Survivor Stories: Dan Ottenheimer

Students from Woodland Hills Senior High School interviewed Dan Ottenheimer, son of Fritz Ottenheimer, German-Jewish refugee and liberator of the Leipzig-Thekla forced labor camp.

Fritz Ottenheimer was born in 1925 in Konstanz, Germany – a large town with a population of around 40,000. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Fritz and his family were forced to endure increasing anti-Jewish propaganda, discrimination, and persecution. And then in November of 1938, Fritz witnessed his father’s arrest, on what is now called Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass,” when about 30,000 innocent Jewish men were taken to concentration camps.

In 2019, two years after his father passed away, Dan began to speak in the Greater Boston area about his father’s experiences in Germany. Dan now also speaks in the Pittsburgh area virtually, as part of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh’s Generations Speakers Bureau.