My Favorite Wife (aka MFW, for those of you who don't follow this deeply neglected blog closely) and I spent a few weeks in Germany recently, visiting family and friends that we hadn't seen in four years, due to the complications of traveling during the COVID-19 pandemic. At one point we found ourselves in the small provincial town of Landau in der Pfalz, walking around the small market square to do a little shopping. As we walked, we came across a number of Stolpersteine. I've seen these many times in various German cities, but in light of recent political developments in my own home country (which I'll get to eventually) they made a completely different impression on me than previously.
These "stumbling stones" or "stumbling blocks" are part of a long-running project of the artist Gunter Demnig to memorialize victims of the Nazi regime that governed Germany from January 1933 to May 1945. Stolpersteine are embedded into the pavement in front of the houses in which those victims lived. You find them all over Germany and in another two dozen European countries. They tell a story that is mostly pretty grim. Back home, I felt compelled to research those stories and was able to piece together more than I had expected.
In front of the house at Marktstraße 81, we found two different stories. The Rosenblatt and Stützel families lived here.
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| Stolpersteine, Marktstraße 81, Landau in der Pfalz |
We can see that in 1938, Nathan and Natka Rosenblatt lived in the house with their children Wolf (7), Doris (9) and Leo (13). By this point in time in the Third Reich, the Jewish Rosenblatts would have been stripped of German citizenship, severely restricted in their movements and prohibited from essentially any participation in public life. The children would have been kicked out of school. Nathan and Natka would have been fired from any job they had and prohibited from practicing any profession. If they owned a business, they would almost certainly have closed it or sold it at a heavily discounted price because the institutionalized boycott of Jewish businesses would have rendered it unviable. At the time there were even more new discrimination and harassment measures in preparation by the Nazi government, but they would not be around to experience those.
From the inscriptions on the Rosenblatt Stolpersteine we can see that they were among around 17,000 Jews deported to Poland as part of the Polenaktion in October, 1938. Its victims were arrested without warning, taken to a prison or transit camp with only whatever they happened to have on their person at the time of arrest, and then transported to the Polish border and forced across. Any who tried to cross back into Germany were shot. The Polish border guards had no idea what to do with the new arrivals; a few thousand were eventually admitted into Poland but most remained stuck first in the open and then in squalid refugee camps that arose in the no-man's land along the border. We can see that Natka ultimately ended up in Auschwitz and was killed there in May of 1942. The fate of the rest of the family is unknown; they may have died of disease or starvation early on, or later in some camp or ghetto, or were shot or gassed or worked to death wherever they eventually ended up. In any case it's safe to assume that there wasn't a happy ending for them, and the fact that only Natka shows up in records is also an indicator that the family was probably separated at some point in their final journey.
We know more about Heinrich Stützel. There's a small street in Landau named after him. Stützel wasn't Jewish, but he was a leading member of the SPD, the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and an active opponent of the Nazis. After the latter came to power, Stützel, a tailor, was unable to find work. As a member of a small resistance group that distributed prohibited newspapers and pamphlets smuggled into Germany from nearby France, he was subjected to multiple house searches and police interrogations. Eventually arrested in May, 1935, he was imprisoned for his activities until early 1937 on a charge of "preparation to commit high treason". Following his release, he would be arrested and jailed again numerous times. One of his sons later recalled how whenever his father was in jail, the authorities would regularly appear in the middle of the night to conduct searches of the family home.
In early 1945 Stützel found himself in a holding camp from which he was to be deported, but before that could happen, the camp was liberated by the advancing Americans. The French occupation authorities overseeing Landau after the German surrender on May 8, 1945 would eventually, in an act of poetic justice, appoint him to lead the local security police, in charge of internment camps that held former Nazi officials as part of the postwar "denazification" progress. He died in 1951.
Down the street, at Marktstraße 48, we saw the house in which the siblings Friedrich ("Fritz") and Luise Schwarz resided. Friedrich ran a drapery business on the ground floor of the house and was married to a Catholic woman; their two children were baptized. Luise lived in a separate apartment above the store. From the inscription on their Stolpersteine we can see that the two of them met very different fates.
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Stolpersteine, Marktstraße 48, Landau in der Pfalz
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But first, some historical background. One of the many families caught up in the aforementioned
Polenaktion was that of seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, who at the time was living in Paris illegally, one step ahead of the police who were trying to find and deport him. Incensed upon learning of his parents' desperate situation, he bought a revolver and walked into the German embassy on the morning of November 7, 1938, claiming to have important information to share with the German ambassador. The ambassador wasn't available, so he was sent to the office of a junior official named Ernst vom Rath. He drew his gun and fired five shots into vom Rath, who died on November 9.
