Early Quakers in England and the United States were often "absolutist" open opponents of religious and political tyranny. The philosopher Horace Kallen has noted that they were able to do this without being exterminated because they happened along at a time when the forces opposed to them were divided by the English Civil War. They were later rescued from the "Quaker Acts" by the "Glorious revolution" of 1689, with its new Bill of Rights and Act of Toleration. Also, Friends had grown rapidly in this period, becoming a sizeable minority of about 1 % of the population of England - 50,000 in 5 million.
How does this early approach of Friends need to be modified when they face an overwhelming and united opposition, and when they are less than a hundredth the proportion of population they were in England in the 1600’s? The experiences of German Yearly Meeting of Friends in the Nazi era, described here, provide us with some evidence on the problems and possibilities of a constructive role for Friends in difficult situations such as these.
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"What would you have done against Hitler?"
Rare indeed is the pacifist who has not heard this question in the days since the second world war. Rarer still is he who could answer without unease. Some have replied that the present circumstances are too different, too distant, for any person to say honestly what he might have done. The popular image of the ruthless Nazi gassing millions of innocent, unresisting Jews clashes with the pacifist hope for an amenable enemy. Others have declared that they could no more fight Hitler than Ho Chi Minh or anyone else, and offered instead their faith in a world where those who wield power always ultimately succumb to the greater righteousness and moral force of non-violent action.
What did pacifists do in the Hitler years? Those who refused the military draft in Britain and the United States are well known. Yet there were pacifists much closer to the front line than that. There were Quakers in Germany. Quakers who, when they stepped each morning into the sunlight, had to decide anew whether to raise their arm in a Nazi salute, whether to patronize a Jewish shop, whether to continue work which, however innocent, contributed to the strength of the Nazi economy geared for war. And they had to decide on the consequences of refusal, for themselves, for their families, for those friends whom they might implicate by nothing more sinister than having said hello.
There were Quakers in Germany who did not close their eyes, who did not suspend their moral convictions. Resistance was not alone the province of those moral and courageous generals who needed the certainty of defeat to goad them to rise against the man who gave them their commands. Resistance - continued resistance -
resistance from before Hitler came to power - that was the labor the Quakers performed. They did this not by imitating Hitler’s violence, or his quest for power. They resisted by saving lives. thousands of lives. Lives that continued long after the eagles of the Third Reich fell to dust.
Historical background
In the days of Fox and Fell (late 1600’s) there arose in Germany several tiny communities of those who called themselves Quakers. The most notable of them was in the north, in Friedrichstadt, a town remarkable for its religious toleration in an era of holy slaughter. But even the Friedrichstadt Quakers vanished, within a century, without a trace. Quakerism in Germany had died once.
A few decades later, German mercenaries returned home from the American War of Independence. They told of gray coated men in silent worship in the area around Philadelphia meeting the descendants of those German Quakers who had abandoned their homeland for Penn’s "holy experiment". Soon visitors came. Friends from America and Friends from Britain, and two small pietistic groups, one in Minden, one in Pyrmont (30 miles away), declared that they too were Friends. The British and Americans had come to visit, not to proselytize, but neither were they adverse to offering financial encouragement. Money came from abroad to build a factory near Minden and a Meetinghouse near Pyrmont.
All was well until the funding waned. It was a slow death, this second one for German Quakerism. The enthusiasm for unification, the draft, the vigor of the new nationalism - all militated against the survival of the Quaker communities. But more ruthless was death from within. These communities were like outposts in a hostile land. Their young could either turn within, or depart for the changing outer world. There was no compromise, no evolution. By the August day in 1914 when the Kaiser’s any swept through Belgium, there was not a German left who called himself a Friend.
The present growth of German Quakerism had its seed in war. When the United States opened hostilities with Germany in 1917, a group of American Friends formed the American Friends Service Committee, an informal, voluntary committee, whose prime concern was to find a form of alternative service for young but broad men at its head, among them Rufus Jones.
Relief work
The Service Committee sent Friends to France as soon as possible, to work at the side of their British co—religionists on housing, hospitals, and other basic tasks of relief for the thousands of civilians who were victims of the war.
Quakerism had the good fortune to belong to the winning side in that war. Friends found themselves in a position to choose to do something about the starvation that was rampant in Germany as a result of the blockade which ended, not with the armistice, as Germans expected, but only with the signing of the Versailles treaty.
