Posted on 02/26/2009 5:07:18 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
If the Polish Foreign Minister at the very start of the new year had, as he said, been plunged into a pessimistic mood by Hitler’s demands, his spirits sank much lower with the coming of spring. Though in his anniversary speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler spoke in warm terms of “the friendship between Germany and Poland” and declared that it was “one of the reassuring factors in the political life in Europe,” Ribbentrop had talked with more frankness when he paid a state visit to Warsaw four days before. He again raised with Beck the question of Hitler’s demands concerning Danzig and communications through the Corridor, insisting that they were “extremely moderate.” But neither on these questions nor on his insistence that Poland join the Anti-Comintern Pact against the Soviet Union did the German Foreign Minister get a satisfactory answer. Colonel Beck was becoming wary of his friends. As a matter of fact, he was beginning to squirm. On February 26, the German ambassador in Warsaw informed Berlin that Beck had taken the initiative in getting himself invited to visit London at the end of March and that he might go on to Paris afterward. Though it was late in the day, Poland, as Moltke put it in his dispatch, “desires to get in touch with the Western democracies . . . [for] fear that a conflict might arise with Germany over Danzig.” With Beck too, as with so many others who had tried to appease the ravenous appetite of Adolf Hitler, the scales were falling from the eyes.
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 459-460
I appreciate the work you put into making these threads. I don’t often comment, but read nearly every one. Very interesting.
Thanks!
Great thread. It is also the 16th anniversary of the first World Trade Center attack. Quite a date it is.
Reading about some of the taxes and levies imposed on Jews is kind of scary. It's clear that the German government, Hitler, was using them to punish them financially so he could redistribute their wealth to those whom he considered superior. Kind of sounds familiar doesn't it?
Actually, Jews leaving the Third Reich was in hindsight a very good idea.
thanks man. absolutely amazing thread and something i look forward to eagerly every day it comes out.
contnue to be amazed at how little people know about history
The problem is those who did leave only found themselves back under the Nazi boot less than a year later. They not only needed to leave the Reich, but Europe, period, if they wanted to survive what was coming.
Easier said than done. In the first place they have been stripped of their wealth and in the second they are often turned away when they try to enter other countries.
And our anti-Semites in the State Department back then didn’t help matters.
Muslims want to make the Middle East judenrein today.
A still earlier order provided that each emigrating Jew must pay a special graduated levy of from one-half to 10 per cent upont the gross value of his possessions into a special fund for taking care of old Jews who are to remain in Germany.
The special levy is in addition to the regular taxes, the 20 per cent punitive find because of the death of Herr vom Rath, the federal 25 per cent flight tax, and a penalty equal to the value of all new goods taken out of the country by an emigrant.
I wonder if the current administration has requested a translation of these laws so they can implement them in the US against anyone who leaves like the Johnson administration did for the 1968 gun control law.
Given US laws in those days, Roosevelt could only do so much. But what he could do he did, so most legal immigrants in the late thirties and forties were Jews.
Congress refused to alow more, and the State Department slow-rolled what measures FDR did take.
Easier said than done. In the first place they have been stripped of their wealth and in the second they are often turned away when they try to enter other countries.
That was the real trick. As it stood there was already the "fine" for the death of Rath, along with the tax to take care of the elderly Jews who could not emigrate and on and on. By Hitler's own design the object was not to just get the Jews out of Germany, but also to take any of their wealth from them in the process. And as for leaving Europe, you can see in the article that doing so was difficult anyway. Many of these places were reluctant to take in the jews leaving them as individuals without country. And then like was said ealier many ended up in neighboring countries (i.e. Poland) just to find themselves back under the Nazi flag a few months later. Last year I posted a letter from the refugee camp in Zbaszyn, Poland that to me was really chilling as well as telling to how bad it really was to be a jew in Europe in the 30s and 40s. I just took a minute to find it to repost it here since I think that despite being from last December it personifies the current conditions.
My dear ones!
You have probably already heard of my fate from Cilli. On October 27 of this year, on a Thursday evening at 9 oclock, two men came from the Crime Police, demanded my passport, and then placed a deportation document before me to sign and ordered me to accompany them immediately. Cilli and Bernd were already in bed. I had just finished my work and was sitting down to eat, but had to get dressed immediately and go with them. I was so upset I could scarcely speak a word. In all my life I will never forget this moment. I was then immediately locked up in the Castle prison like a criminal. It was a bad night for me. On Friday at 4 o'clock in the afternoon we were taken to the main station under strict guard by Police and SS. Everybody was given two loaves of bread and margarine and was then loaded on the freight cars. It was a cruel picture. Weeping women and children, heart-breaking scenes. We were then taken to the border in sealed cars and under the strictest police guard. When we reached the border at 5 o'clock on Saturday afternoon we were put across. A new terrible scene was revealed here. We spent three days on the platform and in the waiting rooms, 8,000 people. Women and children fainted, went mad, people died, faces as yellow as wax. It was like a cemetery full of dead people. I was also among those who fainted. There was nothing to eat except the dry prison bread, without anything to drink. I never slept at all, for two nights on the platform and one in the waiting room, where I collapsed. There was no room even to stand. The air was pestilential. Women and children were half dead. On the fourth day help at last arrived. Doctors, nurses with medicine, butter and bread from the Jewish Committee in Warsaw. Then we were taken to barracks (military stables) where there was straw on the floor on which we could lie down....
