Siegfried Lederer, a Czech Jew, escaped from Auschwitz with the aid of an SS officer who opposed the Holocaust.

The history of the Jews in the Czech lands, historically the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, including the modern Czech Republic, goes back at least 1100 years. There is evidence that Jews have lived in Moravia and Bohemia since as early as the 10th century. Jewish communities flourished here specifically in the 13th, 16th, 17th centuries, and again in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Local Jews were mostly murdered in the Holocaust, or exiled at various points. As of 2021, there were only about 3000 Jews officially registered in the Czech Republic, albeit the actual number is probably as much as ten times higher.

On the night of 5 April 1944, Siegfried Lederer, a Czech Jew, escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp wearing an SS-TV uniform provided by SS-Rottenführer Viktor Pestek. Pestek opposed the Holocaust; he was a devout Catholic and was infatuated with Renée Neumann, a Jewish prisoner. Pestek accompanied Lederer out of the camp, and the two men traveled together to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to obtain false documents for Neumann and her mother.

SS-Totenkopfverbände was a major branch of the Nazi Party's paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation. It was responsible for administering the concentration camps and extermination camps of Nazi Germany, among similar duties. It was both the successor and expanded organisation to the SS-Wachverbände formed in 1933. While the Totenkopf was the universal cap badge of the SS, the SS-TV also wore this insignia on the right collar tab to distinguish itself from other SS formations.

The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were committed primarily through mass shootings across Eastern Europe and poison gas chambers in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed millions of other non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to include the murder and persecution of non-Jewish groups.