A new edited volume, Holocaust Letters: Methodologies, Cases and Reflections, has recently been published, featuring a chapter by LBI London Director Joseph Cronin.
Edited by Clara Dijkstra, Charlie Knight (a member of the LBI London board), Sandra Lipner, and Christine Schmidt of the Wiener Holocaust Library, the volume grew out of an exhibition at the library and explores Holocaust-era correspondence as historical sources. The essays examine letters both as texts and as material objects, showing how they document the ways individuals understood and navigated their circumstances during the Holocaust and in its aftermath.
Cronin’s chapter, ‘Dispatch from an Aryanized business: Otto Poetsch writes to Leo Anker, Danzig, 31 August 1939’, examines a seemingly routine business letter written on the final day of the Free City of Danzig, just before the German invasion of Poland.
The letter was sent by Otto Poetsch, the state-appointed head of a consortium that had taken over the forcibly sold S. Anker grain-trading business, to its former Jewish owner Leo Anker, who had by then found refuge in England. Through a close reading of the text, the chapter highlights the bureaucratic and extra-legal mechanisms used to dispossess Jewish citizens.
It shows how the language of routine commercial administration could mask the racial ideology and coercion that underpinned the ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish property.
The chapter also traces Leo Anker’s life in Britain, where he established a farm in Bedfordshire that served as a training ground for young Jewish refugees, and the family’s long post-war efforts to seek compensation.
A copy of Holocaust Letters will eventually be available for consultation in the LBI London Library following the relocation of our collections.
