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OVERVIEW
PREWAR NAZI GERMANY
S
eizure of power gave the Nazis enormous control over every aspect of
German life. The Nazis could use the machinery of government—the
police, courts, schools, newspapers and radio—to implement their racist
beliefs. Jews, who made up less than one percent of the total population in 1933,
were the principal target of this attack, but the Roma (Gypsies) and the handicapped were also singled out for persecution because they were seen as a
biological threat to the purity of the Aryan race. The Nazis blamed the Jews for
Germany’s defeat in World War I, its economic problems, and for the spread of
communist parties throughout Europe.
National Archives
GERMANS
ACCEPT
ANTI-JEWISH
PROPAGANDA
As Hitler raged
against the Jews, he accused them of
dominating Germany’s economic and
political life despite strong evidence to the
contrary. In 1925 Jews made up less than
five percent of officials in the German
government, including the judicial system.
Yet Hitler’s propaganda machine inflated
this number to fifty percent and then sixtytwo percent. By 1930, less than eight
percent of the directors of Berman banking
companies were Jewish. In 1932,
Germany’s eighty-five major newspapers
had fewer than ten Jewish editors. Yet
many Germans believed the Nazi claim
that Jews controlled the nation’s financial
system and its press. The Nazis skillfully
used propaganda to create the public
perception that Jews were a devious
political, economic, and social threat to the
nation, justifying Hitler’s violent persecution of them.
Hitler at Nazi party rally, Nuremberg,
ca. 1928, from photo album created
by Heinrich Hoffman to document
early Nazi party activities
In April 1933, Hitler began to make discrimination against Jews government
policy. All non-Aryans were expelled from the civil service. A non-Aryan was
defined as anyone who had Jewish parents or two or more Jewish grandparents.
In this same year the government called for a one-day general boycott of all
Jewish-owned businesses and passed laws excluding Jews from journalism,
radio, farming, teaching, the theater, and films. At the same time government
contracts with Jewish businesses were cancelled.
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NUREMBERG LAWS
USHMM: courtesy Hans Pauli
In 1934, Jews were
dismissed from the
army. They were excluded from the stock
exchange, law, medicine, and business.
But it was the Nuremberg Laws of 1935
that took away the
citizenship of Jews
born in Germany, labeling them “subhuman.” These laws defined Jews not by their
religion, but by the
religious affiliation of
Poster entitled "The Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood
their
grandparents.
and German Honor," ca. 1934, with a chart of the forbidden
These laws became
degrees of marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans
the backbone of the
Nazi attack on Jews
up to 1939. Over time some fourteen supplementary decrees were issued which
served as the basis for excluding Jews from professions, medicine, law, from
serving as patent attorneys or tax advisors, and for limiting their business
activities. With these laws Hitler officially made anti-Semitism a part of
Germany’s basic legal code.
Under these laws, marriage between Jews an Aryans was forbidden. Jews were
not to display the German flag and could not employ servants under forty-five
years of age. These laws created a climate in which Jews were viewed as inferior
people. The systematic removal of Jews from contact with their neighbors made
it easier for Germans to think of Jews as less human or different.
German Jews lost their political rights. Restrictions were reinforced by
identification documents. German passports were stamped with a capital “J” or
the world Jude. All Jewish people had to have a recognizable Jewish name.
Jewish men had to use the middle name “Israel,” Jewish women the middle
name “Sarah.” These names had to be recorded on all birth and marriage
certificates. By 1939 the Nazis had seized Jewish businesses and properties or
forced Jews to sell their businesses at rock bottom prices. Jewish children could
no longer go to public schools, theaters, or movie houses. Hotels were closed to
Jews and in some places Jews were prohibited from living or even walking in
certain sections of German towns.
