Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  Cobbling together money from savings, loans from friends, and the sale of valuables, a deflated Heinrich managed to come up with about three thousand marks to pay for transatlantic passage for the seven of them, as well as train tickets to get them to the port in France. He paid extra to ship some well-worn furnishings to America with them. Nothing new or terribly valuable, though; the Nazis wouldn’t allow it. At the start of Hitler’s reign, the Nazis were so eager to force the Jews out of Germany that they had allowed them to leave with much of their money and property. But those days were gone. Now the Nazis were confiscating virtually everything of value they could grab: bank accounts, storefronts and businesses, artwork, jewelry, and generations’ worth of family heirlooms and valuables, forcing the Jews out with little more than the clothes they were wearing.

  Leaders of the synagogue in Freiburg, the one that Heinrich’s father had helped found, bid farewell to Heinrich, thanked him for all his work, and gave him a book in German, History of the Baden Jews—now an endangered species under Nazi rule. Freddy himself insisted on working at the auto shop right up until the day of their departure, making sure to get a letter of reference from his boss before he left. On a mild winter’s day in March of 1938, he put on his best suit and tie, stashed fifty marks in his pocket, and posed for a last family portrait before leaving the home that his grandfather had bought decades before. For the camera, Heinrich mustered a steely grin. Behind him, peering between his mother and father, was sixteen-year-old Freddy, now a hair taller than his father. His smile wasn’t quite as broad as usual, but it was there. He was going to America. And finally, he thought, he could leave the Nazis behind.

  2

  * * *

  Enemy Alien

  BROOKLYN

  March 1938

  As the SS Manhattan sailed past the Statue of Liberty and docked in New York’s bustling harbor, Freddy couldn’t set foot on American soil fast enough. It had been a wrenching few weeks of global hopscotch for him and his family as they traversed three ports and four countries—more than four thousand miles by land and sea, as well as an ocean of swirling emotions.

  His teenage exuberance was evident as the family piled into a couple of large yellow taxicabs at Pier 52 for the last leg of the journey to their new home in Brooklyn. He had never seen automobiles like these on the cobblestone streets of home. As Freddy eagerly pulled the cab door closed behind him, he accidentally shut it on the cabbie’s hand. “Stupid son-of-a-bitch!” the man yelled at him. Freddy didn’t know what the phrase meant; his English teachers at school in Freiburg had never taught him words like that, but he could tell from the cabbie’s tone that he had been cussed out. He was going to have to study up on American slang in his new country.

  Freddy laughed off the episode, unperturbed as usual. He figured the rude reception was a small price to pay for the safety and solace that America promised his family. He was happy just to be out of Germany. Every week seemed to bring more frightening news of Hitler’s latest affront, making it clear how lucky he and his family had been to get out when they did. His mother was right. This was 1938, the “fateful year,” as one Nazi document would call the Reich’s escalating oppression of Jews at the time. If they had waited much longer, they might not have made it out at all.

  Indeed, even as they had packed up the family home and begun their journey, they couldn’t be certain of their fate. Freedom seemed elusive as they headed west by train through the Black Forest’s rugged frontier toward the Rhine River and on to the French border. The Nazi border guards didn’t need a reason to rough them up on their way out, or to seize the few valuables they had with them; hassling the Jews as they fled Germany had become blood sport for the Nazis.

  Freddy and his family had waited anxiously with papers in hand at the border crossing to leave their homeland for France. The boy stood motionless as the Nazi guard eyed the family’s travel papers and clawed through their belongings, finally letting them cross without incident. Freddy let out a sigh. They were out. He hadn’t wanted to leave Germany at first, not when his father was struggling so mightily to hold on to all that the family had, but once they had crossed the border, he was glad to leave it behind.

