Chapter 1
Children in the Early Years of Antisemitic Persecution
On November 27, 1938, the family of Elisabeth Block, Bavarian Jews from the small village of Niedernburg, made an outing in the surrounding countryside. “At around 11:30 we all made ourselves ready to drive with the car,” wrote fifteen-year-old Elisabeth, “because the whole week we have had such lovely weather. [. . .] At Chiemsee we got out and hunted for shells. The lake mirrored the splendid blue of the mountains; it was a wonderful sight. We also got out in Traunstein [. . . and] drove along the German Alpine Road, where we also looked out upon the glacier garden. [. . .] Only at quarter to six did we finally turn for home.”1
1. Elisabeth Block, Erinnerungszeichen: Die Tagebücher der Elisabeth Block, ed. Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte/Historisicher Verein Rosenheim (Rosenheim: Wendelstein-Druck, 1993), 163–64.
As elsewhere in her diary, Elisabeth Block devoted her energies that autumn day in 1938 to describing those things that absorbed her most: the intimacies of family life, the familiar pastimes enjoyed with relatives and friends, and the splendor and beauty of nature. Elisabeth does not, however, mention in her journal entries concerning her trip to Chiemsee a development that must have troubled each family member: the excursion would be the Blocks’ last outing together in their own automobile. Beginning on December 3, 1938, German Jews would be forced to surrender their drivers’ licenses and registration papers. Also omitted in the text are allusions to the lingering effects that the family continued to experience in the wake of the nationwide pogrom against Jews on Reichskristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) on November 9 and 10, 1938. Although the well-assimilated Blocks had been spared the worst of the antisemitic excesses in their insulated hamlet of Niedernburg, local Sturmabteilung (SA) and Nazi Party activists had plundered and vandalized Jewish-owned shops and businesses in nearby Rosenheim. More significantly, Elisabeth’s uncle, Dr. Leo Levy of Bad Polzin,2 had been murdered in his apartment by SA men in the midst of the pogrom, an event Elisabeth references only in passing in her journal.3 Further disturbing developments—the exclusion of Jewish pupils from “German” schools and the economic and social dislocation caused by the stringent antisemitic decrees issued in the wake of Kristallnacht—receive similarly short shrift. Worse trials lay ahead, although, as always, the maturing teenager was loathe to record them: the loss of the family home4 and business; the compulsory sterilization of Elisabeth’s father; the 1941 forced labor provisions for all able-bodied German Jews. Until the family’s transfer to Munich-Milbertshofen, a collection camp (Sammellager) for Jews pending deportation, Block remained largely silent in the face of such ominous developments.
2. Formerly a German spa town in Pomerania, today this is the Polish city of Połczyn-Zdrój.
Elisabeth Block’s reticence concerning the difficulties she and her family encountered as a result of National Socialist anti-Jewish policy was perhaps an atypical response to persecution. For a generation of Jewish children like Elisabeth, the 1930s in Nazi Germany was a time of danger, anguish, and uncertainty. Nazi antisemitic measures isolated Jewish youngsters from their “Aryan” friends and classmates, deprived them of physical and financial security, and subjected them to scorn and humiliation. How did these children respond to such difficult circumstances? How did they view the discriminatory practices aimed at themselves and their loved ones? What strategies did they employ in order to cope with the emotional and psychological trauma they experienced?5 This chapter follows the arc of persecutory policies against Jews in Nazi Germany and their impact and consequences for Jewish children.
5. For a discussion of German Jewish reactions to persecution in general, see Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman, Jewish Responses to Persecution, Vol. 1: 1933–1938 (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010).
From Assimilation to Marginalization
Some 523,000 Jews lived in Germany in January 1933.6 Comprising less than 1 percent of the total population, German Jewry had throughout the nineteenth century waged a hard-fought battle for emancipation and gained full civil rights with the unification of the German state in 1871. Although tacit—and open—anti-Jewish sentiment persisted and received added impetus with the formation of antisemitic political parties and the development of new “racially based” antisemitic theories at the turn of the century, the establishment of the democratic Weimar Republic (1918–1933) marked an era of unprecedented integration of Jewish citizens into German social, cultural, and economic life.7 The process of assimilation, manifested by soaring rates of intermarriage8 and a rise in conversions to Christianity, facilitated Jewry’s tenacious and thoroughgoing participation in nearly all aspects of German society. At the same time, German Jews cultivated a diverse, yet distinct, identity ranging in scope from the mainstream assimilationists to more marginal Orthodox and Zionist circles. An overwhelmingly middle-class community as a result of the economic opportunities that came with industrialization, a majority of Jews lived in Germany’s great cities: Berlin, Frankfurt, Breslau,9 Cologne. Just the same, in 1933, one in five German Jews still lived in a small town. Wherever they lived, most Jews thought of themselves as Germans, as inherently a part of the country and society in which they lived.10
6. Of these, approximately four hundred thousand were German citizens; the remaining number represented chiefly eastern European Jews, many of whom had been born in Germany and held permanent residence status.
7. Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939 (London: André Deutsch, 1970), 36ff.
8. In 1927, for example, 54 percent of all German Jews who wed contracted their marriage with a non-Jewish partner.
9. Today this is the Polish city of Wrocław.
10. Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. 5ff. See also Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel, eds., The German-Jewish Dilemma: From the Enlightenment to the Shoah (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, The Legacy of German Jewry, trans. David Suchoff (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); George Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985); Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Marion Kaplan and Beate Meyer, eds., Jüdische Welten: Juden in Deutschland vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005); Arnold Paucker et al., eds., The Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1986).
Bertel Kugelmann11 was nine years old when the National Socialists came to power in January 1933. Her family of grain merchants lived in the small municipality of Fritzlar, one hundred miles north of Frankfurt am Main. For most of her young life, she had lived a secure existence in rural Hessen. Yet, within weeks of Adolf Hitler’s becoming chancellor of Germany, the unexpected responses of her neighbors and playmates had shaken much of this sense of security and rootedness. Bertel Kugelmann, who like many of her coreligionists had never before encountered overt antisemitism, was now made to feel the brunt of that prejudice often lying just beneath the surface of German village life. For children and adults alike, the profound integration of German Jews within German society and their deep roots in their own local communities made the dislocation and marginalization that accompanied early Nazi antisemitic policy all the more disconcerting and incomprehensible.
11. Bertel Kugelmann lived with her family in Fritzlar until 1939, when she moved to be near a sister in Hamburg. On June 25, 1943, she was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp; she was interned there for almost two years and liberated at Lenzing-Oberdonau, a subcamp of Mauthausen, by American troops on May 5, 1945. In June 1946, Kugelmann immigrated to the United States, where she pursued a career in nursing. In 1956, she married Dr. Melvin Borowsky.
Document 1-1. Bertel Kugelmann, “My Story,” quoted in Paulgerhard Lohmann, “Hier waren wir zu Hause”: Die Geschichte der Juden vom Fritzlar, 1096–2000, vor dem Hintergrund der allgemeinen Geschichte der deutschen Juden (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2002), 257–58 (translated from the German).
We were Jews and our neighbors Catholics, and during my early childhood that was unexceptional. But soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, things slowly began to change. The non-Jewish children from the neighborhood harassed us. Many of them said, “You are a Jew, and you killed Jesus. I can’t play with you any more.” I went home crying and asked my parents what was meant by this accusation. My parents tried to comfort me and told me that we weren’t to blame for the death of Jesus. [. . .] As the persecution of the Jews began to intensify, and one heard from Jews in nearby towns and villages that they had been beaten, that gravestones had been overturned, and that windowpanes had been shattered, Jewish families and some of the [single] adult Jews left their homes and the place of their birth, and emigrated. . . .
