With Holocaust memorial day coming up on 27 January we thought we would share a story about a refugee from Nazi Germany who came to the UK in 1933.
Hermann Ehlert was born on 14 January 1912 and was 21 when he left Germany and settled in Manchester. He had left Germany because his anti-fascist activities were beginning to come to the attention of the German authorities and he felt his arrest was imminent. He found work as a tutor in technical German at the University of Manchester and then later enrolled as a student of commerce and gaining his BA in 1940.
It was these same anti-fascist sentiments that caused him to enlist in the Lincoln Brigade of the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. He fought at Jarama and was seriously wounded by shrapnel at Brunete in July 1937, spending 8 months in the Pasionara hospital in Murcia and returning to Manchester in September 1938.
He was interned in Huyton prison camp on Merseyside as an enemy alien in late summer 1940. However, it looks likely that by 1942 he was back in Manchester as is evidenced by a letter dated 16 October 1942 sent to Mrs K Werner from the 24th Machine Gun Training Centre in Chester asking if Ehlert is available to give a talk about what it is like to live under fascism. We also have a letter addressed to him at 10 Wilbraham Road by Ross E Clark, a Captain in the US Air Force thanking him for a talk he had given to American service personnel.
He was also chair of the Free German League of Culture in Great Britain (Manchester Branch), which was a cultural organisation founded shortly before the war for refugees from Nazi Germany.
He returned to the German Democratic Republic in 1946 and died in Dresden on 20th March 1976 aged 64.
The library's collection of material about Hermann Ehlert is quite small – less than one archive box full, but it is packed with interesting items and includes Hermann’s passport and various documents from his time at the Universities of Vienna and Hamburg. There is also a document by Ehlert setting out his history and the personal reasons why he should not be interned.
The collection also contains several letters including one from GA Sutherland, Dalton Hall, University of Manchester regarding Ehlert's transfer to Huyton and efforts to get him released.
There are papers relating to the Manchester branch of the Free German League of Culture, which was based firstly in Hulme, Manchester and then, after its members had been released from internment, at 187 Oxford Road, Manchester and also to the Manchester branch of the Free German Movement in Britain.
Also in the collection are a number of leaflets, unsigned articles, essays and other papers, and a number of journals (all in German) aimed at Germans in the UK.