[Fritz Flesch - Correspondence on South African Jewry and Apartheid politics I]

The file contains correspondence of Fritz Flesch with newspapers and representatives of Jewish communities exchanged between 1956 and and 1965 regarding the position of South African Jewry on the country’s Apartheid policies. Flesch considered their attitude not critical enough and claimed public Anti-Apartheid interventions from their part as well as from the part of international Jewish representatives. Flesch himself had emigrated to the United States in 1940, following his imprisonment at the Dachau Concentration Camps in 1938/39 after the Nazi takeover in Austria, where Flesch had been active in the Labor movement. Among his correspondence partners are Ronald Segal, the editor of the journal “Africa South”, the “Rand Daily Mail”, Harry Abt from Johannesburg, Caesar C. Aronsfeld from the Wiener Library in London, as well as various politicians and representatives of Jewish communities in the United States. The correspondences are mostly typewritten, including numerous handwritten remarks by Flesch as well as paper clippings. Furthermore, the file contains two letters by Adolf Johann Cord Rüter, the director of the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. In his letters, written in 1965 and in German, Rüter thanks Fritz Flesch for handing over a collection of documents including his correspondence with representatives of the Austrian Labor movement to the Institute’s archives.