Читать книгу My Dear Ones: One Family and the Final Solution - Jonathan Wittenberg, Jonathan Wittenberg - Страница 12

By the summer of 1938 Alfred and his family were well settled in Jerusalem. Reports from more recent arrivals from Germany, who included two of his sisters, made the extreme urgency of his mother’s position all too clear. The situation had deteriorated greatly since he himself had fled; there were no ways out of Germany that did not present major difficulties. Restrictive quotas made the waiting period for visas to the United States extremely lengthy. Exactly how long depended on one’s nationality; separate immigration quotas were fixed for each country. Who could foresee what might happen by the date their number came up, maybe sometime as far distant as 1941 or 1942? After Kristallnacht, when it was no longer possible to cling to the illusion that things would get better, it was clear that an indefinite wait might well amount to a delayed death sentence. The British authorities had meanwhile also had placed far tighter restrictions on entry into Palestine. It was sometimes easier to obtain visas for a number of South American countries or for the Far East, but how was one to know what life was really like in those faraway places, or if one could make a living and put food in the mouths of one’s family?

While it grew ever harder to leave, it also became increasingly difficult to remain in Germany. Jews were progressively stripped of their status, their right to access amenities, their opportunities to work and their economic assets. On 15 September 1935 at the party rally in Nuremberg the promulgation of two new laws was announced to the Reichstag. The first, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans. It also forbade Jews to employ German women under the age of forty-five in their households, ‘in case of Rassenschande’ (racial pollution). The second, the Reich Citizenship Law, defined those not of German blood as merely subjects of the state, in contrast to Aryans who were full Reichsbürger (citizens of the Reich). This effectively stripped Jews of all their rights as citizens and placed them outside the protection of the law. It is not surprising that numerous Jews, many of whom had lost their sons, or had themselves fought with honour for their beloved Vaterland in the First World War, found it hard to fathom such a deep and utter betrayal. Henceforth Germany’s Jews, as well as Roma and other non-Aryans, were legally relegated to the rank of a lesser species. Among the few documents I found relating to my father and his parents were those indicating that they had ceased to be citizens of Germany: ‘German citizenship declared void following the announcement of 7 November 1940’, the cards stated, though why they were issued on this date, by which time the family had already been out of the country for over three years, remained unclear to me.

Less than a year later, in 1936, the Sicherheitsdienst (security police), led by Reinhard Heydrich, created a special department, Amt II, for internal intelligence and surveillance. Subsection 112 was tasked with preparing a card index of all Jews living inside the Reich. My father never forgot the impact of this sinister gathering of data. Over fifty years later, when, during the course of returning a questionnaire for teachers about their background and experience, I was on the point of filling in a box about ethnic origins he demanded with uncharacteristic anger that I leave it blank. When I demurred, he insisted: ‘That’s how they found all the Jews.’

Growing self-confidence and increasing disregard for foreign reactions led the leading Nazis to be ever more outspoken in their anti-Jewish pronouncements. In his address on National Peasants Day in November 1935, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), ostensibly a bodyguard for Hitler and other leading Nazi personalities, but in effect a racial and military elite carefully nurtured to promulgate and enforce all aspects of Nazi ideology, described the Jews as:

this people composed of the waste products of all the people and nations of this planet on which it has imprinted the features of its Jewish blood, the people whose goal is the domination of the world, whose breath is destruction, whose will is extermination, whose religion is atheism, whose idea is Bolshevism … 1

Two years later, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels used similar language at the Party Congress of Labour on 11 September 1937, describing the Jew as:

the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the nations, the son of chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition, the visible demon of the decay of humanity.2

While there was nothing new in the sentiments themselves, their public expression by the top Nazi leadership at major gatherings served as a clear indicator of the rising tenor of anti-Jewish incitement.

For Jews it was a time of ever-increasing hopelessness and terror. Many people committed suicide; ‘In the flat downstairs the couple took their lives together,’ my mother’s mother recalled.

