The broad wooden stairs under the rust-red runner creaked as Inge Wolf took them two at a time to the fifth floor of Friedrichshaller Strasse 23. The bright and colorful lead-glazed windows of the landings looked out onto a leafy back courtyard and the modest lower wing where the lower-income families lived. With each floor she climbed, Inge gained a better view of the roofs of the Schmargendorf district of Berlin and the linden trees tinged with the colors of fall.
It was the first of October, and Inge Wolf was in a hurry to find a suitable position for herself. If she did not begin her compulsory year of domestic service soon, she would be called up by the National Labor Service. The Friedrichshaller Strasse address was her second attempt at finding work on this Thursday morning.
A slender redhead in rimless glasses opened the door marked “Wust.”
“Good day.”
Inge breathed a sigh of relief. She already had been received by four different housewives, all in apron dresses, with a “Heil Hitler,” and “Oh, how nice that you’ve come!” and she had given up hope of a simple “Good day.” The overabundance of Nazi women she was encountering was probably due to the fact that Inge, at twenty-one, was required to fulfill her obligatory service in a family with at least four children. Were she only sixteen, a family with one child would have been acceptable. It was bad enough that someone like herself, who had more on her mind than cooking and cleaning, had to work for others, but this pack of Nazis was really too much. If a woman invoked the Führer in her own home it was not hard to imagine what all would follow.
“You know, I have so many choices, I think I’ll look around a bit more,” she would hasten to say each time, and make her getaway.
Was it Inge’s scrawny figure, her big ears, tousled short hair and intense dark eyes that caused Elisabeth Wust to greet her with “Good day,” or was this the first unmistakable sign of Elisabeth’s doubt in her husband’s convictions? She had been dissatisfied for some time now, without knowing exactly why. She had no apparent reason to complain: her sons were doing splendidly and would some day attend the Napola, the elite Nazi school. On August 12 Elisabeth had received the Maternal Cross in bronze, on her fourth son’s first birthday. Günther Wust was serving as a soldier in Bernau, near Berlin, far from the front, thank God. In civilian life he was a clerk at the Deutsche Bank, soon to become an authorized signatory, a dashing fellow, tall, slim, with dark hair and good manners, the type of man every girl dreamed of. After meeting Günther at a club run by the bank, Elisabeth—engaged to be married to someone else—sent her fiancé packing.
With another sigh of relief Inge Wolf stuck into her jacket pocket the stack of white index cards with addresses from the Labor Service and decided her search was ended. The two women sat down at the freshly scrubbed kitchen table to take care of formalities. It was agreed that Inge would work each day from eight to five.
“I’ll show you around.”
The spacious four-room apartment with its decorative plaster ceilings had a large balcony that overlooked shady Friedrichshaller Strasse and a smaller one off the kitchen, with a view of the roof of the rear wing. Scarcely had Inge entered the living room through the wide double doors before she realized she had made a fatal mistake. A highly polished relief of the Führer, and in bronze! What could she do? The time had come for her to utter her usual excuse and quickly disappear. But her papers lay filled out on the kitchen table and a retreat could arouse suspicion. All she needed was for someone to denounce her. Inge felt sad and weary at this latest disappointment. How long would she have to wander through Berlin before she found a family that had resisted the brownshirts? Did such a family even exist after what soon would be a decade of Hitler’s dictatorship?
She decided to swallow the bitter pill. “There’s something I must say right off,” she remarked, searching for one last way to back out of her decision. “I’m an absolute washout when it comes to housework.” After all, the compulsory year of domestic and agricultural service introduced in 1938 for all single women under twenty-five was supposed to “arouse joy at one’s domestic and social vocation,” as had appeared in the paper recently. Inge most certainly would not be able to demonstrate this commitment to the Reichsfrauenführerin, leader of the women of the Third Reich.
