1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  The other bodies that dealt extensively with Jewish Christians were the Swedish Church and the so-called Gildemeester Aktion. Frank van Gheel-Gildemeester was a fifty-seven-year-old Dutch pastor’s son, an idealistic charity worker who wanted to see the Jews settled in the Harrar Province of Ethiopia, where they would have been reunited with Jewish Fellashas. He had been in and out of Vienna for years, working for charities and latterly as a prison visitor for Nazis imprisoned in Stein or at the Corporate State’s concentration camp in Wöllersdorf. They included Rintelen, the Austrian Nazis’ chosen successor to Dollfuss.270 His charitable work had brought him into contact with leading Nazis, making him an ideal front man for a scheme that would benefit Vienna’s Jews. By his own testimony, he had no interest in race or nationality. He was interested only in humanity.

  His activities were not confined to Austria. Catchpool said Gildemeester had been responsible for the release of the pacifist Fritz Küster from Buchenwald. If this is true, he was playing a similar game to Catchpool himself, operating a humanitarian trade, seeking favours in return for looking after German nationalists imprisoned abroad – although Catchpool annoyed the Nazis so much that they locked him up for a while.271

  Gildemeester’s close links with the Nazis in general and Göring and Eichmann in particular led to his being distrusted then and ever since. The organization smacked of a profitable business, hiding ‘under the cloak of charity’.272 There is no evidence that Gildemeester profited from it, but there remains a slight whiff of sulphur about him. Somehow Rintelen’s son-in-law, Erich Rajakowitsch, managed to work his way into the machinery of the Gildemeester Aktion.273 Rajakowitsch was an ‘ambitious Nazi’, and his role was probably to make sure that Gildemeester remained in with those in power.274 Professor D. Cohen of the Dutch Committee for Special Jewish Affairs warned the British Board of Deputies not to trust him.275 The American Quaker Florence Barrow noted that Gildemeester worked ‘closely with the Gestapo’, extorting rich Jews to give their money to the poor. She wondered ‘whether Mr Gildemeester was being “used”’.276

  He was probably just naive. The Zionist Norman Bentwich called him a ‘well-meaning but eccentric Quaker’.277 On his visits to Vienna he stayed in a simple room in the Dom Hotel in the Singerstrasse, close to their offices. He had been involved with the Friends during the First World War, when he had lived in Chicago, and it may well have been the American Friends’ Service Committee that sent him to Vienna in 1918 when he worked for Herbert Hoover. One woman who was employed by him after the Anschluss thought he had been in Vienna during the First World War, and had helped bring undernourished children to Holland.278 Nothing is known about his activities in the twenties and early thirties, but he remained in touch with the Quakers and visited their offices in Berlin in 1938 with a view to cooperation.279

  Willi Perl was also suspicious of Gildemeester at first, but he came to the conclusion that he ‘was most likely genuine, otherwise he wouldn’t help baptized Jews’ who were anathema to Orthodox ones. He came to the conclusion he was ‘a Christian who was truly concerned for all humans’.280 The first test cases for what was to become the Gildemeester Aktion were the Kuffner brothers, Moritz and Stephan, owners of, among other things, the huge brewery in Ottakring. Moritz Kuffner was also a director of the Reitler private bank that was liquidated on 17 March by the lawyers Heinrich Gallop and Pollak. The Kuffners had been imprisoned after the Anschluss. Under the scheme, the Kuffners offered to pay 10 per cent of their total fortune to finance the emigration of poorer Jews. They had, of course, to discharge the other taxes too. That meant 25 per cent emigration tax, another 20 per cent Judenvermögensabgabe (Jewish fortunes forfeit) and any unpaid arrears. If they were lucky they could escape with something under half of their money, but that was rarely the case. Once the Kuffners offered to pay over the required sums they were released and allowed to emigrate. Gildemeester was brought in to be the front man in a scheme that would ultimately bring together between 120 and 180 rich Jews who would hand over similar sums to finance the emigration of poorer Jews. All but one of the rich Jewish families who participated left the Reich in safety.281

  Few banks were interested in acting as trustees for the scheme. They feared that the Nazis would revoke the project and they would lose their money. On 30 May, however, Krentschker & Co. of Graz agreed to take on the business. They charged 3.5 per cent for fortunes over 300,000 RM and 3 per cent for anything below. The lawyers demanded another 1–1.5 per cent. By the time the scheme was wound up, Krentschker had turned over 25.7 million RM of Jewish assets.282 Others earned themselves small fortunes out of the misery of the Jews: an SS-officer called Fritz Kraus made between 1.7 and 1.8 million RM. There was a brisk trade in Gildemeester application forms.

