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Used Collonil leather oil brought to the US by a German Jewish refugee

Object | Accession Number: 2004.485.46

Container of Collonil leather oil brought by Karl Weiler to the United States when he left Nazi Germany in December 1937. Karl lost his position as an assistant judge in Berlin in March 1933 when the new Nazi government purged the civil service of Jews. Karl rejoined the family agricultural firm in Brakel, Germany. Anti-Jewish pressures increased and, in May 1936, the firm’s board of directors was forced to sell the business at a loss to a Nazi approved buyer. In December 1937, Karl left for the US. After the war ended in May 1945, he learned that his parents, Fritz and Ella, had been deported to Theresienstadt ghetto-labor camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1942. Then in 1944 they were deported to Auschwitz killing center where they were murdered. His sister, Mathilde Fodor, had been deported from Budapest, Hungary in November 1944 to Lichtenworth concentration camp, where she died of starvation. Her husband, Joszi, and son, Karoly, survived.

Date
emigration:  1937 December
Geography
manufacture: Berlin (Germany)
Language
German
Classification
Tools and Equipment
Object Type
Oils and fats (lcsh)
Genre/Form
Shoe polishes.
Credit Line
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Judy Gartner and Susan Oberfeld
 
Record last modified: 2022-07-28 18:28:43
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn515803