But in the face of ever scarcer domestic help Elisabeth Wust was not about to be scared off. “Oh, child, you have no idea what a washout I myself am. Together we’ll manage.” She gave Inge a deep-throated laugh and showed her to the door.
“Until tomorrow, then.”
Lilly:
I’m sorry, but we never had a picture of Hitler. Inge most certainly imagined that. She simply assumed I was a Nazi, that’s all. We were a loyal German family, of course, that’s true. I admit that. My home was furnished like millions of other German households, I admit that too. I never voted for Hitler, but I was married to a Nazi. My husband was a Nazi, not a party member, but a good German and Nazi he was. And that’s when Inge got to know me. He was a real Prussian, though actually he was a Sorb. We had a copy of Mein Kampf, I think. Yes, we did. And we had the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper, lying around. I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t like to admit that my husband was a Nazi and a bit of an anti-Semite, it ran in his family, the usual anti-Semitism without much reflection on it. My parents were always needling me, my father objected to my having married a Nazi. And my brother didn’t approve of it at all, for as long as he remained in Germany. And then he forgot about me entirely. But I wouldn’t have listened to them even without their objections. I did what I pleased at the time, and I definitely wanted to go through with it. I was silly and foolish, but above all I wanted to get away from home. I didn’t give a thought to the rest of it. He was good-looking, everyone liked him, he wanted to be somebody. It was Günther I married, after all, not the Nazi! And I married without my parents’ blessing. Even my parents-in-law didn’t attend the wedding; in their eyes I was too young and spirited. They disapproved of my entire way of life. My father was in the mountains, in the Altvater (Jeseník) range, when I got married. We had to talk him into giving us his written permission, as I was not yet twenty-one. My father was so terribly dogmatic. I didn’t see him again until Bernd was born. Our animosity ended once his grandchild arrived. And then I turned into a good little housewife and had children. Basically, I was brought up to have a family and run a household, and that’s what I did. That’s how I spent those first years—with children and diapers, running the house, taking care of my husband. I was always cross with him, even more so as time went by. The least he could have done was give me a rest on Sundays, but no, the food always had to be on the table at a certain time. Or he could have taken the children for a walk once in a while. He had no idea what to do with small children. He was incredibly proud of his sons, but taking care of them once in a while, there was never any question of that. There were thousands of households like ours, households that had no interest in anything but their offspring. We women swapped recipes, that was more important to us than anything else. Napola? Don’t make me laugh. My husband would have had to be in the party for that, right? Only the children of bona fide party members could enroll at the Napola. Never, he truly was not that kind of Nazi. There were many like him, thousands. Germany was going to make something of itself again, that’s the way it was. A lot of people went along, even became party members, because they believed Hitler could get something done. What it later turned into. . . . But people didn’t really envision any of that at first. Napola—it’s the first time in how many years that I’ve heard that word. My goodness, it must be over fifty years now! No, for God’s sake, he was a good bank clerk, that’s the path he would have followed. The children perhaps would have joined the Deutsche Bank as well, or gone to university. The path was foreordained, so to speak. He was a good German, that’s all.
On October 5, 1942, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, in a speech celebrating the harvest festival, said of the “great race war”: “Whether it is the German or the Aryan who endures, whether the Jew will rule the world, that is what it is about in the end, and that is what we are fighting for in the battlefield.” The newspapers printed his speech in its entirety, and that same day Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler issued the order that all Jews held in concentration camps within the German Reich be deported to Auschwitz.
Meanwhile, Inge Wolf had begun to adjust to life in the Wust household. Reluctantly, she learned how to arrange the growing pile of Völkischer Beobachter newspapers in the study so that the center fold lined up exactly with the edge of the small glass cabinet. But in only a few days she had taken the adorable Wust children to heart. Elisabeth Wust, at twenty-nine, had borne a child with remarkable regularity, every two years: Bernd was seven, Eberhard five, Reinhard three, and Albrecht was one year old.
