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
In 1938 and 1939, the British people rescued nearly ten thousand children from the Nazi occupied countries of Germany, Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The background information can be found in last month’s post – The Kindertransports: Nearly 10,000 Children Rescued from Nazi Territory.
Who were these young people and what are their stories?
Ursula Simon and her family lived in the small town of Quakenbruck in northwest Germany. Her mother sent extra rolls and sandwiches to school for other less fortunate children — those who were hungry because their families didn’t have enough food to feed them. Unfortunately, the recipients grew to resent these acts of charity and the Jews in the town who always had enough to eat.
After the Nazis took power in 1933, anti-Semitism flourished in Quakenbruck. The Simons’ old friends stopped visiting them, isolating the family from the community. Yearly birthday parties were normal in Germany, and Ursula’s mother prepared one for her when she turned eight. Not one child attended. Ursula now understood that she was different from the other children.
Ursula’s father, a loyal, patriotic German, had fought in WWI as a volunteer. He wouldn’t consider emigrating—not from the country he had fought for, not the country to which he belonged. He sincerely felt that the German people would remove the Nazis from power, that the problems were only temporary. But the persecution gradually increased and Mr. Simon had a nervous breakdown. He spent a long period of time in a psychiatric hospital.
Attending school became more and more difficult. Ursula was forced to sit alone in the back corner of the classroom, and the other children threw ink over her work. Her classmates terrorized her during playtime.
On the morning of November 9, 1938, soon after Ursula arrived at school, flames flickered in her classroom window. Fire engulfed a small, ordinary house across the street which served as the local synagogue. The students streamed outside to join the onlookers who clapped, jeered, and shouted. A family lived in one of the downstairs rooms of the synagogue, and their belongings had been thrown out a window into the street. Ursula made it home only to discover that her father had been arrested along with all the Jewish men in their town. They were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Role Call for Buchenwald Prisoners, Mostly Jews Arrested on Kristallnacht Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
At Buchenwald, the guards took away the men’s shoelaces and braces. When Ursula’s father objected to the treatment of the older people, the officials beat him to death in front of the other prisoners to stamp down further opposition. Ursula’s family learned the truth from men who were later released from Buchenwald.
After the events of November 9th (Kristallnacht), Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend German schools. At the end of November, Ursula’s mother sent her and her sister, Hella, to a Jewish orphanage in Hamburg, Germany. The girls were thirteen and fourteen years old. By the summer of 1939, Ursula and Hella were placed on the list for the Kindertransport. Their mother prepared their clothes and embroidered their names on each item.
The girls had mixed emotions—they wanted to go to England but didn’t want to leave their mother behind in Germany. Even if she could find a position and sponsor in England, their mother needed to stay and take care of the girls’ blind grandmother in Quackenbruck. Mrs. Simon travelled to Hamburg in July of 1939 to send her girls off on the Kindertransport. Normally very controlled, she couldn’t hide the hurt and agony welling up from deep within. Her face contorted with grief as she and the girls parted for the final time.
The Simon sisters and fellow Kindertransport passengers arrived at the Liverpool Street Station in London and were taken across the street to a gym to wait for their foster parents to arrive. Ursula, Hella, and three others did not find homes that day and felt that nobody wanted them. They were sent to a hostel near Kensington to spend the night, and the next morning they were directed to the Refugee Committee in Bloomsbury.
The girls traveled unaccompanied in a country where they couldn’t speak or understand the language. Nevertheless they found their way to the Refugee Committee, and Ursula and Hella were assigned to live with a widow in Sussex. They were given a ticket, but they had to find their way to Sussex on their own. Their luggage was lost and the Committee promised to forward it to them, which they did—three months later. In the meantime, the girls wore one set of clothes and washed their underwear and blouses once a week while wearing a bathing suit their mother had put in their rucksacks.
Kindertransport Children in England Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The girls arrived at their new home only to discover that their host had expected little girls, and she only had a single bed for them to sleep in. Ursula and Hella were now fourteen and fifteen. The widow was very nice to them but didn’t understand that teenagers needed more food than she did (she had a very small appetite).
She told the girls that the Refugee Committee didn’t pay her enough for them, so they gave the widow the sixpence pocket money the Committee sent each week. Ursula wrote to her mother but wasn’t able to mail all her letters because she couldn’t afford pay the postage. One month later, WWII began, and she could no longer send or receive mail from Germany.
Ursula and Hella attended school in England and loved it. Ursula learned to speak English by devouring books from the school library, and she developed a love for English literature. But the girls desired to be independent. After Hella turned sixteen in November of 1939, she found work in a fever hospital (for those with infectious disease) and earned enough to provide for herself. Ursula attended school for nine months and then apprenticed with a very high-class dressmaking establishment. The Refugee Committee continued to support her, and Hella secretly contributed to Ursula’s rent. She also took evening classes to continue her education.
After the war, Ursula and Hella learned through the Red Cross that their mother had been deported to Minsk, Russia, where she was probably killed. The girls never obtained more information. On June 1, 1946, Ursula married Peter Rosenfeld, a fellow refugee from Germany. They raised four children and made England their permanent home. Ursula’s recorded testimony can be found on YouTube.
Kindertransport Memorial at Liverpool Station. Courtesy of Loco Steve from Bromley, UK in Wikipedia Commons
Resource:
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. Mark Jonathan 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.
