Fritz Buff papers

Fritz (now Fred) Buff (1921-2017) was the son of Julius and Emma Buff. He was born on July 26, 1921 in Krumbach, Germany, a small Bavarian town where his family had lived for several generations. There, his parents ran an upholstery supply business. Fritz has one sister, Anni (now Anne), two years younger. At the age of ten, Fritz left home to attend a secondary school in Ulm, where he also went to Hebrew school and belonged to a Jewish club and sports organization. He graduated in 1936 and returned to Krumbach where he worked briefly in a local bank, the town's only surviving Jewish business. After six months Fritz left for Munich to study mechanics at a Jewish vocational school. In the summer of 1938 the student body was forced to participate in the dismantling of the city's main synagogue. On the day before Kristallnacht, Fritz and a group of his classmates fled the city by bicycle to evade the annual Beer Hall Putsch commemoration. They spent the day playing soccer, during which Fritz injured his leg and had to be removed by ambulance to the Jewish hospital in town. When the pogrom began that evening, a group of Nazis searched the hospital and began seizing Jewish men. Though Fritz's injury was not serious, the doctor told the Nazis that Fritz needed to stay in the hospital for a full month and therefore he was left alone. Fritz's father, a diabetic, was arrested that same evening and sent to Dachau. Though he was released four weeks later, he never fully recovered his health. In the wake of Kristallnacht, the Jewish vocational school was closed, and Fritz returned to Krumbach, where his family focused their efforts on emigration. Relatives in the United States arranged for Fritz to receive a Cuban visa with the understanding that his parents and sister would follow shortly. Fritz sailed on the MS St. Louis. On board he spent most of his time in the company of Fritz Hilb, a friend from Ulm, and Georg and Werner Lenneberg from Cologne. When the ship was forced to return to Europe, the four were granted asylum in Belgium. Four several months they shared an apartment in Brussels. Meanwhile, Fritz's parents and sister managed to reach the United States by way of Italy in late 1939. A few months later, Fritz secured papers and set sail for America. He arrived in New York on January 13, 1940, seven months after the St. Louis returned to Europe. In 1945 he married Lotte Neuberger, another German-Jewish refugee, originally from Ichenhausen.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Fritz Buff

Funding Note: The cataloging of this collection has been supported by a grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Funding Note: The accessibility of this collection was made possible by the generous donors to our crowdfunded Save Their Stories campaign.

Fred and Lotte Buff donated the Fritz Buff papers to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007.