November Pogrom Research Articles

Disparate lives: Ludwig Guttmann and Robert Wartenberg

The neurologists Sir Ludwig Guttmann and Robert Wartenberg had a number of things in common, e.g., both enjoyed high international recognition for the clinical care they provided to paraplegics and for their contributions to the development of neurological diagnostics. Both were born before 1900. Both were classified as "Jewish" by the National Socialist regime because of their origins. Both had to flee from Germany in the 1930s but nevertheless did not appear to harbor any grudges after 1945; however, both also show differences even more than similarities. Guttmann (1899-1980) stood up for those persecuted, for instance during the November pogroms in 1938. After his late emigration, he soon found anew home in England. His skills in neurosurgery enabled him to convert amilitary hospital into the world's leading treatment center for spinal cord injuries. He was the founder of the Paralympic Games and received aknighthood from Queen ElizabethII. In 1971 the German Neurological Society (DGN) awarded him with a late honorary membership during the presidency of the former SS captain Helmut Bauer. In contrast, Robert Wartenberg (1886-1956) found anew neurological home at the University of California in San Francisco and published numerous books, some of which also attracted attention in the German translation. On various occasions, he opposed the remembrance of National Socialist injustice and even justified the "concurrent research" in conjunction with "euthanasia".

"…without avisible sign of protest or at least solidarity from colleagues": the expulsion of neuroscientists from Hamburg

In Hamburg, the National Socialists' racially motivated exclusion principally hit neurologists from two institutions: the Eppendorf Neurological Clinic (director until 1934 Max Nonne) and the Psychiatric and Neurological Clinic of Friedrichsberg State Hospital (director Wilhelm Weygandt). The chief physician of the neurological department of Barmbek Hospital, Heinrich Embden (1871-1941), who had been trained by Nonne, emigrated to Brazil, whereas Friedrich Wohlwill (1881-1958), another Nonne pupil who had been a pathologist at St Georg since 1924, lived for many years in Lisbon, before he found anew scientific home at the Harvard Medical School. The cerebrospinal fluid researcher Victor Kafka (1881-1955), aFreemason and intermittent member of the Communist Party, was briefly in so-called protective custody (Schutzhaft) in Fuhlsbüttel then fled via Norway to Sweden. Hermann Josephy (1887-1960) and WalterR. Kirschbaum (1894-1982), both imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after the November pogroms in 1938, could successfully continue their professional careers in Chicago. Richard Loewenberg (1898-1954) first opted to continue his career in China, then changed his mind and also went to the USA after the Japanese invasion. With the exception of the latter all were full members of the Society of German Neurologists. The broad scope of their research work clearly illustrates that in addition to clinical core competence, former neurologists could intensively follow scientific interests in the neighboring disciplines of pathology, serology, and psychiatry.

Yehuda Bauer’s Assessment of the US Government and American Jewry During the Holocaust: An Analysis

ABSTRACT Beginning with well-deserved personal praise for Professor Yehuda Bauer celebrating his 95th birthday, this article then examines Bauer's brief but important work Could the US Government Have Rescued European Jewry?, in which he challenges the preferred narrative of American and Israeli Jews: that American Jews were silent, ineffective, divided, timid, self-absorbed, weak, and incapable of bringing a Judeo-centric request to the American political establishment and did not effectively come the aid of their European brethren; that American Jew had the power to do something significant, if only they had tried to use it; and that the American government was antisemitic or, at best, unconcerned about Jews. The article then examines Bauer's contentions regarding the US government's and American Jews' capabilities, interest, and responsibility in saving European Jews. Bauer's consideration is divided into four periods: from 1933 until the Reich's November Pogroms in 1938; from Kristallnacht until the onset of the war in September 1939; from the war until the beginnings of the systematic murder of the Jews, which coincided with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941; and finally during the period of the mass murder, which only ended at the war's end on 8 May 1945. Bauer reconsiders the controversial issue of the bombing of Auschwitz, which he examines from the perspective of the Yishuv in Palestine and the British and American bombing capabilities and wartime priorities as well as the effectiveness of aerial bombardment. The paper also considers Elie Wiesel's challenging of multiple US presidents regarding the decision not to bomb and questions Wiesel's depiction of his discussion with President Jimmy Carter on this issue. Ultimately Bauer's conclusion is that US was not powerful or well-positioned enough to save European Jews, and the Jewish community in the United States did not have the power to impose its will even if it had tried.