The Service Committee was already planning a relief project with British Friends, when Herbert Hoover, another American Quaker, offered the help of the American Relief Administration, which he headed. There were conditions, including the requirement that only American Quakers administer the American relief funds. This brought an end to the joint Anglo-American teams of the war years. But the opportunity for a child feeding project many times what they could have hoped for alone was too enticing to reject.
Germany’s need was great. The first Quaker arrivals sent home grim reports of is gone. Everyone has lost from 25 to 30 pounds and the red cheeks have nearly all ills— appeared. Many have a strange gray-white look..." (Jones 1971, 77) Bread one Friend wrote, has become "very dark and heavy because there is not enough wheat flour to make the yeast work successfully. It still has eight or ten percent of sawdust besides a good deal of ground peas and beans..." (Jones 1971, 77)
But for children the greatest dietary problem was the lack of milk. People gave it "more as a medicine than a food." and it was available at all "only on a doctor’s prescription. . ." (Jones 1971, 81) Healthy children over six could have none those younger, one pint per day. Shortages of substitute protein compounded the problem - meat was scarce.
The malnutrition which resulted also weakened children’s resistance to disease. The bowed knees of rickets were n; longer an unusual sight. There was neither coal to heat hones nor material for warm. clothing, though German parents cannibalized curtains, sheets, table cloths, and even furniture coverings, to make clothes for their children.
American Quakers did not attempt a simple mass giveaway in hope of restoring everyone at once. They spent their resources on those most in need, and with the help of German doctors, selected certain children to receive specific dietary supplements.
Distribution took place through 2,271 kitchens and 8,364 feeding centers in 1,640 communities through out the country. At it, peak in June 1921, they fed 1,010,658 children per day. The program lasted, with one hopeful hiatus, for four years, until October 1924. (Jones 1971, 81—84) About five million German children took part at one time or other, plus 40,000 adult Germans who assisted the several hundred American Quakers.
Results of child feeding
The memory of this aid, a the positive image it created, was what later saved the lives of countless Friends in the Third Reich.
The Quaker program restored to Germany a normal, healthy generation of children for the thirties a forties. In so doing, they also restored Germany’ s capacity to make war. A 15 year 015 child who received food during the project’s first year, 1920, would have been 29 in 1933, old enough to vote, and 41 in 1945, still young enough to fight. those were the eldest. The youngest would have been a child of two who received aid in 1924 - age 11 by 1933 and ripe for the Hitler youth, or 23 by 1945 and likely, if male, to have served in the army for five years. The seeds of peace did not grow exactly as their planters thought they should.
British Quakers worked under the shadow of the massive American program. They spent their more meager resources on University students, on clothing drives, and on spreading the message of peace to any who wished to hear. Pacifism was never so fashionable as during those first few years after the slaughter of the Western front. Many a retired officer swore off the intoxication of military swagger only to replace it with heavy drafts of the latest vogue for pacifist pontification.
Quakers benefited enormously from this in the eyes of the public. Quakers had been the only true pacifists - pacifists during the war itself - willing to go to jail rather than take up a gun and kill innocent German men and boys. There was hardly a German on right or left who objected to conscientious objection of that sort. This approval of properly directed Quaker morality extended also to a curiosity about their Meetings for Worship.
German Yearly Meeting
British and American Quakers held Meetings for worship in cities like Berlin. People came by the hundreds. Descriptions of those early Meetings suggest none of the tranquility and concentration proper to Quaker worship. There was much restlessness due simply to the shook of sitting still for an hour with nothing specific to do. That may well have prompted some attenders to speak, believing themselves fully in accord with the traditional Quaker formula of remaining silent until silence is no longer possible. But others seem to have considered the Meetings a sort of indoors Speakers’ Corner. " The most diverse cranks found it a convenient opportunity for airing their special views, and eldering was all too weak at the beginning to deal with such rank growths." (Fry 1944, 59)
From this soil German Quakerism grew. In time the cranks became bored and the fidgeters chose not to repeat their frustrating experience. In 1925 forty Friends declared themselves the German Yearly Meeting - German Quakerism, they felt, had come of age. It was no mass movement. The Yearly Meeting could count only 199 members by Hitler’s takeover in 1933, the there was a substantially larger group of Friends of the Friends, who participated in many activities.
As a sign of its maturity, this infant Yearly Meeting began to dabble in politics. The Social Democratic party had campaigned against building the warship Panzer in 1928, but when in power in 1929 (without a majority) they conveniently forgot the issue. German Quakers intended to remind them, but split on how. Half wished to censure the party outright, half merely to restate Friends historic opposition to war. Neither would yield. Nothing was done.
