Farewell letters from Nazi victims have been found, with Poles among the authors. Germans are searching for their families.

The Bavarian State Archives, together with the Arolsen Archives, have launched a search for relatives of those murdered in Stadelheim Prison during World War II. The families are to receive farewell letters from prisoners that have been hidden in the archives for decades.

– They teach about courage, dignity, human identity, and not giving up – emphasizes the director of the Arolsen Archives, Floriane Azoulay, in an interview with the Polish Press Agency.

318 Poles lost their lives in a German execution center

Stadelheim, one of the largest prisons in Germany, served as the "central execution center" of the Third Reich from 1934. By 1945, 1,188 people had died there, including German citizens, but also French, Czechs, and Poles. According to sources, 318 Poles were executed within the prison between 1940 and 1945.

Prisoners were entitled to farewell letters, but not all reached their intended recipients. In early 2025, a journalist working at the Bavarian State Archives discovered over 50 such documents, approximately 10 of which were written in Polish.

Azoulay explains that correspondence was monitored and censored by the prison administration. Some letters were likely deemed "inconvenient." For example, René Blondel and Victor Douillet, 24-year-old Frenchmen, wrote to the prison director instead of writing to their loved ones. "You can give this letter to Hitler and tell him: All the French don't care about you. Long live our homeland, France!" they wrote.

The letters will be sent to families and will also be available online.

Contemporary research recalls tragic and absurd sentences. The authors of many letters were convicted for supposedly minor offenses—such as stealing rabbits, driven by hunger, or critical remarks against the army. A case in point is the story of 81-year-old Maria Ehrlich, executed for criticizing the Wehrmacht.

One of the Polish prisoners was 19-year-old Jan Stępniak from Tomaszów Mazowiecki, who worked for a German housekeeper. The woman reported him, accusing him of threats—although, as the archives indicate, this was false. Stępniak was executed on November 2, 1942.

The discovered letters are to be distributed to the families, and their contents to the wider public. The Arolsen Archives plans to digitize them and publish them online. "It's really about justice. Today, it's about persistence, about democracy—what it is and why it's so important that we all fight for it," says Azoulay.

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