ABSTRACT
Otto Brief was a member of the psychoanalytic Study Group in Prague, which was part of the Vienna Society. The summary of the Emergency Committee, written in 1948, notes Dr Otto Brief as “deceased”: “German Psychoanalyst. Interned in a German concentration camp, where he died. Mrs. Brief and their two children were trying to get to Norway from Germany. Ernst Federn, the psychoanalyst and social worker who was imprisoned in Buchenwald, reported that he had met Otto Brief in Buchenwald, and that he had supervised Federn’s observations of their fellow inmates. Otto Brief’s frequent transfers within the concentration camp system, as well as the measures against his family, suggest he may have been an important prisoner because of his medical training. The example of Otto Brief and his family shows that there is still a lot about the biographies of psychoanalysts and candidates during the Nazi domination of Europe that we do not know.
