Welcome back to the History Hit Warfare Podcast. I'm your host James Rogers, and if it's your first time here,

well, we bring you two original, brand new history podcast each and every week that cover the history of war

from Napoleonic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy Landings and 9-11.

However, once a week, I'd like to reach into the Dan Snow's history hit archive

and put out an episode that I think deserves attention.

This episode focuses on what I can only describe as the most remarkable

father and son story I have ever come across. Dan talks with historian Jeremy Dromfeld

about an astonishingly true story of horror, love and impossible survival. In 1939, Gustav Kleinman, a

Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was arrested by the Nazis. Along with his 16-year-old son Fritz,

he was sent to Bookenwald in Germany where a new concentration camp was being built.

They helped build Bookenwald.

Young Fritz learning construction skills that would help preserve him from extermination in the coming years.

But it was his bond with his father that would ultimately keep them both alive.

When the 50-year-old Gustav was transferred to Auschwitz, as we know a certain death sentence. Fritz was

determined to go with him and he did. As his father wrote he was always by my side

the boy is my greatest joy. We are inseparable.

And it was this bond between Fritz and Gustav that did ultimately keep them both alive.

So here is Dan and Jeremy on the boy who followed his father into Auschwitz. Jeremy, thank you very much coming on. It's great to be here. What a story. There is no end is there. I mean each of these

personal experiences of these millions of people could have each one of them has all the

drama and and tragedy and and it's so what's the right word I'm looking for and intensity that you're

I mean it's just extraordinary and it's about your story well I first came

across this story when I'd learned of the existence of the secret concentration

...