a boy a few years later, Alfredo. Marianne grew up in Sao Paulo, she is married has two girls and four grandchildren. Franz, the oldest brother of mother, married after the war, He didn’t have children. Today all descendants live in Brazil. Only Herbert moved to the USA after the war to marry Hilde Dreyfuss, a refugee from Frankfurt. Their common daughter Mishka is married and has two sons, all in the USA. In May 1939 Grandmother Elise died in Breslau. She was buried next to her husband in the Jewish cemetery. The few family members still remaining in Germany attended the funeral. She had lived her last years in an old people’s home in Breslau. About June, July 1939 our parents began to carry out all the necessary steps to leave the country. They had to get new passports marked with a big letter "J" (Jew) and with their forced middle names Gerd "Israel" and Käte "Sara" inserted in the documents.


Document 3: A typical passport of German Jews since July 1938. Sweden and Switzerland requested the introduction of the “J” in German passports. They had to pay a special tax for leaving the country (Reichsfluchtsteuer) and had to do a lot of other administrative steps. In Berlin father met a friend who was employed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Auswärtiges Amt). "Gerd", he said "leave Germany before 26 August. I am giving you good advice". Our father didn’t really believe that information, but as it happened, they could leave the country before that date. Years later, in Chile, father read that the assault on Poland had been planned by Hitler to start just on 26 August 1939. At the last moment, Count Ciano, the Italian secretary of foreign affairs, and Mussolinis´ son in law initiated a final diplomatic effort to mediate between Poland and Germany. Hitler had to postpone his plans for a few days. The mediation, in which the British ambassador in Berlin Henderson was involved, failed. The war begun on 1 September 1939.


How did this information pass to the lower levels? Or was it disinformation? Or did some people in the foreign ministry oppose Hitler? My father’s friend had only a low level position in that office. We couldn’t find out who this friend was. Finally our parents booked on the "Leipzig", a cargo ship belonging to the NDL “Norddeutscher Lloyd” shipping company usually connecting Germany to the Pacific side of the Americas. The first stopover for the ship would be Antwerp, so our parents decided to send their baggage to Bremen, but board the ship in Belgium. According to the new racial laws, it was forbidden to Jews to board a German ship on German soil. A big box was prepared with things thought to be needed in the new country. All items leaving Germany had to have a permit to leave Germany. The box´ size was limited. Usually the box was checked by customs; arbitrarily things were removed from the baggage and often carried away by the officials themselves. But in Schwedt two rather friendly customs officers appeared; they checked the list father had typed and then, without opening the box, sealed it. The box was then sent directly to Bremen on board the ship. Now it was time to say goodbye to our grandparents and the few relatives and friends remaining in Schwedt. It seemed to be a farewell forever of the country of birth, whose language they spoke and whose culture was part of their life. They left by train. Late at night the train arrived in Aachen next to the Belgian border. When two unfriendly border policemen saw the letter "J" stamped on their passports, they started shouting and ordered them to leave the train. All papers were OK, but they minutely checked the hand luggage, looking for more money than the 10 RM each person was allowed to carry out of the country. They didn’t find anything. The train didn’t wait; it was the last one that day and our parents had to spend the night on a bench in the Aachen train


station and wait for the next train in the morning. After crossing the border to Belgium they felt free and relieved. You could feel the different atmosphere in Belgium, people joining the train seemed to be happy and laughed and joked aloud. In Germany, on the train, everybody was cautious not to say a word that could be misunderstood as running down to the regime; so people were mostly quiet. They had a few days to board the ship; so they continued to the Belgian coast and stayed three days at Knokke sur Mer, a seaside resort. It was a different world there. People were enjoying the summer at the sea; you could feel that you were in a free country. Did those people have any idea of what was in store for them a few months later, when in May 1940 Belgium was occupied by the German "Wehrmacht"? After briefly visiting the beautiful old city of Antwerp and asking where the "Leipzig" had docked, they boarded the ship. 4. On board of the "Leipzig". The "Leipzig" was a modern diesel-powered ship, a mixed cargo and passenger vessel. The ship sailed from Bremen and was bound to Valparaíso. It had some 30 cabins for passengers. The ship was nice, clean and neat, the engine quiet, the cabins were small but comfortably furnished. Like our parents half of the passengers were refugees, traveling to different Latin- American countries; the other passengers included all kinds of people, such as businessmen, six catholic sisters returning to their mission station in Peru, a German engineer and his wife who where recently married and decided to settle in Chile, a Chilean agronomist who had finished his Ph.D. studies in Germany. He was staying at an experimental farm in Upper Silesia, married a German woman there and came back to Chile. Both non Jewish families, Fenzahn and Duran, would later became


good friends to our parents. At first our parents expected, that the immigrants would be treated differently from the other passengers, but there was no discrimination at all. All passengers were treated alike. There was no special seating order in the dining room. The captain, called Wagner, gave the traditional dinner during one of the first evenings on board, greeted all his passengers, explained the route and the weather outlook over the Atlantic and the expected time of arrival. The captain was married to a Chilean citizen of German descent and had for years sailed from Bremen to the Pacific side of the Americas. So our parents enjoyed the ship and almost forgot that they had left their country for an uncertain future. It all seemed like a pleasure trip. Flying fishes and dolphins could be seen, the weather was good, it was high summer and the crossing of the Atlantic continued. But on 1 September, the German assault on Poland began. The radio transmitted the "Führer’s" speech. Some sailors began to scream: "Wir fahren nach Polen... (We are traveling to Poland…)". The officers were quiet and worried. World War II had started, but it took three days for the British government to declare war on Germany, after an ultimatum of 72 hours to pull the German troops out of Poland had expired. On 3 September, hostilities in the Atlantic began. All the white parts of the ship were painted gray or black; the lights were dimmed and at night the ship was blacked out. A telegram arrived from the shipping company in Bremen ordering the ship to return to Germany. That was terrible news for the immigrants. Spontaneously a committee was formed which also included non immigrants. They asked the captain to continue sailing or at least to deliver the passengers in a Caribbean Island before returning. The


captain told them that he would be in contact with Bremen and ask the shipping company to allow him to continue the trip. Some anxious hours passed. Would the ship return? Several radio telegrams were exchanged between the ship and Bremen, it was possible to hear the Morse beeper from the wireless station. Two young immigrants aproached our father and said," if the ship turns around, we are going to set the engines on fire! Are you ready to help us with this act of sabotage?” "Are you crazy?" father answered. It was not necessary to apply such extreme measures. The captain was able to convince the company in Bremen to let him continue the trip. The ship was already closer to the Americas, needed fuel for her engines and the captain wanted to unload the cargo at it’s destination. So few days later for the first time our parents saw a part of the New World, the ship passed along the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. The ship docked at the islands of Curacao and Aruba which belonged (and still belong) to the Dutch Antilles. In Curacao the ship was refueled. Then the ship continued to Venezuela and Colombia, where some passengers left the ship. Later the ship reached the Panama Canal. In those days, the canal was entirely administrated by the USA and, since the USA was not at war, the ship could pass through without any delay. Mother said later, that passing the canal was like crossing a beautiful park. The "Leipzig" continued to the Pacific side, towards Guayaquil in Ecuador. The captain explained that the ship would not continue its journey, but that he had arranged with a Chilean ship to carry on the passengers and the luggage designated to Peru and Chile. That ship was the "Peru". It was loading cargo at Guayaquil. The "Peru" was also a "mixed" ship with some cabins for passengers. The "Peru" did not recognize the tickets from the "Leipzig". Telegrams sent from the shipping company in Bremen


