A Special Exhibit opens June 19 in Berlin
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and at a moment when global authoritarianism is on the rise, a tiny fraction of the people with memories of the war and Hitler’s Europe are alive today to relay their stories. It is increasingly the work of archivists and descendants to transmit the record of that time– to honor and reckon with the past, and to invoke what Elie Wiesel called “a prayer, a promise and a vow”: Never again.
A special exhibition opening June 19 at the House of the Wannsee (VAN-see) Conference Memorial and Educational Site on the outskirts of Berlin centers on the story of Fritz Traugott, a German Jewish refugee expelled from his native Hamburg, who returned to Europe as an American soldier.
Traugott was among some 10,000 “Ritchie Boys” in the U.S. Army– soldiers trained in intelligence gathering who graduated from Camp Ritchie, Maryland– and one of the 20 percent of that force who were Jewish refugees with language skills that were leveraged in the effort.
His letters to his wife at home in Providence, R.I., and photos he took at the Wannsee villa in the summer of 1945 are at the heart of the special exhibit that tells Traugott’s story but is as much about memory itself.
“In my mind, it’s not really a story about my father,” said Michael Traugott, who shared his father’s documents with Wannsee after discovering them in 2018. “I think he is kind of a vessel in this story for thinking about the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, and about what happened then, and how it relates to what’s going on now, and other events in between.”
A Portrait of Fritz Traugott
The youngest of three children, Fritz Julius Traugott was born in Hamburg in 1919. After the passage of Nuremberg Laws that sought to marginalize and separate Jews in German society in 1935, he was forced to leave the Lichtwark School, a prominent high school that emphasized cultural education and the fine arts. He remained in close contact with his classmates and his teacher, Erna Stahl, an influential educator who once characterized her own work as creating an “inner counterbalance” in her students to the “destructive, demonic denial of all human spiritual worth, especially in Germany, which could not be undone.”
A 1933/34 class photo of the Lichtwark School from the Traugott archive. Both in the back row, Fritz Traugott is third from the left, and Erna Stahl, fourth from the right. Six of the students in the photo are wearing Hitler Youth uniforms.
With professional opportunities likewise cut off, Traugott followed his brother in immigrating to the United States in 1938, and his parents followed. Traugott’s sister, Hedwig, remained in Hamburg with her non-Jewish husband and two daughters, surviving through Nazi persecution, forced labor, and the bombing of their home.
Traugott married Lucia Scola, an Italian-American Catholic, in Providence.
At 22, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he was transferred to Camp Ritchie to learn counter-intelligence and interrogation techniques. He was first deployed to England to participate in the “secret listeners” program, an operation that helped record details using bugging devices to pick up conversations among German military leaders. They collected important intelligence information to help the war effort, including the location of the facility where V2 rockets were being built.
Traugott was sent to France where with his unit, Mobile Field Interrogation Unit #2, he later traveled behind American troops moving into Germany, interviewing prisoners of war. He was at the Battle of the Bulge, not as a combatant, but working feverishly to collect intelligence from German prisoners. And just after Germany’s surrender, he was billeted at the Wannsee villa from July to September 1945. His unit was housed at the former SS guesthouse that– although his unit may not have been initially aware of it– had been the site of a pivotal Nazi summit a few years prior to plan “the final solution.”
The Summer of 1945
Traugott spent more than two months at the Wannsee villa, a site referred to as “Himmler’s guesthouse,” during this early post-war period. He bought a camera in Berlin and sent pictures and daily letters to his wife in Providence, often on “souvenir” stationery from “the Führer’s adjutant’s office” he had found in the Reich Chancellery.
Based on the photos taken by Fritz Traugott, this artist rendering of the Ritchie Boys at the Wannsee villa was created for the museum by Mathis Eckelmann. Courtesy of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site.
The photos and letters, now on display as part of the special exhibit at Wannsee, include snapshots of soldiers and prisoners of war at Wannsee, the nearby interrogation center, and the ruins of his former home he took on a visit to Hamburg.
His letters communicate his affection for Lucia and infant son, Michael, born in his absence. One personal account to his wife, written on pilfered Nazi letterhead on Aug. 10, 1945, describes how the normalization of persecution made it difficult to communicate and for outsiders to understand it:
You see sweetheart, when you live in danger, or misery, or any other extreme state, you kinda get used to it, or at least it loses most of the effect it has on outsiders.
From the Traugott archive, a letter home on the pilfered stationary of the “Adjutantur Des Führers,” August 10, 1945.
Traugott took two short visits to Hamburg to see his sister and the city he fled in 1938. On his second visit, his sister Hedwig wrote a letter to her parents describing what had happened to them under the Nazi regime. That letter, which is lost today, included details so troubling that Traugott and his brother decided not to deliver it, Michael Traugott said.
