Steven Karras Read online

  IN SCHENKLENGSFELD IN CENTRAL GERMANY, a town with twelve Jewish families, Werner Katzenstein became an easy target for his classmates: “Most of my friends began joining the Hitler Youth. At that time they started calling me a ‘dirty Jew’ and the insults soon escalated into violence and that includes beatings. I remember many trips home from school that included bloody noses and broken glasses.”

  Only gradually did Jews come to the conclusion that there was no future left for them in Germany. Bernard Baum, who came from Giessen, Germany, remembered that his father, Theodore Baum, a decorated veteran of World War I had anticipated problems early on:

  My father was a very bright, intelligent, well-read man, and politically liberal by orientation. He was a World War I hero and was awarded the Iron Cross. He read Mein Kampf in 1930, and when he finished that book he turned to my mother and said, “If this man Hitler comes to power we’re leaving Germany.” So, in January of 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, my father got the papers to leave. Some of his Jewish friends pleaded with him to stay and would ask him, “Why are you leaving? You won the Iron Cross; you’ve got a successful dental practice and are living well.” My father replied, “Because I’ve got three sons.”

  For other German Jews, the decision to emigrate was difficult to make, especially among heads of households. Not knowing another language meant professionals couldn’t qualify to work in their chosen professions in other countries. This impacted most directly on those whose professions were dependent on language skills. Musicians and architects, even filmmakers have a universal language, but lawyers, for example, do not. Some professions have rigorous licensing requirements, and experienced lawyers and physicians knew that it could take years and additional education to obtain recertification for fields in which they had a lifetime of experience.

  The young, who once imagined intellectual and professional careers, instead prepared for mobile professions that they could practice anywhere, but finding a country to take them was difficult. Even though the horrible news of boycotts and anti-Jewish decrees continued to filter out of Germany, countries were still ambivalent to the plight of the Jews. The United States had imposed a quota system in 1924 with a limited number of visas available for refugees from Germany and Austria, and did nothing to lift any restrictions on immigration. Not until 1938 was the full quota of immigrants admitted to the United States.

  Immigration officials erected what historians have called “paper walls.” Hopeful immigrants had to locate citizens in countries who could provide affidavits for their families, assuring immigration officials that the potential émigré could find work and not become a public charge. In addition to Likely to become Public Charge (LPC) documents, immigrants to the United States required a Certificate of Good Conduct. Teenagers and young adults learned physical trades and became plumbers, tool and die makers, mechanics, and cooks to make getting out much easier.

  The emigration crisis had reached its boiling point in 1938, resulting in the largest emigration wave of Jews. On March 12, 1938, German troops crossed the Austrian border and marched into Vienna. What had been a five-year gradual buildup and intensification of anti-Jewish policies and discrimination in Germany came in a shocking instant to Austria’s 183,000 Jews. The Nuremberg Laws were immediately implemented, and Jews lost their Austrian citizenship overnight; Aryanization of Austrian businesses yielded the same results as it had in Germany and spontaneous violence against Jews erupted all over Vienna.

  Peter Terry, the son of a well-known surgeon living in Vienna, remembers: “When you looked out the window, you saw horrible scenes—people being arrested, mostly Jews being forced on their hands and knees and made to wash the pavement while Viennese Nazis spat on them and shouted insults.” SA men made a sport of randomly pulling religious Jews out of crowds and shaving their beards. Pregnant Jewish women were ordered to run in circles until they collapsed in exhaustion. In the months following the Anschluss, five hundred Austrian Jews committed suicide.

  Nazi officials in Austria accelerated forced emigration at such a breathtaking pace that by the summer of 1938, approximately ninety thousand Austrian Jews—one in two—had fled the country. Peter Masters, a future British Commando, was fifteen years old and one of those who fled in 1938: “My aunt in London got fourteen people out, of whom I am one. When I think back to what went on in Vienna on a day-by-day … it sends shivers down my back because there isn’t the slightest doubt that you would’ve been murdered if you’d stayed any longer than we did. The ultimate fate was never in doubt.”

