Harald Leupold-Lowenthal
THE EMIGRATION OF FREUD'S FAMILY
The fate of Sigmund Freud, his family, his office, the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, the publishing house, and the
clinic in 1938 are only partly documented. Research during the last
few years, by Regine Lockot, Karen Brecht, Volker Friedrich has
been useful, but most of our information comes from the personal
reports by friends - some of them complementary and others con–
tradictory. Two years ago, however, the lawyer Martin Binder
turned over to the Freud Archives the documents about the efforts at
restitution of Harry Freud's and his descendants' assets. Among the
contents of more than thirty me boxes we discovered parts of Alfred
Indra's mes-the lawyer who represented Freud in 1938 and his
heirs in 1945-and of those by Erich Fiihrer, the commissar the
Nazis had appointed for Alexander and Harry Freud and who
managed the assets of Freud's four sisters. These documents enable
us to understand at least some of the terrible events in terms of dates
and numbers.
The documents of March 1938 are incomplete, as Alfred Indra
wrote to Martin Freud on November 17, 1961 (he begins with one of
his characteristic sentences: "You know that I am always ready to
serve the Freud family in whatever capacity."): "My mes were saved,
even if parts are missing, since at first the S.S. and then the Russians
took an interest in my affairs."
Indra, together with Anton Sauerwald, tried to make life for
the Freuds as easy as possible . On May 20, 1938, he tried to get
Freud excused from paying the
Reichsfluchtsteuer.
His request states:
On Dec.
31, 1937,
Dr. Freud declared assets of
AS 166.000·
Upon liquidating the assets of the various psychoanalytic enter–
prises the state police [Gestapo] decided in April
1938
that the
psychoanalytic corporation
be
dissolved; and that its earnings be
liquidated and its books destroyed.
On May 5,
1939,
Professor Dr. Freud took responsibility for
'In current Austrian shillings this should be multiplied by forty. To arrive at the ap–
proximate buying power of this shilling in current U .S. dollars, this should
be
multiplied by three.