assuring the payment of the transfer to the Chilean company didn’t help. The Chileans didn’t trust a commitment coming from a country at war. So each passenger had to pay an additional fare for the rest of the travel. That was not a problem for the non immigrant passengers, who were allowed to carry money out of Germany. The catholic nuns applied to the bishop in town to get the necessary funds. Father went to the branch of an American Bank in Guayaquil and asked for a telegraphic transfer of the needed money from his account in the USA. There were no problems for the transfer of the cargo, the receivers in Peru and Chile surely would pay the additional amount. Sometimes it is easier to transport cargo than passengers. The "Peru" took off three days later. Captain Wagner allowed his passengers to remain on board, while he organized the transfer of the luggage and the cargo to the Chilean ship. A friend of father from Schwedt, Heinz Seelig, had settled in Guayaquil more than a year earlier. He had a laundry and was working with his wife under very bad conditions, with primitive equipment to make a minimal living. The climate in Guayaquil is tropical, hot and very damp. Inside the laundry it was much worse. He told father that they would stay in Guayaquil only to save enough money to move to the capital Quito, which lies in the Andes in 2800 meters altitude and has a nice climate. Today his son and grandson have the most modern laundry establishment in Quito, serving hospitals, the police and big hotels. It’s called "La Química". 5. On board the "Peru". After the three days the "Peru" started out to sea. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to the "Leipzig". The "Peru" was an old steamship, a real steamer. You had to be upwind all the time to avoid the cloud of smoke from the chimney. The ship had a


permanent list, it was rusty and the paint was peeling. The cabins were small, uncomfortable and poorly furnished. The engines were noisy. The passengers from the "Leipzig" joined the Latin-American passengers who had boarded in Guayaquil. Those passengers were nice, happy and very, very loud. The food was a cultural shock. Clouds of flies were swarming around open dishes of brown sugar on the tables and our parents found the Chilean specialty of "Guatitas" (pork peritoneum-tripe) simply awful. Disgusting zoological discoveries could also be made in several corners of the ship (rats). Such was their first introduction to Chile, a country which they would in the future learn to love. For now they learned that Chile wasn’t a tropical country. The cargo, the ship had loaded in Ecuador, consisted of bananas and all kinds of citrus fruit. At night, father would climb over the barrier to the cargo and get fresh food to complement their diet. But all this didn’t bother our parents too much; they were learning Spanish from a book and had the opportunity to try out their first sentences by talking to the sailors, officers and the Latin-American passengers on board. Fortunately there was a Chilean Officer of German descent on board, who helped to translate when necessary. The ship stopped at many ports on the way. Passengers left, new passengers arrived, cargo was unloaded and new cargo received. In Callao, Peru, most European passengers left, including the nuns. At the beginning of October 1939, the ship reached Chilean waters and arrived in Valparaiso. 6. Arrival in Chile. Dora Staub, a first cousin of mother, her husband Richard and their son Rudi were


expecting them at the port of Valparaiso. They had been notified by telegram of our parent’s arrival. They had arrived in Chile a few months earlier from Breslau and could give first hand advice about the new country and the new life. Richard Staub had been a judge in Breslau. He lost his job in April 1933, when the Nazis expelled all Jewish judges and lawyers employed as public servants in the courts. The "Leipzig" never returned to Germany. Immediately after leaving the passengers and the cargo in Guayaquil the ship was ordered to move to the bay of Callao (Rada de Callao) in Peru. It arrived there on 21 September 1939. Most of the crew was removed, the ship was on anchored. The Germans concentrated all their commercial ships that had been caught in the region by the outbreak of the war. Peru was neutral and allowed them to stay. In 1941 the Canadian Navy wanted by force to capture those ships to help the British. The British needed urgently ship capacity to replace the heavy losses suffered in the battle of the Atlantic. The German secret service somehow got hint of the plan. The ships were warned and sailed out of the bay and then scuttled themselves to avoid capture by the Canadian war ships “Prince Robert” and “Prince Henry”. This happened on 1April 1941.Captain Wagner of the "Leipzig" moved to Chile, he died there.


Photo 3: The Leipzig

Shipyard - Werft Deschimag AG Weser, Bremen

Launch - Stapellauf 15.2.1938

Delivery - Ablieferung 6.4.1938

Ship Company - Reederei Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL)

BRT 5.898

Aim voyage - Zielfahrt Bremen / Valparaiso

History - Geschichte In service to South America - West Coast.

21/9/1939 - In Callao stationed because of the war.

Self-destruction 1/4/1941 - On the Callao Bay, in order to avoid capture by the Canadian war ships PRINCE ROBERT and PRINCE HENRY.


Photo 4: Father Gerd and mother Käte Meinhardt on a cruise around the Mediterranean sea many years later

Photo 5: Gerd and Käte Meinhardt in Natanya – Israel 1970.


7. First steps in the new country. Our parents moved, on advice of the Staubs, to Santiago, the capital. The Staubs stayed in the region of Valparaiso. Rudi, today don Rodolfo, has a son and a daughter and 8 grandchildren who all live in Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. Richard Staub informed our father, that in Chile the tobacco business would not stand a chance. No tobacco was grown in the country and the import and processing of tobacco was controlled by a state owned monopoly company. The luggage box from the ship was left at the customs in Valparaiso, our parents didn’t have an address where to send it. On arrival in Santiago, they lived in a small hotel (pension) organized by the Chilean Jewish community to help the refugees coming from Central Europe. They had a place to sleep there and two meals a day. On a pin board, notices of housing and work opportunities were advertised. Spanish lessons were given. They met a couple who had arrived a few weeks earlier from Berlin. They were almost of the same age and they decided to share a living place and together look for a working place. The new friends were the Schweitzers. The first job they had in Chile, following a notice from the board, was in the central market ( Mercado Central). In this market all the products coming from the countryside and seafood from the Pacific, were distributed to the shops in the city. Some Jewish merchants had their wholesale trade there and gave temporary jobs to the new arriving immigrants. It wasn’t a high qualified job. Father and Mr. Schweitzer carried bags, ordered conserve tins and loaded the carts carrying the products to small retailer shops in town. But father later said, "It was my own first money earned in Chile".


The Schweitzers and the Meinhardts then rented a small two room flat in the quarter of Santiago called Nuñoa. In this quarter almost all the immigrants had settled in those days. They ordered the luggage box from Valparaiso and could furnish a little of their dwelling. The Schweitzers did the same. Then Mr. Schweitzer and father went out to look for a job. They went along the main avenue in the quarter "la Avenida Irrarrázaval" and entered each shop and each business, asking in awful Spanish for a job for at least one of them. They were lucky; on the first day a Spaniard engaged both of them to attend his shop. For 30 Years Don Amadeo had lived in Chile, but had kept his original Spanish accent. (It’s like an Englishman in America). His retail shop sold equipment for the furniture industry. Metal fittings, like hinges, lockers, etc. were sold, also the ingredients to prepare varnishes, glue for wood and nails and screws. Tools were not offered. The customers were craftsmen making furniture in small workshops. Also Don Amadeo had such a workshop of his own, just in the yard of his home nearby. The next day they began working. The shop was a complete mess. They started cleaning up the shop and put the stock in order. They asked Don Amadeo to make some wooden shelves in his workshop to place the merchandise in order. Father made an inventory of the stock. He began to look for better sources of wholesale suppliers. They had to stand for hours behind a counter and attend to the customers. Both wives helped them. Don Amadeo appeared less and less in the shop and preferred to work in his workshop. He trusted fully to the two "Gringos", so are all European looking people were called in Chile (and in Latin-America). They honestly settled all the accounts with Don Amadeo. It was no wonder that a few weeks later Don Amadeo offered them to manage the shop by themselves. Both agreed


immediately, it was a big chance to own their business. Amadeo accepted his pay off in several installments. Mr. Schweitzer and father agreed to become partners and requested a loan from the "Joint" organization. The "Joint" (exactly "Joint Distribution Committee", a Jewish organization based in NY) gave loans to the refugees, to help them establish some business to make a living. Those loans had to be paid back in nominal value, without interests. The "Joint" until today helps Jews in distress all around the world. According to the inventory it was easy to establish the value of the business. The shop Itself didn’t belong to Amadeo it was rented. Now both partners had a secure income. They moved to a bigger dwelling nearby in the calle (street) Garibaldi 1521. A few months later both women were pregnant. In September 1941 the Schweitzers had a girl called Yvonne (Vonni), two months later Albert Michael was born to the Meinhardts. With two babies in the common house some friction arose between the women. Mr. Schweitzer didn’t feel comfortable in this business for a long run. He was a precision mechanic’s (Feinmechaniker) and wanted to do something related to his profession. So both families decided to separate, both from the business and the shared home. They separated harmoniously. Father paid out the part of his partner in installments. Mr. Schweitzer opened his own business, an electro galvanizing workshop in the yard of his new house. The Meinhardts continued living in the same address, Garibaldi 1521, Nuñoa. Father now needed an employee to help in the shop. He employed a young German refugee, who had left Germany in 1938. Mr. Vogel was about 22, still single and not Jewish. In Nazi-Germany he had done clandestine work for the forbidden Communist Party. When the Gestapo was close to arresting him he got a visa to Chile.