Inge’s first task of the day was to relieve Albrecht—two of his brothers would deliver him from the children’s bunker with his diapers close to overflowing—of his burden. Otherwise, she was primarily busy taking care of the two middle brothers. Each day Eberhard ran to greet “Aunt” Inge, his gingerbread grin sweetly revealing a charming row of rotten teeth. Reinhard, whose alert and serious eyes took in everything, was always begging her to take him to the movies, where he would sit on her lap contented and still as a mouse. Bernd, tall and the eldest, paid little attention to Inge, preferring to spend his afternoons on the street playing war.
Elisabeth Wust had her children so well trained that she could indulge in a bit of leisure activity odd for a Nazi woman. With disarming trust she included Inge in her preparations for visits from her gentlemen friends, so that the two women became something like accomplices, though Inge Wolf neither understood nor wished to understand her employer’s political or sexual preferences. Her afternoon visitors were colleagues of Günther Wust, men with good manners who were well dressed and of stately bearing. “She’s the major sweetheart of minor officials,” Inge scoffed at home, in revenge for the insult of having to polish Hitler’s bronze nose. When a gentleman caller was scheduled, Elisabeth arranged her pale green nightgown to reveal her cleavage, and Inge put fresh sheets on the bed. Then she took the children to the zoo. Lilly was particularly flushed with excitement when expecting a certain Herr Patenheimer, a bank official and “old warrior”—that’s what they called someone who joined the Nazi party before Hitler came to power in 1933—with a shadow on his lung, who for this reason had been excused from duty in the Wehrmacht. When he was scheduled to visit, Lilly ran around the apartment like a teenager, putting up her hair and continuously searching for something, rearranging everything. She could do it best with “old warriors,” she said.
Lilly:
They were men from our circle of friends, the same age as my husband. They were on leave or had some position or other in Berlin. There had to be some men to keep things running, after all. I’ve never suffered from a lack of men. But most of them, well, they couldn’t perform, more or less, it was a sad fact. When I think about it, Günther was the best of them all. I can only explain it by saying that I took very little part in any of it. An orgasm, as they say today, was totally strange to me. But they wanted me, and I didn’t say no. It’s flattering to a young woman, of course, if men are always after her. Morals always loosen up a bit when men are conscripted. No one knew what would happen tomorrow, so we enjoyed life as best we could. The men as well. After all, my husband had Liesl.
I liked him, Günther, I wouldn’t have married him otherwise, that wouldn’t have made sense. But I was much too young and foolish at the time. I didn’t wake up until I was twenty-six, and by then I had three children. Suddenly I no longer wanted to be the little wife and mother, didn’t want only to be obedient and maternal. That’s when my husband and I had our first disagreements. I began to grow up and defend myself. He liked to go out and have a beer by himself. I never wanted to go to the pub with him, it’s true, but neither did I want merely to take care of the children, good God in heaven. I wanted to go to the theater, do something nice together with him. And suddenly it occurred to me: What are you going to do now? It was then that I began to detach myself from my husband. It began with the war, actually. One day we decided to spend a few days with our friends the Herrmanns. Ewald worked at the bank with Günther, our oldest children were the same age, and so we had got to know each other. And Käthe was my best friend. Then I noticed that something was going on. When my husband was called up in 1940 he complained to me in a letter that he hadn’t heard from Käthe. I went to see her, furious. “When Günther sends letters they at least should be written to me,” I hissed at her. Then Käthe began to cry. “Do you love each other that much?” I asked. “Yes,” she sobbed. So I put my arms around her and comforted her. “Love each other then, but leave me in peace.”
