Why Jews Didn’t Leave Europe
There
were more than 500,000 Jews in Germany in 1933, with 30% of them
living in the city of Berlin, 40% living in other large German
cities, and the rest scattered in small towns throughout the country.
More than half of them owned or operated businesses.
When
you look back at Jewish history, there had been long cycles of
Anti-Semitism and recovery. They were sure that Hitler was a passing
phase and things would eventually get better. Most German Jews
thought of themselves as Germans who happened to be Jewish and saw no
reason to have fear. In the previous two hundred years, they had made
tremendous progress and some had fully assimilated and a few even
converted. They saw themselves as patriotic citizens of Germany and
even in the face of Nazism, thought the world was still logical and
they were safe. It also took many resources to leave Germany as is
told in this story:
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They
ask why didn't you run away before? Before the borders were
closed? Before the trap snapped shut? Most Jews remained. To
emigrate one needed not only a lot of money but also a
"bridgehead" in the country of destination: relatives or
friends willing to offer sponsorship and/or hospitality. They
frontiers of Europe were practically closed, and England and the
Americas had extremely reduced immigration quotas. Yet greater
than this difficulty was another inner, psychological nature. This
villiage or town or region or nation is mine. I was born here, my
ancestors are buried here. I speak its language, have adopted its
customs and culture; and to this culture I may even have
contributed. I paid its taxes, observed its laws. I fought its
battles not caring whether they were just or unjust. I risked my
life for its borders, some of my friends or relations lie in the
war cemeteries. I do not want to nor can I leave it; if I die I
will die "in patria [the fatherland]"; that will be my
way of dying "for the patria".
Primo
Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, pp. 163-164
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About
one-third of the German Jews left before the Holocaust. Many of them
were public figures: writers, actors, scientists, and a few prominent
businessmen. Most of them did not go far and stayed in Europe,
expecting to return to Germany when things calmed down. Within a few
years, the Holocaust caught up with them in the nearby countries of
France, Poland, Holland, and Belgium. By the time they realized they
needed to leave Europe, there was no place to go. Immigration to
Palestine was limited between 1933 and 1938. Some also tried to head
to the United States, but the United States immigration laws kept the
numbers small. In 1924, the United States passed the Johnson
Immigration Act which restricted the number of immigrants coming to
the United States from any country. The names of German Jews were
placed on a list and by 1939, the waiting period was four to five
years. France, Britain, Holland, and Belgium were considered good
waiting places until the United States would take them, but by early
1939, they were filling up and also closed their borders.
One
of the most famous examples of countries closing their borders is the
story of the Voyage of the St. Louis. The Hamburg-America Line sold
visas to 907 Jews for $150-$300 dollars each so they could leave
Germany and sail to Cuba. Cuba was a popular destination for German
Jews since it was away from Europe and it was very close to the
United States. 734 of these people were already on the U.S. quota
waiting list. In addition to the exit visas, they paid about $150 for
a landing certificate in Cuba. On May 5, 1939, the president of Cuba
signed Decree No. 937, making all the landing certificates invalid.
Though the Hamberg-American Line knew this, no one on board the St.
Louis was aware of this problem. On May 27th, the ship entered the
port of Havanna, but they were not allowed to land. They stayed in
the Cuban Harbor for 5 days while trying to negotiate a deal to let
them enter. The St. Louis made front page headlines in all the
world's major papers. Eventually, the ship at to turn back to Europe.
When they were about halfway back to Germany, France, Belgium,
England, and the Netherlands each agreed to accept some of the
passengers. Of the 907 passengers, it is estimated that 250
eventually died under Nazi occupation.
Why
did the United States and other countries turn their back on the Jews
of the St. Louis and other refugees? There were many reasons.
Anti-Semitism, fear that some refugees might be Nazi agents, fear
that refugees would take jobs from American workers and lower wages,
fear that resources from the country would be stretched. One other
reason was that there were only 500,000 Jews in Germany, but there
were millions more in Poland, Hungary, Austria, and other countries.
If the United States opened their borders to the German Jews,
wouldn't other countries force their Jews to leave, too? Could any
nation take so many immigrants so suddenly without ruining itself?
The Jews of Europe had no way out.
Moshe
Benstein is an American conductor and scholar who serves as president
of Hard College. In this interview he discusses why Jews didn’t
leave Europe, particularly Germany, after Hitler came to power in
1933. “The Nazis were not as organized as the American film
industry describes them,” he says. “In the breach, segregating
the Jewish population was the first order of business.” Indeed,
Hitler even ordered that Jewish classical musicians be fired from
their groups in the early months of 1933. However, says Benstein,
most German Jews didn’t question that they would live and die in
Germany. They thought Hitler was temporary or that he was so extreme
that there would be a reaction against him. “There was always two
Germanys,” Benstein cites, “There was the Germany of high
culture…and the Germany of the beer hall and…of blood-and-soil
nationalism, which eventually triumphed.”
