Luzie’s first three months in the United States had been filled with tumult, tension, and challenges. Yet she had done well. She had secured affidavits for her family and for her uncle Salomon, incarcerated in a concentration camp. Although her hope of reentering the merchandising world had not been realized, she had secured a temporary job at the American Jewish Committee as a special project assistant. In addition, she had averted a potential breach with her cousin Arnold.
These were not insignificant achievements, and they had been accomplished while she was learning her way around the expansive New York City subway and bus routes, becoming adjusted to the climate and new foods and sharpening her English. What was unusual and strange was beginning to become comprehensible.
Yet there was an element of New York life that would remain shocking—the American attitude toward events in Nazi Germany. As a guest at a Jewish event held at one of the city’s more elegant hotels, it had not been the lavish food, the beautiful dresses, décor, or the music that had impressed Luzie. Standing at the edge of the room, looking out at the attendees, she could only think, “Don’t these people have any idea what is going on in the world?”
As a German Jewish refugee, Luzie knew all too well what was unfolding back home in Berlin. Past experience had, of course, been the basis of her knowledge. Added to this would be information carried in dozens of letters from family members, Jewish friends, and her one non-Jewish correspondent, a former work colleague identified only as Muhme, German for “aunt.” That Luzie used this term of endearment is indicative of their close relationship. Muhme’s letters were not about visas, quotas, and ship tickets but rather filled with office news and gossip.
Many years later, in an intimate conversation with an AJC staffer, an event that was rare for Luzie, she revealed that she had had a “beautiful life in Berlin.” Certainly an important element of that life had been her prized position at L. S. Mayer. Understandably, she maintained a keen interest in the firm’s fate.
Under Nazi rule, there were only two possible fates for Jewish-owned businesses such as L. S. Mayer. Thousands went bankrupt as a result of boycotts by customers and suppliers, the smashing or smearing of store windows, and vicious threats. Businesses that escaped bankruptcy, no small feat, faced Aryanization: they were “transferred” to Aryan ownership. Technically, the Jewish owner was not robbed of his property but sold it to an Aryan. Yet these sales were far from normal business transactions; threatened and bullied, fearing for his life and that of his family and anxious to leave Germany, the Jewish businessman often came to the table and signed away his business for a sliver of its worth.
A scathing description of the process was left behind by a bold Aryanization consultant in his letter of resignation:
I refuse to be involved in any way with Aryanization, even though this means losing a handsome consultancy fee . . . I [can] no longer stand idly by and countenance the way many Aryan businessmen, entrepreneurs and the like . . . are shamelessly attempting to grab up Jewish shops and factories etc. . . . as cheaply as possible and for a ludicrous price. These people are like vultures, swarming down with bleary eyes, their tongues hanging out with greed, to feed upon the Jewish carcass.1
The first and most obvious result of this nationwide fire sale on Jewish establishments was that Jewish entrepreneurs were stripped of their finances. But this disaster was more than financial. A business is often about more than making a living—it becomes part of the owner’s personality and identity—and, for people like L. S. Mayer, Luzie’s employer, part of a long family tradition.
The enterprise had begun as a dry goods company founded by Loeb Solomon Mayer in Frankfurt in 1822. Mayer enjoyed great success, in no small measure due to his wife, Betty, as noted in the company’s centennial booklet.
Mrs. Betty developed a great ability in business matters and proved to be a dynamic entrepreneur, even though the notion of women’s emancipation was foreign to her. She ran the business independently after her husband’s death and traveled regularly to the Leipzig Trade Fair. In an era when all traveling was done by stagecoach, this was a considerable accomplishment for a woman.2
While Loeb and Betty Mayer laid the company’s foundation, it was their grandson, Leo S. Mayer, who sparked the firm’s remarkable growth. The company would expand well beyond Frankfurt with the opening of offices in Pforzheim, Berlin, Paris, and New York. There was also an L. S. Mayer, Ltd., of London, which, though technically a separate company, was in many ways integrated with the German division.