The death of vom Rath was the trigger for the
Kristallnacht, a country-wide riot led by the
SA (Brownshirts) and
Hitler Youth, in which thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were ransacked and looted. There followed, over the next few days, mass arrests of around 30,000 Jewish men. From his
Stolperstein we can see that Friedrich was one of them, sent into so-called "protective custody" in the
Dachau concentration camp near Munich, where they were subjected to beatings, psychological terror and general maltreatment. The arrests had taken place
on orders of SS Gruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Reinhard Heydrich, who was tasked by Hitler with forcing Jews out of Germany; the arrests and subsequent detention were meant as an incentive to leave the country. Curiously, his orders included instructions not to mistreat the arrestees, but here we see the difference between theory and practice.
Most of those arrested were released within a few months, as was Friedrich, who returned to his family in Landau. His mixed marriage afforded him a modicum of protection from deportation, although he was still subject to all kinds of restrictions and persecution. A loyal Nazi party member was moved into the house to keep an eye on things (apparently a common practice, as something similar happened to the—devoutly Catholic—household of MFW'S grandmother). He was later moved to a different house in Landau together with his sister Luise, his daughter Ann and others as part of a common Nazi practice of concentrating all the Jews in one place for better control. His luck (if you can call it that) eventually ran out when he was deported to the
Theresienstadt ghetto in about March of 1945. It appears that he managed to escape the ghetto during the chaos of the final days of the war and began to make his way home, but died of pneumonia along the way.
Luise's path was a different one. She was swept up in the
"Wagner-Bürckel-Aktion" in late October, 1940. During that two-day action,
6,504 Jews living in the Baden and Palatinate regions were given surprise orders to be ready to travel in two hours or less. They were driven in buses to waiting trains, for a journey of around three and a half days to the
Gurs internment camp at the foot of the French Pyrenees. As with the
Polenaktion, they were permitted to take little or nothing with them, and anything of value they left behind was confiscated by the government. Friedrich's mixed marriage protected him and Ann from being forced out, but Luise had no such status.
Gurs, by all accounts, was a squalid hellhole in which starvation, disease and death were rampant, but it wasn't particularly well guarded. In March of 1942, half a year before transports of the Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz began, Luise managed to escape with twenty other female prisoners, who made their way across southern France to the Swiss border. Of that group, it appears that only Luise was permitted to cross the border by the border guards, who took pity on her because she was so ill at the time. She remained in Switzerland as a refugee until March of 1951, when she returned to Landau. She died there in 1966.
Our final stop is Xylanderstraße 6, where Emil and Annette Fried lived with their daughter Marianne. Emil Fried, together with his brothers Sigmund and Theodor, owned and operated several cigar factories, processing the tobacco that was a major cash crop in the region around Landau, as well as importing tobacco from around the world. Their products were mostly sold through dealers in the eastern part of the country. The house at Xylanderstraße 6 was the firm's head office.
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| Stolpersteine, Xylanderstraße 6, Landau in der Pfalz | |
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Recognizing the writing on the wall, the brothers started looking for a buyer for the firm in January 1938. By July they had found one, but the sale was prohibited by a local Nazi official who had other ideas as to who should acquire the firm. Emil, who was the one authorized to sign off on the sale, was arrested on Nov. 10, 1938, in the Kristallnacht aftermath. On November 11, shortly before he was taken away to Dachau, he was forced to sign a contract of sale to the official's preferred buyer. The determination of the final sale price would drag on until July of 1940. The proceeds of the sale paid out to the Fried brothers were based on a very buyer-friendly appraisal of the firm's value, from which multiple charges were additionally deducted, including the Judenvermögensabgaben (Jewish capital levy) that was alone 20% of the sale price.
[According to family lore, the same kind of fate befell a distant relative of my own. As co-owner of a shoe factory in Berlin, so the story goes, he sold his share to his non-Jewish business partner and fled to America while that was still possible. I've long wondered, did he get a decent price, or did his partner pay him pennies on the dollar (or
Pfennige on the
Reichsmark), as was generally the case with "
aryanized" businesses? How much of whatever he got was he able to take with him, and how much was confiscated in the form of the
"Reichsfluchtsteuer" (Reich flight tax) levied on those fleeing Germany?]
Emil would not have had much opportunity to make use of his share of the sale proceeds. After his release from Dachau in December of 1938, he and Anna had moved to Baden-Baden, from where they too were deported to Gurs as part of the Wagner-Bürckel Aktion a few months after the sale closed. Sometime in July or August of 1943 they were released from Gurs, temporarily finding refuge in Nice, France, but were arrested in September 1943 and a few weeks later sent to die in Auschwitz.