He had relatives in the town of Valdivia. He did good job for my father, delivering the merchandise to the customers all over the city. He traveled on his motorcycle which had a wooden box mounted on the backseat. (The motorcycle was a Swedish Husquarna model). He delivered the products, collected the money and brought new orders from the customers. He had a lot of political discussions with my father. In 1943, he joined the "National Komitee Freies Deutschland" (National Committee Free Germany) founded in the Soviet-Union to prepare a new Germany after the Nazis. He asked father to join, but father refused arguing that the Communists had rejected the "Weimar Republic" and so indirectly helped the Nazis to conquer the power in 1933. In 1945 Mr. Vogel quit the job, moved to Valdivia, got married and had a daughter. So little by little the Meinhardt family could establish themselves in the new country. Roberto Yehuda (Franki) was born in January 1945. Now we were a family of four plus several cats. 8. News from Europe. During the first years in Chile our parents still had contact with grandpa and grandma in Schwedt. Censured letters, sometimes opened three times, traveled to and from South- America via Portugal to Germany at war. Reading between the lines, our parents realized that the situation in Germany was getting worse and worse. In late 1941, grandfather and grandmother got the news of the birth of their first grandson in Chile (Michael) and acknowledged the news by letter in early 1942. Then, suddenly, postal communications stopped. Father got worried and had much concerned about that. In the religious community to which our parents had become members, first non


confirmed news about deportations of the Jews to the East was heard. (This community was called the Liberal Jewish Community "Bneí Isroel", also called “the Jeckes” to which most of the Jewish refugees from Central -Europe had adhered in Santiago). In the last months we got new information about the deportation of our grandparents. So we had to correct almost all what we knew previously. Until March 1942, our grandparents still lived in their home in Schwedt, Flinkenberg 6. Then grandpa and grandma had to leave their home to a "Juedisches Arbeitsheim" a (working camp) in Radinkendorf in der Mark near Beeskow. All their possessions, the house with all the furniture, the remaining frozen bank accounts and all other assets were confiscated. The Gestapo had a close eye on them and we found the following letter from the Gestapo to the President of the Government of Potsdam.



Document 4: We found this letter in Yad Va’shem, Jerusalem; it was put on microfiche by the East German secret service “Stasi” from the Gestapo archives in their possession, and after the “fall of the wall” it arrived in Israel. The letter tells the President of the Government of Potsdam about the possessions of the “Jew” Franz Israel Meinhardt.


After the letter from the Gestapo to the President of the Government of Potsdam, our grandfather got the following letter from the President of the Government of Potsdam. Observe the date of the letter and also that it was signed by a Dr. Schüler in the name of the President.

Document 5: Letter from the President of the Government of Potsdam to my grandfather from the 24th February 1942.


At that time the President of the Government of Potsdam was SS – Oberführer (Colonel) Gottfried Graf von Bismarck - Schonhausen, a grandson of Otto von Bismarck, a personal friend of Heinrich Himmler (may his memory be cursed) and a sworn anti-Semite. The letter essentially tells my grandfather that according to the “laws”, he has to renounce all of his possessions. Attached to the letter was a paper that had to be signed by my grandfather, that he acknowledges receipt of the letter.


Document 6: Acknowledge of receipt of the letter from the 24 February 1942 Hand signed by grandpa with the date of 11 March 1942. From this we conclude that till the date of 11 March 1942, grandpa and grandma where still living in Schwedt/Oder.


Photo 6: On the left Franz Meinhardt in 1930 at Marienbad. On the right a distant cousin Bernard Meinhardt from Bavaria.

Photo 7: Grandmother Margarette Meinhardt with her son Gerd Meinhardt, our father. This photo was taken in about 1910.


From Radinkendorf in der Mark they got the "Deportationsbescheid", (the deportation order) and were sent to the "Sammellager", (assembly place) in the Levetzowstr. 7-8 in Berlin. Exact dates we could not find out. At that place there was a Jewish Reform Synagogue that was used as a "Sammellager". From the "Sammellager" they were sent to the train station "Güterbahnhof Moabit am Nordring", (freight rail station). They left Berlin on 2 April 1942 in the so called 12th "Osttransport" (East transport). They arrived at the "Umschlagplatz" in Warsaw on 5 April1942 at 8.00 AM. A not very pleasant journey of three days! (*3) Adam Czerniakow, the leader of the Warsaw "Judenrat", (the internal Jewish administration) noted in his diary on the date 5 April, that 1025 Jews had arrived from the "Reich", (the original and annexed territories to Germany) in a train from Berlin. They had to cross the ghetto by walking, carrying their luggage and were escorted by the Jewish ghetto police and Gestapo men. They were accommodated just outside the Jewish ghetto in a big building used as school, hospital and quarantine station in the Leszno Street Nr. 109. They were still well dressed and had some money and some things of value with them. They could easily be distinguished from the other people in the ghetto, not only by their clothing (people in the ghetto wear almost rags) but also by their yellow six pointed star on their dress. Polish ghetto people wore a white ribbon badge on their arm. Grandpa and grandma could only hardly communicate with them, they didn’t talk neither Polish nor Yiddish, the languages spoken mostly in the ghetto. (*4) ______________________________________________________________________ (*3) Information about the deportation of the grandparents from Schwedt was given by Dr. Daniel Frenkel from Yad V’ashem, Jerusalem. (*4) More details about the life in the Warsaw ghetto is given in the publication of

Dr. Lea Prais: "The Other Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. The discourse of the German refugees in the Warsaw Ghetto, April to July 1942." Dapim publication Vol.20. (In Hebrew).


Photo 8: Map of the Warsaw Ghetto, on top you see the “Umschlagplatz” (rail yard) and at the black cross is the Leszno Str. 109; where the school – hospital – quarantine station was.

Photo 9: photography of the school - hospital – quarantine station at Leszno Str. 109


A week later, after their arrival in Warsaw, Gestapo men appeared at the Leszno Str. 109 and collected all the valuable things from the new arrivals, like money, watches, jewels and the like. (*4). The new arrivals were crowded into the building. During the month of April 1942 some 3000 Jews were deported from the Reich to Warsaw in three Transports and some 1000 from the "Protektorat" (Bohemia and Moravia). Each day the living conditions and the nutrition got worse and worse. They tried to sell their remaining belongings in exchange for food. Most of the deported were older people. Grandpa Franz was 65 years old and grandmother Margarette was 62. They were assigned to work. Diseases broke out. Grandpa died on 10 May 1942. The exact date we got to know only 65 years later. The German authorities of the ghetto, gave a notice to the life insurance company "Nordstern", where grandfather had life insurance and to which he had paid the policies for years. The insurance was closed ("gelöscht"), no money was paid. The insurance amount was kept by the "Nordstern" company or delivered to the "German Reich". Grandfather was buried in the Jewish cemetery, which was on the north-east side outside the ghetto. A small wooden plaque with his name was put over the grave. Tens and sometimes hundreds of dead were buried there each day. During the revolt of the "Armia Kraiova", the Polish home army in August 1944, the cemetery was mostly destroyed by the heavy fighting on the site. (*5) _________________________________________________________________ (*5) Information given by Dr. Roman Wroblwesky-Wasserman (Stockholm –Sweden). See also a map of the ghetto in photo 7.


