Oral History Interview with Herbert Lindemeyer

Herbert Lindemeyer, born in Minden, Germany in 1922, describes his father, who owned a pharmacy; antisemitism after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor; the boycott of Jewish stores in April 1933 and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935; his parents’ discussions of whether to emigrate; Kristallnacht and his father’s incarceration in Buchenwald for a month and the confiscation of his pharmacy by the Nazis; immigrating to England in August 1939 through the help of a British Quaker woman; his internment with thousands of German and Austrian refugees in June 1940 on the Isle of Man; being allowed to leave the internment camp in December 1941; working in a defense job in Manchester, England; getting married in January 1944 to a woman who had traveled to England on the Kindertransport; joining the American Army in October 1945 for an assignment in Germany as an interpreter and mail censor; tracking Werner Von Braun; returning to Minden, where the new owner of his father’s pharmacy had kept papers which helped Herbert obtain restitution; and immigrating to the US in 1948.

Date: 12/06/1983
Interviewer: Eileen Steinberg
Interviewee: Herbert Lindemeyer
Language: English
Subject: Aliens--Great Britain.
Anti-Jewish boycotts--Germany.
Holocaust survivors--United States.
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Germany--Personal narratives.
Jewish businesspeople--Germany.
Jewish property--Germany.
Jewish refugees--Great Britain.
Jews, German--Great Britain.
Jews--Germany--Minden (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Jews--Legal status, laws, etc.--Germany.
Jews--Persecutions--Germany.
Kristallnacht, 1938.
Postal surveillance.
World War, 1939-1945--Concentration camps--Isle of Man.
World War, 1939-1945--War work.
Men--Personal narratives.
Location: Minden, Germany
England
USA
Permalink: https://hoha.digitalcollections.gratzcollege.edu/item/oral-history-interview-with-herbert-lindemeyer/
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