My father, Josef Kugelmann,12 was a grain dealer, highly respected in the community and also among the farmers in the nearby villages with whom he did business. Everyone knew him and came to him when they needed help. Once, when he gave a surety for one of the farmers, he had to put out a good deal of money in order to free him from his debt. He had served in the German army and fought at the front in France throughout all four years of World War I. His father, my grandfather, had served during the Franco-Prussian War. Both felt themselves Germans, like all the other veterans. With their wartime comrades, they were members of veterans’ associations and organizations. When my mother pressed my father to leave Germany, he would not listen to her. “Don’t get yourself worked up,” he said. “Nothing will happen to us. After a little while, Hitler will go away again.”
12. Josef Kugelmann (1877–1942) was incarcerated in the Buchenwald concentration camp in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht. In May 1941, he was again detained, in the Breitenau camp near Kassel. On December 16, 1941, Kugelmann was transferred to Dachau, where he died on June 16, 1942. His wife, Betty Kugelmann (née Plaut), perished in the Ravensbrück concentration camp on October 11, 1942. Three of their four children, including Bertel Kugelmann, survived the war. Their second daughter, Brunhilde, born 1916, was deported to the Łódź ghetto in 1942 and later perished at the Izbica transit camp near Lublin.
My brother Max, twelve years older than I, was an enthusiastic soccer player and belonged to the local soccer league. One day he came home after a soccer game to my room—I remember it as if it were yesterday. His face was black and blue, his lips swollen. He told me that he had been beaten up by some of the spectators; they didn’t like it that a Jewish boy was playing with the rest of the team members. After this incident, my father agreed that my brother should go to my father’s two sisters in the United States, where my older sister Irene had already emigrated in 1929.13 This is what happened to Jewish children already in April of 1933; nevertheless most people voted for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in November 1933.14
13. Max Kugelmann served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945 and returned to Germany in the immediate postwar period in order to locate surviving family members.
14. On November 13, 1933, German voters went to the polls to vote in an election to the Reichstag; the ballot also contained a referendum asking German citizens to sanction Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. The electorate voted overwhelmingly for the National Socialists; however, the ballot for the Reichstag election contained no other party lists beside the Nazi roster.
National Socialist ideology declared that Jews exerted an undue and pernicious influence upon the German and world economies, an influence promoted, Nazi dogma suggested, by the growth of “international Jewry” and its “conspiracy” for world domination. When the Hitler regime came to power in late January 1933, Nazi authorities proclaimed their intention to eliminate Jews from German economic life. When the American Jewish Congress and allied Jewish organizations held a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden15 on March 27, 1933, to protest early Nazi discriminatory measures and to exhort fellow American Jews not to buy German-manufactured products, the Nazi government used the occasion as a pretext to launch its first centrally directed economic measure against German Jewry. On March 28, 1933, the Nazi Party leadership announced a boycott effort against Jewish-owned shops and businesses to begin on April 1. The rationale behind the endeavor was twofold: the campaign would at once represent an initial effort to marginalize Jews in their own communities and might also consolidate public opinion in favor of Nazi antisemitic policy. On the morning of the boycott, local party action committees stationed SA or Schutzstaffel (SS) men outside Jewish-owned stores and enterprises, often holding placards encouraging passersby to purchase their wares only in German stores. Officially, sentries were posted only to “warn the population against entering Jewish businesses”; in practice, “Aryan” shoppers attempting to cross the picket line were often verbally or physically harassed, and in some places, demonstrations turned to violence against Jewish shop owners and spectators. Nevertheless, despite the best intention of central planners like Der Stürmer publisher Julius Streicher, the boycott ultimately failed to win the public support the Nazis had wished for, and international condemnation of the measure ensured that the centralized boycott campaign would be confined to a one-day affair.16 However, depending on the degree of local antisemitic sentiment, so-called wild boycotts, or Einzelaktionen (uncoordinated individual acts against Jews), continued well into the late 1930s, inevitably forcing Jewish-owned businesses in many localities into insolvency or liquidation.17
15. In addition to the event at Madison Square Garden, similar protest rallies took place in Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, and several other American cities.
Irmgard Marx lived in Höchst, today a municipal district of Frankfurt am Main, where her father owned a grain and feed business. She was ten years old on the day of the boycott of April 1, 1933. In contrast to the campaign’s unsuccessful engagement in Berlin, the national capital, the boycott movement in Frankfurt experienced a measure of success, and the young Marx witnessed, perhaps without fully comprehending, the earliest efforts of the Nazi government to displace Jews from German economic life. From a financial standpoint, the stream of antisemitic measures aimed at Jewish-owned businesses had grave repercussions for Marx’s family, who lost their business in 1937 and emigrated to the United States after Kristallnacht in 1938. For both ten-year-old Irmgard Marx and her parents, the loss of familiar customers and the gradual erosion of community support in a place where they had once felt at home would take an emotional toll.
Document 1-2. Irmgard Marx, “Everyday Terror,” in Elfi Pracht, ed., Frankfurter jüdische Erinnerungen: Ein Lesebuch zur Sozialgeschichte (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1997), 227–32 (translated from the German).
On the day of the boycott, on April 1, 1933, an SA man stood in uniform before our store and hindered customers from coming inside. A few brave souls came in through the courtyard18 in order to buy their goods, but the largest share of our customers stayed away. In one case a man, very agitated, came to us in our apartments after he had an exchange of words with the SA man. But this was an exception, and I cannot remember his name. My parents had told us children nothing about the boycott. I myself was shocked when I saw the SA man, but had no inkling of what all this meant for the future. After the boycott, the business went on. The circle of customers had grown smaller, but there was still enough to do. No, in any event, Christian businesses did not shut down for the day out of solidarity [with us]. Things like that just didn’t happen in those days. Later one could see certain Christian-owned stores with signage that said “German” or “Aryan.” Many were businesses that had formerly belonged to Jewish owners. I can still remember very well the signs which appeared on the restaurants, cafes, and movie theaters—when this was I can’t remember any more—which said that Jews were not desired there or that entry was forbidden to Jews. These signs were also posted for swimming pools. In one bakery in our neighborhood, there was once a sign that read, “We do not say Grüss Gott19 any more, but Heil Hitler!”20 Even as young as I was, I was horrified. Now I couldn’t even say “Good day” when I entered a shop or store in order to buy bread or rolls. There was a steady stream of new discriminatory laws which made the daily lives of Jews more difficult. Even my parents and their business were affected.
18. That is, through the back entrance.
Yes, there were several “faithful customers” who came to buy from us long after the boycott, but that circle—especially after 1936—became smaller and smaller. My parents closed their business either in late 1937 or early 1938. How high their losses were I can’t say. [. . .] After the store was empty, my parents rented the space to the “Boha” shoe store.21
21. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom, the Marx family emigrated to the United States, where Irmgard Marx pursued a career as a textile artist in New York City.
Document 1-3. The antisemitic Der Stürmer newspaper portrays Jewish children ejected from a public swimming pool in Bad Herweck, near Mannheim, 1935, USHMMPA WS# 11196, courtesy of the Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History.
In the Schoolroom
Many of the Nazi discriminatory measures of the 1930s aimed to marginalize Jews within their own communities. For adults, marginalization meant removal from professional life, the loss of livelihood and property, and restrictions on their movements and actions in communal spaces. For children, a prominent aspect of segregation was the limitation on numbers and eventual dismissal of Jewish youngsters from German schools. The April 25, 1933, Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities had introduced a numerus clausus22 for Jewish pupils and students, stipulating that enrollment of Jewish youth in schools and universities be limited to 1.5 percent of those registered at any given institution. The expulsion process concluded on November 15, 1938, with a decree definitively banning Jewish pupils from state and public schools.23 Until then, as German law prescribed mandatory education for youngsters under the age of fourteen, significant numbers of Jewish children remained in school beside their “Aryan” classmates. The experiences of these pupils differed appreciably. Elisabeth Block, introduced in the chapter’s introduction, remained at her desk in her rural Bavarian schoolhouse until November 1938, cherishing the time she spent among her sympathetic instructors and close-knit school friends. Yet, many other children were not so lucky and faced mounting discrimination in the public school environment throughout the 1930s. Treated as pariahs and the objects of harassment and ridicule, Jewish students were often subjected to public humiliation and punitive measures by politically zealous teachers and experienced both scorn and neglect at the hands of their peers. Because Nazi authorities also sought to win the hearts and minds of society’s youngest members, Jewish children, beside their “Aryan” colleagues, also endured the endless homilies dedicated to Nazi political, racial, and antisemitic ideology, distilled in class lectures, assembly addresses, and daily songs and rituals.
