1938: Hitler's Gamble

by MacDonogh, Giles

  On 18 November Göring met members of the Defence Council and explained the parlous state of the nation’s coffers and that there was a fear of renewed inflation.99 The rearmament programme was in itself inflationary as it failed to expand consumer sales. In the New Year the Reichsbank sent Hitler a letter requesting restraint in government spending. Hitler’s response was to sack Schacht, although there may have been other reasons. The national debt had increased threefold since Hitler’s takeover. Autarky prevented Germany from indulging in conventional foreign trade.

  Göring was aware that he was not getting his hands on all the money and that he still lacked buying power abroad. On 14 November Fischböck came to him with the first of several schemes to make the Jews sponsor German exports, an idea that had been aired before Kristallnacht. It came about as a result of a meeting between George Rublee’s wife and the German Air Attaché in London, Wenninger. Wenninger had introduced her to Theo Kordt, which had eventually resulted in a direct channel opening up between Göring and Rublee.100 Once again it was necessary to keep Ribbentrop in the dark, especially as the RAM had got it into his head that Rublee was a Jew. The international boycott was starving Germany of foreign currency.101 The chemical giant IG Farben’s foreign orders were down by 40 per cent, for example. Göring wanted the Jews to be allowed to remain in the export trade: ‘the business point of view must prevail . . . every concession involving ideological principles is possible’.102 Under the scheme, Germany would relieve the richer Jews of 200 million RM and allow them to emigrate; in return, after thirty years Germany would pay 3 per cent to the governments participating in the scheme.103

  The Opposition had a new straw to grasp at. Goerdeler relayed the contents of a speech made by the Minister of State and Vice-President of the Reichsbank, Dr Brinckmann, to an audience of industrialists in Cologne. The news was bleak: all the money sucked out of Austria since the Anschluss was now spent. The luxury and high cost of Party functions and the state were to blame. There was no foreign currency and a dearth of raw materials. The annual state budget needed to be reduced by 6,000 million RM straight away. There was only a short time before Germany suffered complete economic collapse.104 Brinckmann later went insane, although it is not clear whether this resulted from the shambles in the Nazi economy or some other cause.

  Within Germany it was clear that the Nazi state was anything but efficient. A further report by Goerdeler showed that the railway system had broken down because it was being bled in the interests of free transport for Party members, road building, and compulsory contributions to various Party funds. They were short of 3,000 locomotives and 30,000 coaches. Goods from Hamburg to Vienna had to go via Trieste to make use of Italian trains.105 The opportunities for working in the arms industries and in other related trades had led to a huge desertion of the land with drastic results in food production. There had been a 16 per cent drop in the number of farm labourers, which would eventually require migrant labour, chiefly from Poland. It was not just the farms that lacked workers: in the mines of the Ruhr, they were 30,000 men short. Overall Germany needed another million men. The temptation to grab them from elsewhere was obvious.

  On that same 7 November that witnessed Rath’s death, the Daily Express in London ran a story under the headline ‘Wife Appeals for Briton’: ‘Somewhere in a German jail lies a forgotten prisoner – 56-year-old Fred Richter.’ The article alluded to Richter’s past as a jockey. His wife Maud had been imprisoned too, but she had been released after a week. There had been no news of Richter since 13 September.106

  KINDERTRANSPORTE

  Even before Reichskristallnacht there was a growing awareness of the urgency of finding homes for the Jews. At the beginning of November one of the busiest of the Quakers, Howard Elkington, was prepared to stump up £100 ‘to help suitable people to emigrate to Australia’. A month later he was obtaining visas in bulk from the Foreign Office in London.107 Norman Bentwich, too, was keen to explore the chances of upping the quotas for Australia. He also looked into the possibility of sending some to Ceylon. Four hundred Austrian Jews were on the water, ostensibly on their way to Liberia. They had left from Galata in Romania on the steamship Minerva.108

  After the pogrom, parents understood that even if they could not make it themselves, it was imperative to let their children go. On 15 November the leading Zionist Chaim Weizmannvi went to see Neville Chamberlain and asked for action to save them. Weizmann set a figure of 10,000 to be found homes in Britain. Pressure was also put on Malcolm MacDonald, the Minister for the Colonies. It was agreed that a further 5,000 Jews could enter Britain providing they left again within three years.109 The idea of the Kindertransporte had been an informal one at first. It was believed that they should be allowed to recover in lands like Switzerland and Norway before returning to their parents. Jews in Britain were particularly active in arranging the transports. One of these was Wilfred Israel, the model for Gustav Landauer in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin. Israel’s colleague in ‘Youth Aliya’ was Lola Hahn-Warburg. The pro-Zionist MP Josiah Wedgwood also sponsored 222 refugees.110

