End

Although I only completed about 10% of this project at the end of the period, the readings and researches have brought understanding into this piece of history that I used to disregard.


Stories of despair - How the SS shoot into a kid's opened mouth when he lied to give a sweet, the mindless mass killings, the need of survival that reduce them into sub-humans, the incessant screaming & cries when the children are taken away from their mothers, the unthinkable human medical experiments, the thousands of entangled bodies that formed a mountain when the gas is released and they struggle for higher ground for fresh air...

Stories of hope - Hidings, extraordinary stories of reunion, rebellion; how a lady survived while buried together with hundreds of bodies. The ghetto uprising..


This is something that I will always remember.. and now I appreciate more of my life and its predicaments.


The words of Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, stand as a testament to why we must never forget this dark period of human history:

"For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time. The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future."

-Elie Wiesel, Night, Preface to the New Translation (New York: Hill and Wang, c2006), page xv.

Story: Susan Sinclair

Susan Sinclair
German Jewish schoolgirl, Nuremberg

A number of men, somewhere between 7-10, came bursting into our house and started smashing up everything. They locked my parents in the bathroom and they were desperate to know what was happening to their girls. There were only two of us at home at the time, my older sister was away at college and my younger sister and I shared a big room and I saw that her bed was full of glass and that everything had been smashed and the furniture was turned upside down. Then they pulled me out of bed and tore my nightdress to shreds and I was so self-conscious as a 15 year old.

There were roars of laughter from these young men, who seemed as if they were drunk, and they said to me, 'Well, get your clothes on, where are they?' And I said, 'In that wardrobe' - this was heavy continental furniture. 'OK, go and got them.' So I went to get them and as I went up to it they got behind it and threw it over. In fact it certainly would have killed me if they hadn't turned quite a large table upside down first; for a short time the table held the wardrobe and I crawled out underneath. Then they started smashing up the rest of the place. My parents were screaming and shouting because they didn't know what was happening to us, it really was awful. Then they left to smash up somebody else's house.
It was then that life as I had known it, stopped.

Part 2 - The Search for Refuge (1937-1939)

"Everyone understood what they ought to be emigrating, but it was only when the wtershed of Kristallnacht occurred in November 1938 that my parents, in common with 90% of other German Jews, thought it's no good staying, they're going to kill us. Survival in the life-threatening sense was the only thing that mattered."


Overview


After 1938, the campaign to create a Judenrein - Jewish-cleansed - economy started in earnest; further laws and decrees published between 1937-1939 led to an ever-increasing spiral of of anti-Semitic violence, suffering and desperation among all sections of the Jewish community, destroying the very foundation of Jewish life in Germany. As a result of the strident anti-Semitic rhetoric spilling over the German borders, Jews in Germany's borderlands were growing increasingly uneasy. The Nazi takeover (Anschluss) of Austria on 13 March 1938 intensified these fears. Whereas the process of discrimination and violence against the German Jews had been relatively gradual, the persecution of the Austrian Jews was immediate and devastating; overnight, they were deprived of civil rights and subjected to extreme violence and humiliation, especially in Vienna.

In the autumn of 1938, thousands of Polish Jews were forcibly expelled from Germany to the border ares between Germany and Poland. On 28 October of that year, for instance, some 17,000 German-Jewish citizens of Polish origin were stripped of their citizenship and dumped in no-man's land on the border near the town of Zbaszyn. This outrage provoked Herschel Grynspan, the son of one of the displaced, to assassinate Ernst vom Rath, the first secretary of the German embassy in Paris, which resulted in wave of Nazi anti-Semitic attacks throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. This is known as Kristallnacht - the night of broken glass - when more than 7,500 Jewish shops were wrecked and many synagogues and precious religious artefacts desecrated or destroyed.


