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Adolf Moritz Steinschneider (1894 - 1944)
From 1926 until 1933, Adolf Moritz Steinschneider lived as a politically
active lawyer and criminal defender in Frankfurt-on-Main. He was engaged
with the German League for the Human Rights, was legal adviser of the
German Peace Society, and attorney for the Communist "Red Aid"
organization. After the Reichstag fire, he had to flee "head over
heels" [as the German expression has it in literal translation] to
Switzerland; his combined law office and dwelling in Frankfurt was ransacked
by Storm Troopers.
When Switzerland withdrew his right of asylum because of his active political
participation, Steinschneider went, in 1935, to Paris. After war broke
out in 1939, he,_ a German political refugee_ interned by the French authorities,
succeeded in fleeing from the North to the South of France in June of
1940. Until the end of 1942, he served as a conscript in various forced-labor
camps of the Vichy regime.
Throughout the whole of his time in exile, Steinschneider, as a non-dogmatic
leftist, reflected in his letters and numerous manuscripts on the [theme
of] political and social liberation from Fascism and Stalinism. An especially
dense account of his "Exiles from the Bottom" are contained
in his letters to his brothers Karl and Gustav Steinschneider, who had
fled to Palestine.
In Bellac, a small town close by Limoges, where also his companion Eva
Reichwein,later Steinschneider and their daughter Marie-Louise had taken
refuge in 1940, he tried to escape the SS-Battalion "Das Reich"
marching through, which apprehended and killed him on June 11, 1944.
[Translated from the German by David M. Fishlow, Washington
DC, USA, a distant relative of Steinschneider's mother Léopoldine,
née Fischlowitz.]
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