During the early years of WWII, the Soviets invaded and occupied the independent country of Lithuania in the Baltics. In June of 1941, the Germans turned on their ally and invaded the Soviet Union, including Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius. Twenty-five percent of the city’s population was Jewish.
Vilnius, Lithuania Old Town Skyline. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia
By late summer 1941, the SS Einsatzgruppen, Hitler’s elite killing squads, began escorting Jewish men, women, and children to large pits in the Ponary Forest outside Vilnius to shoot them. The Nazis murdered tens of thousands of Jews as well as Poles and Russians in this forest.
When World War II began, thirty-nine-year-old German shopkeeper Toni Schmid from Vienna, Austria, was drafted into the German army. Schmid did not support the Nazis or Hitler but was a deeply committed Christian. Schmid was a sergeant and ran an army post behind German troops for soldiers who were stragglers or were separated from their units. In 1941 he was sent to Vilnius where he witnessed SS troops murdering Jewish children. Horrified, he wanted to help the Jews but didn’t know how.
One night Sergeant Schmid walked down a dark street in Vilnius, and a desperate, young Jewish woman stepped out of the shadows and begged him to protect her from the SS death squads. He took her to his apartment for the night and the following day to a Catholic priest he knew.
The priest issued the woman a certificate of membership from his church. Schmid helped her obtain an official identity card and an apartment to rent. He told the German officials that she was a civilian employee from his military unit and the Soviets had taken her documents when they retreated.
Sergeant Schmid helped a young Jewish man also hiding from the death squads. Schmid gave him a German army uniform and the military identity papers of a German soldier who’d died, but his death hadn’t been reported. Then Schmid installed the young man as a military aide in his office.
One of Schmid’s duties was to oversee workshops manned by convalescing German soldiers, Russian POW’s, and Jews with skills needed for the war effort. Although he was only allowed to employ fifteen Jews, Schmid hired dozens to work in the shops.
Site of the Ponary massacre, where the German Nazis and their collaborators executed up to 100,000 people of various nationalities. About 70,000 of them were Jews. Photo by Avi1111 DR. AVISHAI TEICHER. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
Under the cover of darkness, Schmid visited the Vilnius ghetto and supplied the Jews with food, medicine, and baby bottles filled with milk he had kept warm in his pockets. He warned the ghetto residents when Nazi raids were about to take place. Some of Schmid’s Jewish workers were caught in roundups, but he went to the local prison and obtained their release. He hid Jews in the back of covered trucks headed for German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, hoping they would be safer there than in Lithuania.
Sergeant Schmid secretly advised the leaders of a Jewish resistance movement in the Vilnius ghetto. He helped transport Jewish resistance fighters out of the city, warned them of pending German operations, and even supplied them with stolen German weapons. He also permitted resistance members to meet in his apartment.
Schmid’s good deeds did not escape the notice of the Gestapo, and agents began following him. One day they raided his apartment while he was visiting the ghetto. Some of Schmid’s soldiers located him before he arrived home and warned him that Gestapo agents were waiting at his apartment. Schmid fled, but the Nazis caught him after several weeks and sentenced him to death.
Prior to his arrest, Sergeant Schmid had assisted almost 300 Jews to escape the Nazis in Lithuania. On April 13, 1942, he was executed by a Nazi firing squad. The last words out of his mouth were the Lord’s Prayer.
The night before his execution, Sergeant Schmid wrote a letter to his wife and daughter in Austria.
“‘I am informing you, my dearest that I must depart from this world, I am sentenced to death. Please remain strong and trust in our dear God, who decides the destiny of each of us….Now I close my last lines, the last I can write to you, and send my love.’”
Sergeant Schmid took to heart Christ’s teaching that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” But Sergeant Schmid went one step further – he gave his life for strangers.
Source:
Gragg, Rod. My Brother’s Keeper. Center Street, 2016.
