Cecilia Razovsky, the American Activist Who Rescued German Jewish Children (1933-1945)

This article deals with the reaction of one particular American Jewish sector – the Jewish women - and their response to Nazi persecution of European Jews in the 1930s and the 1940s. As against the widespread accusations that American Jews did not do enough to help their co-religionists during those tragic years, this paper claims that Jewish women, of all social standing – from homemakers to professionals – were actively involved in organizing rescue operations and assisting refugees. Of particular note is one extraordinary woman – Cecilia Razovsky-Davidson.

Otto Dov Kulka, German Jews in the Era of the “Final Solution”: Essays on Jewish and Universal History. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter; Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2020. xv + 341 pp.

This chapter evaluates Otto Dov Kulka's German Jews in the Era of the “Final Solution”: Essays on Jewish and Universal History (2020). Readers interested in the significance of antisemitism in modern European history, the centrality of antisemitism in Nazi ideology, the reaction of German Jews to Nazi persecution, and the influence of the German public's attitudes toward Jews on Nazi policies will find this collection a rich source of information. Kulka shows that key organizations of German Jewry such as the Reichsvertretung and its successor, the Reichsvereinigung, managed to preserve their essential functions under the Nazis; they did not become tools of the regime. In general, German Jews were able to resist the process known as coordination (Gleichschaltung). If anything, they became more dedicated to their own organizations and more democratic as persecution increased. The collection also includes Kulka's own experience of miraculous survival in the family camp at Auschwitz and his return visit to Auschwitz in 1978.

The Lonely Flame

This chapter surveys how the American Protestant ecumenical leader Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., responded to the Nazi regime while serving as a pastor in Berlin from 1936 to 1941. Through an examination of Herman’s views of Hitler, the German Church Struggle, and Nazi persecution of the Jews, it weighs just how conflicted American Protestants, including leading Protestant ecumenists, proved on these matters. Based in the Nazi capital, Herman in particular captured the uncertain mind of American Protestants on German affairs. In Berlin, Herman expressed caution about Nazi totalitarianism, yet he still proved open to some of Hitler’s aims of national renewal and voiced his support of the German leader. He also hesitated to support the Confessing Church at first, fearing that the movement might cause enduring ecclesial schism. Finally, when Berlin’s Jews came to Herman seeking aid, anti-Judaism and Christian antisemitism led him and other Americans to be slow to offer their help. Overall, Herman’s interwar record illustrates how Protestant ecumenists were far from monolithic or fixed in their views of their era’s challenges. As their witness fractured, they struggled to meaningfully counteract Nazi fascism.

World Chaos

This chapter investigates how leading ecumenists like Henry Smith Leiper and fundamentalists such as J. Frank Norris and Gerald Winrod responded to a series of crises that swept over the transatlantic world in the early 1930s, including the global Great Depression, Hitler’s seizure of power, the German Church Struggle, and Nazi persecution of the Jews. It documents how ecumenical and fundamentalist Protestants in the United States developed dramatically different interpretations of these events. While ecumenists called for a new global order of democracy and ecumenism, fundamentalists undertook crusades against evil both at home and abroad. In sum, their respective responses to these challenges further fractured their churches and their nation.

The Pink Triangle

This chapter is about how the memory of persecution decisively shaped 1970s homosexual politics. First, the chapter explores the ‘rediscovery’ of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, explaining how the model of the Holocaust was sometimes appropriated as part of this process. The chapter then shows how memory of this persecution, combined with the experience of contemporary discrimination, produced a profound alienation on the part of left-wing gay men from the West German state. Following an analysis of how the pink triangle became a transnational symbol, this chapter evaluates discourses of victimhood in gay liberation. Though the pink triangle was reclaimed from its origins as a badge of shame in the concentration camps, it never became an unequivocal symbol of pride. Finally, the chapter explores how, in the late 1970s, activists of all stripes, the commercial gay press, and the first openly gay parliamentary candidates coalesced around making the history of past persecution a central plank in their efforts to insert themselves into the West German mainstream.

The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation

This book explores ways of thinking, feeling, and talking about homosexuality in the 1970s, an influential decade sandwiched between the partial decriminalization of sex between men in 1969, and the arrival of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Moving beyond divided Cold War Berlin, this book also shines a light on the scores of lesser-known West German towns and cities that were home to a gay group by the end of the 1970s. Yet gay liberation did not take place only in activist meetings and on street demonstrations, but also on television, in magazine editorial offices, ordinary homes, bedrooms—and beyond. In considering all these spaces and individuals, this book provides a more complex account than previous histories, which have tended to focus only on a social movement and only on the idea of ‘gay pride’. By drawing attention to ambivalence, this book shows that gay liberation was never only about pride, but also about shame; characterized not only by hope, but also by fear; and driven forward not just by the pushes of confrontation, but also by the pulls of conformism. Ranging from the painstaking emergence of the gay press to the first representation of homosexuality on television, from debates over the sexual legacy of 1968 to the memory of Nazi persecution, The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation is the first English-language book to tell the story of male homosexual politics in 1970s West Germany. In so doing, this book changes the way we think about this key period in modern queer history.

Refugee Children and the Emotional Cost of Internationalism in Interwar Britain

This article explores the complexity surrounding the politics and emotions of internationalism and humanitarian work in interwar Britain by using as a lens the public and official responses to assisting “refugee children.” Analysis of British responses to refugee emergencies after the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities suggests that attitudes shifted dramatically between the arrival of Basque child refugees in May 1937 and the Kindertransports in late 1938. Charities and refugee committees, many of them faith-based, had to negotiate the spaces between nation, ideology, and emotion to successfully raise funds for refugees. All appeals were to “save” children, and yet the responses and the amounts raised were vastly different. Campaigns to support almost four thousand Basque children proved politically polarizing and bureaucratic. In contrast, the immediate and widespread response to fund-raising to bring ten thousand children to Britain in 1938 suggests that a significant change in attitudes and fund-raising practices had taken place in a short time. Unlike the political divisions that hampered support for the Basque children, Britons from all walks of life appeared by 1938 to embrace the emotional and financial cost of internationalism in a way they had not only a year before.

Conclusion

Terezín was a place where the last generations of Central and Western European Jewry spent the final weeks, months, or years of their lives—lives cut short and ended by Nazi persecution. It was a society in extremis, a story that sheds light on broader issues of ethnicity, stratification, gender, and the political dimension of the actions of “little people.”...

Comrades Betrayed

At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming “evacuations.” Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of this book. The same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, persecution under Hitler. They upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, this book challenges the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, the book exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, the book forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.