  APPROXIMATELY 150,000 GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN JEWS had been fortunate enough to escape by the summer of 1938; 8,000 made it to Great Britain, 40,000 to Palestine, and 55,000 to the United States. This mass immigration sparked an international refugee crisis and posed major problems for countries that maintained very strict immigration laws. In July 1938, President Roosevelt convened (without attending) a gathering of thirty-two countries and a host of relief organizations (many of them Jewish) in Evian, France, to discuss the plight of the Jewish refugees. Although there was sympathy toward the Jews in Germany and Austria, quotas and restrictions stayed the same, and doors remained closed to hundreds of thousands of Jews.

  In October 1938, the Nazis expelled seven thousand Jews living in Germany who had Polish citizenship, but the Polish government refused to readmit them to the country. In early November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a German Jew studying in Paris, received a letter from his mother informing him that they too were among the deportees. Despondent over the news, Grynszpan walked into the German Embassy in Paris with a pistol and shot a junior embassy official, Ernst Von Rath, who died later that evening. The Nazis used Von Rath’s murder as an excuse to launch a highly disciplined and coordinated pogrom against the Jews, otherwise known as the Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass. In two days, seven thousand Jewish businesses were ransacked and looted, windows were smashed, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated, more than a thousand synagogues around Germany were torched and burned to the ground, and almost one hundred Jews were killed.

  In the town of Ludwigshafen, Germany, across the river from Mannheim, Eric Hamberg, who was sick with a fever, watched the tragic events unfold from his bedroom window: “SA men went up to our neighbors’ apartment and took that nice family’s bedding, threw it all out of the window and into the street, and then set it all on fire. I saw people laughing and dancing and being so happy that the Jews were getting something that they didn’t expect.”

  The Nazis entered homes, dragged men out of bed and arrested them; thirty thousand Jewish men, ages sixteen to sixty, were shipped off to Buchenwald, Dachau, Gross Rosen, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. They turned out to be the fortunate ones. They were told they could be released on the condition that they somehow procured a visa and proved to the Nazi authorities that they could leave the country in a short period of time. This put tremendous pressure on wives and relatives to find a way to get their husbands and children out of the camps.

  Jews who had second-guessed and agonized over whether or not to emigrate were now desperate to leave. Applications for visas piled high in the offices of foreign consulates in every major German city; frantic Jews waited hours in lines that stretched around buildings and city blocks to plead their cases. Detached, unsympathetic consulate generals—known to deny applicants for any number of reasons, no matter how trivial—had the power over life and death. Medical records that revealed any history of surgeries or ailments were often grounds for rejection. Karl Goldsmith, who went with his family to the U.S. consulate in Stuttgart just after Kristallnacht, describes the indifference of the consulate general and his staff: “This was degradation at its worst. My father who had had cancer two years before I was born and had surgery was told by the vice council that he could not go to America. You cannot imagine the absolute fear, horror, and terror this produced in my family. It was a horrible experience for me, a seventeen-year-old boy to see my proud, sixty-year-old father degr
aded, insulted, pushed, and treated like dirt.”

  Steven Rose from Frankfurt, later in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, remembers a similar event at a U.S. consulate: “I had a cousin, a girl about the same age as me, who walked with a slight limp. Aside from that slight limp there was nothing wrong with her. Well, they denied her a visa and she became hysterical and then jumped out the window and killed herself. From then on, I had a personal vendetta against the Germans. I hated the bastards.”

  After the tragedy of the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, 180,000 German Jews fled to many of the countries that would take them. The British government offered some relief when it agreed to open its doors to 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children via a rescue initiative called the Kindertransport. The United States, with a German-Austrian immigration quota of 27,370 per year that had never come close to being filled throughout the early and mid 1930s (reaching only 42 percent in 1937, the most yet at that time), allowed 50,000 German Jews to immigrate after Kristallnacht and before entering the war. The quota fill rate hit 100 percent in 1939.