The only lull in the rising level of racist activity had come in the summer of 1936, for the Olympic Games, when Hitler wanted his country to present to the world a benign and industrious image. ‘I went to see them,’ my father told me. ‘Hitler walked past me not this far away,’ I think I recall him saying, indicating a distance of two or three yards. I never asked him why he had gone or how the experience had felt; even the memory of the conversation feels like a chimera.

It was during 1938 that it became unambiguously clear how tight the noose around the Reich’s Jews had already been drawn. At the beginning of the year all Jews were required to hand in their passports; new documents would be issued only to those about to emigrate. My mother, who did not leave Germany until 9 April 1939 and vividly remembered Kristallnacht, following which her father was interned in Dachau, told me how frightening she had found a particular experience during a visit to Germany fifty years later. On being informed that she had to leave her passport at the concierge’s desk, she spent the hours of darkness caught between anxious sleeplessness and nightmares.

Jews were excluded from virtually every part of the economy. While they had already been subject for years to public humiliation and mockery, discriminatory legislation, financial abuse, constant threats and periodic violence, 1938 marked a change of pace in the rise of naked hatred and blatant exploitation. By this time the German national debt, caused not only by the reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles, but especially by Hitler’s huge rearmament programme, was out of control. From where better could the money be taken to plug the hole in the accounts than the plunder of Jewish possessions?

In April 1938 a decree was promulgated requiring Jews to register all remaining assets over the value of 5,000 Reichsmarks. The information had to be provided by the end of June, though in the event the date was put back because it proved impossible to distribute the forms sufficiently quickly. On 23 June Regina received a letter from the Council of the Jewish Community of Berlin alerting her to the fact that:

In our estimation the pension which you draw from us is subject to declaration under the order of 16 April 1938 (RGB1 I. S. 414) concerning the disclosure of assets belonging to Jews. In case you have not already done so, we recommend that you obtain a declaration form as soon as possible from the police station nearest to your home and fill in the details of your pension on side 3.

The reminder further advised her that any other sources of income, such as from national insurance or similar pension plans, had also to be disclosed.

The combined wealth of Germany and Austria’s Jews was estimated by the Ministry of Economics at 8 billion Reichsmarks; that could now be channelled systematically into the coffers of the Reich.

All this information, together with numerous reports on the terrors of life in Germany and the difficulty of obtaining visas would have been well known to Alfred not only from his own family members but from refugees newly arrived in Palestine and from conversations in every quarter. It was abundantly clear to him that his mother had to leave the country as soon as possible. But by what route would she be able to get out of Germany and how was he to persuade her to take action? His friend’s letter would have brought him little comfort, both because of its frank appraisal of the chances of success and because it showed how hard his mother was finding it to come to any kind of decision:

Your mother believes that she could still get 1,000 Palestinian pounds from the Berlin community as a settlement. As the 1,000 LP costs at least 25,700 Reichsmarks, with taxes on top, that would be a sum of at least 30,000 Reichsmarks. That your mother would still be able to transfer the 1,000 LP is out of the question. Firstly, we can’t provide her with the so-called ‘age certificate’ because she’s over sixty, and secondly, even with the certificate she would only get a higher Reichsbank number and it would still be three years before she would be able to make the transfer. At the moment we can’t take anyone out of the queue at the normal price of 25,700. Preferential treatment costs 35,000 and is almost always only agreed to for families.

There followed a no less detailed paragraph in which he weighed the possibilities should Regina decide to make her settlement over to her son Ernst. He had recently been to stay with his mother in Berlin over Shavuot, the celebration of the Giving of the Torah, which fell that year in early June. (‘It’s nice that Ernst and little Jenny spent the festival with you,’ Nelly, who was always interested in family matters, had written from Jerusalem in reply to news from her mother-in-law.) Regina was well aware of the many difficulties with which the family of four young children, with a fifth on the way, were confronted.