T-4 PROGRAM
The Nazis also began the persecution of other groups
viewed as racially inferior. Between 1933 and 1935, the Nazis passed laws
creating involuntary sterilization programs aimed at reducing the number of
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genetically “inferior” Germans.” Targets of these programs included over 300,000
mentally or physically disabled people. A law passed on July 14, 1933 made
sterilization compulsory for people with congenital mental defects, schizophrenia,
manic-depressive illness, hereditary epilepsy and severe alcoholism. This law
also included the blind and the deaf, even those who became deaf or blind from
such illnesses as scarlet fever or from accidents.
When Hitler started the war in 1939, he ordered the elimination of the mentally
handicapped because they were “useless eaters.” The so-called T-4 program
headquartered in Berlin’s Tiergartenstrasse 4 took the handicapped to extermination centers and gassed them with carbon monoxide. In 1941, public outcry
against this program led the Germans to continue it with much greater secrecy.
Before August 1941 about 100,000 people were killed by the Nazis through the
T-4 Program. By the end of the war another 100,000 were murdered in this way.
These men and women along with Jews and Roma (Gypsies) were seen as a
biological threat to the purity of the German Aryan race that had to be exterminated.
THE ROMA
Many of Germany’s 30,000 Roma (Gypsies) were
also sterilized and prohibited from marrying Germans. They were considered by
the Nazis to be racially impure and mentally defective. Later they would be
condemned by the Nazis to the same fate as Jews—total annihilation. Over half
a million Roma were murdered by the Germans in gas chambers, “medical”
experiments, and random killings.
Although treated less severely than Jews or the Roma, homosexuals, mostly
males, were another target of Nazi persecution. They were often given the choice
of sterilization, castration, or imprisonment in a concentration camp where they
were forced to wear a pink triangle. Children of mixed African and German racial
background were also targeted for sterilization. Some of these children were
offspring of German women and African soldiers in the French army stationed by
the French in the Rhineland after World War I. These children were taken from
schools or streets and sterilized, often without anesthesia. Under a 1933 statute,
the “Law for the Prevention of Off-spring with Hereditary Defects,” these
sterilizations were completely legal.
JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES
Jehovah’s Witnesses were singled out for
abuse because they were pacifists. They refused to swear an oath to the state or
serve in the German army and they urged others to act as they did. In addition,
they would not salute the Nazi flag or say “Heil Hitler.” Many Witnesses lost jobs
and some went to prisons and concentration camps in Germany or had their
children taken from them and sent to orphanages.
SS GAIN POWER
Hitler’s position was challenged from within the Nazi
party by the SA, an abbreviation for the German word for storm troopers. Also
called brown shirts, they were Hitler’s private army run by Ernst Roehm. In 1934
Hitler ordered a purge of the SA by the SS, the elite group of soldiers who served
as his personal bodyguard. The Night of Long Knives ended any challenge to
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Hitler’s position of power. Once the SS State was created, resistance to the Nazi
regime was destroyed. Communists, Catholics, Jews, intellectuals, and others
were the targets of the Gestapo, or secret police.
DACHAU FIRST CONUSHMM: courtesy KZ Gedenkstaette Dachau
CENTRATION CAMP
The SS soon took over
from the SA the responsibility for setting up
concentration
camps
throughout
Germany.
Anyone suspected of
disloyalty or disobedience could be sent
there. The first concentration camp was at
Dachau, close to Munich. It was built to hold
Dachau inmates gathered outside and on the rooftops
political dissenters and
of a camp building to hear a speech by Hitler, 1934
“enemies of the state.”
No charges had to be filed against the detainees, no warrant for their arrest was
necessary, no real evidence was required.
In 1935, Hitler reintroduced the military draft, in violation of the Versailles Treaty.
In 1936 German troops reoccupied the Rhineland. That same year Hitler signed
an agreement with Italian dictator Mussolini to establish the Rome-Berlin Axis.
NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS
On November
9, 1938, the Nazis carried out what the German
press called a “spontaneous demonstration”
against Jewish property, synagogues, and
people. Dr. Josef Goebbels, the propaganda
minister, claimed the demonstration was in
reaction to the shooting of a lower-level diplomat
at the German embassy in Paris. A young
Jewish boy attempted to assassinate the official
or because his father had been deported to
Poland. Throughout Germany fires and bombs
were used to destroy synagogues and shops.
