1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  Despite the uncompromising demands he made to Helldorf and the rest, Goebbels claimed that he was not happy with the physical maltreatment of the Jews – at least for the time being. On 4 July he heard that some Jews had been picked on in Sachsenhausen, which was part of his fiefdom as Gauleiter of Berlin. He sent word to stop it. On the 7th he despatched Helldorf to investigate these ‘obscenities’: ‘I don’t want this.’6 Helldorf appeared to be doing his bidding, but a few days later Himmler – who had the means to find out – warned Goebbels of the police chief’s questionable loyalty.7 On 11 July Goebbels took the opportunity to tear Helldorf off a strip. ‘He looked very small’ when the Gauleiter had finished with him.8

  On 2 July Malcolm Christie had reported to the Foreign Office in London that Hitler intended to attack Czechoslovakia in the autumn. The following day Chamberlain had delivered a speech at Kettering in which he had voiced his reluctance to go to war.9 On 5 July, Goebbels had a long chat with Ribbentrop in the Kaiserhof Hotel. They spoke about the imminent strike against the Czechs, better relations with Britain (Germany would honour Austria’s debts) and the Berlin–Rome Axis (they needed to forget about the South Tyrol for the time being). The German Foreign Minister also had cold feet about the savage treatment of the Jews. ‘I promised him I would be a little gentler,’ Goebbels confided to his diary. ‘The principle, however, remains unchanged and Berlin must be cleaned up. For the rest we want to launch a great propaganda campaign about the Jewish problem all over the world, soon.’10

  Himmler had no such reservations. Speaking to the boys of the NAPOLAi schools, he outlined the ideological fuel that was generating the SS:

  We as a nation of seventy-five million are, despite our great numbers, a minority in the world. We have very, very many against us, as you yourselves as National Socialists know very well. All capital, the whole of Jewry, the whole of freemasonry, all the democrats and philistines of the world, all the Bolsheviks of the world, all the Jesuits of the world, and not least, all the peoples who regret not having completely killed us off in 1918, and who make only one vow: if we once get Germany in our hands again it won’t be another 1918, it will be the end.11

  Der Stürmer was naturally in agreement with Goebbels. The worry was that powerful American Jews might spoil their plans. In issue 30, the cartoonist ‘Fips’ showed Jews defiling the Stars and Stripes. Another pair of cartoons presented a Jewish emigrant:

  Als ich den Wanderer fragte:

  ‘Wo gehst Du hin?’

  Da sagte er: ‘Ins Ausland,

  Weil ich ein Jude bin.’

  (When I asked the wanderer:

  ‘Where are you going to?’

  He said: ‘I’m off to exile,

  Because I am a Jew.’)

  The flanking cartoon, however, showed the same Jew returned to Germany. He was laughing: armed with a non-German passport he was now a foreigner and enjoyed protection from foreign powers.12 Germany needed to know its enemy. That July, Munich hosted a meeting of the Academic Society for Research into Jewry.13

  In July, Der Stürmer dedicated a special issue to Austria’s Jews. It mocked the lawyers Hecht and Winterstein, who were already in Dachau, and the fact that 85 per cent of Vienna’s advocates were Jews, followed by 80 per cent of cobblers and newspaper proprietors, 75 per cent of bankers, 73.6 per cent of the wine trade, 73.3 per cent of the rag trade, 70 per cent of dentists and 70 per cent of cinema proprietors. Of course none of this was true any more.14

  There was more bad news for the Austrians. The regalia of the Holy Roman Empire were going to be moved to Nuremberg; in addition, increasing numbers of foreigners had cancelled their visits to the Salzburg Festival. In Vienna it was announced that the city was already one-third Aryanized, but the disadvantage of removing Jews from public life was plain in the hospitals, where there were already 147 positions vacant.15 Jews were now being cleared out of their more luxurious homes in Sievering and Hietzing, on the Ringstrasse and the less salubrious Taborstrasse.16

  On the 6th it was reported that there had been 800 Jewish suicide attempts over the past few days. There followed the final order removing Jews from their posts. Jews also had to leave flats with windows on to the streets and move into the courtyards, which were always of lesser value. ‘Jews are hardly ever seen in the streets of the city, except in queues at the special passport offices.’17 Gentiles could also justify not paying their rent if there were a Jew in the building.18 The British press reported that Viennese businesses had to place a card in the windows saying that the premises were for sale to an Aryan buyer. Streicher’s special Viennese issue of Der Stürmer pointed out – inter alia – that Jews still owned or controlled many Viennese papers. The official Wiener Zeitung published long lists every day of Jewish businesses going into liquidation. The Reichspost was culled in the second week of July, but the Neue Freie Presse and the Wiener Journal remained.

