Broken Lives

by Konrad H Jarausch

  The amateurish nature of such “illegal work” made it easy for the Gestapo to arrest the Socialist youths involved. Zöger, who had just turned eighteen, was roused by his mother with the shout “The police are here.” Like dozens of his friends, he was taken to the Leipzig police prison, interrogated, beaten, and cursed as “red pig … We’ll crack you yet.” He almost failed to recognize his group’s leader, Kurt Lenge, due to his “broken teeth, swollen eyes, blue and yellow-green face.” In his few contacts with other prisoners, “we supported each other in holding out and not giving in.” Months later, a kangaroo court in Zwickau sentenced the seventy or so young Communists to lengthy prison terms. Because of his youth, Zöger received only nine months in the infamous “yellow misery” prison in Bautzen, having to pull threads out of cloth. As a “hard case,” he was given no privileges, but was proud to have held on to his convictions. Thousands of other young Socialists, including youth leader Erich Honecker, experienced the same fate.9

  For domestic opponents, the Nazis built infamous concentration camps—a euphemism for mass prisons—such as Buchenwald, outside the cultural city of Weimar. Established in the late 1930s, this was run by death’s-head SS guards under the cynical motto “right or wrong, my country.” According to the Socialist Moritz Zahnwetzer, the camp housed “political prisoners, criminals, and Seventh Day Adventists,” to whom asocials and eventually Jews were later added. “The first general impression is that here in the heart of Germany a city is being erected, in which the inmates have to do slave labor.” In order to build barracks for the SS, the prisoners worked in quarries: “The labor is hard, the food is inadequate, hunger is a steady companion.” At the slightest pretext, the guards killed inmates for working too slowly, for trying to flee, or just for fun. One prominent victim was Protestant pastor Paul Schneider, who spent sixteen months in solitary confinement for his religious convictions. While claiming to “reeducate” the inmates, the SS, in effect, sought “to eradicate the opponents of the Nazi system” by sadistic cruelty.10

  Hitler was even more passionate about anti-Semitism, but had to be more circumspect in persuading the population to adopt radical measures. True enough, a hard core shared Julius Streicher’s fanaticism, expressed in the “political pornography” of the sexual caricatures in Der Stürmer. But even if they shared some social prejudice against Jews, most people were more preoccupied with overcoming the consequences of the Great Depression or reversing the military defeat than with the “racial purification” of the German Volk. Moreover, many Germans knew their own “decent Jews” whom they considered exceptions and appreciated as competent doctors, lawyers, bankers, and the like. While propaganda pressure gradually persuaded the gentile majority to cut their personal ties to Jewish friends, a minority of courageous anti-Fascists maintained their relationships.11 Compared to widespread approval of suppressing Communism, it took more time to convince most Germans of the need to persecute Jews.

  Part of the difficulty stemmed from the considerable success in integration that made many Jews indistinguishable from their gentile neighbors. Only the new arrivals from Eastern Europe who worked in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel neighborhood approximated anti-Semitic stereotypes, with their kaftans, earlocks, and Yiddish dialect. Many established families, such as the Gompertz clan, were “Germans of Jewish confession,” observant of their orthodox religion but proud of their military service during World War I. Other less religious people, such as the Angress family, occasionally went to reform syna gogues, mixed German and Jewish holiday customs, and sometimes married non-Jewish spouses without paying any particular attention to cultural borders between themselves and their now-“Aryan” friends. Even more secularized folks, such as the Sterns, lived entirely German lives with only a vague recollection of ethnic difference. By profession, identity, behavior and intermarriage, in Peter Gay’s words, “they were Germans.”12

