1938 (45 page)

The Nazi leaders might have found solace in the news from Memelland, where local elections on December 14 showed as much as 87.1 percent in favor of a return to Germany. In Britain, a debate in the House of Lords revealed the extent of Jewish immigration to date. There was concern about the transit of refugees and children in particular. Tallies were limited by the number of voluntary workers prepared to deal with them. Some 15,000 to 16,000 had landed in Britain, but 4,000 to 5,000 had left again. There were around 1,000 children under eighteen who were granted right of asylum. Equally, people over the age of sixty were allowed to stay. There was evidence of a softer attitude: Refugees were allowed to apply for visas in Britain and remain there for two years without papers, provided they had some means of support. Those between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five could submit to further training with a view to finding work in another country. Employment was only to be granted in the case of no Briton wanting to do the work.

The United States had already taken in 40,000; there were 45,000 German refugees in France, 25,000 in Holland (8,000 had already moved on), and 100,000 in Czechoslovakia. It was not apparent at the time, but all those remaining on the Continent were at great risk. There were even 94 Austrian refugees in Albania. The British government was exerting pressure on the colonies to except more immigrants. The Australian government was still claiming it would take 15,000. One S. C. Leslie of the Gas, Light and Coke Company was to go to Austria to interview candidates to work in Australia on December 28. Tanganyika and British Guiana were seen as good bets.

At the same time the Italian government was turning up the heat: on December 7 Jewish refugees were told they had until March 12 to leave, or face imprisonment. The Dutch closed their borders to Jews on December 17, but sent no children back if they had been placed in the carriages by their parents. The Swiss, too, were being increasingly pettifogging in their attitude to the tide of refugees, many of whom had made their way over the green border from the Austrian Vorarlberg. On December 17 the Swiss tally was estimated to be between 10,000 and 12,000. “Permission to enter Switzerland will be given to near relatives of Swiss if in danger and if their onward journey is certain within a reasonable time. Elderly persons will be admitted and arrangements are being made to take about 300 children temporarily.” That very day Hitler issued a
Führerbefehl
: rump Czechoslovakia was to be liquidated as quickly as possible.

The British Legation in Berne reported directly to Foreign Secretary Halifax. Jews required visas to enter Switzerland, in direct response to the Austrians: “In the course of July there was a great influx of Austrian Jews, mainly from Vienna.” The German attitude was largely one of “good riddance.” “German frontier authorities . . . facilitated this illegal crossing of the Swiss frontier. This had, however, been stopped, on diplomatic representations being made to the German government.” The policy now was to send Jews who had entered illegally back. Germans had no need of visas to cross the frontier: “The federal government has entered into communication with the German government. The latter announce that all passports would in future bear a special sign (a large J).” Since October 4, German non-Aryans had to possess a visa, too, so only racially pure Germans were allowed to enter Switzerland freely.

It was not just the Jews that were feeling the rough end of the stick. On December 8 Himmler decided he would clamp down on gypsies, issuing a “Decree for the Struggle against the Gypsy Plague.” Henceforth gypsies were to be issued with papers for easier identification: brown for purebred, light blue for
Mischlinge
, and grey for Aryan nomads. The aim was to prevent any congress between gypsies and Aryan folk. The text darkly hints at the “final solution of the gypsy problem.”

The knives were also out for the Church. A cartoon in
Der Stürmer
showed a priest pelting the regime with muck, but succeeding only in fouling the Cross. For extreme Nazis, the SS, and members of Himmler’s circle, Christmas was already a dead letter anyway.
Stürmer
mocked the idea of the Feast of Christmas in the ruins of Bethlehem and showed Father Christmas with a sack of Jews that no one wanted in their stockings. The Nazis wanted Germans to celebrate the winter solstice on the 21st instead.

