Dear grandkids,
This story is one that really hit me hard when my father told me that Jurgen Nitsche had found these materials while researching Carl Heumann’s past. As my father notes, it is a typical example of how arbitrary one’s existence was, and how completely unpredictable life was.
Can you imagine?
Imagine if the fact that you have blue (or green, or brown) means that you are worthy of being killed – simply because you have that color eyes. Now imagine that, if you have that color eyes AND a phone (or a… I don’t know what the equivalent will be in 20 years!) in your name, you are to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp, where you will certainly be killed. THAT is what Carl and Irmgard dealt with in September, 1941 – and they made every attempt to keep those stressful life/death issues from their young children. It must have been an awful time for them (all)!
My father translated ALL of the documents referred to in his excerpt, and I am adding most of them here, at the end of the excerpt. This story is THAT important, because of what it symbolizes.
Here are my dad’s words:
On July 19, 1940, a decree was issued saying (*13 - pg 325) “Jews are excluded from having a telephone connection. Exceptions are persons who live in a privileged mixed marriage.” That did not keep the head of the NSDAP Regional County Office[1] from sending a letter, dated September 29, 1941, to the Postal Authority with the subject “Official Telephone Directory of the Reich Postal Service Chemnitz, Year 1941.” It was to initiate criminal proceedings and it said:
“As you can see on page 48, in the white pages of the Directory, there is a listing for a ‘Carl Heumann, banker, retired, Friedrich-Schlegel-Strasse 10, telephone number 31724.’
I assume it should be well known to you[2] that the one concerned here is the Jew Carl Israel Heumann who has no right whatsoever to even possess any kind of telephone.
I therefore ask you to act accordingly and notify me of the result.
Heil Hitler!
(Signature, complete with counter signature, stamps, etc.)
The whole process was too tedious to reproduce here -- so allow me to paraphrase:
The postal authority wrote back to the Party office something like this: “Yes, the Jew Carl Heumann had not applied to add his middle name Israel, but according to the Gestapo office responsible for Jewish matters, he is a full Jew in a privileged mixed marriage, and according to the Gestapo he can be granted telephone service. He has now applied to include “Israel” in his name, but wants to transfer the phone to his wife, who is a citizen. But this would be a falsification of the real circumstances. May we do it?”
Party: “Yes, but he didn’t apply for changing his name, therefore, according to my direction, cancel his connection immediately. If his wife later applies, I will decide then. You were ordered to initiate a criminal proceeding against the Jew Heumann; what are you doing about it?”
Post Office: “Yes, he didn’t do it, so charges have to be filed. We didn’t want to duplicate it, and we didn’t know if the Party has already done so, therefore we didn’t.”
Then follows a long letter from Irmgard to the Reich Postal Minister in Berlin: “Oh yes, he did apply to the Police Chief and every agency listed in the directive, but he assumed that they would notify everybody else who needed it. We feel completely innocent, and besides … (what follows is four pages of justification - that she is Aryan, comes from a very German family, and that she, as an Aryan, needs a phone for emergencies, etc…)
That letter apparently prompted lengthy correspondence and file notes, and finally a handwritten and signed comment: “Therefore no charges to be filed.”
And she got the phone under her name.
This was much too close for comfort. Two Nazi agencies, and maybe a dozen individuals thought they had found a good reason - under a whole slew of paragraphs and directives and “laws” and opinions - to arrest him. Meaning Concentration Camp.
It is a very typical example of how arbitrary one’s existence was, and how unpredictable life was. Any one, at any time, could change the interpretation of directives, as long as he could cover his ass with some paragraphs of one kind or other. No one could predict from which direction the next attack would come and whether it might be possible again to wiggle out from under it.
In 2006, Dr. Nitsche in Chemnitz found some incidents about my family. What else is still hidden in the archives? What other harassments, what other chicanery did my parents have to go through that I haven’t heard about?
And we over-protected children had not the slightest knowledge of the hostilities my parents had to deal with! All we could see was that Mother was getting more and more “nervous” and distracted! We only called her “eckig” (angular) and made fun of her!
[1] the Kreisleiter, head of the “Kreis” of the party, equivalent to a county-wide government office.
[2] What he meant was: your office is right across the street from where he lives -- how could you, of all people, not know that this address belongs to the JEW Heumann?
Here are my father’s translations of the documents referred to above.
At this point nothing shocks me about what the Nazis did and were capable of doing. But a small detailed story like this does really point out the absurdity and cruelty of everything they did.
ReplyDeleteI am having trouble keeping up with your posts, but hope to eventually read them.