Nazi prisoner’s last letter given to family 72 years later

Joop Will was 10 years old when his father, Peter, was seized by the Nazis for being a member of the Dutch resistance.

Will never saw his father again after the December 1943 arrest, but thanks to a series of fortunate coincidences and a newly online Holocaust-era archive, the 82-year-old has finally received his father’s last letter, written to his wife and six sons as he prepared to be deported to a concentration camp in Germany.

“I’ve now been away from you at home for the 42nd Sunday,” the father wrote, counting time by the days of worship missed with his family.

“It is very emotional, he thought of us, he had concerns for us,” Will said.

“To know his thoughts were with us, that is a very emotional thing.”

The letter was folded into Peter Will’s wallet and recovered by the British army when it liberated the Neuengamme concentration camp in northern Germany in 1945.

It was transferred in 1963 to the International Tracing Service in the German town of Bad Arolsen.

In 2007, scholars and researchers were allowed access to the documents, beginning the archive’s transformation from a tracing service to a research institution.

In October, the ITS began putting its archive online, and Peter Will’s belongings were among the 50,000 images initially posted, of some 30m documents and images in its collection.