Freedom Gained and Lost: One Family’s Holocaust Fate
In May of 1939, the MS St. Louis departed from Hamburg, Germany, carrying 937 passengers, mostly Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. Leopold and Johanna Dingfelder and their 15-year-old son Rudi were among them. The Dingfelders had made the difficult decision to leave everything behind in Plauen, Germany — their home, their business, the people of their community. The couple’s older son, Martin, had immigrated to America the previous year as anti-Jewish measures intensified in Germany.
The St. Louis was headed for Havana, Cuba, where most of its passengers were denied entry. They were also rejected from the United States and Canada before being forced to return to Europe. Negotiations between the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, US government officials, and others convinced Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium to admit the passengers rather than returning them to Nazi Germany.
At some point on the journey, Leopold wrote a note on a napkin requesting that his family be allowed to go ashore in London because his brother Carl Felder had traveled there from Cleveland, Ohio, to help him. However, the Dingfelders disembarked in the Netherlands and eventually settled in Gouda.
Less than a year later in May of 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands. Jews were quickly banned from civil service and required to register their business assets. In January of 1941, they had to register as Jewish. In 1942, the Nazis began deporting Jews from western Europe, including the Netherlands, to German-occupied territory in eastern Europe.
Leopold, Johanna, and Rudy were arrested in Gouda and sent to the Westerbork transit camp. The following year, Leopold and Johanna were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center, where they were murdered.
Rudi was moved between camps and then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in March of 1944, after which he was forced to work at a nearby Siemens factory. By January 1945, the Soviet Army had advanced on the Nazis. That same month, Rudi and fellow prisoners were evacuated to the Buchenwald concentration camp, a journey with no food amid freezing temperatures. Many of them died along the way.
Rudi was later sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he again became a slave laborer for Siemens. Then the Soviet advance led to another evacuation — a death march with no shoes, food, or water.
“I heard that the American forces were coming … . I escaped with five comrades … three were shot. A Frenchman and I were [freed] by the American forces … and were brought to a military hospital. After two days, my last comrade, the Frenchman, was dying by weakness,” said Rudi in a letter he wrote after the war.
After liberation, Rudi made his way back to Gouda. All of his family’s belongings had been taken. Food and goods were scarce, but he found work where he could and met his future wife, Gerry Wolff.
In 1947, almost a decade after his family’s initial attempt to escape from the Nazis on the St. Louis, Rudi joined his brother, Martin, in the United States. Gerry followed in 1948. The couple was married and settled in Detroit, Michigan. They later had a daughter, Joan.
Like Rudi’s parents, more than a quarter of those who attempted to escape from Nazi Germany on the St. Louis in 1939 were later killed in the Holocaust. Learn more about the Dingfelder and Wolff families and the St. Louis’s journey on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.