  One of those who worked for Lola Hahn-Warburg was Diana Hopkinson, another former lover of Adam von Trott. She was attached to the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany. In her book The Incense Tree she describes how the ‘steady stream of Jews who had been trying to leave Germany’ became

  a torrent which almost overwhelmed the organizations who were working for them. In the large blocks of Bloomsbury offices we were invaded by a throng of bewildered and anguished people. We were busy not only interviewing those who had arrived but with correspondence about those who still hoped to escape. We battled with the Home Office for the necessary permits and sought financial guarantors; interviewed English relations and friends. They wrung their hands and wept and offered bribes or threats in their efforts to free those still in Germany or Austria. If one became a little hardened it was only in the attempt to keep one’s balance and help more effectively. One could not forget that the case numbers concealed suffering human beings, but they themselves hated those ‘case’ numbers. None of us knew that a number on their file might save them from a number branded on their body in an extermination camp later.111

  Diana’s office had been issued with a block permit for 10,000 Jewish children, but that was not enough. She and her colleagues could only take twelve from every thirty applicants. ‘I was in despair over the hopeless task of assessing those whose claims were the strongest, trying not to choose the most attractive or the most pathetic looking. I was haunted by the thought of what would happen to those left behind.’112

  Once the children arrived in Britain, Jews were concerned about their retaining their faith. Of the 9,000 children who arrived unaccompanied in Britain between 1933 and 1939, only 1,000 were placed with Jewish foster parents. The British Board of Deputies was at pains to stress that even non-religious children were Jews and that konfessionslos did not generally mean Christian, but rather ‘the parents were not members of the Jewish Kultus Gemeinde, for political reasons or because they wish to avoid paying the taxes of the KG’. As it was, only a small percentage submitted to baptism while in the care of Christian foster parents.113

  In Germany, measures against the Jews were redoubled. On 11 November they were banned from possessing weapons. By the end of the year they were to be excluded from economic and social life, theatres, German schools (15 November) and universities (8 December). The Zionistische Rundschau was closed, and very briefly replaced by the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt. On 16 November they lost the right to serve or wear military uniform. Their driving licences were revoked and their assets, property and jewellery, with the exception of wedding rings, had to be handed in. All Jewish businesses were to close down on 23 November. At the end of the month Victor Klemperer found that he was banned from the library and effectively cut off from new literature.

  In Franconia the Gauleiter, Streicher, decided that the time had come to relieve the Jew
s of all their property. In Fürth the Jews filed in one by one, ceding their rights for a few peppercorns. Some court officers refused to enter the compulsory sales in the land register.114 Jews were now banned from cafés and restaurants. One victim was the writer and former ladies’ man John Höxter, who was wont to cadge money in the ‘Romanisches Café’ in Berlin. When his friends offered him a coffee, he said he would rather have the 50 Pfennigs. They usually gave him that and more, in the understanding that he could not earn a living any more. After Reichskristallnacht he could no longer enter the building. Realizing he would now starve, he hanged himself from a tree in the Grunewald.115

  One or two things improved. With the winding up of the Gildemeester charity for non-religious Jews in Vienna, the whole machinery for emigration was brought under the roof of the Palais Rothschild. Jews no longer had to look for passports in their own districts. The seriousness of the situation was now clear. In Württemberg the number of Jews dropped from around 7,000 to nearer 6,000 by March.116 In Britain a total of £250,000 was raised for non-Aryan Christians by means of a whip-round in the parishes; more substantial contributions were made by Jewish peers, such as Rothschild and Bearsted, as well as Simon Marks of Marks & Spencer.117 On 29 November the British Consul-General in Vienna was moved to complain about the confiscation of Alfred Piccaver’s villa on the river at Klosterneuburg. A Party member called Rafaelsberger made off with it. The singer was British-born, but he had been principal tenor at the State Opera from 1910 to 1937.118

  Some of the Jews in Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, who had papers for Palestine, were out by the end of the month. Others would have to apply to the Jewish agencies or find places on the Perl-transports. After the British had closed the Greek door, Italy was the most promising alternative, despite the racial laws. Long queues of women gathered outside Passport Control Officer Foley’s office in Berlin, seeking to have their menfolk released from concentration camps. Foley had requested fresh supplies of blank visas for Palestine as well as ‘Youth Aliya’ certificates that allowed young Jews to go to Palestine without their parents. He also asked for more staff to deal with the workload.119

  Sworn to secrecy about their treatment in the camps, for the most part Jews did not wish to talk about it anyway. Bernt Engelmann came across a man who simply had to get it off his chest when he visited an hotelier relative. His aunt had hidden a Jew who was waiting for a passport to take him to Sweden. It was no longer legal for Jews to share hotels with Gentiles. She had put him in the hunting lodge where no one would see him. Engelmann noted that the man, Herr Kahn, had evidently lost a good deal of weight, as his clothes no longer fitted him. He had been in Buchenwald and told Engelmann of the treatment that had been meted out to the Jews who had arrived after Kristallnacht. Kahn had been released after twenty days.

  He had been shaved and inspected by a doctor. He had to swear that any cuts and bruises had been inflicted prior to his arrest. A lecture was given by a superior SS-officer who told them they had been rehabilitated, and encouraged them to make a donation to the Nazi Winter Aid. They were then led past the boxes and another myrmidon made sure they contributed. Next they had to pay for the use of their eating utensils. There was another levy, and anyone who had no money to pay had to be covered by those who did. It was a five-mile walk to the railway station in Weimar. Another SS-man was collecting money for taxis because the old and infirm would not have made it.

