Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  Document 1-7. A crowd of Viennese children look on as an Austrian Nazi forces a youth to paint the word Jud (Jew) on the facade of his father’s store, 1938, USHMMPA WS# 01510, courtesy of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Zeitgeschichte.

  Training Youth for Jobs Abroad

  As antisemitic policies escalated in the mid-1930s, thousands of German Jews chose to emigrate from their native land. By the outbreak of war in September 1939, some 282,000 Jews—nearly half of the Jewish population as it had existed in 1933—had fled Nazi Germany.42 But emigration was difficult: it required sufficient funds and flexibility to resettle in a foreign land. The worldwide Great Depression and pervasive antisemitism presented added obstacles to immigration. Moreover, in order to obtain the necessary visas for entry and residence, most countries demanded that each new immigrant provide the name of a guarantor, who might pledge financial support for the new arrival in the event of illness or unemployment. Most also required that the refugees possess the skills and ability to find work in their new homeland.

  42. That is, Germany’s 1937 borders; 117,000 Jews had also emigrated from annexed Austria by September 1939.

  German Jewish youth faced particular difficulties both in gaining professional skills and in facilitating their emigration abroad. Limited educational opportunities and the decrease in the number of businesses that might take in Jewish employees or apprentices prevented many youngsters from garnering the knowledge and proficiency required for professional placement. Those who had gained the necessary expertise or experience were “not unemployed,” as Jewish educator Heinemann Stern noted; rather “they [were] without a profession.”43 As one solution, Jewish self-help organizations promoted occupational training centers, where young people could acquire the skills they needed to find a job overseas. Most of these training centers were sponsored and directed by Zionist associations, which offered their students vocational training as well as Hebrew-language instruction in the hope that they might immigrate to Palestine.

  43. Heinemann Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich? Jüdisches Leben zwischen den Kriegen: Erinnerungen, ed. Hans Christian Meyer (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1970), 194.

  In 1936, the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany) established an emigration-training farm (Auswandererlehrgut) at Gross-Breesen in Silesia, one of the only non-Zionist centers of its kind.44 Organized by the Hamburg-born pedagogue Curt Bondy (1894–1972), Gross-Breesen began its efforts with 135 boys and girls, aged fifteen to seventeen.45 This initial cadre learned farming and animal husbandry techniques, housekeeping, and artisan skills, as well as carpentry and metalworking. In tandem with the technical curriculum, students received foreign-language training, courses in history and civics, and in-depth instruction in the Jewish religion, with an emphasis on their common cultural heritage. Although early conditions at the center proved primitive, Bondy’s two-year training program would ultimately attract 240 students to the 567-acre estate at Gross-Breesen. Candidates for the training farm were usually recruited from the Bund Deutsch-Jüdischer Jugend (League of German Jewish Youth),46 while the youngsters’ parents or guardians undertook the costs for schooling and board.

  44. For a definitive account of the Auswandererlehrgut Gross-Breesen, see Werner T. Angress, Between Fear and Hope: Jewish Youth in the Third Reich, trans. Werner T. Angress and Christine Granger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

  45. Despite Bondy’s repeated efforts to recruit more female candidates for the training farm, the overwhelming majority of Gross-Breesen’s student population consisted of teenage males.

  46. The League of German Jewish Youth was established in 1933 as a union of several Jewish youth organizations. In 1936, under pressure from Nazi authorities, the association changed its name to the Ring Bund Jüdische Jugend; in January of the following year, the association was banned.

  The leaders of the Reichsvertretung had conceived of their emigration-training farm as a basis for a number of Gross-Breesen settlements abroad. Preliminary efforts focused on the establishment of a coffee plantation in the Paraná province of Brazil, but negotiations foundered, and although new opportunities for satellite farms presented themselves to Bondy and his colleagues, their painstaking efforts yielded few results. Their only successful overseas endeavor materialized in the Virginia Plan. In 1938, William Thalhimer Sr., owner of a Southern-based department store chain headquartered in Richmond, donated a tract of land in nearby Burkeville, Virginia, as the foundation for a communal farm on American soil. Thirty-seven young trainees would immigrate to Virginia in an effort to establish Thalhimer’s Hyde Farm as an outpost of the Breesen experiment; each young person, including Ernst Löwensberg,47 author of the correspondence below, received joint stock in the farm from Thalhimer so that he or she could fulfill residency requirements through the ownership of property.48 While Löwensberg toiled in Burkeville, many of his male colleagues and the staff at the Gross-Breesen training center were arrested by Nazi authorities in the aftermath of Kristallnacht and imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp, while the farm itself suffered extensive damage as a result of the pogrom. Thereafter, several students emigrated; in the following years, thirty-one additional students made their way to England, Argentina, Australia, Kenya, and Palestine. Curt Bondy himself ultimately escaped Nazi Germany through the Netherlands and found a post teaching psychology in the United States at the College of William and Mary. On August 31, 1941, Gestapo officials ordered the dissolution of the Gross-Breesen farm and deployed remaining faculty and trainees as forced laborers.49 Many of the last generation of Gross-Bresseners perished during the Holocaust.