Following Kristallnacht 30,000 German Jews rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps. As the camp population changed from 'undesirables' and 'criminals' to Jews, living conditions deteriorated to sub-human levels. Kristallnacht had enormous international repercussions and helped swing public opinion against the policy of appeasement. The violation of the Munich Agreement in March 1939 spurred Britain and France to react with their guarantees to Poland, Hitler's next likely target.

As war approached, Jews desperately sought refuge from what was now a very obvious threat. Jewish parents were particularly anxious to find safe refuge for their children. This is when, in late 1938 after Kristallnacht, Britain greed to take 10,000 Jewish children. In the event just over 9,000 arrived under the Kindertransport plan, the last group coming on the eve of war.


Despite the stringent immigration policies of potential host nations, emigration from the Grossdeutsches Reich (greater Germany) increased dramatically throughout the autumn and winter of 1938/39. Adolf Eichmann's Central Office for Jewish Emigration, based at first in Vienna and later in Berlin, began to drop its previous policy of persuasion for a new policy of intimidation, with Jews being subjected to humiliations, beatings, confinement in concentration camps and even death. These tough methods, along with the anti-Jewish laws, were extended to Czechoslovakia after the occupation of March 1939. By September 1939 about half of Germany's 500,000 Jews had left the country, along with 125,000 from Austria and 20,000 from the newly occupied Czech lands. Many thousands more were trapped.

Story: John Silberman

John Silberman
German Jewish schoolboy, Berlin


As time went on I became aware that business for my father seemed to be getting difficult. I didn't fully understand why, but there were pressures on customers not to buy from a Jewish manufacturer, and pressures from suppliers to get higher prices, or not supply Jews. My father's situation was not unique, it went on all over the place. It wasn't so much a rule or requirement from the Government to trade and industry, it was the taking of advantage by individuals: right, he's a Jew so we can squeeze him, and what can he do about it?

There was this perpetual threat that if you didn't comply with non-Jewish requests, you'd be report to the Gestapo and be arrested. One always heard of people disappearing, or being arrested then coming back after a week or so having been beaten up or given hard labour or, occasionally, being killed - although the latter was much more common from 1937. But even in those early days, talk of the Gestapo (the secret state police) was always rife.

Story: Dr Edith Bulbring

Dr Edith Bulbring
German part-Jewish (Mischiling) doctor, Berlin

I qualified as a doctor in 1928 and had a position in the Virchow Krankenhus (hospital) in Berlin at the time when Hitler came to power. There was a well-known Jewish professor there, Dr Friedmann. He was n 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 300 beds and perhaps 30 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 rang 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.

Story: Lili Stern-Pohlmann

Lili Stern-Pohlmann
Polish Jewish child, Krakow


We were not discriminated against in any obvious way, bot occasionally my father had difficulty in changing his job because he was Jewish - he was as qualified in his profession as anybody else. Apart from that, what I remember distinctly is that when Pilsudski died in 1935, from our third floor window we could see the funeral procession passing, and after it passed, I noticed policemen were beating people with truncheons. I asked my father, 'Why are they beating those people?" And my father said, 'My dear child, they didn't do anything wrong, it's only because they're Jewish.'

Part 1 - Persecution (1933-1936)

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.

Overview

Hitler's racism and hatred against the Jews and other groups began well before the Nationalist 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. 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 the 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, 1April 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.

On 1 April 1933 the first boycott of Jewish shops, lawyers and doctors took place all over Germany. Members of the SA and SS stood outside Jewish stores and reminded each would-be shopper of the boycott slogan: "Germans protect yourselves. Do not buy from Jews."

Shop windows are broken and goods are looted
Shop windows that are labeled "Jude" to indicate that it is a Jewish-owned shop

Mass Jewish book burnings and Nazi salutes

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 Communist, 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 Lagerfuhrer 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 Totnkopfverbande
- an SS unit. Total organisation of prisoners' lives, backed up wit 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 Restortion of the Professional Civil Service and the law establishing 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, pssed 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 rbid anti-Semitic paper, Der Sturmer.

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.