Donated Collection Sheds Light on Jewish Plight In Nazi Germany

Los Angeles' Jewish Journal reports "a rare collection throwing new light on the paper trail of the Holocaust bureaucracy" has been donated to Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. 

According to the article by Tom Tugend, the collection consists of some 2,000 stamps, letters, ID cards, visas, currency receipts and other assorted documents from the Nazi era.

Tom says, "Valued at $260,000, the collection was painstakingly acquired and organized by Victor, a retired Los Angeles lawyer, over a 30-year period. In many cases, the content tracks the fate of a given Jewish family from the very beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933 to its demise in 1945."

Shown above, a postcard sent from Dachau concentration camp. The collection documents how newly arrived prisoners at Nazi concentration camps were forced to sign similiar postcards and send them to friends and family with the inscription - “Things are going well and we are enjoying ourselves.”

The Germans called this “Operation Briefkarte” (Operation Postcard).  Its goal was that of "lulling the others into the belief that they had nothing to fear when their turn for deportation to the east arrived," according to the piece.

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