1938 (24 page)

Germany’s model for motherhood was surely Magda Goebbels, who had a fifth child while her husband was away in Rome in May and was to go on to produce a sixth and last in 1940. That daughter was described as the “reconciliation child,” as it was produced after Hitler had forcibly patched up their marriage. For the time being the actress Emmy Göring would have to play the role. For the next few months Germans could purchase postcards of Emmy with little Edda.

Officially, no countries admitted Jews anymore. A cartoon by Fips showed a Jew marching past Polish, Swiss, and Dutch doors marked “Jews no longer welcome.” In practice there were still loopholes. Wolfgang Weisl told Waldman that he had run into an illegal immigrant from Austria in Paris. The man had told him that the smuggling of Jews across the border from Germany’s best-known exit point, Aachen, to Eupen in Belgium was “quasi-legal.” Jews with papers were often given a last kick in the backside to help them into their new world of freedom. For those who had none, smugglers charged them anything between twenty-five and five hundred RM. The migrants assembled now in groups of twenty to thirty, where formerly the groups were smaller—five to six.

German border guards were very superficial in their examinations, and curiously, Weisl was told, they never removed jewels. People who wanted to avoid the German frontier posts, however, could do so by paying that little bit extra to the smugglers. Weisl’s informer had marched forty-five kilometers on foot. Once they reached Eupen across the border, they could take a bus or taxi to Liège and then the train to Brussels. If they were caught by the Belgian police, they would be handed back to the Germans at Aachen, where the Jewish Kultusgemeinde looked after them until they found a chance to try again. Two thousand Jews had been able to cross in this way since the Anschluss. “Most of the Jews had no passport,” reported Weisl. He was bitter about events in Vienna: “Not one Christian . . . has interfered in favor of his Jewish friends.” Jews had been forced to urinate on the Torah. This was less than the truth, but Weisl could be forgiven for believing it.

On June 13, the American consul-general, John Wiley, expressed some of his frustrations in a report to the State Department. There had been a “new wave” of Jew-baiting, as Jews were told they had between two and eight weeks to leave or else face Dachau. He had also learned of the illicit transports: “The authorities are encouraging clandestine emigration. I have received what I believe to be a conservative estimate from an authoritative source that over 1,000 have been obliged to cross the frontier at night into Belgium. A few days ago 350 were sent in sealed cars to Greece whence they will be shipped to Palestine without visas or permits of entry. It was explained to me that the competent British authorities are unofficially in the picture and not raising obstacles.”

Wiley had other complaints. One of these involved the treatment of
Mischlinge
. A distinguished composer had been refused admission to a Jewish hospital because he was not a Jew, yet he could not be treated by an Aryan hospital because as far as they were concerned he was defined as a Jew. Another bugbear was Gildemeester, whom he found highly suspicious: “I am not in the position to cast any additional light on the nature of Mr. Gildemeester’s activities in Austria.” He had had a letter from Gildemeester objecting to the Americans describing him as a German agent, and that this was jeopardizing his work. He cited a list of Quakers as his friends. In his reply Wiley suggested the Dutchman write in German or French, as his English was not doing him any favors.

Further repressive measures were introduced on June 14, which were to lead the way for the compulsory transfer of all Jewish business to German hands. Branches of a business were Jewish if the branch was managed by a Jew. Moreover the measure was backdated to January 1, 1938, so that any shifting of positions after the Anschluss would be null and void. That same day, Frick proposed compulsory Aryanization of businesses. A year before, Hitler had declared that the removal of Jewish doctors was even more important than the firing of Jewish civil servants, because people regarded physicians as models. The Führer had been slow to enact his will, because the removal of Jews from medicine would have depleted the service by some 4,000 souls in the Altreich alone, some 8 percent of the whole. In Austria it was much worse: nearly half of Austria’s 7,000 doctors were Jews. Hitler nonetheless went ahead and signed the decree on July 25.

On the 17th, Jews were banned from practicing dentistry. In response, the Viennese dentists Hugo and Bella Schneider, together with their eleven-year-old son, Hans, decided to risk flight. They took a train to the Czech border and bribed a border guard to let them cross. They forfeited “what had been a secure middle class existence” and became “refugees without resources, status or prospects.” They went to live in Karvina on the Polish border, where Hugo had come from and where his brothers still lived. After the Munich Agreement it was ceded to the Poles, and they became illegal immigrants in Poland.

The Schneiders’ prospects were little better than those they had left behind. In the autumn, however, they found a place for Hans at a Quaker school in the Netherlands that had been established for German and Austrian refugees. Hans had to go to Warsaw to get a visa from the Dutch consul. Then he had to fly first to Prague and then to Amsterdam. The aircraft was cancelled due to bad weather, which meant that Hans and his father had to hang around Warsaw without papers for ten days. Hans recalled what his father did: “He asked the first reliable looking man he saw in the street for help, who sent us to a member of the German embassy in whose apartment I then stayed. Equally amazing, the man who sent us there turned out to be a Polish policeman in the very department charged with deporting illegal aliens. I presume there was an anti-Nazi underground in both organisations. . . . I was told to say that I was a relative from Vienna if anyone asked.”

Hans made it to safety in the Netherlands, but his parents were denounced in Karvina. The local police turned a blind eye while they disappeared into the Polish interior. They stayed with distant relatives while they waited for a British or American visa. In April 1939, Hugo Schneider became one of forty dentists allowed to enter Britain, traveling from Poland by boat. Hans rejoined them in August.