Actually, I didn’t hold it against him. My motto was: Just don’t desert the family, otherwise do what you want. I just didn’t want to know about it. Once I suggested to him that we live apart for five years, in the same apartment. I’ll take care of the household, I said, I’ll do that, but nothing else, please. And my husband just tapped his forehead. I needed an escape. I jumped the fence. Before, I could never have imagined cheating on my husband, but he went a bit too far. And later I threw it in his face. We were having some fight or other—Albrecht, my fourth, was barely nine months old—and all of a sudden I got furious and said to him: He’s not your child, by the way. That really got him, mostly because he knew Erwin, you see. But then I told him it was his own fault. Why was he always running around with other women? I felt like I was alone, damn it all, so I gave in, you see. I didn’t have a long relationship with Erwin, it must have happened the third time we saw each other. That was a wild year as it was, he wasn’t the only one. My husband knew that Erwin was chasing me. Right up to the altar Erwin begged me to marry him and not my husband. We always stayed in contact. We moved all over Berlin and he was always right behind us. When he became a clerk at the city hall at Wilmersdorf it was he who got us the apartment in Schmargendorf.
No, I didn’t want that many children. I wanted Bernd and Eberhard; I wanted Bernd to have a little brother. But Reinhard was an accident, I didn’t speak to my husband for three days after I found out. I had just gotten over the last birth. When Eberhard was three weeks old he got a cramp in the lower part of his stomach, and almost died. For more than six months I had to feed him every other hour. He was thin as a stick. And then another child—it was too much for me. But then my nature prevailed. I never would have considered an abortion, not even with Albrecht. I accepted it as my fate, and I enjoyed having my children. But the way they were made, that’s another story.
Erwin Buchwieser, Albrecht’s biological father:
I met Lilly at the beginning of 1933. We were both in a steno and typing course that the Deutsche Bank organized to get the unemployed off the streets. My father was at a local branch of the bank and Lilly’s father was in the foreign section, but they didn’t know each other. I was twenty-one and had trained to be an auto mechanic, but was out of work. I would like to have been an engineer, but I couldn’t manage it financially. The course was a gesture with which the bank hoped to get in good with the new regime, a kind of “emergency relief.” And it didn’t cost them much, after all.
Lilly was simply what I had always wanted. Red hair—that was the first impression—something that for me has always remained a largely unrealized dream. Her spirit, her self-assurance and her good manners impressed me greatly. I lacked all of these. I was awkward. I was shy and retiring, but somehow we connected right off, without a lot being said. But she was already taken. I never tried to change her mind. That would have been futile, it had all been arranged. Both Lilly’s and Günther Wust’s parents were a bit above my social position. I was only a proletarian, really. My father was an employee of the bank, that’s true, but we lived in quite reduced circumstances socially. I was nothing and had nothing. And then I got to know Günther Wust as well, when he came to pick up Lilly after the class. He made a very good impression on me. A bit affected, but he already had a higher post at the bank and had to display a certain attitude toward his clientele. He was very correct, polite, refined. Lilly was refined too, of course. She had her secondary school diploma; I didn’t. And Wust almost surely did not take me seriously. My father was an insignificant clerk who had come to Berlin from a small town and had never really coped well there. So Lilly was someone to strive for in every sense, but marriage was something that was always out of the question. I was unemployed and Günther Wust had a solid position. The Deutsche Bank didn’t let anyone go, not even in times of crisis, it was always reliable.
I married someone else in August of 1938, but I continued to be taken with Lilly. She was something precious to me, a kind of jewel, something fragile perhaps as well, not to mention her erotic allure. She was everything I wanted—red-haired, more intelligent than I, more educated. She was short-sighted and wore glasses. I was always telling her to take them off, so it would be harder for her to see my weaknesses. When finally we went to bed together, I didn’t feel I had done anything wrong. In January 1941, after the French campaign, we were camped south of Berlin in a village called Schöneweide, for a little respite, so to speak, before being sent on to Russia. I had a great deal of freedom to move around in. It must have happened then.
