Broken Lives

by Konrad H Jarausch

  FIGHTING FASCISM

  While the majority of the Reich’s victims submitted dejectedly to their fate, courageous minorities actively fought against Hitler and contributed to the defeat of the Nazis. Political opponents and prominent Weimar politicians such as Ernst Reuter went into exile in Prague, Paris, or London to continue the struggle from the outside. Inside the Third Reich, members of the Left such as Erich Honecker carried on a campaign of subversion, while some officers and members of the elite, such as Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, sought to topple the NS dictatorship in July 1944. For Jews such as Heinz Meyerstein, the key aim was to survive in the underground and escape to Palestine in order to foil Himmler’s extermination plans. While some of those who managed to emigrate in time then participated in anti-Fascist propaganda, others, such as Tom Angress, actually joined the Allied forces and put their lives on the line.63 Since Nazi opponents were the exceptions rather than the rule, traces of their resistance are harder to find in the autobiographies of ordinary Germans.

  One important element of the struggle against the Nazis was the critical publicity by exiled authors that contradicted the positive image of the Third Reich spread abroad by its defenders. The German-language programs of the BBC provided news untainted by Goebbels’ propaganda apparatus and were eagerly listened to by people who were critical of the Nazis. One source of such information was the gentile lawyer and journalist Raimund Pretzel, who was forced to emigrate to Great Britain in 1939 because his Jewish wife was expecting a child. (This constituted “race defilement” according to the Nuremberg Laws.) Having learned English and adopted the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, he published a scathing attack in 1941 called Germany—Jekyll and Hyde, based on his own negative experiences. His call “to mount all possible forms of resistance against Hitler without condemning the country as a whole” resonated with many skeptical Germans, even if such exposés largely ignored the fate of the Jews.64

  The political émigrés had greater difficulties in spreading their oppositional message to the German population due to the Gestapo’s rigorous suppression of any hint of communication and resistance. Communists such as Heinz Zöger were surprised by the swiftness of the Nazi assault, which disrupted their underground organization time and again so that messages from the Comintern in Moscow rarely reached the party members. The Social Democratic leadership fled to Prague, where it set up a Social Democratic Party in Exile (SOPADE) that tried to establish a network of correspondents to report on the mood of the working class. But the cooperation between both leftist parties in a popular front came too late and their hope for a proletarian uprising continued to be disappointed due to Hitler’s apparent successes. Activist youths such as Willy Brandt were therefore forced to flee the country lest they be arrested and carry on the fight from exile in Norway. Lacking such organization, bourgeois politicians could only go into “inner emigration” and wait for a better day.65

  As a result, attempts at internal resistance against the dictatorship by Communist and Jewish youths were doomed to failure. As the daughter of a persecuted Communist, Gertrud Koch “could not just watch [war and injustice] without doing something.” In Cologne, she found a like-minded group of “Edelweiß pirates” who believed “a worse misfortune than Hitler cannot happen.” Hiking together, they decided to produce anti-Nazi flyers with slogans such as “Let’s finally get rid of the brown horde.” When caught distributing leaflets at the train station, they were brutally punished. In Berlin, the young Jew Herbert Baum, a forced laborer in a Siemens plant, gathered a circle of Jewish and Communist friends who also criticized the Nazi repression and debated how to bring about a socialist future. In May 1942, the group set fire to an anti-Communist and anti-Semitic propaganda exhibition about the Soviet Union prepared by Joseph Goebbels. But the Gestapo quickly caught the dissidents and stamped out any opposition before it could develop.66

