Not To Hate But To Love That Is What I Am Here For

About the Book

The fate of a racially persecuted – one of millions. Search for legal and illegal means to emigrate. Denunciation, arrest by the Gestapo, concentration camp, slave labor in the defense industry. The wife of the author commits suicide, because she sees no other way out. The little daughter is sent to the gas chamber, together with her caretaker. After the war’s end, with the cruelties of the years still fresh in Liebrecht’s memory, Heinrich Liebrecht has written down his path through the hell of the Third Reich without a word of reproach or accusation. He is concerned with reconciliation, not retaliation. The star of kindness may not sink, even in the night of cruelty, that is life’s balance for the author, who died at the end of 1989.

About the Author

Heinrich F. Liebrecht, born 1897, participant in WW I, judge in Berlin, removed from office in 1933 for political reasons. Until 1941 co-worker at the law office of the US Embassy, then arrest, torture, concentration camp. Time spent in USA after the liberation. 1949 he returned to the Federal Republic of Germany. He served in diplomatic as Consul and General Consul, and after retirement lived in Freiburg. Ursula Osborne, née Solmitz, was born in Hamburg Germany in 1927. She left for England with her siblings in 1938 in a Kindertransport. She lived in England until 1944, at a boarding school, called Bunce Court, where her aunt was a teacher. Meanwhile the Solmitz parents remained in Germany until 1941, and during that time Heinrich Liebrecht and Lies became their special friends. Liebrecht remained a lifetime family friend after WWII, through exchange of letters, and post-cards, and visits in California and Germany. Ursula, her husband and two sons met him in Freiburg in 1969, and continued the friendship with visits and exchange of letters. When, in his later years, Liebrecht was working on his memoir, he offered to send Ursula a copy. She received the posthumously in published paperback book from his last caretaker in 1996. Ursula earned a BS degree in Chemistry from UCLA in 1948, became a U.S.A. citizen in 1949, worked intermittently in chemical labs and taught in California public schools and in the Peace Corps at a high school in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. All along she continued to cultivate an interest in her native language, German.