Memories of Germany during the 30's What is Weirdness? by Henry P. Kramer

        When I first came to the United States, kids in school thought I was weird. They wanted to know whether we had bathtubs where I had lived in Germany. Did we have telephones, radios, cars? When I told them that we had all of those things they thought, well, maybe they aren't all that weird where this guy came from.
         They didn't have too good an idea as to where Germany was, or even what it was. I once had a kid ask me whether France was in Paris, or was it the other way around?
        Anyone who isn't the same as everyone else is weird. Mostly we don't like people who are weird. Sometimes people don't like others whom they consider weird or different to the point of taking all their rights away and ultimately even taking the right to live away and killing them. That is what happened in Germany to those German citizens who were Jewish or considered Jewish by the Nazis because they had at least one Jewish grandparent.
        I was born in Germany in 1924 and left there in 1936 when I was eleven because by that time it had become clear to my parents that we would be better off by leaving. Father's brother, Uncle Hans, and his wife, Aunt Louise, escaped from Germany to France, were turned over by the Vichy French to the Nazis and shipped off to an extermination camp and killed. So my parents were really smart to get out of Germany and we were very lucky to go to the United States.
But to leave was not an easy decision. As far back as anyone knows, my ancestors lived in
        Germany. My maternal grandmother' s recorded ancestry goes back in the Rhineland to the early 1700s, long before the American revolution. My maternal grandfather's ancestry is recorded back to the late 1600s in Brandenburg, the country around Berlin. Both my paternal grandparents came from a small country town in Westphalia, where my maternal great-great grandfather had a flour mill powered by a big water wheel. My father was wounded as a German soldier in the First World War and my mother was an assistant nurse helping wounded soldiers in a hospital. All my family thought themselves as German as anyone else. Now they would have to leave the country where they knew how to speak the language and had memories and emotional connections to go to a foreign place where they would be strangers to the customs and the language.
        How did the Nazis (National Socialist German Workers' Party) get started?         Germany, after fighting for four long years and both suffering and inflicting millions of casualties, lost the First World War in 1918. In 1919 to make peace it had to sign the Versailles Treaty that was considered by many Germans as very humiliating. Many Germans were not ready to accept the idea that their leaders in the war had been wrong and their misery had been in vain. They were looking for a scape-goat, someone to blame. Many Germans, who called themselves Nationalists, thought that a minority group within Germany, the Jews, were to blame for Germany's losing the war.
        To avenge the "shame of Versailles" there were over 300 political assassinations in Germany between 1918 and 1933 when Hitler formally took power. The few assassins who were punished were jailed for a few months. Several victims were Jewish. One of them was Walter Rathenau, at that time the Foreign Minister of German. He was a middle-of-the-road politician and the son of the founder of AEG, the "General Electric of Germany". Also assassinated was Rosa Luxemburg, who was a socialist and had opposed the war. For this she was jailed. Then she was killed.
        How weird were the Jews? And was their weirdness a reason to take away their rights as citizens? Well, a lot of Jews went to pray in synagogues, not churches, and they said prayers in a foreign language, Hebrew. That's weird. However, half of the Christians in Germany were Catholic and they went to church where prayers were said in a foreign language, Latin. There is a big church in the center of Berlin called the French Church. It was built to accommodate French Protestants, Huguenots, and for a long time they said their prayers in a foreign language, French.
        Jews were said to be weird because they were too successful at business and had become too rich. Other Jews were said to be weird because they stood up for the rights of the poor and had become socialists. Some Jews were considered weird because they wrote books, and plays, and painted pictures that some people didn't understand and like. Other Jews were considered weird because they had no feeling for art and beauty and truth and were interested only in money. Other Jews were considered weird because they acted too much like other Germans and thus lived a lie. In short, every reason why one person might not like another person was given for not liking Jews. And this propaganda took over the minds and hearts of many millions of Germans. They accepted the propaganda whether they had any personal experience with Jews or not. Stirring up hate against the Jews, who were a small group, about 8% of the total population, was a way for the Nazi politicians to unify the people at no great cost to them.
        I remember when I was a little boy, right where we waited to get on the street car a block from our house, a newspaper published by the Nazi party that ruled the government was exhibited in a viewing box protected by a wire grid. The newspaper was called "Der Strümer" and contained lurid pornographic stories about Jewish "crimes" against "Germans". The information was false but no one was allowed to contradict it.
        People were afraid to speak out. I was told by my parents that they were taken to SS headquarters and interrogated because, someone had reported, that I had said in school that Hitler was a murderer. After that experience, my parents were terribly frightened. That may have been one of the reasons that convinced them to leave Germany.
        Many kids in Germany had heard from the radio, from their parents, from the newspapers, from neighbors that Jews were awful. Many of the kids felt that Jews were not Germans, and that Germans were better. And it didn't take much for some kids to feel that they could bully Jewish kids. One afternoon, a bigger kid in the neighborhood saw me on the street in front of my house and yelled out: Hey, Jew, what time is it? I said I don't know, and if I did, I wouldn't tell you because you are rude. We got into a scuffle. Another time, a bunch of kids followed me from school. They were dressed in Hitler Youth uniforms. When we got in front of my house, they started taking off their leather straps to hit me with them. I went into our yard and came out with a broom handle and challenged them. Let the first one step forward and he'll get smacked. None took the challenge. My best friend in the fourth grade told me that I had killed God. I answered: "How could I?" And then I told him: "You better take that back". He wouldn't. So we got into a fight. I got him on the ground and was sitting on top of him. But he wouldn't admit he was wrong. After that, we weren't friends anymore.
