November/December 2008 Feature
A Kristallnacht Retrospective
by Henry Regensteiner
At Fort Tryon Jewish Center in New City, I was asked to participate in a Kristallnacht observance with Dr. Max Kaufmann, an eyewitness, and Mr. Kenneth Koransky, the new cantor of the temple. It was my duty to open the program by presenting a historical overview. It included a brief survey of cultural contributions made by Jews in Germany and Austria. Much of the time was spent on the poet Heinrich Heine whose lyricism places him among the Romanticists. His verses are so melodious and reflect so much love of his native land with an occasional touch of humor and irony that composers were attracted and inspired again and again to set them to music. His widely known work, both in poetry and prose, discloses a unique Heinesque ambivalence vis-ŕ-vis German and Austrian reaction.
It was this ambivalent style of his, which irked his anti-Jewish detractors. He belonged to a literary group called “Young Germany.” He was mistakenly thought to be a revolutionary. He was not. So he left Germany and lived as an exile in France from 1830 until his death in 1856 except for two secret visits to see his mother in Germany. While in Paris from where he sent some perceptive newspaper dispatches, the German censors as well as the German government suppressed his writings by decree—an action that he anticipated as early as 1820 in his tragedy Almansor. Young Heine, a student at the University of Bonn, heard about the burning of “un-Germanic” books by nationalistic student fraternities leading to riots. The reports created anxiety among German Jews, and Heine felt induced to write his play alluding to the German scene. The play’s action takes place in Moorish Granada that had been conquered by the Christian Spaniards in 1491. Heine’s dramatic hero Almansor disguised as a Spanish knight attends the victory celebration following the Moorish surrender. After his return to his home Almansor relates to his wise friend Hassan that he saw a Spanish priest seize a copy of the Koran and throw it into the bonfire. This act of religious intolerance marking the start of the Spanish Inquisition elicits a scornful response by Hassan that in view of Heine’s German scene is not only critically significant but also prophetic of worse things to come. “That was just a prelude. There where books are burned, one will in the end, burn also people.”
Perhaps these are shades of things to come if not prophetic in view of the actions of the Nazis when they came to power in Germany in January 1933. One of their first actions prior to their ever-increasing antisemitism was their burning of books written by non-Jewish as well as by Jewish authors including Heinrich Heine. Jews, who as university professors, teachers, and judges held state positions, were among the first to be dismissed. This boycott was expanded to include the removal of Jewish artists and musicians. Max Liebermann, the renowned painter was compelled to resign as President of the Prussian Academy of Art. He died in 1935. His wife committed suicide prior to being deported. Others left Germany before the terror rose to fever pitch.
The severity of anti-Jewish legislation reached new heights with the Nuremberg Laws promulgated by Hitler and Göring in 1935 ostensibly to protect the purity of German blood from defilement by contact with Jews. So Jewish physicians, unless they were World War One veterans, were deprived of functioning in their profession. Gentile maids could no longer be employed in Jewish households.
The anti-Jewish boycotts had slackened in Germany in 1936 because the Nazis who hosted the Berlin Olympics wished to make a good impression on the visiting foreigners. But when the games were over, the Teutonic fury redoubled. Austria was occupied in March 1938, and at the end of the summer of 1938, Czechoslovakia was compelled at Munich to cede Sudetenland. Just five weeks later in October 1938, Polish Jews who had resided in Germany for many years were rounded up and deported to the no-man’s land between the German and the Polish border. While Poland accepted some of them, the vast majority remained in the open, abandoned, penniless, hungry, and exposed to the elements. Herschel Grynzpan, a distraught Jewish youth living in Paris, heard that his parents were among the deported. He sought out the German ambassador but was referred to a subordinate instead. Grynzpan shot this man who died of his wounds on November 7, 1938.
Martin Gilbert’s dramatic book, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, begins at that point. As the events unfold, it becomes immediately apparent that the subsequent pogrom against Germany’s Jews from November 9 through November 10, 1938 was not, as the Nazi propagandist Goebbels asserted, a spontaneous reaction of the German people to the assassination of a German diplomat. It was, rather, a long-planned, premeditated assault by the Nazi government and its henchmen who had only waited for the right moment to commit their crimes.
