50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany

by Steven Pressman

  ALL THE WAY across town, Paul Beller lived with his parents at No. 48 Stumpergasse, in the more commercial Sixth District, which had a much smaller Jewish population than other parts of the city. His father, Leo, and two uncles were partners in a thriving plywood business that supported all three families very comfortably. Paul’s mother, Mina, was an excellent cook and baker. “She enjoyed going to the park and talking with the other ladies,” recalled Paul, who was born in 1931. “She liked playing piano and she loved classical music—Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. Up until the time that the Nazis marched in, our family was living a very nice and comfortable life.”

  THE BRAUNS, WENKARTS, Teppers, Bellers, and others were just a few of the thousands of Jewish families that, during the early decades of the twentieth century, had little if any reason to question their rightful place in the fabric of Viennese life and culture. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Jews formed a sizeable community that, by and large, considered itself an indelible part of the city.

  Not unlike those in the rest of Europe, Jews in Vienna had endured mixed blessings for hundreds of years. The first mention of a synagogue in Vienna dates back to 1204. Yet even though Emperor Friedrich II offered his protection to Jews in 1238, local Catholic Church leaders officially banned all social dealings between Christians and Jews thirty years later. Albert V, the Vienna-born archduke of Austria, issued a proclamation in 1420 that called for the expulsion of all Jews from Vienna and lower Austria; the city’s original synagogue, built in an open plaza that later came to be known as the Judenplatz, was destroyed. By the end of the sixteenth century, a small number of Jews had been allowed to settle once again in Vienna, though they would soon be restricted to a ghetto in the area that would later become Leopoldstadt, named for Emperor Leopold I, who in 1670 ordered a second expulsion of Jews from Vienna. Within only a few years, however, a handful of wealthy “court Jews” had been permitted to return as a reward for their role as military suppliers and financiers.

  A more enduring turn of good fortune occurred in 1782, when Emperor Joseph II issued his Edict of Tolerance, wiping away a variety of discriminatory laws directed at Jews. In the wake of Austria’s 1848 revolution, which threatened the ruling monarchy, Vienna’s Jews gained additional rights, including official recognition of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde—the organization representing the city’s Jewish community. Austria’s new constitution, drafted in 1867, further liberalized attitudes toward Jews, granting them the unrestricted right to live in freedom and practice their religion throughout the country. Vienna’s Jewish population skyrocketed during this period—rising from a tiny community of 2,600 in 1857 to more than 40,000 by 1870. By the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna was home to nearly 150,000 Jews, which accounted for about 9 percent of the city’s overall population of 1.7 million people.

  Although a virulent wave of anti-Semitism washed over the city at the turn of the century, the outbreak of World War I triggered yet another influx of Jewish arrivals. Some 50,000 to 70,000 Jews sought refuge from the battle-and-pogrom-scarred eastern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, principally in the Galicia region. Although many of these migrant Jews returned to their homes once the worst of the horrors along the Eastern Front had passed, Vienna’s Jewish population continued to rise. The high-water mark came in the early 1920s, when roughly 200,000 Jews accounted for more than 10 percent of Vienna’s total population. In many ways, Jewish culture during this period became synonymous with café culture, as Jewish journalists, writers, and intellectuals exerted a palpable influence over the social, political, and cultural life of the city.

  Yet the safety and security of Jewish Vienna remained fragile. Undercurrents of deep-seated anti-Semitism were gaining swift momentum in the aftermath of Germany’s crushing defeat in World War I and the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jews once again were singled out as scapegoats, cast as the chief culprits responsible for Germany’s descent into ashes, the humiliating terms of the peace treaty with its wartime enemies, and the catastrophic economic conditions that brought Germany to its knees in the years following the war.

  By the time that Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933, Vienna’s Jewish population had drifted slightly downward to about 185,000, which still made it the third largest Jewish community in Europe, trailing behind only Warsaw and Budapest. More Jews lived in Vienna than in Berlin, the German capital, which counted 160,000 Jews during Hitler’s first year in power. Over the next six years, half of Berlin’s Jews left the city in response to the Nazis’ incremental, but increasingly hostile, campaign to rid the Reich of its Jewish inhabitants. In Vienna, as the winter of 1938 was about to give way to spring, the happy childhoods of Robert Braun, Henny Wenkart, Helga Weisz, Kurt Herman, and thousands of other Jewish children dissolved almost at once into a nightmare.

