German-Jewish letters and the Holocaust, 1933-45

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of the letter collections of five German-Jewish families during the period 1933-45. It uses private family collections, alongside those in public archives, to explore the uses, importance, and conceptualisation of the letter in German-Jewish migration during the Holocaust. The thesis centres on the Amberg family from Aachen, the Hirschberg family from Berlin, Eberswalde, and Brieg (Brzeg), the Goldberg family from Plauen, the Licht family from Berlin, and the Rothschild family from Bad Cannstatt and Heilbronn.
Between 1933 and 1941, approximately 276,000 Jews left Nazi Germany out of a population of roughly 500,000 in 1933; in total 80,000 German speaking Jews came to Britain during this period, including members of all five families discussed here. The onset of Nazi rule in 1933 marked the beginning of the gradual state sponsored degradation and impoverishment of Germany’s Jewish population, with the rise of violent antisemitism massively contributing to major peaks in emigration in 1933 and 1938. During this pre-war decade, Jewish communities and Jewish spaces were systematically targeted, ensuring those within them left the Reich, and the spaces themselves often destroyed, reappropriated or relocated. Many German-Jewish families, whose members were separated, sometimes by colossal distances, turned to the letter as a means of attempted connection in an era defined by separation.
Whilst scholarship on German-Jewish migration during the Holocaust is vast, much less has been done to ameliorate the gulf between studies of those that left and those that remained. Although letters have been widely used within scholarship pertaining to German-Jewish migration and the Holocaust more broadly, their critical analysis has not been forthcoming. In studying the individual histories of the five families mentioned above, this thesis centres the letter as a legitimate, and indeed needed, object of study. It argues that the letter played a central role in the lives of German-Jewish families separated during the Holocaust, and makes the case that in using it as a historical source, the scholar can more easily connect the histories of the Holocaust and of refugees, as well as connect histories of the individual, with histories of the Holocaust more broadly. The thesis is divided into seven chapters spread over three parts. Part I centres on how the letter can be, and has been, conceived by different readers ranging from contemporaries to the scholar today. Part II focusses on how the letters in the five collections speak to migratory processes and concerns, and their role in facilitating this. Finally, part III spotlights the letter as a site of knowledge transfer and production, emphasising how correspondence during the period contained both discussion of the everyday, alongside dialogue on the growing persecution of Jews and the course of the war. The thesis ends with a call for scholars to embrace the growing awareness of collections still in private hands globally.

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ORCID for Charlie Knight: orcid.org/0000-0002-0319-0781

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