1938 (43 page)

Within Germany it was clear that the Nazi state was anything but efficient. A further report by Goerdeler showed that the railway system had broken down because it was being bled in the interests of free transport for Party members, road building, and compulsory contributions to various Party funds. They were short of 3,000 locomotives and 30,000 coaches. Goods from Hamburg to Vienna had to go via Trieste to make use of Italian trains. The opportunities for working in the arms industries and in other related trades had led to a huge desertion of the land, with drastic results when it came to food production. There had been a 16 percent drop in the number of farm laborers, which would eventually require migrant labor, chiefly from Poland. It was not just the farms that lacked workers. In the mines of the Ruhr, they were 30,000 men short. Overall Germany needed another million men. The temptation to grab them from elsewhere was obvious.

EVEN BEFORE Reichskristallnacht there was a growing awareness of the urgency of finding homes for the Jews. At the beginning of November, one of the busiest of the Quakers, Howard Elkington, was prepared to stump up £100 to “to help suitable people to emigrate to Australia.” A month later he was obtaining visas in bulk from the Foreign Office in London. Norman Bentwich was also keen to explore the chances of upping the quotas for Australia, and he looked into the possibility of sending some to Ceylon. Four hundred Austrian Jews were on the water, ostensibly on their way to Liberia. They had left from Galata in Romania on the steamship
Minerva
.

After the pogrom, parents understood that even if they could not make it themselves, it was imperative to get their children out. On November 15 the leading Zionist Chaim Weizmann (later the first president of Israel) went to see Neville Chamberlain and asked for action to save them. Weizmann set a figure of 10,000 to be found homes in Britain. Pressure was also put on Malcolm Macdonald, the minister for the colonies. It was agreed that a further 5,000 Jews could enter Britain, providing they left again within three years. The idea of the kindertransports had been an informal one at first. It was believed that they should be allowed to recover in lands like Switzerland and Norway before returning to their parents. Jews in Britain were particularly active in arranging the transports. One of these was Wilfred Israel, the model for Gustav Landauer in Christopher Isherwood’s novel
Goodbye to Berlin
. Israel’s colleague in Youth Aliya was Lola Hahn-Warburg. The pro-Zionist MP Josiah Wedgwood also sponsored 222 refugees.

Diana Hopkinson worked for the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. In her book
The Incense Tree
she describes the “steady stream of Jews who had been trying to leave Germany,” who became

a torrent which almost overwhelmed the organisations who were working for them. In the large blocks of Bloomsbury offices we were invaded by a throng of bewildered and anguished people. We were busy not only interviewing those who had arrived but with correspondence about those who still hoped to escape. We battled with the Home Office for the necessary permits and sought financial guarantors; interviewed English relations and friends. They wrung their hands and wept and offered bribes or threats in their efforts to free those still in Germany or Austria. If one became a little hardened it was only in the attempt to keep one’s balance and help more effectively. One could not forget that the case numbers concealed suffering human beings, but they themselves hated those “case” numbers. None of us knew that a number on their file might save them from a number branded on their body in an extermination camp later.

Diana’s office had been issued with a block permit for 10,000 Jewish children, but that was not enough. She and her colleagues could only take twelve from every thirty applicants. “I was in despair over the hopeless task of assessing those whose claims were the strongest, trying not to choose the most attractive or the most pathetic looking, I was haunted by the thought of what would happen to those left behind.”

Once the children arrived in Britain, Jews were concerned about their retaining their faith. Of the 9,000 children who arrived unaccompanied in Britain between 1933 and 1939, only 1,000 were placed with Jewish foster parents. The British Board of Deputies was at pains to stress that even nonreligious children were Jews and that
Konfessionslos
did not generally mean Christian, but rather that “the parents were not members of the Jewish Kultus Gemeinde, for political reasons or because they wish to avoid paying the taxes of the KG.” As it was, only a small percentage submitted to baptism while in the care of Christian foster parents.

MEASURES AGAINST the Jews were redoubled. On November 11, they were banned from possessing weapons. By the end of the year they were to be excluded from economic and social life, theaters, German schools (November 15) and universities (December 8). The Zionistische Rundschau was closed and very briefly replaced by the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt. On November 16 they lost the right to serve or wear a military uniform. Their driving licenses were revoked, and their assets, property, and jewelry, with the exception of wedding rings, had to be handed in. All Jewish businesses were to close down on November 23. At the end of the month Victor Klemperer found that he was banned from the library and effectively cut off from new literature.

In Franconia, the gauleiter, Streicher, decided that the time had come to relieve the Jews of all their property. In Fürth the Jews filed in one by one, ceding their rights for a few peppercorns. Some court officers refused to enter the compulsory sales in the land register. Jews were now banned from cafés and restaurants. One victim was the writer and former ladies’ man John Höxter, who was wont to cadge money in the Romanisches Café in Berlin. When his friends offered him a coffee, he said he would rather have the fifty pfennigs. They usually gave him that and more, in the understanding he could not earn a living anymore. After Reichskristallnacht he could no longer enter the building. Realizing he would now starve, he hanged himself from a tree in the Grunewald.

One or two things improved. With the closing of the Gildemeester charity for nonreligious Jews in Vienna, the whole machinery for emigration was brought under the roof of the Palais Rothschild. Jews no longer had to look for passports in their own districts. The seriousness of the situation was now clear. In Württemberg, the number of Jews dropped from around 7,000 to nearer 6,000 by March 1939. In Britain a total of £250,000 was raised for non-Aryan Christians by means of an appeal in the parishes; more substantial contributions were made by Jewish peers.

Some of the Jews in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald, who had papers for Palestine, were out by the end of the month. Others would have to apply to the Jewish agencies or find places on the Perl transports. After the British had closed the Greek door, Italy was the most promising alternative, despite the racial laws. Long lines of women gathered outside Passport Control Officer Foley’s office in Berlin, seeking to have their menfolk released from concentration camps. Foley had requested fresh supplies of blank visas for Palestine as well as Youth Aliya certificates that allowed young Jews to go to Palestine without their parents. He also asked for more staff to deal with the workload.

Sworn to secrecy about their treatment in the camps, Jews for the most part did not wish to talk about it anyway. Bernt Engelmann came across a man who simply had to get it off his chest when he visited a hotelier relative. His aunt had hidden a Jew who was waiting for a passport to take him to Sweden. It was no longer legal for Jews to share hotels with Gentiles. She had hidden him in the hunting lodge, where no one would see him. Engelmann noted that the man—Herr Kahn—had evidently lost a good deal of weight, as his clothes no longer fitted him. He had been in Buchenwald for only twenty days and told Engelmann of the treatment that had been meted out to the Jews who had arrived after Kristallnacht.

He had been shaved and inspected by a doctor. He had to swear that any cuts and bruises had been inflicted prior to his arrest. A superior SS officer gave the prisoners a lecture, telling them they had been rehabilitated, and encouraged them to make a donation to the Nazi Winter Aid. They were then led past the boxes, and another myrmidon made sure they contributed. Next they had to pay for the use of their eating utensils. There was another levy, and anyone who had no money to pay had to be covered by those who did. It was a five-mile walk to the railway station in Weimar. Another SS man was collecting money for taxis because the old and infirm would not have made it.

Engelmann and Kahn shared a room in the hunting lodge, and several times he was woken in the night by the other man’s groans. Once he shouted, “Don’t hit me!” When in the morning a motorcar drove up, Kahn became agitated and asked where he might hide. It was a false alarm: It was Engelmann’s aunt with his passport emblazoned with a J.

ON OCTOBER 27, Bishop Batty had left England on a pastoral mission to Austria. He needed to appoint someone to take over from Grimes and make sure that the baptismal business had been properly halted. A month after his trip to Vienna to clear up after Grimes and Collard, he was hauled over the coals for his efforts to aid the Jews by his fellow bishops. The first to take a shot at him was none other than Bishop Bell of Chichester. He wrote to Alan Don on November 30: “I am really very much perturbed at getting the enclosed letter from Mrs Baker about the baptism of Jews in Vienna! I thought from what the Bishop of Fulham told me at the moment on relations with foreign churches that, though there had been a great scandal, it was now over. You see, however, that this complaint is dated 22 November, and baptising at the rate of some fifty a day is really shocking!”

Mrs. Baker was not the only one to blow the whistle. Less than a week later Alan Don wrote to Batty himself:

I think you ought to know that it has come to the knowledge of the Archbishop that a Church of Scotland chaplain at Budapest, the Rev. G. A. Knighton by name, states in a letter dated November 22nd that trouble is being caused in Hungary by the action of the Anglican chaplain in Vienna, who, it is stated, is continuing to baptise a large number of Jews. The actual words are as follows: “All summer the chaplain has accepted Jews and baptised them, without any preparation whatsoever, and baptised them in batches of fifty a day. Several eye-witnesses told me as much.” Seeing as you have recently been in Vienna, you may be able to judge as to whether this statement is in accordance with facts or not. If it is you will doubtless consider what action should be taken as this practice, if continued, is likely to cause a good deal of scandal.

Don had forwarded the correspondence to the archbishop. Batty replied the following day:

The matter to which you refer was first brought to my notice by an article in a German paper which attacks all Christian institutions and leaders. It appeared to me to be a matter for investigation on the spot and I went out to Vienna.

The position is as follows—

1. We have our mission to the Jews and it is difficult for a priest to refuse to deal with a Jew who wishes to become a Christian, but at the moment on political grounds the greatest care is necessary and instructions were issued to the chaplain at Vienna to this effect.

2. It is a fact that a number of Jews were baptised but the statement that they were baptised without any preparation is
absolutely untrue
. The preparation given was carefully thought out and I was assured that it covered all that was essential.

3. The chaplain responsible in the summer when this occurred was the Revd. C. H. D. Grimes, a scholar and a gentleman in whom I have confidence. I think it must be admitted that his intense sympathy with these poor people in their terrible suffering led him to a greater belief in their sincerity than an outsider would have done.

4. Mr Grimes resigned the chaplaincy and left over three months ago. He had been succeeded temporarily by the Revd. F. A. Evelyn who is an experienced priest. He has been instructed that the greatest care must be taken in these cases and long preparation given. Also that if there is the slightest ground for believing that baptism is wanted on political grounds, it must be refused.

The situation has therefore been dealt with directly it was brought to my notice, but I must protest against the statement of the Scotch minister that no preparation was given.

Don was satisfied with Batty’s letter and also wrote to assuage Bell on December 7.

Batty may have felt he had successfully concealed Collard and his own role in the conversions, but he still had not heard the last of it. On January 12, 1939, a Mrs. Elsie Ludovici of Upper Norwood in the south London suburbs wrote to Lang. The wording of the letter would suggest she was probably a convert herself:

I was . . . horrified to hear that mass baptisms had been taking place in Vienna, that they were being admitted at the rate of as many as 900 a day into the Anglican Church, that the whole process of conversion was carried out in four days, and that the Jewesses who knew a little English were present to prompt the converts to say “yes” and “no” at the right moments in reply to the questions put to them during the ceremony because the converts did not know English or understand what they were being asked. You may imagine my confusion with such allegations which amount to charging the refugees with being converted to the Anglican communion merely for the purpose of benefiting from the charities organised for the help of Christians.

Lang asked Don what he knew about this, and Don assured the archbishop that it was “grotesquely untrue.” Mrs. Ludovici seems to have heard about the mass conversions from the Mosleyite Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers.

B
y the end of the year the national conservatives and the Nazis had finally parted ways. “National” government had been abandoned in favor of an ideologically correct Nazi one. At first Hitler’s causes had also been theirs, but there were clear indications in 1938 that this was no longer so. Hitler had already dropped the nationalists from his ranks with the January crisis. The Prussian generals were no longer leading the army; the old school diplomats had ceased to control the Wilhelmstrasse; the voices for a sensibly managed economy had been thrust out into the cold. Göring, a Nazi with national credentials, was increasingly sidelined as the year went on.