Anti-Semitism
or even radical anti-Semitism wasn’t a surprise to Germans at the
time, even after Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass in 1938)
and the outbreak of World War II in 1939, according to Benstein.
“People knew things would be terrible, but no one imagined to
what extent,” says Benstein.
"Volcanoes,
Nazis and Crime" (editorial, June 14) cleverly compares Nazi
Germany to an active volcano. Yet the question "why so many Jews
couldn't bring themselves to leave Germany in the 30's" is not
an enduring point, but myth at best.
In
the first two years of Nazi rule (1933-34) emigration might have been
based somewhat on a person's ability to earn a living in a new land.
After the passage of the Nuremberg race laws, virtually all German
Jews wanted to get out. Does anyone believe there were any Jews in
Germany who did not want to leave after Kristallnacht in 1938?
They
went to Chile, Cuba and China (Shanghai) to South Africa and Santo
Domingo and a score of countries, wherever they could get a visa.
Other nations did not open their doors to German Jewish refugees.
I
had to wait almost four years for a United States quota immigration
visa. It was issued barely weeks before the Nazi volcano erupted in
World War II. My family's roots in Germany went back centuries, and
yet we just wanted to get out, anywhere.
Similar
to their fellow citizens, German Jews were patriotic citizens. More
than 10,000 died fighting for Germany in World War I, and countless
others were wounded and received medals for their valor and service.
The families of many Jews who held German citizenship, regardless of
class or profession, had lived in Germany for centuries and were well
assimilated by the early 20th century. From 1933–39, the German
government passed and enforced discriminatory laws targeting Jews at
a relatively gradual pace. Up until the nationwide anti-Jewish
violence of 1938, known as Kristallnacht, many Jews in Germany
expected to be able to hold out against Nazi-sponsored persecution,
as they hoped for positive change in German politics. Before World
War II, few could imagine or predict killing squads and killing
centers.
Those
who made the difficult decision to leave Germany still had to find a
country willing to admit them and their family. The search for safe
haven was very difficult. The Evian Conference of 1938 showed this
when almost every nation in attendance declined to change its
immigration policies. Even when a new country could be found, a great
deal of time, paperwork, support, and sometimes money was needed to
get there. In many cases, these obstacles could not be overcome.
These
activity sheets illustrate some of the difficulties Jews faced in
trying to leave Germany; they make clear that this seemingly simple
question is actually very complicated.
Why didn’t they just leave?
If
you live in a free, democratic society, it is difficult to imagine
how Nazi Germany worked. It’s natural to ask: why
didn’t the Jews just leave?
In
1933, when Hitler came to power, the population of Germany was 67
million. There were approximately 505,000 Jews. The Jewish community
was less than 1% of the overall population and half of these people
survived. They saw what was coming and successfully emigrated. In
contrast to Poland where three million Jews were killed, representing
the largest national group. Three million of the six million Jewish
victims were Polish.
One
thing that helped me understand how difficult it was for Jews to
leave was to examine the Nürnberg Laws. In Berlin, there is a
memorial near the Bayerische Platz underground station where the laws
are presented on street signs. On one side, the law is printed in
black and white, with the date the law went into effect. On the other
side, is a corresponding color image.
Jews
who convert to Christianity and are baptized are still Jewish by
race. October 1936
I
mage
of baptismal chalice on other side of sign. Source: University of
South Florida
This
memorial is located in a Berlin neighborhood established between
1900-14. Doctors, lawyers, intellectuals, artists and civic officials
lived in this district. Albert Einstein was also a resident. The
memorial is thought provoking and engaging because it makes clear how
Jews in Germany were legally controlled and marginalized. Over time,
their lives became constrained to the point there were no real
options.
I
borrowed these images from a website, created by The University of
South Florida’s College of Education, with English translations of
each sign from the Bavarian
Quarter Memorial.
It
was not an easy process to emigrate. Refugees needed an exit visa to
leave Germany, which meant giving up bank accounts, real estate,
businesses and valuable assets to the state. On the Night of Broken
Glass (November 9, 1938), thirty thousand Jewish men were taken to
concentration camps, namely Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen.
Many died during the weeks in camp, but those who survived were
released several weeks later, and took the experience as a warning to
leave as quickly as possible. Refugees also needed entry visas and
work permits for their new country. Survivor testimony and other
historical documents often describe the process of applying for visas
all over the world, but not obtaining them. Anne Frank’s family is
a good example of this. Her father could not get visas for all four
of them, which is why they went into hiding. He wanted to keep his
family together.