Thereafter the clerk, Hans Albrecht, and executive committee avoided referring political questions to the membership as a whole.
Hans Albrecht spoke the following year at the blasphemy trial of artist George Grosz, and seems to have won a good share of the credit for Grosz’ acquittal. In 1931 the executive committee sent Hitler himself, urging that all act to end the growth and virulence of anti-Semitism. They received a mere seven replies, none positive. Such discouraging results did not stop them from trying again, the next year, this time to stop the death penalty against two Nazis for the murder of a Communist. A. death sentence against rightist violence was a rare victory for the Republic - Weimar courts were notorious for their nationalist sympathies - and the Quaker protest was politely ignored.
Berlin Meeting
The Yearly Meeting was not, however, the center of political activity. The Berlin Meeting gathered regularly with groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation to discuss peace and other political concerns. Among the members of Berlin Meeting were outspoken pacifists like the clerk, Kurt Schmidt, who believed the whole armed establishment would crumble like Jericho when pacifists burst into the streets singing their songs, and Gerhard Halle, a former captain in the Pioneer corps who returned to face the people of the French town he had destroyed during the war. Berlin Meeting had good reason to fear when Hitler entered the Chancellory on January 30, 1933.
Harassment begins
At first little happened. Gerhard Halle lost his job, a direct result of the speech he gave in France. But no Storm Troopers burst in upon the Meetings for Worship even tried to prevent the gatherings with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. By mid-February, Nazi vengeance against leftist groups began in earnest. Socialist Pastor Emil Fuchs, a leader of the Friends of the Friends had to go into hiding in Berlin, where Quakers, among others, helped him until the police caught up. Quakers throughout the country underwent interrogations, had their personal papers searched, and often escaped trouble by what seemed the most extraordinary luck. Storm troopers ignored pamphlets they could not read, or gave a chance to burn incriminating letters, or simply became bored and ended up chatting rather than finishing their task. For the first two months there was no indication that the government intended to crack down on Quakers as such. Then...
April third, Gestapo officers surrounded the home of Corder Catchpole, British representative of the Quaker Secretariat in Berlin. A rifleman peered down from a neighbor's roof ready to pick off anyone who might try to escape. Corder had been reading the Bible to his family, a morning ritual. The Gestapo let him finish, before taking him to one room, his wife to another, and the children outside. They accused him of being "a Communist, Quaker, leader of this sect, pacifist, and member the peace movement." (Peetz and Lachmund 1963, 29) It was all true, save the first, which he denied. But the real question was whether it was now a crime to be a Quaker. The Gestapo interrogated him at home for hours, then rushed him off to headquarters and detention.
Rumors grew so rapidly that an unknown British newspaper reported: "The consumption of Quaker Oats has apparently been threatened by the recent arrest of Mr. Catchpole, the International Secretary of the Society of Friends (‘Quakers’), and the subsequent association in the popular mind of the word ‘Quaker’ with the terms ‘Marxist, Pacifist,’ and the like. The company which manufactures Quaker Oats in Germany has found it necessary to issue a statement disclaiming any connection with the Society of Friends. Their product is a ‘purely German product. "‘ (AFSC) Regardless of the sufferings of the Quaker Oats company, the Gestapo in fact released Corder after 36 hours, or his word as a Quaker that he would not leave the city.
At the moment of arrest, it seemed as if the Nazi s might have chosen Corder as their first Quaker target because he was a foreigner, a natural object of loathing for that xenophobic party. But in cleaning up after the raid, Mary Catchpole found the actual indictment, which one of the Storm Troopers had accidentally dropped. The inadvertent villain was the Catchpole’s own loyal housemaid. While cleaning Corder’s study, she had noticed a letter from a Hannover Communist, whom the Nazi’s had compelled to drink two liters (about 2 quarts) oil impressed the maid, who repeated the story to the charwoman and hinted that this was only one of many such stories on Corder’s desk. The charwoman apparently could not long withhold such gossip. When she saw her friend, "Fräulein W", she repeated everything. This Fräulein W did not know the Catchpoles personally, had no particular sympathy for them, and had heard tales from a neighbor that many foreigners visited the house, including some the neighbor thought were Russian Communists disguised as Frenchmen. Fräulein W had also heard stories about the Catchpoles’ friendliness toward ordinary workers, a further sign of Soviet sympathies. The charwoman’s gossip only added final proof that the Catchpoles were spies or worse, and Fräulein W did not miss her chance to show the new regime she was on the right side - she went to the Gestapo with her suspicions. (Peetz and Lachmund 1963, 29) The lesson was clears innocent gossip now had dangerous consequences- Quaker openness had to give way to greater care.