"Sent to die" sounds ugly enough, but nevertheless glosses over the brutal horror of their final days, so let's consider what that actually meant. At the
Drancy internment camp near Paris that served as a collection point for Jews being deported eastward, Emil and Anna would have been crammed with 80 to 100 other prisoners into a cattle car, too tightly to even sit down, with no windows, no food, no water, no heat, no toilet. They would have endured a multi-day journey in these conditions across France, Belgium, Germany and occupied eastern Poland.
Upon arrival at the
Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, assuming they were among those who survived the journey, and assuming they were not shot or clubbed to death on the spot for failing to immediately follow a guard's orders, they would have been forced onto the selection ramp and separated, Emil with those men and older boys who were deemed unfit to work, Anna with the women and all other children. They would have then been marched by SS men to the gas chambers (or loaded on trucks and driven if they were too infirm to walk), forced to disrobe and then herded inside. With the doors bolted shut, guards would have poured in a load of hydrogen cyanide-based insecticidal fumigant pellets through vents in the ceiling. All of the occupants would have been dead within the space of ten or so minutes.
Their daughter Marianne had moved with them to Baden-Baden, then to Berlin, and then in mid-1940 back to Baden-Baden. In September of 1940, five or six weeks before the
Wagner-Bürckel Aktion, which she threby escaped, she relocated to Neu Isenburg, near Frankfurt/Main. She was trained as an
Erzieherin, or childcare specialist, and appears to have practiced that profession in the
Heim Isenburg Jewish orphanage. Her last known address is in Frankfurt, from which she was deported to, and killed at, the
Sobibor extermination camp in June of 1942.
So why am I telling you all this unpleasant stuff? Two reasons.
The first reason is a simple one. I just want to remind myself, and you, that all of these names are more than just words etched into the sidewalk (although it is remarkable enough that they have been memorialized in this way). These were people who were just living their lives, and surely wanted to go on doing that, but instead were subjected to an organized system of persecution and brutal violence that would cost most of them their lives, simply because they belonged to the wrong group (or in one case, the wrong political party). Four generations after the end of the Third Reich, those events seem distant and abstract. I think their stories, or as much of them as I can piece together, are worth remembering. These were living, breathing human beings and not just footnotes to history.
The second reason, as I alluded to at the beginning of this piece, has to do with current events in my own home country. But first, back to Germany, now in the postwar period.
Directly after the end of the war, the prevailing attitude was to avoid talking about the crimes of the preceding twelve years and instead focus on rebuilding. In the Soviet occupation zone, which would become communist East Germany, that attitude was state policy. The official line was something like, "we are communists, and the Nazis persecuted communists, so we were also victims"—and thereby absolved from any need to consider what went on under the previous regime.
In the West, under a pluralistic and democratic society (imposed by the Western allies), the postwar generation coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s—MFW'S generation—demanded an actual reckoning. They viewed the horrifying legacy that had been handed to them with shame and outrage and wanted to know exactly what their parents and grandparents and everyone else did during those twelve years. Were they active Nazis? Did they have blood on their hands, and whose? Were they Schreibtischtäter, "desk murderers" who kept the trains to the East running and the war machine supplied without ever getting their own hands dirty? Did they actively or passively resist? Were they just trying to keep their heads down, hoping they would somehow come out the other end alive?
The broadcast of the American miniseries "Holocaust" in 1979 created a much wider discussion in (West) German society. The public reckoning continued with widely and intensively discussed events such as the traveling exhibition "
War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944" or the publication of Daniel Goldhagen's book
Hitler's Willing Executioners, both of which dealt with—and exploded—different aspects of the myth that the crimes of the Nazi era were purely the work of a relatively small segment of German society.
There are certainly voices, mainly on the right-wing fringe, who say that it's time to stop talking about this and move on, or that it's all exaggerated, or that none of it really happened, etc. But those voices remain a distinct minority (though a larger one in the East than in the West), tend to be shouted down or just ignored, and do not have the power to turn those beliefs into broad public policy. It of course remains to be seen whether that will be the case ten or twenty or thirty years hence, but that's the way it is now and the way it's been for the past several decades.