  KENDRICK AND PALESTINE

  On 5 July Wiesl recorded that, contrary to pessimistic reports in the Jewish press, 381 illegal immigrants had arrived in Palestine.ii They were described as Revisionists but included nearly 100 Agudist sports club members. ‘I learn that the Austrian authorities are ready to allow a new transport to leave Austria in July, under the same conditions, i.e. granting permits to £15 for transport fees per head of emigrant at the price of 12 RM per pound.’ It transpired that the British would be prepared to turn a blind eye to 1,000 illegal migrants and that Eichmann had been brought round too.19

  The coup had been brought off by Perl and his associates. Perl gathered around him the richer Jews who were ready to pay the costs of young Jews who wanted to go to Palestine, because they were unable to get their money out. On 9 July the young Jews left for Greece via Jugoslavia, the Greek Consul ‘convinced’ by a few banknotes. They were going to Palestine, theoretically to attend a sports camp. The Jugoslavs had even granted transit visas. Eichmann voiced his pleasure at seeing the back of them; quoting a line of the Revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, he told them, ‘You need a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan.’20At the South Station they sang the Zionist hymn Hatikwah in triumph.21

  On 25 July Mosche Schapira wrote to Eliahu Dobkin to tell him that Kendrick had been asked by the British Foreign Office to give an account of illegal emigration to Palestine. Kendrick had not been satisfied by the answer Schapira had sent him from Jerusalem, ‘but required positive steps to be taken against the Revisionists’ or there would be disadvantages for legal emigrants. He showed understanding in a difficult situation but ‘the law was the law.’22 In fact, British policy was more liberal than it might have appeared. Rich Jews were the most welcome in Palestine, but there were quotas for artisans and workers too. In 1937 214 Austrian Jews went to Palestine, representing 28.1 per cent of legal immigrants. In 1938, that figure rose to 2,964, or 40.5 per cent of legal immigrants. Given that PCO officials could not handle more than twenty-five applications a day, Kendrick’s office was evidently working flat out to process the applications. Austrians and Germans were always preferred to Poles.

  If one of Kendrick’s staff was more sympathetic than the rest to the activities of the Perl-Bureau, it was Miss Stamper.23 She suffered a breakdown later, possibly brought on by stress. Mary Ormerod lodged a complaint against Miss Stamper, claiming she had been rude to applicants, told them that there were quite enough Jews in Britain, made antisemitic remarks and torn up a visa application in front of the petitioner. She resigned soon after but justified her conduct, saying she had gone out of her way to help Jews, which was undeniably true.24 A report at the time describes the Passport Office staff as being ‘so overwrought that they will burst into tears at the slightest provocation’. The Consul-General complained a few days later: ‘We should need a staff of forty people and a building the size of the Albert Hall . . .’25

  The Passport Office in Vienna had already been reinforced with extra staff from Sofia and Copenhagen, so that it could now handle between 150 and 175 applications a day. There were s
ometimes 600 waiting, preyed upon by black marketeers trading in tickets. Some pregnant women tried to go into labour in the queue, thereby having their babies on British territory; ushers were manhandled and occasionally struck by petitioners; and disappointed Jews hurled accusations at the officials. Benton, Kendrick’s number two, admitted that the one and only time in his life when he had been reduced to tears was that summer. ‘It gets under your skin, you see. In the end it just builds up.’26