  CHAPTER 4

  What people don’t understand is that in the beginning you could get out. Everyone could get out. But nobody would let us in.

  —HENNY WENKART

  VIENNA

  MARCH–APRIL 1938

  The young girl sat upright in bed, struggling to hear the voices that crackled out from the large console radio that her parents kept in the living room of their apartment. Henny was not quite ten years old but, sadly, knew plenty about the rapidly deteriorating world around her. After listening for a few more moments, she recognized the strained voice on the radio as that of Kurt Schuschnigg, Austria’s chancellor for the past four years. She also grasped at least the vague outlines of Schuschnigg’s solemn address. The German army was on its way to Vienna, and the beleaguered Austrian leader had no intention of spilling any blood in a futile challenge to Adolf Hitler’s lightning-fast move to swallow up Austria into the Third Reich. “And so, I take leave of the Austrian people with a word of farewell uttered from the depths of my heart,” Schuschnigg somberly informed his radio audience. “God protect Austria.” It was the evening of Friday, March 11, 1938, and once Schuschnigg had concluded his speech, a radio announcer dispassionately informed listeners that, as of the next day, Austria would no longer exist as an independent nation. At that very moment, German troops were amassed along the border, waiting for orders to enter the country.

  The radio station began playing the opening strains of Beethoven’s First Symphony. Before the broadcast had ended, Austrian Nazi Party members and supporters began streaming through Vienna’s streets with lusty shouts of “Sieg Heil!” while waving swastika banners and cheering Hitler’s unopposed annexation of the country. As Henny lay in bed later that evening, she heard her mother and father talking in whispers. She was unable to make out what they were saying.

  A few days later, Hermann Wenkart took his daughter for a walk in a nearby park. Already small metal plaques had been attached to almost all of the long wooden benches, announcing that the benches were reserved for Aryans. With a deep sigh in his voice, he began telling Henny about the Anschluss and what it foretold for themselves, along with their relatives and friends. Henny looked up at her father and said, “Well, I already know that.” He smiled and then told her something that came as a great surprise. He had awakened at four o’clock that morning and made his way to the American consulate, where he took his place in a long line that had already formed outside the building in the predawn darkness. Everyone there had the same objective: getting their names on a rapidly expanding waiting list for visas to America. Henny was taken aback. Nobody she knew was ever up at four in the morning, other than the men who drove the horse-drawn milk wagons that delivered bottles of fresh milk and cream before dawn each day. Hermann looked into his daughter’s eyes and made a solemn promise: “I give you my word of honor that you will be all right.”

  Adolf Hitler returned to Vienna on the morning of Saturday, April 9, arriving by train from Berlin at the city’s Westbahnhof station and stepping into his six-wheeled Mercedes limousine. The motorcade, with Hitler’s car in the lead, drove down Mariahilferstrasse, Vienna’s main shopping a
venue, only a few blocks from Paul Beller’s apartment building. Three weeks earlier, Völkischer Beobachter, a leading Nazi Party newspaper, noted that the street was the most “Jew-infested” commercial thoroughfare in Vienna. On the day of Hitler’s return, however, “Vienna is again a German city,” exclaimed the newspaper. One day later, on April 10, 99.7 percent of Austrians voted yes in a plebiscite that formally approved Hitler’s takeover of the country.

  Within the first ten days of the Anschluss, the Viennese police reported nearly one hundred suicides throughout the city, virtually all of them Jews. By the end of April, the number of suicides had jumped to at least two thousand. Among the victims was Henny Wenkart’s pediatrician, who took his life by jumping out a window. It took less than a year to wipe out Vienna’s once-plentiful ranks of Jewish doctors, all of whom, in the name of Aryanization, were no longer permitted to practice medicine. A city that had once been home to two thousand Jewish doctors—including, most famously, Sigmund Freud—now had none. Freud himself had been given permission to leave for London in June 1938, traveling on the Orient Express with his wife and daughter.

