News Brief

I belonged to a well established bourgeois family which had strong roots in Germany and was deeply imbedded in the German Jewish humanistic tradition. Louis Lewandowsky, the composer of modern synagogue music, and Hermann Cohen, the neo-Kantian philosopher, were close relatives of my grandparents.

We were also deeply interested in politics. My father was associated in his legal practice with a Socialist member of the Reichstag, who was also one of the country’s foremost criminal lawyers. My mother was active in the Democratic Party.

As a student I myself had taken part in the electoral fights at the universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg in 1929 and 1930 where, as Republican supporters, we fought a courageous but hopeless battle against the Nazi students who already formed the overwhelming majority of the student body.

It was at the universities that I had my first direct encounters with the Nazi terror and I remember vividly when we Jewish students were chased out of the University in Berlin by SA troops and had to jump out of the windows in order to avoid being beaten up.

AN ENORMOUS SHOCK

The day Hitler was appointed Chancellor was an enormous shock for us. For years, we had been aware of the danger of such a development. But in the general elections only a few weeks earlier the Nazi Party had suffered its first great defeat, losing more than a million votes.

It was due mainly to a financial scandal involving the East Prussian Junkers, belonging to President Hindenburg’s entourage, that the alliance between the National Socialists and the German Nationalist Party came about, opening for Hitler the way to power.

I particularly remember the evening of January 30, 1933, when tens of thousands of Nazis marched with torches through the streets of Berlin, giving a foretaste of what was to come. I remember, too, the radio speeches of Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, in the first weeks, shouting insults and threats at the Jews and other political enemies.

They created an unbearable atmosphere in our homes, finally causing us to turn off the radio altogether. The terror system which was thus installed very soon showed its real face.

One of the most spectacular events was, of course, the burning of the Reichstag (Parliament) building, destined to influence the general elections of March 5. Nobody doubted who had really committed the crime. Soon we learned of the places in Berlin where the Nazis were beating up and torturing their political enemies, and of the first concentration camps in Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen.

The first judicial measures against Jews were taken during the months of March and April.

RECALLS THE BOYCOTT DAY

What sticks particularly in my mind is the Boycott Day, the first of April, when throughout Germany, SS and SA men were posted as boycott guards in front of every Jewish shop, the office of every Jewish physician and every Jewish lawyer and when hundreds of individual Jews were dragged through the streets, insulted and beaten up.

The first of April, in fact, brought the great change in my life and that of my family. On that day, I was suspended at the tribunal where I worked. My father was suspended as a lawyer, my older sister was suspended as a high school teacher, and my younger sister was thrown out of the school she attended as a pupil. On that day, the lives of four members of a family of five were completely turned upside down.

The same evening, we had the special privilege of a visit by 20 or 30 SA men who demonstrated before our house, a villa in the Berlin suburbs, shouting curses at us and threatening us for half an hour or more until they finally dispersed.

GERMAN JEWS WERE NOT PREPARED

Events like this came as a deep shock to the Jews of Germany. Although they had witnessed the dangers for many years, they had never really believed that it would happen and were not prepared. The great majority believed they were an inseparable part of the German people and did not understand what was happening. Only a minority had been Zionists and had warned what might be at stake.

The central institutions of German Jewry had fought well against the Nazis and their calumnies. But they had done so by trying to persuade the enemy of the insanity of its theses by rational arguments. They had never realized that they were completely missing the point, that the enemy’s beliefs came from deep irrational, emotional and mythical sources which no logical argument could overcome.

There was even a small group of German “nationalist” Jews who had sympathy with the Germans’ national “awakening”.

It was the Zionists who gave leadership in those day of panic. There was the unforgettable article of the late Robert Weltsch in the Jewish newspaper, Juedische Rundschau, with its slogan: “Wear the Yellow Badge With Pride.”

And there were the unforgettable speeches of Martin Buber and the sermons of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, which later helped to re-establish the morale of German Jews and notably of the Jewish youth.

(Tomorrow: Part Two)