Siegfried Halbreich papers

Siegfried Halbreich (1909-2008) was born in Dziedzice, in the Upper Silesia region of Poland. After his graduation from high school, he served briefly in the Polish Army from 1930-1932, before attending the University of Krakow to become a pharmacist. He practiced pharmacy in Katowice, Poland from 1935-1939 before the outbreak of World War II. At the outbreak of war, Halbreich was drafted back into the Polish Army and fought for thirteen days until Poland surrendered and his battalion was dissolved. Following his brief period in the army, Halbreich returned home to Katowice. After two weeks, a transport for Jewish men was being arranged by the Germans, and so he escaped by train through Germany and Austria, before being stopped at the border in Yugoslavia, where a German spy in the Yugoslavian army arrested Halbreich and turned him over to the Gestapo. From that point until the end of World War II, Halbreich was imprisoned in concentrations camps; first at Sachsenhausen, and then later Gross-Rosen, Buna/Monowitz in Auschwitz, and Dora-Nordhausen where he was eventually liberated in 1945. Upon release, Halbreich worked with the American War Crimes Department as an interpreter in preparation for the Nuremberg Trials. He also gave testimony to the Polish War Crimes Commission and testified against Adolf Eichmann in 1960. Halbreich immigrated to the United States in 1946, settling first in Cleveland, Ohio, and later in Beverly Hills, California, where he ran a picture framing business. Halbreich spent much of his later years educating on the Holocaust, giving many lectures to schools around the country. In Los Angeles, he was active in the “1939 Club,” where he served as President from 1976 to 1977, and he was also active in the Martyr’s Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust in Los Angeles, as well as the local branch of the Anti-Defamation League.