22. Literally, this means “closed number”; in normal usage, it is a method to limit the number of students at universities where the number of applicants greatly exceeds the places available. Before 1945, such limitations were often used as a racial quota in order to limit the number of students of a given minority, especially Jews.
23. See Document 1-11.
Gerd Zwienicki24 was a high school student25 in the northern German city-state of Bremen. The eldest of four children, he was the son of Jewish parents who ran a bicycle shop in the Hanseatic port city. After his graduation in the mid-1930s, Zwienicki began rabbinical studies in Frankfurt and enrolled at the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary in Würzburg. In the course of Kristallnacht in Bremen in November 1938, his mother, Selma, was murdered by SA men. The following year, the remaining Zwienicki family members emigrated to Canada, and in 1944 Gerd was ordained as a rabbi, taking up a position at the Hebrew National Orphan’s Home in Yonkers, New York. But in 1934, Gerd Zwienicki was a seventeen-year-old teenager with a class composition to write. The topic assigned to him for the essay—“Does history show that racial mixing leads to the decline of a people?”—forced the young Jewish student to reflect and reiterate Nazi racial theories concerning the purity of the Nordic “Aryan” race and the danger of assimilation with “inferior peoples.”
24. Gerd Zwienicki, later Rabbi Jacob Wiener (1917–2011), earned a PhD in human development and social relations from New York University and became a social worker for the New York City Department of Human Resource Administration after World War II. In 1948, he married Trudel Farntrog, a fellow survivor. Rabbi Wiener was a longtime volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
25. That is, he was a pupil in an Oberrealschule.
Document 1-4. A class essay by Gerd Zwienicki, “Does History Show that Racial Mixing Leads to the Decline of a People,” c. 1934, USHMMA, Acc. 2055.122.1 (translated from the German).
Does History Show That Racial Mixing Leads to the Decline of a People[?]
It is the most significant merit of the National Socialist movement that it clearly recognizes—and that it time and again points out to all racial comrades [Volksgenossen]26—that a great people [Volk] can only endure for the long term when it concerns itself with maintaining the purity of its race. To support the assertion that a mixing of races unquestionably leads to the decline of a people, history delivers several striking examples.
26. The term Volksgenosse (Volk comrade) first appeared in usage in German-speaking countries in the early nineteenth century; it had a meaning similar to the German term Landsmann (compatriot). The term was adopted and widely used by National Socialists to impart a feeling of inclusivity to those persons of “German blood” who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft, the German racial community.
First, let us think of the fate of the great world empires of antiquity: the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman empires, to summon forth the most conspicuous examples. From the peasant stock of the Iranians came the establishment of the Persian Empire that was sustained by the spectacular religious movement of Zarathustra. This religion has a very Nordic composition in that all world events are connected to the battle between good and evil, of light against darkness. The idea of world empire was originally foreign to the Aryan27 peoples of Persia. Only after the final conquest of Babylon did they adopt the idea from vanquished Semitic peoples and follow this course to its highest realization. But the borders [of the empire] were spread too far; and the upper stratum of peasant and chivalric peoples of Nordic ancestry and upbringing were not of sufficient number in such a multiracial world empire, and they dissolved into racial chaos. The Persian Empire grew ever more frail and irresolute. With ease it could be overwhelmed by such a powerful people as the Macedonians. Even Alexander [the Great] fell victim to the dream of world empire, which he came so close to accomplishing. Here we witness the terrible tragedy, unparalleled in history. Just so, the Führer, as the willing servant of his people, in accordance with their nature, willfully rejects the notion of the fusion of races, so that he might establish a world empire of eternal peace, God’s kingdom upon earth. This mixing of races and peoples, however, transpired at the cost of the Macedonian-Greek conquerors and naturally led within the briefest of periods to the decline of this people and to the disintegration of their world empire. Nevertheless, the vision of world empire experienced such a renewal and intensification through Alexander that this ideal has never again disappeared.
27. The word “Aryan” derives from Sanskrit. Since ancient times, Persians (the peoples of modern-day Iran) have used the term Aryan as a racial and ethnic designation to describe their lineage, language, and culture. Indeed, the name “Iran” is a cognate of “Aryan” and means “land of the Aryans.” In linguistic terminology, “Aryan” refers to a subfamily of the Indo-European languages, and before the term’s adoption and perversion by National Socialist ideologues, it was employed to describe the parent language of the Indo-European language family. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, linguists and ethnologists began to argue that speakers of the Indo-European languages constituted a distinct race, separated in the racial hierarchy from the Semitic peoples (i.e., Jews).
The history of the Roman Empire is the history of Rome. Its march of destiny leads from the Latin patrician state to the national state and climaxed with world empire. The founders of the Roman state [were] the Indo-Germanic and Nordic peasant peoples. The healthy growth from city-state to national state advanced mainly through the constant foundation of farming settlements, which was first made possible by the great reproductive capacity [Kinderreichtum] of the peasant families and the gens.28 For centuries, the vitality of the Roman people, built upon peasant foundations, maintained its ascendancy. With the further expansion of the empire beyond the borders of Italy, friction slowly developed between those peoples who, no longer tied to the soil, followed the advance of expansion—together with nonfarming peoples engaged in trade—and those of a Nordic hereditary disposition whose innate drive for expansion of ethnic territory functioned through a strategy of colonization. These two opposing impulses, which developed side by side contemporaneously, we can clearly perceive in Rome’s political actions, but to explore specific examples would take us too far afield from our subject matter. After the greatest and most difficult wars which Rome had to fight, after the war against Carthage, the foundation of the state, its peasant class, was almost completely [decimated]29; the racial core of the population was most gravely affected. Now the greatly enervated foundation of peasant stock succumbed to the geopolitical laws of a world power, with all of the consequences inherent in racial transformation. With the riches from every land streamed into Rome also masses of peoples of foreign race. A mercantile spirit and a dissolute culture, introduced from other religious practices, also permeated deeply into political life. The newly established class of great landholders adopted from Carthage the plantation farming economy, with thousands of slaves. The peasantry was completely undermined, both racially and economically. While the Romans’ hereditary character, as well as their political forms and prototypical works, would have great impact for hundreds of years to come, the old vitality of the Roman Volk, with its origins in the race, began slowly to erode, until their world empire was overrun by Germanic tribes. [. . .]In conclusion, let us look within the confines of contemporary history and the present. Can we not here clearly see the results and consequences of racial mixing? We have only to compare North and South America. While in South America, the predominantly Latin European settlers have for the most part mingled with the aboriginal inhabitants, the largely Nordic population of North America has interbred very little with the lowly colored peoples.30 The results that must arise from these circumstances we see before us. The racial makeup and culture of South America are clearly different from that in North America; the racially pure Germanic has become the lord of the American continent, and will remain so as long as he does not degenerate by defiling his blood.
28. These were Roman patrilineal clans comprising families with the same stock in the male line, sharing a common family name and worshipping a common ancestor.