Document 7: From the Nordstern Insurance Company, observe the stamp “erloschen” (expired) and the Christian cross (what an irony!) with the date 10.5.1942


Document 8: this document was obtained from the present legal representative of Nordstern Insurance Company - the AXA Insurance. Grandmother was now alone. She was assigned to an external "Arbeitskommando" (working command), and worked daytime outside the ghetto. She met a Swedish woman and asked her to write a letter to our parents in Chile. In the letter she informed us about her husband’s death and the dreadful situation which she was in. The letter, according to our mother, was sent through diplomatic mail. It took more than a year to arrive at the Swedish Embassy in Santiago - Chile. Mother got the letter first, she opened it and decided not to show it to our father. She destroyed it. She knew that father was very close to his

parents and she couldn’t bring to him so directly such bad news. She thought that the letter had been written by a Swedish Red- Cross nurse. Perhaps the letter-head was from the Swedish Red Cross. We are now trying to find out who that Swedish woman was, that helped Jews in distress in Warsaw. From our investigation, we know that there were no Swedish


women working for the Red Cross at that specific time in Warsaw. At the moment we know about two Swedish women who were staying in Warsaw in those days and had a connection to Swedish couriers that could bring post to Sweden. One is Margit Jelnicka – Vingquist. Margit who lived at the Swedish Embassy house (the Swedish Embassy was not functioning more as an Embassy, after September 1939) at the Bagatela Str.3 in Warsaw. After the “Warsaw Swedes Affair” (*6) she was probably under continuous observation by the Gestapo, and it is very unlikely that she would be involved in any subversive activity. It is also difficult to think about that grandmother by her own initiative would go to the Bagatela Str.3 and talk to her. It was strictly forbidden by death penalty by SS- Scharfuehrer (Watch Master) Dr. Heinz Auerswald, for anyone to leave the building without his explicit authorization. Auerswald was also the one who gave the orders to plunder the German Jews at Leszno Str.109. Without knowing the language, grandmother would not dare to go on her own outside the building at Leszno Str.. Also there where plenty of Polish informants paid by the Gestapo, who would immediately detect and arrest her. _____________________________________________________________________ (*6) Józef Lewandowsky: "A fish breaks through the net. Sven Norrman and the Holocaust". Article published in "POLIN 14", 2001. (A Swedish man who helped in Warsaw).


On the other hand, it was very improbable that Margit would go to Leszno Str. as we already said, because of the “Warsaw Swedes Affair”. The other Swedish woman is Elna Gistedt. At that time Elna was a well known actress and operetta soprano in Warsaw. She had a restaurant-coffee shop and we know that Jews with false papers where working there (*5). We also know that grandmother was working in an “Arbeitskommando” outside the Ghetto and it could be that she worked/helped at the restaurant –coffee shop for Elna. From the work of Dr. Lea Prais (*4) we read that on the 7 June 1942, Adam Czerniakow, the leader of the Warsaw "Judenrat", (the internal Jewish administration) invited the German Jews from the “Arbeitskommando” to a dinner at a restaurant nearby the Ghetto. He would not do this without explicit authorization from SS – Dr. Auerswald. That could be the occasion that grandmother Margarette used; talking in German with Elna Gistedt (German was at that time second language in Sweden), and telling about her distress. With the address of our parents Gerd and Käte Meinhardt in Santiago de Chile, Elna could have used a letterhead of the Swedish Red Cross as camouflage, sending it with one of her several friends/couriers to Sweden. Once the letter arrived in Sweden, someone could send it with diplomatic post to the Swedish Embassy in Santiago de Chile. Elna Gilstedt is most likely of the women we are thinking about, but there is no 100% certainty. Dr. Roman Wroblewski-Wasserman from Sweden and Prof. Barbara Engelking-Boni and her Ph.D. student Dr. Marta Pietrzykowska from Warsaw, are helping us to solve this puzzle.


Photo 10: Beautiful actress and soprano singer Elna Gistedt Some words about Sweden during WW II. There was a lot of cooperation with the Nazis directly and indirectly by the Swedish Government. The country remained officially neutral but with a strong Germanophil-tendency. But a lot of Swedes assigned to diplomatic and business affairs in the occupied countries, saw the terrible reality in those territories and tried to help as best as possible, using their diplomatic status or using the protection they got having Swedish


nationality. The best known case is the secretary in the Swedish Embassy in Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg who could save some 8,000 Jews from deportation to Auschwitz, by putting them under the protection of the Swedish government. In Warsaw some Swedes offered themselves to act as couriers, carrying information from the Polish underground to the Polish government in exile in London and could inform what was happening to the Jews in Poland. Grandmother remained in Warsaw until 22 July 1942. On that date the first big "Aktia", (detention round up and deportation action) started and all the German Jews were sent to the extermination camp "Treblinka". The German Jews were the first to be deported from Warsaw to the death camp of "Treblinka", we suppose that grandmother was amongst them. SS - Sturmbannfuehrer (Major) Hermann Hoefle was in charge of the "Grossaktion" on the 22 of July 1942. We will talk about this perpetrator later on. A few days before the deportation of the Jewish German refugees began, they had been taken from the building in Leszno Str. and put in some place inside the Ghetto. The Germans needed the building in Leszno Str. for running the operation. The German Jews had to be at 16:00 at the Umschlagplatz with only 15 [Kg] in personal belongings (1 luggage). The trip to Treblinka took about 3 to 5 hours (several stops, etc.) and even though the distance was only 100 [Km] from Warsaw to Treblinka, it wasn't a pleasant trip in the overcrowded cattle wagons (understatement)! Arriving about 22:00 in Treblinka, meant that only on the next day, 23 July in the morning, the cattle wagon doors where opened. Almost all the passengers inside were dead, mostly by suffocation. If grandmother survived that night, she was taken the next morning to the gas chambers, nude, after leaving her clothes behind and hair shaved.


Photo 11: At the “Umschlagplatz” in Warsaw, Gestapo and their Ukrainian helpers, shouting orders to hurry to get Jews inside the cattle train.

Photo 12: Jews assembling at the „Umschlagplatz“ before leaving to Treblinka.


According to Kommandant Franz Stangl declaration during his trial in Düsseldorf 1970:

“We could smell (the burning bodies) kilometers away. The road ran alongside the railway tracks. As we got nearer Treblinka but still perhaps fifteen, twenty minutes drive away, we began to see corpses next to the rails, first just two or three, then more and as we drove into what was Treblinka station, there were hundreds of them -- just lying there -- they'd obviously been there for days, in the heat. In the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still alive -- it looked as if it had been there for days.... thousands of bodies everywhere, putrefying, decomposing. Across the square in the woods, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls -- whores from Warsaw I found out later -- weaving, drunk, dancing, singing, playing music -- Dr Eberl, the Kommandant showed me around the camp, there was shooting everywhere ... “

From another extract of Kommandant Franz Stangl’s testimony:

"I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager (Dead camp) Treblinka. I remember Wirth (Oberstuermfuehrer Cristian Wirth) standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity, it couldn't have; it was a mass - a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, 'What shall we do with this garbage?' I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo."

Grandmother, Margarette Meinhardt nee Loewenthal was one of the “rotten” bodies lying in the pits …. She and grandfather didn’t die in Schwedt as they had hoped. (*7) _____________________________________________________________________ (*7) The extermination camp Treblinka is well documented at the Wikipedia as well

the important book of Prof. Yitzhak Arad: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation

Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987.