Trains
to life, trains to death. Kindertransport memorial at
Berlin-Friedrichstrasse train station, unveiled in 2008. Source:
http://www.kindertransporte.de
After
November 9th, the Kindertransport
program
started to send thousands of German, Austrian and Czech Jewish
children to safety in England. I know a survivor, born in Berlin, who
was one of these children. After his father returned from weeks of
torture and cruelty in Sachsenhausen, he took immediate action to
save his two boys. The boys were sent via the Kindertransport
to
England where he was placed in a refugee home for boys in London. The
parents also eventually got there. This survivor knows that he is
“lucky” to have had his parents and older brother, but sometimes
lamented the absence of his extended family in his life. Until he was
nine, he had grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. What would
it have been like to have grown up with these people?
In
2006, two Stolpersteine
(“stumbling
stones”) were laid for his grandparents at their old apartment in
Berlin: 33
Bleibtreustraße.
They were killed in Riga, Latvia.
Stolpersteine
“stumbling
stones” for Julius and Margarete Liepmann in Berlin.
A
German camp survivor I was close to for several years, was born in
1920 and was in his teens during the 1930s. The reality of what the
Nazis were doing hit him when he was no longer allowed to play soccer
on his local team. Soccer is German’s national sport.
Traditionally, German children attend school in the mornings and are
excused in the early afternoon to have a hot meal at home. Afternoons
are spent at sport clubs, music lessons and other extracurricular
activities. For many boys (and girls, these days), soccer is what
they live for and that’s how it was for this man. To comprehend the
feelings of anger, shame and frustration, of being shut out,
rejected, is impossible. I knew this man when he was in his eighties.
He had a number on his arm from Auschwitz and survived four years in
the camps. But the most painful thing, he told me, was being kicked
off that soccer team.
In
the damp dark streets of early morning Vienna, SS Gestapo Chief
Heinrich Himmler’s agents raced to find one of the biggest
ideological enemies of the Nazi state—a
58-year-old Ludwig von Mises.
A political economist and critic of the socialist state, von Mises
narrowly managed to flee to Switzerland just as his
would-be
captors were closing in.
Kristallnacht
Himmler
and his Nazi thugs had another reason to find and kill von Mises. It
was 1938 and he and other enemies of Hitler’s state—Jews, like
von Mises as well as anti-socialists reformers—held private wealth
the Nazi war machine desperately needed to keep running.
The
Nazi Party rose to power in when their leader, Adolf Hitler was
appointed Germany’s Chancellor 1933. Hitler has achieved this
position by hammering at two powerful themes: restoring the German
supremacy robbed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and “the Jewish
question.” Hitler dreamed of uniting “racially desirable”
Germans in a new and powerful state. But this unison could not happen
without first weeding out the rest of Germany (i.e. Jews as well as
homosexuals, gypsies, and freemasons, among others).
The
Jewish question referred to a European debate that had been raging
for centuries regarding the appropriate civil, legal and political
status of Jews as a minority within European countries. German
economist and sociologist Werner Sombart had praised German Jews as
positive contributors to German society for their entrepreneurialism
and capitalism, but within the Nazi party this sentiment was
considered radically left wing.
It
was this climate—mere months after von Mises escaped Vienna—that
eventually led to the infamous Kristallnacht—when entrepreneurs
like Trudi Kanter were driven from their homes, lost their
livelihoods, and in some tragic cases, were killed. Trudi, who’s
brilliant autobiography
Some
Girls, Some Hats, and Hitler
tells
the story of going from freedom and entrepreneurship to living under
the oppression of Nazi Germany, lost her business almost overnight.
But, how did the Nazi’s target entrepreneurs for their theft? Why
did they block
entrepreneurship
and free ideas?
And, perhaps most importantly, how did their efforts to tax and seize
Jewish wealth so quickly turn into a genocide?
Wealth
Confiscation and the Nazi State
The
Nazis considered German Jews “a foreign race”—but they were
also very interested in their wealth. Anti-Semitism had a long
history in Europe: it was largely influenced by the Christian belief
perpetuated in the Middle Ages that the Jewish people were
collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. Persecution of
European Jews was widespread during the Crusades, beginning in 1095,
when Jewish communities along the Rhine and the Danube were
massacred. Due to this discrimination, many Jews adapted by turning
to entrepreneurship and some had become quite successful by the
twentieth century. Hitler pointed to their wealth in order to pit
many economically stressed German citizens against German Jews. This
was Hitler’s first step in fueling anti-Semitism, long before he
made a move against Jewish lives, as Götz Ally explains in his
probing and well-researched study of Nazi economic policy, Hitler’s
Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State.
