Across Germany, in fact, the Jews were enjoying a remarkable golden age that continued on through the 1920s, as German leaders—ushering in a Second German Empire with grand economic ambitions—gave the Jews greater civil rights and opened doors long closed to them. While the vestiges of centuries-long persecution lingered, Jews managed not only to assimilate but to thrive in almost every walk of life. It was an era in Germany when a young Jew named Albert Einstein could become a world-famous scientist; a businessman named Adolf Jandorf could found an iconic Berlin department store; novelist Lion Feuchtwanger could enter the ranks of Germany’s most respected writers; and a young political philosopher named Hannah Arendt could begin her storied career. By the time Freddy was born, in 1921—the same year Einstein, living in Berlin, won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work in physics—the cloud that had shadowed German Jews for so long appeared to have finally lifted.
Most of the goyim—the non-Jews—were civil and cordial, even friendly, to Freddy and his family. The Mayers’ next-door neighbor, Herr Wagner, who owned an umbrella shop, was a trusted friend to Heinrich and helped with the accounting for his hardware business. Wagner had been Heinrich’s sergeant during World War I—a Christian soldier answering to a Jewish officer—and the two neighbors built a bond that erased whatever religious differences separated them. Freddy would come to remember him as “a gentle Gentile.”
At his hardware business, Heinrich was known around town for letting his customers—most of them Christian—buy their metals and hardware products on credit. It was a practice his customers came to appreciate. “It was not always possible for us to make payments to the Mayers in a timely fashion,” the family of one tin buyer wrote years later, when Heinrich tried to reclaim some of the money the Nazis had taken from him. “Other suppliers kept pressuring us, but never the Mayers.”
Freddy’s father would sometimes give the children presents at Christmastime so they didn’t feel left out of the holiday festivities. At his core, Freddy was a proud Bobbele, a term of affection for someone born in Freiburg—Christian or Jew. Being a Jewish boy in those years felt so unremarkable that it seemed almost an afterthought to Freddy. He never considered himself deeply religious, although his parents certainly were. The family kept kosher in the home, and he grudgingly went to religious school like almost all the Jewish kids in town; but that was his parents’ choice, not his. He loved the Jewish holidays—not because of any deep religious connection, he admitted, but because he was allowed to skip school for the day. He identified culturally as a Jew, an oppressed people in Germany for centuries, but God and spirituality? That was never really Freddy’s thing.
Nor was he a deep thinker. He was a mediocre student, by his own admission; his older brother, Julius, named after their grandfather, was the real scholar in the family, the “smart one,” an accountant in the making. Freddy wasn’t envious; he had no real academic ambitions himself, and he always admired his brother’s intellect—at least until nightfall came. Julius would stay up for hours reading German books of all sorts in the bedroom they shared, and Freddy would plead with him to turn the light off so he could please get some sleep. Finally, Heinrich and Hilda reached a truce and put the boys in separate rooms to end the bickering.
If his brother was the thinker in the family, Freddy was the doer: his genius resided in an adeptness with his hands. He would spend his free time in his father’s workshop tearing things apart and putting them back together—toys, gadgets, soapbox cars, engines, anything he could find. Or he would sit in the warehouse adjoining the house and watch his father’s employees prepare hardware parts and wholesale metals to sell.
He loved nothing better than examining the newfangled automobiles from Mercedes-Benz and other German, and even American, manufacturers, which were becoming a more common sight on the streets. Freddy talked of building cars, or maybe airplanes, when he grew up. In the boy’s eyes, no task was too difficult, or too dangerous—although some experiments did go awry. Freddy, as a boy of only five or six, had an idea to make the car his father bought, an American-made Ford, go farther with less fuel, so he poured a liquid concoction of his own making into the gas tank. The experiment did not go well. A few years later, still barely able to see over the steering wheel, he managed to start the car and take it out on the streets by himself for a brief ride, only to have a passing police officer stop him and drag him back home by the ear. Heinrich was not amused.
