1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  EXIT STRATEGIES

  Officially, no countries admitted Jews any more. A cartoon by ‘Fips’ showed a Jew marching past Polish, Swiss and Dutch doors marked ‘Jews no longer welcome’.10 In practice there were loopholes. On the day that saw the birth of Edda, Wolfgang Wiesl told Waldman of the American Jewish Committee that he had run into an illegal immigrant from Austria in Paris. The man had told him that the smuggling of Jews across the border from Germany’s best-known exit point, Aachen, to Eupen in Belgium was ‘quasi-legal’. Jews with papers were often given a last kick in the backside to help them into their new world of freedom. For those who had none, smugglers charged them anything between 25 and 500 RM. The migrants assembled now in groups of twenty to thirty, whereas formerly the groups were smaller – five or six.

  German border guards were very superficial in their examinations; and curiously Wiesl was told they never removed jewels. People who wanted to avoid the German frontier posts, however, could do so by paying a little bit extra to the smugglers. Wiesl’s informer had marched forty-five kilometres on foot. Once they reached Eupen across the border they could take a bus or taxi to Liège, and then the train to Brussels. If they were caught by the Belgian police, they were handed back to the Germans at Aachen, where the Jewish Kultusgemeinde looked after them until they found a chance to try again. Two thousand Jews had been able to cross in this way since the Anschluss. ‘Most of the Jews had no passport,’ reported Wiesl.11 He was bitter about events in Vienna: ‘Not one Christian . . . has interfered in favour of his Jewish friends.’ Jews had been forced to urinate on the Torah.12 This was less than the truth, but Wiesl could be forgiven for believing it.

  On 13 June the American Consul-General, John Wiley, expressed some of his frustrations in a report to the State Department. There had been a ‘new wave’ of Jew-baiting, with Jews being told they had between two and eight weeks to leave; otherwise they would face Dachau. He had also learned of the illicit transports.

  The authorities are encouraging clandestine emigration. I have received what I believe to be a conservative estimate from an authoritative source that over 1,000 have been obliged to cross the frontier at night into Belgium. A few days ago 350 were sent in sealed cars to Greece whence they will be shipped to Palestine without visas or permits of entry. It was explained to me that the competent British authorities are unofficially in the picture and not raising obstacles.13

  Wiley had other complaints. One of these involved the treatment of Mischlinge. A distinguished composer had been refused admission to a Jewish hospital because he was not a Jew; yet he could not be treated by an Aryan hospital because as far as they were concerned he was defined as a Jew. Another bugbear was Gildemeester, whom he found highly suspicious: ‘I am not in the position to cast any additional light on the nature of Mr Gildemeester’s activities in Austria.’ He had had a letter from Gildemeester complaining that the Americans had described him as a German agent, and that this was jeopardizing his work. He cited a list of Quakers as his friends. In his reply Wiley suggested the Dutchman write in German or French, as his English was not doing him any favours.14

  Further repressive measures were introduced on 14 June, which were to lead the way for the compulsory transfer of all Jewish business to German hands. Branches of a business were Jewish if the branch was managed by a Jew. Moreover the measure was cunningly backdated to 1 January 1938, so that any shifting of positions after the Anschluss was null and void. That same day, Frick proposed compulsory Aryanization. A year before, Hitler had declared that the removal of Jewish doctors was even more important than the sacking of Jewish civil servants, because people regarded physicians as models.15 The Führer had been slow to enact his will, because the removal of the Jews from medicine would have depleted the service by some 4,000 souls in the Altreich alone, some 8 per cent of the whole. In Austria it was much worse: nearly half of Austria’s 7,000 doctors were Jews. Hitler nonetheless went ahead and signed the decree on 25 July.

