Dr Wilhelm Rechnitz papers
Collection
Included with these papers are letters from fellow Jewish German internees who were deported to Australia in 1940 as 'enemy aliens' and survived the holocaust in Europe, through which some of their stories can be revealed.
Reverend Dr Wilhelm Rechnitz was a German Jew with a PhD in Philology from Berlin University. He fled Germany to England in the 1930s and was subsequently deported to Australia on HMT Dunera in 1940, where he was detained as a refugee in internment camps at Hay, NSW and Tatura, Victoria. From 1949 to 1972 Rechnitz spent most of his time living and working in the Torres Strait. He converted to Anglicanism and was ordained as a Minister in 1953. As a language expert, he spent a lot of his time recording the Indigenous languages of the Torres Strait and translating church texts into these languages. He spent time on various islands, including Thursday Island, Darnley Island, Badu and Saibai. He retired to Brisbane in 1972 and died in 1978.
In copyright.
Library Board of Queensland