A 1930 auditor’s report described L. S. Mayer as a “leading, well respected export business,” with annual sales exceeding ten million reichsmarks.3 The company had 158 employees, in addition to 34 apprentices and 74 industrial workers. Luzie joined this prestigious firm in 1933 as an assistant to a top executive.
Luzie’s correspondence is replete with affection for the firm and her work there, as well as her hopes of one day reentering the business world. What about L. S. Mayer so appealed to this young woman?
L. S. Mayer did not function as a typical middleman between factory and consumer, purchasing open market goods available to all and reselling them; instead, the company often designed and patented its own goods.4 This creative element certainly could have been attractive to Luzie.
A shopper sees a finished product, such as a leather handbag, on a store shelf. Delighted with it, she buys it, never knowing all the detailed work that went into its design and production. But Luzie knew this behind-the-scenes process well. She saw and was perhaps at times part of the discussions about a sample’s fine points. Was the bag’s closure too small, the handle large enough? Was the leather dull, the color slightly off? The journeys from idea to sample and then from sample to approved design likely added interest to her job.
Luzie worked at L. S. Mayer until her exit from Berlin in October 1938. In this she was fortunate, for by 1938, approximately 70 percent of Jewish-owned businesses in existence when the Nazis assumed power had either failed or been Aryanized.5
How had L. S. Mayer survived the first five turbulent years of Nazi rule? The answer can be found in the White Book, a multivolume chronicle of the Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies from 1933 to 1939, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee.6 Luzie was a project assistant on the White Book. She likely typed the manuscript and helped compile and translate the cited material. The White Book draws on a wide range of sources, including Nazi legislation, government circulars, newspapers, posters, and leaflets. Also cited are German-Jewish documents: newspapers, journals, and reports from community organizations. Nothing within the AJC Archives identifies those in Germany who were forwarding the information to the AJC in New York. Yet we do know that the project, at least when Luzie worked on it, was directed by a woman named Margarete Muehsam-Edelheim, former editor of the C. V. Zeitung, one of German Jewry’s chief newspapers. The White Book encompasses the full scope of Jewish life in Germany: the civil service, education, army, agriculture, special tax regulations, registration of Jewish property, and many other subjects.
Within these volumes there is much that touches on, and explains, L. S. Mayer’s fate. It is essential to remember that L. S. Mayer was not part of the retail world but part of a universe that existed in the background—the wholesale sector. The company’s Berlin office at the corner of Ritterstrasse had nowhere near the foot traffic of a store on the Kurfürstendamm, the city’s elegant shopping boulevard. L. S. Mayer didn’t need the thousands of clients that traipsed into a large department store, for their clients, though fewer in number, bought in bulk. Although L. S. Mayer made a grand statement, with its large signs and corner location at Ritterstrasse, this was hardly the case for all wholesalers. Unlike a retailer, a wholesaler can be located on a third or fourth floor of an office building, out of sight to casual passersby.
Their less prominent locations helped the wholesale businesses survive since the Nazis needed to be stationed at prominent spots to spread their vicious propaganda. “The wholesale trade,” the White Book explains, “does not furnish such a good object of attack for propaganda purposes because it is not as visible to the man in the street, as the retail store with its manifold displays.”7
There was also the important issue of capital. An Aryan interested in buying a Jewish business needed far less capital for a bakery or a shoe store than for a large enterprise with multiple locations, such as L. S. Mayer. Furthermore, as the White Book notes, managing a store, though not easy, certainly lacked the complexity of a wholesale operation. “It is much more difficult to replace quickly the special market experience of a wholesaler. Therefore the rough methods of political warfare were avoided in the case of the Jewish wholesale trader in favor of the slower method of economic exclusion.”8
Finally, L. S. Mayer was more than a domestic wholesaler; it was also an exporter. The Nazis did not immediately turn on Jewish export companies that had foreign connections and brought hard currency into Germany. Thus, Jewish export firms were treated at first with greater caution than other Jewish firms.
