The new government moves swiftly to restrict the civil liberties of Germany’s half million Jews, who make up less than one percent of the population but who nevertheless are prominently represented in urban settings, in professional fields, in academia. Many of these families have German roots going back centuries, and in fact identify more closely with their German heritage than their Jewish identity.
Legislation unfolds incrementally at first. A one-day boycott of Jewish business is proclaimed. Non-Aryan[*] civil servants are forcibly retired. Kosher butchering is forbidden by law. Non-Aryan children find it harder to be admitted to schools and universities. Jewish newspapers can no longer be sold in the streets.
At prestigious universities, Jewish professors are fired and students gather raucously before bonfires of books. Torchlight parades and jackboots on cobblestones herald the time of terror. The huge party rallies in Nuremberg rivet the nation; at the party gathering in 1935, race laws for the purity of German blood are formally institutionalized. Now it is a punishable crime for a Jew and an Aryan to be in love. And even those with Jewish grandparents who had converted to Christianity were now defined as Jews, even if their families had not practiced Judaism for generations. Disenfranchisement followed as those now legally defined as Jews were unceremoniously stripped of their citizenship rights. Identity documents were stamped with a red letter ‘J’. ‘Jews Not Welcome’ signs appear in shop windows, though in deference to foreign visitors, the Führer orders them removed from public view during the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 to cloak the increasing atmosphere of persecution. The window for escape is also rapidly shrinking; Jews find it difficult to obtain passports for travel abroad. But the discrimination is incremental, so the question begged is, should they leave? After all, this is their rightful home, Germany. Surely, the injustice will be righted when the world steps in or a new government comes to power. Who could possibly imagine the slave labor factories, the killing fields and forests, the industrialized mass murder, and the complicity of the ordinary man—even the neighbors—in the horrors to come?
Increasingly, Jews were also being impoverished by the state. Jews were now required to register their property, and non-Aryan businesses were taken over by other Germans, the pitiful compensation set by the state. Jewish doctors could not treat non-Jews, and Jewish lawyers lost their occupation. Who could afford to leave? Discounting the rampant antisemitism of the day, most nations had extremely rigid immigration policies, and at the international Evian Conference held at the French resort in 1938, almost every nation involved turned its back and refused to reconsider their immigration policies in the wake of an obviously humanitarian crisis.[12] Where would they go?
*
A turning point came on the night of November 9-10, 1938. In Paris, a German embassy official was shot by a desperate Jewish teenager. When he died from the wounds, Party officials meeting in Nuremberg decided to use the assassination as a pretext to launch state-sponsored pogroms aimed at German communities throughout Germany, Austria, and occupied Czechoslovakia. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels announced that ‘the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.’[13] The Night of Broken Glass raged on in the Reich as thousands of shop windows were smashed, Jewish businesses were plundered, and hundreds of synagogues were set afire as firemen stood idly by to ensure the flames did not damage neighboring buildings. Thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested, many of them to be incarcerated at the first camp to be used for this purpose: Dachau. Many would never return to their families. In the wake of the violence and extensive property damage, German officials levied the cost of the cleanup on the Jewish population. The German Jewish community was fined a billion marks (nearly 400 million dollars in 1938) to compensate German insurers for their payouts, and many were now utterly ruined economically.[14] In a measure designed to exacerbate the destruction of Jewish life in Germany, severe punishments and restrictions immediately followed. Remaining Jewish schoolchildren were expelled from public schools and universities. Plays, movies, concerts, and other forms of public entertainment were off limits. Jews could no longer drive. They were forced to hand over their securities and even jewelry. By the following year, radios would be turned in to the German police. The noose was closing.
At this moment, Fred ‘Fritz’ Spiegel was a German boy of six.
Fred ‘Fritz’ Spiegel
I was born in Dinslaken, Germany, on April 21, 1932, a small town at that time of about 20,000 inhabitants, to a German Jewish family. My family had been living in this general area for hundreds of years. My father, Sigmund Spiegel, loved to play fussball (soccer), and I have a picture of him together with his teammates on the 1913 Dinslaken soccer team. He had been a sergeant in the German army in World War I and was badly wounded in the Battle of Verdun. He had received many decorations for valor in battle, including the Iron Cross. My uncles and grandfather had also served in the German army. My father died in December 1933, when I was one year old, so I do not really remember him except from stories my mother and other people told me.
After my father's death, my grandfather, Louis Spiegel, came to live with us. One of my earliest memories is of my grandfather playing skat, a German card game, in the evenings at our house with his friends and neighbors. My grandfather was well known and friends with nearly everybody in town. Behind our house there was a nice park, and Grandfather used to take me there for walks and so that I could play with the neighborhood children. He would sit on one of the park benches and talk to his friends, while keeping a watchful eye on me.
