The “300 Children Campaign” of 1939
In 1939, 300 children arrived in Switzerland. The plan was that they would travel on to other countries after a few months. World War II got in the way and many of the children stayed here for years, as Anneliese Laupheimer’s story shows.
Sabina Bossert
Sabina Bossert is a specialist in contemporary Jewish history at the Archives of Contemporary History at the ETH Zurich.
Among these children was a pair of sisters from Memmingen, Anneliese and Lotte Laupheimer. They came from a middle-class Jewish family. Their father, Julius Laupheimer, co-owned a men’s clothing store with his brothers. At the end of 1938 Julius Laupheimer was arrested and temporarily interned in the Dachau concentration camp. Anneliese was eleven years old at the time, and had an intellectual disability.
In the summer of 1942, Anneliese and Lotte’s parents were deported to Poland. In a postcard dated 19 June 1942, the Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe Lublin (Jewish Social Self-Help Lublin) wrote that the Laupheimers were “in Piaski, Lublin district, and healthy”. From 1940 Piaski, which was part of the German-administered part of Poland after Germany’s occupation, was the site of a ghetto set up initially for Polish Jews who were deported to the Belzec extermination camp in March 1942. The ghetto then became a transit camp for German Jews who were later murdered in the Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps. No details are known of the fate of Jeanette and Julius Laupheimer; but it is clear that they didn’t survive World War II. A former neighbour from Memmingen, Else Günzburger, wrote to Emma Zuberbühler on 14 March 1946: “Unfortunately, both parents and the bachelor uncle Herr David are no longer alive. Of the Jews in Memmingen, only the gentlemen from the mixed marriages are still alive, Gutman, Grünfeld and my husband[.]”
When the war ended, a lot changed for Anneliese. In 1946 her sister emigrated to the USA, where she married Walter Ullmann. Since it was now clear that Anneliese no longer had a family to return to and, due to her disability, emigrating was not an option, SHEK applied for permanent asylum in Switzerland on her behalf. After the end of World War II, most of the refugees – in line with Switzerland’s maxim of being only a transit country – had to travel on to other countries. The few who stayed behind for reasons of health or age lived here in a kind of provisional arrangement; they were granted permanent asylum in 1947. Overall, just under three percent of all refugees admitted during World War II were able to stay in Switzerland permanently, i.e. around 1,600 people. Of these, 1,345 people were granted permanent asylum, including Anneliese Laupheimer “due to incurable illness”.
Ilse Wyler-Weil was Anneliese’s guardian for many years. Ilse Wyler, who had also come to Switzerland with the 300-Kinder-Aktion, had married Swiss livestock dealer Max Wyler and lived with him in Uster. She regularly visited Anneliese, whom she described as “very much in need of affection” and “lovely and well-behaved, but wholly unable to occupy herself in any way”, and brought her small gifts for her birthdays and for Jewish holidays.
Anneliese Laupheimer died in 2008 and was buried at the Winterthur Jewish Cemetery. As there were no heirs and no will, the remainder of her assets (minus the cost of the funeral and headstone) were awarded to the VSJF, Ilse Wyler-Weil and the Hugo Mendel Foundation.