  Then it was off to the port city of Le Havre in France’s Normandy region to board the SS Manhattan. Just two years earlier, the same stately ocean liner had ferried more than three hundred American athletes to compete at the Olympic Games in Berlin. Now the ship was crammed with Jews from Germany, Austria, and beyond, fellow refugees fleeing the Führer. A butcher from outside Heidelberg, a merchant from Stuttgart, a baker from Budapest, a clerk from Vienna, a rabbi from Palestine: all designated “Hebrew” on the ship’s passenger manifest. It was a rough crossing, so rough that rumors flowed back to the Jews in Freiburg that Heinrich and his family had perished en route to America. Grim news from the continent they had left behind, meanwhile, followed Freddy and his family relentlessly out to sea. Days after his family set sail came reports that Hitler’s troops had invaded Austria with little opposition. Hitler, the onetime Austrian corporal, was coming home, and his imperial ambitions were now plain for the world to see.

  Freddy could see the pain in his parents’ eyes as they heard the news. To them, the threat posed by the Nazis was obvious, but the world seemed indifferent. On the very day they arrived in America, the front page of the New York Times carried a largely stenographic account of a speech by Hitler, with the German dictator declaring that the Nazis’ invasion of Austria had “saved many lives.”

  The mere thought of his native land now riled Freddy. He and his family had barely settled into their cramped new home near Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, not far from the famed ballpark at Ebbets Field where the hapless Dodgers played, when he made a defining decision. Named Friedrich at birth, he had gone by “Fritz” his whole childhood, but he would no longer answer to it. It was the puckish nickname of Prussian kings and emperors, and it sounded too German for his tastes; he wanted nothing to do with it. From now on he was “Fred,” or “Freddy” to his friends. That sounded American, which was what he now considered himself. Likewise, his father abandoned “Heinrich” in favor of “Henry,” and father and son vowed never to speak German in the house again. Their new language was English, complete with all the gruff slang the young man picked up on the street from assorted cabbies and street vendors. The Germans had forsaken them, and Freddy was now determined to forsake Germany as well.

  His brother, Julius, ever the studious one, enrolled in college in New York soon after their arrival. Freddy had no interest in going back to school. Forgoing a high school degree for a vocation wasn’t a difficult decision for him. He wanted to keep working on automobiles, and anyway, the family was desperate for money. American immigration authorities had made clear that they didn’t want any newly arrived refugees living on the public dole. In Germany, the Mayers had lived the genteel life of a merchant’s family, but now Heinrich—Henry—was scrambling just to come up with rent money. The once-successful businessman doubled up on jobs, working as a dishwasher and a night watchman; to save a nickel in bus fare, he would trudge by foot across the last long stretch of bridge over the bay to Rockaway to scrub dishes. It was a desolate walk. He didn’t complain, not in front of the children. He had escaped the Nazis, which was more than many Jews in Germany could say. But he was a broken man; he considered himself a “nobody”—a Niemand—in his new homeland. As badly as he wanted to abandon the German language, at fifty he found it difficult to learn English, and he struggled to fit into this strange new land of FDR, Fred Astaire, and Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. The Nazis had robbed him of both his past and his future, creating “impossible circumstances” for him and the country’s Jews, he said. Not only had he left his home and his family business in Germany, he had left his identity as well.

  With a teenager’s adventurous spirit, Freddy had a much easier time of it. The reference letter from his former German Ford employer helped him quickly find work fixing and painting c
ars in Brooklyn. He was a curiosity at the auto shop, speaking English with a combination of German and British accents, just as his teachers in Freiburg had taught him; the other mechanics found his speech and mannerisms amusing. Freddy laughed along with them. When he told them stories of the old country, they were surprised to hear that Germany had modern-day innovations like movies and cars. They thought of it as a backward place, the country that had lost the last big war.

  But there was one topic he talked about only rarely: being a Jew. Once, overhearing one of his bosses at the shop slurring a Jewish customer, he confronted him, just as he had the student who had used an anti-Semitic epithet against him at school in Freiburg, and quit on the spot. But for the most part he didn’t advertise his religion. He wanted to blend into Brooklyn life. Generations of Jews and other Ellis Island immigrants before him had formed their own separate enclaves in America, transplanting the roots of ethnic and religious identity from the homeland to their new country. Freddy had no interest in that. He wanted to become what he would later describe as “the perfect American.”

