Biographical History

Walter Kutschmann (1914 - 1986), stepbrother of the donor’s mother, was a Gestapo officer who escaped to Argentina and was hunted by Simon Wiesenthal for war crimes but who died before he could be extradited.

The donor's mother, Margarete Hollingshead née Hoffmann, (1917-2007), was half-German, born in Blankenburg-am-Harz, Saxony-Anhalt. She was sent to live with her English mother’s relatives when her mother died in 1930. Her father, Ernst Hoffmann, remarried in 1939: Frau Hanna Kutschmann, a widow with three children: Walter, Klaus and Hannele. Ernst Hoffmann, then a serving officer in the German army, died in The Hague in 1941. In 1946 Margarete started receiving letters from Hanna Kutschmann, who was living in Bischhausen, Lower Saxony, and Walter Kutschmann, living in Spain under an assumed name (Enrique Garcia). He had been in the Gestapo throughout the war and escaped to Spain in 1944, and from there to Argentina in 1947 (assumed name: Pedro Ricardo Olmo). Margarete appeared to have acted as a postbox between Hanna and Walter, as well as sending money, food and clothing to Hanna in Germany. Walter wanted his mother to join him in Argentina, which she did in 1949.

The letters from Hanna and Walter cease with Hanna’s letter dated 8 September 1949 from Buenos Aires. It doesn’t seem that Margarete ever heard from either of them again. The letters from Hanna and Walter are in German, Hanna’s handwritten and Walter’s typed.

There is a third batch of letters, in English, from a Spanish woman called Mercedes Alario, dated from January 1948 to April 1952. She had a relationship with ‘Enrique Garcia’ (Walter Kutschmann) while he was in Spain, assumed he was going to marry her, and was devastated to hear that he had married a German woman in Argentina.

Another view of the Ernst/ Hanna/Walter relationship is provided by Ernst’s sister, the donor’s great-aunt Bertha. In 1946 she writes from Germany to Margarete.

Scope/Content

Correspondence received by Margarete Hollingshead (née Hoffmann) from friends and family including her stepbrother, Walter Kutschmann, a former Nazi war criminal.Correspondence received by Margarete Hollingshead (née Hoffmann) from friends and family including her stepbrother, Walter Kutschmann, a former Nazi war criminal.