  Between March 1938 and March 1939, nearly half of the city’s Jewish population had departed. The vast majority had hoped to immigrate to the United States, especially since so many of them had relatives already living there. But America’s immigration laws created an insurmountable obstacle for most German and Austrian Jews seeking safe haven in the United States. First, fixed quotas capped the number of immigrants from every foreign country, resulting in a long waiting list for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Jews. Second, America would only admit refugees who were able to guarantee that they would not require any sort of public assistance once they arrived. Stymied by the United States’ closed-door policies, many of Vienna’s Jews instead dispersed to other far-flung corners of the earth—Shanghai, Havana, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere. A few even managed to sneak into Palestine despite the strenuous efforts of the British authorities to prevent more than a trickle of Jews from legally entering the Holy Land and disrupting the fragile Arab-Jewish balance that His Majesty’s government was vigorously attempting to maintain.

  From the earliest moments of the Anschluss, newspapers and magazines throughout the United States and the rest of the world were filled with detailed accounts of Hitler’s takeover of Austria and what it meant for the country’s Jews. “Their fate is even worse than that of the Jews in Germany, where the persecutions were spread over a period of several years,” the New Republic magazine informed its readers in April 1938, only weeks after the Anschluss. “In Austria, the full force of the sadistic Nazi attack has come overnight.” Hitler’s Nuremberg laws, which had gradually stripped German Jews of their civil rights over a period of five years, were instantly put into effect. Hermann Göring, Hitler’s field marshal, had wasted no time in issuing a blunt warning that Jews were no longer welcome anywhere in Austria. Vienna, he announced, would become purely German again. “The Jew must know we do not care to live with him. He must go,” Göring told foreign journalists. Throughout Vienna, groups of Jewish men, pious rabbis among them, were forced to scrub clean the few anti-Anschluss symbols that had been painted on streets and sidewalks prior to Hitler’s arrival. Newly emboldened members of the Hitler Youth organization set out across the city, taunting and terrorizing Jewish shopkeepers and whitewashing swastikas, skull and crossbones, and Jude across their storefront windows.

  Within days of the Anschluss, in an early morning raid that was carefully planned well in advance, the Gestapo shut down the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde—Vienna’s official Jewish community office—and arrested the organization’s president, two vice presidents, and executive director. Six weeks later—on May 3, 1938—Adolf Eichmann, a thirty-two-year-old SS lieutenant who had been dispatched to Vienna to plan and enforce the Judenrein policy, officially permitted the Kultusgemeinde to reopen and released some of the arrested leaders. But Eichmann had only one purpose in mind for Vienna’s Jewish leaders: to help him carry out the removal of every Jew—man, woman, and child—in the city. By the summer of 1938, more than twenty thousand people had made their way to the Kultusgemeinde’s headquarters at No. 2 Seitenstettengasse, where they often had to wait for hours to officially register for emigration papers. Long rows of wooden filing cabinets on the second floor of the building, located only a few blocks from the Gestapo’s headquarters at the Hotel Metropole, spilled over with thousands of cardboard index cards that meticulously listed Jewish families desperate to leave Austria as soon as possible. Eichmann and other Nazi officials were determined to fulfill Hitler’s dream of a Juden-free Germany and Austria. Only one question remained: Where would all those Jews go?

  The visa section at the American consulate office in Vienna was overrun with applicants hoping to gain admission into the United States. Long lines of people would form early each morning, anxiously waiting for the consulate to open its doors at 9:00 A.M. The overworked staff would often remain at their desks until 10:00 P.M., seeing as many as six thousand people and conducting up to five hundred interviews each day. Given the limited number of spaces allotted to Germany and Austria, the consulate officers knew that most of the individuals and families who were pleading for visas would have to wait as long as five years before their turn would come up.

  To help expedite the forced Jewish exodus, Eichmann had set up the Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung—the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration—which established, in a highly bureaucratic and assembly-line manner, a brutally efficient process for ridding Austria of Jews. Eichmann also found—or rather, annexed—what he considered to be an ideal location for his Zentralstelle. The ornate palace that occupied a full city block at No. 22 Prinz Eugenstrasse had, until recently, been the home of Albert Rothschild, a member of the Vienna branch of the famous European Jewish banking family. Designed in the French neo-Renaissance style, the imposing nineteenth-century building—one of five palaces belonging to various Rothschilds who lived in Vienna—was set back from the street, with a courtyard and a U-shaped layout. The entrance hall led to an enormous marble staircase, and throughout the building were crystal chandeliers, gold leaf, and polished parquet floors.