  SAFETY

  When most former refugees recall their arrival in the United States, Great Britain, or Palestine (then a British Mandate), they speak of the immediate sense of relief after stepping off the boat and the comfort of knowing they were finally out of danger.

  While the Depression in the United States continued to cast a dark shadow and jobs were difficult to come by, Jewish relief organizations—such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)—labored to help refugees find jobs and accommodations. Nevertheless, for most it was a glorious time; refugees explored their new environments with great wonderment and enthusiasm. For Kurt Klein, a refugee from Walldorf, Germany, New York made quite an impression:

  I had seen New York City in films and photos, but I could hardly believe that I was there. Of course to a young boy that part was an adventure—to get out of the environment not only because of the perils imposed on me and my family, but just to travel to a place like that seemed immensely exciting to me. It meant that much more to me to see New York and discovering all it could offer. Even a subway ride was exciting.

  For the younger refugees, it was a chance to make up for all of the lost years from their youth—they went back to school, learned English, and began to assimilate. Their vocational training received in Germany paid off in many cases, and getting jobs helped lift some of the burdens for those supporting their families. The refugee communities that desired to maintain roots while adjusting to their new environment settled in scattered, but closely-knit, communities. New York had its Washington Heights (called the “Fourth Reich”), Chicago its Hyde Park, and Los Angeles had yet another thriving Jewish community. Edmund Schloss, a refugee from Jesberg, Germany, whose family settled in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, enjoyed the familiarity of maintaining ties to the refugee community: “Within Hyde Park we had a big circle of friends and relatives and life became very comfortable. One could walk up 53rd Street and only hear German being spoken.” The German newspaper, Aufbau (to rebuild), circulated among refugees and was an important source of news. During the war, the Aufbau dedicated a section to refugees in the armed forces entitled “Our Boys in the Army,” which listed all who were fighting overseas, in Europe as well as in the Pacific.

  Refugees closely followed the events in Europe with great concern. There was little doubt that war with Germany was imminent, and even the refugees who had considered themselves pacifists knew war was the only way to stop Hitler and possibly save their families.

  Despite the Jewish refugees’ feelings about the war, American and British immigration policy had yet to understand the unique antipathy that German Jewish immigrants felt toward their homeland or recognize the important skills they possessed. Those who had fled the Nazis were still categorized as Enemy Aliens, nationals of countries at war or in conflict with their host countries, and were not spared the rampant suspicion that their presence might prove to be an internal threat to their country’s national security.

  IN GREAT BRITAIN, there was increasing concern over a fifth column and suspicion that Nazi spies were hiding among the Austrian and German immigrant population. After France fell to Germany and the Luftwaffe began pummeling industrial cities in bombing raids over England, killing thousands of civilians, the British government rounded up male refugees it called Friendly Enemy Aliens and placed them in internment camps on the Isle of Man. In his book, Striking Back: A Jewish Commando’s War against the Nazis, Peter Masters writes:

  Although we sympathized with our British hosts’ concern about the threat of a fifth column of infiltrated spies posing as refugees, we also knew that we were the real thing: refugees. We had no trouble at all telling friend from foe, and we would have been happy to help our jailers identify any suspect elements among us, had there been any. We who had hoped to fight the common enemy were being held as prisoners by our own side, probably for the duration of the war—our war! What we wanted was to help.

  Circumstances were not as extreme for refugees in the United States, though they did experience setbacks because of their status. In many cases, refugees had to turn in cameras and shortwave radios to authorities. Perhaps the greatest restriction was being prohibited from enlisting in the military until, in 1940, the Selective Training and Service Act was passed by the United States Congress. The act required all men, including enemy aliens, eligible for military service to register for the draft. To their great delight, refugees were drafted into the military as early as 1940. In Great Britain, the privilege of enlistment was eventually granted to refugees, but they could only serve out the war in labor battalions in the Royal Pioneer Corps. Although a setback for those eager to get into the fight with Germany, it was a way out of the internment camps.

