Well, in the other thread I note that I think I would not have any problems from persecution, other than potentially being drafted and sent to a bad combat position.
I seriously doubt I would have left at all. If I did leave, it would probably be around the time a few million angry russians were bearing down on us, and the glorious thousand-year reich I was promised was looking like it wasn’t going to work out after all.
Not only would I not have left, but because of the very points Mr. Kobayashi makes above, I think I would likely have been a solid supporter of the party, probably having joined up in some way at some point.
The only thing I can think of that would make me do otherwise is if I, or a friend that I actually care about, were to find themselves on the wrong end of Nazi persecution. That might change my tune. Otherwise, as long as it’s just strangers and the faceless masses of ‘the Jews’ I can’t see myself caring more about that than the fact that we now have prosperity and success.
I read that the famous German film director Fritz Lang was offered a good position in the Nazi film industry. He left Germany the same night-didn’t even go home to pack.
Well, I can tell you an anecdote about that! My parents are Holocaust survivors. When I was a teenager I lived in Montreal. A few months after the PQ came to power for the first time in 1977, my dad decided we were going to move away. Even the earliest restrictions on the use of English were reminding him a bit too much of something he had already gone through, and didn’t want to repeat.
It really is difficult to put myself into that space. Being essentially aryan by birth, I suppose I would fit right into the target audience for the government, but I have always been inclined to go against the grain somewhat. I like to think I would stay and use whatever position I had to undermine the government (if only to harbor the underground opposition), but it would probably depend on whether I was born in '99 or '20.
Leave to go where? By the time the hardcore stuff began to happen, it was very difficult to get an immigration visa from most other Western countries, and without one you can’t emigrate. Soft antisemitism was pretty widespread and socially acceptable back then; other countries may not have been actively persecuting their own Jews, but they didn’t particularly want to allow large numbers of foreign Jews into their borders, either.
And just leaving Germany didn’t necessarily protect you. If you (like Anne Frank’s family, who moved from Germany to the Netherlands) emigrated from Germany to another country in continental Europe, you’re still most likely doomed.
That was one of the reasons the Holocaust was such a tragedy: by the time the average person could unmistakably see the threat ahead, it was too late to escape it.
Precisely. Unless you left no later than early in the 1930s (say around 1934), Jewish or not, you weren’t likely to be going anywhere.
I had the eerie experience of picking up a book in my college library which was published around 1935, and in which the author (who was Jewish) made reference to “the growing troubles in our country (Germany)” in his preface. I found myself wondering if (having guessed at what was coming) he’d managed to escape - but I never bothered to do any checking, because I sensed that I probably wouldn’t have liked the answer to my question.
Up until maybe 1938 or 39 I would have been saying “At least this Hitler guys is finally getting the economy going and standing up to those damned French and English demands. Sure, he has a bug in his bonnet for the Jews but that’s not uncommon.” I would have stayed and probably served in the army when called up, just like almost everyone else.
Even if you weren’t Jewish, your options would have been limited. If you don’t speak a foreign language quite well, you could maybe get away to America, but otherwise your opportunities outside Germany would be slim indeed. I mean, where are you going to go and what are you going to do? Unless you have some kind of plan, it’s gonna be real rough and you could end up sliding pretty far down the pole.
Even if you hated Nazis and everything about them, you didn’t necessarily have a lot of really good options. Of course, democracy was dead as a doornail even before they took over - you would have exchanged a messy, tyrannical psuedo-democracy for a “cleaner”, tyrannical non-democracy.
This. Anyone here who says that they would have left, but does not belong to a category of people that was actually persecuted by the Nazis, is likely answering the OP with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. As someone who would have been considered relatively “pure” by their standards, everything I would have known about the current state of affairs in Nazi Germany would have been presented to me in a way that would have likely sucked me in to the hysteria. I only know about the atrocities committed by the Nazis from media that would have been censored and/or propagandized by them if I had lived there at the time - I probably would not have known anything about the regime that I would be sufficiently put off by to abandon my homeland and my family/friends until Hitler was long gone.