  The scales were slowly falling from the eyes of the damned. On the 17th, Jews were banned from practising dentistry. In response, the Viennese dentists Hugo and Bella Schneider, together with their eleven-year-old son Hans, decided to risk flight. They took a train to the Czech border and bribed a border guard to let them cross. They forfeited ‘what had been a secure middle-class existence’ and became ‘refugees without resources, status or prospects’. They went to live in Karvina on the Polish border, where Hugo had come from and where his brothers still lived. After the Munich Agreement it was ceded to the Poles, and they became illegal immigrants in Poland.16

  The Schneiders’ prospects were little better than those they had left behind. In the autumn, however, they found a place for Hans at a Quaker school in the Netherlands that had been established for German and Austrian refugees. Hans had to go to Warsaw to get a visa from the Dutch Consul. Then he had to fly to Prague, then to Amsterdam. The aircraft was cancelled owing to bad weather, which meant that Hans and his father had to hang about Warsaw without papers for ten days.

  He asked the first reliable-looking man he saw in the street for help, who sent us to a member of the German embassy in whose apartment I then stayed. Equally amazing, the man who sent us there turned out to be a Polish policeman in the very department charged with deporting illegal aliens. I presume there was an anti-Nazi underground in both organizations . . . I was told to say that I was a relative from Vienna if anyone asked.17

  Hans made it to safety in the Netherlands, but his parents were denounced in Karvina. The local police turned a blind eye while they disappeared into the Polish interior. They stayed with distant relatives while they waited for a British or American visa. In April 1939, Hugo Schneider became one of forty dentists allowed to enter Britain, travelling from Poland by boat. Hans rejoined them in August.

  THE VIENNA THEATRE FESTIVAL AND HUGH GRIMES

  Thwarted by his failure to rid his city of Jews, Goebbels was now being badgered by another group of pests. ‘A large number of pastors have signed a petition for Niemöller. Wastepaper basket!’18 More pleasant work took the form of the Vienna Theatre Festival. ‘Vienna needs to become a fun city once again.’ He flew in on 12 June, visiting the Cobenzl in the Vienna Woods with its magnificent views. The Festival opened with a performance of Rosenkavalier conducted by Böhm. That night Goebbels soothed the ruffled feathers of the Austrian comedian Hans Moser in a suburban wine tavern in Grinzing. There were violins, and Moser sang Heurige songs. It was ‘indescribably romantic’. Dawn had risen before Goebbels made it back to his hotel.19

  He stayed to see the performance of Hamlet starring Gründgens and Marianne Hoppe. The ‘genius Shakespeare’ was clearly an honorary German – ‘how paltry others appear beside him’.20 On 18 June Goebbels was back at the Festival with Magda and the following day drove up to the Kahlenberg that overlooks Vienna from the east. The Festival closed with a performance of Lohengrin given by the Berlin opera ensemble and directed by Tietjen.

  On 14 June, while Goebbels was back persecuting Jews in Berlin, things began to accelerate in Vienna’s Anglican Church. The incumbent, Hugh Grimes, initially decided to take matters in his own hands in a quiet way by marrying Jews in the Anglican rite, thereby conferring baptism at the same time. Grimes had been in Vienna since November 1934. In October 1935 he had paid a visit to Germany following the issue of the Nuremberg Laws and written to Bishop Bell, ‘I may say that I myself am pro-Jew and have always been so.’ He believed that Britain and the United States should tell the Germans to stop persecuting the Jews:

  Obviously such declarations need to be conveyed to the government as wisely as possible, otherwise they will only strengthen the wild men on the left [of the Party] in their cry for the extermination of the Jews who are plotting against the Reich.21

  That Grimes may have suggested baptism as a way out is implied by the next article in the file, which examines the use of baptism for humanitarian ends. It advises against, as under the new German law everythi
ng is based on race: ‘Baptism alters nothing.’22 Grimes knew better. He knew that he could not guarantee success but he could offer a glimmer of hope. There were the countries that accepted baptized Jews, at least in cases of transit, and there were the officials who were prepared to accept a baptismal certificate, even if it meant turning a blind eye to the physical appearance of the person trying to pass the frontier. The Germans were anxious to be rid of the Jews, after all. The only thing that held them back was the ‘dough’.

