Otto and Monna Weinmann papers

Otto Weinmann was born in Vienna, Austria, on January 12, 1903. When he was six years old, his family moved to Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, where he attended elementary and grammar schools. In 1916, the family returned to Vienna, where Otto completed his education. After graduation, he moved to Germany and worked as an administrative clerk at a banking and shipping firm in Hamburg, and later in Berlin, between 1921-1931. In 1931, he moved to Amsterdam, where his uncle Paul was working as a bookbinder. He spent four years there, working with the merchant Bank and Export firm of Leeser. In 1935, Weinmann moved to Prague to work in the textile manufacturing and export business. His mother, Jenny, passed away in 1936. As rumors of the political situation worsened, Weinmann left Prague in 1938 and moved to Paris. In 1939, he joined the Czechslovak army under French command. When Germany invaded France in 1940, Weinmann was caught up in the wave of Allied military evacuations and was one of the soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk to England. Once in England, he joined the 2nd Armored Regiment, 3rd Squadron of the Czech forces, working as part of a tank regiment under British command. In London, he met Monna Steinbach, a refugee from Vienna who fled to England in 1938. They married in early summer 1943. On November 3, 1944, Monna gave birth to a daughter, Janice. Otto Weinmann was sent with his regiment to France in September 1944, where he participated in the liberation of the Dunkirk region. He was demobilized and returned to his family in England in 1945. After the war, he learned that his uncle Paul had likely been deported from the Netherlands and perished in the Holocaust. Otto, Monna, and Janice Weinmann emigrated to the United States in 1948.