Authors: Giles MacDonogh
The outside world was not necessarily ready for the brutal treatment of the Austrian Jewry. In Germany the persecution had cooled down after the boycott and the Nuremberg Laws, and during the Berlin Olympics of 1936 the obvious signs had been cleared away. The Aliens Committee of the British Board of Deputies had been more concerned with other Jew-baiting nations, such as Poland, Romania, and Russia. On March 23 the Aliens Committee held an emergency meeting. Austrian Jews seeking refuge in Britain had been turned back at the frontier. The Home Secretary was determined to “treat each case on its merits.” Even those who managed to cross the border were—in theory at least—to register their presence in Britain with the German consul.
THE POPULAR board game “Juden raus!” sold nearly a million copies in Germany between 1936 and 1940. The aim was to bring as many Jews as you could to one of six
Sammelplätze
(collection points) and then it was “auf nach Palästina” (off to Palestine). You threw a die and, if you were in luck, landed on the shops of Kohn, Gorstein, or Stern. There were homely instructions for the children written on the board, such as “
Zeige Geschick im Würfelspiel / damit Du sammelst der Juden viel
” (“Throw the dice with all your skill / and with sundry Jews your baskets fill”). And finally “
Gelingt es Dir 6 Juden rauszujagen, / so bist Du Sieger ohne fragen!
” (“Should you manage to drive six Jews out / You’ll be the winner, there is no doubt”). The board was covered with caricatures of Jews in the style of
Der Stürmer.
But the British didn’t want the Jews to go to Palestine, first choice for 90 percent of Austrian Jews. The Balfour Declaration had stipulated the creation of a Jewish homeland (as opposed to
the
Jewish homeland), but after 1935 the British had had a change of heart, partly based on the levels of street violence in Palestine. March 1937 had seen a spate of Zionist bombings of Arab cafés and buses. Official attitudes had also changed after the Italian attack on Ethiopia. Between 1936 and 1938 immigrant levels had fallen. For the time being immigration was limited to around 12,000 per annum. There were “strong Arab demands for the complete stoppage.”
To obtain a permit to go to Palestine, Jews had to visit the British Passport Control Office. Many years later, Kenneth Benton, Thomas Kendrick’s second-in-command at the PCO, described a typical day of dealing with Jewish hopefuls:
They used to fill up the courtyard by about nine o’clock in the morning and I used to stand on the steps and give them a lecture on what chance they had of getting away. “Your only chance of getting to Palestine now is either if you’ve got relatives or a capitalist visa. But you might be able to get to Grenada. You might be able to get to Jamaica. India will only take you if you are a qualified dentist,” and so on.
Then during the day they were coming in one after the other. I had a whole lot of women who were examiners working for me spread through the office. But the stories were so terrible: that they had been separated from their children; that they had seen loved ones go off in a Nazi convoy with the Gestapo and so on and it just went on all day and at the end of it it made one desperately unhappy that you could do nothing. The American vice-consul who was a pal of mine said: “I’ve got to the point where if any woman leaves my office not in tears, I feel I haven’t done my job.” It was a dreadful, dreadful time.
The British clung to their policy despite the crisis brought about by Nazi racial law. A British white paper published in May 1939 outlined the government’s new policy: Palestine was to be a state with an Arab majority and a Jewish minority fixed at no more than 75,000 Jews settling before 1944, unless the Arabs consented to more. Meanwhile Secretary for the Colonies Malcolm Macdonald looked at the possibility of establishing a Jewish state in British Guiana. By the end of the year, however, the Foreign Office had decided that British Guiana was “climatically unsuitable.” The new policy was as leaky as a colander: 51,186 managed to reach Palestine illegally between April 1, 1939, and March 31, 1945.
Lucian Meysels’s case was typical of many Jews who realized they had to act fast:
On the evening of 11 March we knew we had to get out—
hic et nunc.
My father had been cultural editor of the
Neue Freie Presse
, a job for life, he thought. This had the advantage that he had not written a word on politics under his by-line for the past three years and at the same time had contact with several legations. We immediately started to get visas—a prerequisite for getting an exit visa. The first visa we got was Czechoslovakian, which we intended to make use of although my father never intended us to stay there: “fifty miles between us and Hitler is not enough.”
