Interview of prisoners, Dachau

Dr. Mieczyslaw (Mietek) Dortheimer, born in 1911 in Krakow, Poland, set out to be a lawyer after graduating from Krakow’s Jagiellonian University. When the Nazis marched into Krakow, he fled with his wife and father to Lwow. His father later moved to the Warsaw Ghetto and was subsequently gassed at Treblinka. Later, Dortheimer worked in Tarnow as a factory administrator, on false papers. After the Tarnow ghetto liquidation, with help from his brother-in-law who was in the resistance, Dortheimer managed a saw-mill in the small town of Suchedniow. In January 1944, Dortheimer, his brother-in-law and wife were arrested and interrogated for two months in Radom prison, where it was discovered they were Jewish. In June 1944 they were ‘death marched’ 100km to Tomaszow and crammed onto cattle-cars for Auschwitz. From Auschwitz, Dortheimer was sent to the Natzweiler sub-camp Vaihingen-Enz, and months later to Dachau, where he contracted Typhoid shortly before liberation. Fluent in five languages, Dr. Dortheimer became Chairman of the Jewish Information Office in Dachau and interviewed Nazi war criminals for the Dachau trials as Administrative Director of the War Crimes Branch, (employed by US Army). He emigrated to Australia with his wife and two children in September 1948. After starting out as a laborer on a chicken farm, he built a successful importing business in Melbourne, where he died in 1984.