Original title: Correspondence from the Reich Youth Leadership regarding Herbert Kleindick

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Correspondence between NSDAP offices - Personnel Department, Reich Youth Leadership; offices of the Personnel Dept., NSDAP, Mittelrhein (11) District.

Two sons of Fritz Emil Schueler, of Bad Godesberg, were members of the Hitler Youth. When it was alleged that they were not of “Pure Aryan blood” the Personnel Inspectorate (Überwachungsstelle) started an investigation, resulting in their being struck of the Hitler Youth membership lists.

Record of an interview with Mr Singer, a Polish citizen resident in Duisburg, Germany, Jewish, who emigrated illegally to Holland in December 1938. His Aryan wife and his small daughter followed him in 1939. Mr. Singer was interned at Hook van Holland, his wife and child remained free until April 1940, when all three were sent to Westerbork, then still under Dutch administration. When the Germans took over the camp on 13 July 1942, Mischlinge and partners of mixed marriages were released, and the Singers returned to Amsterdam. The rest of the report describes the hardships of life in Holland under German occupation.

Mrs Kahle, an 'Aryan' German, wife of Prof. Kahle, formerly orientalist at Bonn University (see P.III.f. No. 703) describes briefly her and her family’s life up to 1933. She and her husband were from the very beginning decidedly against the Nazi regime. The boycott (1 April 1933) she calls the “Schand-tag des Deutschen Volkes”. They never allowed her sons to enter the Hitler Youth and when her youngest boy, who was then 10 years old, at Easter 1937, was compelled by law to join, she succeeded in getting him out of it with a doctor‘s certificate. In 1938 both her other sons had to do “Arbeitsdienst”. She felt it her duty to visit them every Sunday and in this way to counter-act the effect of the Nazi ideology on young people. She tells of the impossible timetable in the camp and the insufficient hygienic conditions. Many of the youths became severely ill.

On 10 November 1938 one of her sons went to a few Jewish shops in order to help the owners to save valuables which he took home; Mrs Kahle and her husband gave hospitality to a Jewish colleague of his and his wife. On 11 November all the Kahle sons were eagerly engaged in helping Jews to get their shops in order. Mrs Kahle could not expose herself in the same way, because of her husband’s position, but she visited Jewish people. This became known & an article was published in the Westdeutscher Beobachter (17 November 1938 edition) under the heading: 'Dies ist Verrat am Volke Mrs Kahle & her sons are helping the Jewess Goldstein with the “Aufraeumungsarbeiten”'. It was the preliminary to Prof. Kahle’s dismissal, Her eldest son was sentenced by a disciplinary court (copy of the sentence is added to this report); Prof. Kahle was forbidden by the Gestapo to speak to his colleagues any more. The attitude of the family caused a kind of tumult among the inhabitants of Bonn and their position became threatening. Finally, they succeeded, under almost insurmountable difficulties, to emigrate to England in April 1939.

Dr. Rosenblatt was a Jewish prisoner of war (Polish Army) in Germany where Jews were kept apart from the rest of the prisoners under inferior conditions. After his release, Dr. Rosenblatt followed his parents who had escaped to a small ghetto in Poland. In 1942 all small ghettoes in Poland were dissolved and the Jews transferred to one big one. Out of 30,000 Jews, 27,000 were exterminated in Auschwitz. Some 600 Jews who had been living in hiding were rounded up in the Synagogue and shot by Germans and Ukrainians (p.3-4).

In 1943 the women were sent to Ravensbrück, the men to Buchenwald (p.6). After some time a new selection took place this time to a camp in Saxonia. At the beginning of 1945 new deportations took place to Theresienstadt. The inmates there shared their rations with the new arrivals whose physical conditions were most pitiful. After the liberation by the Russians, Dr. Rosenblatt was most impressed by the relief work of Jews, Russians and UNRRA allotted to the youth in the first place.

The author was deported from Hamburg to Riga/Jungfernhof on 7 December 1941, together with his wife, 7-months-old child and his parents. The Camp-Commandant was Unterscharfuehrer SS and SD Rudolf Seck. After a few days the camp contained about 5,600 persons. They were crammed into dilapidated stables with no protection from the cold (30-35° Celsius below 0). A special squad had to pull out the corpses of those who were found frozen to death in the mornings; they were piled up in the yard. Seck tried to have them burned, which did not succeed, so 700 were buried in a mass-grave.

At regular inspections Seck took those too feeble to rise from their bunks, outside to have them “bumped off”. The sick quarters were evacuated regularly: the sick were thrown into lorries and taken away to be killed. At roll call Seck made selections of elderly people to be taken away and killed. He boasted of having killed around 5,000 Jews.

On 26 March 1942, Aktion Duenamuende was carried out by Seck and numbers transported to their death. The people in the transport had been told that they were being sent to work at Duenamuende, hence the name.

The author lost his entire family at Jungfernhof in one or the other of the described ways. He reports of savage beatings of men and women on their bare buttocks in front of the assembled crew, carried out by Seck with a cane, until they fainted.

Mrs Ehrenberg lived with her first husband, an engineer holding a French diploma, Schlama Goldstein, and their little daughter (born 1938) in comfortable circumstances at Lodz, Poland (p.1, 10, 11, 13). Together with innumerable others, they fled from the approaching Germans in September 1933. The situation on the main road proved to be chaotic; she went back to Lodz through burning villages, under the fire of German planes shooting recklessly down at the fleeing people (p.1). Terror at Rawa-Mazowiezka; hostages (p.2); a pastor (Volksdeutscher) ordered the murdering to be stopped. After the occupation of Warsaw, the author's husband and brother returned to Lodz, too, but as the oppression was getting worse, fled to Bialystok (p.3-9), a Polish town, belonging to Russia at the time. When, in February 1940, the author's family had to move into the Ghetto Lodz she pretended to be a Polish Aryan and tried to join her husband with her little child (who soon died there) at Bialystok, occupied by the German troops since June 1941. Although she enjoyed the help of several people, the dangers of her illegal life finally proved too much for her nerves, and she went to live in the Ghetto, in August 1943. Dreams coming true (p.5-6, 9-10, 12). In view of the pending liquidation, her husband insisted that she left the Ghetto, and she used her Aryan document to get released; as she was leaving, the SS-officer who was guilty of the murder and [illegible]JÄ misery of innumerable human beings, gave her a kitten to save its life (p.6).

She then made several - interesting - attempts to rescue her husband (p.7), but could not save him from the worst. At last she was denounced by an informer, Czeslaw Bielilo (p.7, 13) and imprisoned at Bialystok, as, since November 1943, Jews who had escaped from the Ghetto were no longer shot dead on the spot, where they were discovered, but had to be taken to an annihilation camp.

Horrible transport to KZ Stutthof near Danzig. Selected and sent to Auschwitz (p.9-11). There she was an eye-witness of all kind of horrors and atrocities. With the aid of a Polish detainee, she would succeed to hide and rescue Jewish girls from the selections (p.11).

In October 1944, transfer to Bergen-Belsen (p.12-13). Typhoid. She would see Irma Gresse repeatedly but never saw her ill-treating a detainee (p.12). Liberation, on 15 April 1945. Visit to Lodz; of her large family only one aunt had survived.

At Konstanz, Bodensee (p.13), she made the acquaintance of Mr Hajim Ehrenberg, a survivor of Treblinka, whose wife and children had perished. She got married to him, in December 1946, and with the help of the Joint, they emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1949, where they are both working successfully, after a son was born to them, in 1950. (p.13,14).