So Luzie’s employer had survived into 1938. But surviving and prospering are not the same. In 1931, the company had sales exceeding ten million reichsmarks; in 1938, the sales had slipped to two million reichsmarks.9
The bad news continued. In the summer of 1938, a significant tax penalty was levied against L. S. Mayer for the alleged violation of customs regulations. It is impossible to know whether the fine was for a legitimate violation or was merely a Nazi ruse to “legally” extract money from a Jewish firm. At the time, Jewish companies were under assault for one violation after the next, from tax infractions to the breaking of “hygiene” laws. In any event, L. S. Mayer went ahead and paid the penalty, for what choice was there? Any protest of innocence would have risked the possibility of fierce Nazi retribution.
The firm, after all, was being watched. The L. S. Mayer surveillance file, maintained at the Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce, was growing month by month. In June 1938, a staffer recorded that “conditions within this Jewish company are rather murky. We heard that the Jew Nachmann has a bad reputation among Aryan employees due to his Jewish audaciousness.”10
L. S. Mayer, which had existed in Germany for more than a hundred years by following the motto “Always Evolve,” was, by the time of Luzie’s departure, facing a precarious future.
Hired years before Luzie, Muhme had been one of Luzie’s closest friends at L. S. Mayer. Although details are unknown, during Kristallnacht Muhme had more than proved her friendship and had been of great assistance to both Luzie and her father. As an Aryan she had been able to stay on at L. S. Mayer, and she kept Luzie abreast of all that was changing.
To: Luzie Hatch, New York
From: Muhme, Berlin
Date: March 6, 1939
Translated from the German
Dear Miss Hecht,
From now on I will write back to you promptly, since I now have the time!!
You must surely think I am very disloyal for only now answering your letter from December of last year. In any case, I immediately got in touch with your mother and dispatched her to come and see me in the store. Naturally, I wanted to sell her much more than she needed. Despite my cajoling, she only took the things that she wanted. So of course there was nothing more that I could do.
I can just see you prancing around in our beautiful things. Now, if only you, dear Luzie, could gain a foothold there and find a position that satisfied you.
I am lacking both the desire and the time to tell you everything in detail. You cannot even imagine what has been going on here. On December 31st, we had to evacuate the premises. Only the front room, the conference room, the private conference room, and the counter in the back where Erna used to sit remained for processing. In any case, it was an amazing operation.
In Frankfurt there are two pro tempore directors and one public fiduciary. Mr. St. [Strauss]11 did not return to Frankfurt from his trip to Italy but went directly to London, where he still is today.
In the last third of January, we heard that our company would be Aryanized after all. Pf.12 wrote to me that Mr. Rosenberg, an Aryan, was coming to Berlin with the new coworker. Since we no longer had a store and wouldn’t have been able to rent one that quickly, he would showcase the merchandise in a hotel. I had to put myself at the gentlemen’s disposal and invite the customers in advance.
I did that, and worked together with Mr. Rosenberg in the hotel until Feb. 13. The success was not what the gentlemen had imagined, as the timing was very unfavorable. The competition had already eaten away at some of the money; also there had just been a clearance sale and the department stores were having physical examinations. Also, they only wanted to buy from companies where the Aryanization had already been completed, even though I was able to produce a form saying that we had been approved by the chamber of commerce.
Dresdner and I each kept one suitcase and leather goods, and we continued selling out of the apartment. I had to, since I am still drawing a salary until 03/31. As of today, we have sold K 4.000 without being in the hotel. A remarkable accomplishment, no?
Miss Volbrodt, the good Erna, found a very comfortable secretarial position through Lipski. Miss Schwarz and Ida Eichler found employment in the pattern business with Rudfluwe, and Ella is a packer with Nord und Süd. I almost forgot that Mr. Berlin is a salesman with Fodry & Bartenbach Pforzheim. Only Mrs. Wünsch, Erna Ende, and I, we still have no new position. And I don’t want to quit yet either. It has all been a little much for my nerves and my sick heart. Now I have to see to it that I recover, and then it can start again.
Saturday, eight days ago, your dear parents bade me farewell. Of course they will be corresponding with you. Your father was very confident. He only regrets that you are so alone over there.
Write soon, I am enclosing an international reply coupon for you.
With love from your
Muhme