1938 (16 page)

The Quakers succeeded by sheer doggedness, trying to bend the home secretary’s ear in every instance or to find someone who would sponsor the Jew, so that he would not be a burden on the taxpayer. In May, the Quakers asked one of their number, Corder Catchpool, to go out to Austria to see what could be done. He wanted to talk to the “highest authorities. . . . It appears that efforts for relief are being made difficult, if not deliberately obstructed, and that little can be done until the position is cleared.” Catchpool had been in touch with Sir Wyndham Deedes and Norman Bentwich. Sir Robert Vansittart put him on to Sir Ernest Holderness, who gave him an introduction to Thomas Kendrick at the PCO. The Quakers’ brief was severely limited. As one official (“HNN”—possibly Alice Nike) wrote on August 27, “I can only help non-Aryans, Mischling [
sic
] and Confessionslos [
sic
]. . . . I never take up an entirely Jewish case unless, for instance, a married pair where one of the couple is Aryan.”

The other bodies that dealt extensively with Jewish Christians were the Swedish Church and the so-called Aktion Gildemeester. 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 Falashas or Ethiopian Jews. 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 Anton Rintelen, the Austrian Nazis’ chosen successor to Dollfuss. 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 only interested 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 favors in return for looking after German nationalists imprisoned abroad—although Catchpool annoyed the Nazis so much they locked him up for a while.

Gildemeester’s close links with the Nazis in general, and Göring and Eichmann in particular, led to his being distrusted then and ever since. His organization smacked of a profitable business, hiding “under the cloak of charity.” 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. Rajakowitsch was an “ambitious Nazi,” and his role was probably to make sure that Gildemeester remained in with those in power. Professor D. Cohen of the Dutch Committee for Special Jewish Affairs warned the British Board of Deputies not to trust him. 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.’”

He was probably just naive. The Zionist Norman Bentwich called him a “well-meaning but eccentric Quaker.” 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 worked for him after the Anschluss thought he had been in Vienna during the First World War and had helped bring undernourished children to Holland. 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.

Willi Perl was also suspicious of Gildemeester at first, but he came to the conclusion that he “was most likely genuine, otherwise we wouldn’t help baptised Jews,” who were anathema to Orthodox ones. He came to the conclusion he was “a Christian who was truly concerned for all humans.”

The first test cases for what was to become the Gildemeester Aktion were the Kuffner brothers, Moritz and Stephan, owners, among other things, of the huge brewery in Ottakring. Moritz Kuffner was also a director of the Reitler private bank that was liquidated on March 17 by the lawyers Heinrich Gallop and Pollak. The Kuffners had been imprisoned after the Anschluss. Under the scheme, the Kuffners offered to pay out 10 percent of their total fortune to finance the emigration of poorer Jews. They had, of course, to discharge the other taxes too. That meant 25 percent emigration tax, and another 20 percent
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 safely.

Few banks were interested in acting as trustees for this scheme. They feared that the Nazis would revoke the project and they would lose their money. On May 30, however, Krentschker & Company of Graz agreed to take on the business. They charged 3.5 percent for fortunes over 300,000 RM and 3 percent for anything below. The lawyers demanded another 1 to 1.5 percent. By the time the scheme was scrapped, Krentschker had turned over 25.7 million RM of Jewish assets. 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.

The basis for the Action was the so-called Ha’avara Agreement, 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, 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 though emigration was exactly what Eichmann had foreseen, and the Gildemeester organization can only have been good news as far as he was concerned. The advantage for the richer Jews who availed themselves of Gildemeester’s organization was that it arranged everything for them: passports, visas, preparation for emigration, and so forth.

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 kindertransports. Of the 2,675 non-Aryan Christians who left Vienna before October 21, all seemed to have been sponsored by Gildemeester’s charity. All in all, about 30,000 Jews profited.

Gildemeester’s more idealistic vision remained on the drawing board. He wanted to finance 13,000 plots of land in Harrar Province in Ethiopia. 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.

NOT EVERYONE by any means was sympathetic with the Jewish émigrés. “Some, a few,” wrote
Times
correspondent Douglas Reed, “have had themselves baptised; but they remain Jews.” He continued:

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 apparent. The convert is usually reconverted 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.

Streicher’s weekly,
Der Stürmer
ran a cartoon of Jews racing toward a baptismal font—“Only if the Jews might live more Jewish lives.”

Reed and Streicher naturally overstate the case. Some Jews had been edging toward Christianity for some time. One example is the Viennese Jew Karl Josef Balner, who converted to Catholicism in May 1938 and was baptized by a priest in Erdberg called Franz Brenner. Balner chose to live the life of a “U-boat,” i.e., in hiding like a 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 Bichlmaier’s Pauluswerk charity, which was responsible for Jewish Christians. Balner survived the war. 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.

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
(or committee) for Palestine.

MARCH HAD been a good month for Hitler: Everything was going swimmingly. Hitler’s plebiscite campaign began with a speech in Königsberg on March 25. He was going to show the outside world that they 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 up 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.” Hitler, the Messiah, spoke. Germans remember hearing this speech assembled in the halls of their schools.

This messianic and self-congratulatory tone was too much for the Austrians. The Socialist leader and former chancellor, Karl Renner, let it be known on April 3 that he would vote yes in the plebiscite. There is a suggestion that his decision was horse-trading, and that he wished to arrange the release of leading Socialists. On the other hand, the Austrian Socialists had been in favor of the merger after the First World War. The Anschluss would end the “stray wandering of the Austrian people.” He was not alone to break ranks and join his fellow travelers: Ex-President Miklas and Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg both tested positive.

On April 3, he was in the faithful city of Graz in Styria, where on March 13 60,000 to 70,000 people had formed a parade to celebrate the Anschluss. Graz was close to the border with Yugoslavia, which had received large amounts of Lower Styria in the Versailles settlement. Styrians and Carinthians resented their Slavic neighbors. 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.”

APRIL, MAY, JUNE

B
y April, the rights enjoyed by Austria’s Jews 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 now been revoked. With each new measure introduced in Vienna, Jews were pushed outside the boundaries of law. 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 older than 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 March 31 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
, an Austrian Nazi who had fled the Corporate State and worked for the Gestapo in Berlin. It contained 151 persons, the majority of them Gentiles who had loomed large in the Corporate State rather than Jews.

After a shower and shave in their prison on the Rossauer Lände, the 151 passengers were transferred to five Black Marias. At the West Station there was a cry of “Get out, you dogs!” Guards beat them viciously with rifle butts, forcing them into the compartments of the train. Some were counseled by a more compassionate policeman: “Take off your spectacles, look after your eyes.”

The train left at around midnight. The brutality was relentless. One man ran onto 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 morning and were received by the commandant oozing mockery and disdain, a foretaste of what some would endure for the next seven years. They were led to the showers again and issued striped uniforms. Their heads were 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.