  That included practicing American-style capitalism. He found his skills as a German-trained diesel mechanic in high demand in New York City, as automobiles became the new mode of transportation, and he parlayed one job into another, then another. As a mechanic, as a cabbie, as an auto painter; anything that paid the bills. If on a Friday he thought his boss wasn’t paying him enough, he would quit and by Monday find a better gig that paid him a dollar more. He cycled through dozens of jobs in his first year or so in New York—too many to count—with each earning more than the last. He knew that his father needed every dollar.

  But even as Freddy followed the classic path of the American immigrant, the Third Reich continued to shadow him. Eight months after his arrival, in November 1938, came the most jarring news yet from Nazi Germany. Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass,” brought a terror unlike anything the Jews remaining in the country, some four hundred thousand of them, had ever experienced. In an orgy of violence that was carefully planned by the Reich’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, to look spontaneous, Nazis and German rioters burned more than a thousand synagogues, destroyed countless Jewish businesses and storefronts, killed nearly one hundred Jews, and began imprisoning tens of thousands more in camps.

  The horrific reports from Germany reached Freddy and his family in fragments, like the shards of broken glass in the aftermath of the attacks themselves. The frustration of not knowing what was happening in their homeland compounded the pain of the rampage itself. Why wasn’t the vaunted American press telling the world more about the ravages of Hitler’s regime? Freddy wanted to know. Why was the world not rising up against Hitler and the Nazis?

  He could only wonder what had happened to the Jews who had stayed behind in Freiburg, friends and neighbors who hadn’t been lucky enough to get out. What had become of the stately home where he had grown up, or of the Jewish cemetery where his grandparents were buried? He and his family had no way of knowing that Nazi mobs in Freiburg had destroyed the synagogue where he had celebrated his bar mitzvah; or that the mobs had looted and burned what was left of the city’s Jewish businesses; or that the Nazi authorities had begun rounding up virtually all the remaining Jews in town to send them to near-certain deaths at concentration camps.

  But improbably, the violent rampaging in Freiburg had yielded a glimmer of hope as well: the silver breastplate from the synagogue’s holy Torah had survived the night of destruction, along with a pair of ornate wooden doors that had welcomed worshipers. Undetected in the bedlam of Kristallnacht, congregants had somehow managed to remove the sacred artifacts and hide them underground for safekeeping. If that wasn’t a sign of resilience, what was?

  Hitler seemed unstoppable to Freddy and his family as they followed the dire news out of Europe from afar. Months later, in the summer of 1939, the Nazis and the Russians signed their notorious “nonaggression” pact. “Strange bedfellows,” his father observed when he heard about the agreement. “It’ll make a hell of a marriage.” No longer fearing Soviet intervention, Hitler invaded Poland barely a week later, with a massive attack force of 1.5 million smashing through the borders by land and sky. “Here’s the next world war,” his father told Freddy as they listened anxiously to the radio reports. Britain and France declared war on the Nazis two days later, and World War II had begun.

  For now, however, it was a war for Europe to fight, not America. The strains of “America First” isolationism ran deep in the United States, fueled by the ugly strains of anti-Semitism from influential Americans like aviator Charles Lindbergh and auto magnate Henry Ford, each of whom accepted high-profile honors from Hitler, even as his policies grew more oppressive. Freddy had always adored Ford automobiles, whether he was tuning one up in Brooklyn or swiping his father’s in Germany. He was unaware of the long-running vitriol of the company’s famous founder, whose Michigan newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, had published a series called “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” in a remarkable ninety-one consecutive issues beginning in 1920. On his seventy-fifth birthday, in 1938, Henry Ford beamed as a German diplomat pinned a golden cross with four small swastikas on his breast pocket, the first American to receive a medal created by Hitler himself to honor “distinguished foreigners.”

  Colonel Lindbergh, for his part, denounced “the Jewish groups” in America in 1941 for dangerously “agitating for war” against the Nazis. Freddy bristled when he heard such nonsense. The Jews were trying to survive a war, not start one. There were a few like-minded people among the Washington power-brokers who mattered most, but not many. Harold Ickes, FDR’s longtime cabinet member, called out Lindbergh and Ford by name repeatedly—both for their “unworthy words” of isolationism and for their proud acceptance of medals from a “ruthless dictator who is . . . robbing and torturing thousands of fellow human beings.”