In September 1935, in the midst of the seventh annual Nuremberg party rally, Nazi leaders promulgated the so-called Nuremberg racial laws, which historians view as a central feature of the acceleration of legislated discriminatory measures in Nazi Germany. The first, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor (Blood Protection Law) (Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre, or Blutschutzgesetz), imposed bans upon marriage and extramarital relations between German Jews and German “Aryans,” thus providing a legal basis for the punishment of Rassenschande (“race defilement”), or miscegenation. The second piece of legislation, the Reich Citizenship Law (Reichsbürgergesetz), created a new status for “Aryan” Germans, “Reich citizen,” upon which all political and civil rights in Germany would be based. Jews were denied most integral civil rights, possessing only Staatsbürgerschaft (state citizenship), a status that suggested they were now subjects, not citizens. Ancillary ordinances provided a legal definition for “Jewishness” based on confessional, as well as biological, terms.31
31. See Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2003); Cornelia Essner, “Die Nürnberger Gesetze” oder die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns, 1933–1945 (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2002); Lothar Gruchmann, “Blutschutzgesetz und Justiz: Zur Entstehung und Auswirkung des Nürnberger Gesetzes vom 15. September 1935,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 31 (1983): 418–42; Otto Dov Kulka, “Die Nürnberger Rassengesetze und die deutsche Bevölkerung im Lichte geheimer Stimmungs- und Lageberichte,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 32 (1984): 582–624; Abraham Margaliot, “The Reaction of the Jewish Public in Germany to the Nuremberg Laws,” Yad Vashem Studies 12 (1977): 75–107.
Artist Irene Spicker Awret lives today in Falls Church, Virginia. In the summer months of 1935, fourteen-year-old Irene lived with her parents in a comfortable middle-class district of Berlin, where she dreamed of becoming a painter. Although the escalating discriminatory legislation had persuaded the secular teenager to take increased pride in her Jewish heritage, the regime’s antisemitic measures had had limited practical impact upon the young girl’s life: the demeanor of her teachers and classmates had not yet altered, and best friend Tutti Mahlow “did not care that [she] was Jewish.”32 The two girls spent hours together, playing, studying, and reciting the plays of Goethe and Schiller. With the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, however, Irene’s world changed dramatically. Lifelong friendships extinguished overnight, and the girl who had once hidden her childhood illnesses from her parents in her eagerness to go to school now hated the classroom lectures in history and ethnology (Volkskunde), which were punctuated with antisemitic rhetoric and Nazi propaganda. With the Nuremberg Laws came a heightened sense of discomfort and anxiety for Germany’s Jews, both young and old. For young Irene Spicker, in those difficult days before her family left Germany for Belgium in 1939, art seemed her only stable refuge.33
32. Irene Spicker Awret, They’ll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist’s Coming of Age in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 78.
33. Irene Spicker (1921–) fled from Berlin to Belgium in 1939, where she remained in hiding for several years. Arrested in 1943, she continued to draw while confined to a Gestapo prison in Brussels. Her artwork attracted the attention of Gestapo officials, who ordered her transfer to an art workshop at the Mechelen (Malines) transit camp. There Spicker avoided deportation and fell in love with fellow prisoner-artist Azriel Awret. The couple married soon after their liberation from Mechelen in September 1944.
Document 1-5. Irene Spicker Awret, They’ll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist’s Coming of Age in the Third Reich (Madison, WI/Takoma Park, MD: University of Wisconsin Press/Dryad Press, 2004), 88.
Shortly after returning from my vacation trip, the Nuremberg Laws were published, making mixed marriages unlawful and punishing sexual intercourse between Jews and “Aryans” with hard labor.34 At the same time we were demoted from citizens to subjects. To top it all, my friend Tutti Mahlow dropped me like the proverbial hot potato. I should try to understand, she said, sounding very considerate—her father was a magistrate, her sister had to think of her fiancé’s career. In the space of a day, we went from being good friends to classmates who politely greeted each other from a distance. It was more humiliating than having to sit through one of Doctor Kadner’s ethnology courses. Though he was a good teacher of French and geography, and had a doctorate from the Sorbonne, the Nazi bacillus seemed to have softened his brain. More and more often he arrived in class wearing his brown S.A. uniform, giving the “Heil Hitler” salute as if from a grandstand, and proclaiming the planned geography lesson had been changed to ethnology. For forty-five minutes I would try to concentrate on a drawing so as not to have to listen to Doctor Kadner’s description of the characteristics of sub-species such as Negroes and Jews, mainly of Jews. On the blackboard, he wrote in neat rows: “kinky hair,” “flat feet,” “receding forehead,” “obesity.” Then he strode to my bench at the back of the class, praising my drawing. My teacher’s conduct toward me remained correct and friendly, the unspoken agreement of my dispensation from the “German greeting,”35 extending to ethnology. While he taught his revolting antisemitic drivel, I continued to sit in the back of the class drawing.
34. Persons convicted of Rassenschande (“race defilement”) typically received a prison sentence; during the war years, such a crime might warrant the death sentence or internment in a concentration camp without trial.
35. This was Heil Hitler, the Nazi salutation that often replaced such greetings as “good day” in common conversation.
“I Decide Who Is a Jew”36
36. This saying, later attributed to various Nazi leaders, was first spoken by Karl Lueger (1844–1910), the antisemitic Christian Socialist mayor of Vienna.
On March 12, 1938, German troops marched into Austria. A long tradition of sentiment in both countries favored a unification of the two German-speaking lands, particularly in truncated Austria after World War I. Although the Treaty of Versailles and that of St. Germaine37 specifically forbade such a union, a pan-German nation represented a political goal of many disparate interest groups in both states, including the National Socialist Party. Supported by the Hitler government, the Austrian Nazi Party, which had been illegal since 1933, staged a coup on March 11, 1938, the eve of the German invasion, in part to preclude a national referendum on Austro-German unification. The so-called Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria into Germany, proceeded formally on March 13, 1938, and received the enthusiastic support of most of the Austrian population.38 In the days and weeks following these events, German anti-Jewish legislation was extended to what came to be called the Ostmark, and Vienna and other centers of Jewish life in Austria became sites of brutal and spontaneous antisemitic violence.39 For Austria’s 192,000 Jews, some 4 percent of the general population, the spring and summer months of 1938 played out in nightmarish scenes of physical violence, appropriation of private property, and public humiliation. Eighteen-year-old Walter Grab,40 from a Viennese middle-class family, learned two valuable lessons from his own encounter with local Nazi zealots in this context. For him, the events of the spring of 1938 demonstrated what many Jews in Germany did not yet comprehend and would first grasp in the wake of Kristallnacht: that Jews could no longer count themselves safe from the escalating anti-Jewish measures of regional and national authorities or from the sometimes violent wrath of the local antisemitic population, many of whom were their neighbors. Second, Grab began to understand that grassroots antisemitism was neither logical nor rational and that familiarity could breed both contempt and salvation.
37. The Versailles Treaty officially ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied powers in World War I, while the Treaty of St. Germaine-en-Laye represented peace terms between the Allies and the new Republic of Austria.
38. See Evan Burr Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938–1945 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
39. See Hans Safrian and Hans Witek, Und keiner war dabei: Dokumente des alltäglichen Antisemitismus in Wien, 2nd ed. (1938; Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2008); Evan Burr Bukey and F. Parkinson, eds., Conquering the Past: Austrian Nazism Yesterday and Today (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989; Hans Safrian, Eichmann’s Men, trans. Uta Stargardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010).
40. Walter Grab (1919–2000) emigrated to Palestine in 1938. He became a prominent historian of Germany, researching the democratic trends prevalent before German unification in 1870 and writing extensively on the history of German-Jewish emancipation. As a professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv, Grab founded that university’s Institute for German History in 1971.
Document 1-6. Walter Grab, “The Jews are Vermin Except for My Jewish Schoolmate Grab,”41 in “Niemand war dabei, und keiner hat’s gewußt”: Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit und die Judenverfolgung, 1933–1945, ed. Jörg Wollenberg (Munich: Piper, 1989), 45–50 (translated from the German).