Counting
gold bars confiscated by Nazi soldiers
According
to a study released in 2010 by Hans-Peter Ullmann, a Cologne history
professor, Jewish wealth confiscated by the Nazis paid for roughly
one third of Germany’s World War II effort. Nearly 120 billion
marks—over $17.4 billion today—was plundered from German Jews by
laws and looting. According to Ullmann, the tax authorities under the
Nazis actively worked to “destroy Jews financially.” Even Jews
who managed to escape Germany before the Holocaust had to leave part
of their wealth behind in the form of an “exit tax.”
Another
critical piece to Hitler’s rise in popularity was his promise to
restore German power. The Treaty of Versailles had not only forced
Germany to disarm, but had also stripped Germany of land that was
turned over to neighboring countries. The ascension of the Nazi party
to national prominence was meant to be a first step in rearming
Germany for an attack on those neighbors that would take back that
territory, and restore the nation to its former glory.
By
1934, Hitler had broken several key agreements in the Treaty of
Versailles by increasing the German military to one million men. The
treaty limited the German army to 100,000, and also prohibited German
manufacturing of new military equipment, in which Hitler was
investing heavily. Hitler had to solve the problem of how to pay for
both the rearmament and the vast increase in government services he
planned to use to fight raging unemployment and keep the beleaguered
middle class on his side.
The
Treaty of Versailles
With
Hitler’s approval, Göring developed a three-step plan to
confiscate Jewish wealth. First, all Jews would be required to
declare their wealth. If they hid any assets, they would receive an
automatic ten-year prison term and have their wealth confiscated.
Next,
Göring used this data to institute a 20% tax on Jewish wealth,
raising millions for the government. With the military budget still
growing, however, deficits continued to soar and Goering moved to
step three: In 1938, a law was passed nationalizing all property
owned by German Jews.
Wedding
rings stolen during Kristallnacht
Feedback
from his ambassadors in other countries, however, made Göring
realize that Germany would be harshly criticized if perceived to be
outright stealing the Jewish community’s assets. That is when he
came up with a diabolical plan to make it appear that German Jews
were being treated fairly. In 1939, in return for their stolen
wealth, the Nazis issued war bonds to the Jews that paid a small
amount of interest, and would only be honored if Germany were to win
the war that had begun on September 1, 1939 with Germany’s invasion
of Poland.
Having
stolen most of the Jewish wealth, which prevented Jewish people from
maintaining their businesses or starting new ones, the Nazis next
declared that only specific pawn shops could be used by the Jews to
sell their jewelry, which it was no longer legal for them to own. At
these pawn shops, the prices were set far below market value.
Even
with this grotesque theft from some of Germany’s most productive
citizens, the massive military buildup still required more money, so
Hitler’s government decided to impose a 50% surtax on most German
groups. To avoid lowering the morale of the average German citizen,
however, the Nazis made an informal but clear pact with the German
people: If the Wehrmacht (the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany)
were to successfully conquer and plunder other countries, the German
people would not have to pay the tax. This was a clever move that
consolidated German support for World War II and ultimately for the
Holocaust, as well.
The
1934 army
Once
a country was conquered by Germany, its wealth was looted through
confiscation and through taxes on its businesses. In France, the
Germans seized the stock market and sold off portions of it to pay
the bills of the war. Each country that was conquered was forced to
remit most of their gold holdings to the German central bank. Another
way the Nazis transferred wealth back to Germany was to raise the pay
of German soldiers in a particular country while at the same time
devaluing the currency of the conquered country relative to the
Deutsche Mark. This handed purchasing power to the occupying German
soldiers, who were encouraged by their commanders to buy goods to use
themselves and to send back to Germany. The stores in the conquered
country would be left with too few goods for its own population,
driving up prices, starving citizens and in effect bankrupting the
local economy.
German
soldiers were encouraged to plunder and loot homes, businesses and
farms. The rule was that anything that would fit into a postal bag
could be sent back to their own families with no tax paid. In 1940,
during the first six months of the Third Reich’s invasion of
Russia, German soldiers shipped 3.5 million bags of stolen property
back home.
An
apartment after being looted by Nazi soldiers
As
a result of all these policies, as well as generous social programs
back home, the average German enjoyed a higher standard of living and
benefited directly from the systematic plundering of their own
German-Jewish neighbors, as well as the citizens of occupied
countries under the Nazi regime.
Sadly,
once millions of European Jews had been stripped of their wealth by
the Reich, they became expendable to the Nazis and Hitler’s “final
solution” to “the Jewish question” was launched. Three years
later more than six million Jews had lost their lives to the
Holocaust; so did other “undesirable” minorities, including
freemasons and gypsies.
By
studying the economic decisions that led up to the Holocaust, perhaps
we can learn from this horrific chapter in world history. In Part 2,
I will explore similarities between how the Nazis used taxation to
disempower German Jews before launching into full-blown genocide and
strikingly similar economic policies enacted by the Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia before they, too, became genocidal and massacred three
million Cambodians between 1975-1978.