  FDR himself came to see war as inevitable against the Nazis and their menacing Axis partners, Italy and Japan, but short of a clear provocation he seemed determined to stay out of the growing conflict as long as possible. Even when a Nazi submarine torpedoed an American navy destroyer ship near Iceland in October 1941, killing eleven sailors, Roosevelt held his fire, and America waited.

  The inevitable came seven weeks later, on December 7, 1941, as the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor brought America to war. It was a Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn when Freddy heard the news. Flooded with rage, he wanted to run down to the army recruiting station that very day to enlist, but since it was a Sunday, the office was closed. The next day, he was among the first swarm of young men at the recruitment office on Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan. He could see the Statue of Liberty off in the distance, the reflection cascading off the water. Lady Liberty had ushered him into the country three years earlier when he fled Nazi Germany, and now she was beckoning him once again—this time to fight for his new homeland. Thousands of gung-ho recruits around New York had the same idea. All anyone in line at the recruitment office could talk about was Pearl Harbor, and many of the recruits spoke eagerly of shipping out to the Pacific to “fight the Japs.” Freddy had a different agenda. Although the United States would not officially declare war against Germany until four days after the Japanese attack, he was already bristling to bring the fight to his old countrymen—the Nazis.

  He could almost imagine himself in a fighter plane over Europe, or at least working on fighter plane engines, as he handed over his papers to the military recruiters that day.

  Name: Friedrich Mayer . . . . Age: 20 years old . . . . Height: 5’7” . . . Residence: 651 East Fifth Street, Brooklyn, N.Y. . . . Place of Birth: Freiburg, Germany.

  The formal response stunned Freddy: Rejected.

  Some of the other would-be military recruits were turned away for being too heavy, or too sickly, or too old, or having too many children at home to support. Freddy—young, fit, and eager—had a different defect: he was considered an “enemy alien.�
�� As a German immigrant, he was banned from enlisting because the government feared he might work to assist the other side. He could turn out to be a German spy, or some sort of anti-American saboteur, the thinking went. No matter that he was a German Jew. He and his family had fled the Nazis, and yet now his adopted country thought he might be one of them. Freddy was dumbstruck. It seemed crazy. In Germany he was targeted for being a Jew. In America he was targeted for being a German. Which was it? No one standing in line in that recruiting office hated Hitler and the Nazis more than Freddy, and no one knew them better than he did. Yet here he was being denied the chance to fight them, just as America was going to war.

  Freddy trudged home, disappointed but resigned to the decision. What else could he do? He didn’t make the rules.

  Up until then, Freddy had heard nothing about the urgent edicts issued by FDR’s War Department on the subject of “enemy aliens.” But in Washington, outsize fears of a possible “Fifth Column”—a supposed stealth force of 1.1 million American residents of German, Italian, and Japanese descent who officials worried might aid the enemy—were driving a crackdown on civil liberties unlike anything seen before in times of war or peace. Japanese Americans bore the worst of it, with more than 110,000 ultimately forced into internment camps on orders from President Roosevelt. But hundreds of thousands of Americans of German and Italian heritage, including many born in the United States, were targeted as well, not only prohibited from serving in the US military but sometimes arrested, put on watch lists, restricted in their travel, or forced to turn over their cameras, radio transmitters, and guns. So widespread were fears of a Fifth Column incursion that some young students of German American heritage were even barred from participating in a spelling bee.

  Very few actual cases emerged of foreign-born Americans plotting acts of sabotage against the United States, and within months Washington began easing some of the more severe restrictions, including the ban on military service. Officials came to realize that they would need every able-bodied man they could find, not to mention women, in this new world war. But it was Julius, as the older of the two Mayer brothers, who got the first notice from the draft board to appear for duty, in the fall of 1942. Freddy saw his chance. Julius was close to finishing college by then, and through a bit of fast talking, Freddy appealed to the draft board to let him take his brother’s place, so that Julius could get his academic degree as planned.