  The charity was based at Wollzeile 7. Arthur Kuffler, the chairman of Mautner textiles, acted as joint chairman along with Gildemeester, the non-Jewish front man. The real power resided in the then office manager, Hermann Fürnberg. The charity had a staff of eleven or twelve. The basis for the Aktion was the so-called Ha’avara Accords, which had allowed German Jews to ship their money out to Palestine after 1933. The drawback with Ha’avara was that it only allowed the big fish through, while the little ones remained caught in the net. The Gildemeester Aktion set out to let the big fish help the little ones. The elimination of the smaller fry through emigration was exactly what Eichmann had foreseen, and the Gildemeester Aktion can only have been good news as far as he was concerned. The advantage for the richer Jews who availed themselves of the Aktion was that it arranged everything for them: passports, visas, preparation for emigration and so on.

  Another area where the Gildemeester charity could help was in releasing Jews from ‘protective custody’ in a concentration camp. A man might be bought out of Dachau for sixty RM. Gildemeester also provided affidavits for emigration to the United States. Altogether they sold 24,500 questionnaires, and 8,378 Jews received grants amounting to 905,936 RM, not including the children who left on the Kindertransporte. Of the 2,675 non-Aryan Christians who left Vienna before 21 October, all seemed to have been sponsored by Gildemeester’s charity. All in all about 30,000 Jews profited.283

  Gildemeester’s more idealistic vision – financing 13,000 plots of land in Harrar Province in Ethiopia – remained on the drawing board. To this end he intended to create a Gildemeester Bank in the City of London. Mussolini, on the other hand, showed no interest in having Germany’s rejected Jews in his new African Empire. When the Germans brought the subject up, he told them he would not part with so much as a square inch of territory, but thought a Jewish homeland might be established in Russia, Brazil or the United States.284

  BAPTISMS

  Not everyone by any means was sympathetic with the Jewish émigrés.285 ‘Some, a few,’ wrote Times correspondent Douglas Reed,

  have had themselves baptized; but they remain Jews. In three Central European capitals that I know the baptism of Jews, since the annexation of Austria, has become an industry. The step is taken in all cynicism, as a business proposition, a means of getting into countries that have banned the admission of Jews, a device to tide over the years until the antisemitic wave subsides again. The Jews joke about it among themselves, and the Jews I know, who talk frankly with me because they know that I understand the racket, joke about it with me. One Jew, discussing it with me, told me of an acquaintance who, to his annoyance, found that he had to pass through a period of instruction in the faith he was about to acquire before he received the coveted baptismal certificate, and how he cut short the priest’s explanation of the immaculate conception with the words ‘Schaun S’, ich glaube Ihnen sämtliche Sachen’ (‘Look here, I believe everything’). This was thought very funny and sent a roar of laughter around the table. In one of the capitals I speak of, several hundred Jews were baptized as Church of England Christians in the summer of 1938, and by a trick they succeeded in pre-dating the baptismal certificates, so that the reason for the conversion should not be too appar
ent. The convert is usually re-converted to the Hebraic faith when the antisemitic period passes.

  These baptized Jews, who have no belief whatever in Christianity, join the community of ‘non-Aryan Christians’ for whom your Church leaders constantly appeal.286

  Streicher’s weekly Der Stürmer ran a cartoon of Jews racing towards a baptismal font – ‘Only if the Jews might live more Jewish lives.’287

  Reed and Streicher naturally overstate the case. Some Jews had been edging towards Christianity for some time. One example was the Viennese Jew Karl Josef Balner, who went over to Catholicism in May 1938 and was baptized by a priest in Erdberg called Franz Brenner. Balner chose to live the life of an U-boot (submarine) rather than emigrate, and during the summer months he inhabited a tomb in the Jewish part of the Central Cemetery. In the winter he was hidden in a monastery by men working for Father Bichlmair’s Pauluswerk charity, which was responsible for Jewish Christians. Balner survived the war.288 Marriages were also a means of getting out. In 1938 there were advertisements in Prague newspapers offering the services of Christian grooms for Jewish brides. Such gallantry did not come free of charge.289