41. In German, “Die Juden sind Ungeziefer, ausgenommen mein jüdischer Schulkamerad Grab.”
On the afternoon of April 25, 1938, after six weeks of Nazi rule in Austria, I was on my way home. Not far from our apartment there was a Jewish gymnasium [Turnheim] in the basement of the house at 20 Liechtensteinstrasse. As a child of seven or eight, I had often exercised there. As I neared this building, I was halted by a number of Nazis who had formed a column and were wearing armbands and swastikas. One of them called to me, “Are you a Jew?” As I answered in the affirmative, he dragged me to the building where the gym hall was and ordered me down the cellar stairs. [. . .] In this anteroom of the gymnasium, I saw some twenty to twenty-five Jews, whom the Nazis had assembled and forced into a corner of the room. A Nazi sent me over there as well. The large gymnasium and also this antechamber were—you must pardon the expression—completely covered in shit. The floors and even the walls were completely plastered with excrement. It stank to high heaven. Here, in my estimation, an entire regiment of SA or SS or some other kind of Nazis had relieved themselves, and clearly right before they began to gather Jews together here; the excrement was still very fresh and moist. Apart from the Jews, there were fifteen or twenty Nazis in the changing room. Behind me there were more Jews being forced down the cellar steps, so that there were thirty-five or forty of us in all—only males. For the Nazis, this was enormous fun. They amused themselves tremendously because they could vent their anger on these helpless and perplexed Jews whom they had chased into this excrement-covered gymnasium. They laughed and shouted at us for ten or fifteen minutes, and mocked us because we were afraid. Finally, one of them stepped forward and said, “You Jews have left us this filthy gymnasium. Jewish gyms are so dirty! Once again one can see how filthy Jews are! And now you have to lick it up!” What does one say when one is delivered into the hands of such barbarians, who seem to have human faces? Nothing. We stood there silently. We had been delivered up to them and imagined now that anything could happen. But they were just making a joke. They had devised a way to humiliate and humble the Jews. This was not an ordered action, like the pogrom of November 9 [Kristallnacht], in which Jewish businesses were plundered and the homes of Jewish citizens demolished. No, this was mob amusement. I am not sure if such “fun” took place in other cities, but in Vienna it did. We were completely at the mercy of the arbitrary whims of these Nazis. And they found it so hilarious that we huddled together in terror. How could one lick up this Nazi excrement?
And then one of them shouted, “Okay, let’s get started. To work!” And several Jews actually tried to scrape together the excrement with their hands and to throw it in the bathroom toilets. But it was impossible. At the best one could only smear the excrement around. It wasn’t possible to clean the dressing room and gymnasium in this way. The Nazis laughed and jeered at us, but finally one of them brought us a shovel, a broom, a waste can, and a couple of towels, and we turned the water faucet on. But for this type of cleaning one needed a fire hose. I took one of the towels—had a burning fear of being beaten in this cellar by these Nazis and tried to crawl after the other Jews and throw the excrement into the toilets. The whole thing lasted a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, during which time we tried to obey the Nazi orders. We were not very successful. And while I squatted and bent, so that in my terror, I would hide my fright as much as possible, I lift my eyes, and my glance meets unequivocally the glance of one of these laughing Nazis, standing around with the swastika armband on his brown shirt. And I recognized him immediately. It was a [former] schoolmate of mine from the Volksschule. [. . .] He had even once eaten next to me, had played in the schoolyard with me. His name was Lichtenegger. That I will never forget.
And this former schoolmate Lichtenegger saw me and recognized me, even as I had recognized him. This recognition was uncomfortable for him and embarrassing. I saw that in an instant; I sensed that he did not want to humiliate me, a Jew whom he knew, but an anonymous Jew, the Jewish bogeyman of the National Socialist racial madness. “The Jew” was a vermin that one crushed underfoot, that one must destroy, but schoolmate Grab, whom he had known as a fellow creature, that he didn’t want. These were his thoughts, which I comprehended in a split second, as our eyes met. And I got up, threw down my towel, and went over to Lichtenegger, while the other Jews tried to wipe the mess away. In my broadest Viennese dialect, I said, “Look here, Lichtenegger, you know me, get me outta this.” He looked down at the ground, [. . .] tore a piece of the edge of a newspaper, and wrote on it, “This Jew can go.” Apparently he had a little authority, was some kind of low-level leader of these Nazis. After he wordlessly handed me the piece of paper, I went to the cellar stairs, said to the Nazi on guard there, “Lichtenegger said I can go,” and revealed the scrap of paper. Then I ran up the stairs, showed the paper to the Nazi before the door, and ran home as fast as my legs could carry me.
Document 1-7. A crowd of Viennese children look on as an Austrian Nazi forces a youth to paint the word Jud (Jew) on the facade of his father’s store, 1938, USHMMPA WS# 01510, courtesy of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Zeitgeschichte.
Training Youth for Jobs Abroad
As antisemitic policies escalated in the mid-1930s, thousands of German Jews chose to emigrate from their native land. By the outbreak of war in September 1939, some 282,000 Jews—nearly half of the Jewish population as it had existed in 1933—had fled Nazi Germany.42 But emigration was difficult: it required sufficient funds and flexibility to resettle in a foreign land. The worldwide Great Depression and pervasive antisemitism presented added obstacles to immigration. Moreover, in order to obtain the necessary visas for entry and residence, most countries demanded that each new immigrant provide the name of a guarantor, who might pledge financial support for the new arrival in the event of illness or unemployment. Most also required that the refugees possess the skills and ability to find work in their new homeland.
42. That is, Germany’s 1937 borders; 117,000 Jews had also emigrated from annexed Austria by September 1939.
German Jewish youth faced particular difficulties both in gaining professional skills and in facilitating their emigration abroad. Limited educational opportunities and the decrease in the number of businesses that might take in Jewish employees or apprentices prevented many youngsters from garnering the knowledge and proficiency required for professional placement. Those who had gained the necessary expertise or experience were “not unemployed,” as Jewish educator Heinemann Stern noted; rather “they [were] without a profession.”43 As one solution, Jewish self-help organizations promoted occupational training centers, where young people could acquire the skills they needed to find a job overseas. Most of these training centers were sponsored and directed by Zionist associations, which offered their students vocational training as well as Hebrew-language instruction in the hope that they might immigrate to Palestine.
43. Heinemann Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich? Jüdisches Leben zwischen den Kriegen: Erinnerungen, ed. Hans Christian Meyer (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1970), 194.
In 1936, the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany) established an emigration-training farm (Auswandererlehrgut) at Gross-Breesen in Silesia, one of the only non-Zionist centers of its kind.44 Organized by the Hamburg-born pedagogue Curt Bondy (1894–1972), Gross-Breesen began its efforts with 135 boys and girls, aged fifteen to seventeen.45 This initial cadre learned farming and animal husbandry techniques, housekeeping, and artisan skills, as well as carpentry and metalworking. In tandem with the technical curriculum, students received foreign-language training, courses in history and civics, and in-depth instruction in the Jewish religion, with an emphasis on their common cultural heritage. Although early conditions at the center proved primitive, Bondy’s two-year training program would ultimately attract 240 students to the 567-acre estate at Gross-Breesen. Candidates for the training farm were usually recruited from the Bund Deutsch-Jüdischer Jugend (League of German Jewish Youth),46 while the youngsters’ parents or guardians undertook the costs for schooling and board.
44. For a definitive account of the Auswandererlehrgut Gross-Breesen, see Werner T. Angress, Between Fear and Hope: Jewish Youth in the Third Reich, trans. Werner T. Angress and Christine Granger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
45. Despite Bondy’s repeated efforts to recruit more female candidates for the training farm, the overwhelming majority of Gross-Breesen’s student population consisted of teenage males.
46. The League of German Jewish Youth was established in 1933 as a union of several Jewish youth organizations. In 1936, under pressure from Nazi authorities, the association changed its name to the Ring Bund Jüdische Jugend; in January of the following year, the association was banned.
