Julius Strassburger family correspondence

Julius Strassburger (1896-1983) was born in Leutershausen to Max Strassburger and Frieda Oppenheimer Strassburger. He married Selma Mane (1904-1991) and the couple lived with their two sons, Fred (1932-2004) and John (born Hans, 1934-) in Weinheim. Julius Strassburger worked as a leather buyer and began to make plans to leave Germany in the summer of 1935. He obtained visas for his family with the help of his cousins Harvey, Eugene, and William Strassburger in Pittsburgh, and they settled in Delaware in July 1936. Selma Strassburger's parents died in the concentration camp at Gurs in 1941. The Julius Strassburger family correspondence documents his family’s immigration to the United States with the help of his cousins in Pittsburgh. The letters describe his increasingly constrained life in Germany, his cousins’ efforts to secure him a position in Delaware in the leather industry as well as affidavits for him and his family, and the family’s arrival in 1936. The correspondence also includes a 1940 postcard from Selma Strassburger that her father never received, correspondence from 1941 documenting the family’s unsuccessful efforts to bring Julius Strassburger’s sister and brother‐in‐law, Greta and Fritz Stiefel, to the United States, and a clipping dated approximately 1965 from Linn’s Weekly Stamp News entitled “Gone – Without Leaving Address” about stamps on mail returned from addressees who had most likely been transported to concentration camps. Some of the German correspondence is accompanied by English translations provided by the donor.