  Until 1933 the defensive strategies of Jewish Germans had worked well enough to suggest that lingering prejudices would be overcome in the future. On the local level, their involvement in public charities created much goodwill in the gentile community. On the national plane, the majority of Germany’s half-million Jews voted for the Liberal and Social Democratic Parties, which had supported emancipation and legal equality. Jewish veterans, often decorated with Iron Crosses, gathered in the National League of Jewish Front Soldiers, a nationalist organization that stressed their disproportionate sacrifices in World War I. More moderate Jews belonged to the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, whose very title suggested that its sixty thousand members saw themselves as both Jewish and German. Finally, a growing minority of the younger generation followed the clarion call of Zionism without actually going to Palestine. This formidable array of organizations implied that their future in Germany was secure.13

  The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, the purge of the civil service, and the restriction of higher education therefore came as horrible surprises. On April 1, 1933, the government announced that “all businesses owned by Jews had to close for the day.” Photos show uniformed SA men trying to discourage shoppers by asking, “Don’t you know that this is a Jewish store?” (image 17). A week later, the Nazi regime purged public employment of leftists and Jews under the pretext of “restoring the civil service,” excepting solely veterans of the First World War. Extended even to lawyers in private practice, this prohibition destroyed professional livelihoods and signaled that Germans should no longer do business with Jews. At the same time the government claimed to reduce overcrowding of universities by limiting Jewish access to academic training to less than 1 percent, the proportion of Jews in the population, thereby denying them higher education. Though shocked by the harshness of these measures, the leaders of the Centralverein decided merely to hope that the storm would blow over as it had often done in the past.14

  17. SA boycott of a Jewish store. Source: Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

  The brutality of the SA and the lawlessness of the state triggered a first wave of flight into Austria and other neighboring countries where Germanspeakers might be welcome. Prominent Nazi opponents, especially if they were both Jewish and leftist, had no choice but to escape across the borders if they did not want to end up in “protective custody” like the Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher. But even ordinary Jews such as Samuel Keil decided to flee to Vienna, for the police no longer guaranteed his security in Germany. One day a horde of brownshirts stormed into his warehouse “and started to knock crates of eggs off their storage platforms,” finding the mess hilarious. When a war veteran employee with an Iron Cross protested, they tore “the medal from around his neck” and forced him to wipe the floor. Jack Keil recalled his father’s humiliation: “I had never seen a man cry before.” Better-off families such as the Sterns, feeling “apprehensive, became determined to emigrate” as well. But after finding job prospects in France uncertain, they decided to stay.15

  While their parents were wrestling with grave decisions, teenagers sought refuge in Jewish youth groups, largely patterned on the German Youth Movement. The Aryan-looking Ingeborg Hecht joined the “German-Jewish Hiking Group Comrades” to roam through the North German heath until “our beautiful League was prohibited in 1936.” Diminutive Tom Angress became a gung-ho member of the boys’ club “Black Platoon,” which considered itself patriotically German and religiously Jewish at the same time. “Finally I belonged to a group of boys my age and thus could cope much better with the daily unpleasantness of school.” More dedicated Jews such as Lucy Mandelstam “became interested in Zionist youth movements and joined Blue White.” There, she sang “Hebrew songs, danced the Hora and learned about Israel.” Imbued by “national Jewish agrarian romanticism,” Georg Iggers idolized the kibbutz.16 In an increasingly hostile environment, these youth groups provided comfort and companionship.

  The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which “excluded Jews and non-Aryans from German citizenship,” were “a further shock,” as they reduc
ed Jews to the status of “state subjects.” In racist terms, they prohibited marriages and extramarital sex between Jews and gentiles and forbade the employment of female Aryan servants under the age of forty-five in Jewish households. Moreover, the “Reich citizen law” robbed Jews of their rights as citizens and made them helpless against bureaucratic chicanery, “casting them out of the German national community.” Thereafter, any official act such as getting a passport or government job required proof of Aryan ancestry back to one’s grandparents. (This resulted in a new industry of checking church records.) The new distinctions also produced a class of “mixed race” persons who were three-quarters, half, or one-quarter Jewish, like Ingeborg Hecht or Bettina Fehr, whose survival became increasingly precarious.17 With one stroke, Jews had lost a century of progress toward emancipation.

