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How a Nazi saved Sigmund Freud

The extraordinary story of the psychoanalyst’s escape from the Holocaust.

January 28, 2010 10:34
Sigmund Freud and  his daughter Anna arrive in Paris after fleeing Vienna in June 1938.

ByAnonymous, Anonymous

11 min read

Vienna, 25 July 1947: Anton Sauerwald looked very haggard for a man of 44. His doctor, Karl Szekely, had written many times to the court to explain that his patient was suffering from tuberculosis and the proceedings should be delayed. Sauerwald had spent a month in hospital. However, Judge Schachermayr would have no more delays.

For most of the war Sauerwald had been an officer in the Luftwaffe, not a pilot but a technical expert. In March 1945 he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp at Bad Heilbrunn run by the Americans, but in June he was released and returned to Vienna.

He was an extremely well-educated man. When he was 24 years old, he published four learned papers in the Monatshefte für Chemie (Chemical Monthly), one of the leading journals in the world in the field of chemistry. He had a doctorate from the University of Vienna, where his professor was a distinguished organic chemist, Josef Herzig. Sauerwald always liked and respected “Herr Professor Herzig”.

Once back in Vienna, Sauerwald could not find his wife, Mariane. While he was searching for her, someone else was looking for him. Harry Freud, Sigmund’s nephew, was an officer in the American army and he insisted that Sauerwald must be tracked down. Harry believed that Sauerwald had robbed his family and destroyed the family business, the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag or publishing house that his grandfather had started in 1919. He forced his way into the Sauerwalds’s old flat to seek out documents that would prove the man’s guilt. No one would stop an American officer.