Around 1936, when I was four or five years old, things started to change and my park was not so nice anymore. Older kids started to pick on me, tried to beat me up, threw stones and dirt on me, and called me ‘dirty Jew.’ Then my grandfather's friends also started to curse him, and he decided it was time to get out of the park. When I went home, I asked my mother, ‘How come those kids call me 'dirty Jew'? Am I dirty? I took a bath this morning.’ After a few more incidents, we did not go to the park anymore, even though it was almost our back yard. After that my grandfather started to take me to the Jewish Orphanage to play. The orphanage had been established many years earlier for the whole area called the Rhineland. It was much safer there in the huge house with the large fenced-in yard. The older kids kept an eye on me while I played with the other little kids in the orphanage. It was really fun and I soon knew a lot of the kids. However, I longed to play in the park, the beautiful park by our backyard, with its big lawns, lake, and tall trees. But this had become too dangerous for a Jewish child. I never played there again.
November 9, 1938. That day and the next few days, I will never forget for the rest of my life. I was 6 ½ years old, still living in Dinslaken. I was living with my mother, my older sister Edith, and my grandfather. I had started going to school a few months before. As Jews were not allowed to go to the local schools anymore, we went to the Jewish school which had been established many years earlier. I remember Mr. Weinberg, the teacher, because he rented a room in our house.
There was just this one teacher, plus a few teacher’s aides. My Aunt Klara was visiting us that day, November 9. It became dark early, and that evening, I went to visit the elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Brockhausen, who rented a third-floor apartment from my mother in our house. I had become very friendly with them and even though non-Jews were not supposed to rent from Jews anymore, they had refused to leave. They invited me to come the next morning and join them for breakfast, something I had often done in the past.
I woke up early the next morning, November 10. Looking out the window, I noticed a lot of smoke coming from the direction of the synagogue. Also groups of men were running around armed with pickaxes and all sorts of other tools. I had no idea what they were doing and what was happening, but it looked scary and threatening. I asked my mother, but she also did not know what was going on. Then I de
cided to go upstairs; maybe they knew something. After all, Mr. Brockhausen was a retired policeman, surely he would know. When I arrived upstairs they were up and waiting for me. They did not know what was happening; at least, that was what they said. However, when I asked them about the smoke, they said the synagogue was on fire, but the fire engines were there. ‘Not to worry, Fritz. The fire will surely be put out soon.’
Mrs. Brockhausen was preparing the breakfast when suddenly I heard a deafening noise downstairs coming from the direction of our apartment. Then I heard somebody smashing down the door and the noise of breaking glass. My mother and sister started to scream. I wanted to run downstairs, but Mr. Brockhausen held me back. I could clearly hear things being smashed downstairs and being thrown out of the window on to the street below. Finally I went downstairs. The entrance door to our apartment, which was partially glass, had been smashed. Upon entering, I found that many things had been totally destroyed, the windows broken, and much of our furniture and crystal was on the pavement below. My mother, sister, and Aunt Klara were standing on the balcony crying. My grandfather had been arrested and taken away by two policemen. Mr. Brockhausen came in and tried to calm everybody. Soon the two policemen returned. We were told we could not stay in our apartment and had to go with them. On the way out, we passed by the downstairs apartment that was empty because the Abosch family, a Jewish family who had rented it from my mother, had been expelled to Poland a few weeks earlier. Their apartment was totally destroyed. People were standing in the street and watching as the Jewish families left their houses, and some of them spit at us and threw stones and sand. We passed by the synagogue, still burning. The policemen brought us to the Jewish school where we were told that we had to stay overnight. Apparently after we left our apartment, some of the Nazis came back. They tried to set the house on fire. Mr. Brockhausen stopped them, claiming the house belonged to him.
In the middle of the night, my mother woke me up. She wanted me to say goodbye to my babysitter from the orphanage. As I found out years later, the children still living in the orphanage were terribly abused during Kristallnacht. The Jewish community had then decided to take the thirty children from the orphanage to Cologne, Germany, from where they were sent afterwards to Belgium and Holland to try to keep them out of harm's way. That night was the last time I ever saw my babysitter.
Most of the about thirty children living in the orphanage at the time of Kristallnacht did not survive the Holocaust. According to the diary kept by Yitzhak Sophoni Herz, the director of the orphanage at that time,
The police ordered us to get ready for a march through the center of Dinslaken. I was to be responsible for preparing this march. The news that there would be a ‘Judenparade’ spread like wildfire.[*] The people of Dinslaken stood three and four deep along the sidewalk to await the Judenparade. Most people cursed and taunted us but on the faces of a few there was disgust at the proceedings.
In front of the parade were two policemen, flanked by uniformed Nazis. The little children of the orphanage were forced to climb into a hay wagon and four older boys were forced to pull this wagon.
The Jewish cemetery, where my father and grandmother were buried, was not spared either. It was completely vandalized; headstones were smashed and overturned.
A few days after Kristallnacht, we left our house in Dinslaken. My mother sent Edith and me to live with relatives in Holland. The border into Holland had been closed for refugees leaving Germany; however, after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the Dutch authorities relented and allowed children who had relatives living in Holland to come into their country.