The tragedy of Kristallnacht, Night of the Broken Glass, took place in Germany, Austria, and the Nazi-occupied section of Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) on November 9-10, 1938. The Nazis damaged or destroyed 1000 synagogues and 7500 Jewish businesses, sent 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps, and beat ninety male Jews to death.
These events shocked the world. However, many countries, including the United States, only permitted a small percentage of Jews to immigrate, regardless of guarantees of financial support from relatives, friends, and acquaintances in those countries.
Shortly after the events of Kristallnacht, a delegation of prominent Jews in England met with Prime Minister Chamberlain and requested that he allow young German children and teenagers to temporarily enter Britain, retrain, and return to their home countries at a later time.
The Jewish representatives were most concerned about teenagers threatened with arrest and those already in concentration camps. Jewish and non-Jewish agencies assured the British Home Secretary that they would meet the financial needs of the refugee children, apart from government funds, and their stay would only be temporary.
As a result, the British government gave permission for unaccompanied refugee children under the age of seventeen years to enter Britain and didn’t announce a limit to the number of children who would be admitted.
The non-Jewish groups consolidated and formed the non-denominational Movement for the Care of Children from Germany (later called the Refugee Children’s Movement, RCM). Agents of the organization traveled to Germany and Austria and set up the selection, processing, and transportation plans.
A representative of the Jewish refugee agencies met with Jewish leaders in Berlin, and volunteers gathered the names of the most threatened children. These included teenagers in danger of arrest or already in concentration camps, children in Jewish orphanages, children whose parents were in concentration camps, children who could no longer be financially supported by their parents, and Polish children or teenagers at risk of deportation.
Through radio broadcasts, the BBC Home Service appealed to the British people to provide foster homes. Five hundred people answered the call. Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers visited the homes of these potential foster parents and reported on their suitability.
Several hundred immigrant applications from Germany arrived in London each week, demonstrating the urgency of the situation. British volunteers processed the applications, many of them working around the clock, grouping the children in lists and sending travel arrangements to the parents and guardians in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.
The Nazi government only permitted the refugee children to take a small amount of money out of the Reich, but it wasn’t unusual for parents to place valuables in their children’s luggage. Some children were excited about the journey, but others were angry with their parents and felt rejected. Later on, guilt plagued these children for how they had responded.
The first Kindertransport left Berlin on December 1, 1938, and the first transport from Vienna left ten days later. The trains traveled across Germany and into the Netherlands and then Belgium. At the border crossings, German guards terrified the children by looting their baggage. After reaching the coast, they boarded ferries and sailed to either Harwich or Southampton, England. The German adults who had accompanied them returned to Germany as required by arrangements made between England and Germany. One of these adults was later imprisoned in Auschwitz and lost his own wife and child to the gas chambers.
For the first three months, most of the Kindertransports were from Germany, but later the number of transports leaving Austria increased. Nicholas Winton, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker from Britain, witnessed the plight of the refuge children in Czechoslovakia and organized Kindertransports from Prague. Many of these children had previously fled with their families from Germany, Austria, or the Sudetenland and were living in squalid refugee camps.
The transports continued after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, but they were halted when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Hundreds of children waiting to leave Nazi-occupied territory could no longer escape. Most of them did not survive the war.
Close to ten thousand lives (70% Jewish) were saved through the Kindertransports, but the majority of these children never saw their parents again. Some of the rescued teens eventually joined the Allied armed services and fought to free their homelands from the vicious grip of the Nazis. Many remained in Britain after the war, but others emigrated and settled in various countries around the world.
Source:
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport by Mark Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer
Last month, I shared how Hitler came to power and took dictatorial control of Germany in 1933, and I described the state of the Jews in Germany during the interwar period (WWI – WWII). Here’s the link to the post if you missed it: “How Did Evil Men Take Power in Germany?” Today we will examine how Hitler and the Nazis gradually subjugated their opponents and the Jewish people prior to WWII.
