Dresden (10 page)

 

HENNY WOLF
had been eight when the Nazis came to power. Blond and blue-eyed, the pretty daughter of a prosperous movie theater owner and his wife, she had led a carefree existence within a loving family until then. After 1933 everything changed. The reason was simple: Her father was Aryan, but her mother was a Russian-born Jew. Henny counted as a “mixed-race” or
Mischling
child.

For a teenager, as Henny had become by 1938, certain aspects of life—such as choice of school and the attitude of friends—loomed especially large. Henny was still at a normal state school and living a relatively normal life, but already she was suffering from the first pin-pricks of official persecution. One was the ban on Jews (and
Mischlinge
) using park benches in the Grosser Garten, where she and her parents had always loved to walk and feed the squirrels. She had also noticed the increasing numbers of anti-Jewish signs, some specific in their meaning (such as in the park and along the Brühl
Terrace), some purely insulting. The Nazi newspaper in Dresden,
Der Freiheitskampf
, reported with satisfaction that in the inner suburb of Johannstadt the local Nazis had put signs on all the advertising pillars in the area bearing messages such as “The Jews Are Our Misfortune” or “He Who Buys from Jews Is a Traitor to the
Volk
!” Henny Wolf's family's house lay just east of Johannstadt; the abusive posters and signs lined their regular route into the city.

Again in Johannstadt, at the beginning of 1938 notices started to appear on the doors of apartment blocks and houses saying, “Jews live in this building.” Soon a competing notice becames widespread: “In this building live no Jews.” At the beginning of February, as part of the carnival (Fasching), a special procession toured the entire city under the motif: “The Children of Israel Move Out.” On March 4 alone, a hundred anti-Semitic meetings were held in the Dresden District. In two different large venues, Mutschmann and Julius Streicher addressed crowds. Other speakers who took part in the campaign—brought in from all over the Reich—were rewarded with a gift of wall plaques of pure Meissen porcelain inscribed with the Hitler quotation: “In warding off the Jews, I fight for the Work of the Lord.”

Soon the flood of discrimination became a torrent. In the spring several other suburban communities followed the spas at Weisser Hirsch and Bad Schandau in refusing admission to Jews. The Dahlener Heide (an area of heathland popular with Dresdeners) was closed to Jews. Jews were banned from regional bus services, from occupying land belonging to the city, and in June Jews were not allowed to move to Dresden without police permission. In July 1938 it was decreed that all Jewish businesses in Dresden must be marked with a uniform sign declaring in black letters on a yellow background: “Jewish Business.”

The climax to the hate campaign approached. During the night of October 27–28 1938, some 724 men, women, and children, born in Poland and/or without German citizenship—90 percent of the Jewish-Polish population of Dresden—were arrested in a lightning operation personally supervised by the Dresden chief of police. They were assembled at the mainline station in Dresden Neustadt and at around 1:15 in the afternoon of October 28 were sent by special train, under police guard, to the border town of Beuthen in Silesia. From there, despite the fact that many had lived in Germany all their lives, they
were literally forced over the border into Poland. This was part of a planned, nationwide orgy of expulsions. Dresden's figures easily beat those of other Saxon cities such as Leipzig (50 percent of the Polish-Jewish population) and Chemnitz (78 percent).

The mass expulsion of Polish-born Jews from Germany led directly to the cataclysm that would reveal the true direction in which Hitler and his underlings were heading. Many Jews were refused entry by the Polish authorities and remained in no-man's-land for weeks before their hosts relented.

Among the Polish-born Jews deported from the Reich were the Grynszpan family, parents and two sisters. Soon a postcard detailing the Grynszpans' pitiful plight in no-man's-land got through to their son Herschel, a seventeen-year-old illegal immigrant, living alone in Paris. The young man acquired a gun. On November 7, 1938, he arrived at the German embassy and talked his way inside. He had wanted to see the ambassador, but was directed to a junior official, Legation Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Alone in an office with the diplomat, Herschel Grynszpan pulled out his gun and shot him.

The irony was that vom Rath was no Nazi. Tragically, this assassination, carried out by a desperate, lonely youth, pitched Germany into a final devastating eruption of violence. It was for this outrage that the past year of escalating anti-Semitic agitation in towns and cities all over the Reich had surely been preparing the way.

Kristallnacht
—the Night of Broken Glass—began in Dresden, as elsewhere, early on the evening of November 9, 1938, following vom Rath's death in Paris. It was initiated by the Nazi Party's local organs, themselves centrally directed from Munich, where Hitler and the other prominent Nazis were gathered to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the attempted Bürgerbräuhaus coup of 1923. Goebbels embarked on a hate-filled speech before the leadership returned to their hotel and orders were given for a nationwide pogrom. In Dresden, a “spontaneous” open-air protest meeting against the murder of vom Rath was staged in the Rathausplatz—a few hundred yards from where Semper's Dresden synagogue, now nearing the centenary of its consecration, stood proudly by the river Elbe. The crowd listened to inflammatory speeches by Nazi orators.

The rampage began under cover of darkness. Soon came the sound of shattering shop windows in the near-deserted streets of
Dresden. Jewish-owned businesses in the Prager Strasse, the city's main shopping thoroughfare, were worst hit. The mob swept through, leaving destruction its wake. Finally the rioters turned to the visible sign of Jewish presence in Dresden, the synagogue.