I disagree. There would have been numerous instances you would know about. But fundamentally nobody except the Nazis had the ability to politically organize; other political groups were destroyed entirely. The only major protest I recall working was formed of married women who wanted their husbands back; it worked because the Nazis didn’t want the bad image right then and could afford to be juuuuuust lenient enough to relax. But only once, and it was never intended to be permanent.
As a result, you can’t complain in Nazi Germany - at least not very loudly. But you still know a good deal about what’s going on. You know, but you can’t do anything about it. But regardless of the government, it is still your country and your people. If you want to leave, you possibly can - assuming anyplace will take you. But you’ll arrive with virtually nothing. Most people - and most Jews or even Communists - decided to try keeping their heads down, or at most they only ventured elsewhere in Europe, where a great many were later caught. Many others, including artists and scientists and writers and ordinary people, just gave up because all political expression or protest, whether from Right or Left, was banned entirely. If they couldn’t afford or couldn’t stand to go overseas, they practiced what was called “Inner Emigration” and relocated away from the cities, especially Berlin).
It was called the Rosenstrasse protest, in Berlin in 1943. After Stalingrad, the Gestapo started the Grossaktion Juden, also called the Fabrikaktion, to round up the remaining Jews in Germany, most of whom were factory workers in war essential industries. It included Jews married to Aryans, who had, for the most part, been spared deportation to Poland or extermination.
In Berlin, about 7000 Jews were arrested. About 1800 of them, most of them “Privileged Jews”; Jewish men married to Aryan women, and employees of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany (the agency set up by the Nazis as the “official” Jewish organization of Germany, that they used as sort of a puppet government over German Jews) were being held in the Jewish Welfare Office on Rosenstrasse.
Their spouses gathered outside the office in protest for a week, chanting and demanding their husbands be freed, in spite of police attempts to clear the area and threats to shoot them. At the end of that time, the people in there were released and were spared the fate of the rest of the Jews in the Aktion, who were sent to Auschwitz.
It was the only public protest against the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
OP here, I was meaning more or less if you were in the category of the opression target classes - Jewish, Gypsy, Gay. disabled etc. Not really the generic German of no particular importance.
I didn’t pick up on that when I made my earlier post. It’s interesting that you mention Kristalnacht as a game changer, as that would be difficult not to notice, however I didn’t really give it much thought in my earlier post because it had always been my understanding that it was mainly perpetrated by civilians, and while the government may have turned a blind eye, there wasn’t much visible state support. After taking a closer look it seems that it actually did generate considerable outrage from the German populace.
For me? I don’t know. I have relatives who are still there, although my grandparents immigrated to the US as children.
I can give an anecdote about my husband’s paternal grandfather. A well off Jew from an aristocratic family - his father was an ambassador and a decorated WWI solider, he was born in Shanghai, raised mostly in Germany but somewhat internationally, who was a university educated architect working as a clerk in a big architectural firm in Berlin.
He voted for Hitler, as I understand.
He left in 38, somewhat late but he had quite a lot of money. He fled to Australia because he could afford it and it seemed this was as far away as he could get at the time. He begged his sisters and his mother to leave. He offered to pay off or bribe whoever he possibly could.
Only his mother survived the war (his father died in the previous war.) She lived three months after being liberated from the camps. He spent the war in an Australian camp for German nationals. He became a somewhat famous architect in Melbourne.
He was a bit crazed. He spent his life becoming more and more convinced the Nazis were coming for him. He changed his name late and life and tried to insist his kids did, too (they didn’t.) Ironically, he was suspected of being a Nazi himself because he kept changing his story about his past, had a German accent and was of the correct age. (See above, Nazis might find him.)
So…in that case, 38, even starting from a point that he believed that Hitler was a good thing for Germany.