Alfred’s correspondent then put forward a different option:

If we leave Ernst entirely out of the picture, it still remains to be considered whether your mother shouldn’t apply for a pensioner’s certificate. At the moment there are no more pensioner’s certificates to be had, but from 1 October a new quota will become available. Pensioner’s certificates are distributed solely by the government in Jerusalem. The Palestine Office can only offer advice and the consulate here can only accept applications for the purpose of forwarding them on. You therefore need to link up with the government department for immigration over there; in many cases this has proved very useful. It would be a prerequisite that the Ha’avara arrange the transfer of the pension. At the moment it is being more generous than seems to me likely to be judged warranted, in that it’s ready to transfer not just 8 Palestinian pounds per person per month but the entire pension up to the amount of 550 Reichsmarks. Your mother understandably raises the objection that the transfer of pensions is liable to be stopped at any moment and that she will then find herself over there without any means. Here too it’s a question of making the decision as to whether one is prepared to accept the risk or not. Most of the people with whom I speak would be happy if they could only get into the country on a pensioner’s certificate.

The writer was using a terminology that was closely familiar to him as an advisor in the Treuhand-Stelle organisation, but it is probably right to assume that the details would have been depressingly familiar to the mass of Jews desperate to leave Nazi Germany. But what in fact was this organisation which played such a decisive role in the lives of tens of thousands, and how was Regina, subject to different pressures from the various members of her family, to reach her decision?

All applications from Germany for immigration to Palestine had to be made through the offices of the Palästina Treuhand-Stelle (the Palestine Trust). The organisation had a remarkable history and was substantially different from the Nazi-run emigration offices later set up in Vienna and Prague by Adolf Eichmann, and which Reinhard Heydrich, as head of the SS under Himmler, was resolved after Kristallnacht to replicate in Berlin.

The Treuhand-Stelle’s partner, the Trust and Transfer Office Ha’avara Ltd in Tel Aviv, known simply as the Ha’avara, or ‘Transfer’, was established in the summer of 1933 as a result of a strange confluence of interests between the agricultural needs of the growing Jewish settlement in Palestine and the more rationally motivated departments of the Nazi government. A less likely coincidence of concerns would be hard to imagine. Yet ultimately the agreement, which was supported not only by the German Foreign office and the Treasury but even for a time by parts of the SS because it appeared to offer a practical resolution to the ‘Jewish problem’, allowed many thousands of Jews to escape Germany and avoid total destitution while enabling the Nazi state to rob them of most of their assets within the sanction of an ostensibly legal framework. It wasn’t until the second year of war, when the policy of removing the Jews beyond the borders of the Reich proved impracticable and no longer appealing to Nazi ideology that the words ‘solution’ and ‘Jewish problem’ combined irrevocably to form a rather different meaning. While filled with murderous rhetoric and contemptuous violence from the first, it was not initially obvious that Nazi policy would necessarily lead to systematically organised, comprehensive mass extermination, or how it would do so.

The agreement also had to conform to the policies of the British administration under which Palestine had been ruled since the League of Nations formally appointed his Britannic Majesty as the Mandatory for the territories in July 1922. This act incorporated almost verbatim the wording of the Balfour Declaration in which, in a letter dated 2 November 1917, Lord James Balfour announced to Lionel Rothschild, then chairman of the Zionist Federation, that His Majesty’s Government:

viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, [it being] clearly understood that nothing might be done which would prejudice the existing civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.

The meaning of ‘favour’ and the implications of the concurrent ‘understanding’ were to vary in the minds of the territory’s British rulers as the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine deteriorated over the following years, with disastrous implications for the Jews of Europe.

Negotiations with the German authorities began in 1932, the last year of the Weimar Republic, after the German government under Chancellor Brüning imposed a ban on the removal of capital from Germany in response to the global economic crisis following the great depression. A certain Sam Cohen ran a citrus growing company in Palestine, Hanotaiah Ltd of Tel Aviv, and was keenly aware of the need for heavy equipment to develop the land. In March 1933 he signed an agreement with the German Foreign Ministry to enable the transfer, in the form of agricultural machinery, of up to a million Reichsmarks belonging to German Jews. Through this device Jews already anxious to leave Germany could take with them a small portion of their assets, just enough to avoid immediate penury on their arrival in a country where, as the popular saying went, the only commodities available in plenty were sun, sand and stone. They were required to deposit a significant sum in a special account in Germany as payment for the equipment bought by Hanotaiah Ltd and other interested companies, and were subsequently reimbursed upon their arrival in Palestine by the importers, who paid in this manner for their purchases.