The leaders of the Reichsvertretung had conceived of their emigration-training farm as a basis for a number of Gross-Breesen settlements abroad. Preliminary efforts focused on the establishment of a coffee plantation in the Paraná province of Brazil, but negotiations foundered, and although new opportunities for satellite farms presented themselves to Bondy and his colleagues, their painstaking efforts yielded few results. Their only successful overseas endeavor materialized in the Virginia Plan. In 1938, William Thalhimer Sr., owner of a Southern-based department store chain headquartered in Richmond, donated a tract of land in nearby Burkeville, Virginia, as the foundation for a communal farm on American soil. Thirty-seven young trainees would immigrate to Virginia in an effort to establish Thalhimer’s Hyde Farm as an outpost of the Breesen experiment; each young person, including Ernst Löwensberg,47 author of the correspondence below, received joint stock in the farm from Thalhimer so that he or she could fulfill residency requirements through the ownership of property.48 While Löwensberg toiled in Burkeville, many of his male colleagues and the staff at the Gross-Breesen training center were arrested by Nazi authorities in the aftermath of Kristallnacht and imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp, while the farm itself suffered extensive damage as a result of the pogrom. Thereafter, several students emigrated; in the following years, thirty-one additional students made their way to England, Argentina, Australia, Kenya, and Palestine. Curt Bondy himself ultimately escaped Nazi Germany through the Netherlands and found a post teaching psychology in the United States at the College of William and Mary. On August 31, 1941, Gestapo officials ordered the dissolution of the Gross-Breesen farm and deployed remaining faculty and trainees as forced laborers.49 Many of the last generation of Gross-Bresseners perished during the Holocaust.
47. Ernst Moritz Löwensberg (later Ernest Loew) served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Following the war, he purchased a farm near Norwich, Connecticut, which he managed until his death in January 1986.
Document 1-8. Letter of Ernst Löwensberg, Burkeville, Virginia, to students of the emigration-training farm at Gross-Breesen, Silesia, June 16, 1938, USHMMA, Acc. 2000.227, Herbert Cohn Gross-Breesen Collection (translated from the German).
Dear Friends!
It is eight days that I have been here on the farm, where we will all be gathered together in the near future in order primarily to advance what we started in Breesen: working and learning. Concerning what comes after that, we don’t want to discuss right now. I will try to report briefly to you all that I have done and experienced and seen since I have been here.
From Richmond it is about sixty miles to Burkeville, and then another six miles beyond that. [Curt] Bondy has told us that the landscape here is like that of the Black Forest, and this is true. [. . .] The road leading here is very curvy and hilly, and also much varied in appearance. The fields on either side are always surrounded by forest. People’s houses lie quite aloof from the roadway. That somewhere in the distance there must be a house, one determines in the following way. At the edge of the road stand posts on which a kind of pipe has been mounted (it almost looks like a drainage pipe), and on this there is a name. This is the mailbox for the U.S. Mail,*50 which comes once a day by automobile. [. . .] Some six miles beyond Burkeville there is also such a mailbox. The lettering reads “R. J. Barron,” and next to it a pretty sign announces Hyde Farmlands, and here the road forks. Then one drives another five minutes with the car, and then one does not see a cottage but a massively built manor house. [. . .] I won’t write much about it. I can only say to you that it is excellently suited to our purposes. Twenty-two rooms are at our disposal—bigger ones and smaller ones. They are only waiting for a painter to spruce them up a bit. [. . .] There is a lovely balcony on the second floor, and I can imagine that we will put our musicians up there, while we sit and listen on the lawn below.51 The former owner of the grounds is living here—a man who like other people in the area only farmed a portion of the entire property. He’ll remain here on the site principally as an “expert.” Since the farm property has been purchased by Mr. Thalhimer, he is working now with two young hands who live here and with a neighbor family. [. . .] Tuesday we harrowed with the new machine for cowpeas,* and at the same time we spread phosphorus fertilizer. Then I separated and hoed the cucumbers* (Gurken). When each of you hears that from me, I can imagine that many of you cannot resist letting a smile cross your lips. Yes, indeed, Ernst Löwensberg does the weeding, and he will do much, much more. Here hoeing is more difficult than in Breesen because there is only one hoe,* and you cannot change blades on it. One cannot always be running to the blacksmith to sharpen it all the time. What sort of tool do you all imagine I used over and over, one and the same, for all the hoeing I have done? It is dull on every side. But in any case, we keep going. In Breesen I would have said that I couldn’t work with such a tool. But one gets used to many things! On Wednesday, we hoed cucumbers* the whole day. This morning hoeing watermelons.* Then butter beans.* This afternoon we hoed the corn* (Mais). In between we planted more butter beans. But what soil! In Gr[oss] Breesen, it would be sifted, plowed, cleared of roots and stumps, and harrowed beforehand. I can’t describe to all of you how much stubborn quack grass there was, in addition to all the other weeds. The hoeing work proceeds like this: the weeds are hoed out of the rows [and fall] into the furrow. They are left there. One rain is all it takes, and they are [striking root and] growing again to beat the band. There are not enough people to clear them away and then burn them. I’ll say it again: through intensive effort and supported only by our brief experience at Gr[oss]-Breesen, we will cultivate the soil here and will then succeed in bringing in a full harvest. The chief crop here is tobacco. [. . .]
50. All phrases marked in italics with an asterisk (*) in this document were written in English by Löwensberg within the original German-language text.
51. The Gross-Breesen students held nightly musical performances at their training farm.
I could write about much more. But for now this is enough. I hope that you have at least an impression of what it looks like here from what I’ve told you. There are many special things of which I have not written. I have resumed the connection with you all after the four weeks of silence while I was underway on my journey here. I will gladly answer your questions as best I can. You only need to write to me. There are certainly things that would interest each of you.
Now I have written you all! Now I expect that you will write me!
Greetings to you all,
Ernst Löwensberg
Document 1-9. Jewish teenagers unload a cart of hay at the Gross-Breesen’s emigration-training farm, Germany, c. 1936, USHMMPA WS# 68299, courtesy of George Landecker.
Reichskristallnacht
On the night of November 9 and 10, 1938, a nationwide pogrom against German Jews erupted throughout Germany and annexed Austria and in areas of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops. Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass, as the event came to be known, had its roots in the murder of Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official stationed in Paris, on November 7, 1938. Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris, had shot the diplomat in response to the German authorities’ recent expulsion of several thousand resident Polish Jews from the Reich.52 Vom Rath’s death two days later happened to coincide with the anniversary of the Nazi’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, the most significant date in the National Socialist calendar. The Nazi Party leadership, assembled in Munich for the commemoration, chose to use the occasion as a pretext to launch a night of antisemitic excesses.
52. See Gerald Schwab, The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Gynszpan (New York: Praeger, 1990). Grynszpan’s family numbered among the deportees.
In its aftermath, German officials would contend that Kristallnacht had begun as a spontaneous outburst of public sentiment; in reality, the pogrom was initiated primarily by Nazi Party officials and conducted by members of the Nazi Party, the SA, and the Hitler Youth. The “rioters” destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Greater Germany. Many synagogues burned throughout the night, in full view of the public and local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. SA and Hitler Youth members smashed windows, plundered homes, and looted Jewish-owned shops and businesses. The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and Vienna, home to the two largest German Jewish communities. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, attacking Jews they encountered and forcing them to submit to acts of public humiliation. Although Nazi authorities had not specifically ordered aggravated violence against individuals, Kristallnacht claimed the lives of at least ninety-one Jews between November 9 and 10. As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo arrested some thirty thousand Jewish males, ultimately transferring most to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps until each prisoner could produce the requisite papers for emigration abroad. Significantly, Kristallnacht marked the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a massive scale on the basis of their ethnicity. The events of Kristallnacht represented an important turning point in Nazi antisemitic policy. After the pogrom, anti-Jewish measures radicalized dramatically, with a concentration of powers for antisemitic policy resting more and more concretely in the hands of the SS.53
53. For a more detailed account of the Kristallnacht pogrom, see Hermann Graml, Reichskristallnacht: Antisemitismus und Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988); Walter Pehle, ed., November 1938: From “Reichskristallnacht” to Genocide, trans. William Templer (New York: Berg, 1991); Alan E. Steinweis, Kristallnacht, 1938 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).