First confrontations
Even family could not be trusted. One Berlin Quakeress, voice trembling, phoned Olga Halle to reveal that her son-in-law had found a copy of "Der Quäker", the magazine of the Yearly Meeting, at her home. He was a loyal Nazi who had been out of work until the Party found him a small post at the Air Ministry. The political contents of the magazine so horrified him that he marked all the seditious passages with the intention of exposing them to the Gestapo. That seemed certain to mean the end of the Yearly Meeting.
Olga calmed the woman, and went straight to the son-in-law’s office. There she chatted first about aviation, explaining that she was the niece of Otto Lilienthal and telling of some of her uncle’s famous flight experiments. The son-in-law knew who Otto Lilienthal was. He seemed honored to be talking with so near a relative. Then, with her social status clearly established, Olga insisted he had misunderstood the passages in "Der Quäker", and that if he read more copies he would realize the contents were religious, not political. When she left, she took the marked copy with her. The son-in-law did nothing to stop her, nothing more against German Friends.
There was enough in Quakerism itself to antagonize the Nazis, but many German Quakers had compounded their danger with socialist ties. The Lachmunds of Mecklenburg among them. In April the government dismissed Hans from his judgeship. They tried to continue as before, but when Margarethe invited some "former" young socialists to her house for a discussion of the classics (anything to protect them from Nazi propaganda). They were arrested. That was on a Saturday.
Monday, Margarethe went to protest to the highest Nazi official of the area, the man who had known her husband back when Hans was still as attorney. She was defiant. The purpose of the gatherings, she told him, was purely literary - politics had nothing to do with it. Of course this was true only for the actual content of the meetings, not for the intent nor the selection of participants. Yet Margarethe was capable of emphasizing that which was strictly true while avoiding comment on the rest. The Gauleiter believed her. He promised he would have the boys released. Their arrest was probably more to scare the young men anyway, than out of any real fear of conspiracy, and two days in jail would have sufficed to accomplish that.
Rather than dismiss Margarethe, however, the Gauleiter began his own interrogation. What about her frequent correspondence with foreign pacifists - was this not an attempt to undermine the fighting spirit of the State? She admitted having such contacts. They were, in fact, good friends, people her husband had met while studying in Paris before the world war. That, she claimed, made all the difference. The letters were personal, not political, and were not such letters to old friends all Owed?
There is no reason to think she actually fooled the Gauleiter with this reasoning, but the reference made him recall his own experiences during the war. His had shown him the need for military power, military superiority, just as Margarethe’s had revealed to her the
They agreed that the war had been the central experience of their lives. The Gauleiter asked, perhaps only as a polite way of closing, how she and her husband were getting along.
They were leaving Germany, she announced. They did not want to live in a land where everyone was afraid. The only reason they had not left already was that they wished to make sure their parents could visit them abroad. There the interview ended. She felt lucky the Gauleiter had not arrested her on the spot. But at a second interview, at the Gauleiter’s request, she repeated her desire to leave - it was too late to back down. Then nothing happened. Nothing for several months, and their plans for departure went forward slowly.
Toward the end of the year the government unexpectedly restored Hans’ judgeship, a less important post, but a judgeship nonetheless. They had no idea why, until Margarethe happened to meet the Gauleiter on the street. He had received a promotion to Lübeck, but before departing, he had had the judgeship restored. He wanted to persuade the Lachmunds to remain in Germany. Germany needed people like them, he said, and he hoped National Socialism would convert them eventually, they were not, he knew, opportunists who would change their minds overnight.
If these escapes were common, the Nazi’s might have a milder reputation today. But it is significant that the Lachmunds, Halles, and society - not rich by any means, but possessing a wealth of knowledge, education, and connection, which could awe the ordinary Storm Trooper and force higher officials to deal with them as equals. Forthrightness helped too - for the Nazis were accustomed to frightened prisoners, trembling interviewees, not to people who spoke their minds and admitted their dislikes. It was not that these Quakers were without fear. But they mastered their fear - an ability the Nazis respected.