  At the end of March, Eichmann convened a meeting of the most important representatives of Zionist bodies who were still at liberty. He told them that he was going to solve the Jewish problem, but he needed obedience and cooperation. Alois Rothenberg was appointed his collaborator to head a twelve-member Dachverband (umbrella organization) for Palestine.290

  *

  March had been a good month for Hitler: everything was going swimmingly. His plebiscite campaign began with a speech on Königsberg on 25 March. He was going to show the outside world that Germans were the true democrats. Much of his time was spent in Austria. On the 31st, a speech in Frankfurt filled with mystical deism was broadcast over the airwaves. Hitler continued to spice his language with references to the All Highest: ‘I believe that it was also God’s will that from here a boy was to be sent into the Reich, allowed to grow to manhood, and be raised to become the nation’s Führer, that he might lead his homeland into the Reich. There is a divine will, and we are nothing but its tools.’291 Germans remember hearing this speech assembled in the halls of their schools.292

  This messianistic and self-congratulatory tone was music for certain Austrians. The Socialist leader and former Chancellor Karl Renner let it be known on 3 April that he would vote yes in the plebiscite. There is a suggestion that his decision was horsetrading, and that he wished to arrange the release of leading socialists.293 On the other hand, the Austrian socialist had always been in favour of the merger. The Anschluss would end the ‘stray wandering of the Austrian people’. He was not alone in breaking ranks and joining the fellow travellers: ex-President Miklas and Ernst Rüdiger Prince Starhemberg both tested positive.

  On 3 April, Hitler was in the faithful city of Graz in Styria where on 13 March 60–70,000 people had formed a parade to celebrate the Anschluss. Graz was close to the border with Jugoslavia, which had received large areas of Lower Styria in the Versailles settlement. Styrians and Carinthians resented their Slavic neighbours. That very day the Austrian concentration camp at Wöllersdorf, which had been used for Nazis, mysteriously burst into flames. In Berlin, Goebbels gloated: ‘a shameful blot swept from the horizon’.294

  4

  APRIL

  THE FIRST DACHAU TRANSPORT

  By April Jews’ rights had reverted to what they were before 1867, when they were first accorded permission to settle in the Austro-Hungarian capital. In 1868 they had also been granted leave to renounce Judaism. This had been revoked. The Gestapo chief Huber had made it clear that ‘unpleasant’ Jews and ‘above all Jews with criminal records’ would be arrested and sent to Dachau. Jews aged over fifty were not to be sent unless their cases were deemed serious, as they were unlikely to survive the regimen in the camp. The first transport left on 31 March and arrived on the first of the month. It was organized by a Major Herzog, working from a list thought to have been drawn up by a Dr Hackl, an Illegale or Austrian Nazi who had fled the Corporate State and worked for the Gestapo in Berlin.1 It contained 151 persons, the majority of them Gentiles who had loomed large in the Corporate State rather than Jews.2

  After a shower and shave in their prison on the Rossauer Lände, they were transferred to five Black Marias. It slowly dawned on them they were being taken to Dachau. At the West Station there was a cry of ‘Get out, you dogs!’ Guards using rifle butts viciously beat them into the compartments of the train. Some were counselled by a more compassionate policeman: ‘Take off your spectacles, look after your eyes.’3 The train left at around midnight. The brutality was relentless. One man ran on to a guard’s bayonet to put an end to it. From Dachau railway station they were taken in cars to the camp. They arrived in the late forenoon and were received by the commandant with much mockery and disdain, a foretaste of what some would endure for seven years. They were led to the showers again and issued with their striped uniforms before having their heads shaved. When this was over, other, compassionate prisoners appeared with little presents of sausage, jam or butter, treasures extracted from their lockers. The Austrians proved a great attraction to the other prisoners, some of whom had been there since March 1933.4

