1. Rafael Medoff, FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith (Washington, DC: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, 2013), 2.
2. Ibid.
1. After immigrating to the United States, Rolf Hecht anglicized his first name, changing it to Ralph. Thus, within the letters, he is usually referred to as “Rolf,” while in the narrative he is referred to as “Ralph.” Although he was Luzie’s half-brother, she always spoke of him as her brother.
2. ORT was a Jewish institution that provided agricultural and vocational instruction.
3. Henry Rodwell, phone interview, London, May 2008.
4. Ralph Hatch, personal interview, Monroe Township, NJ, June 2008.
5. Ibid.
6. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997), 15.
7. John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), 401.
1. According to the log of the Westphalia, Nathan’s sister Ida had not come to the United States with him in 1873.
1. “Seventy-Five Thousand German Jews Get Passover Relief, Record Total,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 6, 1936, vol. 1, no. 202.
2. Ibid.
1. “Twenty-Five Thousand Jews Under Arrest in Wake of Worst Pogrom in Modern German History,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 13, 1938, vol. 4, no. 185.
2. Inge Diamond, phone interview, Boca Raton, FL, December 2011.
3. Ibid.
4. Eva Emmerich, personal interview, Pittsburgh, PA, December 2011.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
1. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997), 259.
2. 100 Jahre L. S. Mayer (1922), Hessisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, Darmstadt.
3. L. S. Mayer’s auditor report, 1930, Landesarchiv Berlin.
4. After a design was patented, L. S. Mayer usually entered into monopoly contracts with factories, granting them the exclusive right to produce the item. This was a good strategy: the factories were pleased because monopoly contracts were generally more profitable, and retail clients were pleased because they were assured a supply of unique goods.
5. Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24.
6. Only the first volume of the White Book was published. Eighty thousand copies of The Jews in Nazi Germany: The Factual Record of Their Persecution by the National Socialists were printed in 1933. A special effort was made to distribute the book to non-Jews, particularly professionals in the field of journalism. In 1935, ten thousand copies of an enlarged edition were printed.
7. White Book, no. 3, chapters 8–11 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1939), 177.
8. Ibid., 178.
9. Chamber of Industry and Commerce Records for Frankfurt, L. S. Mayer card files, Trade and Industry Archive of Hessen, Darmstadt.
10. Ibid.
11. Strauss’s failure to return was also noted by Nazi officials. The Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce entry for L. S. Mayer in November 1938 notes: “The former managing director, the Jew A. Strauss, is currently residing in Italy. Due to recent events in Germany [Kristallnacht] we do not expect him to return.”
12. “Pf” is most likely a reference to L. S. Mayer’s Pforzheim office.
1. “Billion Mark Fine, Ban on Business Received with Apathy by Reich Jews Faced with Famine,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 14, 1938, vol. 4, no. 186.
2. Like most German Jewish students, Ralph Hecht was enrolled in public school when Hitler assumed power in January 1933. However, the 1933 Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools, which established a quota limiting Jewish registration, ended Ralph’s public school studies. Although he would have qualified for an exemption because his father had served in the German army during World War I, his parents decided to remove him from public school and enrolled him in the Theodor Herzl School, a Jewish institution.
3. Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
4. Ralph Hatch, personal interview, Monroe Township, NJ, June 2008.
5. NDR radio interview, Bonn, August 8, 1991, Hatch Collection, American Jewish Committee Archives.
6. Ibid.
7. G. E. Miller [Mauricio Fresco], Shanghai: The Paradise of Adventurers (New York: Orsay, 1937), 401.
8. Shanghai Ghetto, dir. Amir Mann and Dana Janklowicz-Mann. Rebel Child Productions, 2002. Film.
9. Ernest G. Heppner, Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 52.
10. Ernest O. Hauser, Shanghai: City for Sale (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 240.
11. David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976), 43.
12. Ibid., 116.
13. Ibid., 85.
14. Heppner, Shanghai Refuge, 52.
15. In Japanese, Nazis, and Jews, David Kranzler states that the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was the most essential of the relief organizations. He contends that it is doubtful that the refugees would have survived without the Joint’s assistance.