In April of 1933, the German government sponsored a two-day boycott of Jewish businesses. Political opponents of the Nazis and all Jews who hadn’t fought in WWI were dismissed from civil service. New laws pushed Jews out of other government jobs, including Jewish doctors who worked in government-financed healthcare programs.
In 1933 . . . 37,000 Jews emigrated from Germany.
In 1934 . . . another 23,000 Jews fled the country.
But during these early years of Nazi control, many Germans, including the Jews, thought that Hitler wouldn’t last long.
Not even everyone in his own movement agreed with his policies.
The three-million-men-strong, brown-shirted, street-fighting SA Stormtroopers, who’d been instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power, now threatened the party’s power and existence. Hitler’s close friend Ernst Röhm headed the SA. He and the other SA leaders were unhappy with Hitler’s slow implementation of the radical policies the Nazis had advocated from the beginning. Also, Röhm wanted Hitler to combine the Reichswehr, the German military, with the SA and replace the officer corps. The German military leaders fought back by threatening to topple the Nazi regime if the too-powerful SA wasn’t eliminated.
Between June 30 and July 2, 1934, and under Hitler’s direction . . . Heinrich Himmler and the SS arrested the SA leaders and shot them to death, including Hitler’s buddy, Ernst Röhm.
This operation became known as the “Night of the Long Knives.”
As a result, the German Army leadership formed an alliance with Hitler and supported him when he declared himself Führer on August 19, 1934, less than three weeks after the death of President Hindenburg. Most of these military leaders remained loyal to Hitler for many years to come.
In September of 1935, Hitler reduced the Jews to the status of second-class citizens and stripped them of their civil rights. Despite this, many thought the worst was over. Indeed, the Jews felt a sense of calm for two years, and . . .
10,000 Jewish emigrants returned to Germany from neighboring countries in 1935.
By 1938, Germany had rebounded from the economic instability created by WWI and the Great Depression. Firmly in control of the country, Hitler and his regime set their sights on territorial expansion, and Jewish policies took a radical turn.
The German Army occupied Austria in March, 1938.
There were 185,000 Jews (3% of the country’s population) living in Austria, and 170,000 of them lived in Vienna (10% of the city’s population). Sixty-two percent of all lawyers in Vienna were Jewish, and a similar percentage held positions in finance and commerce. Almost 50% of all Viennese doctors were Jewish, and Jews dominated trade and were quite visible in cultural enterprises.
Before the occupation, the Nazi Party was very active in Austria, promoting the unification of Germany and Austria and stirring up anti-Semitism. After the annexation, anti-Jewish laws were put in place and enforced immediately. The Jews quickly came under attack and were even assaulted in the streets. Jews lost their businesses and their apartments from the start.
In August of 1938, SS Lieutenant Adolph Eichmann set up an emigration office in Vienna to help speed the exit of Jews from the country, and . . .
150,000 Jews left during the following eighteen months.
The Nazis forced them to give up their property and their wealth before leaving Austria, but the Jews were thankful to be alive.
Violence against the Jews increased in Germany and Jewish businessmen were pressured to sell and leave. Jews who had previously immigrated from Poland were sent back; however, the Polish government didn’t allow them to return and left them to fend for themselves in the frontier zone. An angry young Jewish man in Paris whose Polish parents resided in the frontier zone retaliated by shooting Ernst vom Rath, a German officer stationed at the German Embassy in Paris. The Nazis used this incident to accelerate Jewish persecution in Germany and Austria.
On the nights of November 8-10, 1938, SS and SA men, dressed as ordinary citizens, “set fire to 1000 synagogues, smashed up 7500 Jewish-owned businesses, invaded and ransacked the homes where Jewish people lived, and fatally assaulted over 90 Jewish men. Police herded 30,000 male Jews into concentration camps until they could be ransomed out by their terrified families” (Cesarani).
This event became known as Kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass.”
In addition, the Nazis charged the German Jewish community one billion Reichsmark (approximately 400 million U.S. dollars at that time) for the damage done on Kristallnacht. This spared the German insurance companies from paying.