9. Again in Chile: In Chile father used to listen to the news transmitted by the radio. They were called "El reporter ESSO" and were sponsored by the oil - company. They were musically accompanied by the melody of the "Tango de Oro" (golden tango). The news came from the US, but they were objective and true. Not like the faked news you could hear in Nazi Germany. Father now could understand them; his Spanish had improved a lot. The first years the news coming from Europe at war, was bad news. The Nazis and their Allies, called the Axis powers, had conquered almost all of Europe; they were deep inside Russia and were advancing in North-Africa towards the Egyptian border. Father was happy when the USA entered the war in December 1941. "Now they are going to stop those madmen", he said. But his disappointment was great, when the Japanese conquered one country after the other in the Far - East and expelled the Americans from the Philippines. Only by the end of 1942 the situation changed, in "El- Alamein" the Germans and Italians were defeated by the British 8th Army and in the first days of February 1943 the Germans were beaten heavily at Stalingrad. Let us make some historical facts clear, the big war involving millions of soldiers and 1000’s of tanks was fought on the Eastern front, between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. From then on, the Axis powers began to retreat on all fronts and victory of the Allied Forces was approaching. The German and Japanese cities were bombed and mostly destroyed. In January 1945 the Western Allies were deep inside Germany as were the Russians from the East side. It was only a matter of weeks for the final defeat of the Axis powers. By the end of March 1945 father found a mention of Schwedt in the newspaper "El Mercurio" in Santiago. The Red - Army was standing on the other side of the Oder river, preparing the final assault on Berlin. Until then, Schwedt had not been affected by the war, not a single bomb had fallen on it, there were no industries or military objects in the town.


On 26 April the Red- Army finally succeeded in conquering Schwedt. The town was destroyed almost completely by Russian artillery and German guns trying to recapture the town. Grandfather’s house was destroyed completely. (*8) A few days later on 30 April Hitler committed suicide. On 9 May1945 the war in Europe ended after the unconditional surrender of the German army. The war continued a few months in the Pacific, until the Japanese surrendered too. Now, the non-confirmed news from Europe which had reached Chile already in 1942, was confirmed in a horrible way. All over Europe millions of innocent people had been killed by the Nazis. The Jews had paid the highest price. The names of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor and Belcek in Poland, Theresienstadt in Checoslovakia, Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Bergen- Belsen, Ravensbrück and others in Germany, Mauthausen in Austria and other camps over Europe, were the sites of the crimes committed by the Nazi German regime. This regime which had brought so much destruction over Europe and finally on Germany itself, had been supported by so many people in Germany. Father realized what fate he had escaped. In Sachsenhausen some 200,000 people had been imprisoned during all the years. Some 100,000 of them perished in the camp! (*2) Our parents started a search request for the missing relatives through the International Red Cross and the "Joint" organization. They never got an answer. Only in the last years (father and mother were already dead) we have found out what happened to our grandparents. But for other relatives, that had shared their fate, nobody knows exactly what happened to them. People met in the synagogue Bnei Isroel in Santiago. _____________________________________________________________________ (*8) “Schwedt 1265- 1965", historical notes, published by the Rat der Stadt Schwedt “Schwedter Jahresblätter - Heft 8 - 1987", published by the Stadtmuseum Schwedt.


The Kadish prayer (death prayer) was recited for all the dead lying scattered all over Europe with no grave. Money was collected for the "Joint" organization, to help the survivors displaced over the continent. (DPs, Displaced Persons they were officially called). 10. Life goes on: But life continued in Chile. The family began to feel well in the country. A few years later the children were sent to school. Normal life had started, not only in Chile but for all the families from Breslau and Schwedt who had escaped from Europe in time. Now the family was scattered all over the world. In Australia, Israel, Argentina, Brasil, Chile, the USA, South Africa and other countries they had found shelter and security and they will always be grateful to the countries who admitted them, saved their lives and gave them a chance to settle down and begin a new life. Lisbeth Meinhardt, who had queued in the winter of 1938/39 for so many hours together with mother in front of the different consulates in Berlin, finally got visa to Argentina and left Germany with her husband Kurt Meinhardt and the elder daughter Gisela in spring of 1939. Ruth Meinhardt, her youngest daughter, born 1921 and then 18 years old, found a job for a few days as a hostess in an international agricultural show near Berlin. It seems that for such a short time job they didn’t ask for the "Ariernachweis"(Certificate of Aryan descent) and she really didn’t look Jewish at all. She spoke French well and attended to the French guests who came for the exhibition. She was a very tall and attractive women, and met a young French farmer who had just finished his studies in agronomy. They fell in love. Maurice Marie Auroux told her of his dream to build a farm of his own. But in France there was not enough land available to buy, so he planned to buy land in Argentina. He asked her to marry him and to come


with him. She agreed but asked him to help get her parents and sister out of Germany. They married in France. He could easily get a visa, he was Catholic and came as an investor, bringing money and jobs to Argentina. We suppose that he transferred some money to buy land in Argentina. This made it easy to get a visa for himself, his wife and for his wife’s parents. However he postponed the departure to Argentina until it was too late. The war broke out and in 1940 they still were in France. Ruth didn’t have French papers, even being married to a Frenchman. In May 1940 she was interned at “Camp Gurs", as an enemy citizen. She was pregnant. In June1940 France surrendered to the Germans. The northern part of the country was occupied by the German army. In the non occupied zone in the south, in Vichy, the collaborator regime of marshal Petain was established. “Camp Gurs” was an awful place to stay, especially for a young 18 year old pregnant woman. Maurice Auroux tried all he could to get his wife freed, but the Vichy authorities refused to release her from “Camp Gurs”. In September 1940 she escaped from “Camp Gurs”. She was hidden by family in a small village. Early in 1941 her son Jean Luc was born in La Celette cher France. She remained hidden and was protected by her French family. In 1943 her daughter Marie France was born in Faverdines cher France. In early 1945, when France was already free, her second daughter Marie Odyle was born, also in Faverdines cher France. The family then moved to Argentina. The land Maurice Auroux had bought, was located some 1,500 Km away from Buenos Aires, were Ruth’s parents and sister had settled down in the meantime, near the town of El Bolsón next to "Lago Puelo" (Puelo Lake). It’s the beginning of Patagonia and the winters are hard and cold. They had several hard years to establish the farm. Ruth was


fully engaged as a mother of three children, keeping the house and helping in the farm. They lived quite isolated, the next neighbors living kilometers away. The three children were educated as Catholics and they are very successful. Today Juan Lucas (Jean Luc) manages the farm. His sisters moved to the city. They are all married and their descendants live in the province Rio Negro - Argentina. Kurt and Lisbeth died in Buenos Aires. Gisela moved after the war to the USA, she married and has a daughter and grandchildren living in Florida. Gisela lives in a home for old people in Florida. Ruth died in 2004 and her husband Maurice Marie Auroux died earlier in 2000, both died in Argentina. 11. Schwedt after the war: After the capture of Schwedt in April 1945 by the Red Army, Schwedt became part of the Soviet Occupied Zone, Sowietische Besatzungs- Zone, (SBZ). Some reconstruction began immediately after the war. In 1949 the town became part of the GDR, German Democratic Republic, Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR). The republic wasn’t democratic at all, and one political party, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED), dominated the country. Opposition was not allowed. A new dictatorship was established. Refugees from the eastern parts of Germany, which had become part of Poland and the Soviet-Union, were incorporated to the original population of Schwedt, who had survived the war. Tobacco was still planted in the fifties and sixties. Most of the fields were now integrated in collective farms, called LPG’s, (Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft) and the processing of the tobacco was done by the "VEB Rohtabacke Schwedt", meaning a state owned enterprise. In Honnecker’s time the town was proclaimed as "Musterstadt des Sozialismus", (model city of socialism). The oil pipeline "Drushba" carrying oil from Siberia ended


there and a big oil refinery was built. This refinery is called "Petrochemisches Kombinat" (PCK) and processes the oil coming from Siberia. A lot of new jobs were created and people from other parts of the GDR moved to Schwedt. Parts of the refinery are located on the former fields of grandfather Franz Meinhardt. . Also a paper processing plant was established. Schwedt was the site of the military prison of the DDR. In this prison offenders punished by military courts of the "peoples national army", Nationale Volksarmee, (NVA) were imprisoned. Tobacco growing was neglected over the years and has almost disappeared. The former drying shed (Trockenspeicher) from grandfather was demolished in 1965. Prefabricated edifices were built in the site. 1960 father visited his native town, arriving in the DDR with his Chilean passport. A young lady was attached to him as a Spanish interpreter. After hearing her poor Spanish father said, "Fräulein Sie brauchen sich wirklich nicht zu bemühen!" (“Young lady you really don’t have to bother”). He walked through Schwedt, saw the remaining ruins of the house where he was born and talked with the mayor in the town hall. The city left a sad impression on him. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. A year later the DDR didn’t exist anymore and was incorporated in the Federal Republic of Germany. The new capitalistic economy brought a lot of unemployment to the town. The towns economy in the last few years is recovering. In the last two years the mikveh (the Jewish ritual bath) was cleaned and restored. It is now a kind of museum of the Jewish life in Schwedt. The mikveh is on the land formerly owned by Hugo Meinhardt.


