LITMIR.BIZ

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the family had already been out of the country for over three years, remained unclear to me.

      Less than a year later, in 1936, the Sicherheitsdienst (security police), led by Reinhard Heydrich, created a special department, Amt II, for internal intelligence and surveillance. Subsection 112 was tasked with preparing a card index of all Jews living inside the Reich. My father never forgot the impact of this sinister gathering of data. Over fifty years later, when, during the course of returning a questionnaire for teachers about their background and experience, I was on the point of filling in a box about ethnic origins he demanded with uncharacteristic anger that I leave it blank. When I demurred, he insisted: ‘That’s how they found all the Jews.’

      Growing self-confidence and increasing disregard for foreign reactions led the leading Nazis to be ever more outspoken in their anti-Jewish pronouncements. In his address on National Peasants Day in November 1935, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), ostensibly a bodyguard for Hitler and other leading Nazi personalities, but in effect a racial and military elite carefully nurtured to promulgate and enforce all aspects of Nazi ideology, described the Jews as:

      this people composed of the waste products of all the people and nations of this planet on which it has imprinted the features of its Jewish blood, the people whose goal is the domination of the world, whose breath is destruction, whose will is extermination, whose religion is atheism, whose idea is Bolshevism … 1

      Two years later, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels used similar language at the Party Congress of Labour on 11 September 1937, describing the Jew as:

      the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the nations, the son of chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition, the visible demon of the decay of humanity.2

      While there was nothing new in the sentiments themselves, their public expression by the top Nazi leadership at major gatherings served as a clear indicator of the rising tenor of anti-Jewish incitement.

      For Jews it was a time of ever-increasing hopelessness and terror. Many people committed suicide; ‘In the flat downstairs the couple took their lives together,’ my mother’s mother recalled.

      The only lull in the rising level of racist activity had come in the summer of 1936, for the Olympic Games, when Hitler wanted his country to present to the world a benign and industrious image. ‘I went to see them,’ my father told me. ‘Hitler walked past me not this far away,’ I think I recall him saying, indicating a distance of two or three yards. I never asked him why he had gone or how the experience had felt; even the memory of the conversation feels like a chimera.

      It was during 1938 that it became unambiguously clear how tight the noose around the Reich’s Jews had already been drawn. At the beginning of the year all Jews were required to hand in their passports; new documents would be issued only to those about to emigrate. My mother, who did not leave Germany until 9 April 1939 and vividly remembered Kristallnacht, following which her father was interned in Dachau, told me how frightening she had found a particular experience during a visit to Germany fifty years later. On being informed that she had to leave her passport at the concierge’s desk, she spent the hours of darkness caught between anxious sleeplessness and nightmares.

      Jews were excluded from virtually every part of the economy. While they had already been subject for years to public humiliation and mockery, discriminatory legislation, financial abuse, constant threats and periodic violence, 1938 marked a change of pace in the rise of naked hatred and blatant exploitation. By this time the German national debt, caused not only by the reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles, but especially by Hitler’s huge rearmament programme, was out of control. From where better could the money be taken to plug the hole in the accounts than the plunder of Jewish possessions?

      In April 1938 a decree was promulgated requiring Jews to register all remaining assets over the value of 5,000 Reichsmarks. The information had to be provided by the end of June, though in the event the date was put back because it proved impossible to distribute the forms sufficiently quickly. On 23 June Regina received a letter from the Council of the Jewish Community of Berlin alerting her to the fact that:

      In our estimation the pension which you draw from us is subject to declaration under the order of 16 April 1938 (RGB1 I. S. 414) concerning the disclosure of assets belonging to Jews. In case you have not already done so, we recommend that you obtain a declaration form as soon as possible from the police station nearest to your home and fill in the details of your pension on side 3.

      The reminder further advised her that any other sources of income, such as from national insurance or similar pension plans, had also to be disclosed.

      The combined wealth of Germany and Austria’s Jews was estimated by the Ministry of Economics at 8 billion Reichsmarks; that could now be channelled systematically into the coffers of the Reich.

      All this information, together with numerous reports on the terrors of life in Germany and the difficulty of obtaining visas would have been well known to Alfred not only from his own family members but from refugees newly arrived in Palestine and from conversations in every quarter. It was abundantly clear to him that his mother had to leave the country as soon as possible. But by what route would she be able to get out of Germany and how was he to persuade her to take action? His friend’s letter would have brought him little comfort, both because of its frank appraisal of the chances of success and because it showed how hard his mother was finding it to come to any kind of decision:

      Your mother believes that she could still get 1,000 Palestinian pounds from the Berlin community as a settlement. As the 1,000 LP costs at least 25,700 Reichsmarks, with taxes on top, that would be a sum of at least 30,000 Reichsmarks. That your mother would still be able to transfer the 1,000 LP is out of the question. Firstly, we can’t provide her with the so-called ‘age certificate’ because she’s over sixty, and secondly, even with the certificate she would only get a higher Reichsbank number and it would still be three years before she would be able to make the transfer. At the moment we can’t take anyone out of the queue at the normal price of 25,700. Preferential treatment costs 35,000 and is almost always only agreed to for families.

      There followed a no less detailed paragraph in which he weighed the possibilities should Regina decide to make her settlement over to her son Ernst. He had recently been to stay with his mother in Berlin over Shavuot, the celebration of the Giving of the Torah, which fell that year in early June. (‘It’s nice that Ernst and little Jenny spent the festival with you,’ Nelly, who was always interested in family matters, had written from Jerusalem in reply to news from her mother-in-law.) Regina was well aware of the many difficulties with which the family of four young children, with a fifth on the way, were confronted.

      Alfred’s correspondent then put forward a different option:

      If we leave Ernst entirely out of the picture, it still remains to be considered whether your mother shouldn’t apply for a pensioner’s certificate. At the moment there are no more pensioner’s certificates to be had, but from 1 October a new quota will become available. Pensioner’s certificates are distributed solely by the government in Jerusalem. The Palestine Office can only offer advice and the consulate here can only accept applications for the purpose of forwarding them on. You therefore need to link up with the government department for immigration over there; in many cases this has proved very useful. It would be a prerequisite that the Ha’avara arrange the transfer of the pension. At the moment it is being more generous than seems to me likely to be judged warranted, in that it’s ready to transfer not just 8 Palestinian pounds per person per month but the entire pension up to the amount of 550 Reichsmarks. Your mother understandably raises the objection that the transfer of pensions is liable to be stopped at any moment and that she will then find herself over there without any means. Here too it’s a question of making the decision as to whether one is prepared to accept the risk or not. Most of the people with whom I speak would be happy if they could only get into the country on a pensioner’s certificate.

      The writer was using a terminology that was closely familiar to him as an advisor

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