On the Roof of Himmler's Guesthouse - The U.S. Army in Wannsee in 1945
Special exhibition, including an audio walk, in the garden of the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site. June 19, 2025, to June 30, 2026, open daily 10 am to 6 pm, admission free.
- Fritz Traugott was expelled from Hamburg as a Jewish German in 1938. He returned to Germany as an American soldier. From July to September 1945, his unit found accommodation in the Wannsee villa, the former SS guest house.
- He sent his wife Lucia photographs and letters from the Wannsee villa almost every day, often on stationery from the “Führer's adjutant's office”, which he had found in the Reich Chancellery. The letters and photographs of Fritz Traugott are published for the first time; they are the core of the exhibition.
- The exhibition is a portrait of Fritz Traugott, in documents and in an audio walk, describing his experiences in the summer of 1945: What can these sources tell us about the liberators' perspectives on defeated Germany?
- It was only after Lucia Traugott's death in 2018 that her children took up the documents and approached the House of the Wannsee Conference: Michael, Mark and Kathryn Traugott will travel from the USA to attend the exhibition opening.
Audio Walk
Fritz Julius Traugott, born in Hamburg in 1919, a student at the Lichtwark School, fled to the USA in 1938. His brother Wolfgang and parents Moritz and Therese also managed to emigrate to the United States. His sister Hedwig survived the Shoah with her non-Jewish husband and their two daughters in Hamburg. When Fritz Traugott arrived in Germany, he set off in search of his sister and traveled to Hamburg in June 1945.
Fritz Traugott was one of the so-called Ritchie Boys: US soldiers who, because of their native German language skills, were trained to interrogate prisoners of war and war criminals. The “Mobile Field Interrogation Unit #2” conducted interrogations not far from the Wannsee Villa. They knew that they are housed in a former SS guesthouse, but they were not yet aware of the meeting that took place in the house on January 20, 1942.
“During outings to the cinema and theatre, some of the Ritchie Boys discovered aspects of German culture that they were familiar with from before the war. For many, their return to Germany represented a break from the past. The Germans who had forced them to leave now looked to them as representatives of a new power. Through persecution and loss, the language, places and people they had once known had become alien to them. When they went to places such as the Reich Chancellery or the former SS guesthouse in Wannsee, they encountered symbols and signs of Nazi rule. By appropriating stationery, emblems and buildings like the villa on Lake Wannsee, the men demonstrated their own personal victory over the Nazi dictatorship.”
“We would like to thank Michael, Mark and Kathryn Traugott for their trust and openness. Fritz Traugott rarely spoke to them about his childhood and youth in Germany or about his time in the US army. Sifting through the valuable sources and sorting them together can reconstruct a piece of family history. Further research, which we carried out in American and German archives, can add to the puzzle - but it will always remain fragmented.”
For more information:
Eike Stegen
Press and Public Relations
Telephone: +49 30 2179986 40
E-Mail: stegen[at]ghwk.de
The exhibition is made possible by the LOTTO-Stiftung Berlin