Store windows were shattered, leaving broken
glass everywhere. By the time it ended, nearly
100 people had been killed. That night became
known as the Night of Broken Glass, or
Kristallnacht. German documents found later
showed that Kristallnacht had been carefully
planned weeks in advance by the Nazis.
USHMM: courtesy Stadtarchiv Pforzheim
Shattered stained glass
windows of a synagogue in
Pforzheim after Kristallnacht,
10 Nov. 1938
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Even before Kristallnacht, many Jews in Germany and Austria had sought to
escape. Between 1933 and 1939, about half the German-Jewish population
succeeded in finding refuge in other countries. More than two thirds of Austrian
Jews fled the country as well. Some found safety in Palestine. Others went to
China which did not require an entry visa. Latin American nations admitted some
Jews as well. Many believed mistakenly they would be safe in France, Holland,
and other western European nations. Because of the worldwide economic
depression, public opinion in almost all countries was overwhelmingly opposed to
immigration of any kind. The United States, Canada, and Britain maintained
existing numbers of immigrants imposed by the Quota Law of 1924. Many Jews
who remained under Nazi rule in Germany or Austria did so only because they
could not get visas
USHMM: courtesy Norbert Hilsberg
or sponsors in host
countries or lacked
the money needed
to emigrate.
In March 1938,
German
troops
marched into Austria and met no
resistance. Austria
became a part of
greater Germany.
This Anschluss, or
uniting, although a
violation of both
the Treaty of Versailles and the
Austrian election poster, 1936-1938. The German text above reads
Treaty of St. Ger“Hitler our last hope” and below “Therefore come to us!”
main, would be
justified by provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which stated that all people of
one nationality had the right to live under one government. Hitler next seized the
Sudetenland, an area in western Czechoslovakia where many Germans lived.
For a short time he persuaded the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain,
and the French Premier Edouard Daladier, that he was right in doing so. But
when he invaded and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, no justifications could
be found.
WORLD WAR II BEGINS
Poland would be next. On September 1, 1939,
German forces, spearheaded by tanks and bombers, marched into Poland and
crushed all organized resistance. England and France declared war against
Germany on September 3, 1939 and the world was once again at war.
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T E A C H IN G L E S S O N
3
Handout 3A: The Shame of Nuremberg
Handout 3B: Diary Entry: Anne Frank
Handout 3C: Henry Before and After Kristallnacht
Vocabulary:
Aryan, Nuremburg Laws, Gestapo, Kindertransport, Reichstag
Read Overview 3 and summarize for students. Then write the terms democracy
and dictatorship on the board. Have students identify the major differences
between these two forms of government. Through discussion, students should
recognize that a dictatorship is a government in which power is held by one
person or a small group. A key characteristic of a dictatorship is that it is not
responsible to the people and cannot be limited by them. Those in power have
absolute authority over the people they govern.
Many modern dictatorships are also totalitarian. This mans that those in power
exercise total control over every aspect of their citizens’ lives from school to
workplace, from what people read to how they spend their leisure time. In a
democracy, political authority rests with the people and democratic leaders
govern with the consent of the governed. The rights of citizens are protected by
law. The majority rules, but the minority has rights that are protected by law.
Among these rights are freedom of religion, assembly and petition, speech, and
press.
Review the differences between these forms of government. Then distribute
Handout 3A. Tell the class that this is a copy of an actual newspaper article that
appeared in the New York Herald Tribune in 1935. Use these questions to start
discussion:
1. What lawmaking body passed the Nuremberg Laws?
2. To what political party did most members of the Reichstag belong?
3. The members of the Reichstag were elected by the people of Germany. Does
this mean that it was a democratic legislature? Why or why not?