As much as anything, Freddy loved listening to his father regale him for hours with stories about the Great War—even in Germany’s losing cause. Heinrich, a lieutenant in the German 110th Regiment, told the boy how he had fought for the Kaiser at the French fortress of Verdun in 1916, one of the war’s bloodiest battles. It was his valor there that earned him the Iron Cross, the holy talisman that he kept stashed in a special place in the house. That Heinrich was a Jew never mattered to the Kaiser, he told the boy.
Freddy would parade around the house wearing his father’s black military belt, the shiny German medallion on the buckle pulled so tightly that his belly bulged over the top. He imagined that he might get the chance to fight for Germany himself, perhaps as a pilot like the Red Baron, the country’s famous World War I ace. This was his country, after all, and the boy was eager to defend it, not as a Jew but as a German, just as his father had done before him.
But neither Heinrich nor Freddy had anticipated the startling rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Few Germans had. Hitler was a political outlier in 1925 when he wrote Mein Kampf, his race-baiting jailhouse screed calling for the creation of a New Order and an Aryan master race. Yet by the early 1930s his Nazi Party was winning seats in the Reichstag with a campaign built on restoring German “pride” in the midst of the economic woes blamed on the Treaty of Versailles—and on the Jews.
Improbably, Hitler was now knocking on the door of the presidential palace in Berlin. Heinrich, five hundred miles away, noticed the Nazi Party’s ominous rhetoric—how could he not?—but he was convinced that the party’s vile brand of politics would not take hold. Hitler would never come to power, he told Freddy. The Nazis’ views reflected an ugly, extremist strain, his father said; not the true German sentiment he had always known. Hitler wasn’t even a native-born citizen. He had started adulthood as a low-ranking soldier in the Austrian army. What business did he have trying to run the country? “They’re still a minority; nothing bad will happen,” Heinrich told the boy, then just twelve, as Hitler prepared a bold bid for president of Germany in 1932.
His father was right—for the time being at least. Hitler earned barely a third of the vote in the national election. While it was a formidable showing for a onetime fringe candidate, he still lagged far behind incumbent president Paul von Hindenburg, who branded him a dangerous extremist and a “Bohemian corporal.” What Heinrich and so many others hadn’t foreseen, however, was the shrewd backroom maneuvering of Hitler and his top Nazi lieutenants; they succeeded less than ten months after the electoral defeat in striking a deal with Hindenburg to make Hitler the ruling chancellor of Germany—and setting off the Third Reich’s twelve-year reign of terror in Europe.
Hitler’s bold political coup triggered a panic among Germany’s Jews. Tens of thousands fled the country within months of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The Nazis were all too eager to see them go. Freddy’s childhood playmate, eight-year-old Gerd Schwab, was among the early refugees. Like Heinrich, Gerd’s father, David, was a Jewish businessman and a decorated World War I veteran; David and his wife were best friends with Freddy’s parents, making up a regular foursome in bridge games at the house. That was before Hitler. After the Nazis took power, David Schwab feared the worst, but unlike the Mayers and many other of the city’s Jews, he had an escape route in mind. His plumbing business had a second plant in Basel, Switzerland, about forty-five miles across the German border. Desperate to get out of Freiburg, the Schwabs gathered up as many of their things as they could and left, with Freddy’s oldest friend suddenl
y gone overnight.
A year into Hitler’s reign, Freddy became a bar mitzvah at his family’s synagogue, the same one his grandfather helped found sixty years earlier, when the Jews’ place in Freiburg finally seemed secure. Freddy’s ceremonial rise to manhood coincided with the ascent of a Nazi madman in Berlin, but the boy walled off the outside demons, undertaking the ritual with his customary ear-to-ear grin. His brother, Julius, always the scholar, had chanted practically the whole prayer service for his own bar mitzvah a few years earlier, but Freddy was content reading a single parsha from the Torah; that was enough for him. The family celebrated with a party at the house in an ornate room reserved for special occasions. The room was normally off limits to Freddy, a boisterous boy always at risk of breaking the good china, but now he basked in the milestone. With his whole family around him—parents, siblings, grandparents—the place felt safe and protected from the unease swirling around them.