  On August 20, 1938, Josef Bürkel, who had been installed as the Nazi gauleiter in Vienna after the Anschluss, spelled out the new function of the Rothschild palace in a memo sent to all Nazi state and party offices throughout Austria. “Undesirable interruptions and delays have occurred in the emigration of Jews. In addition, the question of Jewish emigration has been dealt with inefficiently by certain offices,” wrote Bürkel. “To assist and expedite arrangements for the emigration of Jews from Austria, a Central Office for Jewish Emigration has therefore been set up in Vienna, at Prinz Eugenstrasse 22.”

  Eichmann and other Nazi officials took enormous satisfaction in converting the Rothschild mansion into a one-stop facility for hastening the fulfillment of Judenrein. “This is like an automatic factory, let us say a flour mill connected to some bakery. You put in at the one end a Jew who still has capital and has … a factory or a shop or an account in a bank,” Wilhelm Höttl, an SS officer who served under Eichmann, later recounted. “He passes through the entire building, from counter to counter, from office to office. He comes out the other end. He has no money, he has no rights, only a passport in which it is written: you must leave this country within two weeks. If you fail to do so, you will go to a concentration camp.”

  IN THE WAKE of the Anschluss, even the youngest Jews felt the sense of peril that had descended over the city. Elizabeth Zinger was five years old and had recently started kindergarten. Sitting quietly in her classroom one morning, the little girl raised her hand, trying to get her teacher’s attention so that she could request permission to go to the bathroom. The teacher, however, continued to ignore her, even as it became obvious why she wished to be excused. Finally, Elizabeth could not wait any longer, and she wet herself. Her teacher shot her a scolding look and grabbed the frightened gir
l by the collar of her blouse, pulling her out of her chair and in front of the rest of the class. “You see. This is what the Juden do. They make in their pants,” the teacher announced to the other students, after which she shoved the sobbing girl back into her seat. “After that horrendous experience, my mother didn’t send me back to school,” Elizabeth remembered, “which was just as well, because very shortly thereafter it was announced that I could not come back. Nor could my sister—and all because we had committed that terrible crime of being Jewish.”

  Jewish children all throughout Vienna quickly learned to live in fear of the Nazis and their sympathizers. Kurt Herman’s path literally intersected with Hitler’s celebrated arrival in Vienna. At the age of seven, he was walking with his mother across a bridge that spanned the Danube Canal, not far from their home in the city’s Second District. Suddenly a long motorcade of black cars, each adorned with a small red swastika flag that flapped in the breeze, rumbled through the streets, passing directly in front of Kurt and his mother. Standing in the backseat of one of the cars was the German chancellor, who would repeatedly thrust out his right arm in a gesture that, even at his young age, Kurt recognized as the Nazis’ salute. The young boy stood there, motionless. Everyone around them was cheering loudly and waving their arms in enthusiastic salutes. The young boy and his mother, worried about standing out in the crowd, timidly held out their arms as well.

  A few weeks after the Anschluss, Robert Braun walked into his fourth-grade classroom at the Schubert Schule and took his usual seat at a desk in the middle of the room. All of the other boys began filing in as well and then waited for their teacher to quiet them down—not an easy task for a classroom filled with rambunctious ten-year-old boys. Robert noticed that a yellow line had been painted in front of the last row of seats in the room. After all of the boys had arrived, the teacher stood up in front of the class and began speaking in a somber tone. “The authorities have ordered that we rearrange the seating in the room,” the teacher announced. He pointed to the yellow line on the floor and proceeded to call out the names of all of the Jewish boys in the class. From now on, he said, they were to sit in the row of seats behind the yellow line. In the weeks that followed, some of the boys in the class began showing up at school in outfits that Robert had come to recognize as the Hitler Youth uniform—dark-colored short pants, khaki-colored cotton shirts, knee-high white stockings, and red armbands emblazoned with black swastikas. He quickly learned to steer clear of those boys as best he could, although sometimes they would chase him, taunt him, or try to throw punches at him. One of them hurled a small rock. It left a scar across his scalp that would still be visible seventy-five years later.