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When Hitler invaded Austria on April 11, 1938, H. Peter Oberlander was away on a school ski trip at age fifteen. He and other Jewish boys were soon segregated and locked up for two days. They returned to Vienna in a separate rail car.
Even though his father Dr. Fritz Overlander (1889-1953) was wounded twice during World War I and decorated for his services in the Austrian Imperial Army, widely acknowledged as a human rights lawyer, accepted as a Master of Vienna's Masonic Lodge and a recipient of Austria's highest civilian honour, the Knight's Cross, in 1935, for his work on behalf of army widows and orphans, he was soon arrested, taken to Gestapo headquarters, interrogated and severely beaten. He was not seen by his family for four months. His law office was ransacked; his Doctorate of Law was revoked; his Knight's Cross was abrogated; former colleagues and friends grilled him; his teeth were knocked out; and he was sent to Mauthausen to work as a labourer to build the camp. Only the intervention of Vienna's Deputy Minister of Justice, Peter Sippl, gained a reprieve. Sippl was then removed from his position. Upon his release, Oberlander was forced to forfeit all his assets to the Nazis and given 48 hours to leave Austria.
This is how and why Peter H. Oberlander arrived in London with his family in September of 1938, only to be arrested himself as an enemy alien. His younger brother George was allowed to accompany his parents, Fritz and Margaret, when they immigrated to New York in 1940, but Peter was deported to Canada and held in various internment camps as a presumed "dangerous enemy alien." Released in early 1942, he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from McGill University in 1945. After he became the first Canadian to obtain a Master of Urban Planning degree, he became the first Canadian to gain a Ph.D in Urban and Regional Planning from Harvard. Oberlander founded the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of B.C. in 1952 and the Centre for Human Settlements in 1975. He worked around the world spreading his integral message: “The city is humanity’s greatest achievement.” Oberlander was alsol integral for convening the first UN Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver in 1976 and the third session in 2006. His daughter Judy Oberlander later founded the SFU City Program on Urban Issues.
Peter Oberlander and his wife Cornelia Oberlander, a landscape architect, both became Order of Canada recipients. In 2009, he was posthumously accorded the United Nations Human Settlements Programme's 2009 Scroll of Honour Award, the most significant human settlements award in the world, “for a lifetime of promoting the urban agenda around the world.” Born in November 29, 1922, he died on December 27, 2008 at age 86. Ken Cameron's book, Showing the Way: Peter Oberlander and the Imperative of Global Citizenship (Tellwell 2018) pays tribute to his influence as a planner, but it was left to his daughter, Wendy, to discern and retrieve the impact of the Holocaust on her father's life.
In an extensive feature article in Zachor in 2013, Wendy Oberlander described her own investigations into her father's reticence to discuss wartime experiences and their personal repercussions. She describes her visit to the remains of Camp B in Ripples, New Brunswick where he was held for the winter of 1940-1941. "For a myriad of reasons," she writes, "my father Peter Oberlander did not talk about his war-time experiences when I was young. Stray references to ‘camp’ (always spoken without an article) alluded to some kind of deprivation here in Canada; much later, in 1991, he briefly spoke about one night spent on Ile Saint-Helene in 1941."
She continues: "In the archives, I found notes on his condition in the camps, his route through temporary camps in England, his safe arrival somewhere in Canada, his relocation to Camp ‘T’. I unearthed pleading telegrams and letters from my grandparents to the British authorities, refugee agencies, American diplomats and the Canadian government telling of anxieties, fears, a family visa set to expire in weeks... The evidence was overwhelming, my father started to speak, and a narrative began to take shape. He shared what he could — the locales, the scenes, the restrictions, the imprisonment. A few papers surfaced, the suitcase, a name or two. (The notebooks included in the exhibition arrived at his house a few months before his death. He had packed them away, with all his worldly possessions c. 1948, into trunks that were stored in a colleague’s basement for 40 years.)"
These investigations and questions led her to make a 1996 video, Nothing to be written here. The title arose from Prisoner of War stationery internees were forced to use. After her father died, Wendy Oberlander found the draft of a letter he wrote to his parents the night he was released from Camp ‘I’ in November of 1941. Free at last in Montreal, he wrote, "So strange, so queer, I can hardly put it in words my vocabulary fails me. All seems like a dream, so unnatural, nearly impossible. Often I had to pinch myself, to know whether it was reality or just one of those mad nightmares… I at first had a deep breath of freedom and then went to bed. Imagine in a bed for myself with white linens, and I could sleep as long and I like, and could turn the light off when I like."
Peter Oberlander's responses to the Holocaust were his innovative and deeply humanistic approaches to architecture and housing, spreading his solutions globally, as an antidote to xenophobia. "By the end," his daughter concluded, "I had discovered so much, finally grasping how the silence offered protection to my father when words — in any language — failed him, and how the promise of tomorrow was always greater than the losses of the past. I learned, too, that xenophobia and distrust of the ‘other’ was not unique to this internment; it persists today, close to home and around the world. Twenty years later, I remain humbled by my father’s courage, and by the spaces between the stories, the silences and gaps that will never be filled — and the need to speak about them."
