Gunhild Tegens samling

Gunhild Maria Elisabet Tegen (1889-1970), daughter of Johan Petter Nordling and Maria Erika Dahlén, was a Swedish writer and translator. Her engagement with the prosecution of Jews in Nazi Germany began in 1934 when Tegen read Gerhard Seger’s report on the German situation, written and published shortly after the latter escaped from Oranienburg concentration camp. Influenced by Seger’s report, Tegen wrote a film manuscript in 1935 concerning the situation of Jews in Germany, which, despite receiving minor acclaim, was never made into a film. During World War II, Tegen was active in the Committee for Intellectual Exiles (Kommittén för landsflyktiga intellektuella), maintaining engagement in refugee care and the peace movement. She also maintained close contact with Jewish poet and playwright – and later Nobel laureate – Nelly Sachs, who had arrived in Sweden as a refugee in 1940. After World War II, Tegen extensively documented the experiences of concentration camp survivors, which would be published in the edited volume _De dödsdömda vittna_ (Testimonial of the Condemned) in 1945. The majority of interviews, questionnaires, and manuscripts used in the volume can be found in this collection. Finding aids are available online. Links to finding aids: http://www.alvin-portal.org/alvin/view.jsf?pid=alvin-record%3A8151&dswid=6976 https://sok.riksarkivet.se/arkiv/HwhW5d2NSKIcf3zk3EFoc6 The collection contains a rich assortment of records related to the experiences of Jewish survivors of concentration camps, compiled by Gunhild and Einar Tegen as part of their post-World War II documentation project. The documentation was gathered at the initiative of the Swedish Joint Committee on Democratic Reconstruction (Samarbetskommittén för Demokratiskt Uppbyggnadsarbete), of which professor of philosophy Einar Tegen, the author Gunhild Tegen’s husband, was president. The interviews were conducted by Swedish psychologist Valdemar Fellinius and polyglot Dory Engströmer and carried out at refugee camps and university locales. Though the documentation process encompassed over 600 refugees, many survivors would abstain from answering the questionnaire out of fear that inclusion in such a book might compromise their identities and lead to future persecution. The questionnaires and interviews touched upon victims’ conditions of abduction/arrest, their conditions of escape or rescue, their treatment during their detainment at concentration camps, as well as the victims’ personal experiences and general well-being following their exposure and subjection to atrocity. A considerable number of interviewees in the collection are Jews who had been prisoners at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, and Belsen. As the questionnaires and interviews of Jewish victims were quantified separately from Christian prisoners, the Tegens’ preliminary work with the assembled material offers specific insights into the experiences of Jewish survivors, offering graphic statistics on the types of abuse that they suffered in the camps. Additional statistical information includes countries of origin, nationalities, spoken language, and quantified data on specific concentration camp internment. In addition to the documentation covered by the committee initiative, the collection includes correspondences between Gunhild Tegen and her acquaintances from other European countries who, having learned of the committee’s work with refugees, decided to share their accounts of survivor experiences. The collection furthermore contains various source material related to Testimonial of the Condemned, the 1945 book in which Einar and Gunhild Tegen published the documentation mentioned above. The collection includes correspondence between the Tegens and various publishing houses in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands in the couple’s attempts to translate and publish the book abroad, which met limited success. Plans to translate the manuscript to Hebrew and send it to Mandatory Palestine for publishing and revision were made as early as December 1945. The correspondence in the collection further shows that discussions to use the Testimonial of the Condemned as evidence in the Nuremberg trials had taken place. Though the endeavor was ultimately not realized, a copy of the book was sent to the Chief United States Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Robert H Jackson.