The fate of German-Jewish psychoanalyst refugees in the Netherlands: An overview

Abstract

This article deals with the six German-Jewish psychoanalysts who fled from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands in the 1930s. Watermann and Landauer perished in the German concentration camps. Levy-Suhl survived the German occupation of the Netherlands but died soon after. Reik went on to the USA before World War II. Lampl and Keilson lived and worked in the Netherlands for the rest of their lives.

Key words:

• World War II
• The Netherlands
• Jewish analysts – refugees
• Watermann
• Reik
• Lampl
• Keilson

Notes

¹ Louis Tas, who was also in the camp with his father Jacques and his mother, mentions him in his diary of the camp, which he edited under the pseudonym Loden Vogel (Lead Bird; Loden Vogel, 2000).

² Quoted from Freud in a letter to Jeanne, dated 18 February 1932: “that his [Hans’] jealousy of me comes to light so clearly, is perhaps inevitable for the course of the disease” (from a Dutch translation then translated into English).

³ I owe this quotation to Hanna Stouten.

⁴ From then on, the name Hans was written with one “n,” the form we have used throughout this article.

⁵ Marie Bonaparte intervened in this case with the Dutch Queen Juliana, as is clear from Queen Juliana's answer to Marie Bonaparte of October 10, 1948 (Stouten, 2011, p. 168).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Harry Stroeken

Author

Harry Stroeken is a Dutch psychoanalyst and member of the IPA. He has published extensively on the history of psychoanalysis in Dutch, German, and English.