Jewish Displaced Persons in Munich

After the end of the war in 1945, more than eight million people who had left their home countries as a result of persecution by the Nazis were living in the territory of present-day Germany—those formerly deported and imprisoned in concentration camps, forced laborers and prisoners of war. They had now become Displaced Persons (DPs).

A comparatively small group of DPs in the western occupation zones were the 50,000–75,000 Jewish survivors. “The Surviving Remnant”—Sh’erit ha-Pletah in Hebrew—was what they called themselves. At first, Jewish survivors were placed in camps according to their country of origin. Only after a critical report was submitted to the U.S. government in August 1945 about conditions in the camps, where Jewish survivors sometimes had to live in close quarters with former collaborators, were Jewish DP camps established.

Munich became the unofficial capital of the Sh’erit ha-Pletah. As a result, a blossoming East European, Jewish society emerged around the aid organisations’ offices. After the founding of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the relaxing of the immigration regulations of the USA and other countries, a mass emigration ensued that lasted until 1951. Few Jewish DPs remained in Germany.

What else is there?

Timeline: Jewish Displaced Persons in Munich 1945–1951

Voices

The American psychologist David P. Boder traveled to Europe in the summer of 1946 to talk to “war sufferers.” He recorded more than a hundred interviews in occupied Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy, using a wire recorder. The resultant recordings are among the earliest eyewitness interviews with survivors.

David Boder Archive

Jürgen Bassfreund

Jürgen Bassfreund was born in Bernkastel an der Mosel, near Trier, in 1923. After leaving school, he went to Berlin to attend business college. In 1943, at the age of 21, after two years of forced labor, he was deported. Bassfreund survived Monowitz-Buna as well as the concentration camps in Auschwitz, Groß-Rosen, Dachau, and Mühldorf. When he was liberated by the Americans from the Dachau satellite camp in 1945, he weighed less than 30 kilos and was seriously ill with typhus. After his recovery, he worked in Fürth as a cinema projectionist and learned English on his own. On September 20, 1946, David P. Boder conducted this interview in the “Funkkaserne” (barracks used by the radio communications unit). Just a few days later Bassfreund emigrated to the USA.

Interview Jürgen Bassfreund, September 20, 1946

Download transcript (PDF, accessible)

Jack Bass on the Website of the Alabama Holocaust Education Center

Roma Tcharnabroda

Roma Tcharnabroda was born in 1916 in Kielce, Poland. In 1941 she survived the pogroms in German-occupied Lvív, was deported to a labor camp but managed to escape. She lived in Warsaw with false papers, was betrayed and forced to enter the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1943 she was deported to Majdanek concentration camp, from there to munitions factories in western Poland and finally to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She suffered severe frostbite and, three days after liberation, both of Tscharnabroda’s legs were amputated. David P. Boder interviewed her at the UNRRA University in Munich on September 24, 1946 where she was studying pharmacy. In 1951 she took her life in Munich.

Interview Roma Tcharnabroda, September 24, 1946

Download transcript (PDF, accessible)

Places

The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) took over the administration of the DP camps in the American zone in October 1945. By the end of the year, it was in charge of a total of 227 Jewish and non-Jewish camps in the three western occupation zones. In the Munich area, the Föhrenwald DP camp became the third large Jewish camp after Feldafing and Landsberg.

Map of all DP camps in Upper Bavaria

www.after-the-shoah.org is a project of the Nuremberg Institute for Holocaust Studies.