Traugott returned home in the fall of 1945.
Unearthing the Past
Traugott went on to rear three children in Providence– Michael, Mark, and Kathryn. He established his own jewelry company and later worked as a sales manager for the Colonial Knife Co.
Traugott seldom spoke to his children about his life in Germany or his time in the war. He had likely signed nondisclosure agreements during his service, his son said, and there were memories unwanted. Traugott avoided speaking German for a long period after the war and didn’t return to visit Germany for more than 25 years.
Traugott died in Palm Beach in 1995.
Lucia preserved the letters, photographs, and documents displayed in the exhibition.
It was only after her death in 2018 that their children discovered these historical sources: Over 300 letters and a few dozen photographs.
Michael initially made contact with the Wannsee Conference House with an emailed photograph of the villa with the American flag hoisted above it.
After two years of research and contact, the museum is presenting a special exhibit that centers on Traugott’s materials and experience.
History, Memory, and Extrapolation
The upcoming exhibit, which includes an audio tour in the gardens of Wannsee, brings with it a convergence of past and present, and of personal and global history that invites exploration into the legacy of perpetrators, victims, and liberators.
“Fritz Traugott’s biography, letters, and photographs provide us and our visitors with a different and new perspective on the history of the House of the Wannsee Conference,” said exhibit curator Judith Alberth. “His parents, his brother and he himself were expelled due to antisemitic persecution, and his sister, his brother-in-law, and his nieces survived the Shoah in Hamburg in desperate circumstances. Their stories add a significant perspective to the sources and biographies of perpetrators that the House is mostly linked to.”
“L’dor vador,” which translates to “from generation to generation,” is a central concept in Jewish culture, which places weighted emphasis on the passing of stories and traditions across time.
“Part of this journey recently has been a deeper recognition of this Jewish history, which we never lived, but has been brought to the forefront through the development of the exhibition,” said Michael Traugott, who had little exposure to religion aside from Catholic sacramental ceremonies growing up. “…There’s also an element of realizing opportunities that we lost to have extended conversations with our father – which he might not have wanted to participate in.”
Michael, Mark, and Kathryn Traugott, retracing their father’s steps at the Wannsee House
Traugott’s descendants– who will all attend the opening of the exhibit– have used the photographs and documents to plumb their family history. In 1994, Michael Traugott also took a trip to Berlin to retrace steps his father had taken and to reproduce photos his father had taken on the same grounds, 50 years prior.
“Sifting through the valuable sources and sorting them together can reconstruct a piece of family history,” Alberth wrote of the exhibit. “Further research, which we carried out in American and German archives, can add to the puzzle – but it will always remain fragmented.”
“This project has involved memory, but also extrapolation,” said Michael Traugott. “It’s both trying to reconstruct events of the past with relative accuracy, but thinking about how behavior, events, and belief systems might be extended forward in time to other events, and other periods.”
Traugott’s story invites us to imagine what it might have been like for a refugee to return to Germany in what his son described as “a strange re-immersion.”
Museum director Deborah Hartmann writes, for example, of what it might have meant for Traugott to appropriate stationary and souvenirs from places like the Chancellery: “The men demonstrated their own personal victory over the Nazi dictatorship,” she writes.
For Hartmann, the exhibit is also an occasion to consider how we remember past events, and the impact of memory on our political actions and national and community identities.
Research on collective memory distinguishes history and memory. French scholars Jean-Francois Orianne and Francis Eustache write that “history separates the past from the present and future, whereas memory links them together. Memory always operates in the present: it is a continual rewriting of the past in the present for future use.”
The exhibit ends with a photograph of Vice President J.D. Vance, visiting the Dachau Concentration Camp on Feb. 13, 2025. The next day, at the Munich Security Conference, Vance demanded that Germany’s far-right parties, including the AfD, not be excluded in coalition governments. AfD leaders have specifically repudiated the idea that we should educate future generations about atrocities in Germany’s past, as a safeguard to our future.
“The open and critical discourse on history is a core element of free, democratic societies,” said Hartmann. “Authoritarian governments therefore see it as a threat and seek to impose only the narratives they have set as valid. This repeatedly leads to distortions in the history of the Holocaust, which we must counter. When the leader of the far-right AFD party, in a conversation with Elon Musk on X, refers to Adolf Hitler as a ‘communist,’ and Musk agrees with her, they are denying the ideological origins of the Holocaust in racist antisemitism.”
The exhibition, which will run until next summer, opens June 19, 2025, with free daily admission from 10 to 6. The museum’s registration for the opening– which can be attended live or online– is now open.
This post was written by Tevah Platt, a communicator for the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. Michael Traugott is a research professor affiliated with the Center for Political Studies and an expert on campaigns and elections, voting behavior, and political communication.