BOOKS:
Improving Human Settlements -- Up with People (UBC Press 1976)
Homelessness and the Homeless (Centre for Human Settlements 1988) with Arthur Fallick
Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer (UBC Press, 1999) with Eva Newbrun
Land: The Central Human Settlement Issue (UBC Press 2014)
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
The Oberlanders in Baden bei Wien, 1930, Austria: Margaret, Fritz & Peter, age 7
Even though his father Dr. Fritz Overlander (1889-1953) was wounded twice during World War I and decorated for his services in the Austrian Imperial Army, widely acknowledged as a human rights lawyer, accepted as a Master of Vienna's Masonic Lodge and a recipient of Austria's highest civilian honour, the Knight's Cross, in 1935, for his work on behalf of army widows and orphans, he was soon arrested, taken to Gestapo headquarters, interrogated and severely beaten. He was not seen by his family for four months. His law office was ransacked; his Doctorate of Law was revoked; his Knight's Cross was abrogated; former colleagues and friends grilled him; his teeth were knocked out; and he was sent to Mauthausen to work as a labourer to build the camp. Only the intervention of Vienna's Deputy Minister of Justice, Peter Sippl, gained a reprieve. Sippl was then removed from his position. Upon his release, Oberlander was forced to forfeit all his assets to the Nazis and given 48 hours to leave Austria.
This is how and why Peter H. Oberlander arrived in London with his family in September of 1938, only to be arrested himself as an enemy alien. His younger brother George was allowed to accompany his parents, Fritz and Margaret, when they immigrated to New York in 1940, but Peter was deported to Canada and held in various internment camps as a presumed "dangerous enemy alien." Released in early 1942, he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from McGill University in 1945. After he became the first Canadian to obtain a Master of Urban Planning degree, he became the first Canadian to gain a Ph.D in Urban and Regional Planning from Harvard. Oberlander founded the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of B.C. in 1952 and the Centre for Human Settlements in 1975. He worked around the world spreading his integral message: “The city is humanity’s greatest achievement.” Oberlander was alsol integral for convening the first UN Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver in 1976 and the third session in 2006. His daughter Judy Oberlander later founded the SFU City Program on Urban Issues.
Peter Oberlander and his wife Cornelia Oberlander, a landscape architect, both became Order of Canada recipients. In 2009, he was posthumously accorded the United Nations Human Settlements Programme's 2009 Scroll of Honour Award, the most significant human settlements award in the world, “for a lifetime of promoting the urban agenda around the world.” Born in November 29, 1922, he died on December 27, 2008 at age 86. Ken Cameron's book, Showing the Way: Peter Oberlander and the Imperative of Global Citizenship (Tellwell 2018) pays tribute to his influence as a planner, but it was left to his daughter, Wendy, to discern and retrieve the impact of the Holocaust on her father's life.
In an extensive feature article in Zachor in 2013, Wendy Oberlander described her own investigations into her father's reticence to discuss wartime experiences and their personal repercussions. She describes her visit to the remains of Camp B in Ripples, New Brunswick where he was held for the winter of 1940-1941. "For a myriad of reasons," she writes, "my father Peter Oberlander did not talk about his war-time experiences when I was young. Stray references to ‘camp’ (always spoken without an article) alluded to some kind of deprivation here in Canada; much later, in 1991, he briefly spoke about one night spent on Ile Saint-Helene in 1941."
She continues: "In the archives, I found notes on his condition in the camps, his route through temporary camps in England, his safe arrival somewhere in Canada, his relocation to Camp ‘T’. I unearthed pleading telegrams and letters from my grandparents to the British authorities, refugee agencies, American diplomats and the Canadian government telling of anxieties, fears, a family visa set to expire in weeks... The evidence was overwhelming, my father started to speak, and a narrative began to take shape. He shared what he could — the locales, the scenes, the restrictions, the imprisonment. A few papers surfaced, the suitcase, a name or two. (The notebooks included in the exhibition arrived at his house a few months before his death. He had packed them away, with all his worldly possessions c. 1948, into trunks that were stored in a colleague’s basement for 40 years.)"
These investigations and questions led her to make a 1996 video, Nothing to be written here. The title arose from Prisoner of War stationery internees were forced to use. After her father died, Wendy Oberlander found the draft of a letter he wrote to his parents the night he was released from Camp ‘I’ in November of 1941. Free at last in Montreal, he wrote, "So strange, so queer, I can hardly put it in words my vocabulary fails me. All seems like a dream, so unnatural, nearly impossible. Often I had to pinch myself, to know whether it was reality or just one of those mad nightmares… I at first had a deep breath of freedom and then went to bed. Imagine in a bed for myself with white linens, and I could sleep as long and I like, and could turn the light off when I like."
Peter Oberlander's responses to the Holocaust were his innovative and deeply humanistic approaches to architecture and housing, spreading his solutions globally, as an antidote to xenophobia. "By the end," his daughter concluded, "I had discovered so much, finally grasping how the silence offered protection to my father when words — in any language — failed him, and how the promise of tomorrow was always greater than the losses of the past. I learned, too, that xenophobia and distrust of the ‘other’ was not unique to this internment; it persists today, close to home and around the world. Twenty years later, I remain humbled by my father’s courage, and by the spaces between the stories, the silences and gaps that will never be filled — and the need to speak about them."
BOOKS:
Improving Human Settlements -- Up with People (UBC Press 1976)
Homelessness and the Homeless (Centre for Human Settlements 1988) with Arthur Fallick
Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer (UBC Press, 1999) with Eva Newbrun
Land: The Central Human Settlement Issue (UBC Press 2014)
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
The Oberlanders in Baden bei Wien, 1930, Austria: Margaret, Fritz & Peter, age 7