  As a result of such brutal exclusions, German Jews had to reaffirm their sense of Jewishness and began a difficult search for the submerged side of their heritage. Peter Gay asserted unequivocally that, without their own doing, “we had suddenly become Jews.” In the same vein, Fritz Stern reported, “I began to feel that I was not German” without really understanding what he now needed to become. Georg Iggers similarly alluded to his transformation of identity, “I saw myself more and more as a Jew than as a German.” Ruth Klüger stated that after the Anschluss, “when my shaky belief in Austria began to waver, I became Jewish in self-defense.” She even changed her nickname from the sweet “Susi” to “an appropriate Jewish name” and adopted the biblical “Ruth.” Unsure what Jewishness could mean beyond religious affiliation, Tom Angress put his pain over the loss into verse: “Once we were sons of this land / And now? Woe to us, such woe. / We know only hate, know only distress / and still love Germany so much.”18

  In order not to succumb to self-loathing, most Jewish youths developed coping strategies that made it easier to survive the mounting pressure of the Third Reich. Isolated by decree and behavior from their Aryan peers, they were forced to construct segregated lives in the shrinking spaces that remained available. One important stratagem was focus on one’s own family. According to Peter Gay, “my parents were a refuge, an island of order and reason, just by being there.” Another mechanism of retaining sanity was the development of hobbies that could be pursued in one’s own home, such as listening to foreign radio stations, voracious reading, or stamp collecting. Watching spectator sports was yet another outlet, since one could cheer for the American sprinter Jesse Owens to triumph over Nazi athletes or boxer “Jersey Joe” Walcott to defeat the German heavyweight champion Max Schmeling. Adolescents who were still young enough to go to school, such as Georg Iggers, could also attend separate Jewish institutions or, like Tom Angress, prepare for later emigration by learning how to do practical farm work.19

  After the Nuremberg Laws made future prospects bleak, the main topic of discussion in Jewish families “wasn’t religion—it was emigration.” Leaving Germany seemed to be full of risks, since Nazi regulations required that by going to a foreign country, one give up one’s economic security, social position, and cultural capital. Tom Angress remembered, “We waited, tried to adjust, hoped the Nazis would change their mind about the Jews and otherwise went about our daily activities.” As long as business remained acceptable, it did not seem necessary to leave everything behind. “Papa was reluctant to take his wife and children to a foreign country, where his future would have been uncertain.” But once the “deteriorating situation of the Jews in Germany” made emigration a necessity, families “were encouraged to explore all possible avenues.” As intermediate strategies, the Warmbrunns shifted their business to neighboring Holland, while the Eycks sent their son to boarding school in England.20

  Even after a decision to emigrate had been made, many obstacles stood in the way of its timely implementation. The contradictory nature of Nazi policies wanted to push Jews out, but at the same time profit from their leaving. This complicated obtaining exit papers. Legal emigrants had to sell their businesses at a discount, leave behind virtually all their possessions, and pay an exorbitant Reich Flight Tax on their assets while being allowed only ten Reichsmark in foreign currency per capita. At the same time, the reluctance of potential receiving countries to add more indigents to an overcrowded labor market still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression made it difficult to gain entrance to safe havens. In many countries, consular officers were themselves anti-Semites who were reluctant to let Jews in. Obtaining an entrance visa required financial sponsors and a place within a country’s restricted quota.21 As a result, it took much time and determination to complete the necessary paperwork.

  While frantically searching for a way out, Jewish families tried to carry on in reduced circumstances that made escape ever more imperative. Assimilated folks such as the Fröhlichs thought, “we were Germans; the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were.” Occasionally this identification with the “better Germany” was reinforced by contacts with courageous gentiles such as helpful teacher Elisabeth Flügge, attesting “to surviving pockets of decency in Nazi Germany, even of quiet resistance.” Peter Gay recalled, “For many thousands of German Jews like my parents, however alert they had to be to the hostile atmosphere that bore down on them, a certain separation of spheres seemed plausible, even appropriate.” While revolted by Nazi brutality, many Jews considered Hitler’s threats “so utterly implausible” as to be “unreliable guides to future conduct. They were literally incredible.”22 As a result they tried to continue somewhat normal lives while at the same time preparing to leave.

