Herbert Luft papers
Extent and Medium
folder
1
Creator(s)
- Herbert Luft
Biographical History
Herbert Luft (1907-1992) was born on August 21, 1907 in Essen, Germany. Herbert Luft was incarcerated in Dachau concentration camp and was released due to the efforts of his wife. He and his wife emigrated to England and eventually to the United States. In 1961 he worked as an American correspondent at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Israel. Luft died on January 13, 1992 in Los Angeles, California.
Archival History
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Acquisition
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Herbert Luft
Funding Note: The cataloging of this collection has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
The materials are a part of a larger collection that was created by Herbert Luft and donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via the Collections Department. After accessioning, these documents were removed and transferred to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives on 5 Sept. 1991 by Michele Wehrwein of the Collections Department. As part of a unification project, the remaining contents of the collection that were in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Art and Artifacts Branch were transferred to the Archives in 2005.
Scope and Content
Includes various documents written by Herbert Luft. Among the documents are stories of life in concentration camps and shortwave radio transcripts of broadcasts conducted by Herbert Luft in 1942. The broadcast messages target the German people and give praise to the American government and military for their aid to the people of Europe. The broadcasts were recorded by the US Department of Agriculture, Division of Information, for Shortwave Broadcast of the O.W.I. to Europe. A later accretion to the papers includes a photograph of Herbert Luft and a letter written inside Birkenau concentration camp by a woman who witnessed the birth of a child in the camp.
System of Arrangement
Arrangement is thematic
People
- Luft, Herbert, 1907-1992.
Corporate Bodies
- Birkenau (Concentration camp)
- Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei. Schutzstaffel
- Ravensbrück (Concentration camp)
Subjects
- World War, 1939-1945--Propaganda.
- Des Moines (Iowa)
- United States
- Women.
- Concentration camp inmates' writings--Germany--Birkenau.
- Executive departments
- Weapons industry.
- Radio broadcasting.
- Austria.
- Escapes.
- Propaganda, American.
- World War, 1939-1945--Concentration camps.
Genre
- Letters.
- Document
- Photographs.
- Transcripts.
- Correspondence.