It was a brief respite. Not long after his bar mitzvah, the Nazi campaign of persecution hit Freddy straight on the first time, when he was forced to leave his public school in Freiburg. His offense: being a Jew. It was part of a series of Nazi education policies put in place nationwide, throwing nearly all Jewish children out of the public schools based on the pretense of “overcrowding.” Ludin, the same Nazi dean who let Freddy off the hook for slugging his classmate, delivered the news personally. Ludin seemed apologetic; he didn’t want to do this, he told Freddy, but it was a new era in the Reich and he had no choice. He sounded sincere to Freddy. For a Nazi, Ludin didn’t seem like such a bad guy.
Freddy made the best of his abrupt expulsion, shrugging it off the way he did most problems once he realized he couldn’t fight his way past them. For him, there were worse punishments than having to give up his schoolbooks. He quickly set to work on his first love—engines and automobiles—as an apprentice for a mechanic at a trade school. His father, meanwhile, talked the Ford auto dealer who had sold him his car into getting the boy a job at the repair shop in Freiburg. Freddy was content; he just had to hope that the Nazis wouldn’t ban Jews from working on automobiles anytime soon.
Heinrich remained resolute. No matter what draconian policies the Nazis enforced, he would not be run out of his homeland. Not when Freddy was expelled from school. Not when a Nazi newspaper campaign demanded that Germans boycott Jewish businesses. Not when the Nuremberg Laws banned Jews from mixing with people of “German blood.” Not when all his Christian employees and the family’s maid had to stop working for him because he was a Jew, or when it became almost impossible for him to buy raw materials like lead and copper for his business. Not when he and Freddy, dismayed, watched the footage of Hitler presiding over the 1936 Olympics after banning “non-Aryans” from German squads. Not even when word began to spread that the Nazis were rounding up Communists, homosexuals, and other “undesirables”—and that the Jews might be next.
Even then, Heinrich stayed firm. “Nothing bad will happen to us,” he kept repeating to his son as a matter of faith. His optimism sprang not from mere hope or delusion. In a particularly cruel bit of psychological warfare, in 1934 the Nazis sent certificates in Hitler’s name to thousands of Jewish war veterans, honoring their service to Germany on the twentieth anniversary of World War I and promising them special treatment even in the face of sweeping anti-Semitic measures. On its face, it was recognition of Heinrich’s standing. He was a leader in the Freiburg veterans’ council, a volunteer in the local fire brigade, a citizen of standing, a good neighbor and friend to the Christians. He was even due a sizable German pension when he retired: 177 marks a month. If things got worse, God forbid, he was protected. Or so he thought.
As the man of the house, Heinrich made the decisions, but Hilda could at least ponder the family’s potential escape routes. “Look, we better prepare,” she told Freddy one day. They needed to make plans. Even if she could somehow persuade Heinrich to leave, she knew it would be difficult to find a place to take them in, and that would take time, regardless. They would need visas, transportation, a place to stay, money—all the elusive essentials necessary to get out of the country. She began contacting the few relatives she knew outside Germany, quietly at first, then with increasing desperation. Could they help? Somehow?
Even Herr Wagner, the “gentle Gentile” next door, was urging Heinrich to flee. He offered to manage the hardware business until the Mayer family could come back—if they could come back. Then it happened. In late 1937, more than four years into Hitler’s reign, Heinrich’s resolve melted. One day he announced to Hilda that he was ready to leave. There was no single trigger point, no final threat or frightful episode that made him reverse course. It was simply the end, the crushing weight of four years of Nazi edicts vilifying him and his people, sapping his business, making his family outcasts. He had no will left to fight for his survival in this oppressive new place called the Third Reich. It was time to get out.
If it wasn’t too late already. Where could they go? The British had squelched emigration to Palestine, the ancestral homeland where so many frightened European Jews longed to resettle. And Heinrich had no real foothold elsewhere in Europe outside Germany, unlike his friend David Schwab, with business interests across the border in Switzerland.