I don’t remember a picture of Hitler in her living room. But that was the rule then, so I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it. Or would I have? Perhaps I would have said something like, “Good old Adolf, already here too,” or something like that. But an image of Hitler was also used as a cover then. When the block warden came by to collect for the NSV, the Nazi public welfare organization, or for Winter Relief, one had to reckon with the fact that he would look around to see if you at least had a picture of Hitler on the wall, or a Nazi banner hanging outside the window. Half the population were spies and informers, after all. But is that so important? I never noticed Lilly exhibiting any sort of enthusiasm for Hitler. I myself was a National Socialist out of conviction. I joined the party in 1931 because I liked its platform. And there was nothing in the platform about those things. I’m still glad today that I was a soldier and didn’t have to participate in the things that party members did here. That Jews were taken to concentration camps and killed there. . . . Nowhere was it written that they wanted to destroy them. And if there was, then I thought: economically. It all boiled down to the Jews apparently having influence everywhere, due to their wealth. Yes, I believed that, that they played a dominant role in economic life. We were told, for instance, that most bankers were Jewish, and that Hollywood was run by Jews. They’re just harder-working, for God’s sake, but we didn’t see it that way at the time. I never did any Jew harm, not even verbally, but everyone says that. Today I sometimes ask myself: Why did we take so little notice? But do you think any of us little people took it seriously when they sang their vicious songs against the Jews? And then they had to assume a middle name, one that sounded Jewish. God, what all went on. . . . What I felt about it at the time, I can’t tell you today. It struck me as a bit odd.
In 1933, when we were attending the Deutsche Bank course, people often said in passing, “Things are moving forward!” or “Victory!” But it was all very vague, no one made propaganda for one party or the other. Bob was there, too, Lilly’s brother, who was a Communist or a Social Democrat. I always got the impression that Lilly’s parents were conservative, what earlier was called German-national. The conservatives couldn’t have been happier about the Nazi movement. The Nazi and Communist workers were beating each others’ heads in, and they counted on that. As a rule it was the workers who were beating each others’ heads in. But when I was together with Lilly I had other things on my mind than talking politics.
Elisabeth Wust noticed right away that Inge was an intelligent girl, quite different from the previous one who had worked for her, who then had left to get married before her year was up. Inge Wolf, for her part, found the red-haired lady of the house, with her translucent, freckled complexion and her high, sharp cheekbones, not exactly unattractive, but rather dense. She seldom found herself in the sticky situation of having to dodge a political discussion. Elisabeth Wust usually was preoccupied with other things, but now and then she would prattle on about something she had just read in the Völkischer Beobachter. And when the Hitler Youth marched by in their smart uniforms and their ta-ra-ra-boom, she would open the windows, lift up Eberhard and point down at them: “Look, Eberhard, Hitler Youth. When you’re ten you can march with them.”
Once a week Günther Wust was granted a day’s leave from his guard company in order to visit his family. The slight, thirty-six-year-old with the little mustache was not bad-looking, and his pipe lent him the dreamy composure that pipe-smokers exude.
Things got political at home only when Lilly’s parents, the Kapplers, visited. Barely did the door close behind Father Kappler than he was drawn to the likeness of Adolf, which soon was to be found lying face-down on the chest of drawers. Then his wife would fold her hands over her portly stomach and smile contentedly. This harmony was rare, however, for Günther and Margarethe Kappler were usually battling each other. Friends of the family report that each January a new vase of Bohemian crystal had to be ordered to replace the one shattered during the Christmas holiday fight. Mother Kappler smashed lightbulbs and Meissen porcelain now and then as well, not to mention the time she recklessly put them in debt for a pretty dress with a collar of Brussels lace, an act of irresponsibility that brought her rather miserly husband’s blood to a boil. Lilly found it particularly irritating that her father—at home a pedantic tyrant and braggart who went around sticking little pieces of paper to the wall with the message “Do it right away”—was considered by outsiders to be an amusing entertainer and welcome guest. It was not uncommon for her parents’ visits to Friedrichshaller Strasse to end in discord and leave Lilly in tears. Her father relished embarrassing his daughter by reciting risqué poems. He’s a windbag, she would say to herself, her lips pressed together and her eyes on the floor in mortification.
