Documents of Injustice: The Case of Freud

The Austrian Cultural Forum New York presents Documents of Injustice. The Case of Freud. After great success in Vienna, the exhibition travelled to Manhattan, where it will be on view until February 2026. The exhibition sheds light on the last months of the Freud family in Nazi Vienna and recounts the events of the following years. The systematic dispossession of Sigmund Freud and his brother Alexander is traced in detail, and new findings deepen the knowledge of the fate and murder of their four sisters, Rosa, Maria, Adolfine, and Pauline, by the Nazi regime.

Unpublished (Perpetrator) Documents

The Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna recently acquired previously unknown documents from the estate of the Nazi-appointed “provisional administrator” of the International Psychoanalytical Publishing House (owned by Sigmund and Anna Freud). These now form the central element of the exhibition: Together with hundreds of original files, business correspondence, and lists of the asset manager of Alexander Freud and the four sisters, they provide insight into the legal and financial processes of the Nazi crimes. These records reveal another perfidy: The founder of psychoanalysis was able to ship the entire furnishings of Berggasse 19, including his collection of antiquities, to London, thus making his emigration appear privileged in the eyes of the international public. Behind the scenes, however, the Nazis robbed him of almost all his financial resources via the International Psychoanalytical Publishing House, putting his son Martin, who served as its managing director, under enormous pressure.

Alexander Freud was internationally recognized as the owner of the Allgemeiner Tarif-Anzeiger (General Tariff Gazette) and a freight expert, having achieved greater wealth than his more famous brother. It was only by surrendering all his possessions that he was able to save his life and that of his wife. Penniless, they left Vienna, fled via Zurich to London, and then on to Canada. Four of Freud’s five sisters were living in Vienna in 1938 – they were unable to leave the country. Evicted from their homes, quartered in a “collective apartment,” they were robbed, deported, and murdered in 1942.

The Fate of the Sisters

The exhibition presents new research findings and clarifies central questions in Freud research concerning the fate of the sisters – dispelling the myth that they were abandoned: Previously unpublished documents and letters from family members in Vienna, London, and New York describe the precautions taken by the brothers and other relatives to protect the elderly women in Vienna, as well as their ultimately fruitless efforts to get the sisters out of the country.

Messages from the sisters in Vienna, now held in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), reveal their increasingly dire living conditions against the backdrop of anti-Jewish measures. These personal records, as well as oral history interviews with Viennese women who cared for the elderly women, convey their fear, despair, and repeatedly burgeoning and disappointed hopes. In 1942, the four women were deported from the Seegasse retirement home to Theresienstadt and subsequently murdered: Adolfine Freud died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp; Rosa Graf, Pauline Winternitz, and Maria Freud were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp.