English

Rudolph Erwin Alexander Schwab Document Collection

A collection of over 2,500 letters discovered in South Africa and written mostly in German. The letters cover the period from 1936 to approximately 1970 in which Rudolph (Ralph) Alexander Erwin Schwab, who fled Hanau, Germany in 1933 corresponded with various people including his parents and brother who were stuck in Germany before and during the war and eventually killed by the German Nazis. The letters also describe in some detail, life in South Africa during that time as a new immigrant, Ralph's attempt to find out what happened to his family during the war, his legal battle with the German government for reparations and many hundreds of letters back and forth with his German "friends" who assisted him. The letters describe a range of thoughts, emotions and significant life experiences of family and friends who were eventually scattered all over the globe including Brazil, Canada, New York, St Louis, Illinois and France. The collection, discovered in Johannesburg in 2009, is one of the largest epistolary collections relating to the Holocaust period. The letters are unusually extensive and well written, and the fact that both sides of the correspondence were preserved (Schwab kep

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