The Bornplatz synagogue or Margrit Kahl’s mosaic? An art historical appeal to preserve Hamburg’s place in German postwar memory culture

ABSTRACT In recent months, debate has been swirling in Hamburg over the rebuilding of the Bornplatz synagogue. My concern is a work of art, ‘Synagogue Monument,’ a memorial created by local artist Margrit Kahl (1942–2009) to mark the fiftieth jubilee of the November pogrom. Kahl traced the synagogue’s outline with cobblestones, on its original scale, as well as its complex domed ceiling and vaulted spaces. At present, the inclination is to integrate the mosaic into the new synagogue. If this plan is carried out, the decisive features of this work of art would be destroyed, and with it the memory of the old local Jewish community. Moreover, it would come at the expense of the significant place Hamburg holds in German postwar memorial culture.

»Wir musizieren – trotzdem!« – Die Stuttgarter Jüdische Kunstgemeinschaft

Abstract The Stuttgarter Jüdische Kunstgemeinschaft (Stuttgart Jewish Art Society) existed only five years from 1933 to 1938 before the November Pogrom put an end to Jewish cultural work in Stuttgart. In just these five years, however, the Kunstgemeinschaft had become a nationally known and celebrated institution of Jewish cultural work – despite and in reaction to the National Socialists’ repressive policy of exclusion and surveillance. The Kunstgemeinschaft offered working alternatives for Jewish artists who had become unemployed and cultural events for the Jewish population excluded from society. In addition, the idea of »geistiger Widerstand« (intellectual resistance) found its way into the work of the Kunstgemeinschaft. But the real achievement of the Kunstgemeinschaft was its sheer existence in times of adverse and constantly changing political circumstances: it offered the Jews of Stuttgart and Württemberg a place of cultural enrichment and a home in difficult times.

Starting Anew

In the aftermath of the November pogrom of 1938, thirty thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. After being released, around one hundred rabbis were able to leave Germany for Great Britain. But escaping Germany was not the end of their personal hardship. Once respected community leaders, rabbis arrived destitute and depended on charitable organisations for their livelihoods. Some would be classified as enemy aliens and faced with internment once again. The refugee rabbis would not to be discouraged, however, and they began, at first just a small circle, to reclaim their place in Jewish life once again. In a new country, a new context, and in the midst of around eighty thousand refugees, the rabbis were able to reignite their work and embarked on a great number of initiatives and projects. They were able to place the German Jewish heritage into Anglo-Jewry, where it continues to live on today.

The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco

The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco1 Sara Halpern (bio) The transnational story of "Shanghai Jews" began in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria (Anschluss) and the November pogroms (Kristallnacht), when German and Austrian Jews sought to escape the inferno. Shanghai, which was one of the few places in the world that did not require an entry visa, offered one possible route out.2 In their quest to get there, more than 16,000 Jews rode on trains through the Brenner Pass on the Austrian-Italian border and embarked on ocean liners in Genoa. After that path closed in June 1940, they traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, where they boarded ships bound for Shanghai via Japan.3 Those trains and ships carried them to safety in Asia's largest port, a city with over 5,000,000 Chinese and 50,000 foreigners. Over the next decade, as China experienced military and political turmoil, these German-speaking Jewish refugees formed a cohesive community of families and unaccompanied men, who were [End Page 87] either unmarried or had left their non-Jewish wives behind. The Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) and the refugees' hope that Shanghai would serve only as a waystation led all but a few to emigrate from China after the collapse of the Axis powers in 1945. Approximately 7,000 refugees traveled to San Francisco. Unlike Canada and Australia, which ran selective labor schemes, the United States permitted corporate affidavits with no labor contracts.4 The US government also offered transit visas to those journeying onward to Canada, Europe, Palestine/State of Israel, or Latin America. The rest of the group traveled directly to Australia, Canada, and Europe.5 Little is known of Shanghai Jews' post-World War II emigration and resettlement processes. After spending an anxious decade together, including twenty-eight months confined in a Japanese-sanctioned "designated area," which the refugees called the "ghetto," it is striking that so many refugees' memoirs, diaries, and testimonies were silent about their transition to freedom outside of China.6 Their stories instead frequently conformed to the Holocaust survivor narrative of experiences under Nazism, flight, survival, and grief. Those who spent their childhood in Shanghai frequently employed this literary strategy and supplemented their stories with what they learned from their parents. The absence of Shanghai Jews' post-Holocaust stories in memoirs, diaries, and testimonies raises questions concerning their postwar transition from Shanghai to their new homes in Australia, Europe, Israel, and the Americas. How did the refugees experience their first days of arrival? How did they interact with the local Jewish community and other Holocaust survivors? How did the former groups perceive Shanghai Jews while still reeling from the news in Europe? How did Shanghai Jews negotiate their refugee experiences as they attempted to find a place for themselves socially and economically in their new locales? In turn, how did the broader society treat these traumatized new migrants? These questions can be answered through the framework of diaspora: Shanghai Jews carved out their own space within the German-speaking [End Page 88] Jewish diaspora of over 250,000 refugees from Nazism.7 They constructed a "microdiaspora," grounded in their shared trauma of uprooting, and in experiences and memories of surviving in and emigrating from Shanghai during a catastrophic moment in Jewish history.8 While not a "home" in a literal sense, Shanghai served as a nexus for experiencing and remembering their Holocaust survival.9 As white Europeans, they grappled with cultural shocks; as impoverished and stateless residents, they struggled with hyperinflation, scarce goods, and uncertainty without consular protection; as Jews, they were confined in a "ghetto." Amidst these difficulties, Shanghai's transcolonial and cosmopolitan nature afforded new arrivals a chance to create economic, political, social, and cultural activities with German-Jewish flair. In "Little Vienna"—as English-language Shanghai newspapers described the German-Jewish community—they spoke German while learning English and "pidgin English," a blend of Chinese and English.10 Compared to other transient communities that had escaped Nazi persecution, Shanghai lasted the longest, from 1938 to 1950. This protracted wait for resettlement elsewhere contributed to formations of...