Not a single Jew lives anymore in Schwedt an der Oder! In March 2010 the city of Schwedt is going to honor the former citizens, who where expelled, deported and killed. A small stone plaque with the names of our grandparents, Franz Meinhardt and Margarethe Meinhardt will be placed on the pavement, just in front of their former home, in Flinkenberg Str. 6. This will be a kind of symbolic tombstone for them. These little stone plaques, called "Stolpersteine" are made of bronze, and placed in different parts of the town, remembering the Jewish people of Schwedt who were victims of the Holocaust.

Photo 13: Franz Meinhardt (middle) and his brother Dr. Willy Meinhardt (right, founder of the OSRAM Lighting Company in Berlin and its first CEO General Director). The official car, with driver is standing in front of grandfathers home in Flinkenberg Str. 6, Schwedt an der Oder. 12. Some historical facts about the Holocaust. Still there are people who deny the facts about the terrible crimes that were committed during the Holocaust. Here we present some undeniable facts. Operation "Reinhardt", (Aktion Reinhardt).


The purpose of the operation "Reinhardt" was to kill all the Jews from the occupied part of Poland, which the Nazis called "Das Generalgouvernement". The "Generalgouvernement" comprised the districts of Warsaw, Lublin, Radom, Krakow and Galicia. The operation began in July 1942 and lasted till autumn 1943 - 2.5 million Jews were killed plus some 50,000 Roma (Gypsies). Most Jews came from Poland, but several thousands had come from the "Reich" (like our grandparents), from the "Protektorat" and from the Netherlands. For this purpose three extermination camps were built, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. The operation was called "Reinhardt", to honor SS - Obergruppenführer (General) Reinhardt Heydrich governor of the Protektorat, who was killed in June 1942 by the Czech underground near Prague. The mass murder was organized by the SS under the direction of the "RSHA" (Reichssicherheits Hauptamt) in Berlin. The chief commander was SS - Heinrich Himmler, in Poland the local commander was SS – Obergruppenführer (General) Odilo Globocnik. The operation "Reinhardt" was part of the general plan to kill all the Jews of Europe that had been decided on 20 January 1942 in the "Wannsee Konferenz" in Berlin. The death camp of Majdanek begun to work in October 1941, Belzec was started in March 1942, Sobibor followed in May and Treblinka in July 1942. It was easy to capture the Jews for the transport to the death camps. They were already concentrated in forced ghettos, which had been established in 1940, after the occupation of Poland. Almost all the Jews from the ghettos were transported to the camps. Only those Jews capable to do hard work, were classified as "working Jews" (Arbeitsjuden). They were selected, at least for a time, to work in enterprises supporting the Nazi military effort. When sick or too weak they were just killed.


The transport to the camps was done by freight and cattle trains. Each of the four camps had a railway terminal nearby. After arriving in the camps the victims had to give away all the few possessions they carried with them. The women were shaved, their hair collected. All victims had to give up their clothes. Naked they were subjected to a last search for valuable objects, like jewels or coins hidden in their bodies. Then they were pushed to the gas chambers, which were disguised as showers or disinfection chambers. The killings were then done in the gas chambers. The gas used was the exhaust fumes of big Diesel engines, a gas mix which contained the deathly CO, carbon monoxide. After ventilating the gas chamber, the corpses were extracted by the "Sonderkommando", (special command), composed of Jewish inmates who had to do this macabre work. Gold teeth in the mouth of the dead were extracted and collected. Then the bodies were carried to mass graves dug in the earth and then burned. The very special smell of the burning human flesh was detected by the Polish peasants kilometers away from the death camp. Jews of the "Sonderkommandos" did all the terrible work, cutting the hair of the women, collecting and classifying the clothes of all victims, collecting the money and jewels found, and carrying the corpses to the graves. In each camp there were some 20- 30 German supervisors, SS men, having the main command over the camp. Some 100 - 120 Ukrainian and Lithuanian collaborators, called the "Trawniki", helped them and were often more cruel to the prisoners, than their German masters. The original plan was to finish killing all the Jews of the "Generalgouvernement" by the end of the year 1942. That goal wasn’t reached. In early January 1943 a telegram was sent from Lublin to Berlin indicating the number of victims killed to this time. The


telegram was intercepted and decoded by the British Secret Service. It was the "Hoefle telegram". SS-Sturmbannführer (Mayor) Hermann Hoefle, is the same man who was in command of the “Aktia” (Grossaktion) in Warsaw in July 1942. (*9). On 11 January 1943 the British Secret Service intercepted two radio telegrams sent in an interval of 5 minutes. The first telegram was sent from the police headquarters in Lublin to Berlin. Five minutes later another telegram was sent to the Sicherheitspolizei",(security police) in Krakow. It took five days for the decoder specialists at decipher station in Bletchley Park near Woburn, England to decipher the telegrams! Both telegrams were classified as "Geheime Reichssache", (State Secret), the highest secrecy classification during Nazi Germany. (*10) _________________________________________________________________ (*9) From the Wikipedia articles in German and in English. (*10) Every SS - member involved with the “Aktion Reinhardt” had to sign a special document where he swore total secrecy. Again SS – H. Hoefle was in charge of this bureaucratic procedure. The first telegram was directed to the "Reichssicherheitshauptamt" (RSHA) to the hands of "SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann" in Berlin. The text that followed was illegible and couldn’t be de deciphered. The second telegram was directed to the "Obersturmbannführer Heim" in the security police command of Cracow. The sender of both telegrams was a "SS Sturmbannführer H. Hoefle" of the police headquarters in Lublin. The second telegram was almost completely decoded in Bletchley Park.


Document 9: The original decoded “Hoefle Telegram” as it was found in the year 2000 at Bletchley Park. A translation of the complete second telegram to English is: 13/15. OLQ de OMQ 1005 83 234 250 State secret! To the commander of the Security Police, for the attention of SS Obersturmbannführer HEIM,CRACOW. Re: 14-day report operation REINHART. Reference: radio telegram from there Recorded arrivals until 31 December 42, L 12761, B 0, S 515, T 10335 totaling 23611. Situation [gap] 31 December 42, L 24733, B 434508, S 101370, T 71355, totaling 1274166. SS and police leader of Lublin, HOEFLE, Sturmbannführer. From the “Hoefle Telegram”, the letter L stands for the camp Lublin-Majdanek, the letter B stands for Belzec, the letter S for Sobibor and the letter T for Treblinka. The 14 day report means the arrivals and killings of the last two weeks of the year 1942. The telegram gives the total number of people killed for operation Reinhardt until the end of 1942. (*11) (*11) There is a print mistake and in Treblinka (T) it should read 713555 – the last five is missing.