4. What is meant by the statement in the article that the Reichstag is “now
nothing more than a rubber stamp”?
5. Was there any discussion of these laws before they were passed? Did any
members of the Reichstag oppose them? How do you think opposition to the
laws would have been treated?
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6. Who was hurt by these laws?
7. What restrictions were put on Jews by these laws? What were the penalties
for breaking these laws?
8. What do you think the Nazi party hoped to achieve with these laws?
Focus discussion on the following question: What is the difference, if any,
between individual acts of prejudice and discrimination and those which are
carried out through government laws? (The passage of the Nuremberg Laws by
the Reichstag encouraged and supported prejudice and made hatred of Jews
acceptable. A society that tolerates or legalizes bigotry through its government is
different from a society where discrimination is unlawful. In a democratic society
like the United States, individual acts of discrimination and prejudice do occur.
However, they are not sanctioned by the government and are often actively
opposed by government laws and regulations. Furthermore, in countries where
discrimination is illegal, people who believe they have been treated unfairly can
seek redress through the courts.)
Next have students suggest ways laws such as these would have been
discussed in a democratic legislature like the Congress. Point out that German
Jews had no way of expressing their opposition to these laws, because they had
no representation in the legislature. Ask students how Americans opposed to the
passage of laws can protest against them before their passage. (by contacting
their legislative representatives, public petitions and protests, use of media) How
would a minority group in a democracy protest such laws once they were
passed? (legal actions, using television and other media as a forum for
discussion, public protests, possibly economic boycotts)
Distribute Handout 3B. Have students read the handout. Then list on the
chalkboard the restrictions Anne describes such as riding on a train or subway,
driving a car, going to the movies. Emphasize that German Jews faced these
restrictions solely because they were born Jewish or had Jewish parents,
grandparents, or great grandparents. Prejudice rather than illegal activities by
Jews made them subject to these laws.
Connect to Language Arts: Ask students to imagine that these laws were
applied to all families with children between the ages of fourteen and eighteen in
your school. The reasons why these laws apply only to this set of students has
not been made clear to students. However, they must follow the rules or face
serious penalties. Have each student write a paragraph or diary entry describing
how his or her life would change if they and their families were faced with such
laws. Have students describe a typical school day and a weekend day. How
would students’ after-school activities change?
their jobs change? their
schooling change?
Connect to American/North Carolina History: Encourage students to think of
periods in American history when citizens have been treated unfairly as a result
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of government legislation. Compare and contrast the Nuremberg Laws with such
laws as the Indian Removal Act during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the
black codes and Jim Crow laws during the period following Reconstruction, and
the internment camps for some Japanese Americans on the West Coast during
World War II. Areas for comparison and contrast include purpose or aims of such
laws, groups affected by the laws, responses of citizens to such laws, and
differences in ways citizens in a democracy and an authoritarian society could
respond to such laws. Provide students with a copy of the Bill of Rights. Have
students decide which of the Nuremberg Laws and the laws cited by Anne Frank
in her diary would be illegal under the Bill of Rights.
Distribute Handout 3C. Tell students that this survivor testimony examines the
experiences of a German Jewish boy in prewar Germany. Locate the city of
Dresden on a map. Explain that the Kindertransport, or Children’s Transport,
mentioned by Henry in this selection refers to the transporting of Jewish children
from Germany and other Nazi-occupied countries during the prewar years. The
Kindertransports allowed several thousand children to escape some parts of
Europe under Nazi domination at that time. The children were sent without their
parents to places of temporary or permanent refuge. Great Britain, where Henry
went, provided shelter for some 10,000 Jewish children between the ages of four
months and seventeen years. The first trainload of 100 children left Germany on
Decem-ber 3, 1938. The last train left Germany at the end of August 1939. The
events of Kristallnacht that Henry relates and the round-up of 30,000 Jews by the
Nazis put pressure on the British government to admit the young refugees. The
following questions might be used to discuss the handout.