  Revenge was a driving force motivating refugees to serve in the army, especially among those who had lived through Kristallnacht and spent time in a concentration camp. Refugees instinctively felt that if anyone should be inducted into the military to go and fight the Nazis, it should be them. John Slade, a thirty-four-year-old banker from Frankfurt, was working on Wall Street when he was seized with the urge to go to war: “I decided that if a guy from Oklahoma could fight against Hitler, then I, too, must fight.” Amidst vestiges of suspicion of their national origins, this was a fighting chance to prove their loyalty and learn more about their new country. In the United States, it was also the fast track toward becoming naturalized citizens, something that refugees desired and strived to obtain. Nevertheless, it was their duty to serve the countries that had taken them in.

  The Allies came to recognize the many strategic advantages in making use of the refugees’ German language fluency—including the many local German dialects—as well as their motivation and willingness to help the war effort.

  IN THE UNITED STATES, fledgling intelligence agencies, like the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), singled out refugees who were only too keen to help provide any vital information that could be of use to the war effort: their knowledge of various regions and cities, locations of industries, factories, famous landmarks, Gestapo headquarters, train stations, and ports, as well as names of regional Nazi party leaders and mayors of towns. Joseph Persico, author of Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents during World War II further explains, “Intelligence agencies even wanted the clothes off the refugees’ backs. They wanted their wristwatches, pens, razors, wallets, luggage, and their underwear. The quality, fabric, and workmanship of a suit, could indicate the state of the German economy. The kind of steel in a razor might reveal something of German industrial processes.”

  Once the war came to the United States, refugees already in the military were pulled out of the ranks and placed in division intelligence sections. Early in the war, British intelligence—coming out of North Africa and France via Force Françaises de l’Interieur (FFI, or French Forces of the Interior)—was the best
source of information for refugees to learn proficiently. Subsequently, they became instructors and taught officers and enlisted men basic German, German Army commands, and how to identify German uniforms, ranks, and insignia.

  Not long after U.S. forces landed in North Africa and helped drive the German army off the continent, the U.S. government decided to centralize its intelligence operations in Hagerstown, Maryland, at Camp Ritchie. Between 1942 and 1945, thousands of refugees from the Nazis passed through Camp Ritchie, where they received highly specialized training that included learning the German table of organization, order of battle, interrogation of prisoners of war (IPW) techniques, combat exercises, field maneuvers, psychological warfare, and counterintelligence. Once out of Camp Ritchie, graduates filled the ranks of intelligence and interrogation units that were attached to different outfits all over Europe, and ultimately in American Military Government in Germany at the end of the war. Needless to say, a great many refugees served only in a combat capacity and ended up in frontline outfits; while they spoke German and could be a great source for translation and ad hoc frontline interrogation when needed, they also fought just like any other soldier.

  CONVERSELY, JEWISH REFUGEES IN GREAT BRITAIN were sought out for their obvious linguistic advantages over the average British “Tommy.” In 1942, Chief of Combined Operations Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten convinced Winston Churchill to create a unit of German-speaking soldiers of exceptional initiative and self-reliance and include them in the roster of No. 10 Inter-allied Commando/Special Services Brigades. They would become No. 3 Troop, 10 Inter-allied Commando. However, it was Churchill’s idea to call them “X Troop,” or the “British Troop;” it was a unit shrouded in mystery because of the very high concentration of German and Austrian Jews. Consequently, troops were ordered to Anglicize their names, create false personal histories, and don Church of England dog tags to conceal their identities in the event of capture. Unlike refugees serving in the U.S. Army, refugees serving in the British Army were not given citizenship. Since they were German nationals and not British citizens, they were not protected by the Geneva Convention and the Germans had the right to execute them in the event of capture. They became reconnaissance and weapons experts, but most importantly, they were remarkably skilled frontline interrogators.