Twelve-year-old Marguerite Strasser experienced the events of November 9 and 10, 1938, in Munich, the cradle of the National Socialist movement. Strasser’s mother had died shortly after her birth, and her father had recently fled to Strasbourg, so Marguerite lived until her own flight to France in the care of her elderly grandmother. The events of November 10 made a powerful impression upon the young girl. Many of the pogrom’s central features—the burning synagogues, the mistreatment of Jews in the streets, the ransacking and destruction of houses and businesses, and the arrest of Jewish men en masse in the wake of the action—figure as Strasser’s fundamental images of the event. Her latter-day recollections also make it clear that Strasser internalized much of the rejection and trauma she and other Jews experienced at the hands of their fellow Germans in the wake of Kristallnacht.54
54. Marguerite Strasser (b. 1926) emigrated in May 1939 to France, where she worked for several years as a social worker. In 1951 she returned to Munich, where she worked as a translator and raised a family.
Document 1-10. Marguerite Strasser, “Then I Felt Like a Subhuman . . . ,” in Friedrich Kraft, ed., Kristallnacht in Bayern: Judenpogrom am 9. November 1938: Eine Dokumentation (Ingolstadt: Claudius Verlag, 1988), 109–10 (translated from the German).
On this day [November 10, 1938], I didn’t want to go to school, because I already had the feeling that something was up. In my class, it was doubly difficult, because I was already a complete outsider there. And on this day the atmosphere was worse still. I was harassed more often, and the looks were even more hateful. In the first period we had calisthenics, and the teacher humiliated me on this day more than usual. Then my schoolmates hid all of my clothes, and I, completely dissolved in tears, had to search for them in every nook and cranny.
It was a very wicked prank, and of course as a result I came much too late to the math hour which followed. And, because I had also not done my homework, I promptly received an extra homework assignment.
In the middle of class, a pupil came in with an order from the director that the Jewish pupils had to leave the school immediately. I packed up my things. My classmates made very merry: they clapped and shrieked as I crept towards the door. But the mathematics teacher called after me, “And don’t forget your extra assignment!” With this he showed that he didn’t approve of this expulsion. It was very nice of him—until today I have not forgotten that. I was afraid to go straight home and went first to the home of a friend, who lived close by. She was half Jewish. She was not home yet, however, and her parents were in complete despair. She came home a half an hour later, sobbing, with torn clothing and covered with bruises. She was treated so cruelly by her fellow classmates. Her parents were so distressed that they sent me home immediately.
I was able to sneak past the synagogue in the Kanalstrasse.55 The building was still giving off clouds of smoke. The windowpanes were shattered. On the street among the shards of glass lay singed books and burnt religious objects.
55. This is today Munich’s Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse.
Many people were standing before the synagogue, most of them in uniform, yelling “Juda, verrecke”56 or something of that nature. Others walked by shyly—it was embarrassing to them. I went away then, with tears in my eyes. I did not dare take the tram.
56. This invective, used often in Nazi parlance, translates roughly as “Die, Jews!” or “Jews, drop dead!”
When I arrived home crying, my grandmother said to me that I should save my tears until I knew everything. That is to say that my uncle, like all Jewish men over the age of eighteen, had been taken to Dachau. The Gestapo had been to the house, had ransacked the place, and ordered that we had to leave the apartment immediately.
Our loyal housekeeper, Afra, was indignant that an old lady and a little girl should simply be thrown out of their apartment. So she went in the afternoon to the Gestapo headquarters and carried on like a madwoman, asking what the big idea was and declaring how inhumane they were. In any case, we were allowed to remain in the apartment.
My grandmother had always said I must be proud that I am Jewish, but that was completely incomprehensible to me. I had always been terribly ashamed that I belonged to this horrible people with their terrible Jewish grimaces, as they were pictured in Der Stürmer. In my family certainly no one looked like that, but somehow it had still made an impression on me, and I felt like an inferior Untermensch.57 And in school I was treated in exactly this manner, and at some point came to accept that I was of lesser value than the others.
57. This means “inferior being.”
The Dismissal of Jewish Children from “German” Schools
In 1933, some sixty thousand Jewish children were of school age in Nazi Germany.58 Especially in the earliest days of anti-Jewish legislation, parents and family members may have been able to shield youngsters from the worst aspects of antisemitic persecution: financial difficulties, the diminution within the circles of customers and business associates, the attenuation of social and community support, the likelihood of the loss of livelihood and property. But no one could protect Jewish children from the unconcealed prejudice and discrimination that they encountered in their classrooms. Long before comprehensive efforts were undertaken to displace Jewish pupils from German public schools, Jewish boys and girls often experienced brutal treatment and painful rejection at the hands of their teachers and fellow students. In many schoolroom settings, they were held up to public ridicule by instructors and endured both taunting and bullying from their peers. Jewish children often had to sit on separate benches from their “Aryan” schoolmates, and in some schools, Jewish and German pupils were physically segregated. Spurned by classmates with whom they had been friendly for years, they could not join in many student events and were often excluded from school festivities and outings. The curriculum itself was alienating, with its emphasis on “Aryan” superiority, racial hygiene, and Nazi themes such as antisemitism and the subordination of so-called inferior peoples. In the midst of these indignities, Jewish pupils had few alternatives. As German law prescribed that school attendance was mandatory until age fourteen, many Jewish teenagers simply dropped out of school. Others—some 52 percent by 1936—enrolled in Jewish schools supported by the Reichsvertretung or other private organizations. Although this was a substantial leap from the 14 percent of students attending Jewish schools in 1932, a significant percentage of Jewish children nevertheless remained in public school classrooms until a decree in November 1938 definitively banned them from attending German schools.59
Nazi efforts to expel Jewish pupils from German public schools began with the April 25, 1933 Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities. This legislation imposed a quota for Jewish students, stipulating that enrollment of Jewish youth in schools and universities be limited to 1.5 percent of the students registered. The decree looked imposing, but in practice, its bark was worse than its bite, for exemptions were granted to all students whose fathers had fought in World War I; and in many areas, the Jewish population was such that resident Jewish children in a given district fit within the prescribed quota. In the years that followed, regional ordinances further limited Jewish school attendance in certain areas, but a comprehensive national ban came only in the wake of Kristallnacht. Among the multitude of regulations marginalizing Jews in German social and economic spheres in the aftermath of the pogrom came a November 15, 1938, decree from the Reich Minister of Education, dismissing all Jewish pupils from German (i.e., public) schools.60
60. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997); Monika Kingreen, ed., “Nach der Kristallnacht”: Jüdisches Leben und antijüdische Politik in Frankfurt am Main, 1938–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999).
Document 1-11. Decree of the Reich Minister of Science, Education, and Adult Education re the schooling of Jews, November 15, 1938 (translated from the German).
The City President Berlin, C.2., November 22, 1938
of the Reich Capital, Berlin Burgstrasse 20
Dept. of Higher Education Tel. no. 52 0021
III Gen 1952/38
Copy
The Reich Minister for Science, Berlin, W 8, November 15, 1938
Education, and Adult Education Postal Box
E I b 745 (b)
Re: Schooling for Jews
After the infamous act of murder in Paris, no German schoolteacher can further be expected to give instruction to Jewish schoolchildren. It also goes without saying that it is intolerable for German school pupils to sit in the same classroom with Jews. The segregation of races in schools has already been generally accomplished in the last several years; but there is still a residual number of Jewish students in German schools, for whom school attendance with German boys and girls can no longer be permitted.
Subject to further legal regulations, I hereby order the following, effective immediately:
1. Jews are not permitted to attend German schools. They may only attend Jewish schools. As far as this has not occurred already, all Jewish male and female pupils now attending German schools are to be immediately dismissed.
2. Jews are defined by §5 of the First Decree of November 14, 1935, of the Reich Citizenship Law (German Law Gazette, I.P. 1333).
3. This regulation extends to all schools falling under my jurisdiction, inclusive of compulsory education establishments.
