Sachsenhausen

Sachsenhausen, one of the early concentration camps, was established in the summer of 1936. Located outside of Berlin, the main function of Sachsenhausen was to train officers to be commandants for the other camps.

Early in 1945 the Allies broke through to Berlin and started bombing on a nightly basis, creating large craters in the streets. The Nazis gathered about thousand Jews and transferred them from Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen, where a subcamp named Schwarzweide was established. This subcamp was responsible for filling in the bomb craters left by the Allied air assaults in Berlin. Of those thousand prisoners, less than a dozen survived the war. We can identify mail from the Schwarzheide subcamp by the initials SCHWH in the return address.

Bergen-Belsen

The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was set up originally as a special camp to house Jews to be traded for German nationals held abroad. This plan never came to fruition, and Bergen-Belsen was one of the first camps liberated by the Allied troops. Pictures of the emaciated men and women taken by Margaret Bourke White appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine.

This cover was written at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and transported to the Berlin Jewish Council. It was mailed through the postal system in Berlin on  December 14, 1944. The card was censored and checked for hidden messages using a blue chemical strip. It finally reached Rabbi Ehrenpreis in Stockholm, Sweden.

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Buchenwald

In the mid-eighteenth century, the town of Weimar was a seat of the German Enlightenment. It was home to some of the greatest German minds, including Goethe, Schiller, and Bach. However, Weimar also would become the site of Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps inside the 1937 German borders.

The camp, built to house opponents of the Nazi regime, was constructed by the prisoners themselves. After Kristallnacht and the beginning of the war, it became a major camp that incarcerated Polish and Soviet prisoners.

On this postcard, sent from the Buchenwald concentration camp, the Israel middle name identifies the sender as a Jewish inmate.  The card is dated November 11, 1942, and has brief preprinted instructions to the recipient, indicating that “I am only allowed to write and receive one letter every 4 weeks.”

Dachau

Hitler came to power on March 5, 1933, and the official opening of the first concentration camp was March 22, 1933: This was Dachau. This cover below is dated June 12, 1933, three months after the opening of Dachau opened.

A Personal Story

Many years ago I found an auction catalog containing 12 lots of postal cards from Dachau. The first listing was a postal card similar to this one, canceled March 22, 1933, the first day the camp was opened. We stamp collectors love to find a cancellation on the first day of an event, and the catalog description did not indicate it was a special date. I called the auctioneer, and before I even had a chance to explain, he said, “I know! You are the tenth person to call and tell me that I missed that March 22 is the opening of Dachau.”

He gave me information on the phone auction for the item, and I called in. The first time around, I bid $300.00; the second time, I had to calculate the cost of flying to New York, staying in a hotel, and dining, so I bid $1,100.00. The next time the bid came my way, it was close to $2,000.00, and I dropped out. The lot sold for over $2,000.00. I told this story in a presentation in 1986 at AMERIPEX, an international philatelic exposition. A gentleman in the audience raised his hand and said that he was the one who bought that cover.

Nuremberg Laws

Hitler changed the laws to nullify the degrees of Jewish professionals. Doctors, lawyers, and dentists could not pursue their respective careers, except with Jewish clients.

For example, this letter, sent from Dr. Alfred “Israel” Karpen, includes the text “Licensed solely for the legal counseling and representation of Jews” in the lines below the return address. Dr. Karpen could serve only as an advisor (Konsulent) to Jewish clients. (NOTE: The title doctor [Dr.] applied to lawyers in this era.) Even if a lawyer had many Aryan clients, he could not practice law on their behalf.

Sara and Israel Middle Names

When Hitler was elected to power on March 22, 1933, he immediately started to change German laws to take things from the Jews, including citizenship, property, and professional degrees. On August 27, 1938, he finally gave the Jews something: He required the Jews to assume a middle name. All female Jews were to take the middle name of Sara, and all male Jews, Israel. This addition had to appear on all documents: passports, land titles, court papers, and so on. With regards to the postal system, this made it easier to identity Jewish mail for censorship.

This cover was sent air mail from Martha Sara Lipmann in Hannover, Germany, to Cleveland, Ohio, on September 11, 1939.

Der ewige Jude

Der ewige Jude was an exhibit featuring what the Nazis deemed to be “degenerate art” that traveled all over Germany and Austria. Depending how you translate the phrase der ewige Jude, it could mean “the wandering Jew” or “the eternal Jew.” Photographs featured in the exhibit identified typical “Jewish” features. The clothes they wore, facial and racial characteristics, religious items, and culture, were all shown in a very negative light. It also included so-called entartete Kunst (degenerate art) by Jewish and other sculptors and painters.

This postcard acted as an announcement of the opening of the exhibit and became the symbol for the show. It depicts a Jew with a hand out asking for money, we see the black coat (kaputa) and the sidelocks (payot) the traditional dress of the ultra-orthodox European Jew.The letters are in a Hebrew-like font in red to symbolize the blood libel, a slanderous myth related to Passover that was used to justify persecution of Jews starting in the Middle Ages. The map of Russia with the hammer and sickle links the Jews with Communism.

Dachau was initially a camp for political and ideological opponents of the Nazi regime, e.g., union leaders, communists, and social democrats. Jews who were members of these groups were detained, but mass arrests of Jews did not take place until Kristallnacht, five and a half years later.

This image is the full post card. The preprinted instructions indicate that

Protective prisoners may receive 1 package of underwear every month up to 10 lbs. (food, smoking materials, etc., are excluded). In addition, one letter and one postcard are permitted. Nonobservance of the rules will result in confiscation. Visitation is not permitted.

The writer, Otto Marx, was a merchant in Bavaria. He later wrote a book about his experiences in Dachau.

Anti-Semitism

Hitler’s rise to power began with the fall of the Weimar Republic. There was rampant unemployment and great unrest in Germany. Hitler made speeches at beer halls, union party gatherings, and other events. One of his major themes was that Jews were the root of all evil and the cause of Germany’s problems. Anti-Semitism began to raise its ugly head and was manifested in many different forms: anti-Semitic literature, songs, and even labels placed on envelopes.

The back of this envelope, postmarked in the mid-1920s, bears an anti-Semitic label reading “Don’t buy from Jews or shop at their stores.”

Ludwig “Israel” Lewinter was a dentist practicing in Vienna. However, due to the changes in laws, his practice was limited to Jews and his title was no longer dentist: it was “caretaker of Jewish teeth” (Zahnbehandler).