On December 10 the Nazis once again showed their fangs toward the churches. The singing of carols and school Christmas concerts were banned that year. The Christmas tree—being German—was permissible, but only when shorn of its Christian fetters. Klemperer noted that the newspapers had been muzzled for the first time. Christ had been banished from Christmas. The feast celebrated the great German soul, the rebirth of the light, and the reawakening of the German Reich. “The Jew Jesus, everything spiritual as well as anything generally human has been thrown out.” All traditions were under attack, and that included those held by conservative-minded Germans. On December 21 Keitel emitted an ukase that no officers might congratulate the ex-kaiser on his eightieth birthday. “This was signed by a former Imperial officer,” wrote Groscurth. “God forbid! And my, how little certain of itself this regime is.”

The execution laid on in Buchenwald that Yuletide was not just a warning—it was a gift. Peter Forster had managed the unimaginable: He had escaped from the camp, killed a guard, and crossed the Czech border, but the Czechs had handed him back. His execution was to be a lesson to them all. As was the Nazi custom, the senior prisoner performed the role of executioner. The entire camp was assembled by night. Spotlights lit up the scaffold, as well as the prisoners. No one was allowed to avert his sight. The executioner appeared before the prisoner, twisting the rope. To what end they couldn’t say.

Then Forster was strung up, but when this happened, the senior prisoner jumped up and grasped him by the knees. The extra weight broke Forster’s neck. The executioner jumped down, and it was then that the spectators realized why the rope had been twisted: The corpse proceeded to spin faster and faster on the rope lit up by the spotlights. It was a grotesque scene. Only then were the men allowed to return to their huts. A few days later, guards discovered that alcohol had been smuggled into the camp for a New Year’s party. Fifty men were made an example. They were stripped, tied to wooden horses, and beaten until the flesh hung from their backs. A drunken Commandant Rödl meandered around, and the Buchenwald band was on hand to play the camp song.

Many of the men and women mentioned in these pages died violent deaths. The Nazis either were killed in action, committed suicide, or were hanged after the war. Most of those who resisted their power suffered a similar fate in the last stages of the conflict. Those Jews who failed to leave mainland Europe generally perished as well. Fred Richter’s later history makes sad reading. He appeared before a magistrate at the Landgericht on January 20, 1939. He seems to have successfully argued that he was only a messenger and had no idea what he was involved in. He later complained that the magistrate had been rough with him, and he recanted everything he said. He had no idea that espionage was involved.

On September 15, 1939, he was tried before the notorious Peoples’ Court in Berlin. Tucek was naturally a model witness. Kriminalrat Preiss appeared for the prosecution: He had interrogated Kendrick and was able to produce his testimony. Preiss informed the court that Richter had tried on several occasions to interest Kendrick in agents. The court concluded that Richter had been lying. Kendrick’s testimony was in keeping with Tucek’s. Richter was therefore convicted of acting as an accomplice to Kendrick. He was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment and to pay a fine of 1,000 RM for wasting the court’s time. He was released into captivity in Austria. He remained in Stein prison until June 15, 1942. He wrote his last letter to Maud from there in May that year, before he was moved to Marburg in present-day Slovenia; in September that year he was moved to Graz. He left Graz in February 1943 for Auschwitz, dying at 8:22 AM the day after his arrival, allegedly from heart disease. He had not survived the infamous ramp at the railway siding.

Tucek appears to have been working for the Gestapo. A man of that name was active in tracking down and torturing Austrian Communists in Paris during the war, and the French requested his extradition once he had been spotted on the streets of Vienna. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment by a military court in Paris.

The pogrom of November 9–10 had destroyed Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement in Germany. The shock felt by many Britons after the events of the Reichskristallnacht made it untenable. It was now quite clear that Hitler would push for war and that dangling trifles at him, such as the return of the German colonies, would not satisfy him in the long run. Although “J’aime Berlin” (as some were now calling Chamberlain) was unaware of it then, Hitler had already given instructions to OKH on October 21 to draw up plans for the invasion both of rump Czechoslovakia and Memelland.