  Engelmann and Kahn shared a room in the hunting lodge, and several times he was woken in the night by the other man’s groans. Once he shouted, ‘Don’t hit me!’ When in the morning a motor car drove up, Kahn became agitated and asked where he might hide. It was a false alarm: it was Engelmann’s aunt with his passport emblazoned with a J.120

  On 27 October Bishop Batty had left England on a pastoral mission to Austria.121 He needed to appoint someone to take over from Grimes, and make sure that the baptismal business had been properly halted. A month after his trip to Vienna to clear up after Grimes and Collard, he was hauled over the coals by his fellow bishops. The first to take a shot at him was none other than Bishop Bell of Chichester. He wrote to Alan Don on 30 November: ‘I am really very much perturbed at getting the enclosed letter from Mrs Baker about the baptism of Jews in Vienna! I thought from what the Bishop of Fulham told me at the moment on relations with foreign churches that, though there had been a great scandal, it was now over. You see, however, that this complaint is dated 22 November, and baptizing at the rate of some fifty a day is really shocking!’122

  Mrs Baker was not the only one to blow the whistle. Less than a week later Alan Don wrote to Batty himself:

  I think you ought to know that it has come to the knowledge of the Archbishop that a Church of Scotland chaplain at Budapest, the Rev. G.A. Knighton by name, states in a letter dated November 22nd that trouble is being caused in Hungary by the action of the Anglican chaplain in Vienna, who, it is stated, is continuing to baptize a large number of Jews. The actual words are as follows: ‘All summer the chaplain has accepted Jews and baptized them, without any preparation whatsoever, and baptized them in batches of fifty a day. Several eye-witnesses told me as much.’ Seeing as you have recently been in Vienna, you may be able to judge as to whether this statement is in accordance with facts or not. If it is you will doubtless consider what action should be taken as this practice, if continued, is likely to cause a good deal of scandal.123

  Don had forwarded the correspondence to the archbishop. Batty replied the following day:

  The matter to which you refer was first brought to my notice by an article in a German paper which attacks all Christian institutions and leaders. It appeared to me to be a matter for investigation on the spot and I went out to Vienna.

  The position is as follows –

  1) We have our mission to the Jews and it is difficult for a priest to refuse to deal with a Jew who wishes to become a Christian, but at the moment on political grounds the greatest care is necessary and instructions were issued to the chaplain at Vienna to this effect.

  2) It is a fact that a number of Jews were baptized but the statement that they were baptized without any preparation is absolutely untrue. The preparation given was carefully thought out and I was assured that it covered all that was essential.

  3) The chaplain responsible in the summer when this occurred was the Revd. C.H.D. Grimes, a scholar and a gentleman in whom I have confidence. I think it must be admitted that his intense sympathy with these poor people in their terrible suffering led him to a greater belief in their sincerity than an outsider would have done.

  4) Mr Grimes resigned the chaplaincy and left over three months ago. He has been succeeded temporarily by the Revd. F.A. Evelyn who is an experienced priest. He has been instructed that the greatest care must be taken in these cases and long preparation given. Also that if there is the slightest ground for believing that baptism is wanted on political grounds, it must be refused.

  The situation has therefore been dealt with directly it was brought to my notice, but I must protest against the statement of the Scotch minister that no preparation was given.

  Don was satisfied with Batty’s letter and also wrote to assuage Bell on 7 December.124

  Batty may have felt he had successfully concealed Collard’s and his own role in the conversions, but he still had not heard the last of it. On 12 January 1939 a Mrs Elsie Ludovici of Upper Norwood in the south London suburbs – almost certainly a converted Jew herself – wrote to Lang:

  I was . . . horrified to hear that mass baptisms had been taking place in Vienna, that they were being admitted at the rate of as many as 900 a day into the Anglican Church, that the whole process of conversion was carried out in four days, and that the Jewesses who knew a little English were present to prompt the converts to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the right moments in reply to the questions put to them during the ceremony because the converts did not know English or understand what they were being asked. You may imagine my confusion with
such allegations which amount to charging the refugees with being converted to the Anglican communion merely for the purpose of benefiting from the charities organized for the help of Christians.

  Lang asked Don what he knew about this, and Don assured the archbishop that it was ‘grotesquely untrue’. Mrs Ludovici seems to have heard about the mass conversions from the Mosleyite Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers.125

  12

  DECEMBER

  The Philadelphia-based industrialist Robert Yarnall was in Vienna in December looking specifically to help non-Aryans and Mischlinge who counted as Jews under the Nuremberg Laws. The IKG was still in funds and continuing the work of getting Jews out. Engel told him that 55,000 Jews had left to date out of the total of 165,000, and 20,000 of a supposed figure of 120,000 non-confessional Jews. Yarnall paid a call on Gildemeester, ‘the mystery man of Vienna’: ‘He has a Gestapo man at his side all the time to check his work.’ Yarnall acknowledged, however, that Gildemeester was good at getting children out and Jews released from Dachau and other camps. Yarnall saw some of Heydrich’s staff in Berlin and was granted authority to continue in his own task.1