
Joseph Spring was born in Berlin on 18 January 1927 under the name Josef Sprung to a family of Polish Jews. After the early death of his father, his mother ran an ice cream parlour in the German capital until 1935. She sent Josef and his brother Heini to relatives in Belgium so that they could escape anti-Semitic discrimination in Nazi Germany. After the Wehrmacht invaded Belgium in May 1940, they fled to France. Josef was able to obtain genuine French papers under a false identity: as ‘Joseph Dubois’, he worked as a translator from then on.
In 1943, he decided to flee from occupied France to neutral Switzerland with two of his cousins. They revealed their Jewish identity to the Swiss border guards in the hope of receiving help. But the border guards initially turned them away and then handed them over to the Gestapo. The Germans deported them to Auschwitz via the Drancy transit camp near Paris. Josef Sprung had to conduct forced labour at the construction site of an IG Farben factory in the Monowitz subcamp.
When the Auschwitz concentration camp complex was cleared in January 1945 in the face of the advancing Red Army, the SS forced Josef Sprung, on his 18th birthday, to board a clearance transport via Gleiwitz to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in the Harz mountains. He was assigned to a subcamp in Blankenburg, where he was forced to do hard labour again. In early April 1945, the Blankenburg subcamps were cleared and the inmates were driven north. Josef Sprung managed to escape near Magdeburg. On 12 April 1945, he was liberated by US soldiers.
In 1946, Josef Sprung emigrated to Australia and changed his name to Joseph Spring. He met his wife Ava on a trip and they had two sons. They lived in Melbourne, where they ran a travel agency. In 1998, he sued the Swiss Confederation for complicity in genocide due to his extradition to the Gestapo. The court dismissed the claim, but the public trial drew attention to Switzerland's complicity in Nazi crimes.
As we have sadly now learned, Joseph Spring passed away on 8 January 2025 at the age of 97. Our thoughts and condolences are with his family and friends.