4. La violence contre les Juifs en Allemagne après 1933

The practice of persecuting the Jews in Germany after 1933 was marked not only by anti-Jewish laws and regulations. It was also characterised by a high degree of public violence against Jews. This article explores the most important stages in the escalation of violence against the Jews, which began long before the infamous 1938 November Pogrom.

11. La Gestapo et la persécution des Juifs en Allemagne, 1933-1939

This article examines the persecution of German Jews before the Shoah – from the seizure of power in 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939. In addition to briefly outlining the formation of the Gestapo and its growth in personnel, its changing priorities will also be discussed. Subsequently, the various stages of persecuting the Jews, which began with the early pogroms and boycotts in 1933, will be thoroughly described. Gradually, the exclusion became systematic, which was also reflected in the organisation of the Gestapo, which formed its own “Jew departments” to bureaucratise the persecution. The preliminary highlight was the 1938 November Pogrom. Although the so-called “Reichskristallnacht” was not initiated by the Gestapo, it seized the opportunity to take the lead in “Jewish policy”. Thus, in the course of the Pogrom, over 26,000 youths and men were deported to concentration camps. A view of the tightened measures after 1939 and the deportations from the Reich concludes the article.

Strategies and Mechanisms of Scholar Rescue: The Intellectual Migration of the 1930s Reconsidered