  Once Grimes had begun the process, word got round the assimilated Jews and they began to form a queue outside the chaplaincy. Grimes baptized eight Jews on 14 June; twelve on the 19th; sixteen on the 26th. He reached 103 on 10 July, beating that on 27 July with a mighty 129. The greatest number of baptisms he managed in a day was 229 on 25 July. After that he went on leave.23 The entries in the Register provide evidence of the sort of Jews who were prepared to go through a ‘political’ baptism for the sake of acquiring papers of transit. The probable destination of such applicants was Britain, its colonies and Dominions, or the United States. Only in certain cases would Palestine have been meant: there were other ways of getting to Palestine that did not require this sort of compromise.

  Most of the applicants were from Vienna itself, although there are Burgenländer among the entries, driven to Vienna by the move to ‘purify’ Austria’s easternmost province. A few Germans figure in the books, but they are mostly married to Austrians. The rest come from the former lands of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: Viennese residents rather than fugitives. Many of them were hoping to go to Australia, but the contradictory policies of the Australian government proved a frustration. Some might have believed that baptism in the Anglican rite could have helped. This was probably the case with the distaff branch of the actor Paul Henried’s family from Vienna. After a while they cut their losses and went to Paris, and from there to New York. His father found a sponsor in America at the last moment and left his mother behind. She was protected by a Christian family for a year, but the Gestapo found her and she perished in the camps.24

  The Zeisl brothers collected as many visas as they could and rented a villa in Baden while they thought about what to do. The composer Erich Zeisl managed to get visas for Shanghai from a student called Hong Pan, who was a nephew of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. ‘We bought somewhere a visa to Liberia where they said that when you arrive, somebody would come and stick a fork in you to see if you were good to eat.’ Finally he went to the American consulate and looked at the New York telephone book for people called Zeisl. He found seven and wrote to them all.

  Then one day they met a man in the coffeehouse who said he could obtain French visas for a price. They gave him the money and he handed over the visas, but they were from Cologne and not from Vienna. This presented new complications. They had to change their residence to Cologne and go to the embassy to activate the visas. They had applied for visas to Australia (and, although he doesn’t say so, they had had themselves baptized by Grimes), but they were deterred by the fee of £1,500. Then a plumber called Zeisl in New York sent an affidavit. Eventually they chanced it and went to Cologne and by a miracle the visa worked.25

  PALESTINE

  Wiesl had more news on 15 June: 300 Revisionists had been allowed to leave Vienna ‘with the silent encouragement of both the Nazi authorities and the British Consulate in Vienna’. In fact a total of 480 had left on 9 June. This flatly contradicted British policy in Palestine, as it was Kendrick’s duty to interpret it, and yet it is improbable that he allowed the Jews to leave without seeking advice from Whitehall first.

  The British Consulate in Vienna seems to be aware of that illegal transport [wrote Wiesl]. The secretary of the emigration department, a Miss Stamper, is told to have advised would-be emigrants not to wait for a certificate but to leave with that illegal transport. Incredible as that story seems to be I have heard it from different quarters, and I would be glad to be able to believe that not all of humanity has been lost even in consular offices.

  Wiesl was at a loss to understand the Janus-features of Nazism, which could encourage emigration at the same time as arresting young Jews and putting them to forced labour.26 The policy seemed contradictory: on the one hand Jews were being told to go; on the other hand it could take weeks to obtain the necessary papers.27 What he failed to appreciate was that the Third Reich not only wanted to be rid of the Jews, but needed slaves if they were to succeed: young German men were bound for the army.

  BERLIN

  Eichmann’s work in Vienna pleased his masters: he was getting results, whereas in Germany the pace of emigration had been slow. George Clare remembered the particular kindness of the Berliners towards the Jews after his family’s experience in their native Vienna.28 Neither Hitler nor his Berlin Gauleiter was happy about this. Hitler had even managed to connect the Jews with another of his bugbears – the nobility. Nobles, he said, married Jews. On 16 June the police mounted a razzia: ‘The persecutions were carried out exactly to the Viennese model.’29 On 18 June the Gauleiter reported ‘lots of arrests . . . we are going to make Berlin free of Jews’.30 There was outrage in the foreign press.

