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March 17, 2007
Uncle Leo's Medals
Physical traces of Holocaust victims are hard to come by. Bad Kissingen has a Jewish cemetery, but naturally the victims of the Nazis have no gravestones there. Or anywhere else.
Leo and his wife were forced to shut down their textile store after Kristallnacht, when German law forbade Jews from continuing to operate businesses. So the store and its wares are gone.
Their storefront and second-floor apartment are still there, but unrecognizable. The building was forfeited to the Reich upon their deportation. It is now a modern-looking bank.
Before placing him on the train to the East, the Gestapo took from him the 6 soupspoons, 6 teaspoons, 6 knives, 6 forks, the napkin holder and the napkin ring that he had brought with him. The Gestapo was good enough to inventory them, though.
These too are also now gone.
I tell you all of this so that you'll see why, as I arrived in Germany, I was expecting to find only paper traces of Leo's life. I learned about six months ago that the Bavarian state archive in Würzburg has hundreds of pages of files from the reparations lawsuits that my grandfather brought after the war, and just a few weeks ago I learned that the archive also has a slim Gestapo file on my great-uncle. It was these that I was interested in seeing. I knew these papers would give me at best only an indirect glimpse of Leo's life, but I was in no position to complain. This is a good deal more than remains about the lives of most victims of the Holocaust.
First thing Monday morning, groggy from jetlag, I opened the Gestapo file and began to read. It was just 10 or 12 pieces of paper, but I read them with nauseous interest. I was surprised to find his identity card ("kennkarte") in the file, stamped, as required, with a big "J" for "Jude." A few of the documents in the file allowed me to piece together the story of how this all-important kennkarte – which I would have expected him to carry with him on the journey eastward – ended up in his Gestapo file instead. It is a sad story, and I will tell it here sometime soon.
But as I went to put the Gestapo file aside and turn to the tall stack of records from the reparations cases, I noticed an envelope taped to the inside of the front flap of the Gestapo file. Someone had written the word "Beilage" on it, which means "enclosure" or "attachment." And it did not lie flat; I could tell that something thicker than paper was inside.
I reached in and pulled out two small packages, each perhaps the size of a large pack of chewing gum. They were pieces of thin cardboard that had been folded in thirds and then in thirds again, to enclose something. I unfolded one and out tumbled something solid, wrapped in blue onion-skin paper.
It was a medal.
I opened the other package. A second, identical medal, but without the ribbon.
These were the medals my great-uncle received for his military service and his injuries in World War I.
I held one in my hand, and as I realized that I was holding something that my great-uncle had held, my eyes filled with tears. I cried very softly – I was in a public space, and felt self-conscious. But I was not prepared for this – for the possibility that I might come upon even one of his belongings, let alone one that would have been so meaningful to him.
It was only later that I figured out how the medals came to be in the file. Leopold must have brought them with him when he was forced from his home in Bad Kissingen to the site in Würzburg from which he would be deported. Even at that late date – April 25, 1942 – he must have maintained a desperate hope that his military service in World War I might protect him from what lay ahead. These medals (and his useless left arm) were his proof of that service, the only protection that he had left.
But it was a vain hope. The Gestapo seized the medals, wrapped them up neatly in thin folded cardboard for me to find sixty-five years later, and sent Leo off to his fate.
I am convinced that these medals belong to my family, and tomorrow will be filing a demand with the Staatsarchiv Würzburg to turn them over to us.
Perhaps they will comply; perhaps they will not. I will let you know.
UPDATE, 3/19/07: For those of you who can read German, the demand letter that I've just faxed to the Staatsarchiv Würzburg is available here as a PDF file.
Posted by Eric at March 17, 2007 8:27 PM
Comments
Amazing post, Eric. I hope you'll be posting more about this.
Posted by: Orin Kerr at March 19, 2007 2:34 AM
No helpful information from me, but I thought you might find my experience of seeking synagogues and cemeteries in Transylvania and speaking with the elderly there to be poignant.
http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2005/11/different-holocaust-up-close.html
Posted by: Assistant Village Idiot at March 19, 2007 10:31 AM
Thank you for the post, Eric. Stories like yours are important reminders to us of the evil that can exist in the world.
The medal is amazing. I'm particularly impressed that the ribbon is in such good condition after all these years. It certainly belongs to you and your family (I have my grandfather's war medals in a small box at home), and I hope the German government will turn it over to you.
ELM: To be clear, that photo is a photo of a medal pretty much identical to the one I saw, but it is not actually a photo of my great-uncle's medal. The archive in Würzburg strictly forbids photography.