  Kendrick, however, remained adamant that there were to be no more exceptions, and he put pressure on the Jugoslav government to that effect. Transit visas for crossing Jugoslavia were annulled, together with entry visas for Greece. At the end of July the Greeks officially closed their borders to Jews.27 The visas were already in the hands of the agent, who kept quiet about it, and tried to get the Jews to the Adriatic anyhow, without success. The Revisionists were stopped before they could reach the boat at Fiume. Some 850 despairing Jews went back to Vienna.iii Later that month the Royal Navy intercepted the Attrato with 100 Austrians on board. It was on its seventh journey to Palestine.28

  Kendrick’s forcing of the hands of both Jugoslavs and Greeks was a setback, closing two important doors simultaneously. At the Anglican Church in Vienna Grimes was just off on leave. His verger, Fred Richter, was without question bringing candidates for baptism from among the assimilated Jews of the city. They would have hoped to use one or other land route to escape from Austria. Richter was also Kendrick’s office manager. Did Kendrick know about Grimes’s activities? If he did, he must have taken no notice.

  Perl was still hiring Greek boats and on 20 September 130 of the original party left Fiume on the Draga for Palestine. Now that Italy, Jugoslavia and Greece had closed their borders to the Jews, the only possible way out was down the Danube. No visas were required for the river steamers, but Romania would not let them leave from their ports without entry visas. The Liberian Consul in Vienna, however, was prepared to issue 1,000 visas for 10,000 RM on condition that none of the Jews turned up in Liberia. Perl not only had the use of the Draga but had two other ships, the Gheppo and the Ely. On the Danube route he was using the cruisers Melk and Minerva. On 31 October 1,100 people left Vienna on the two ships, successfully making it to Palestine.

  JEWISH DESPAIR

  The despair of the Jews struck many visitors to Vienna. Mosche Schapira of the Zionist organization Hechaluz Hamisrachi in Palestine reported on their terrible despondency at the beginning of July: ‘I try to console them and give them courage, but this is all in vain if we cannot offer them real consolation in the form of certificates.’29

  On 9 July the Quaker Ethel Houghton in Vienna wrote to Alice Nike in London:

  The situation here has become infinitely more acute . . . Practically all Jews were dismissed from their employment on 1 July, without notice and given no compensation . . . All Jews are being given notice to leave their houses if they are living in municipal blocks of flats, and also those living in the better districts of Vienna are shortly to be moved out.

  She added with a certain naivety, ‘There is a rumour that even those entitled to pensions will not get them . . . the time has come when relief in some form is becoming an absolute necessity.’ It appears that food parcels were suggested.30

  The Gauleiter, Globocnik, made a speech on the 16th in which he asked disingenuously, ‘Why are the borders closed to poor Jews? [. . .] No, comrades . . . we will solve the Jewish problem, and will not be dictated to by anybody else as to how.’31 In London, The Times published a letter on 19 July, signed by – among many – the Archbishop of York and George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester. It related that there had been 7,000 Jewish suicides since the Anschluss. This is almost certainly a wild exaggeration. It called on Britain and the United States to act against this ‘degrading reproach against our humanity’.32 Bell made his maiden speech in the House of Lords on the 27th. He used the occasion to attack Nazi antisemitism. He chided Germans who had lowered themselves to ‘dishonour and cowardice’. He reported that even ministers of state in Vienna had said openly that the place for the Jews was the Danube, or in one of the city’s cemeteries.33

  THE EVIAN CONFERENCE

  The Evian Conference ran from 6 to 15 July. It was Roosevelt’s appeal of 25 March that set the ball in motion. He created a Presidential Advisory Committee on Political Refugees while Secretary of State Cordell Hull invited the British, French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes and Swedes, together with twenty Latin American countries, to come to a conference to discuss the fate of the Jews. At first it seemed that America, Australia and South America could absorb a large number of them. In March the American Consul in Vienna had issued 25,000 forms, but this proved another false hope: the Jews had first to find backers in the United States, and the quota permitted from Austria was low – just 1,413.34 Later that small tally was subsumed into a figure of 27,130 for the whole Reich, which was better than Ireland (17,853) but less than half the quota for Great Britain (65,721), where no one was being forced to emigrate.35

