Leo and Emmy Steinweg
On 20 April 1940, the secretary of the Katholiek Comité voor Vluchtelingen (Committee for Refugees) in Utrecht, Hendricus Jacobus Kuipers, sends a list with the names of 248 Catholics who want to emigrate as part of the ‘Brazil Action’ to the nuncio in The Hague, Paolo Giobbe. Among them were Leo and Emmy Steinweg from Münster, who had fled from the Nazis to Utrecht in 1938. Leo, a famous motorbike racer, is a Catholic of Jewish origin. He was baptised in 1935 shortly before his marriage to Emmy. Leo and Emmy Steinweg appear on another list of 978 people who have been granted visas by the Brazilian embassy to the Holy See. Their departure was planned for 1 June, but the invasion of the Netherlands by the German Wehrmacht on 10 May put paid to these plans. Leo was able to hide in Utrecht until 1942, but was then deported to Auschwitz and deployed as forced labour in the Gleiwitz subcamp. In February 1945, he was transferred to Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he died under unexplained circumstances. In 2000, at the age of 96, his wife wrote a memoir of her ‘Life with Leo’. On 13 December 2023, a Stolperstein is laid for Leo Steinweg at Rothenburg 51 in Münster.