  The actual political and military resistance was an elite affair, considered treasonous by most Germans during a life-and-death struggle. Even while Hitler was successful, conservative circles disliked the crudeness of his style, and some generals, such as chief of staff Ludwig Beck, worried about the coming war. When military fortunes turned in 1942, it was no longer enough to make Nazi jokes or to criticize obnoxious policies. Action was called for. A circle of officials, diplomats, soldiers, pastors, and trade union leaders coalesced around Leipzig’s mayor, Carl Goerdeler, determined to overthrow the Nazi dictatorship. These men were motivated by the looming defeat and reports of anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic atrocities in the East and sought to restore Germany’s honor. Unfortunately, the officers’ July 20, 1944 plot failed as had several previous attempts; the bomb placed in Hitler’s Eastern headquarters did not kill him. Even if the political ideas of the resistance were somewhat authoritarian, the willingness of these men and women to risk their lives to restore humane values still commands respect.67

  Sure of popular support for harsh penalties, the Nazis unleashed an unprecedented burst of violence in retribution for the putsch. Its military leaders, including Claus von Stauffenberg, Henning von Treskow, and Hans Oster, were summarily shot in the army headquarters at the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin. The Gestapo then hunted down the supporting political network, ranging from the members of the shadow cabinet to mere sympathizers of the conspirators. The persecution extended to these people’s family members and others who were barely involved, such as the father of later television journalist Wibke Bruhns. As chief prosecutor of the People’s Court, the Nazi fanatic Roland Freisler had a field day accusing the resistors of treasonous betrayal of their oath to the Führer. The killing spree continued into April 1945, costing the lives of such upright men as Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer.68 With the murder of hundreds of regime opponents and the incarceration of thousands of others, this purge severely damaged the Prusso-German elite and impaired postwar rebuilding.

  More successful were some individuals’ efforts to escape Nazi murder through illegal flight into countries where they would be safe. It took exceptional courage, acting ability, and a support network to get away. Born in Göttingen in 1920, mechanic’s apprentice Heinz Jehuda Meyerstein was imprisoned in Dachau in 1938. After his release a few months later, he fled to Holland where he worked in a Jewish Werkdorp, an agricultural labor camp, in preparation for emigration. But when Nazi raids got too dangerous in 1942, he volunteered for war production with fake papers as a Dutch laborer in the Ruhr Basin. When the Gestapo found out, he returned illegally to occupied Holland and then began to work with false Wehrmacht documents in France for the Organisation Todt, hoping to get to Spain. After a failed first attempt and a brief stint with the French resistance, Meyerstein and a group of comrades finally succeeded with immense effort in crossing the snow-covered Pyrenees in early March 1944. “Before him lay freedom and the way to Eretz Israel.”69

  For those Jews fortunate enough to escape the Nazis’ clutches, the next challenge was to complete their odyssey by finding a place where they could remain more or less permanently. If they had, like the Marlens family, merely fled to a neighboring country such as France, they had to get a visa to someplace beyond the reach of the SS. A favorite transition point was Cuba, where the Fröhlichs waited in anxious suspense for a couple of years until they were admitted to the United States. Another safe haven was Great Britain, which increased its refugee quota to fifty-five thousand individuals in the hope that they would, like Gerhard Weinberg’s family, merely pass through on their way to North America. By interning all people with a German passport, whether Jewish, like the Eycks, or not, the UK made it clear that it preferred to be only a temporary destination. Some refugees had to travel as far as Shanghai in order to reach a safe haven from which they could move to Israel. Forced “to flee from the terrifying Jewish fate to a faraway foreign world,” families were “dispersed over vast distances.”70

  As an act of symbolic rejection of the German past, many refugees also changed their names in order to facilitate int
egration into their new homes. A distant relative who took in Georg Igersheimer and his eight-year-old sister anglicized their last name to Iggers in order to make it sound less German and Jewish. Although he was at first angry at this change of identity, he eventually accepted the transformation, since it made dealing with US authorities easier. Similarly, a cousin of Peter Fröhlich had translated the family name to Gay, because the former was “hard to spell and impossible to pronounce.” Moreover, “he wanted to say farewell, as categorically as he could, to the country of his birth in behalf of the country of his future.” He thereby became Peter Gay, since his “overriding desire was to become a good American.” When confronted by an immigration official, Werner Karl Angress, after some rumination, decided merely to drop his middle name and become “Tom,” which “sounded much more like my new self.”71

