LEAVING GERMANY

As conditions worsened in Germany, more and more Jews made the agonizing decision to leave and live elsewhere. Between 1933 and the beginning of the war in 1939, somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 Jews left Germany. Most of those who left were young, 18-30 years old. And many, if not most, of them did not plan to be gone forever. There was always the hope that somehow Hitler's government would collapse, and then they could go home. But first they had to get out. This was by no means a simple matter. For in order to get out, they had to find a country that would take them in. (To appreciate how much effort this required, see the section on obtaining entry visas.)

John Baer, a young man in Breslau who decided to leave in 1938, had an experience that was quite typical. Visiting all the embassies in Berlin he discovered that "almost every country had closed its doors to Jewish refugees." But he learned that while he had no chance of getting a visa in Berlin he might have some luck in France. There the consul for Peru was willing to grant someone a temporary "tourist visa" for a limited stay "in exchange for a little compensation." In other words, a bribe. Even that proved hard to arrange because the Peruvian wanted nearly $300 in American money, and Germany by then would not permit anyone to take that much money out of the country. So what to do? Baer found a solution when he made contact with a man in America whose mother lived in Breslau. The man would send the American money to Paris and in exchange Baer would give about $300 worth of German marks to the mother. Once the exchange was made, he had his visa for Peru.

Some 270,000 to 300,000 Jews left Germany as Baer did, seeking new homes around the world. Few of the countries in Europe accepted any appreciable numbers of these immigrants. France gave refuge to the largest number, and Austria admitted some (until 1938, when Germany annexed Austria, at which point the refugees had to seek another refuge). Italy also took some. Britain was reluctant to take many and took steps to block any significant number from entering its mandate in Palestine. Spain and Portugal would accept only those refugees who had evidence that they were passing through to another destination.

Howard K. Smith, then just beginning his career as a journalist, believed that by 1940 "the young [German Jews] had mostly escaped or been imprisoned. Those who remained were old, decrepit, pathetic creatures . . . whose bodies were almost broken." Some older Jews did fit Smith's description, but there were others who were quite healthy and determined to resist the Nazis, sometimes just in spirit, sometimes in more overt ways. Resistance groups arose both in Germany and across the expanse of the growing Nazi empire. A group formed by Herbert Baum in Berlin in 1938-39 resisted the Nazis with sabotage and antifascist literature. Another group, the Chug Chaluzi, helped German Jews go underground and hide. Other Jews went underground on their own, sometimes with the assistance of sympathetic German Christians or German communists. When German troops invaded Poland and Russia, Jews in the occupied areas formed partisan groups and fought back.

But for those who, like the elderly neighbors that Howard K. Smith had known in Germany, were too old, too weak, or simply unwilling to reject a lifetime of respect for law (even law decreed by criminals) the future offered little hope. Two such men were Herman Stern's brothers, Moses and Julius. Both men rejected all suggestions to leave Germany in the 1930s. By the time they changed their minds it was too late. Both subsequently died in the Holocaust.

Hitler's aggression in expanding his German empire simply compounded the crisis. Seizing Austria left 200,000 Austrian Jews faced with the question of whether to stay or try to leave. By annexing most of Czechoslovakia in late 1938 and then seizing Poland in 1939, Hitler, who had said his only goal was to get all the Jews to leave, had effectively increased the Jewish population of his Third Reich by millions.

The attack on Poland also led to war in Europe. And now Hitler, who had promised that war would mean the end of European Jewry, gave orders that would inaugurate a nightmare.

Sources: John V. H. Dippel, Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire: Why So Many German Jews Made the Tragic Decision to Remain in Nazi Germany (1996); Charles Gelman, Do Not Go Gentle: A Memoir of Resistance in Poland (1989); Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (1998); Walter Laqueur, Generation Exodus: The Fate of Young Jewish Refugees From Nazi Germany (2001); Ruby Rohrlich, editor, Resisting the Holocaust (1998); John J. Michalczyk, editor, Resisters, Rescuers, and Refugees (1997); Howard K. Smith, Last Train From Berlin (1942); Yuri Suhl, editor They Fought Back: Stories of Jewish Resistance in Nazi Europe (1978).

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