Inge Wolf liked Father Kappler, with his little mustache, if only for his political beliefs. Like her father, he had been in the German Communist Party, but had burned his membership book in 1933 to placate his fearful wife. He had a unique relationship with images of Hitler. Kappler had one at home, lying under the runner at the entryway to the apartment, and he took diabolical pleasure in watching everyone who entered his South End home step on Hitler first. He particularly savored it when it was his suave son-in-law, Günther, whose attempt to join the Nazi party (NSDAP) had failed due to the temporary freeze in new membership of May 1, 1933. That Günther Wust, out of injured pride, did not apply again did nothing to change his father-in-law’s scathing view of him.
Bernd Wust, Lilly’s eldest son:
I don’t think we had a picture of Hitler at home, but perhaps we did; I wouldn’t put it past my father, in retrospect. What we did have were those soldiers made out of papier-mâché or clay—and among them was the Führer in the pose of a military leader. I had a bunch of toy soldiers, a whole chest full: soldiers shooting, soldiers firing cannons, soldiers marching and little horses, too. Like tin soldiers, only a bit larger, and painted. We traded them as children—how many infantrymen do you have, and so on. And one boy had SS men in black uniforms; well, they were worth more, of course. So that Führer we did have. And whenever my grandfather came to visit I always found that Führer hung upside down somewhere. He stood in a broad-legged stance, an open space between his legs, so that he could be hung from a hook or a key. He was being hanged, that was clear. Vati also had a pile of other stuff, a lot of Nazi booklets, for example, booklets for functionaries, he had a subscription to them, but you could buy them too. Mutti didn’t throw them away. And then when the Russians came—it was obvious what the booklets were, they had the eagle on them and such—we shoved them under the bed. And as we were sitting in the cellar and the Russians were searching the house, we were shaking with fear that they would find them.
In mid-November 1942, as the result of an embezzlement case involving the Berlin Gestapo, SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, former head of the “Central Office for Jewish Emigration” in Vienna and personal secretary to Adolf Eichmann, arrived in Berlin. Brunner, an Austrian known as the “Butcher of Vienna,” had rendered that city Judenrein (“Jew-free”) as of mid-October. Small and bow-legged, he considered it his duty to “show these damned Prussian swine how to deal with Jew bastards.” Brunner introduced to Berlin the moving van method he had tested in Vienna, by which Jews could be rounded up from their homes or work places without attracting a great deal of attention. Security police and Jewish police (so-called Ordner) systematically combed entire sections of the city, wandering the streets in the closed vans like dog catchers and shoving in anyone wearing the yellow star. Berlin had been teeming with rumors since Brunner’s arrival. Gerd Ehrlich—who soon was to make the acquaintance of Inge Wolf and Elisabeth Wust—was the son of a prosperous Berlin lawyer who had died of a heart attack in 1940. At the end of the war Ehrlich, from his exile in Switzerland, recorded his account of how he and his family experienced the “Brunner operation.” [Gerd W. Ehrlich, Mein Leben in Nazideutschland (My Life in Nazi Germany), unpublished manuscript written in Geneva in the winter of 1945]
Gerd Ehrlich:
He arrived with a multitude of diabolical ideas. “Let the Jews exterminate themselves.” From then on, the Jewish community itself was to take over the rounding up of victims for transport. Only in those extremely rare cases when the Jewish Ordner encountered resistance among their own was the Gestapo to step in. This obscene idea was brought before a special meeting of the Jewish Community Council on November 19. To the credit of our representatives it must be said that a good number of those executive members present refused to serve as executioners. Unfortunately, from the beginning the old gentlemen took the wrong path of resistance to those orders issued from Burgstrasse [Burgstrasse 26 was one of the addresses of the Reich Security Main Office]. They offered only passive resistance, not daring to call for an insurrection. As a result, decent people were arrested immediately and assigned to the next transport. It was in this way that the community leadership ended up in the hands of obsequious pawns of the Nazis.