1. The Clipper was a method of air transport. The carrier depending on the season either stopped in Lisbon or Bermuda before proceeding to Europe. When World War II began, British censors examined the mail of carriers refueling in Bermuda, thereby delaying mail delivery.
2. Alfons Isack Gestapo file, Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsselfdorf.
3. Ibid.
4. Silbermann was an L. S. Mayer executive who had managed to leave Germany.
1. Hans was likely referring to all the greetings to Luzie from her former L. S. Mayer colleagues that had been added to the end of Muhme’s letter of May 5, 1939.
2. Inge Diamond, phone interview, Boca Raton, FL, December 2011.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Both the Hilfsverein Deutschsprechender Juden of Buenos Aires and the HICEM claimed credit for rescuing these refugees. It is likely that each organization assumed a different role. Although the Hilfsverein paid the disembarkation and travel fees, it appears that the HICEM was responsible for successfully negotiating with the Chilean government and ultimately acquiring Chilean visas for the refugees.
6. Letter from the Hilfsverein Deutschsprechender Juden to Joseph C. Hyman, executive director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, March 15, 1939, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 1069, no. 1 of 2.
7. Ibid.
8. Friedrich Borchardt, Report on Bolivia, May 1939, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 1075, no. 1 of 2.
9. Diamond interview.
10. Letter from Sociedad de Protección de los Immigrantes Israelitas, La Paz, Bolivia, to AJDC, Paris, January 16, 1940, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 1075.
11. Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 142.
12. Ibid., 138.
13. Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz, Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 125.
14. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 139.
15. Ibid., 140.
16. This is not to suggest that women and children were never the targets of Nazi violence. During Kristallnacht, it was reported that women and children in Leipzig were driven into the shallow river, where they were forced to stand for hours in the cold water. In Karlsruhe, the children in the Jewish children’s home were put into the street. Still, at this point, the primary victims of physical attacks were male.
17. Ruth Kluger, Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 30.
18. The HICEM was an international Jewish organization, established in 1927 to deal with Jewish migration. It was set up by three organizations: HIAS (the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, an American Jewish organization based in New York), ICA (Jewish Colonization Association, based in Great Britain), and Emig-Direkt (founded in Berlin in 1921). HICEM is an acronym for HIAS, ICA, and Emig-Direkt.
19. “The Situation in Shanghai,” HICEM report, YIVO Archives, HICEM Collection, box 70, folder xvc-3.
20. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 143.
21. Ibid.
22. C. Wild, Baden-Baden and the Black Forest (1886), 4.
23. Alfons Isack Gestapo file, Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
24. Ibid.
25. According to his file, the suspension was based on Hitler’s amnesty granted to the civilian population on September 9, 1939.
26. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 21.
1. “Reich Reported Deporting Jews to Poland, France,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 29, 1940, vol. 7, no. 170.
2. US State Department Records, 1940, LM 193, reel 58, National Archives.
3. Hilde Übelacker came back to Germany in 1946. She had escaped to Switzerland four years earlier with the assistance of Protestant clergy in France. In 1952, she moved back into her childhood home with her husband. The farm family she had worked for as a teenager were her “best friends as long as they lived.”
4. Hilde Übelacker, personal interview, Baden-Baden, Germany, May 26, 2011.
5. Ibid. At this point the Nazis had not begun their policy of extermination. Death camps such as Auschwitz did not yet exist. But as early as October 1939, following the invasion of Poland, Jews had been uprooted and deported to inhospitable areas in the east. See Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial (New York: Random House, 2011), 75.
6. Übelacker interview.
7. “Report on the Deportation of German Jews to Southern France,” Karlsruhe in Baden-Württemberg, October 30, 1940, Politisches Archiv Auswärtiges Amt (PA/AA), R 100869, Berlin.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Achim Reimer, Stadt zwischen zwei Demokratien: Baden-Baden von 1930 bis 1950 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 130.
11. “Report on the Deportation of German Jews to Southern France.”
12. “Verzeichnis der am 22. Oktober 1940 aus Baden ausgewiesenen Juden,” Stadtmuseum/Stadtarchiv, Baden-Baden, 3–5.