Obtaining the necessary papers to enter Palestine was far less difficult in the early 1930s than it would later become, because British policy was still relatively relaxed with regard to Jewish immigration. However, a White Paper issued by Colonial Secretary Passfield in October 1930 had expressed the view that the Balfour Declaration imposed on Britain an equal obligation to both Jews and Arabs, and that immigration should not be allowed to rise to a rate which would put the local Arab population out of work. But, due to the influence of Chaim Weizmann, who had the diplomatic skills and personal charisma of a world-class statesman without at that point representing a state, and to whom Britain felt indebted for his invention at a critical stage in the First World War of a way of manufacturing acetone out of maize, any change in policy was swiftly rejected. As a result, Palestine received between 40,000 and 60,000 Jewish immigrants each year, with an even greater total in 1936. How immigrants were chosen was left largely to the discretion of the Jewish Agency, recognised by Britain in 1930 as the authoritative body in this regard and named in Article 4 of the Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations. It was during this comparatively relaxed period that Alfred and his family were able to procure certificates with relative ease.

Although Hitler’s rhetoric had long threatened them with a far more sinister fate, and violence was rife, Nazi policy throughout the 1930s was chiefly aimed at forcing the Jews out of Germany. With few countries willing to accept immigrants, let alone impoverished refugees, Palestine provided an essential destination. It wasn’t until towards the end of the decade that the Nazi leadership began to feel concern lest the establishment of a national homeland would allow the forces of international Jewry an increased opportunity to exercise their demonic influence over world affairs. Before then, the possibility that the Jews would actually succeed in forming a country of their own had seemed to them too remote to merit serious consideration. The Nazi government and the Zionist infrastructure thus found in one another improbable partners in promoting, for entirely different reasons, a common agenda of encouraging Jews to remove themselves from the Reich and resettle in Palestine.

But solving its Jewish problem wasn’t the only concern behind the readiness of the Nazi leadership to listen with interest to the overtures from Palestine. Germany badly needed foreign income and the Middle East offered a potential new market for its exports. Hjalmar Schacht, director of the Reichsbank, was a realist. He was well aware that too rapid an exclusion of Jews from Germany’s business infrastructure would be disastrous for the economy. From after the initial boycott of Jewish shops and businesses across Germany on 1 April 1933 until his eventual dismissal by Hitler in 1937, he sought to exercise a restraining influence on the Führer and his more militant ministers. He favoured the gradual and orderly takeover of Jewish assets, not out of concern for Germany’s Jews, but because he considered this to be in the country’s best economic interests. Hitler, too, came to understand that it was unwise to act drastically until the economy was sufficiently robust to finance the forthcoming war, which he had always regarded as inevitable, that is to say, desirable. The transfer of funds in such a way as allowed the greater part to be confiscated in the process with the apparent consent of their owners, and the sale of German goods abroad with the benefits it brought to the country’s balance of payments, both served these ends well.

There was yet another reason for the Nazi interest in establishing a trade relationship with the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Such an agreement would be a particularly eloquent way of breaking the boycott of German goods, which was perceived as being led by international Jewry abroad. In actual terms the boycott probably did relatively little damage to Germany, but it was taken very seriously in Berlin, precisely because of the exaggerated importance attributed to the influence of international Jewry. The myth that Jews were immensely wealthy and manipulated world affairs through their control of international finance and the media was not only carefully exploited, as evidenced by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda films, but widely credited, and not only by the Nazis.

The question of the boycott was hotly debated in Jewish circles as well. It came to a head at the eighteenth World Zionist Congress, held in the late summer of 1933 in Prague. In the end, it was judged that a pragmatic approach to helping Jews to get out of an ever more threatening Germany was more important than the boycott and would in the long term have a more constructive effect on the Jewish future.