1. What two events of 1935 made Henry uneasy? How was Henry personally
affected by the passage of the Nuremberg Laws?
2. Review the Nuremberg Laws in Handout 3A. What part of the law forced
Henry’s family to dismiss Kaethe? What penalty did Henry’s family face for
failing to dismiss her?
3. Why was it so difficult for Henry’s father to find a job after he was dismissed
form the bank? How do you think the removal of Jews from their jobs as
doctors, lawyers, and other professional positions might have affected the
way non-Jewish Germans viewed them? How might it have affected how they
felt about themselves?
4. How did Hitler use the shooting of the undersecretary at the German
Embassy in Paris to further his own anti-Semitic program? Why does Henry
call Kristallnacht a “supposedly spontaneous outburst of popular anger”?
5. How was Henry’s family personally affected by Kristallnacht? What does
Henry mean when he refers to his father as a “fatherland-loving” father? Why
did Henry’s father think the Gestapo would not take him away once they knew
of his status as a World War I veteran?
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6. How did his stay in Buchenwald affect Henry’s father?
7. According to Henry why was it so difficult for people like his family to leave
Germany up to 1941?
8. How did Henry get out of Germany? Why did his mother want him sent to
Britain instead of Holland? Was her belief that Holland would not be a safe
haven correct? Explain.
9. Why weren’t other members of Henry’s family able to protest his father’s
seizure and imprisonment? Why wasn’t the Dresden Jewish community able
to protest the destruction of Kristallnacht or the passage of the Nuremberg
Laws? How might Americans have responded to each of these events if they
had objected to them?
Connect to Language Arts and Literature: Have students read Kindertransport by Olga Drucker (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992). This
book, especially appropriate for middle schoolers, is a powerful autobiographical
account of a young Jewish girl’s struggles as a refugee in England from 19391945. For a writing activity, have students imagine they are a young Jewish boy
or girl leaving Germany on a Kindertransport. Have students describe their feelings about leaving family, friends, and their German homeland. As an alternative
activity, students might make a timeline of Henry’s life in the prewar years,
adding events in German and world history to the timeline to indicate how the
changes in Henry’s life are related to events taking place in prewar Germany.
The ideal state is that in which an injury done to the least of its
citizens is an injury done to all.
Solon, Athenian Statesman
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HANDOUT 3A
THE SHAME OF NUREMBURG
New York
Herald Tribune
September 16, 1935
The Shame of Nuremburg
by Ralph Barnes
NUREMBURG, Germany, September 15, 1935. Strict new laws depriving German Jews
of all the rights of German citizens were decreed by a cheering Reichstag here tonight
after an address by Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Tonight’s decrees are among the most
sweeping measures taken since the Nazis came into power two and half years ago. Under
the new laws, Jews in Germany will be put back abruptly to their position in Europe during
the Middle Ages.
The new laws, which go into effect January 1, help to realize the anti-Jewish part of the
Nazi program. They are described as laws for the protection of German blood and German
honor. As read before the Reichstag by the president of the legislative body, they are:
1. Marriages between Jews and Germans are forbidden.
2. Physical contact between Jews and Germans is forbidden.
3. Jews are not permitted to employ in their household German servants under the age
of 45.
4. Jews are forbidden to raise the swastika emblem (now the national flag).
Violation of any of the first three laws is punishable by imprisonment at hard labor.
Violation of the fourth law is punishable by imprisonment.
Tonight’s session of the Reichstag was called unexpectedly by Hitler. All but two or three
of the 600 members are Nazi party men. The Reichstag, which is now nothing more than a
rubber stamp, was called to order by the president of the Reichstag at 9 P.M. After speaking
of the three laws, the President asked the Reichstag for unanimous approval. Six hundred
men, most of them in brown uniforms, leaped to their feet.
With the anti-Jewish wing of the Nazi party now in power, further anti-Semitic measures
are expected to be enacted soon.