A couple of weeks later, a friend of my father in the Wallnerstrasse told us to apply for a pilgrim-cum-tourist visa for Palestine
since that quota had not been used up by the spring of ’38
. After all, who wanted to make a pilgrimage to the unruly Holy Land then. “Gesagt, getan” [Sooner said than done] : my father got us three visas for a deposit of £30 or £40 each, to be refunded “on our return.” We could have gone direct, but my mother wanted to say goodbye to her brother before leaving Europe. We stayed in Bratislava for three weeks and took a train by a circuitous route via Hungary, Yugoslavia and Italy, after the travel agent where we had bought the rail tickets told us we would not need any transit visas. However, hardly had we been on the train, than we were bounced off by the Hungarian Frontier Police. Fortunately we had left a day earlier than required. . . . My father sent my mother . . . to the Hungarian Consulate to get transit visas. No sooner had she met the consul, than the man told her: “we don’t give visas to Jews!” Whereupon she told him “I’m not Jewish,” putting her baptismal certificate, which she had wisely taken with her, under his nose. Minutes later she had three visas. We caught the train the next morning and this time got through in time for the boat.
As a result of the Anschluss and the tightening up of passport controls, emigration became more difficult from the Altreich too. Long lines formed outside the offices of the Jewish Hilfsverein in Berlin, the Palestine Agency, and the British consulate in the Tiergartenstrasse. In a great many instances it was the passport control officer in Berlin, Frank Foley, or his counterpart in Frankfurt, Robert Smallbones, who found some means of issuing them with the precious papers. Many Viennese Jews went to Berlin themselves, where the atmosphere was calmer and there was as yet little or no violence directed toward them.
THE BRITISH were not the only people helping to save Jews. The Chinese consul-general Ho Fengshan is credited with issuing 4,000 visas to Jewish residents between 1938 and 1941. In the first three months of his posting he is supposed to have helped 1,200 Jews reach Shanghai. Ho was Christian and believed this was the natural thing to do. Once in Shanghai there was an infrastructure to help the Jews, but it was quickly stretched. Shanghai was open, but the immigrants needed transit visas. Iraq, for example, could not be crossed unless the Jew was in possession of a British or Palestinian passport. By June 1939 there were 9,500 Jews registered and another 1,500 unofficial migrants. It was thought the town would have 25,000 by the time the influx slackened off. Only 350 had found work.
If you bought a one-way steamship ticket, the right of abode was thrown in with it. A visa for Shanghai did not necessarily imply that the possessor was serious about going to China. In many cases it was simply a means to leaving German territory, and the ultimate objective would have been to enter Britain or the United States. It was a precious means to get out of a concentration camp after November 10.
Wolfgang von Weisl operated the New Zionist Organization from the rue de Bassano in Paris’s affluent
seizième
quarter. He reported that there were already 24,000 applications lodged at the French consulate in Vienna by April 26. Some Jews got stuck in India, where there were 26,080 toward the end of the war, 10,000 in Bombay alone and 2,000 of them acknowledged refugees from Hitler. Desperate Jews set their sights on different countries that they thought might offer them a refuge. Unscrupulous persons set about selling bogus visas. Paraguay appeared to encourage immigration, but then it turned out that they wanted recruits for a war against Bolivia. Some countries responded by setting quotas. Australia was one of these, fixing the number of possible places at 500 in March. By the end of the month there were already in excess of 6,000 applicants. The first to arrive landed in October: twenty-two Austrians, three Germans, and two Czechs. Australia looked to be the only one of the dominions to respond to the plight of the Jews, but the government soon began to renege on their promises.
IN 1938 the Foreign Office in London thought there could be as many as a million baptized Jews on the Continent. No one was clear about what was in store for them. Bishop Bell of Chichester had responded to the potential threat by creating the Church of England Committee for Non-Aryan Christians in 1937. It was ready to provide travel expenses, grants, and tuition fees for non-Aryan Christians deemed to be at risk. The Committee was founded on the idea that there was no specific body looking after non-Aryan Christians other than the Quakers. The Jews had their own organizations, whereas the Christian “number was as great, if not greater, than that of Jewish victims.”