Thwarted by his failure to rid his city of Jews, Goebbels was now being badgered by another group of pests: “A large number of pastors have signed a petition for Niemöller. Wastepaper basket!” More pleasant work took the form of the Vienna Theatre Festival; “Vienna needs to become a fun city once again.” He flew in on June 12, visiting the Cobenzl in the Vienna Woods with its magnificent views. The festival opened with a performance of
Rosenkavalier
conducted by Böhm. That night Goebbels soothed the ruffled feathers of the Austrian comedian Hans Moser in a suburban wine tavern in Grinzing. There were violins, and Moser sang
Heurige
songs. It was “indescribably romantic.” Dawn had arrived before Goebbels made it back to his hotel.

He stayed to see the performance of
Hamlet
, starring Gründgens and Marianne Hoppe. The “genius Shakespeare” was clearly an honorary German: “How paltry others appear beside him.” On June 18 Goebbels was back at the festival with Magda and the following day drove up to the Kahlenberg, which overlooks Vienna from the west. The festival closed with a performance of
Lohengrin
, given by the Berlin opera ensemble and directed by Tietjen.

On June 14, while Goebbels was busy persecuting Jews in Berlin, things began to accelerate in Vienna’s Anglican Church. The incumbent Grimes initially decided to take matters in his own hands in a quiet way by marrying Jews in the Anglican rite, thereby conferring baptism at the same time. Grimes had been chaplain in Vienna since November 1934, and in October 1935 he had paid a visit to Germany following the issue of the Nuremberg Laws and had written to Bishop Bell: “I may say that I myself am pro-Jew and have always been so.” He believed that Britain and the United States should tell the Germans to stop persecuting the Jews: “Obviously such declarations need to be conveyed to the government as wisely as possible, otherwise they will only strengthen the wild men on the left [of the Party] in their cry for the extermination of the Jews who are plotting against the Reich.”

That Grimes may have suggested baptism as a way out is implied by the next document in the file at Lambeth Palace, which examines the use of baptism for humanitarian ends. It advises against it, as under the new German law everything was based on race: “Baptism alters nothing.” Grimes knew better. He was aware that he could not guarantee success, but he could offer a glimmer of hope. There were the countries that accepted baptized Jews, at least in cases of transit, and there were the officials who were prepared to accept a baptismal certificate, even if it meant turning a blind eye to the physical appearance of the person trying to pass the frontier. The Germans were anxious to be rid of the Jews, after all. The only thing that held them back was the “dough.”

Once Grimes had begun the process, word got around to the assimilated Jews, and they began to form a line outside the chaplaincy. Grimes baptized 8 Jews on June 14; 12 on the 19th; 16 on the 26th. He reached a massive 103 on July 10, beating that on July 27 with a mighty 129. The greatest number of baptisms he managed in a day was 229 on July 25. After that he went on leave. The probable destination of the applicants was Britain, its colonies and dominions, or the United States. Only in certain cases would Palestine be the final goal; there were other ways of getting to Palestine that did not require this sort of compromise.

The entries in the register provide evidence of the sort of Jews who were prepared to go through a “political” baptism for the sake of acquiring papers of transit. Most of the applicants were from Vienna itself, although there are Burgenländer among the entries—driven to Vienna by the move to “purify” Austria’s easternmost province. A few Germans figure in the books, but they are mostly married to Austrians. The rest come from the former lands of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy—Viennese residents rather than fugitives. Many of them were hoping to go to Australia, but the contradictory polices of the Australian government proved a frustration. Some might have believed that baptism in the Anglican rite could have helped.

WEISL HAD more news on June 15: 300 Revisionists had been allowed to leave Vienna “with the silent encouragement of both the Nazi authorities and the British Consulate in Vienna.” In fact a total of 480 had left on June 9. This flatly contradicted British policy in Palestine, as it was Kendrick’s duty to interpret it, and yet it is improbable that he allowed the Jews to leave without seeking advice from Whitehall first: “The British Consulate in Vienna seems to be aware of that illegal transport.” Wrote Weisl, “The secretary of the emigration department, a Miss Stamper, is told to have advised would-be emigrants not to wait for a certificate but to leave with that illegal transport. Incredible as that story seems to be I have heard it from different quarters, and I would be glad to be able to believe that not all of humanity has been lost even in consular offices.”

Weisl was at a loss to understand the Janus features of Nazism, which could encourage emigration on the one hand while arresting young Jews and putting them to forced labor. The policy seemed contradictory: On the one hand, Jews were being told to go; on the other hand, it could take weeks to obtain the necessary papers. What he failed to appreciate was that the Third Reich not only wanted to be rid of the Jews but needed slaves if they were to succeed. Young German men were bound for the army.

EICHMANN’S WORK in Vienna pleased his masters. He was getting results, whereas in Germany the pace of emigration had been slow. George Clare remembered the particular kindness of the Berliners toward the Jews after his family’s experience in their native Vienna. Neither Hitler, nor his Berlin gauleiter was happy about this. Hitler had even managed to connect the Jews with another of his bugbears: the nobility. Nobles, he said, married Jews. On June 16 the police mounted a
razzia
; “the persecutions were carried out exactly to the Viennese model.” On June 18, the gauleiter reported “lots of arrests. . . . We are going to make Berlin free of Jews.” There was outrage in the foreign press.