Signed for
(L. S.) Zschintzsch
Elisabeth Block, a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl from Niedernburg, Bavaria, had remained in her unsegregated classroom until the late fall of 1938. Although she lived in a rural community, where the abuse of Jewish pupils often proved harshest, Elisabeth thrived, surrounded by friendly schoolmates and buoyed by frequent outings with her class to the beautiful Alpine countryside. Elisabeth, who was introduced earlier, kept a diary in which, even during this dark period, she was loathe to record unpleasant developments. On November 17, 1938, she noted her expulsion and that of her siblings, Trudi and Arno, from their small Bavarian school. Just a week after the murder of her uncle, killed by SA men during Kristallnacht, Elisabeth remained cautiously optimistic about the new state of affairs. Although resolved to make the most of her new homeschooling, her entry makes plain the pain of isolation and separation from her friends and old life that lay just beneath the surface.
Document 1-12. Diary for Elisabeth Block, entry for November 17, 1938, in Elisabeth Block, Erinnerungszeichen: Die Tagebücher der Elisabeth Block, ed. Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte/Historischer Verein Rosenheim (Rosenheim: Wendelstein-Druck, 1993), 162–63 (translated from the German).
November 17, 1938
Now what Mama has feared for so long has come to pass. Trudi, Arno, and I may not go to school any longer. With a terribly heavy heart, I took leave of my dear schoolmates.
My Schedule:
6:30: wake up; make the beds after breakfast. Around 8:00 a.m.: go to “school” in Papa’s room, which will last till 10:00 a.m. We have German, mathematics, geography, history, drawing, and geometry. Tuesdays and Fridays from 1:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m.: stenography and English with Mama. Between 10:00 and 1:00: cooking and washing dishes. Afternoons: digging in the garden, homework, etc. Mondays: help Kathi with the wash, which is very much fun, because in the shed we’ve had a very nice, spacious laundry set up. In the evenings, Gabriele von Bülow’s Daughters61 and An Artist’s Life by F. Wasmann will be read aloud while we sew.
61. This was Gabriele von Bülow’s Töchter, a book coauthored by Anna von Sydow and Gabriele von Bülow, daughter of the famous German scholar, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt.
I am now completely preoccupied with this schedule and with preparations for Christmas62 and feel exactly as content again as if I were going to school.
62. Like many German Jews, the secular Blocks celebrated Christmas and other Christian holidays, not from religious conviction but to participate in the holiday’s outer trappings. The Blocks had a Christmas tree and joined in local public festivals; Elisabeth’s diary is full of holiday drawings and references to religious events and periods, such as Lent.
Document 1-13. A young girl reads her classroom lesson in Hebrew to her fellow classmates at a school sponsored by the Jewish Community of Berlin, c. 1935, USHMMPA WS# 32505, courtesy of the Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
What’s in a Name? Israel and Sara
In the wake of Reichskristallnacht, Nazi authorities accelerated legislation aimed at the “Aryanization” of Jewish-owned property and businesses and intensified efforts to isolate and segregate Jews from their fellow Germans. Jews were barred from all public schools and universities, as well as from cinemas, theaters, and sports facilities. In many municipalities, Jews were forbidden to enter designated “Aryan” zones. In order to further marginalize members of the Jewish community, German officials required Jews to identify themselves in ways that would separate them from the rest of the population. All German Jews were required to carry identity cards that indicated their “racial” heritage, and in the autumn of 1938, all Jewish passports bore the identifying letter J. In August 1938, German authorities had already decreed that Jews could employ as a forename only those “Jewish names” from an official list maintained by the Reich Interior Ministry. This Second Decree for the Implementation of the Law for the Changing of Family Names and First Names63 went into effect on January 1, 1939. Thereafter, Jews whose given names did not correspond to those on the authorized register had to add the name “Sara” after their first name if female, and “Israel” if male. On September 1, 1941, Nazi officials took this marginalization effort to an ominous conclusion, ordering all Jews over the age of six resident in the German Reich to wear a yellow star on their outer garments when in public.
63. The German is Zweite Verordnung zur Durchführung des Gesetzes über die Änderung von Familiennamen und Vornamen.
In the summer of 1939, lawyer Gilbert Kraus and his wife, Eleanor, traveled to Europe to bring refugee Jewish children back with them to the United States. Under the aegis of the Brith Sholom lodge, a Jewish fraternal organization headquartered in Philadelphia, the Krauses, with the help of Vienna’s Jewish Community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde) chose fifty Viennese youngsters who already possessed affidavits and stood on the U.S. quota list. The Krauses and their lodge personally vouched for the financial security of the children and arranged foster homes for them in the Philadelphia area.64 While procuring visas for the youngsters at the American consulate in Berlin, Eleanor Kraus witnessed the disquieting effects of recent Nazi policy upon a young Jewish girl in her charge.
64. For a more comprehensive discussion of the Krauses’ rescue efforts on behalf of Brith Sholom, see chapter 9.
Document 1-14. Eleanor Kraus, “Don’t Wave Good-bye” (unpublished manuscript, private collection, c. 1940), 144–46 (© Liz Perle and Steven Kraus, reprinted with permission).
The children looked terrible. They were so weary and most of the little ones were still crying. The more we tried to stop them, the more they seemed to cry. Finally, I saw Gil.65 I went up to him. “What about the visas? What about the visas?” I said. He leaned over and whispered to me, “There are fifty-seven visas here and waiting. All our worries are over.”
65. This refers to Eleanor’s husband, Gilbert Kraus.
I went to Bob66 and gave him the news. None of us made any comments. After all, no one else but the three of us knew what a gamble we had taken. Now we had to settle down to clearing the children’s papers. The Embassy had put on about fifteen extra clerks to help with the paper work. Each child had to be interviewed separately and had to fill out a form and each child would have to have a physical examination by the doctor at the Embassy.
66. This refers to Dr. Robert Reuss, who accompanied the Krauses to Germany to make arrangements for the emigration of the children.
Gil went into Mr. Volmer’s office and I went into Mr. Rose’s office. We decided to bring one child in at a time for the interview. The child would enter and sit at the desk and Mr. Volmer and his German secretary would ask the questions of the child in German. He would give his name, address and all the other information. He would also have to sign, if he could write. Mr. Volmer was sweet with each and every child. I tried to make the child feel at home. The secretary kept typing all the information as it was given. The Vice Consuls were most considerate—had worked out every detail to make things go as quickly as possible for all of us. It was tedious, it took time, but on the whole it was going quickly. Some of the children were only four years old and these interviews naturally consumed more time than the older children.
There was one little girl I will never forget. I think she was about six or seven years old. She came in for her interview and sat in the big office chair across from Mr. Volmer. She looked like an Alice in Wonderland figure sitting in the chair with her long blond hair and her bright blue eyes. Mr. Volmer smiled. “Can you write?” “Ya” [sic], she said. We put the pen in her hand. “Write your name here,” said he, showing her the place on the paper. At this she seemed to freeze with fear. She grabbed the pen, lowered her head, and began to sob hysterically. She mumbled something over and over again which we could not hear. “What’s the matter? Don’t cry. Raise your head. We can’t hear you.”
Still she kept her head lowered, still she kept mumbling the same words over and over. She naturally spoke in German. I said to Mr. Volmer, “Can you understand her? What is she saying? I can’t make it out.” [. . .]
She was so overcome with terror I did not know how to pacify her. Finally she raised her head and said for all to hear, “Muss ich Sarah schreiben?” [“Must I write ‘Sarah’?”]
It took a moment for the implication of this question to hit all of us. We were too stunned to answer. Even the German clerk stood with her mouth open. Mr. Volmer lowered his head into his hands for a moment. My German was so limited, but I answered, “Nein, nein. Schreibe Charlotta. Schreibe Charlotta” [sic].
Mr. Volmer took over. “Write Charlotta. Write Charlotta,” said he. “Your name is Charlotta. You will always keep your name where you are going. You need never write Sarah again.”