Among those council representatives arrested on November 19, 1942, was my stepfather. He didn’t return home from the meeting and I never saw him again. I myself was working the night shift on that dark day, and after lunch I went back to bed to get some sleep. Around four o’clock my mother, looking terribly pale, came into my room with the bad news: “Benno has been arrested. The whole family has to go to the collection camp this evening.” Horrified. I jumped out of bed and got dressed. The dreaded moment had arrived. According to the agreement I had made with my parents, I now had to separate from them, in order somehow to remain in Berlin for as long as possible. I helped my poor mother and my little sister pack the last of their things in rucksacks. I will never forget this terrible afternoon. Thank God we were too busy with preparations for the “trip” to see the whole tragedy of the moment clearly. Neighbors helped us pack the paltry amount of luggage that was allowed. By eight o’clock everything was ready and we set off on the difficult path to the train station. I accompanied my mother and sister to the collection camp, located on Grosse Hamburger Strasse in the former Jewish Home for the Aged. At the door of the building, which was guarded by the police, I had to take leave forever of those I hold dearest. A last kiss for my little sister Marion, a last blessing from my good mother for my future, and the gate to the prison closed behind them. A world had come to an end. Despite its hardships my relatively sheltered youth ceased to exist with the closing of that gate. From then on I had to stand on my own two feet . . .
Several days after my family was transported, the Gestapo came to seal off our rooms. Once again I had just returned from the night shift, and personally opened the door to them. They were somewhat amazed at the sight of the bare rooms (I had sold all of our transportable items to neighbors), and angrily asked who had removed everything. I played dumb and said that I was merely a subtenant, worked my twelve-hour shift at the factory, and was too tired to meddle in other people’s affairs. I could state quite calmly that I had nothing to do with the “Walter family,” for indeed I carry my father’s name. So the rooms were sealed, and despite their threat that my presence in the empty rooms might cause trouble for me yet, I went back to bed. But the “friendly” advice of the two officials reinforced my decision to join the illegal underground soon.
In order not to arouse suspicion prematurely, I continued to report to work at the factory. I arranged with the man who relieved me that I would always work the night shift and he the day. I slept hardly at all during those first weeks of December. I had to take care of the final preparations concerning my uncertain future. I secretly carried from the apartment suitcases packed with the last of my belongings, quickly sold the remaining valuables, and burned any incriminating evidence. By mid-December I was finally ready. Not a moment too soon.
On November 24, 1942, Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York held a press conference in Washington. He told reporters that according to sources confirmed by the State Department two million Jews had been murdered in an “extermination campaign” aimed at wiping out all the Jews in Nazi Europe. This information was confirmed in Jerusalem that same day. A detailed report on the construction of gas chambers in Eastern Europe and on the transports of Jewish adults and children “to great crematoriums in Oswiecim, near Cracow,” circled the globe. Though the mass murder of Jews had been going on at Auschwitz since mid-1942, this was the first reference to it to reach the outside world. BBC reports on the gassing and shooting of Jews were broadcast in Germany as well.
At the end of November, Roosevelt’s “President’s Third War Powers Bill” was defeated in Congress. The bill called for the repeal of laws that hindered “the free movement of persons, property and information into and out of the United States.”
“As I read it,” a Republican congressman said, summing up the majority opinion, “you throw the door wide open on immigration.” The conservative press, the Chicago Tribune above all, expressed “shock” at finding politicians attempting to “flood this nation with refugee immigration from Europe and other nations.”
“The ugly truth,” Newsweek wrote on November 30, 1942, “is that anti-Semitism was a definite factor in the bitter opposition to the President’s request for powers to suspend immigration laws for the duration.”