The author is factual. He relies on witnesses. They reported on the widespread destruction of over 1,000 synagogues, of many Jewish homes and businesses that were broken into and looted. The persecuted were exposed to murder: ninety-one within twenty-four hours. More than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, humiliated, and tortured in concentration camps. Traumatized by their ordeal, they were unable to speak about their gruesome experiences—many never. It was their pride and self-esteem and fear of the Gestapo that prevented them.
Martin Gilbert recounts that greed and theft were a part of the outrage. He relates, as was observed independently in Midstream, March/April 2006, that the chief perpetrators met with Göring two days later on November 12, 1938. They were planning to derive still more profit at Jewish expense. Göring gave vent to Schadenfreude—to devilish delight at the thought of doing harm. Insurance indemnity to which the Jews were entitled was denied them. They should pay for the clean-up and the destruction. Moreover, all German Jews were fined 400 million dollars “for their crimes.” These and other Nazi decisions which paved the way to genocide became a part of the indictment of Göring and the other Nazi defendants at their trial by the War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-1946.
Nazi greed had no bounds. The German Jews were forced to aryanize. This meant that Jews had to give up their shops to Nazis for little or nothing. According to a Berlin report cited by Gilbert, 3,500 Jewish businesses changed owners. Arthur Propp’s bitter experiences in distant Königsberg, East Prussia, were published in Midstream in February 1957. A well-to-do businessman, he was imprisoned in a dungeon, and he was not released and allowed to leave Germany before he agreed to give up his possessions.
The Nazis went so far as to arrange to smuggle Jews out of Germany at steep ransom prices, which the Jewish community in Palestine had difficulty to meet. But some managed to leave Germany in time. Thus a train with 280 Berlin Jews arrived in Vienna where 120 Austrian Jews joined them. They continued until they reached a Yugoslav port where they boarded a ship bound for Palestine. The ship eluded the British fleet trying to intercept the illegal immigrants who disembarked on a deserted beach.
Martin Gilbert’s book is full of stories of escape, of heroism. and of “defiant compassion.” Even though Holland had already been invaded, Geertruida W˙smuller Meijer, a heroic Dutch woman personally rescued German Jews and put them on board a ship bound for Britain. Similarly, there were courageous German clergymen who risked their lives by helping Jews. A Pastor Grüber preached against the Nazis during the day and devised escape routes for Jews at night. And we read about an Austrian mountaineer who smuggled Jews over the Alps into Italy whence some managed to travel to Britain via Spain and Portugal.
The author lists numerous diplomats who were actively engaged in the rescue efforts even though their superiors were trying to undercut their activities. Special mention should be made of Captain Frank Foley, the passport control officer of the British embassy in Berlin who, time and again, provided visas to German Jews in dire need. Gilbert also identifies other diplomats and the American volunteer Varian Fry who, working in unoccupied (Vichy) France, provided visas with the help of United States Consul Hiram Bingham. Varian Fry, whose dedicated work secured the rescue of notable persons including the poet Franz Werfel and the author Lion Feuchtwanger, was finally recalled by the United States Department of State.
In my talk that was intended as an introduction of our guest speaker, I devoted a little time to the dramatic “St. Louis” affair, the tragic story about the more than 900 German Jewish passengers on board the German ocean liner bound for Havana, Cuba. Most of them were not allowed to land and were denied entrance to this country. In the end, German captain Gustav Schröder, a sympathetic person, let the passengers disembark in Antwerp, Belgium. The passengers were distributed among Belgium, Holland, France and Britain, which took the largest group. For a long time it was thought that many, if not all of the passengers, who didn’t go to England had died in the Holocaust. According to an article published in The New York Times on March 31, 1999, most of them except for about thirty-six are accounted for. One of these was discovered in the Washington Heights section of New York City by researchers of the Unites States Holocaust Museum. The lady “managed through pluck, endurance, and the whims of fortune to survive the war.”
She was described as feeling embittered about her frustrating experiences. Her sea voyage with her late husband had brought her so close to American shores only to be denied entrance. This hostile, isolationist policy elicited her withering scorn. The article quoted David S. Wyman’s book The Abandonment of the Jews: “It’s a broader picture of a world that didn’t have room for Jews.”