Foreign boycotts of German goods were slowly strangling the regime. The new enemy was the “Jewish State”—the United States, which for Hitler meant “world Jewry.” If the United States were to stop importing German goods, then Germany would institute a policy of expansion to the east. It would mean the conquest of
Lebensraum
. That the die was cast is evident from Hitler’s speech in the Reichstag of January 30, 1939: “I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the bolshevisation of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” In Goebbels’s interpretation, the two-and-a-half-hour speech was a “tough polemic against America.” Others have seen the “prophecy” as a green light to his hard-line supporters, who would begin to implement the “Final Solution” in the last weeks of 1941.

ON CHRISTMAS DAY, Kurt von Schuschnigg was still in the Metropole, but he had the solace of a small radio furnished after Himmler’s visit on December 11. He could listen to the Coronation Mass from the Steffl. He took solace in the
Agnus Dei
. On December 31, 1938, Austrian passports became invalid. Now Austrians had to seek new papers and face fresh humiliations along the way. On December 30, Helmuth Groscurth recorded a story about Goebbels, who had attempted to rape a young actress in Schwanenwerder. She was able to flee with the help of her fiancé. The Gestapo had learned of the incident and sent the girl a bunch of flowers with the message: “for the brave little lady.” This may have explained the minister’s mood as he donned his pajamas that night: “and so to bed. A new year! It is spine-chilling! The best thing to do would be to hang myself.”

AFTERWORD

T
he history of Central Europe in 1938 is, to some extent, the history of my own family. That year my maternal grandfather’s family scattered to the four winds. The Zirners and the Zwiebacks had come to Vienna from Baja and Bonyhad in Hungary two generations before, when, following defeat in the Austro-Prussian War, the emperor finally allowed Jews to settle in the capital. The cloth merchant Ludwig Zwieback promptly bought the stock exchange building housed in the old Palais Arnstein-Pereira in the Weihburggasse and opened a department store around the corner in the Kärntnerstrasse. His brothers opened a more down-market version in the Mariahilferstrasse. When Ludwig died at his home on the Morzinplatz in 1906, he left each of his three daughters a third share in a fortune of some 2.2 million gold crowns, at a time when a genteel retirement might have been eked out on 3,000 a year.

The daughters were my great-grandmother Gisela; Ella, who inherited the business; and Malwine, who married the lawyer Josef Kranz. My great-grandmother married Marton Zirner, who had succeeded his father, Max, as court jeweler. They had four children: Josef, Katharina, Walther, and Felix. Josef died an “aspirant” in the K & K dragoons near Warsaw in 1915. In civilian life he had been co-répétiteur in the opera houses in Hamburg and Breslau, having abandoned the law for music. He was hoping to become a conductor.

On March 11, 1938, Great-Uncle Josef’s wife, Gina Kaus, the feminist novelist and later screenwriter, was the first of my relatives to make the decision to run. She was another sparkling example of old Viennese Jewry: the half-sister of Princess Stephanie zu Hohenlohe, Hitler’s Jewish spy. Her books had been burned in Berlin in 1933, and she had made her way home to Vienna. Referring in her autobiography to the flames that engulfed the works of Heine, Thomas Mann, and Sigmund Freud, she said, “Never have I been in such good company.”

After Josef’s death Great-Aunt Gina married the Trieste-born Gentile Otto Kaus, but that marriage ended in separation. She left Vienna in 1938 with her latest lover, and third and last husband, Eddy Frischauer, the brother of the journalist and writer Willi, who was already based in Britain. As Kaus’s wife, she had an Italian passport. When they were detrained in Feldkirch in the Vorarlberg and asked to show their papers, Frischauer flourished his baptismal certificate, prudently issued to him shortly after his birth by his Catholic, assimilated Jewish parents. It worked. He and Gina found safety in Switzerland. His parents, however, were gassed. Gina eventually started a new career in Hollywood. She wrote no more novels, however: She had lost her language and her audience in Germany. She died in Los Angeles at age ninety-two.