For clarity the figures may be arranged as a table:

Recorded arrivals for

the 2 weeks until 31 December, 1942

Sum total as of 31 December, 1942

L (Lublin Majdanek) 12 761 24 733

B (Belzec extermination camp)

0 434 508

S (Sobibor) 515 101 370

T (Treblinka) 10 335 713 555

Total 23 611 1 274 166 In other words until the end of the year 1942 - 1,274,166!! people had been killed in the operation "Reinhardt”. The killings continued in 1943, without any interruption until the end of November 1943. At the death camps no names where written down nor the numbers tattooed on the arms of the victims, they were only counted like cattle… We do not know the exact numbers of Jews killed in the “Reinhardt Action”, the exact numbers where in the safe’s of Eichmann, Mueller, Kaltenbrunner and Himmler ( may their memory be cursed forever), and all that information was destroyed on purpose at the end of WWII. The order to destroy all State Secret material was given by SS - Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner near the end of the war. All we can do is an estimation that about 2.5 Million Jews where killed by the operation “Reinhardt” . According to the US National Security Agency, "It appears the British analysts who had decrypted the message missed the significance of this particular message at the time. No doubt this happened because the message itself contained only the identifying letters for the extermination camps followed by the numerical totals. The only clue would


have been the reference to operation “Reinhart”, the meaning of which – the plan to eliminate Polish Jewry that was named after the assassinated SS-General Reinhardt Heydrich – also probably was unknown at the time to the code breakers at Bletchley." So, at that time the British Secret Service didn’t really understand the meaning of these telegrams. The decoded text was classified by the British as "most secret" and remained for 58 years in the archives, not accessible to the public. Only in the year 2000 the Public Record Office released the archives to the public view. (*12) In November 1943, the Nazis stopped the operation "Reinhardt". In the camps, the buried dead in the mass graves were exhumed and burned. The Nazis tried to wipe out any evidences of their crimes. Again the "Sonderkommandos" had to do that awful work. The camps where transformed into farms. The Belzec camp was dissolved first. In Sobibor and Treblinka the prisoners rebelled and killed some of the SS guards and "Trawnikis". Some hundreds of inmates escaped to the woods surrounding the camps. Most were captured again. Only about 200 prisoners survived the four camps and were alive by the end of the war. During the last months of the operation, the concentration camp of Majdanek, near Lublin was also used to kill several thousand more Jews. Other millions were killed in other camps in Germany and the occupied territories. The sentence of the “Six Million Jews killed in the Holocaust”, much blasphemies by the Holocaust deniers and revisionist “Historians” was put forward by no other than SS - Sturmbannfuehrer (Major) Wilhelm Hoettl. ______________________________________________________________________ (*12) Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 15 V.3". Oxford University Press, 2001.


After the war, Höttl figured prominently as a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trial.

In an sworn affidavit dated 25 November 1945, the thirty-year old Höttl described a

conversation he held with Adolf Eichmann in August 1944. The meeting of the two men

took place at Höttl's office in Budapest: (*13)

"(Eichmann) expressed his conviction that Germany had lost the war and that he personally had no further chance. He knew that he would be considered one of the main war criminals by the United Nations, since he had millions of Jewish lives on his conscience. I asked him how many that was, to which he answered that although the number was a great Reich secret, he would tell me since I, as a historian too, would be interested and that probably he would not return anyhow from his command in Romania. He had, shortly before that, made a report to Himmler, as the latter wanted to know the exact number of Jews who had been killed. Approximately 4 million Jews had been killed in the various concentration camps, while an additional 2 million met death in other ways, the major part of which were shot by operational squads of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia."

The mass murder only stopped after the liberation of the camps by Allied and Russian troops in early 1945. Our grandparents were two of the millions of victims of the Holocaust. (*13) The Secret Front by Wilhelm Höttl, with an introduction by David Kahn (author of The Codebreakers), Enigma Books, 1954.


13. The Korherr report: On 18 January 1943, Heinrich Himmler instructed the chief inspector of the statistical bureau of the SS, Dr Richard Korherr, to prepare a report on the progress of the "Final Solution of the Jewish question". Korherr's credentials for this task were unimpeachable, since he was a professional statistician, had only been a Nazi party member since 1937 and was not a member of the SS. The report that Korherr produced and its supplement are among the most important surviving Nazi documents. The main report of 23 March 1943 summarized the position as at 31 December 1942. The supplement detailed the events of the three months to 31 March 1943. Himmler was generally satisfied with the report, apart from Korherr's use of the code word for murder, Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) to describe the treatment of the Jews. Instead he demanded the use of the word durchgeschleust, variously translated as "dragged through or sifted." By 1943 the true meaning of Sonderbehandlung was so well understood that it could not appear in a document intended for presentation to the Führer. In fact, Korherr omitted to remove a later use of the word in his report. During his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann stated that he had subsequently used the report in planning the extermination program. Information on the number of Jews enabled determination of the size of the team needed to organize liquidations in a particular place or country, the number of railroad cars required, and the camp to which the victims were to be deported. Even more telling are Korherr's statistics for the Generalgouvernement and the former Soviet territories occupied by Germany. 1,274,166 Jews are described as having been "sifted" through the camps of the Generalgouvernement. This figure is of particular interest, since it precisely coincides with the total of Jews transported by the operation


“Reinhard”, as disclosed by the recently discovered Höfle Telegramme. This would undoubtedly have been Korherr's source for this data. The report also mentions 145,301 Jews as having been "sifted" through the camps of the Warthegau (principally Chelmno and, according to the RSHA statistics, the "evacuation" of 633,300 Jews from the occupied Soviet territories, including the Baltic countries, since the beginning of the Eastern Campaign (principally victims of the Einsatzgruppen). The report states that between 1933 and 1943, either through forced emigration or extermination, European Jewry had lost almost half its number – something in excess of 4 million people. After the war Korherr attempted to diminish the importance of the report. He claimed that the data in his report was false because of inflated claims contained in the Einsatzgruppen reports. He also claimed that he did not realize that the Einsatzgruppen killed people. Korherr had been employed by the West German Ministry of Finance, but was dismissed from this post in 1961, following the publication of Gerald Reitlinger's book: "The Final Solution", in which the Korherr Report featured prominently. The significance of the Korherr report lies as much in the irrefutable evidence it contains of the Nazi's genocidal policies as in its wealth of statistics. Whether or not, the Korherr Report abundantly demonstrates a concerted, continent-wide strategy of government sponsored annihilation. As such, it remains a pivotal document for our understanding of the Holocaust.


Most of the information on the mass murder of Jews and others was collected by the Nazi authorities themselves! They did archive the statistics of the number of people killed. Most of the records of the mass murder were kept by the murders in their bureaucracy. ______________________________________________________________________ (*14) Reitlinger, Gerald: The Final Solution – The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, Jason Aronson Inc, Northvale, New Jersey and London, 1987 Hilberg, Raul.: The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003. Gutman, Israel, ed.: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Macmillan Publishing, 1990.


Document 10: Page 9 of the original Korherr’s 16 page report, observe the exact value 1 274 166 Jews also mentioned in “Hoefle’s telegram”


