Andy:
You'd do well to confirm the details of this story. First: when did
this happen? Mass deportations >from Austria happened >from late 1941
onward, and 1942 would be the date for the "onset of the time what the
Nazis were removing all Jews."

That your friend's grandfather was taken to Dachau suggests that he
already had special status, as very few Jews were deported >from Austria
into Germany. Mauthausen (in Austria), Theresienstadt (in what had been
Czechoslovakia), Lodz and the ghettos to the east were more common
destinations. Also: Dachau was not a death camp, i.e., there were no
programs of systematic murder carried out there. A horrible
concentration camp, to be sure--but not like Auschwitz or Belzec.

Argentina was a neutral country, so his citizenship would likely have
been respected by the authorities, at least to the extent of not sending
him to the ghettos and extermination camps. And it was quite possible
to get to Argentina--my great-grandmother and her daughter (my
great-aunt) emigrated there to join the rest of their family in early 1941.

All told, there would have been little long-term benefit to keeping your
friend's grandfather in Dachau; it may well be that he was interned for
the purpose of extorting as much of his property as possible before
sending him to Argentina.

Roger Lustig
Princeton, NJ USA
research co-ordinator, GerSIG

Andy wrote: