by Lyn Smith
PERSECUTION
After 1933 it was just accepted that if you were a Jewish child you were liable to be beaten up, bullied, or whatever else they chose to do with you. It was no use appealing to policemen or teachers because they're not supposed to interfere or even be interested in helping you because you are perceived to be an enemy of the state.
Hitler's racism and hatred against the Jews and other groups began well before the National Socialist Workers Party - the Nazi Party - came to power on 30 January 1933. Nazi ideology outlining the worldwide conflict between 'Aryans' and Jews was a major theme of Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle, published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926 respectively). Jews, along with Communists, with whom they were closely identified, were regarded as threatening the very basis of German and 'Aryan' (Caucasian of non-Jewish descent) culture, and Hitler's stated mission was to alert Germany and the world to this threat, and to destroy it.
Although the first fatal Jewish victims of the Nazi era can be dated as early as 1 January 1930, when eight Jews were killed by Nazi storm troopers (Sturmabteilungen, SA), it was not until the Machtergreifung - Hitler's seizure of power - in January 1933 that the impact of anti-Jewish measures was felt. German Jews, increasingly isolated by Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and segregated by the various laws, were the main victims during the years 1933-1936. There was, however, a certain amount of spillover of anti-Semitism into neighbouring countries.
During this period, the increasing violence against Germany Jewry was of a relatively sporadic character compared with the mass campaigns which came later, although there were indications of what was to come. For instance, on Saturday, 1 April 1933, a one-day boycott of Jewish shops occurred, when windows were daubed with anti-Jewish slogans and armed SA guards prevented Aryan customers from entering Jewish shops. A purge of German Jewish, Communist and other books considered to be 'disruptive influences' was also undertaken, culminating in the mass book burnings of 10 May 1933 - both events organised by Joseph Goebbels and his Nazi cohorts.
One of the first tasks the Nazi Party set itself on achieving power was to establish the concentration camp system. Dachau concentration camp was opened in March 1933, the first prisoners consisting mainly of Communists, Social Democrats and other political enemies of the Nazis. In 1934, an Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was created by the Schutzstaffel (SS) chief, Heinrich Himmler, under the command of Theodor Eicke, the SS Lagerführer of Dachau. The aim was to restructure the camp system. All units henceforth operated uniformly under a central command with strict training of guards who were organised into the Totenkopfverbände - an SS unit. Total organisation of prisoners' lives, backed up with a brutal regime of punishment, was the order of the day.
It was during this phase that legislation was formulated and implemented restricting economic and professional activity as well as social contact with 'Aryans'. On 11 April 1933, the publication of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service and the law establishing a numerus clauses on Jews for admission into the legal profession was published. More than fifty other decrees were enacted between this date and September 1935, each of which covered a different profession. On 15 September, the so-called Nuremberg Laws, passed by a special sitting of the Reichstag during the massive, dramatic Nazi Rally held in the city, brought shockwaves to German and European Jewry. The Nuremberg Laws defined who was considered a Jew and revoked what few rights Jews still possessed. All these measures were backed up with an increasing vitriolic anti-Jewish and racial propaganda campaign by the Nazi-controlled media, led by Julius Streicher's (Gauleiter of Franconia) rabid anti-Semitic paper, Der Stürmer. Throughout this time, Jews were encouraged to emigrate and, despite all the problems of gaining admission to safe havens, just over 35,000 Jews left for Palestine, Western Europe, Britain and the United States in 1933.
Ludwig Baruch
German Jewish schoolboy living in London
My father had come to England in 1928 to manage a German firm in Liverpool; I left Hamburg in September 1930 to join my parents there. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, it was a traumatic event in our family; my mother completely broke down. She cried for days on end, she feared both war and what it meant for the Jewish people and for the Germans as well. She was very much an established German intellectual and was completely overwhelmed by Hitler's seizure of power. At that time the resistance to Nazis in Germany and elsewhere were the Communists. I was most impressed, especially as a Jew; I felt the only people who could really oppose and contain the Nazis were the Communists.
John Fink
German Jewish youth, electrician's apprentice, Berlin
When Hitler came to power I had to leave my school. I went to a Jewish school for one year then my parents decided, as there was no sense in continuing education, I should learn a trade. They found me a position as an apprentice in a small Jewish outfit, just the boss and me. I was fourteen years old. We had a motorcycle with a sidecar and we did gas and water installations as well as electrics. In 1936 the boss, who was married to an 'Aryan' woman, had to flee Germany. He went to South Africa and I lost my job. I was lucky enough to find another job in Berlin near the Kurfurstendamm, again a small electrical contractor where I finished the four years' apprenticeship.
Ruth Foster
German Jewish schoolgirl, Lingen
When Hitler came to power things changed. We had teachers at school who were very pro-Nazi - they went to the Nuremberg rally each year - and I was the only Jewish girl in this high school. One particular teacher made my life a misery; she told the girls not to talk to me, and the girls with whom I used to go to school in the mornings and met afterwards suddenly ignored me because of the fear of this one teacher. And she arranged that I would sit right at the back of the class, two rows were left vacant and I sat against the wall. Then there came a law - more or less at the same time as the Nuremberg Laws came out - that all the Jewish children had to leave German schools and universities.
At one time there was a boycott when the SA put big slogans, 'Deutsche, kauft nicht von Juden, die Juden sind unser Unglück!' - 'Germans, don't buy from Jews, the Jews are our misfortune.' This was quite soon after Hitler came to power. They smashed the windows and they looted the shops. The farmers didn't dare deal with Jewish people any more, even though they were quite sympathetic, and so it became very hard. My mother had quite a bit of jewellery which she had to sell in order to raise some money and times were, well... tough.
Gudrun Kübler
German woman, Berlin
You had to be very careful. I always had to be because of my husband's job (on the General Staff of the Luftwaffe). It would have been a catastrophe if I had shopped in that Jewish store, for example.
Magdalena Kusserow Reuter
German Jehovah's Witness schoolgirl, Bad Lippspringe
When the times of Hitler started, they observed us not saying 'Heil Hitler' and every year it became more difficult when we didn't say this. My father wanted to teach us religion and he took us out of the religion lesson. And this one teacher said, 'These Kusserow children, they are not for Hitler, they have to go to Moscow, they are Communists.' Then the children made fun of us and said, 'You go to Moscow, you are not our people, you are not for Hitler.' My father taught us that saying 'Heil Hitler' meant that salvation came from Hitler, but the Bible tells us that salvation comes from Jesus Christ. He told us that we must choose, that real Christians would be persecuted, and that one day maybe they would persecute us also, because the Bible says some will be killed because of faith, the belief in Christ. I never thought this would be in our own family, never thought about it until it came.
Dr Edith Bulbring
German part-Jewish (Mischling) doctor, Berlin
I qualified as a doctor in 1928 and had a position in the Virchow Krankenhaus (hospital) in Berlin at the time when Hitler came to power. There was a well-known Jewish professor there, Dr Friedmann. He was an expert on infectious diseases. After 1933 Dr Friedmann and his Jewish staff were dismissed. I was the only one left because I wasn't fully Jewish. I was in charge of three hundred beds and perhaps thirty turnovers a day. So the conditions in this hospital were now quite unimaginable.
At that time there was a very severe diphtheria epidemic; one of the children got to the stage where his throat was blocked by a diphtheria membrane and needed a tracheotomy. We were told there was no doctor left to do this. The nurse asked me if I had ever done this operation. I said, 'No, but have you ever assisted in such an operation?'
'Oh, many times,' she said.
'Well then, that's fine, we'll do it. I know how it's done.'
And I did it and the boy got better. I was very pleased. The telephone rung when I got back to my room: would I please come to the administration. The administrator said, 'Miss Bulbring, we gather from your questionnaire that you are of part-Jewish origin. Therefore we no longer have any use for your services.' There were no other doctors left in that hospital.
(Sir) Hans Krebs
German Jewish biochemist, Freiburg
The first really great change which affected everybody when Hitler came to power was in early April 1933. A number of us, including myself, were temporarily relieved of our posts, allegedly in order to comply with the furious wishes of the people who wouldn't tolerate the presence of Jewish people in these positions. So I was personally directly affected: I was paid but was not allowed to deal with my patients nor was I allowed to go into my laboratory. In fact that was to be the end: I left right in the middle of the experiments - had to leave right in the middle of these - from one day to another.