It seems doubtful now that the number of non-Aryan Christians exceeded that of Jews, but assimilation had indeed led to a great many conversions, and as yet it was not clear how much risk the
Mischlinge
ran. Bishop Bell may have been sympathetic, but that was not true of all bishops. The most pro-German of the prelates was Headlam of Gloucester, who thought the Jews “clever, malicious and untruthful, and they have excessive influence on the press of Europe.”
The unsung hero of the British bishops was Basil Staunton Batty, bishop of Fulham, who was responsible for the British parishes in northern Europe. As early as March 12, 1933, he told Cosmo Gordon Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury, to put pressure on the Nazis over their treatment of the Jews and to oblige the German Protestant church to react: “I am asking for further information from those I can trust. . . . My object in writing is to suggest that if I can stir up the church in Germany to protest against any persecution on religious grounds . . . we might make some pronouncement in England which would show them we stood behind them in this matter.” At the end of the month, Batty wrote to Lang again about the persecution of the Jews. “My own opinion is that a protest should be made by the Lutheran Church and that the Christian Church throughout the world should support it but I fear that the Lutheran Church will not take action through fear of Hitler.”
He was right: The Lutheran Church in Germany was largely silent. As its foremost martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote at the time, “She was silent when she should have cried out because the blood of the innocent was crying aloud to heaven. She has failed to speak the right word in the right way and at the right time. She had not resisted to the uttermost the apostasy of faith, and she has brought upon herself the guilt of the godlessness of the masses.”
Batty sat on the Foreign Committee of the Church of England, and two years later he took Headlam to task over the Confessing Church in Germany, the only Protestant organization that was resisting Hitler: “The Confessional Church deserves our sympathy. It is putting up a good fight for the essentials of the Christian faith.” In Canterbury, the archbishop was also quick to condemn British policy. On March 22, 1938, he wrote to the home secretary, Samuel Hoare, to protest against the entry restrictions placed on Austrian Jews, pointing out the dramatic rise in Austrian suicides. Jews had been turned back at Croydon Airport. Both Hoare and Chamberlain were at pains to tell the Commons that indiscriminate immigration would cause difficulties at home and that they did not believe there were grounds “for an alteration of the laws.”
Archbishop Lang had been measured in his approach to the Anschluss. On March 29 he told the British House of Lords he was aware that the Austrians had sought just such a merger after the Great War and thought that it had been inevitable. The statement was interpreted as approbation in Germany. On the other hand, he believed the manner in which it had been carried out was reprehensible, even if he was thankful that it had taken place without bloodshed. That last line caused him some considerable embarrassment, and he regretted it later; several peers were better informed than he was of the murderous nature of the German occupation.
Lang atoned for his error. On July 17 he was one of the church leaders to institute Sunday prayers for the Jews. The chief rabbi of Great Britain, J. H. Hertz, asked for Jews to assemble at five that same day, so that Jews and Christians could be united in prayer. The Jews said prayers for imprisoned Christians such as Pastor Niemöller, while the Christians prayed for the Jews. In the Anglican Church in Berlin a similar service was held. Bishop Batty was naturally behind the latter and reported on the service to Lang. By the end of the year, not only had Lang lost his reputation for sympathy for the Nazis, but
Der Stürmer
had made him the cover story for issue 52 for “standing up for Jewish assassins.”
ACCORDING TO the Nuremberg Laws (enacted in Austria on May 20, 1938) baptized Jews were still Jews. The Quakers played a leading role in helping “non-Aryan Christians” to safety. Later a third of the places on the kindertransports were reserved for their nominees. The idea of bringing Jewish children to safety had been mooted by Richard Cary, secretary of the International Secretariat, as early as the summer of 1933. The British and American Quakers maintained an office for the German Emergency Committee in the Singerstrasse in Vienna, dealing mostly with Catholic converts. After November they were besieged by applicants: 11,000 applications were made for 15,000 people. The Quakers succeeded in getting as many as 4,500 out by the time war broke out in September 1939, including around 1,200 children. Of these 60 percent went to Britain, with somewhere between 200 and 300 going to America and about 150 to Australia, where the colonial government required £200 before granting a visa.