‘I beg you again from my heart to help me find my sister’: RELICO and the Need for Knowledge

Editor’s note: As has previously been mentioned on this blog, our sister blog, Migrant Knowledge, also always bears some relevance to the history of knowledge. This is not surprising since, as that blog’s motto points out, it seeks to “writ[ e] knowledge into the history of migration and migration into the history of knowledge.” In that spirit, we offer this crossposting from Migrant Knowledge as we have occasionally done since that blog’s inception.

On 12 June 1942, Rosel Wolff (1899–1982) handwrote a letter from her new home in the small village of Broughton in Lancashire, England, to RELICO, the Committee for Relief of the War-Stricken Jewish Population. Having fled to Britain in August 1939, she sought to maintain contact with her beloved sister, Paula (1896–1942), after her brother, Theodor (1905–1978), was interned in Australia as an enemy alien in July 1940, traveling there on the infamous SS Dunera. After receiving news via the Red Cross that her sister had been forcibly taken, Rosel wrote in desperation to RELICO in Geneva in an effort to locate her:

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Marginalized Migrant Knowledge: The Reception of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in West Germany after 1945

Today we offer two examples of academic knowledge on the move in tandem with the Migrant Knowledge blog. Anna Corsten looks at the reception of two German-speaking refugee historians in West Germany, and Razak Khan discusses the place of certain travel experiences in Magnus Hirschfeld’s thought.

In Germany today, Hans Rosenberg (1904–1988) and Raul Hilberg (1926–2007) are viewed as important pioneers in the study of National Socialism and the Shoah. Because of their Jewish background, they had been threatened by Nazi persecution and had emigrated to the United States.1 In the postwar era, Rosenberg’s work was initially embraced in the United States and marginalized in West Germany, whereas Hilberg’s was both praised and attacked in the United States, and ignored in West Germany. How and why did these historians move from the margins to the mainstream of German historiography? How did migration figure in their work and its reception?

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