        There was a young girl in the neighborhood who was about 12 years old. She liked me like a little mother. I was only about eight or nine. Her father was a judge and he was a Nazi. Her older brother was in the SS. When I visited their house the brother looked very handsome in his black uniform with silver fittings. I asked my friend why her family didn't like Jews like us. She said that I was wrong. Her family disliked only "bad" Jews but not "good" Jews like us. I have wondered what her brother did after the war started.
        After Hitler came to power many people lost their hope and confidence. My mother and I were on a walk and we passed a house a few streets over. The house was wrecked from a fire. She told me that Jewish people had lived in the house and that they had committed suicide by turning on the gas and as a consequence there was an explosion and a fire.
        I loved riding my bike for long distances. A friend and I rode along the Rhine for many kilometers to visit an old ruin on a former island in the river. Now the channel had silted in and people could cross over. This had been the castle of a German emperor in the early middle ages. We arrived there and were greeted by a sign saving "Dogs and Jews Prohibited." We didn't go in.
        We had a maid and a cook. One day, we had to lay off the maid. The cook stayed. A new law had been passed prohibiting German women from working in a Jewish household if they were younger than thirty-rune years of age. My father, a lawyer, was a partner in a law firm. One day, the partnership was dissolved because Jews and Christians were no longer allowed to be in partnership. Another day, my mother had to go to school with me at the Gymnasium, a German college preparatory high school for kids from the fifth to the twelfth grades. She told the home room teacher, a very nice older gentlemen that I had to leave the school. He wanted to know why. I was doing so well. She told him that I was Jewish and he understood and said he was sorry.
        I then enrolled in the Jewish school that had been started in a hurry for all of the Jewish kids in the city. It turned out to be a very good school because our teachers had been kicked out of the Universities and were very fine scholars. The school was next to the synagogue which together with the school was burned during the Knistall Nacht riot.
        My father, a lawyer, earned his living by appearing for his clients in the courts. One day, a rule was made that Jewish lawyers could only practice before the court one day a week, on Wednesdays, and then only between the hours of 3PM and 5PM, a time that the Judges frequently took off.
        One day, in 1935, the German Army, reinforced by the Nazis, came into our city, Düsseldorf, on the river Rhine, in defiance of the terms of a treaty signed between the German government and the Allies who won the war. The Rhineland was a demilitarized zone. My parents were waiting for the British and French armies to come into the Rhineland, defeat the German army and thus finish off this whole Hitler thing. That didn't happen. If it had, forty to sixty millions of lives would subsequently have been saved. My feelings were with both sides. On the one hand, together with my parents, I hated Hitler and the Nazis. On the other hand, it was exciting to see German soldiers. Even though I was Jewish I could not help feeling pride in Germany.
        I had an old uncle who was simple minded. He liked riding his bicycle and sort of regarded every other bicycle rider as his buddy. He greeted everyone he passed with the raised arm Hitler salute. He was later killed in Auschwitz. After the war, my parents tried to reclaim some of his property. In the official report that was returned to them by the German court, Uncle Alfred was listed as having emigrated from Germany to "somewhere in the East".
        People tried to escape from Germany. It was hard since the Nazis made a law forbidding people to take more than $2.50 of their money with them when they left. My parents were friends with a lady who lived in Düsseldorf. Sometimes I would visit with her on my way home after school for cookies and cake. Her son was an engineer-salesman who sold heavy equipment, cranes, bull dozers, elevators, and so forth, outside of Germany. He had arranged with a foreign customer to be paid directly in the foreign country so that he would have money outside Germany to live on. He did not come back to Germany. The SS arrested his non-Jewish wife, called her a Jew whore and beat her brutally to get her to tell them where her husband was. She didn't give him away. After they let her go, she was able to join him outside Germany. They told me their story after I met them both in the United States.
        After a while, I got the attitude that if you don't like me and my kind, then I like you even less. I went out to collect money from other Jews for the Jewish communities in Palestine which later became Israel. One day I went out to an apartment on my list and asked the lady who answered the knock if she would like to contribute. I realized that she was not the one I was supposed to contact. She was not even Jewish. But the lady asked me inside, gave me a cookie, and put money in my collection box, and said what a nice thing to be doing, what a nice little boy, collecting money for the less fortunate. I felt guilty for bad thoughts I had about the other non-Jewish Germans.
        What is weird? When I was a kid in Germany most Germans dressed up in uniforms, raised their right arms, and said Heil Hitler to each other, and marched up and down doing the goose step. That was normal. Jews didn't participate, they weren't allowed to. They were weird.
        People are different and at the same time they are alike. And that fact is hard to accommodate to. People learn to regard some as being of their own kind and others as being subhuman. And these attitudes can change rapidly and have little to do with the facts. During my life-time, we have hated and then again respected the Russians several times. First they were denounced as filthy, atheistic Bolsheviks. President Roosevelt was fiercely criticized for establishing diplomatic relations with them. During the Second World War they become our trusted allies against the dreaded Axis. After the war, they again became the "Evil Empire". And now, we sometimes feel sorry for them. But they are excellent musicians and we like their astronauts.
        The same thing happened with the Japanese. We changed from admiration for their ancient culture and art, to hatred for their sub-human cruelty, to disdain for their shoddy merchandise, to respect for their technical and industrial excellence, to admiration for being fellow leaders of the Industrialized World, the hallowed Council of Seven, to hatred for the lop-sided balance of trade.
        The difficulty of adjusting to the fact that humans are basically the same and yet in some ways different has caused and is still causing more misery in the world than anyone can account for. What can we do about it?