Martin Gilbert, a careful, soft-spoken historian, prefers to state facts. He quotes from the papers of Breckenridge Long, the Assistant Secretary of State, responsible for the policy of delay in the processing of immigration documents of refugees. Gilbert tries to be fair and states at one point that although the United States did not change the old quota system, it still admitted more Jewish immigrants from Germany and Austria than any other country or combination of countries.
The author writes glowingly about the successful rescue of some 10,000 Jewish children from Germany who, following Kristallnacht, were sent by Kindertransport to Britain. This British effort begun first on an experimental basis was continued in earnest after Lord Stanley Baldwin, a former Prime Minister, appealed on radio to “the honour of our country” and to “our Christian charity.” The Kindertransport came to an end with the outbreak of World War II on September 3, 1939.
Dr. Max Kaufmann, the guest speaker at our Kristallnacht remembrance, came to Britain as one of the children. He described his experiences to the assembled audience.
His easy-going and informal manner of presentation immediately made a good impression. He recalled his and his sister’s agony when saying goodbye to their parents in Mannheim, Germany. After he had his Bar Mizvah, the two young people left their parents behind. He was, to be sure, grateful that he was given an opportunity to make a new beginning in the free west. For somebody else older than himself, it might have been an adventure. But he, his sister, and most other children on the Kindertransport were a frightened lot. They had seen the Nazi terror with their own eyes. They walked in a daze and, as if paralyzed, they spoke only in monosyllables, if at all. They understood their dire situation. They were moving ever farther away from their parental care and home. All of them had the presentiment that they might never see their dear parents again.
And this deadening fear lasted for a long time. The anguish in their souls subsided somewhat when they confronted the British countryside and met the cordiality and warmth of their selected English foster parents. Thus were the children able to think of other things and adapt themselves to their new surroundings. Max Kaufmann said that he remained true to his Jewish roots. It gave him the strength to persevere. It was with sadness that he observed that not everybody followed his example. This remark reminds one of what another witness said. When this German Jewish youngster objected to attending Sunday school and praying with British pupils in the chapel of their boarding school, the headmistress took the sensitive youngster aside. Telling him that children can be cruel if somebody insists on being different, she advised him to attend, and, nevertheless, follow his own religious services outside the school.
I was also reminded of a spiritual change in the life of Dr. Alfred Döblin, a German-Jewish physician and well-known writer living as an exile in Paris. When the Nazis invaded France, he joined other refugees fleeing southward. It seems, from what he has written about his experiences, that he was constantly grappling with the roots of evil and darkness in our modern world. He felt demoralized, disoriented, and apparently, in need of spiritual counsel. No rabbi was at hand. Döblin was prepared to speak with anyone because the world was, as Shakespeare says, “out of joint.” Thus he talked with a clergyman and was persuaded to convert.
Dr. Kaufmann impressed me as being an amiable, conciliatory and stable man with strong convictions. He has no use for compromising the beliefs that have given him stability and strength. He expresses gratitude and pride that Britain extended help to the Jewish children of the Kindertransport and that Lady Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister, has acknowledged the contributions to society made by these children now grown. It was good to hear the remarks of this patient and thoughtful eyewitness who spoke words of appreciation for the generosity and goodness of our country. And if he expressed any criticism it was an observation he shares with me that many young people have little or no idea of historical facts or current events.
It was for the listeners and also for the communicators an impressive and interesting Kristallnacht retrospective whose conclusion was heightened by a song recital presented by our cantor and by a candle-lighting ceremony. The cantor’s rendition of a father’s anguish lamenting the burning down of Jewish places of worship was especially moving. “Es brennt Kinder, es brennt.”
The saying is that the number of victims is an unimaginable statistic which is difficult to comprehend. However, seeing and hearing just one survivor makes the event meaningful and significant. •
About the author
Henry Regensteiner, is a long-time contributor to Midstream. His highly acclaimed book, Theodor Herzl / Journalistic Stories, which he selected, translated, and edited, is still available at Herzl Press. (See the ad on the back cover of this issue.)