Strategies and Mechanisms of Scholar Rescue:The Intellectual Migration of the 1930s Reconsidered Simone Lässig (bio) the forced migration of academics is not a phenomenon unique to our times, nor are contemporary efforts to aid endangered scholars and scientists without precedent. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war, and the triumph of fascism in Italy, set off a wave of academic migration that differed in cause and duration from the earlier, largely routine cross-border movement of individuals and knowledge. Following the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, the forced emigration of scholars and scientists quickly became a mass phenomenon. On April 7, 1933, the new regime enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), whereupon 614 employees of German universities, along with many other Jewish and politically suspect civil servants, summarily lost their jobs. Two-thirds of the dismissed academics were classified as "non-Aryans."1 The situation grew steadily more perilous with the public book burning of May 1933; the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their civil rights, in September 1935; and, finally, the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9–10, 1938. By that point, it was unmistakably clear that Jews could no longer lead [End Page 769] normal lives and were increasingly at risk in Germany and its recently annexed territories. Individuals whose careers were abruptly interrupted by political persecution and/or antisemitic discrimination faced a challenge of a special sort. Neither they nor the states where they sought refuge could fall back on knowledge born of experience or proven coping strategies in responding to the developing situation. It is therefore all the more remarkable how quickly and efficiently a number of actors and organizations outside Germany took action. The question thus arises whether the mechanisms developed to aid endangered scholars and scientists in the singular historical context of the 1930s could serve as a model for academic rescue efforts in the twenty-first century. To answer that question, we must first ask which initiatives to rescue academics at risk under Nazi rule and to help them find their way in foreign academic cultures proved effective, and why. REFUGEE SCHOLARS FROM NAZI EUROPE AND INTERNATIONAL RESCUE INITIATIVES: SHIFTING FOCI IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH The history of forced migration and exile in general took shape as a field of research about 40 years ago. The historical profession—especially in Germany and Austria, the countries of origin of most of the refugee scholars of the 1930s—long ignored the subject (Krohn 2012). Only in the 1970s, as a new generation of historians began to engage critically with the very recent past, did it become a productive field of research in the United States and the two German states. Historians in the German Democratic Republic launched a series of bibliographical projects on the "antifascist exiles." In the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or DFG) sponsored a major program for "exile research" (Exilforschung) between 1973 and 1984. It was in this context that groups such as the Society for Exile Studies (1977–79) were established and that the first comprehensive accounts of the academic migration of the Nazi era were published (Röder and Strauss 1980–83; Spalek 1978). Much [End Page 770] of this early work was carried out by literary scholars (historians of science took up the subject somewhat later); their disciplinary background was reflected in the heavy concentration on intellectual elites. They were generally less interested in the many "nameless" émigrés than in well-known writers, artists, journalists, political activists, scientists, and scholars (Fermi 1968; Fleming and Bailyn 1969; Hughes 1975; Coser 1984). Research on the academic émigrés centered at first on their experiences as actors. Biographical studies made clear how widely the émigrés' experiences varied, the challenges they faced in adapting to new academic cultures, the ambiguities of their attempts at identity-building, and the considerable impact of adjustment to life abroad on their scholarly work. In the late 1980s, scholars began to move from biographical works on individual émigrés to studies of the impact of the Nazi...

Fear and Terror: The Expulsion of Polish Jews from Saxony/Germany in October 1938

ABSTRACTThis article is a regional study that focuses on the expulsion of Jews with Polish citizenship from Saxony, mostly long-term legal residents of Germany, in the context of the so-called ‘Polenaktion’ (27–29 October 1938). The article gives a brief overview of the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany and highlights the special circumstances in Saxony, specifically in Leipzig. The article examines the role of the local police forces in carrying out the arrests and transports to the German–Polish border. It further draws attention to the tumultuous situation near Beuthen (Bytom) where the distressed expellees were chased across the border into Polish territory. The article also traces the steps of individuals and families after their disorienting arrival in Poland. Finally it addresses the question of the ‘returnees’ – a limited number of expellees who were allowed to return to their hometowns in Germany for a short period in order to take care of their businesses, financial affairs and apartments. Highlighting Saxony as one example, this article shows that the brutal mass expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany was not only an unprecedented act of mass violence and viciousness against Jews in Germany, but also became a precursor, a ‘test case,’ for subsequent mass deportations. The Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS and the Main Office of the Security Police most likely did not have fully developed plans for mass deportations ready in October 1938. However, the Nazi authorities could draw on their experiences during the Polenaktion with regard to logistics, coordination of administrative steps and offices, panic control, intimidation, and brutality. These measures set the stage for the arrests and mass transports during the November Pogrom not even two weeks after the Polenaktion and for the mass deportations during World War II.

"Una generale e identica rivoluzione degli spiriti". Il carteggio fra Erich Neumann e C.G. Jung in occasione dei pogrom del novembre 1938