Posted by: Steve White at March 19, 2007 10:35 AM
What a wonderful post. I hope your request is granted.
Posted by: Curtis at March 19, 2007 10:59 AM
I'm currently reading Victor Klemperer's diary, "I Will Bear Witness," starting from the beginning of Hitler's rise to power until well into the reconstruction efforts after the war. As early as 1937, he's already detailed his struggle to (unsuccessfully) prove his WWI service in order to protect his pension.
Best of luck in getting the medals returned to your family, and I look forward to reading the follow-up to the story.
Posted by: Andrew at March 19, 2007 2:35 PM
Truth be told, I really don't care for much of your political opinions. However, this post and your thoughts about this journey you have undertaken are really moving. I enjoyed reading this post immensely. Please keep us updated. This is something that we can all root for without the need to resort to political opinions.
Posted by: Brian at March 19, 2007 4:03 PM
The letter is well written, and it may lead to success - but don't be surprised if in return you receive a reply referring to various regulations which would make such a request impossible to fulfill. Finding counterexamples generally works in such a situation, however.
As an example, the forbidding of photography in an archive is fairly common, but getting an official exemption could be a wearisome process - but to the extent it is allowed at all, it is possible to cite such cases when trying to have a request granted.
I don't really have any suggestions if your request is refused, except to note that getting really incensed seems to work much, much better in Germany than it does in the U.S., as long as you avoid any personal insults or disparagements. For example, saying the rules are stupid is fine - saying 'someone' is stupid for following stupid rules is borderline, saying 'you' are stupid for following stupid rules is generally not acceptable, and can actually be illegal - insulting someone's personal worth as a human being is not protected speech. (The same way publicly boycotting anyone/anything in Germany is illegal - and for much the same historical reasons.)
Which is now straying off topic.
Posted by: cya at March 20, 2007 3:12 AM
This leaves me at a loss for words.
Oh, and manual trackback
Posted by: Joel at March 20, 2007 4:57 PM
Wow. I hope you get the medals back. I've read through some of my grandfather's and great-aunt's files files, and the deeply official style of all of it just chills the blood. My grandfather served in WW1 too; fat lot of good it did him.
Posted by: paul at March 21, 2007 7:11 PM
best of luck with this. i can only imagine how important such a piece of history would be to your family.
Posted by: sly civilian at March 22, 2007 4:25 PM
One of the things I marveled at during my time in Germany (some of it in Wurzburg and BK) was that Germans, even as they undertook the most horrific tasks, managed to be so organized that they preserved physical evidence that helped to tell the story long after the participants had passed on to whatever hereafter they believed in. It surprises me not in the least that the bureaucrats who processed your uncle's deportation kept such a file.
Beyond that, I have nothing important to say except that I wish you success in your efforts to find the rest of the story, and perhaps something that resembles closure.
Posted by: R. Stanton Scott at March 22, 2007 9:45 PM
That is quite a story. I hope they are returned to your family.
Posted by: Jack at March 25, 2007 12:49 PM
Is it original medal on the photo? Or you just posted a picture of the same medal from some site?
Plz answer if you read it.
[ELM: The photo in this post is not the original. However, I have now received the medals from Germany, and I have a photo of the original medal up here.]
Posted by: Ilya at April 14, 2007 7:42 AM
Found your comment to other comment about no photography in the archive.
Posted by: Ilya at April 14, 2007 7:53 AM
This is a political issue. It's what happens if you ignore politics and hope it'll go away. I'd hope we all agree on that.
I hope the owner of this blog does not find this comment disrespectful in broadening the subject. Please remove it if so.
Posted by: me at April 14, 2007 10:36 AM
The reason the Germans documented all this so thoroughly is that they thought they were totally in the right to be taking these actions. The same actions that we now call atrocities.
You will find the same attention to detail and record-keeping among the Department of Homeland Security in the US today -- as they ban people from entering the US based on secret evidence. As they arrest people for taking photographs of public buildings. As they build blacklists of hundreds of thousands of names who are either not permitted to travel, or who are surveilled and physically searched every time they travel. As they "designate" foreigners as enemy combatants, imprison them without trial, and torture them for confessions of things they did not do.
Atrocities? How could these safe and sane measures to protect the homeland, adopted in time of danger, ever be considered crimes against human rights? Only with the perspective of hindsight will the public see its own overreaction as malignant.
Posted by: John Gilmore at April 26, 2007 4:18 PM