Caution
The Quakers were, however, mostly more ordinary folk. Hans Albrecht and the executive committee of the Yearly Meeting met in April 1933 and sent a strong warning to every member. It began: "The Society of Friends is no peace society, no welfare union, no humanitarian league of any sort, but rather a religious society..." and if anyone missed their disclaimer toward politics, the beginning of the third paragraph made it still clearer: "The Society of Friends has never taken a fundamental stand to the state as such or to the form of the state as such. It has always given to Caesar that which is Caesar's." Accept the Nazi takeover - that was what the warning said - accept it and, if necessary, lay dawn any active prosecution of Friends social testimonies. But the executive committee feared some Friends would not cooperate: "... we ask responsibility and not to believe that as Quakers they must do something, or that under that name they could do more than where their own power would suffice." (Otto 1972, 297-9)
It was an unsubtle exhortation to keep the Yearly Meeting out of trouble. The survival of that institution was their prime concern, and they were prepared to lose members who did not agree. Two pamphlets accompanied the warning ("Christian Life, Belief, and Thought" and "Christian Deeds’), and with them the message that Friends should test whether they could remain within the circle of those who "are ready to carry the responsibility for the preservation of Quakerism in Germany." What the executive committee offered instead of social action was an "inner emigration" to religion.
An evaluation
In safer times one might scorn the cowardice of this committee of Friends. They could have decried Hitler, his right to rule, his legalized warfare in the streets. They could have petitioned against the government, made themselves a clear voice of principled defiance, and accepted persecution with the fortitude of those 16th century Quakers who languished and died in sunless cells. If they had done so, they would also have condemned the pacifist response to Hitler to the same well lauded futility of the Confessing Church, or the generals' conspiracy. Quaker resistance survived beneath this shield of official submission. They preserved, by acquiescing, the prestige of the child-feeding days. Without the timidity of this committee, there might be nothing more to tell.
Quaker projects
From 1933 to 1939 British and American Quakers undertook a series of projects - with the assistance of their German co-religionists, in so far as those Friends dared, or had the opportunity, to help.
Prison visitation was the first and most obvious need. Gilbert MacMaster, former American representative at the Secretariat in Berlin, returned from his retirement in Switzerland almost as soon as the arrests began. He talked his way into seeing Emil Fuchs in his Berlin jail, and as a result Emil received permission for a typewriter and paper, to have something to relieve the boredom. This encouraged Gilbert to try further.
The wife of General Paul von Schönaich, President of the German Peace Society, asked Gilbert to help her husband, now imprisoned in Altona, near Hamburg. When Gilbert requested to see him, the prison authorities made delays which he interpreted, probably rightly, as a polite refusal. But he made a second attempt anyway, speaking this time with the new Nazi chief of the institution.
At first this chief shouted abuse at him. Gilbert did not respond in kind, but steered the conversation to some things on which they could both agree: "the difficulties which lay in the way of effectively combating the rising ill feeling against Germany in outside countries, and the soundness of the German position as regards the Treaty of Versailles." (AFSC) The prison chief said nothing about letting Gilbert see von Sch5raich, but as Gilbert was leaving, guards brought von Schönaich into the outer office and the prison chief allowed them to talk briefly. The government released von Scht5naich a short while later. The main reason probably was that he was too old and had too little influence to be any threat. But it is likely they would have ignored him until the Christmas pardon, had Gilbert’s visit not brought his case to their attention.
This success, as the Quakers saw it, encouraged further visitation. The process was never easy. Bureaucratic confusion caused repeated delays. When Gilbert tried to see Herman Seeger, former Secretary of the German Peace Society, he first traveled to the camp at Oranienburg. There the commandant disclaimed any power to grant interviews - that was the prerogative of the Gestapo. Thus the following day Gilbert went to the Gestapo headquarters at Prinz Albrechtstrasse, a few blocks from the Quaker Secretariat. A guard refused him access. He had to present the request in writing, the guard said. Gilbert acquiesced. He wrote the necessary letters,again. This time he talked his way past the guard into an office. A Gestapo bureaucrat promised to investigate the possibility of a visit, n, more important, made an appointment for him to see a higher official the next day.
But that higher official also disclaimed any authority to permit such visits - only the camp commandant could do that. Gilbert acted as if this were nothing more sinister than simple confusion, as it may indeed have been. He explained the camp commandant’s opinion. In that case, decided the official, there was no reason why he would not write a note saying that there was ‘~ no reason on his part for not admitting" Gilbert. (AFSC) The meeting grew friendlier. They talked of the official’s relatives in America, and before Gilbert left, the official offered Gilbert use of his own phone to set up a new appointment with the camp commandant. The rest went easily.
Gilbert’s actual success at freeing people was modest, particularly after Seeger escaped in 1934, just days before the government had promised to set him free (officials had, of course, told him nothing). But the Nazis released many of their prisoners anyway in the years before the war - sometimes only to rearrest them a few months later.
