Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (10 page)

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  1. Charlotte Stein-Pick, memoirs, LBI: 41.
  2. Ibid., 43–45. See also Ruth Abraham, memoirs, LBI: 3–5.
  3. Limberg and Rübsaat,
    Sie durften nicht mehr Deutsche sein,
    325.
  4. Charlotte Stein-Pick, memoirs, LBI: 45. See also Gerdy Stoppleman, memoirs, LBI: 5. Stoppleman’s husband left Sachsenhausen in March 1939. “More than his body, my husband’s mind was deeply affected. Almost every night he experienced Sachsenhausen Concentration camp anew in nightmares so alarming that I feared for his sanity.”
  5. An extreme example of this happened during the deportations, when a nurse walked into a double suicide. Terribly upset, she wanted to share her feelings with her husband but could not “because of his own depressions.” She did confide in her girlfriend. Frieda Cohn, Yad Vashem, Ball kaduri Collection, 01/291, 5. See also Leo Gompertz, memoirs, LBI: 10.
  6. Charlotte Stein-Pick, memoirs, LBI: 39.
  7. erna Albersheim, ms., Harvard: 33.
  8. Mally Dienemann, ms., Harvard: 25.
  9. elisabeth Freund, in Monika Richarz, ed.,
    Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries
    (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 413.
  10. elisabeth Freund in Richarz,
    Jewish Life
    , 414–4l5.
  11. Richarz,
    Jüdisches Leben
    , vol. 3: 6l. Richarz writes that of the deportees (of about167,000), the proportion of women was 20 percent higher than that of men. Also, 28,077 Austrian Jewish women, almost twice the number (15,344) of Jewish men, were deported from Vienna. Josef Fraenkel,
    The Jews of Austria
    (London: Val-lentine, Mitchell, 1970), 526.
  12. JWS
    , 1937: 7–13; 27. Home care assistants (
    Pflegerinnen
    ) were recruited from among women who were previously sales personnel, independent business people, nurses’ aides, artists, kindergarten teachers, and housewives.
    JWS
    , 1937: 78–81. Avraham Barkai has discovered that some Jews protested against Jewish women who worked in the social service sector of the Jewish communities as “double earners” (women whose husbands also had jobs). Also, he has found letters to the editor of the
    CVZ
    —the newspaper of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith—proposing that these women should become domestics in order to let older and more experienced men who needed jobs take their places. Avraham Barkai, “Der wirtschaftliche existenzkampf der Juden im Dritten Reich, 1933– 38,” in Paucker,
    The Jews in Nazi Germany
    , 163.
  13. Hanno Loewy, ed.,
    In mich ist die grosse dunkle Ruhe gekommen, Martha Wertheimer Briefe an Siegfried Guggenheim (1939–1941)
    (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurt Lern-und Dokumentationszentrum des Holocaust, 1993), 6, 9, 13, 15, 22, 37.
  14. “Laura Pelz” in Morris, “The Lives of some Jewish Germans,” 43.
  15. Ruth eisner recalled that her male cousin left in 1936, three years before she did, because his parents did not want him to face more beatings from neighborhood bullies. See her
    Nicht wir allein
    , 8.
  16. Alice Nauen interview, 15. Research Foundation. Her father was secretary of the Hilfsverein in Hamburg.
  17. Attacks on individual women seem to have occurred mostly in small towns, although, for examples from Nuremberg and Düsseldorf, see Rita Thalmann and
    emmanuel Feinermann,
    Crystal Night
    (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 70 and 8l. If one collected all of these tales, it would be noticed that women were not “exempt” from violence even as early as 1938.
    erna Albersheim reported on a small town in east Prussia where some women and girls were imprisoned for about two weeks. Ms., Harvard: 63. Alice Baerwald described the same town, reporting that the fourteen women had to march through town saying “we have betrayed Germany.” People ran alongside them crying “beat them to death, why are you still feeding them!” Ms., Harvard: 58.
    For examples of women who were beaten in small towns, see “Lest we Forget!” by Anonymous, memoirs, LBI: 5. Also, see Frances Henry,
    Victims and Neighbors: A Small Town in Nazi Germany Remembered
    (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1984), 11–17, describing a Jewish woman, blood dripping down her face as she ran down the street in “Sonderburg,” and another elderly couple forced to run through the town’s streets followed by SA throwing stones at them.
    In eberstadt, the local Nazi party leader murdered an 81-year-old Jewish woman, shooting her three times, when she resisted his orders to march to the city hall. Ulrich Baumann, “Jüdische Frauen auf dem Land,” (referring to Baden-württemberg), University of Freiburg, unpublished paper, 1992, 38. In Breisach, a Jewish woman was badly beaten in her home on 10 November. Günther Haselier,
    Geschichte der Stadt Breisach am Rhein
    (Breisach: Stadt[verwaltung], 1985), 450.
    In Arheilgen (later part of Darmstadt), about a dozen SA men cornered a young woman and her father in their home. when one of them shouted for a “long knife,” Johanna Reinhard jumped out of the window. She died of her injuries the following day and her father killed himself a few days later. klaus Moritz and ernst Noam, eds.,
    NS Verbrechen vor Gericht, 1945–55: Justiz und Judenverfolgung
    , vol. 2 (wiesbaden:
    Kommission für die Geschichte der Juden in Hessen
    , 1978), 94–97.
