The auditorium at the Humboldt University in eastern Berlin was packed as several students who had been expelled by the Nazis nearly 70 years ago took the podium for a panel discussion on their experiences.
“I was supposed to be arrested, but they took my father in my place,” recalled writer Stefan Heym, 88. “My mother told me to get out of the country as fast as possible.”
Heym fled over the mountains on foot and ended up in New York, where he became editor of an anti-fascist German weekly newspaper.
He served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945, but eventually returned to East Germany, where he enjoyed an illustrious career as a writer and politician.
Twenty-two of the 2,200 students expelled in 1933 paid a five-day visit to the university as part of a reconciliation program called Classmates of 1933.
The panel discussion was one of the highlights. Although some of the visitors — in their 80s and 90s — are physically frail, their memories are still clear.
“I came to Berlin for two reasons,” said Rabbi Leo Trepp, who was born in 1913 in Mainz. “I wanted to study in the rabbinical seminary here, and also the university had the best reputation.”
Trepp fled in 1938 after a brief internment in the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. He lives today in San Rafael, Calif., and teaches every summer at the University of Mainz.
“I left because I had to go,” he said.
If the former students were generally ready to tell their stories, the current students were thirsty for answers.
After a theology student named Christoph pressed him, Volkmar Zuehlsdorff, 88, told of a book burning he witnessed.
“We came out after dinner, it was about 9 p.m., and we saw how the bonfire had been prepared. There was a huge pile of wood and a big stage with loudspeakers. At about 10 p.m. it started to rain heavily, and they were supposed to make a fire,” he said.
“But they had a lot of gasoline. And then the German Girls Union came, looking very pretty. And the Hitler Youth came after them.”
Books were delivered in two large furniture trucks, he said.
Zuehlsdorff said he watched and listened as the young Nazis handed books down the line and threw them into the towering bonfire, saying, “I hereby deliver to the flames the collected works of Karl Marx” or “I am throwing into the flames the works of Sigmund Freud.”
The site of the burning, across the street from the main university building, is now marked with a memorial.
“It was so indescribably idiotic. Some of us secretly laughed. Then Goebbels came and gave a speech about the ‘insidious Jewish character,’ ” Zuehlsdorff said. “It was a horrible experience. It is hard to grasp.”
Zuehlsdorff left Germany shortly thereafter.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