  Austrians formed over half of the 18,695 men admitted to Dachau in 1938. They were kept apart from the others and dismissed by the guards as ‘lazy, Jew-infested, priest-ridden coffeehouse scum’.5 At one point in the spring of 1938 they were put to work building a perimeter road around the camp. ‘Amongst them were two ambassadors, three ministers, a state secretary, a senior judge, a state prosecutor, the mayor of Vienna, a general, a colonel and three majors, two university professors, some senior police officers, two prominent Viennese lawyers and a number of well-known journalists and authors.’6 According to one of the deportees, this was the ‘Austrian elite’.7

  The extent of the Nazi purge was noticed by one Berliner in the camp: ‘Looking at you one would almost be ashamed to be free.’ There were several leaders of the Fatherland Front, such as the Corporate State’s counterpart to Dr Goebbels, Colonel Walter Adam,i as well as Richard Alexander and Hans von Becker; other political grandees included propaganda man and later Vice-Chancellor of the Second Republic Fritz Bock; Eduard Ludwig, Minister for the Press, responsible for dealing with foreign journalists; Dr Viktor Matejka, who had run the cultural wing of the Christian trades union movement before converting to communism in Dachau; Ludwig Draxler, the former Minister of Finance; the later Chancellors Leopold Figl and Alfons Gorbach; and the future governor of Lower Austria, Josef Reither. Johann Staud ran the Corporate State’s trades unions (he died in Flossenbürg in 1939) and General Baron Karl Werkmann was the last secretary to the Emperor Charles. Baron Theodor Hornborstl was the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Austrian Foreign Office who had tried to drum up support from abroad at the moment the Nazis were gathering at the frontier. There was also the mayor of Vienna, Richard Schmitz.

  Several people were there because of their earlier role in the persecution and suppression of National Socialism. The later minister of justice, Josef Gerö, as public prosecutor had imprisoned Nazis at Wöllersdorf. Dr Robert Hecht was the Secretary of State in the Ministry of Justice who had found the legal apparatus needed to wind up democracy and ban the Nazis. He was also a Jew and committed suicide in Dachau. Dr Eduard Streitmann, who had been an anti-Nazi police commissioner, was sent to Dachau with his son. There was also the head of security in Styria, Colonel Franz Zelburg; the Police General Rudolf Manda; Dr Alois Osio, who had been head of the high court, and naturally handed down impressive sentences to Nazis; and Major Baron Emmanuel Stillfried, who had been the camp commandant at Wöllersdorf.

  There were also the socialists Robert Danneberg and Major Alexander von Eifler, Chief of Staff of the Republican Schutzbund.ii The highest-ranking socialist caught by the Nazis, Danneberg had tried to flee on the night train to Prague on 11 March, but was one of the unlucky ones who were packed off bac
k to Vienna. A Jew, he was killed in Auschwitz in 1942. The socialist leaders Otto Bauer and Karl Seitz got away, but Bauer died in Paris in July. There was also the political informer Theodor Krisshaber, and a communist called Josef Händler who had been in and out of Wöllersdorf for four years and had little fear of Dachau. They joined General Archduke Josef Ferdinand of Habsburg-Lothringen and the two Hohenberg brothers, Max and Ernst, the children of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who had made no secret of their revulsion for Hitler, and had reached Dachau the day before.

  There was a total of sixty full Jews among the 151, including Friedmann, Ehrlichiii and Stricker from the IKG; four members of the Schiffman family, whose premises had been so rigorously plundered on 11 March; and Willy Kurtz, who had been prominent in street combats between the Fatherland Front and the Nazis. The Nazis took particular pleasure in beating him now that he could not hit back. His size made him dangerously noticeable, as did his clothes: his trousers reached to his calves, while his tunic could only be buttoned at the top. He was finished off in Auschwitz in 1942.

  Six of the eight Burstyn brothers were there, who owned a well-known bath-house as well as the Viennese taxis; Dr Wilhelm Blitz, a millionaire prominent in the Pan-German movement; Ludwig Klausner, who ran the Delka chain of shoe shops; the hatter Robert Korff; and the spice-merchant Johann Kotanyi, who hanged himself in the camp.8 Pictures of their ‘healthy’ life in Dachau were shown in Völkische Beobachter to coincide with the opening of the Eternal Jew exhibition in August.9 What the ‘elite’ thought of the inclusion of the Jews has not come down to us but within the camp, we are assured, there was no antisemitism. Others dispute this, and say the greens (criminals) and blacks (antisocials) were as antisemitic as the SS.10