  47. Ernst Moritz Löwensberg (later Ernest Loew) served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Following the war, he purchased a farm near Norwich, Connecticut, which he managed until his death in January 1986.

  48. Virginia Historical Society Archive, Manuscripts Mss1 T3275 a FA1, William Blum Thalhimer Papers, 1914–2005.

  49. Angress, Between Fear and Hope, 73.

  Document 1-8. Letter of Ernst Löwensberg, Burkeville, Virginia, to students of the emigration-training farm at Gross-Breesen, Silesia, June 16, 1938, USHMMA, Acc. 2000.227, Herbert Cohn Gross-Breesen Collection (translated from the German).

  Dear Friends!

  It is eight days that I have been here on the farm, where we will all be gathered together in the near future in order primarily to advance what we started in Breesen: working and learning. Concerning what comes after that, we don’t want to discuss right now. I will try to report briefly to you all that I have done and experienced and seen since I have been here.

  From Richmond it is about sixty miles to Burkeville, and then another six miles beyond that. [Curt] Bondy has told us that the landscape here is like that of the Black Forest, and this is true. [. . .] The road leading here is very curvy and hilly, and also much varied in appearance. The fields on either side are always surrounded by forest. People’s houses lie quite aloof from the roadway. That somewhere in the distance there must be a house, one determines in the following way. At the edge of the road stand posts on which a kind of pipe has been mounted (it almost looks like a drainage pipe), and on this there is a name. This is the mailbox for the U.S. Mail,*50 which comes once a day by automobile. [. . .] Some six miles beyond Burkeville there is also such a mailbox. The lettering reads “R. J. Barron,” and next to it a pretty sign announces Hyde Farmlands, and here the road forks. Then one drives another five minutes with the car, and then one does not see a cottage but a massively built manor house. [. . .] I won’t write much about it. I can only say to you that it is excellently suited to our purposes. Twenty-two rooms are at our disposal—bigger ones and smaller ones. They are only waiting for a painter to spruce them up a bit. [. . .] There is a lovely balcony on the second floor, and I can imagine that we will put our musicians up there, while we sit an
d listen on the lawn below.51 The former owner of the grounds is living here—a man who like other people in the area only farmed a portion of the entire property. He’ll remain here on the site principally as an “expert.” Since the farm property has been purchased by Mr. Thalhimer, he is working now with two young hands who live here and with a neighbor family. [. . .] Tuesday we harrowed with the new machine for cowpeas,* and at the same time we spread phosphorus fertilizer. Then I separated and hoed the cucumbers* (Gurken). When each of you hears that from me, I can imagine that many of you cannot resist letting a smile cross your lips. Yes, indeed, Ernst Löwensberg does the weeding, and he will do much, much more. Here hoeing is more difficult than in Breesen because there is only one hoe,* and you cannot change blades on it. One cannot always be running to the blacksmith to sharpen it all the time. What sort of tool do you all imagine I used over and over, one and the same, for all the hoeing I have done? It is dull on every side. But in any case, we keep going. In Breesen I would have said that I couldn’t work with such a tool. But one gets used to many things! On Wednesday, we hoed cucumbers* the whole day. This morning hoeing watermelons.* Then butter beans.* This afternoon we hoed the corn* (Mais). In between we planted more butter beans. But what soil! In Gr[oss] Breesen, it would be sifted, plowed, cleared of roots and stumps, and harrowed beforehand. I can’t describe to all of you how much stubborn quack grass there was, in addition to all the other weeds. The hoeing work proceeds like this: the weeds are hoed out of the rows [and fall] into the furrow. They are left there. One rain is all it takes, and they are [striking root and] growing again to beat the band. There are not enough people to clear them away and then burn them. I’ll say it again: through intensive effort and supported only by our brief experience at Gr[oss]-Breesen, we will cultivate the soil here and will then succeed in bringing in a full harvest. The chief crop here is tobacco. [. . .]

  50. All phrases marked in italics with an asterisk (*) in this document were written in English by Löwensberg within the original German-language text.

  51. The Gross-Breesen students held nightly musical performances at their training farm.

  I could write about much more. But for now this is enough. I hope that you have at least an impression of what it looks like here from what I’ve told you. There are many special things of which I have not written. I have resumed the connection with you all after the four weeks of silence while I was underway on my journey here. I will gladly answer your questions as best I can. You only need to write to me. There are certainly things that would interest each of you.

  Now I have written you all! Now I expect that you will write me!

  Greetings to you all,

  Ernst Löwensberg

  Document 1-9. Jewish teenagers unload a cart of hay at the Gross-Breesen’s emigration-training farm, Germany, c. 1936, USHMMPA WS# 68299, courtesy of George Landecker.