  The fact that so many Jews were emigrating to the capital of the Reich formed one theme for Goebbels’ summer solstice speech that year. An audience of 120,000 gathered in the Olympia Stadium. The last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth was played followed by fireworks. He reported that no fewer than 3,000 Jews had settled in Berlin in the past few months. Together with Helldorf he made plans to step up the persecution and later came up with the idea of creating a proper ghetto in a largely Jewish district of Berlin, to be funded by the richer Jews.31

  After the speech, Helldorf relayed the instructions to the Party. They were to daub slogans on Jewish shops. This upset Funk, who said it was illegal. When the razzia took place various unwanted elements joined in the looting, including gypsies. Goebbels had them taken to a concentration camp, but defended his notion of ‘spontaneous demonstrations’. ‘For the rest this sort of popular justice has certainly done some good once more. The Jews are terrified and they will certainly think twice before they see Berlin as their el dorado.’ He was to use these methods again on a grander scale in November.32

  On 22 June the German prizefighter Max Schmeling lost his bid to regain his title. He had beaten the black Joe Louis in 1936, which had resulted in rioting in Harlem. This time Louis cracked two of Schmeling’s vertebrae two minutes into the fight and when he screamed with pain the German broadcasting authorities turned off the live link. Later Goebbels decided that the film of the fight would not be shown in Germany. Schmeling arrived back on a stretcher. Goebbels sent flowers to his wife, the Czech actress Anny Ondra. He had a weakness for Czech starlets.33

  The defeat was a return to the embarrassing theme that had haunted the Berlin Olympics, when German sprinters had proved no match for black Americans.iii Not only was German defeat keenly felt in Nazi circles, but the Americans too saw it as an ideological victory. In the run-up to the fight, Jewish lobbies had tried to prevent the match from taking place. The fastidious Reck-Malleczewen naturally objected to being told that Germany had been subjected to national defeat.34

  There was another anti-Jewish razzia on 28 June in Berlin. The Jewish hostess Bella Fromm, who was protected by her contacts in various embassies and legations, went out with a friend to survey the damage. Jews were being roughed up by SA-men who had daubed various Jewish-owned shops in the Kurfürstendamm with slogans and cartoons. In the poorer Jewish areas shops had been looted or trashed. Even pint-sized Hitler Youth boys had joined in the sport. The mob had also attacked the Israel department store, owned by the eponymous family, who had joint German-British nationality.

  The next day the municipality had to send people round to remove the graffiti.35 After Funk, it was Göring who tried to queer Goebbels’ pitch, but even if the action had been a failure this time, the latter would accept no criticism. ‘For the rest, the fight against the Jews will go on,
legally . . . They have to get out!’36 On the 29th Jews had to sack their Jewish employees within two weeks. On the pretext of ascertaining the wealth of Vienna’s remaining Jews, searches for gold, silver and jewels were carried out between 29 June and 3 July. Confiscations yielded 600,000 RM or the equivalent.37

  7

  JULY

  Now the weather was warmer, Hitler was spending much of his time at the Berghof. The Chancellery was in chaos, as he had commissioned Speer to tear down the building and construct something in its place worthy of the Führer of the German Reich. A fire broke out at the site, causing fears that the Führer would not be able to move in on 1 August as desired. In fact, he did not have a chance to show it off to the world’s press before the New Year.1 Speer’s architecture in general found favour with the bigwigs. Goebbels saw the great Berlin model on 7 July and thought it marvellous, its author a ‘proper artist’.2

  In Vienna the Nazi authorities had a problem when one of their weapons blew up in their faces: starved of advancement, Hitler’s Austrian Legion mutinied.3 In other areas, however, things were going to plan. It was reported that Louis Rothschild was still under arrest and all Rothschild property had been placed under the control of a commissioner. Governor Bürckel gloated. ‘This is a revolution. The Jews may be glad that it is not of the French or Russian pattern.’4 The next day he returned to the theme: Vienna was

  overfilled with Jews, who have obtained an overwhelming preponderance in industry and trade, the theatre and other branches of culture and in every branch of public life; a certain amount of time is necessary to clear them out, as we intend to do . . . I seize hold of the big offenders and lock them up.

  Bürckel warned the world’s press that the Jews would not be allowed to hang on to more than 4–5 per cent of their property after they had paid the Reichsfluchtsteuer and other taxes.5