After the November Pogroms in 1938, tens of thousands of Jews tried to leave Nazi Germany. Although the United Kingdom’s immigration policy remained strict, this country, along with a few others, announced that it would accept Jewish children and teenagers. The so-called Kindertransports to the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1939 would become one of the greatest rescue missions before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Two out of the roughly 10,000 saved ‘Kinder,’ as the participants call themselves today, were the Augsburg-born twins Ernst (1925–1941) and Rudolf Farnbacher (1925–1946). Although the transports saved thousands from being murdered in the Shoah, they only temporarily brought salvation for the two brothers: The public register of the English district of Howdenshire near Leeds shows that Ernst Farnbacher committed suicide two years after his emigration, aged only 16. The medical record shows that he died by self-strangulation “whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed.” Five years later, Hendon District near London recorded an almost identical entry in the register referencing a poison, potassium cyanide. In 1946, Rudolf Farnbacher took his own life at the age of 21. He had presumably discovered only a short while previously that his parents had been murdered in Auschwitz.

Suicides were very rare among the roughly 10,000 Jewish children and teenagers who fled to the United Kingdom. Yet the records concerning the Farnbacher twins evince the enormous psychological pressure with which these young participants in the transports were confronted. Their case also adds a hitherto underappreciated dimension to the story of the transports, which have to date been regarded as a tragic, but above all successful, rescue operation.