In this podcast episode, we talk about a letter dated 23 April 1945, from a man called Hans Fröhlicher to the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs. Hans Frölicher was the Swiss ambassador to Germany during World War II. The neatly typed, official letter starts: ”I have the honour to enclose a copy of a communication that was secretly delivered to the Consulate General in Munich/Rottach-Egern. It concerns a cry of distress from non-German Jews deported to the territory of the Reich, who are being held prisoner under deplorable conditions in various external commandos of the Dachau concentration camp.”
Enclosed with it was a typed copy of a, most likely handwritten letter that had reached Hans Fröhlicher against the odds. In this last phase of the war, prisoners from all over Europe, including survivors of the Ghettos in Eastern Europe and concentration camps such as Auschwitz, were driven to the interior of Germany and placed in already overcrowded camps such as Dachau. The situation in these camps became appalling and they were places of mass starvation, disease and killing, although not planned like in the extermination camps, but by complete and deliberate neglect. Therefore, the prisoners referred to these camps as Cold Crematoria.
This letter and the enclosed copy are now in the Swiss Federal Archives, as a lasting reminder of Jewish agency. Even though resistance was dangerous and difficult, Jews sought and found many ways to resist the intentions of the Nazi’s to dehumanize, humiliate and exterminate them.
Featured guest:
Johannes Meerwald is a scientific project officer for the EHRI project at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. He is a PhD Candidate at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt on the late phase of the Holocaust and the Jewish prisoners who were deported to southern Bavaria. Podcast host is Kevania de Vries-Menig.
Music accreditation: Blue Dot Sessions. Tracks - Opening and closing: Stillness. Incidental, Gathering Stasis, Pencil Marks, Uncertain Ground, Marble Transit and Snowmelt. License Creative Commons Atttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BB BY-NC 4.0).
Andy Clark, Podcastmaker, Studio Lijn 14