Beate 'Bea' Green
German Jewish schoolgirl, Munich
One day in 1933 I had a bad cold - I was eight at the time. My mother said, 'You stay in bed.' So I was in bed when the front door opened. Now normally when my father came in, he would open the door briskly and whistle and my brother and I would rush down the corridor to see who would get there first to embrace him. Now, first of all this wasn't the right time for him to come back, so I assumed that it was either my mother or the maid, neither of whom were in the flat as far as I knew. But nobody came into my room which is what I would have expected. After a while I got out of bed and went to the corridor where, outside the bathroom, I saw my father's tattered and blood-soaked clothes.
For an eight year old it was a shock, but there wasn't an adult around that I could ask, 'What's happened?' So I wandered along the corridor to where my parents' bedroom was. The door was closed and I did something I'd never done in my life before - I knocked on the door and then opened it. I saw my father pull the bedclothes right up to his eyes. Obviously, with hindsight, I know that it was so I shouldn't see his bashed up face. He simply said to me, 'Wait until your mother comes home.' That was odd because he would never have talked about 'mother', he would say 'Mutti' - Mum. And of course in due course my mother did come home. From then on I felt I was being protected from the truth. They thought that by not telling me about what really happened, I wouldn't worry, when of course as a child you worry much more if you don't know than if you know, however hard it is to know the truth.
Later I heard that my father, who was a lawyer, had on this day - 10 March 1933 - gone to the police headquarters in order to lay a complaint on behalf of one of his Jewish clients who owned one of the big stores in Munich and who had been arrested. When he got to the police headquarters, somebody said to him, 'Dr Siegel, you're wanted in room so and so,' which happened to be in the basement. When he got there he saw it was full of brownshirt thugs who proceeded to beat him up. They knocked his teeth in and burst his eardrums. The one thing my father was worried about was that they would damage his kidneys. So he held his arms against his back and of course that meant that his head was unprotected which is why he had all the injuries that he had. But fortunately, our family has thick heads, lots of bone and in fact apart from the fact that he was beaten, bloodied, had his teeth knocked out, his skull was not broken.
They then cut off his trouser legs and took off his shoes and socks and hung a placard around his neck with the notice, 'I'm a Jew and I will never complain to the Nazis again.' They led him around Munich like that. They got tired of it after about an hour and let him go near the railway station. As he got into a taxi, he told us that a man came up to him and said with a slight American accent, 'I have just taken a picture of you, do you mind if it is published?' My father said, 'Do as you like.' I mean this is not something he would have worried about at that time. That picture appeared in the world's press, published by Hearst (William Randolph Hearst, American newspaper magnate).
Rudi Bamber
German Jewish schoolboy, Nuremberg
When the huge Nazi rallies were held in our town, I had very conflicting emotions. It was very exciting, even attractive: the razzmatazz, the marching columns and the colours. The Nazis were very good at organising these and they were very impressive and spectacular and one could not but - I suppose 'admire' may be the wrong word - but they certainly impressed me; the power and the force and ability were all very evident. Everything was decorated in Nazi flags, everywhere, every window - it was an absolute riot of colour. And the Party leaders used to go on a motorcade through the town, and people would mass and shout as they stood or sat in their cars, clearly visible. I admit, very foolishly, joining the throng, standing there to watch this spectacle. I saw Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Hess - they all went by in their cars. Of course my parents would have been appalled to think what I was doing. In a way I was slightly tainted by the Nazi propaganda. People used to say to me, 'Well, you are Jewish but you're all right, it's the other Jews, the international Jewry which are evil and out to destroy Germany.' So I had this sort of dichotomy, that on the one hand I knew that I was hated and despised, and yet felt that when it came to an individual approach, people said, 'Oh well, you're all right, you're not like them.'
Else Baker
Part-gypsy German child, Hamburg
Hitler? You couldn't escape Hitler, even a two-year-old would have picked up Hitler then. On his birthday and certain other days everyone had to fly his flag, and when he spoke on the radio, everyone had to listen attentively. I never had contact with gypsies or Jewish people. I think I led a very sheltered, rural life - racial and ethnic differences wouldn't have meant anything to me. I had heard about gypsies because there was a song about them in German and it describes how they lived in forests and didn't pay taxes and had a jolly life of it. I also heard stories of gypsies stealing washing off washing lines but I never came across any; just a sort of folklore about them which had rubbed off slightly on me. I loved my adoptive parents as my mother and father - that's all the parenting I knew.