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HANDOUT 3B
A DIARY ENTRY of ANNE FRANK
S
aturday, June 20, 1942. The arrival of the Germans was when
the sufferings of us Jews really began. Anti-Jewish decrees
followed each other in quick succession. We must wear a yellow
star. We must hand in our bicycles. We are banned from trams
[trains or subways] and forbidden to drive. We are only allowed to
do our shopping between three and five o’clock and then only in
shops which bear the sign
USHMM: courtesy Samuel Schryver
“Jewish shop.” We must be
indoors by eight o’clock and
cannot even sit in our own
gardens after that hour. We are
forbidden
to
visit
theaters,
cinemas, and other places of
entertainment. We may not take
part in public sports. Swimming,
tennis courts, hockey fields and
other sports grounds are all
prohibited to us. We may not
visit Christians. We must go to
Jewish schools, and many more
restriction of a similar kind.
Sisters Jetty and Shelly de Leeuw in the
Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, Holland,
wearing yellow-star badges, 1942 or 1943.
Both were later deported and perished,
the same fate suffered by Anne Frank
and her sister Margot.
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HANDOUT 3C
HENRY BEFORE AND AFTER KRISTALLNACHT
I
n 1935, two events made me, at age nine, very uneasy. First, the Nuremberg
Laws of 1935 with their sweeping restrictions on Jews and on contacts
between Jews and non-Jews. These laws forced us to discharge Kaethe, our
maid, who was also a sort of nanny to me. She was deeply attached to the family
and we two to each other and we all cried as she moved out. Second, the bank in
which my father held a high position and which was owned by a local Jewish
family, was forcibly taken over by a non-Jewish bank, the Dresdner Bank. The
Dresdner Bank, Germany’s second largest bank, had been founded by Jews in
the middle of the nineteenth century. But by 1935, the founders’ family had been
ousted, and it was now “Aryan” as Nazi terminology had it.
Exclusion Begins
The removal of Jews from professional life continued with the dismissal of my
father from his job at the bank a year later. For a while, my father set himself up
in the real estate business. But by now he was over fifty years old and non-Jews
were unlikely to use a Jewish real estate agent. They knew he might not be able
to hire a secretary or even rent an office. Neither of these events in themselves
were catastrophic, but they show the slow, step-by-step restriction of our life
space in the first five years of the Nazi regime. For some like my fatherlandloving father, this slow progression was never quite enough impetus to get out,
until my mother took charge in 1938 and insisted that we try to do so.
My own life soon changed greatly too. After a year in junior high, in the summer
of 1937, after a soccer game in which I was the goalkeeper, my high school
classmates bunched up to give me a beating. I escaped just in time. I would
never return to school except to retrieve my books. By 1938 exclusion was
formalized by government decree and shared by all Jewish children. The Jewish
community hastily set up its own schools. Although understaffed, the school had
highly motivated and able teachers. At this time in early 1938, the kids in our
apartment complex also excluded me from playing with them and from one day
to the next stopped speaking to me. It was frightening. They were my playmates.
Father Taken Away on Kristallnacht
However, the event which marked the beginning of the end occurred on the night
of November 9, 1938. On November 7, seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan
had gone to the German Embassy in Paris and shot an assistant to the ambassador. The shot did not kill but only gravely wounded him. News of the incident
was broadcast on German radio immediately with hourly updates. We suddenly
realized that, in one way or another, my family and the rest of the Dresden
Jewish community would face some kind of awful, unpredictable punishment if he
died. We all prayed for his survival. But he did die and on the night of the ninth
and again on the tenth, the Kristallnacht occurred, a supposedly spontaneous
outburst of popular anger which was, in fact, ordered by Himmler’s second in
command, Reinhardt Heydrich, with the approval of the top Nazi party and gov19
ernment leaders. Remaining Jewish shops had their windows smashed and the
Dresden synagogue was set afire. That night all over Dresden Jewish men we
knew began to be arrested in their homes, pushed into police vans, and whisked
away. Their families did not know what had happened to them or what to do.