Gottfried Semper's grand, half-Romanesque, half-Oriental house of worship by the river Elbe had become a well-known, even well-loved feature of the city's skyline—a fascinating architectural addition, giving a touch of exoticism to the place where the old city walls had once opened to the east. The synagogue acted as a meeting place for what until 1933 had been a flourishing Jewish community—even after Hitler's rise to power, plans were carried forward for a long-projected extension to the main building, allowing room for an extra 150 worshippers. Despite the Nazis' growing encroachment on the community's freedoms, this new section was completed and opened in 1935, a touching example of courageous, if misplaced, optimism.

Perhaps no one could quite believe that what happened all over Germany on the night of November 9, 1938, could also take place in somewhere like Dresden, a
Kulturstadt
(city of culture), where intolerance had always been kept within polite bounds, where, as every Dresdener will proudly declare, “art has precedence” (
die Kunst hat Vorrang
). But that night art was irrelevant. A group of SA men broke into the synagogue even before the main mob arrived, scattering gasoline and setting alight the interior, with its rich hangings and wooden furniture and fittings. With the building ablaze and surrounded by baying Nazis, four engines of the Dresden fire brigade arrived promptly. A specially equipped boat, anchored by the nearby banks of the Elbe, stood ready to supply water from the river for their hoses. The firefighters rushed toward the still-fresh conflagration—only to find themselves barred from quelling the fire by a ring of SS and SA thugs.

The fire-fighting professionals were permitted to save only the nearby buildings, including the community houses (Zeughausstrasse No. 1 and No. 3, later to feature as two of the infamous “Jew houses”), a warehouse, and the old youth hostel. Sometime in the small hours, the great wooden dome of the synagogue collapsed and sank into the sea of flame beneath it. By morning, what had once been the largest synagogue in Germany was a collection of smoking ruins.

The Nazi high burgomaster of Dresden, Dr. Kluge, announced that same day with open satisfaction: “the symbol of the hereditary
racial enemy has finally been extinguished.”

The painter Otto Griebel saw a ribbon of dark smoke curling into the air over by the river terrace, where the synagogue lay. Within minutes he was on his way to the scene of the atrocity. He saw firemen standing idly by beside their great, motorized fire engines, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. It was an eerie scene. As Griebel watched, the scene turned even uglier:

Transfixed with horror, Griebel wandered through the center of the city, picking out its best shopping streets—Seestrasse, Schlossstrasse, Prager Strasse. Every Jewish-owned business had been subjected to destruction and pillage. Perhaps he may have passed the young tram driver's son, Günter Jäckel, now eleven. That day Günter was late for school, because on the way to class he and his friends had made a detour to inspect the ruins of the synagogue. At lunchtime, when school was over:

What the schoolboys didn't know, and perhaps few of the gawking, silent adults knew, was that during the night 151 Jewish men from Dresden had been taken from their homes and, amid scenes of casual brutality, shipped off to a special camp at Buchenwald, near Weimar. Most were eventually released, but from now on it was an unignorable fact that the only life possible for a Jew was one of escalating violence and increasingly perilous isolation. More than five hundred synagogues throughout Germany had been attacked, and in most cases destroyed in a similar fashion to the Semper synagogue in Dresden.

The embassies of the democracies and the aid offices of the Jewish Agency experienced a steep increase in the number of Jews in Dresden wanting to emigrate. However, the free nations had always been reluctant to “take” Jewish refugees, and little changed in that regard. A concession on the part of the British authorities meant that German-Jewish children could be sent on the
Kindertransporte
to London, where they were provided with foster homes and in many cases later sent to relatives and friends in North America and elsewhere. Henny Wolf's parents considered this route for her, but she refused to leave them.

It was typical of the regime, and especially of Gauleiter Mutschmann's even crueler local variant, that extra sadistic touches were added to the spiritual and physical damage wrought by the Kristallnacht mobs. Less than forty-eight hours after the synagogue's destruction, a circular went out from the Saxon Ministry of the Interior in Dresden to the mayors of all the state's major cities. Its author was Professor Dr. Martin Hammitzsch, among other things head of the Dresden Planning Authority. And also Adolf Hitler's brother-in-law. It read with charmless bureaucratic brutality:

That same day, High Burgomaster Kluge and his colleagues met to discuss the circular. Since the ruins represented a public danger, it was the city's duty to demolish what was left of the Dresden synagogue, for which it selected the municipal Technische Nothilfe and the private demolition specialists Mätschke and Co. The cost would be borne by the Jewish community. Of course, everything must be done by the book. Representatives of the Jewish community were summoned to meet with the city authorities to receive their instructions.

As Construction Counselor Wolf observed dutifully in his notes: “The representatives of the Israelite Religious Community are not available.” An inquiry at Gestapo headquarters evinced a formal confirmation of this. And the Gestapo should know—for the Jewish community representatives had been rounded up during the night and were either in prison in Dresden or being subjected to an educative roughing-up in Buchenwald concentration camp. There seems little doubt the good gentlemen of the municipality were also perfectly well aware of this fact. The “unavailability” of the Jewish community leaders meant that the city was entitled to clear the site without further consultation with its former owners.

On November 15 the district court in Dresden ordered that, in the absence of appropriate Jewish representatives, two Aryan lawyers could be appointed as administrators of the Jewish community, allowing them to authorize the wrecking teams of Mätschke and Co. to start their work. A large proportion of the bricks from the synagogue were dumped in the western suburbs of the city, where by a cruel irony Jewish forced laborers would later incorporate them into the new surface of the Meissner Landstrasse, the main highway leading northwest out along the Elbe.