"Minsk - Im lager der deutschen Juden"

Karl Loewenstein (1887-1976) was born to Jewish parents in Siegen, Germany, and in 1917 he married Margot Hamburger, who also came from a Jewish family. In 1919, however, he converted to Christianity as a Lutheran. After having served as a naval officer during World War I, he worked as a director of a bank in Berlin, named Busse and Co. He was active in a Lutheran parish in Berlin-Weissensee, and in the 1930s, was one of the founders of a Confessing Church congregation that split from that parish. Due to his involvement in the Confessing Church, as well as his Jewish background, he was arrested in November 1941 and deported to the Minsk Ghetto. In May 1942 he was transferred to Theresienstadt, where he was appointed by the camp commandant to supervise the security services in the ghetto, including the fire brigade. He survived the war and following liberation, he moved to Great Britain, where one son lived, and then to Australia, where another son (Fred Lowen) lived, before returning to Berlin, where he lived the remainder of his days. Photocopy of a published article by Karl Loewenstein, titled "Minsk--Im Lager der deutschen Juden," 16 pages, which originally appeared in "Die Mahnung: Organ des Bundes der Verfolgten des Naziregimes Berlin, e.V.," Vol. 4, No. 1, 1 January 1957. The article describes Loewenstein's experiences, from the point in which he was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin in 1941, through his deportation to Minsk and what he experienced and witnessed there until his transfer to Theresienstadt the following year. He describes living conditions in the camp to which deportees from Berlin were assigned, the structure of the Jewish Council in the ghetto, duties assigned to Loewenstein, escape attempts from the ghetto, efforts to obtain clothing, food and other necessary goods through the black market, descriptions of mass shootings that he witnessed--including one of children from a Russian orphanage--as well as the use of mobile vans as gas chambers for killing ghetto residents.