14. The Perpetrators (may their memory be cursed): Some lines about the Nazis involved as perpetrators and mentioned in this work 1. Hermann Hoeffle, SS- Sturmbannfuehrer (Major), born 1911 in Salzburg, suicide 1962 in Vienna. Directed the “Grossaktion” (Aktia) in the Warsaw ghetto in July 1942. He wrote the infamous "Hoeffle Telegram". Was strongly involved in the Holocaust; a fact that was discovered much later. 2. Franz Stangl, SS- Obersturmbannfuerer, (Lieutenant Colonel), born 1908 in Altmuenster, Austria. He died in 1971 in prison in Düsseldorf (heart attack). He was the commander of the death camp Treblinka from Sept. 1942. Escaped after the war to Brazil and was extradited to Germany. He was convicted to life in prison. 5. Christian Wirth, SS- Obersturmbannfuehrer, (Lieutenant Colonel), born 1885 in Oberbalzheim and killed 1944 by Yugoslav Partisans near Trieste. "Wirth was more than brutal. In my opinion, his brutality was grounded more in his human nature, than in his political mentality. He bellowed, screamed and threatened us and hit members of the German garrison in the face. There was no-one at Belzec who was not afraid of Wirth", said Werner Dubois, himself a SS-guard at Belzec. 6. Adolf Eichmann, SS- Obersturmbannfuehrer, (Lieutenant Colonel), born 1906 in Solingen and hanged 1962 in Israel. After the war he escaped to Argentina and lived under false identity. He was captured by the Israeli Mossad and brought to court in Israel in 1960. He was the mastermind of the detailed organization of the Jewish Holocaust. From him, Wilhelm Hoettl got the information about 6 million Jews killed. 7. Wilhelm Hoettl, SS- Sturmbannfuehrer (Major), born 1915 in Vienna, died 1999 as a free person in Austria. He was the person who told the world about the figure of ‘Six Million Jews’ killed by the Nazi machinery during WW II. 8. Dr. Heinz Auerswald, SS- Scharfuehrer (Watch Master), a lawyer by education, born 1908 in Berlin and died 1970 as a free person in Germany. He was the commissar of the Warsaw Ghetto who took special interest in the German Jews living in the Leszno Str. 109. He gave the orders to plunder the Jews from Leszno Street as well as strict orders with the death penalty for anyone leaving the building without his explicit authorization. 9. Dr. Richard Korherr, Nazi party member, born 1903 in Regensburg and died 1978 as a free person in Braunschweig. He was the chief statistician of the SS and had free access to Eichmann’s safe. On January 1943, Heinrich Himmler instructed him to prepare a report on the progress of the "Final solution of the Jewish Question"- the infamous 16 page long "Korherr Report". After the war he claimed that he didn’t know what the numbers in his report meant.


10. Dr. Imfried Eberl, SS- Untersturmbannfuehrer (Lieutenant), born 1910 in Bregenz Austria and died 1948 by suicide in prison in Ulm, Germany. Eberl was a physician by education and directed the death camp of Treblinka during the arrival of grandma Margarethe on 22 July 1942. He was relieved of his post in Sept. 1942 by Franz Stangl. About his organizational qualities says the Düsseldorf District Court #3 in 1965: "In Treblinka, which was scrambled by the inability of the first camp commander Dr. Eberl, the entire machinery of destruction and everything went haywire, until the accused took the lead on the Ukrainian guards and brought this wild bunch, as he put it, military discipline and order at once." 11. Gottfried Graf von Bismarck- Schonhausen, SS- Oberfuehrer, born 1901 in Berlin, a grandson of Otto von Bismarck. In 1949 he died with his wife in a car accident in Verden /Aller. He was a personal friend of Heinrich Himmler. After the failed assassination of Hitler in July 1944, he was send to a concentration camp and survived. Like many of the conspirators against Hitler he was an aristocratic and an anti-Semitic figure. 12. Reinhardt Heydrich, SS- Obergruppenführer (General), born 1904 in Halle an der Saale and killed by Czech agents in May 1942 in Prague. Operation “Reinhardt” was named after him. Feared by his superiors as well by his comrades and called the “Blond Beast”, Heydrich was a multitalented personality, an ideological intellectual, a pilot, an excellent sportsmen, a perfectionist administrator – he organized the “Wannsee Conference” where the infrastructure of the “Final Solution” of the European Jews was decided, a screwed manipulator of power, an expert and a fan of classical music. Hitler considered him as his natural successor. 13. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, SS- Obergruppenführer (General), born 1903 in Ried im Innkreis, Austria and hanged in1946 in Nürenberg. Kaltenbrunner was the successor of Heydrich and a totally different personality, gray and boring in all its activities. A servant by nature and apart of having a mistress, nothing can be said about him. 14. Heinrich Himmler, SS-Reichsführer (General in Chief) , born 1900 in Münich and committed suicide in 1945 in Nürenberg. As Reichsführer-SS, he oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo. A powerful manipulator that was considered by the “Der Spiegel” weekly newsmagazine "the greatest mass murderer of all time”. 15. Odilo Globocnik, SS- Obergruppenführer (General), born 1904 in Trieste and after being captured in 1945 committed suicide. Globocnik was in charge of the operation “Reinhardt“ and was known as corrupt as he was a fanatical Nazi. He was also responsible for the liquidation of the Warsaw and Bialystok Ghettos.


16. Heinrich Müller, SS-Gruppenführer (Lt-General), born 1900 in München and after the war he disappeared. There are speculations that he worked for the Soviet secret service KGB. Müller was the direct superior to A. Eichmann and was informed in all details about the “Final Solution”. It was said about him: "Müller was a stickler for duty and discipline, and approached the tasks he was set, as if they were military commands. A true workaholic who never took holidays” 17. Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production in the government of Adolf Hitler. Born in 1905 in Mannheim, Germany and died in 1981 of natural causes. Speer spent 20 years in the Spandau prison, principally for the use of the forced Labor. 18. Dr. jur. Eberhard Schöngarth, SS -Obergruppenführer (General), born 1903 in Leipzig and executed in 1946 by hanging by the British. Schöngarth was the commander of the security police (SIPO). Hoeffle’s telegram was send to Franz Heim SS- Untersturmbannfuehrer, (Lieutenant) who was the deputy commander of Schöngarth. About Franz Heim we do not know anything, he just disappeared mysteriously… 15. Acknowledges and thanks: This article couldn’t have been done without the help of people who supported and helped us in the search for facts. Thanks: -to Dr. Henry Laquer who helped transform the first version of this script in 1996, in meaningful and understandable English. A big part of the first version has been taken over to this text. -to Dr. Lea Prais from the Institute for Holocaust research at Yad Va’shem, for helping us to find out what happened with the German Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. -to Dr. Daniel Frenkel from Yad Va’shem in Jerusalem, who gave us the information of the deportation of our grandparents in Berlin 1942. -to Dr. Roman Wroblewsky-Wasserman from Stockholm – Sweden who gave information about life in the Warsaw ghetto during the years of WWII and is helping us to find the Swedish women who was contacted by grandmother in 1942.


-to Karin Herms from the Stadtverwaltung Schwedt, who gave us information about the "Kristallnacht" in Schwedt. -to Anke Grodon from the Stadtmuseum Schwedt, who looked in the Schwedt archives from for information about the Meinhardt family. -to the pupil Jennifer Rauch from the Carl Friedrich Gauss Gymnasium in Schwedt who collected the information needed for the "Stolpersteine" and is writing a schoolwork about the Jews in Schwedt. -to Marianne Arnsdorff for her help with the English grammar. -to Prof. Barbara Engelking-Boni from Warsaw.

-to Dr. Marta Pietrzykowska from Warsaw -to Mr. Lennart Jansson, first secretary at Swedish Embassy in Warsaw -to Mrs. Leonie Saker for her help with the English grammar. 16. Appendix: Abbreviations used in this text: Nazi, actually NSDAP, (Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeitspartei) . The party which took over the power in January 1933 and established a personal dictatorship. The leader was the "Fuehrer" Adolf Hitler. SA Schutz Abteilung, a paramilitary organization of the Nazi party. SS Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organization of the Nazi party which took over the complete police of the German Reich. It was in charge of the internal security and persecuted all the opposition to the Nazis. It established the concentration camps and sent the Jews and other victims to their death. The chief commander was Heinrich Himmler. RSHA as already explained (Reichssicheheitshauptamt), was the central office in Berlin organizing the Holocaust and the persecution and imprisoning any opposition to the Nazis. USA the United States of America PP Palestine Pound. The currency used in British Palestine, it was worth one British- Pound.


EINSATZGRUPPEN Special military force, mostly from the SS; that persecuted and killed Jews behind the Wehrmacht lines in the Soviet Union. WEHRMACHT German regular military forces. BRT Brutto Register Tons, a measure of the size of a ship, its weight and water Displacement.

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A Journey for Life and a Journey for Death: The Meinhardt ... Word - 8385.pdf · For their honeymoon they made a trip to Palestine. ... life. She was married to Gerd Brueckmann, and