This essay deals with the correspondence between Erich Neumann, Jung’s best known and most important student, and C.G. Jung, and situates this correspondence within the context of the November pogroms of 1938. A detailed analysis of four letters, two by Neumann and two by Jung, shall shed light on the question to what extent the incipient murder of the Jews becomes the nervus probandi of the relationship between Neumann and Jung. Neumann’s reflection about the collective Jewish determination in the face the Novemberpogroms 1938, brings Jung to an alleviative relativization and secularization of his former position. This precipitates a deep crisis and feelings of disorientation and desertion in Neumann; a negative father complex is constellated, discharged in a dream. Moreover the analysis traces how certain culturetheoretical assumptions are undermined in the face of the impending catastrophe.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction Jeraldine R. Kraver Let me confess that I am not always the best citizen of the College English Association Board of Directors. As Editor of The CEA Critic, I sit on the Board and attend both our virtual meeting in the winter and our on-site meeting the evening before the annual conference begins. Typical of such conclaves, there are reports from each of the officers (that is a total of thirteen or so) and a variety of sub-committees. During the four very long hours of the meeting, there are multiple calls to question and motions and seconds. There are seemingly endless budget items to review and policies to revise. For the CEA, the annual conference is our New Year’s Eve: March in Indianapolis was the coda to 2015. And while the Board’s eyes were now on the future and Denver in 2016, mine were growing increasingly heavy. Despite my lethargy at business meetings, Second Vice-President, Jeffrey DeLotto, grabbed my attention when he described his visit to the CEA’s archives at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. Centenary is the home of former CEA President (and former editor of The CEA Critic) Earle Labor, Emeritus Professor of American Literature and Director of the Jack London Research Center. Although I have met Professor Labor in person only once (and he was all the gracious southern gentleman one would expect), I feel as if I know him very well because my husband—and Critic co-editor, Peter Kratzke—wrote a dissertation in which Jack London featured prominently. As far as I was concerned, Professor Labor was all but living with us in our Lexington, Kentucky, flat. Not only did I thus perk up a bit during Jeffrey’s presentation about what will become of the archives, but, when the discussion turned to CEA Historian Joe Pestino’s recollections about the founding of the organization itself, I was fully alert, even taking copious notes. Since the Board’s meeting in Indianapolis, I have discovered through a little digging of my own that the founding fathers of CEA declared their independence in 1938 from the then- and still-reigning King of Language and Literature, the Modern Language Association. In his Preface to a 1972 Peabody Journal of Education issue devoted to “A Look into the Future of College English,” Professor Labor traces how the CEA was founded “by a group of young radicals in the Modern Language Association who felt that the research-oriented MLA was slighting the concerns of teaching” (1). Reading this history, I wondered, “What did a radical English professor look like in the 1930s?” Did these young radicals meet for post-session cocktails and rage against the MLA machine? Did they gather downtown [End Page 147] at Café Society, the Bohemian hot spot in Greenwich Village? Perhaps they traveled uptown to Harlem and Minton’s, at that time the hip new jazz club. Was all the talk about Pearl S. Buck’s Nobel Prize for The Good Earth or the November pogrom in Europe, already known as Kristallnacht? In explaining how the first generation of CEA members “continued to place primary emphasis upon concerns of the frontline classroom teacher. . . “ (1), Professor Labor offers a clue about what these young CEA Turks might have been discussing (beyond the release of the first Superman comic or Bette Davis’ performance in Jezebel, that is). Given their commitment to placing teaching at the center of what we do, I like to think that what they were talking about was Louise Rosenblatt’s just-published Literature as Exploration. Six months earlier, The New Republic, identifying the work as written “chiefly for teachers of high-school and college English,” suggested that Rosenblatt had addressed social science and aesthetics in ways “unequaled by some of our best Marxists” (231)—and, after all, are not most young radicals at the very least left of center? In fact, I envision that Rosenblatt, who was teaching at Brooklyn College in 1938, might very well have been one of these young CEA radicals. Or, perhaps Mark Van Doren, who would serve as CEA President in 1945 and 1946 and was then teaching at Columbia...

The correspondence between Erich Neumann and C.G. Jung on the occasion of the November, progroms 1938 [corrected

In the light of recently-published correspondence between Jung and Neumann, this paper considers and connects two aspects of their relationship: Jung's theory of an ethno-specific differentiation of the unconscious as formulated in 1934, and the relationship between Jung and Neumann at the beginning of the Holocaust in 1938-with Jung as the wise old man and a father figure on one hand, and Neumann as the apprentice and dependent son on the other. In examining these two issues, a detailed interpretation of four letters, two by Neumann and two by Jung, written in 1938 and 1939, is given. Neumann's reflections on the collective Jewish determination in the face of the November pogroms in 1938 led Jung to modify his view, with relativization and secularization of his former position. This shift precipitated a deep crisis with feelings of disorientation and desertion in Neumann; the paper discusses how a negative father complex was then constellated and imaged in a dream. After years of silence, the two men were able to renew the deep bonds that characterized their lifelong friendship.

Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the dynamics of racial exclusion: violence against Jews in provincial Germany, 1919-1939

Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Volksgemeinschaftas a Political Concept The origins of the Volksgemeinschaft during the First World War All Authority emanates from the Volk Weimar Parties and the Volksgemeinschaft Volksgemeinschaftas Exclusion Chapter 2. Anti-Semitic Violence in the Weimar Republic Fall 1923 Violence in the Provinces Caesura 1930 Assault on the Constitutional State Chapter 3. 1933 - They won't do anything to us, after all we're Germans April Boycott Emden Dual State Chapter 4. The Boycott as a Political Arena Tradition of Boycotts Resentment Boycott in Hesse Schluchtern Gelnhausen Political Arena Chapter 5. The Crowd as an Actor Gelnhausen Intensification of Violence East Prussia Collective Violence Chapter 6.Racial Defilement - Honor, Gender, and Volk's Justice Persecution of Racial Defilement after the Seizure of Power Pillory Processions 1935 Norden Media Honor and Shame The Nuremburg Laws Chapter 7. The Dilemma of the Politics of Violence The Individual Actions continue Jemgum Gladenbach Wolfhagen Illusion of the Grace Period Chapter 8. Pogrom The Pogramatic Mood in the early Fall of 1938 November Pogrom Wolfhagen Emden Norden Treuchtlingen Pogroms in Europe Effects Conclusion. The Production of the Volksgemeinschaft Inclusion and Exclusion Division Honor and Shame Popular Justice (Volksrecht) Self-Empowerment Bibliography Index of Places

Eichmann's Jews: the Jewish administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938-1945

Preface. 1 Prologue. Survivor guilt. Breaching taboos. No mass murder without victims. 2 The Vienna Kultusgemeinde before 1938. Securing evidence - at the scene of the crime. Jewish strategies to counter anti-Semitism. The corporate state - in the shadow of the Third Reich. 3 Persecution. The German invasion and the Austrian response. Expropriation through the deprivation of rights. The hunt for booty. 4 Struggle for survival and escape. The decapitation of the Jewish Community. The attempt to escape or 'Get rid of the Yids and keep theirmoney here.' 5 The Vienna Jewish community under Nazi control. The reorganization of the Kultusgemeinde. Jewish self-help and welfare. 'Emigration' - mass expulsion. Illegal escape. 6 November pogrom - overture to murder. 7 The Jewish community after the pogrom. Escape as a last resort. Functionaries: victims and messengers of terror. Administration during the terror. Benjamin Murmelstein. The employees in the system. Lateral entrants. 8 Beginning of the end. Nisko or the dress rehearsal for deportation. Segregation, concentration and theft. 9 Deportation and extermination. 10 The administration of extermination. Segregation and identification or a Jewish star for 10pfennigs. Liquidation - expropriation to the last. Designation and handing over of victims. Welfare and burial service - administration in the shadow ofdestruction. 11 Die Kultusgemeinde - authorities without power. Individual stories. The victims' perspective. The administration and its employees. The conditioning of leading functionaries. Questions of character - individual Jewish functionaries beforeand after 1945. 12 Discussion of the Jewish councils and the situation inVienna. List of abbreviations. Notes. Index of persons.

Kristallnacht 1938 (review)

Reviewed by: Kristallnacht 1938 Hans-J. Doescher Translated by Suzan Meves Kristallnacht 1938, by Alan E. Steinweis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 214 pp. $23.95. The question often arises as to what can be considered novel and original in a newly published book—especially when numerous publications on the same subject already exist. More than two dozen monographs and documentations on the Nazi-staged pogroms in November 1938 are presently available. What new insights can a further book provide on the November pogroms that took place throughout the German Reich some seventy years ago? [End Page 131] On November 7, 1938, 17-year old Polish Jew Herschel Grynspan made an assassination attempt in Paris on the life of the German Embassy's Second Secretary, 29-year old Ernst vom Rath. The German diplomat died of the inflicted bullet wounds two days later. Nazi leaders used the assassination as a pretense for triggering pogroms on Jews throughout the entire Reich, euphemistically known as the "Kristallnacht" (Crystal Night or Night of Broken Glass). During and after this spasm of violence and plunder, about 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds would perish in the following months. Alan E. Steinweis (Professor of History and Director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont) has evaluated, in addition to research literature and important court records (post-1945 trials), numerous eye-witness reports made by Kristallnacht victims. Based on these, he has gained new and well-founded insights into the events in the days that followed Grynszpan's assassination attempt and vom Rath's death. Kristallnacht 1938 clearly reveals the participation of all classes of society in the November na-tion-wide pogroms. Based on actual statements and reports by the perpetrators, Steinweis's book clearly reveals that the assertion voiced and heard in Germany during many post-war decades that nobody really knew what was happening to the Jews belongs in the world of myth. The violence, manipulated from above, executed from below, was visible to all, in big, medium-sized, and small cities, in towns, hamlets and rural communities. And as no clear instructions were issued by the Nazi regime as to how exactly the violence, looting, and humiliating treatment of the Jewish victims were to be carried out, it was left to the individual Nazi officials to decide how to do it, and this without any delay. The many obstacles involved in Herschel Grynspan's planned trial are also discussed in Kristallnacht 1938. The trial was finally postponed and Grynszpan sent to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, where supposedly he was executed in July 1942. The Kristallnacht in November 1938 provided a testing ground for probing antisemitic actions throughout the country and paved the way for grand scale actions. It clearly showed the Nazi regime that it could count on the wide support of the general population, both young and old, to support it in its antisemitic actions. [End Page 132] Hans-J. Doescher University of Osnabrück, Germany Copyright © 2011 Purdue University

