After More than 80 Years, Families Finally Read Their Loved Ones’ Last Words

#lostwords – Farewell letters from Munich-Stadelheim

• Fourteen families already found with the help of volunteers
• Eighty-two-year-old daughter of a victim learns of her father’s fate for the first time
• Project inspires further research into farewell letters from sites of Nazi executions

Around nine months ago, the Bavarian State Archives and the Arolsen Archives launched a collaborative project focusing on the farewell letters found in the execution files of victims of Nazi persecution from Munich-Stadelheim, one of the regime’s central execution sites. The project partners are now presenting the initial results of the #lostwords project.

Volunteers play key role in success

With the help of their Europe-wide network of volunteers, the Arolsen Archives succeeded in locating 14 families within a few months. In addition, extensive information about the people who wrote the farewell letters was gathered. The search for relatives is made easier by the wealth of detail often contained in the execution files held at the Munich State Archives.

One example of a successful search for surviving family members is the case of Lorenz Frühschütz, who was executed in Munich-Stadelheim on October 12, 1943. Volunteers found information on social media that led them to his daughter, Helga Knott, who is 82 years old and now lives in Sardinia. Only through #lostwords did she discover that her father had been executed. Because her mother died young, she had known nothing about his fate beforehand. “I’m a great believer in reality. If something has happened, I want to know about it,” says Helga Knott. This attitude explains why she not only read the letters, but also studied his execution file. “He had a different opinion. And he lived at the wrong time. If he had lived in a different era, he would have been free to express his views.”

Not every search leads to family members

Some execution victims were so young that they had not started families of their own when they were killed. Nevertheless, the research often fills important gaps and reveals new connections. The case of Jean Ferrier from France is a good illustration. The search for his relatives led to his hometown, where a street had already been named after him. His farewell letter is now helping to keep the memory of this victim of Nazi murder alive in the town where he lived.

Unexpected collaborations and new lines of research

The #lostwords project has also led to surprising connections with other research initiatives. In early 2025, microscopic specimens from several people executed at Munich-Stadelheim were discovered in the collection of the Institute of Anatomy in Erlangen. During the Nazi era, it was common practice not to bury the remains of execution victims, but to hand them over to nearby anatomical institutes for use in research and teaching. The Institute of Anatomy in Erlangen is now working with the Arolsen Archives to search for the families of these victims as well.

Research in other archives has also led to the discovery of further collections of undelivered farewell letters from the Nazi era.

Farewell letters that never reached their intended recipients

As a “central execution site” in the Nazi era, the Munich-Stadelheim prison was one of the main sites of Nazi injustice in Munich. A total of 1,188 people were executed there up until 1945. Among the most poignant documents to survive are these undelivered farewell letters written by condemned prisoners to their relatives, which were withheld by the prison administration or penal authorities of the time. More than 50 such letters can be found in the 844 so-called execution files, which have been stored in the Munich State Archives since 1975 and are freely accessible for academic and personal research.

The Nazi judiciary as an instrument of persecution

Between 1933 and 1945, the judiciary was co-opted to serve the aims of the Nazi regime, becoming an integral part of its system of injustice. The number of crimes punishable by the death penalty rose from three to 46 during this period. The “justice” dispensed by the special courts was politically motivated and the intention was to consolidate power, eliminate opponents, and intimidate the population.