- H.J. Fliedner, Die Judenverfolgung in Mannheim 1933-1945 ("The Persecution of the Jews in Mannheim 1933-1945"), II, Stuttgart, 1971, pp. 72-73.
Srodborow, December 6, 1938
Dear Raphael,
I am on holiday in Srodborow. I worked in Zbaszyn for five weeks. Apart from Ginzberg, I am among the few who managed to hold out there for a long time. Almost all the others broke down after a more or less short time. I have neither the strength nor the patience to describe for you everything that happened in Zbaszyn. Anyway, I think there has never been so ferocious, so pitiless a deportation of any Jewish Community as this German deportation. I saw one woman who was taken from her home in Germany while she was still in her pajamas (this woman is now half-demented). I saw a woman of over 50 who was taken from her house paralyzed; afterwards she was carried all the way to the border in an armchair by young Jewish men. (She is in hospital until this day.) I saw a man suffering from sleeping sickness who was carried across the border on a stretcher, a cruelty not to be matched in all history.
In the course of those five weeks we (originally Giterman, Ginzberg and I, and after ten days I and Ginzberg, that is), set up a whole township with departments for supplies, hospitalization, carpentry workshops, tailors, shoemakers, books, a legal section, a migration department and an independent post office (with 53 employees), a welfare office, a court of arbitration, an organizing committee, open and secret control services, a cleaning service, and a complex sanitation service, etc. In addition to 10-15 people from Poland, almost 500 refugees from Germany are employed in the sections I listed above. The most important thing is that this is not a situation where some give and some receive. The refugees look on us as brothers who have hurried to help them at a time of distress and tragedy. Almost all the responsible jobs are carried out by refugees. The warmest and most friendly relations exist between us and the refugees. It is not the moldering spirit of philanthropy, which might so easily have infiltrated into the work. For that reason all those in need of our aid enjoy receiving it. Nobody's human feelings are hurt. Every complaint of bad treatment is investigated, and more than one "philanthropist" has been sent away from here.
We have begun on cultural activities. The first thing we introduced was the speaking of Yiddish. It has become quite the fashion in the camp. We have organized classes in Polish, attended by about 200 persons, and other classes. There are several reading rooms, a library; the religious groups have set up a Talmud Torah [religious school]. There are concerts, and a choir is active.
...Zbaszyn has become a symbol for the defenselessness of the Jews of Poland. Jews were humiliated to the level of lepers, to citizens of the third class, and as a result we are all visited by terrible tragedy. Zbaszyn was a heavy moral blow against the Jewish population of Poland. And it is for this reason that all the threads lead from the Jewish masses to Zbaszyn and to the Jews who suffer there.
Please accept my warmest good wishes and kisses from
Emmanuel
- R. Mahler, "Mikhtavei E. Ringelblum mi-Zbaszyn veal Zbaszyn" ("Letters of E. Ringelblum from and about Zbaszyn"), Yalkut Moreshet, No. 2 (1964), pp. 24-25.
Could you possibly mean "judenfrei"?
Any historian ever compile information on these ~250M Jews? Anyone know of a book that would explore these individuals? I ask this in all due respect.
Here's some data from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that backs up the statistics in the article relatively well though not exactly matching.
European Jewish population distribution, ca. 1933
In prewar central Europe, the largest Jewish community was in Germany, with about 500,000 members (0.75% of the total German population). This was followed by Hungary with 445,000 (5.1%), Czechoslovakia with 357,000 (2.4%), and Austria with 191,000, most of whom resided in the capital city of Vienna (2.8%). In western Europe the largest Jewish communities were in Great Britain, with 300,000 Jews (0.65%); France, with 250,000 (0.6%); and the Netherlands, with 156,000 (1.8%). Additionally, 60,000 Jews (0.7%) lived in Belgium, 4,000 (0.02%) in Spain, and 1,200 (0.02%) in Portugal. Close to 16,000 Jews lived in Scandinavia, including 6,700 (0.11%) in Sweden, 5,700 (0.15%) in Denmark, 1,800 (0.05%) in Finland, and 1,400 (0.05%) in Norway. In southern Europe, Greece had the largest Jewish population, with about 73,000 Jews (1.2%). There were also significant Jewish communities in Yugoslavia (68,000, or 0.49%), Italy (48,000, or 0.11%), and Bulgaria (48,500, or 0.8%). 200 Jews (0.02%) lived in Albania.
MM would be a thousand times a thousand = a million.
Thanks for your reply
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