  Once they were expelled from regular schools, youths sought to acquire practical skills that might help them in their new lives outside of Nazi Germany. One essential strategy was to learn English or French so as to be able to communicate abroad. Teenagers like Irmgard Mueller took up typing, stenography, sewing, or cooking, combining commercial and homemaking abilities. In order to acquire a trade, Albert Gompertz became an apprentice to a textile business, which proved quite useful in the United States. The training farm for Jewish emigrants at Gross Breesen in Silesia, led by a charismatic war veteran, Professor Kurt Bondy, tried to provide knowledge for settling in Palestine. After moving there in 1936 Tom Angress learned skills like carpentry and fieldwork, while at the same time experiencing an intense “sense of community” and imbibing “ethical and cultural values” for a lifetime. Another extended family from Bohemia, which included Wilma Abeles-Iggers, managed to get a Canadian visa by applying for agricultural settlement.23

  The increasing plunder of businesses under the euphemism of “Aryanization” speeded preparations for emigration by destroying the material basis of Jewish life. Lawyers were forced to dissolve their partnerships with gentiles and allowed only to act as legal consultants for Jewish clients. Similarly, doctors lost their insurance privileges and were restricted to practicing for Jewish patients, even if some gentiles were loath to give up their trusted medical authorities. From 1938 on businessmen were also compelled to turn over legal control of their enterprises to gentile partners, often selling their shares much below market value. When the prosperous Breslau industrialist Ernst Schwerin was warned by a loyal accountant that the Gestapo was about to arrest him, he fled the country overnight although the Finance Ministry had found no irregularities. Tired of constant SA harassment, prosperous Gelsenkirchen furrier Leo Gompertz also decided to cut his losses and liquidate his business in order to leave the Third Reich.24

  By the late thirties the ever more massive NS repression turned the trickle of Jewish emigrants into a veritable flood. Tom Angress did not want to abandon Gross Breesen when told “that Papa had decided to leave Germany with the family.” But his resourceful father smuggled one hundred thousand Reichsmark, his entire property, out of the country, while his son escaped Gestapo scrutiny at the Dutch border in spite of his Jewish passport. In September 1938 Major Edgar von Zerbony, the husband of a patient, knocked on the door of Fritz Stern’s fath
er. “He urged us to depart at once,” since his comrades “had told him that Hitler was determined to destroy Czechoslovakia” and that would make escape impossible. Because they had also finally found a sponsor who put up the $3,500 to obtain a US visa, the terrified Sterns immediately flew to Amsterdam and took a boat to New York. A few weeks later the Iggers family similarly escaped by train to Holland.25 Seeing the handwriting on the wall, all Jews who could do so now fled in haste.

  In March 1938 the Anschluss extended the persecution of Jews to Austria, adding more than two hundred thousand new victims. When “trucks of brown-shirted Nazi SA toured the streets” to celebrate the reunion with Germany,” Lucy Mandelstam recalled, her “whole world fell apart and everything changed” and “my beautiful Vienna suddenly became a menacing and frightening place.” Jack Keil remembered “the eerie feeling” of sitting with his parents in their darkened apartment and listening “to the screaming, yelling, hoarse but strangely fascinating voice of Adolf Hitler.” The shouts of “Sieg Heil” and “Jews out” by men in Nazi uniform made it clear that “what took a while in Germany, came about literally overnight” in Austria. The quick extension of the Reich’s anti-Semitic measures implemented by Adolf Eichmann signaled unmistakably that Jews had become “once again the object of violence and fury.” Due to widespread racism, “the Austrian Nazis were even more virulent than their German counterparts in 1933.”26