Letter by a Jewish Prisoner of War who Served in the Army of Nazi Germany – Sent from Camp McCain for Prisoners of ...

Letter by a Jewish Prisoner of War who Served in the Army of Nazi Germany – Sent from Camp McCain for Prisoners of War in the USA to Rabbi Max Koppel – 1943
A handwritten letter by a Jewish Wehrmacht soldier. Sent from the McCain camp for prisoners of war, USA, to Rabbi Dr. Max Koppel in New York. Camp McCain, Mississippi, 1943. German.
A handwritten letter by Willibald Hoffman, a Jewish soldier in the army of Nazi Germany who was taken prisoner and held in the McCain camp for prisoners of war in Mississippi, USA. Written on the official lettersheet of the Prisoner of War mail, with the official stamps of the camp, the American censor and the USA post. He writes, "You will be amazed by these lines, since I have lost all contact with my relatives […] my father's name is Shmuel Felix and he came from Austria-Hungary, where he owned […] coloring and weaving factories. Later, my father moved to Koln on the Rhein, where he was the owner of a wholesale fabric store. As he was Jewish, the events in Germany forced him to escape. I adopted a different name" (German). At the end of the letter, Hoffmann asks Rabbi Koppel to visit him in the detention camp so he could give him additional information.
Camp McCain for prisoners of war, whence this letter was sent, was established in the Granada district of Mississippi state in 1942 as a training camp for American infantry bound to join the fighting in Europe. During the war, more than 7700 German prisoners of war were held in the camp. They were put to work in the cotton fields of the Mississippi delta. The camp operated until October 1944.
The addressee, Rabbi Max Koppel, was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in 1905. A graduate of The Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau (JTS) and the universities of Breslau and Würzburg, he served as a rabbi in Hirschberg (today, Jelenia Góra in Poland) and Berlin and was an educator at the Joseph Lehman school of the Reform community in Berlin. In 1937 he immigrated to the USA, was one of the founders of Congregation Emes Wozedek in Washington Heights and Rabbi of the congregation.
[1] lettersheet, 35.5 cm (folded into an envelope, 10X15 cm.) Good condition. Some stains and minor blemishes.