Jüdische Gemeinden, Vereine, Stiftungen und Fonds: "Arisierung" und Restitution (review)

Judische Gemeinden, Vereine, Stiftungen und Fonds: Arisierung und Restitution, by Shoshana Duizend-Jensen. Veroffentlichungen der Osterreichischen Historikerkommission, Bd. 21/2. Vienna-Munchen: Oldenburg Verlag, 2004. 347 pp. euro49.80. Before the Anschluss in March 1938, the Viennese Jewish Community was one of the richest and liveliest in Europe. It ran schools, a home for the elderly, a hospital, and a home for blind Jews, to mention just a few of its institutions. Out of 200,000 Austrian Jews, most of them residents of Vienna, approximately 130,000 managed to escape Austria and 70,000 were killed in the Holocaust. In her book, a work commissioned by the Austrian Historians Commission, Shoshana Duizend-Jensen shows that in addition to the famous Jewish community of Vienna, 34 Jewish communities existed in the Austrian provinces. They owned property and ran synagogues. There were also more than 600 Jewish clubs and associations in Austria, such as the famous sport club Hakoah, a variety of religious and Zionist societies, fraternal lodges, and 325 charitable foundations. Jewish life in pre-war Vienna was active and heterogeneous. After giving an overview of the property owned by the Jewish communities and the numerous Jewish institutions before the Anschluss in 1938, Duizend-Jensen analyzes their Aryanization and liquidation, and finally discusses the complicated question of restitution. She shows that the liquidation was done in step-by-step fashion, whereby the so-called Stillhaltekommissar fur Vereine, Organisationen und Verbande played the major role. While some clubs were dissolved immediately after the Anschluss, a few-mainly the Zionist associations-were permitted to exist for a while. The assets of those that were dissolved were transferred to the Stillhaltekommissar fur Vereine, Organisationen und Verbande and, to a major extent as well, to the Viennese Jewish community, whereby 25-40 percent of all assets were retained by the National Socialists in the form of fees such as the Aufbauumlage and Verwaltungsgebuhr. The Viennese Jewish Community, on the other hand, was forced to use all the money transferred to it to support impoverished Jews and to finance the emigration and finally the deportation of Austrian Jews. It was also put under great pressure to sell its own property far below its market value. As Austrian historian Doron Rabinovici1 has shown, the Jewish community was put into a very difficult position after the Anschluss. The National Socialists appointed the leaders of the Jewish community and forced them to fulfill their demands, which went as far as supporting and financing the deportation of those who failed to emigrate. By forcing the Jewish community to sell all the assets of Jewish institutions, the perpetrators could relieve themselves of the responsibility of supporting the impoverished Jewish population.2 Duizend-Jensen also discusses the expropriation of synagogues and prayer rooms (Betstuben) during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938 when synagogues were burned all over Germany and thousands of Jewish men sent to Dachau. In Vienna alone 42 synagogues were demolished and the land on which they had stood was Aryanized by individuals as well as by the city government. In addition, more than 110 prayer rooms were also dissolved. Duizend-Jensen points out that, like the synagogues, most of the prayer rooms also possessed ritual objects such as torah scrolls and prayer books, all of which disappeared or were destroyed. …

Allianz Versicherung sous le Troisième Reich

While the initial interest in the history of the Allianz insurance company and the insurance industry in the 1933-1945 was inspired by the problem of unpaid and confiscated Jewish insurance policies, there are numerous other issues that are of no less and perhaps greater importance in dealing with insurance history in the Nazi period. These included collaboration with the regime in domestic and business politics, especially during the Pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, engagement in policies of confiscation and expansion during the war, and insuring production at the Ghetto of Lodz and of SS production facilities in concentration camps. It is to Allianz’s credit, however, that they have been very open and ready to support a full account of their role during the National Socialist regime.