    In Usingen, a town of about 2,000 people in 1933, the November Pogrom involved the beating of at least two Jewish couples. Moritz and Noam,
    NS Verbrechen
    , 232–233. Reports from the cities of Nuremberg and Fürth describe Jews being driven from their homes with leather straps and Jewish women with evidence of strap marks on their faces.
    Deutschland-Berichte, 1939
    , 920.
    For three more instances of violence against women in small towns, see Heinz Lauber,
    Judenpogrom: Reichskristallnacht November 1938 in Grossdeutschland
    (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1981), 110–114, 221–233. In addition, some women were also taken hostage for husbands who had hidden. In Frankfurt, for example, they were taken hostage, but a few were released after a day in jail in order to care for their children at home. Andreas Lixl-Purcell,
    Women of Exile
    (westport: Greenwood, 1988), 71. In Dresden, women were taken hostage until their husbands turned themselves in.
    Deutschland-Berichte, 1939
    , 922.
    Finally, the elderly, female and male, were not spared physical brutality either. on the edges of Berlin, rioters set the tiny shack (
    Laube
    ) of an elderly couple aflame. when the couple tried to escape in their nightshirts, the band tried to force them back into the house. The man died of a heart attack and the woman needed to be institutionalized thereafter.
    Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands
    ,
    1938
    (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Petra Nettelbeck, 1980), 1340.
  18. This was not true for eastern european Jews who had been deported
    before
    the po-grom. There, men, women, children, and the aged were swept up and deported.
  19. BJFB
    , April 1937: 5. See also, erika Guetermann, “Das Photographien Album,” memoirs, LBI, for another example of a woman who would not leave her parents and was later killed by the Nazis.
  20. Ruth Glaser, memoirs, LBI: 26, 7l.
  21. BJFB
    , December 1936: l.
  22. BJFB
    , April 1937: 10;
    BJFB
    , December 1936: 1.
  23. CVZ
    , 20 January 1938: 5.
  24. CVZ
    , 3 March 1938: 6. The article was written by Hannah karminski, who also encouraged women to take household preparation seriously.
  25. For example, in 1937,
    the number of emigrés supported by the emigration section
    (wanderungsausschuss) of the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland was 7,313 [the Hilfsverein supported 5,762 and the Palestine office of the Jewish Agency—Palästina-Amt—supported 1,551]. This broke down to approximately 4,161 men and 3,041 women. January/February 1938: 6–7. The Hilfsverein supported 3,250 men and 2,512 women (that is, 56.4 percent of the people it supported were male and 43.5 percent were female). The Palestine office supported 911 men and 529 women. There were 111 people not categorized as male or female. (If one ignores these 111 people, the other figures of 911 and 529 result in: 63 percent men and 36.7 percent women).
    These are all approximate figures since about 16 percent of the Hilfsverein emigrés and 16 percent of those heading for Palestine did not require financial support, but are included in the overall statistics.
  26. These programs included: Hechaluz, Habonim, and Makkabi Hazair.
  27. Pioneered by Recha Freier in Berlin in 1932, Youth Aliyah was offi begun in 1934 and supported fi by Hadassah, the Zionist women’s organization in the United States. Its purpose was to rescue children by sending them to Palestine.
  28. Until April 1939, Youth Aliyah sent 3,229 children from Germany to Palestine, saving them from Nazi terror. Thank you to Sara kadosh of the Joint Distribution Committee Archives (Jerusalem) for the fi es from Germany. other fi - ures for Youth Aliyah, claiming 7,000 children brought into Palestine, are cited by Norman Bentwich,
    Jewish Youth Comes Home: the Story of the Youth Aliyah, 1933–1943
    (London: V. Gollancz Ltd., 1944), 62, 82. In the pamphlet
    Ten Years Children and Youth Aliyah
    (London: Children and Youth Aliyah, 1944), 2, it is claimed that 10,000 children were brought to Palestine in the ten years of YA
    .
    See also Report of the Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews in Palestine prepared for the 21
    st
    Zionist Congress (1939) for statistics and sum total of Youth Aliyah.
  29. women were a majority in the Jewish population of German-dominated europe. In Poland (1931), 52.08 percent of the Jews were female. In Hungary (1930),
    52.08 percent were female; in the Netherlands (1919), 51.9 percent were female, in Lithuania (1923), 52.08 percent were female. Raul Hilberg,
    Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945
    (New York, Aaron Asher Books, 1992), 127.
  30. IF
    , no. 9 (27 February 1936).
  31. Sybil Milton, “women and the Holocaust,” in
    When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany
    , ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 301. Bruno Blau set up the following table to show the disparity between males and females in 1939 (figures include Austria, exclusive of Vienna and the Sudetenland.)
    Male
    Female
    Total
    Single
    32,254
    43,222
    75,476
    Married
    50,746
    49,563
    100,309
    widowed
    6,674
    28,347
    35,021
    Divorced
    2,700
    3,982
    6,682
    ToTAL
    92 374
    125,114
    217,488
    See Bruno Blau, “The Jewish Population of Germany, 1939–l946,”
    Jewish Social Studies
    12 (1950): 165.

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