Dr. Desider Friedmann

Desider Friedmann was born in Austria-Hungary as the son of Samuel and Ernestine Friedmann [now Boskovice in the Czech Republic], the head of the temple in Boskowitz. After graduating from grammar school in Brno in 1899, he studied law at the University of Vienna and joined the Jewish student fraternity Libanonia. After completing his doctorate in law, he practiced as a lawyer in Vienna. In 1921, he married Ella Stiassni and had two daughters with her.

Desider Friedmann was a member of the Zionist Association for Austria (ZLVfÖ) and at times its chairman. He became Vice President of the IKG Vienna in 1921. When he became President of the IKG in 1933, it was the first time a Zionist had held this position in Vienna. In 1934, he was appointed to the State Council of the Federal State of Austria, of which he was a member until 1938.

In this function, Desider Friedmann witnessed the downfall of a free and independent Austria on March 12, 1938 with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht. Afterwards, on March 18, 1938, the Jewish community in Vienna was searched and closed by members of the SS and Desider Friedmann was arrested along with his vice president Jakob Ehrlich, the official director of the IKG Josef Löwenherz and other Jewish functionaries in the course of the National Socialist persecution of Jews. (His second vice president Robert Stricker had already been arrested on March 14, 1938). In the course of the raid, donation receipts for the Vaterländische Front were found during the search of the IKG's premises. The campaign donations amounting to 800,000 schillings for an organization that advocated Austrian statehood were the official reason for the arrests.

After the receipt was found, Adolf Eichmann blackmailed the IKG into paying the same amount by deporting the members of the Presidium, including Desider Friedmann, to the Dachau concentration camp on April 2, 1938 on the so-called Prominent Transport. On April 13, 1938, he was transferred to the Vienna Gestapo. From September 25, 1938 to May 10, 1939, Desider Friedmann was imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp. After his release, the Nazi regime no longer allowed him to hold any leading positions in the Jewish community. He was not allowed to leave the Reich territory and was placed under house arrest in Vienna.

On September 24, 1942, Desider Friedmann was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto together with his wife. There he soon became a member of the so-called Council of Elders, an institution created and monitored by the SS to control the apparent autonomy of "Jewish self-administration". In this function, he became Jakob Edelstein's deputy on November 24, 1942, succeeding the deceased Heinrich Stahl. In the Theresienstadt ghetto, he had to manage the Bank of Jewish Self-Government, which issued its own banknotes.

In addition, he was forced to appear in the propaganda film Theresienstadt. A documentary film from the Jewish settlement area to portray the bank director. He has to give lectures to representatives of the Red Cross and be chauffeured through the ghetto in a car. Together with his wife, he was deported on one of the last transports to the Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1944 and murdered there.