  But shedding a German origin was not so easy. The expulsion continued to haunt especially those secular Jews who had been fully integrated before. While children adjusted quickly, adults found that their accents, clothing style, and behavior gave them away. Many refugees to the United States who wished to maintain their lifestyle congregated in immigrant quarters such as Washington Heights in Manhattan, known colloquially as “the Fourth Reich.” In contrast to native-born Americans, the new arrivals remained focused on events in Europe, eagerly following the news and sending letters until replies ceased to come. While some teenagers saw emigration as an exciting adventure, others more socialized in German culture, such as Peter Gay, suffered from rejection, picking fragments of Berlin “from my skin as though I had wallowed among shards of broken glass.” At best, they assumed, like Fritz Stern, “a double life: the German past, ever present, ever ominous, and the American present, immediate, uncertain, but ever promising.”72

  The key difficulty for all refugees was building new lives in constrained circumstances without the resources they had been forced to leave behind. Albert Gompertz recalled, “Naturally, all of us were happy to have arrived in this wonderful country where we immediately felt what it meant to be a free person.” In order not to depend upon charity or relatives, “we all had to find work immediately to support ourselves.” But for middle-class professionals or businessmen who had once employed assistants or servants, obtaining jobs in a strange environment was difficult. Moreover, not being fluent in English made the search for gainful employment frustrating. Penniless refugees were often reduced to accepting menial tasks in the immigrant community for low wages, starting once again from the bottom. The only consolation was having survived, since, as in Gompertz’s case, “mother’s parents and many of their brothers and sisters were later deported by the Nazis and killed in the extermination camps.”73

  For most Jewish families, emigration meant social demotion, and fathers were rarely able to maintain their prior social status. Only established scholars such as Albert Einstein could gain positions in an overcrowded academic job market with the help of aid committees. By contrast, doctors like Fritz Stern’s father had to study hard and retake the medical boards, even if they had already practiced successfully for decades. Lawyers had to learn a whole new legal code and financial system and until then were reduced to lesser jobs like Gerhard Weinberg’s father, an assistant to an accountant, or switched careers entirely like Erich Eyck, who became a popular historian. If they arrived without capital, businessmen such as Leo Gompertz or Gay’s father had to begin as traveling salesmen or accept a lower position such as the metalworks job taken by Iggers senior. Faced with such difficulties, Werner Warmbrunn’s father “committed suicide with lab cyanide—ostensibly over despair over [his] work situation, his inability to perform work that he felt was expected of him.”74

  Surprisingly enough, women turned out to be better able to deal with the status loss and keep their families afloat, even if they had never worked before. Still in Nazi Germany, Lucy Mandelstam’s “mother became the head of the family; without her we would have starved.” In New York, Fritz Stern’s “more robust and cheerful” mother “sought and gradually found work tutoring children and introducing her method for teaching arithmetic at a few private schools.” Erich Eyck’s wife “took over and ran a boarding house”; Georg Iggers’ mother “catered to new arrivals with meals and rooms” as well. Albert Gompertz remembered that “my mother managed to find work right away by sewing evening bags at home (although she had really never done such work) and was paid by the piece.” Other former society ladies resorted to cleaning and washing in order to put food on the table.75 The refugee women cultivated social relationships with other exiles, immigrant friends, and new American acquaintances.