Fred and his sister received a fortuitous reprieve from the terror. Unfortunately it would not last long.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lost in Germany
The preeminent scholars of the Holocaust tell us that the Holocaust began on January 30, 1933, the day that Hitler came to power. They will also agree that the word ‘holocaust,’ from the Greek referring to a burnt offering to the gods at the temple, is now considered an inadequate name, and perhaps on some levels inappropriate.[15] Saul Friedländer sees it as an event that is impossible to put into normal language. Raul Hilberg, in his groundbreaking work at the beginning of the 1960s, called it the ‘Jewish Catastrophe’ or destruction; in Hebrew, ‘HaShoah.’ Yehuda Bauer, who first classified it as the watershed event that it is, still struggles with the label ‘Holocaust’ and falls back on the ‘genocide of the Jewish people,’ which he tells us is unprecedented in the history of mankind. The language escapes us.
In Germany, Kristallnacht was not the beginning, but marked a major turning point for Germany’s Jews. Six years after the elections which had brought the Nazi ideology to the forefront, it marked the moment when the political, social, and economic persecution of Germany’s Jews became much more sinister, with mass incarcerations, open murders on the streets, and hugely ramped up physical destruction of property. Our exploration of the authentic sites of the Holocaust should rightly begin here, in the cradle of the place where democracy failed, with catastrophic consequences for the Jews of Europe, and for the world.
July 4, 2013/Hadamar, Germany
It’s Independence Day back home in the States, and this morning I am on a bus with our group of American teachers in the heart of Hesse country in Germany on our way to the Hadamar Memorial site, where the secret T–4 euthanasia program got underway. On my unplanned music playlist, the heavy and foreboding opening chords of Soundgarden’s “Fourth of July” is the first sound to set the mood as we glide through the farms and fields of the picturesque German countryside. It’s followed on the playdeck by “Lost in Germany” by King’s X; probably not a coincidence, and an apt metaphor for what I will experience here this week.
We turn off the highway and make our way to the town of Hadamar. It is small and almost quaint, the streets winding us up to the big building on the hill. The bus driver negotiates the tight turns like an expert, and we are at the hospital. The town lies below us.
We step off the bus. A nurse guides a patient in a wheelchair; Hadamar is still a functioning psychiatric center. But it is also a historical memorial site, and certainly related to the topic at hand—the Holocaust.
Somehow our appointment here has been crossed up and not quite anticipated. It seems that a group of German schoolkids have the tour booked at the moment and we cannot enter into the bowels of the institution, where one can still see the basement rooms that functioned as the early experimental gassing chambers. And today maybe that is what was meant to be.
So instead we are inside of the bus garage, a simple wooden barn with a plain dirt floor, so horribly, terribly ordinary. Haunting portraits of murdered children look at us. This is the face of ‘Aktion T–4,’ dreamt up and administered from ‘TiergartenStrasse 4’ in Berlin. School buses with blacked-out windows carried the selected children through the picturesque town and up the hill to the hospital garage, where boys and girls could be discharged out of sight—no one had to know, but everyone did; the program was an open secret. At Hadamar, local children even taunted those arriving on the buses, ‘as children will.’
My notes tell me that doctors and nurses did the killing—starving, injecting, and later gassing; there were no cases of doctors or nurses who refused. So much for that Hippocratic Oath.
It was Nazi Germany’s first foray into government-sponsored mass murder, predating the mass murder of the Jews by a couple of years. But it was here that the tools of mass murder, from gas chambers to deceiving the victims, were refined. Before long, five such centers would be operating throughout Germany and one in Austria.
As the clouds of war gathered over Europe in the summer of 1939, Reich doctors and midwives were mandated to report any child with any disability or developmental issues from birth to age three; five thousand infants and toddlers were murdered under this system. Later, the program would be expanded to include all children up to age 17, and eventually, to adults. In October 1939, doctors and public
health officials were instructed by Hitler himself to encourage parents to give up their children to these state-run clinics.
With the decree of the Führer, there was huge ‘peer pressure’ for families to have their disabled children institutionalized, to commit government resources instead on the healthy. You would have seen ‘Useless Eater’ posters with disabled children featured, and other ‘life unworthy of life’ propaganda. Although in reality the machinations for the program had begun before the outbreak of war, later documents were altered to make the euthanasia program seem as if it were part of wartime measures. Records were falsified to indicate that the deceased had died a natural death, when in fact lethal injection, starvation, and neglect, and later gassing by carbon monoxide, was the norm.
By definition, the T–4 euthanasia program is not the Holocaust, but it is concurrent and intersects. Here we have the first evidence of gassing of human beings. How else do you figure out how to build efficient gas chambers? Trial and error, of course. Engineers who go on to build Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, the major killing centers in Poland, and start the mobile van gas chambers at Chelmno, all get ideas here.
We do not get to go inside, but it is a fine summer day and we hike up to the top of the hill behind the facility. There are flowers, memorials, and a mass grave. Families might have been notified by post that their loved one had passed away suddenly, of some natural cause that made no sense. Appendicitis? The child had had the appendix out long before heading to Hadamar.
A Train Near Magdeburg Page 6