As a result of this unlikely combination of interests, an agreement was signed on 25 August in which the Warburg Bank of Hamburg and the Wassermann Bank of Berlin, along with the Anglo-Palestine Bank, established the Palästina Treuhand-Stelle der Juden in Deutschland, G.m.b.H. (The Palestine Trust Company on behalf of the Jews of Germany Ltd), subsequently known simply as Paltreu, in Berlin. Its offices were located on the Meinekestrasse. There can be no stranger measure of its support for this endeavour to expedite the departure of Jews from Germany than that, when the premises were sacked on Kristallnacht, the SS apparently helped them to reopen as quickly as possible, and even ordered the release from prisons in Berlin and Vienna of Jews connected with the Palästina-Amt.3

In simple terms, the Ha’avara – or transfer – system worked as follows: Jews planning to emigrate to Palestine could, whether or not they already had the necessary travel documents, deposit sums in the relevant account in Germany, known simply as Konto 1. If they were successful in reaching Palestine, a percentage of the money would be returned to them by the Anglo-Palestine Bank after their arrival, either in currency, movables or real estate. In this way they were able to take a fraction of their capital with them out of Germany. At the same time agriculturalists in Palestine could purchase from German manufacturers the essential equipment they needed. Meanwhile, by far the greatest proportion of the assets of all German Jews was simply stripped from them in the form of special levies and stolen by the state.

It was from the offices of Paltreu that Regina had received her fateful letter after Kristallnacht in 1938. Matters had changed drastically since Alfred had obtained his papers five years earlier. Two separate elements had contributed to the worsening of the situation. In the first instance, Nazi policy towards the Jews had become increasingly more savage, contemptuous and brutal. Yet for many the second factor constituted, at least until the outbreak of war, no less of a barrier to escaping from Germany. The attitude of the British government towards Palestine had altered sharply. In 1936 what became known as the Arab Revolt began with violent protests against what was seen as excessive Jewish immigration. It continued with varying levels of intensity for several years. At the same time, the probability of war became ever more imminent. With major bases in Egypt and North Africa as well as in Palestine itself, Britain was anxious not to jeopardise its position in the Middle East by antagonising local populations and their leadership. This concern culminated in the White Paper of May 1939 that limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the following five years, a figure calculated to ensure that Jews would not exceed a third of Palestine’s total population. To David Ben-Gurion, then head of the Jewish Agency, and to the leadership of the embryonic Jewish state, this constituted a betrayal of the commitments promised in the Balfour Declaration. For many Jews stuck in Europe and desperate to get out, it would prove fatal.

In the meantime, applicants faced further dilemmas. The already severely limited number of places on the British quota was further divided into categories. For which kind of certificate should they apply? Category A, itself split into five sections, was for immigrants with their own means of support. Visas issued in this class were known as ‘capitalist certificates’. Category A1 was for those with at least 1,000 Palestinian pounds available to them in the country. To qualify for category A2 one had to be a practitioner of one of the ‘free professions’ and to possess at least 500 Palestinian pounds. The category recommended by Alfred’s friend on the Paltreu team was A4; it applied to those in receipt of a regular pension of not less than 4 Palestinian pounds per month. But it had also become virtually impossible to move money out of Germany. As Alfred was to write later in the year concerning the desperate situation of his brother, one needed relatives or friends abroad to guarantee the funds. But at least at this point in time, the Jewish community was still able and willing to forward her full pension, should Regina succeed in emigrating to Palestine.

Regina, however, was troubled. What if the political situation should degenerate to the point where it was no longer possible to send any monies out of Germany at all? She didn’t want to become a burden to her children who were struggling to make ends meet in a new and impoverished country. Yet matters were only going to get worse and soon there might be no opportunities left for leaving Germany at all, with or without funds. As Alfred’s friend had written:

I would urgently advise you to get the process of obtaining a pensioner’s certificate underway before it is too late. As the transfer of funds to Palestine is congested and is no longer available at all for other countries, one hears every day of people who emigrate leaving their entire fortune behind. Also, it’s always better to take the risk that one can still count on the transfer of enough to live on for another 6 or 12 or 18 months, than to wait until this opportunity too has passed.

Regina made the application, and was refused.