  Reichskristallnacht

  On the night of November 9 and 10, 1938, a nationwide pogrom against German Jews erupted throughout Germany and annexed Austria and in areas of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops. Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass, as the event came to be known, had its roots in the murder of Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official stationed in Paris, on November 7, 1938. Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew living in Paris, had shot the diplomat in response to the German authorities’ recent expulsion of several thousand resident Polish Jews from the Reich.52 Vom Rath’s death two days later happened to coincide with the anniversary of the Nazi’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, the most significant date in the National Socialist calendar. The Nazi Party leadership, assembled in Munich for the commemoration, chose to use the occasion as a pretext to launch a night of antisemitic excesses.

  52. See Gerald Schwab, The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Gynszpan (New York: Praeger, 1990). Grynszpan’s family numbered among the deportees.

  In its aftermath, German officials would contend that Kristallnacht had begun as a spontaneous outburst of public sentiment; in reality, the pogrom was initiated primarily by Nazi Party officials and conducted by members of the Nazi Party, the SA, and the Hitler Youth. The “rioters” destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Greater Germany. Many synagogues burned throughout the night, in full view of the public and local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. SA and Hitler Youth members smashed windows, plundered homes, and looted Jewish-owned shops and businesses. The pogrom proved especially destructive in Berlin and Vienna, home to the two largest German Jewish communities. Mobs of SA men roamed the streets, attacking Jews they encountered and forcing them to submit to acts of public humiliation. Although Nazi authorities had not specifically ordered aggravated violence against individuals, Kristallnacht claimed the lives of at least ninety-one Jews between November 9 and 10. As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo arrested some thirty thousand Jewish males, ultimately transferring most to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps until each prisoner could produce the requisite papers for emigration abroad. Significantly, Kristallnacht marked the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a massive scale on the basis of their ethnicity. The events of Kristallnacht represented an important turning point in Nazi antisemitic policy. After the pogrom, anti-Jewish measures radicalized dramatically, with a concentration of powers for antisemitic policy resting more and more concretely in the hands of the SS.53

  53. For a more detailed account of the Kristallnacht pogrom, see Hermann Graml, Reichskristallnacht: Antisemitismus und Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988); Walter Pehle, ed., November 1938: From “Reichskristallnacht” to Genocide, trans. William Templer (New York: Berg, 1991); Alan E. Steinweis, Kristallnacht, 1938 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

  Twelve-year-old Marguerite Strasser experienced the events of November 9 and 10, 1938, in Munich, the cradle of the National Socialist movement. Strasser’s mother had died shortly after her birth, and her father had recently fled to Strasbourg, so Marguerite lived until her own flight to France in the care of her elderly grandmother. The events of November 10 made a powerful impression upon the young girl. Many of the pogrom’s central features—the burning synagogues, the mistreatment of Jews in the streets, the ransacking and destruction of houses and businesses, and the arrest of Jewish men en masse in the wake of the action—figure as Strasser’s fundamental images of the event. Her latter-day recollections also make it clear that Strasser internalized much of the rejection and trauma she and other Jews experienced at the hands of their fellow Germans in the wake of Kristallnacht.54

  54. Marguerite Strasser (b. 1926) emigrated in May 1939 to France, where she worked for several years as a social worker. In 1951 she returned to Munich, where she worked as a translator and raised a family.

  Document 1-10. Marguerite Strasser, “Then I Felt Like a Subhuman . . . ,” in Friedrich Kraft, ed., Kristallnacht in Bayern: Judenpogrom am 9. November 1938: Eine Dokumentation (Ingolstadt: Claudius Verlag, 1988), 109–10 (translated from the German).

  On this day [November 10, 1938], I didn’t want to go to school, because I already had the feeling that something was up. In my class, it was doubly difficult, because I was already a complete outsider there. And on this day the atmosphere was worse still. I was harassed more often, and the looks were even more hateful. In the first period we had calisthenics, and the teacher humiliated me on this day more than usual. Then my schoolmates hid all of my clothes, and I, completely dissolved in tears, had to search for them in every nook and cranny.

  It was a very wicked prank, and of course as a result I came much too late to the math hour which followed. And, because I had also not done my homework, I promptly received an extra homework assignment.

  In the middle of class, a pupil came in with an order from th
e director that the Jewish pupils had to leave the school immediately. I packed up my things. My classmates made very merry: they clapped and shrieked as I crept towards the door. But the mathematics teacher called after me, “And don’t forget your extra assignment!” With this he showed that he didn’t approve of this expulsion. It was very nice of him—until today I have not forgotten that. I was afraid to go straight home and went first to the home of a friend, who lived close by. She was half Jewish. She was not home yet, however, and her parents were in complete despair. She came home a half an hour later, sobbing, with torn clothing and covered with bruises. She was treated so cruelly by her fellow classmates. Her parents were so distressed that they sent me home immediately.

  I was able to sneak past the synagogue in the Kanalstrasse.55 The building was still giving off clouds of smoke. The windowpanes were shattered. On the street among the shards of glass lay singed books and burnt religious objects.

  55. This is today Munich’s Herzog-Rudolf-Strasse.

  Many people were standing before the synagogue, most of them in uniform, yelling “Juda, verrecke”56 or something of that nature. Others walked by shyly—it was embarrassing to them. I went away then, with tears in my eyes. I did not dare take the tram.