  The League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sir Neill Malcolm, created difficulties too. He felt the Americans should not have convened the conference if they were unprepared to improve their quotas,36 and he refused to accept that the League was responsible for Germany’s Jews.37 The Viennese-born Dr Henry I. Wachtel offered assistance to Jews, sending out copies of the New York telephone book and telling them to try their luck by contacting American Jews to secure affidavits.38

  The delegates arrived on the 5th, and Roosevelt’s Emissary to the Holy See, Myron C. Taylor, had dinner that night with Lord Winterton and Sir Charles Palairet, the former ambassador to Vienna. Although the meeting was called at Germany’s behest, the delegates were there to discuss the fates not just of German and Austrian Jews but of Jews from Poland, Romania and Hungary, countries that had also introduced racial laws and were anxious to see the backs of their Jewish populations. This was in response to the Romanians, who on 13 April had proposed an annual export equivalent to the number of Jews born every year. They also pointed out that ‘Jewish problems’ were not confined to Germany.39 Jewish exiles were already causing internal problems in many countries. The big three closed ranks. The Americans did not want to change their quotas. There were 40,000 German exiles in France, and both France and Britain expressed their reluctance to take in any more. At Evian Lord Winterton excused the British record by pointing out that the Mandate had already absorbed 300,000 Jews, including 40,000 Germans.

  Countries such as Britain were interested in creaming off the best. The United Kingdom only desired physicians with a worldwide reputation or younger ones with two years’ practical experience. On the other hand Britain was open to Jews wanting to enter full-time higher education, although the money to pay for the courses had to be found first. Those taking medical degrees were not allowed to practise.40 Other countries had more specific demands. In Central America they were against doctors and intellectuals; in Peru they wanted no lawyers. The Argentinians said they had done enough. San Domingo offered to take 100,000 Jews. A Belgian Catholic group agreed to help on condition that they submitted to baptism. Canada was not interested unless they brought riches with them; Denmark and Holland were fine for transit, but the Belgians required a visa, otherwise they would be sent back. China was still possible. Cuba wanted $500 a head.41

  The idea of Madagascar was raised again in the French press. Later Taylor looked into the British suggestions for a Jewish homeland: their first choice of British Guiana was ‘not ideal’ as it would accommodate only 5,000 at the most. Northern Rhodesia could house 400–500 families.42 The Jews in Palestine believed that the British should have removed all restrictions on emigration and that they could have fitted in 80–100,000 new arrivals every year. On the other hand peace between the Jews and the Arabs needed to be brought about first. The British agreed on a compromise limiting emigration to Palestine to 75,000 Jews spread over five years.

  One of the greatest disappo
intments was the stance of the British Dominions, countries with huge unpopulated expanses that showed very great reluctance to allow significant numbers of Jews to settle. Kenya seemed particularly appropriate for Jewish settlement.43 Northern Ireland was looking for industrious artisans.

  As one Australian said at Evian, ‘we have no real racial problem [and] we are not desirous of importing one’.44 The Australians would not even allow Jews to land.

  At the end of the conference the delegates had made provision for the inter-governmental committee to be opened in London ‘to continue and develop the work of the Evian meeting’. This was a British idea. A director would be appointed whose job was to improve the ‘conditions of exodus and to approach governments and countries of refuge’.45 In short: nothing very much had happened at all.

  The British government went back to sleep and left it to Sir Wyndham Deedes and Bentwich to put pressure on the Dominions. Lord Winterton agreed to chair the new committee and the American George Rublee became the director. Writing to his friend and collaborator Wilfred Israel at the end of the month, Catchpool called Evian ‘a catastrophic setback’.46

  Der Stürmer exulted. ‘Fips’ drew a picture of a Jew in black tie being pelted with eggs and fruit: the Jewish ‘distortion’ on Lake Geneva had come to nothing. The Jew was mocked for his cries of ‘Oy Vey!’47 Not all doors had closed, however. Writing on 27 August, an official at Friends’ House in London said,

  I’m afraid we were too hopeful about the results of the conference. We frequently suggest Bolivia to people who have friends in London, who are prepared to help them to a small extent, because we understand that a visa can be obtained from this end if a passport can be sent here . . . for an enterprising foreigner with some sort of technical training, prospects are good.48