The history and the crimes committed by the Nazis—and ordinary Germans—are standard topics in German schools in the post-reunification East and West. Teaching about the war and the Holocaust generally begins somewhere between sixth and eighth grade. The treatment of these topics is not simply one unit that takes up a few weeks in history class, but rather is handled in a fairly comprehensive way across the curriculum in an age-appropriate way for each class level. History classes do of course look fairly extensively at the events of the period and the conditions that led up to them, but the curriculum weaves these topics into other subjects as well. For instance, a high school-level German class might read and analyze post-war novels written about the period by famous authors like Günter Grass or Heinrich Böll, or analyze the rhetoric of speeches by Hitler or the propaganda of Goebbels. An art class might look at the Nazis' obsession with purging society of what they called
entartete Kunst, (degenerate art).
The depth and breadth with which the topic is treated varies from state to state and school to school, but in general, it's a very frank portrayal of a framework of discrimination and persecution that evolved into a system of organized murder on an industrial scale, within the wider context of a militaristic, totalitarian state that waged an unprovoked war of conquest that killed tens of millions of people and ultimately led to the near-total destruction of the country itself. Classroom learning is frequently supplemented with trips to monuments and concentration camps, to witness the scene of the crime, as it were. There are connections to a difficult past made at a more local level. For example, there are actually two
Stolpersteine in Landau that invoke the memory of Marianne Fried. One is the one I told you about above; the other is one of
25 that memorialize the fates of the Jewish students of her former school, a project of tenth-grade students of the school itself.
The message of all of this can be boiled down to this: This is an actual thing that happened in your country, right here in your town, even right here in your school. It was an unspeakably terrible thing that our people collectively—many actively, many others just by looking away when they saw what was happening—did to other human beings, starting with fellow citizens and members of our community. You are not responsible for this thing that happened long before you were born. You are responsible for knowing what happened and what conditions led up to it, and helping to ensure that it can never happen again.
The extent to which that message resonates with the target audience is of course inevitably going to be mixed. What matters—in my mind, anyway—is that this is the
officially sanctioned and
mandated message. The topic is handled head-on, with a very clear emphasis that this definitely happened and was unequivocally malevolent, no ifs, ands or buts. There is no tolerance for arguments that this is going to make young Germans "uncomfortable" or that it will be "divisive" or other such drivel. There is no state government requiring schools to teach that there was some silver lining, the way that Florida's 2023 state academic standards for social studies prescribe that "
Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit." There are no discussions of "
positive aspects", or arguments that those were different times with different rules, or that maybe there were at least some plausible justifications, or that
the victims could have done more to avoid their fate, or that bad things happened in other places too and that maybe makes what we did somehow not so bad, relatively speaking. There is no tolerance for assertions that the facts of history are exaggerations or just never happened, or that there was somehow
another side to the story that deserves consideration. On the contrary,
Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.
I contrast that with how Americans deal with the nasty stuff in our own history. Or, really, don't deal with it. Many, if not most Americans, have at best a vague awareness of these things. We don't talk much about how the original inhabitants of the land were systematically
driven off their land,
forced to give up their culture, and
murdered in large numbers. We, or at least those of us who are not descended from its victims, talk about slavery as a thing that happened a long time ago and was, umm, sort of bad, but we don't really know all that much about it and it's over now anyway and so we certainly don't dwell on it; we don't talk about
the physical and mental violence and the general brutality of how slaves were treated. We don't learn about the physical violence of
lynching of Blacks in the post-slavery era, or the economic violence of
redlining in the north and west. We don't discuss the
forced relocation of over a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II. Some of us read
The Diary of Anne Frank in school, but few of us learn about the undercurrent of antisemitism that created
deliberate bureaucratic hurdles that thwarted her father's attempts to find refuge for his family in the U.S. Yes, the information is there if one chooses to go look for it, but seldom if ever is one ever directly confronted with it.
Another word the same people have taken up a crusade against: "woke". To me, this word simply means acknowledging the historically structural nature of racism in American society and recognizing that the non-white population still faces both subtle discrimination and not-so-subtle maltreatment by state institutions. Florida governor and presidential candidate
Ron DeSantis has built a whole identity around this. Other Republicans are
attacking the U.S. military for its supposed promotion of "woke" culture. The message is that we must not only not talk about these things, we must wage a war to keep anyone else from talking about these things.
But what is the point of this? Are we collectively so morally feeble that we can't handle anything that might cast in a different light the image of The Greatest Country On Earth that we are spoon-fed from our earliest days? Is it just the backlash for the recognition that the country will inevitably continue to become less white? Is it a material concern about being asked to pony up for reparations of some kind? All of the above, I would guess.
Simple ignorance of history might be excusable, but an active political program of a major party and its adherents to deny history, to whitewash it, to hide it, to erase it? The contrast with how the Germans have diligently, even if imperfectly, struggled to come to terms with their own past, something I was once again reminded of as I looked at those names inscribed in the sidewalks of a small town, could not be more profound.
Very well said.
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