They had one real hope—America. Although it was a faint beacon, barely flickering, they put in an application with the American consulate in Germany, knowing that getting a visa to the United States was difficult, and the gates of America remained closed to all but a lucky few. Many American leaders were oblivious, or willfully blind, to the plight of Europe’s Jews and the havoc that Hitler was wreaking. The tight restrictions on visas reflected that gross misperception. The Nazis had shown “a desire to ease up on the Jewish problem,” the American ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd, wrote optimistically in 1933 during Hitler’s first year in office. A few months later, the ambassador met with Hitler himself and cabled Washington to report that he had come away more optimistic than ever for “the maintenance of world peace.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his first term in the White House, remained largely a silent bystander to Hitler’s threats of terror, as tens of thousands of German Jews were denied entry, even as American immigration quotas sat unfilled. Bureaucrats in the immigration service were indifferent to the refugee crisis, and the political perils of letting in Europe’s Jews were too great for even a popular president like FDR to take bold action. Hatred for the “kikes” was blatant in many quarters; in 1934, a year after Hitler seized power, some twenty thousand American Nazi supporters held their first mass rally at New York City’s iconic Madison Square Garden. A giant swastika banner hung between two smaller American flags at the rally, an onerous symbol of Hitler’s support in America.
Not until Roosevelt won reelection in 1936 did his administration begin to lower the bars to immigration for those trying to flee Nazi persecution. Nearly eleven thousand Germans, overwhelmingly Jewish, began to enter the next year. It was only a tiny fraction of those seeking to escape, but it was something. With their prospects for getting out improved, Hilda tracked down relatives in the United States on her side of the family to vouch for them with the immigration authorities; they had to produce affidavits affirming that Heinrich had the character and money to come to America. Policy makers, with distorted images of immigrants as slothful, insisted that Jewish émigrés not become a “public charge” and a drain on Depression-era resources.
Hilda waited anxiously for any word from America. She didn’t realize it, but their timing was fortuitous. In November 1937, just before a crush of new Jewish applicants made immigrating to the United States even more difficult, the notification came: the American consulate in Stuttgart had approved their visas—seven in all for the whole family and Hilda’s mother. Hilda was jubilant; Heinrich less so. How they had managed to get so lucky was unclear. Freddy didn’t know, and didn’t ask. He had little sense of what to expect in America, but he accepted his newly approved visa for what
it was: the chance at a new start in an exciting, far-off land.
Just as Freddy’s family was finally planning its exit, Hitler was maneuvering to expand his tyrannical empire. The Führer convened secret meetings that same month with top military and foreign policy aides, laying out his brazen plans for Europe in what became known as the Hossbach Conference. Two weeks later, on the very same day that the Mayers’ visas to America were approved, Hitler and his top lieutenants were wrapping up a series of meetings with Britain’s Lord Halifax, a key aide to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, during an extravagant game-hunting tournament in Berlin. A rambling Hitler assured his British visitor that he “wanted no more wars,” and an upbeat Lord Halifax came away believing that Hitler did, in fact, want peace, just as Ambassador Dodd had informed Washington four years earlier. Halifax had to concede that many of the Nazis’ policies, including the onerous treatment of German Jews, “offended British opinion,” but he recognized Hitler’s accomplishments, too. “I was not blind to what he had done for Germany,” Halifax wrote. Ten months later, Britain’s ill-fated policy of appeasement toward Hitler would be formally enshrined in the signing of the notorious Munich Agreement, which allowed the Nazis to seize part of Czechoslovakia without fear of resistance from Britain or France.
As Hitler’s ambitions grew more audacious, Heinrich realized that their American visas were worthless without the king’s ransom needed to transport them across the Atlantic. After years of letting his hardware customers buy from him on credit, he counted up about ten thousand marks’ worth of debts owed to him (more than $70,000 today). He tried to collect on them, but doors in Freiburg were now closing in his face. Many of his customers, once so grateful to Heinrich for the unofficial line of credit, knew that they couldn’t be forced to repay a “Jewish debt” in the current Nazi climate. So most of them simply reneged.
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