An Inverted Detective Thriller: Henry Ries and the Quakers’ Rescue of Stefanie Ries from Nazi Germany, 1939–41

Abstract

An Inverted Detective Thriller: Henry Ries and the Quakers’ Rescue of Stefanie Ries from Nazi Germany, 1939–41 Vivien Green Fryd (bio) During the academic year of 2012–13, I had the opportunity to live in Berlin, Germany as the Terra Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität. My desire, or should I say compulsion, to bear witness to and try to piece together and understand my family’s history in the Holocaust and World War II brought me there. I had long thought about writing about the photographs taken by my uncle, Henry Ries (1917–2004), especially his Landing Arrival of the Candy Bombers in the Tempelhof Airport (fig. 1) of the Berlin Airlift, which has become an iconic image in both the U.S. and Germany. But after giving a tour to some of my friends and former students in February of the exhibition, “Art in Berlin, 1880– 1980,” an exhibit that included seven of his photographs in the Berlinische Galerie, I began to look through papers about my mother’s rescue from Nazi Germany. [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Henry Ries. Landeanflug eines “Rosinenbombers im Tempelhof Airport” (Landing Arrival of the Candy Bomber in the Tempelhof Airport). 1948. Photograph. © Henry Ries. Deutsches Historisches Museum. Invoice No. 2007/952, file PH009230. My brother, Kenneth Martin Green, and his daughter had gathered the material from the American Friends Service Committee’s (AFSC) archives, which at that time was located in the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia: correspondence about my uncle’s and the Quaker’s frustrating two-and-a-half-year attempt to get my mother, Stefanie Ries, out of Berlin. That year, twelve years after I had received those letters, I read them and felt as though I was reading a thriller with its dramatic rescue, its puzzles, its suspense, its villains, heroes, and heroines. Of course, I knew the outcome, my mother did escape, but the suspense was inverted. I knew neither the plot nor all the characters, and as with any mystery, I worked to unpack the many factors that resulted in my mother’s [End Page 32] safe passage to the U.S. in March 1941—six months before a worker for the AFSC reported that “emigration from Germany and German-controlled areas was largely choked off.”1 I knew the villains were the Nazis; the heroes the Quakers, my mother’s nanny, Maria Schönfeld (fondly referred to as Fräuchen), and my uncle; and the victim my mother. To my surprise as I read through the correspondence, I found a protagonist I had not much considered before—the U.S. State Department—the role of which became more troubling the more I dug beneath the surface. I learned that the person in the State Department responsible for impeding my mother’s escape from Nazi Germany, an individual whom I now consider a villain, was Avra Milvin Warren, Chief of the Visa Division. To my dismay and disappointment, I realized that not just Warren, but also others in the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did their best to obstruct my mother’s rescue and that of many others. And I learned about three additional heroes—Senator John A. Danaher (CT), Jacob Weiss from New York City, and Benjamin Gross from Rockland County, New York. Many scholars have examined those in the U.S. State Department under President Roosevelt’s administration who expressed antisemitism in their diaries, and the ways in which it influenced their immigration policies.2 Surprisingly, less has been written about the AFSC Refugee Section, especially its work on behalf of saving children from Central Europe before and during World War II.3 The unpublished archival material from the Friends’ library about my mother’s situation not only adds more information about the life of her to-be-acclaimed photojournalist brother, Henry Ries, but also about the role Quakers actively played in saving her life as well as others. They are the central protagonists in this story: my uncle, born Heinz Ries, later known as the New York Times photojournalist Henry Ries...