Leslie Brent and the Mysterious German Surgeon

In a 3 and a half page article in the October 3, 1953, issue of Nature,1 and more extensively in 1956 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London,2 Billingham, Brent, and Medawar reported the successful transplantation in mice of the immune cells (leukocytes) that make up the normal bone marrow, spleen, and lymph nodes. The donor cells were obtained from adult mice and infused intravenously into unaltered newborn mouse recipients whose immune system was not yet sufficiently developed to reject the cells. When the recipient mice grew up, they could freely accept skin and other tissues from the original cell donor, but from no other donor. These world's first examples of acquired transplantation tolerance led to Medawar's corecipiency (with F. Macfarlane Burnet) of the 1960 Nobel Prize. Medawar shared his portion of the cash award with Billingham and Brent. The sobriquet “holy trinity” was applied to Billingham, Brent, and Medawar when their 1953 observations escalated during the next 15 years to clinical bone marrow and organ transplantation. Peter Brian Medawar, the senior author of their seminal paper, was a 38-year-old zoologist, who in World War II-related duties had demonstrated a dozen years earlier that the barrier to successful transplantation is a donor-specific immune response.3 The rank order of authorship in all publications by Medawar's research group was determined alphabetically. Accordingly, the lead author of the 1953 Nature article was 32-year-old Rupert Billingham, who had spent the war as a lieutenant on antisubmarine escort vessels. Five years after completing their famous 3-author paper, Billingham moved to the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and developed a fruitful collaboration with the future University of Pennsylvania surgery chairman, Clyde Barker, before moving to the University of Texas (Dallas) as Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy. Medawar died in 1987 (at 71 years) and Billingham in 2002 (81 years). The third author, Leslie Brent, was the youngest. Brent was born on July 25, 1925 (his birth name was Lothar Baruch) in Koslin, a small German market town that is now a thriving Polish city of 110,000 (spelled Koszalin). Because of being persecuted in the predominantly non-Jewish local schools, his family placed him in a Jewish orphanage in Berlin in 1936 (Fig. 1); his parents and sister moved to Berlin the following year. After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 8–10, 1938 (“the night of broken glass”), the young Brent escaped to England in the Kindertransport operation that saved 10,000 Jewish children from extermination. Neither his parents nor anyone else in his immediate family survived the Holocaust. After a stint in the British infantry between ages 18 and 22 (1943–1947, final rank captain; Fig. 2), he became Medawar's student and later his associate (Fig. 3). In 1969, he was appointed Professor of Immunology at St. Mary's Hospital and Medical School, London, a position held with distinction until his retirement in 1990 (Fig. 4). FIGURE 1. Leslie Baruch at the age of 10, before entry into the Jewish orphanage in Berlin. FIGURE 2. Leslie Brent, the 21-year-old infantry officer whose adopted name was registered in England as an antigenocide precaution in the event of capture. FIGURE 3. Leslie Brent approximately 40 years old, with his scientific mentor/colleague, Peter Medawar. FIGURE 4. Leslie Baruch Brent in his 80th year (photo by Z. Pacholski Liszalin, Poland). The birth name, Baruch, was officially restored (as Brent's middle name) in the late 1990s. Brent made no secret of his early difficult life, but it was not a subject upon which he cared to dwell. Recently, he authorized me to make public my correspondence with him that took place during 1996–1997, along with my related correspondence with 2 distinguished German surgeons. One of the surgeons was Rudolf Pichlmayr, Dhc, MD, Professor and Chairman, Department and Clinics of Abdominal and Transplantation Surgery, Hannover University Medical School. An Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Eng) and of the American College of Surgeons, Pichlmayr was the principal speaker at the transplantation session of the World Congress of Surgery in Acapulco, Mexico, on August 29, 1997. During an early morning swim, he apparently was caught in an undertow and drowned. He had just turned 65 years old and was deeply mourned throughout Germany and the world. The other surgeon was Michael Trede, BA, MD, BChir, Professor and Chairman of the Mannheim Surgical Clinics and University of Heidelberg Medical School. Trede was a major figure after World War II in restoring Germany's place in international surgery. He is an Honorary Fellow of all 4 British Royal Surgical Colleges; an honorary member of the American Surgical Association and American College of Surgeons; and coeditor Emeritus of the World Journal of Surgery. Trede recently published a German-language autobiography4 in which the same events are described as in the following self-explanatory letters.