13. Manfred Kirschner, personal interview, Pembrooke Pines, FL, July 2012.
14. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Tribunal Under Control Council Law No. 10, vol. 13 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1952), 165.
15. Angelika Schindler, personal interview, Baden-Baden, Germany, May 2012.
16. The Baden transport was originally conceived as a trial run. The Nazis hoped to deport 270,000 Jews from the Old Reich, Austria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Vichy France. French opposition apparently derailed this plan. See Appendix, “Report on the Deportation of German Jews to Southern France.”
17. Übelacker interview.
18. Ibid.
19. Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 65.
20. Letter from Herbert Katzki, October 27, 1940, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (hereinafter AJDC) Archives, Collection 33/44, file 618, no. 2 of 2.
21. “Report on the Deportation of German Jews to Southern France.”
22. “Refugees in French Concentration Camps,” pamphlet, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, fol. 619, no. 2 of 2.
23. Hanne Hirsch Liebmann, interview, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1990, available at: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_oi.php?MediaId=1652.
24. Kirschner interview.
25. Quoted in Zuccotti, Holocaust, French, and Jews, 66.
26. If Arnold had not met the first two requirements for sending money to unoccupied France, he would have needed to file an application for permission to transmit funds with the US Treasury Department.
27. Letter from HICEM staffer to HIAS office, New York, December 6, 1940, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 619, no. 1 of 2.
28. Letter by Joseph J. Schwartz, February 12, 1941, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 619.
29. Zuccotti, Holocaust, French, and Jews, 67.
30. Michael Merose, Marta’s grandson and Dora’s great-nephew, shared this letter with the AJC Archives. It is his belief that the letter was probably his grandmother Marta’s last letter, written shortly before her death in 1941. He is uncertain whether it was ever sent.
31. Report on internment camps, February 1941, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 619, no. 1 of 2.
32. Ibid.
33. Übelacker interview.
34. Kirschner interview.
35. Oskar Wolf Diary, 1940–1941, Stadtmuseum/Stadtarchiv, Baden-Baden, 1.
36. Ibid., 22.
37. Letter from an aid worker, November 16, 1941, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 620, no. 2 of 2.
38. Report prepared by Dr. J. W., translated January 30, 1941, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 619, no. 1 of 2.
39. Übelacker interview.
40. Ellen Bonnell, American Friends Service Committee, Marseille, report for the Philadelphia office, January 7, 1941, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, fol. 619, no. 1 of 2.
41. Unitarian Service Committee Assistance Report, February 19, 1941, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 619, no. 1 of 2.
42. Statement by Dr. Joseph H. Schwartz, May 5, 1941, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 619, no. 2 of 2.
43. Those transferred out of Gurs in 1941, unless they had the good fortune of escaping or emigrating, had a short reprieve. In August 1942, the Nazis issued an order calling for the deportation of foreign Jews from unoccupied France to the east.
44. “Information Service Report No. #, The Camp de Gurs,” January 15, 1941, AJDC Archives, Collection 33/44, folder 619, no. 1 of 2.
45. Unitarian Service Committee Assistance report.
1. The Germans had surrendered in May 1945, but war did not end in the Pacific until the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
1. Moise Moiseff, “Jewish Transits in Japan,” HIAS Records, YIVO Archives, Record Group 245.4, XV, C7.
2. Their names are included in the list of Lodz ghetto inhabitants, 1940–1944, Yad Vashem Archives. This determination was also made by the Yad Vashem Archives due to information from the organization of former residents of Lodz in Israel, Jerusalem 1994.
3. Gerri Rozanski, personal interview, New York, February 2009.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. “AJC Committee Veteran Awarded Germany’s Order of Merit,” AJC press release, New York, October 6, 1992.
7. “Remarks by Luzie Hatch on the Presentation to Her of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany at the New York German Consulate General,” September 24, 1992, Luzie Hatch Collection, American Jewish Committee Archives.
1. The part of the Palatinate that was then part of Bavaria. It is located immediately east of the Saar.