On the morning of the second day, the bell of our apartment rang at 7:30. I
opened it and two men in civilian clothes stormed in, asked where my father was,
and crashed into his bedroom. They found him standing in the middle of the
room. My father asked if they were really going to take a decorated veteran of the
Great War away. To make his point, my father turned from them to go to his desk
to get out his medals. The smaller, meaner one of the two quickly drew his
revolver and pointed it at my father and told him not to move and to raise his
hands. I stood at the door petrified. They grabbed him, rushed him away so
rapidly past where our coats hung that my father snatched the wrong coat, the
lighter one of his two overcoats. They shoved him down the stairs so that he
almost fell and we lost sight of him until we looked out the window and saw him
being pushed into the police wagon.
My father did not return until a month later. During that month, we had only one
official, preprinted postcard
USHMM: courtesy Robert A. Schmuhl
from him in a shaky
handwriting very different
from his usual curved
script. We learned he was
being held in a concentration camp called Buchenwald. Slowly some of my
parents’ friends were released and although they
had to swear not to speak
about their experiences,
they did. We learned that
my father had caught
Prisoners standing during a roll call in Buchenwald
pneumonia, partly because
concentration camp, Germany, ca. 1940.
he had grabbed the wrong
Each man wears a striped hat and a uniform with
colored triangular badges and identification numbers.
coat. We feared he might
die.
In fact, he did survive. On the eighth of December just short of a month after
being arrested, he came back, but he was a wreck. His head had been shaved
and was covered by scabs. He was emaciated; he sank onto a kitchen chair and
sobbed uncontrollably for a long time—something I had never seen him do. It
would take him over a year to recover. By that time my parents and my halfbrother were in Chile, South America. They were able to get a visa to Chile just
before the outbreak of war. Up to 1941, the German policy was to rid the country
of Jews, forcing them to leave everything behind, but not to exterminate them.
The real problem was the refusal of other countries to open their doors to more
than a limited number of those seeking to flee. My family used this visa three
weeks after the war began to emigrate to Chile.
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Henry Escapes Germany on the Kindertransport
I was not with them, because while my father was in Buchenwald, we received
information that England and Holland had offered to accept Jewish children but
not their parents, provided the Jewish communities of those countries guaranteed their upkeep. My mother decided that I should be sent out but only to
England. She sensed that a war by Germany against its neighbors was possible
and that Holland was not a
USHMM: courtesy Instytut Pamieci Narodowej
safe haven. And so in
early January at age
twelve, a month after my
father had come home
from Buchenwald, I traveled with my mother to
Berlin where I joined
Jewish children from other
parts of Germany for a
railway journey on a
special train that became
known as one of the Kindertransports. My mother
and I loved each other
dearly. We were both sad
Jewish refugee children arrive in England on the first
and anxious, but we also
Kindertransport from Germany, Dec. 1938
felt relief and optimism.
Getting out of Germany was clearly the right thing to do after Kristallnacht.
All the children on that transport ended up briefly in a holiday camp on the coast
of the North Sea. It consisted of a set of light cabins constructed for summer use.
They were very cold in mid-January. English families would come to select
children to give them a home for as long as need be. However, I was not chosen
by any of the families, so I ended up in a hostel for Jewish refugee children in
London. There I could write and receive letters from my parents in Chile. In
November 1940, after two months of being bombed every night, spending the
night in the basement of the hostel, I was invited to live with a widower and his
housekeeper, a family friend from Germany, in the city of Lincoln about 140 miles
north of London. From that time on, life went upwards. During the war, I worked
down in the coal mines. Then I attended and graduated from the London School
of Economics. In 1948, I was able to visit my family for ten months in Chile.
From there, in the summer of 1949, I came to the United States and life really
began.
THEN AND NOW
After leaving Chile in 1949, Henry came to the United States to begin his
graduate studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Henry and his wife
came to North Carolina in 1968 after Henry was offered a position in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He taught
at the university until his retirement in 1994.
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