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.
16. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, 84–89.
17. See Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews, 1933–1943, trans. William Templer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989).
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 s
tandpoint, 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.
19. This was the customary greeting, meaning “good day,” used throughout most of southern Germany and Austria.
20. This was the so-called German greeting introduced by the Nazis as a standard salutation.
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: th
e 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.
Children during the Holocaust Page 6