  It went without saying that older teenagers also had to work in order to contribute to their families’ meager budgets. Since he had crossed the Atlantic with Gross Breesen friends, Tom Angress found himself doing agricultural labor in Hyde Farmlands, Virginia, which was “pleasant, interesting and sometimes even exciting” in the beginning. Werner Warmbrunn had to pitch in on his sister’s farm in upstate New York before beginning college on a scholarship. Starting out as errand boy in a delicatessen, Albert Gompertz was eventually fortunate enough to get a job in his occupational field, a millinery supply house, for $12 a week. “Everything I earned went towards our support and I was happy to be of help.” Peter Gay had to drop out of high school in Denver and started as a shipping clerk at the Imperial Cap Company before moving up to office work and becoming “a clerk in a wholesale distributor of magazines.” By contrast, his struggling father never quite made it. “Hitler had broken him.”76

  If they wanted to go to college, younger teenagers first had to complete their schooling which had often been broken off in Germany. Few were as fortunate as Franz (renamed Frank) Eyck, who received a scholarship to St. Paul’s School, an elite secondary institution in the United Kingdom, in 1936. Against the wishes of his family, who preferred vocational training for him, Georg Iggers chose the academic track at his high school in Virginia. His superior performance earned him an interest-free loan by a Jewish organization to attend the University of Richmond. Due to his superior German training, Fritz Stern was able to skip his sophomore year in a private New York high school and enter “the small, male undergraduate division of Columbia University” led by Nicholas Murray Butler. In spite of his interrupted schooling, Peter Gay completed his studies at East High School and in 1943 received “a full scholarship to the University of Denver.”77 By opening new cultural doors, this training speeded the Americanization of the young refugees.

  In these institutions, the young Jewish men took a strong stand against Nazi Germany, cheering the Allied war effort. Peter Gay recalled that “all through the war my hatred of Germany and Germans retained this high fever pitch,” and that he justified the bombings from an “imperious hankering for revenge.” Frank Eyck pleaded in a letter to the London Times for understanding for the refugees’ plight: “We shall sacrifice our lives if necessary in the struggle to uphold Western Civilization, remembering the inhuman suffering of those who are so dear to us.” Nonetheless, the “panic, fear, suspicion, and general mistrust of foreigners” plus “a certain amount of anti-Semitism” induced the British to intern thirty thousand people on the Isle of Man. The attack on Pearl Harbor turned Fritz Stern into an “enemy alien,” although he “continued writing or speaking about current affairs” in order to warn Americans of “the lessons of failed democracies.” Like Georg Iggers, he heard rumors about the persecution of Jews, but at the time found mass murder hard to believe.78

  Faced with choosing between “deplorable and senseless” internment or military service, Frank Eyck volunteered for the Royal Army. But the shadow of suspicion allowed him only to serve in the Pioneer Corps, doing heavy physical labor in Britain from 1940 to 1942. After strenuous lobbying, he graduated to the Education Corps for the following two years, where he tried to build morale by explaining “The British Way and Purpose” of the struggle to skeptical troops. These propaganda lectures triggered intense discussions a
bout the meaning of democracy, the appeal of Communism, the truth of stories about Nazi atrocities, and the like. It took until the summer of 1944 for Eyck to use his language and culture skills for psychological warfare through radio monitoring, POW interrogation, and BBC broadcasts, as well as German programs in the Soldatensender Calais intended to “undermine German morale.” He also helped to produce leaflets that persuaded Wehrmacht soldiers to surrender and end the war.

  In the US Army, Albert Gompertz had a more typical military career, although he was fortunate enough to be spared lengthy combat. The young volunteer was inducted in December 1942 and classified as “an interpreter because of my knowledge of the German language.” For the first time, “living with American-born men from all walks of life, I felt like a real American.” Impressed by the enormous resources of the United States, he became a naturalized citizen in May 1943, with full citizenship delayed until his honorable discharge. Trained by interrogating Wehrmacht captives at Fort Hood in Texas, he was shipped to Britain in March 1944 and participated in the D-Day invasion. (“Luckily for us, our troops and our allies had established a solid beachhead by then.”) Thereafter, he was moved from one POW camp to the next, where he was annoyed at the soft treatment of the German prisoners. Though offering to do front-line duty at the Battle of the Bulge, he was sent to Paris instead in order to prepare for the establishment of the occupation government.79