Rest homes
These ex-prisoners were generally not ready to plunge back into the society of the Third Reich. Many suffered physical ills. Most were emotionally exhausted. To help them, the British Quakers established Rest Homes. The idea came from Herta Kraus, a German Quakeress and early refugee.
Helen Dixon took up the notion and traveled to remote Falkenstein in the Taunus mountains in southern Germany, where she rented rooms at a small hotel. Although Falkenstein seemed well removed from the political troubles of the rest of the country, it was not without its resident Nazis. The head of the local Nazi women’s organization suspected her at once, and demanded she explain her purpose at a public gathering. Helen Dixon replied (as the story goes): " I wanted to invite a few friends for a short holiday, so I looked all over Germany for the most beautiful spot, and chose the Taunus Mountains. I looked about in the Taunus for the most charming village, and chose Falkenstein, and I looked for the most attractive hotel and chose the Frankfurter Hof. So here we are." (Howard 1950, 12) Charm succeeded at what strict honesty could not accomplish.
The Rest Home remained there for five and a half years, and they opened a second in Bad Pyrmont, in central Germany, the old resort toim whose 18th century meeting house the German Quakers had. repurchased (not that they had the money) and restored. as the permanent headquarters of their Yearly Meeting.
Finding guests to populate both rest most needy was no difficulty, but selecting the most needy was. At first the German Quakers suggested whom to invite, and soon the guests themselves began recommending others. The operators of the Rest Homes kept the names of those who made recommendations strictly secret so that no guest ever learned the origin of the invitation. Spouses came too, not only because they were part of the recovery process, but because they had also suffered and were in equal need of rest. Poverty was no barrier. The stay was completely free. The British Quakers spent up to 650 pounds per year on the project, and held expenses down by not operating during the summer when the rates were higher.
The best known of the Rest Home guests was Ernst Reuter, later mayor of West Berlin during the Soviet blockade. In the l920’s he had been mayor of Magdeburg, and in 1933 he was one of the Social Democratic Reichstag members who protested the actions of the Nazis. The Gestapo arrested him in June 1933. Within two months he was in the concentration camp at Lichtenburg, where he remained until January 1934. On his release, the Quakers invited him to the Falkenstein Rest Home.
Elizabeth Fox Howard, housemother at that time, met him at the railroad station. He was so weak that he "looked like an old man." And a suspicious old man too — he "wondered at first what sort of galère he had got himself into." (Howard 1941, 59) But he soon made friends and recovered quickly. Elizabeth suggested he leave Germany. Reuter would hear none of it. As soon as he was well, he returned to Magdeburg and renewed contacts with his old political allies. On June 16, 1934 he planned to meet one of the former editors of the Reichsbanner (anti-Nazi) newspaper, in secret, at the lion’s cage in the Dresden zoo. He met the Gestapo instead, and returned to Lichtenburg.
Elizabeth decided she had to set him free to save his life. Reuter was not then famous enough for the sort of campaign the foreign press was waging on behalf of Karl von Ossietsky (1936 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize). Her only choice was to deal directly with the Nazis themselves. She received a letter of introduction to Ernst Hanfstaengl, officially only the Foreign Press Chief, but considered enormously influential because Hitler had hidden at his. home after the failure of the 1923 Munich Putsch.
Hanfstaengl was the. most accessible of the top rank Nazis. He was an art historian, a classmate of Franklin Roosevelt from Harvard, and cosmopolitan to a degree few Nazis ever were. Hanfstaengl was extremely cordial to Elizabeth, even though he knew exactly what she wanted. A,t first he tried to change the subject, to talk about the composer Gluck, whose bust decorated his office, but she politely turned the conversation back. Eventually he agreed to see what he could do - and a few days thereafter he announced that Reuter would soon be free. "If I am ever in trouble," he told her, "I hope I shall find as faithful a friend as this man has in you." (Brandt and Lowenthal 1957, 72) In September Reuter left Lichtenburg again, spent a few more weeks in the Quaker Rest Home, and this time escaped within six months to London.
Relief
If Rest Home bordered on the illegal in Nazi Germany, that did not stop the Quakers from going farther. British Friends particularly were willing to extend themselves on more political issues. For about a year (1933-1934) William R. Hughes distributed cash to families of those in concentration camps. Hughes was not a Quaker himself, but his funds came from London Yearly Meeting and he made no secret of his Quaker affiliation, even using the Berlin Secretariat as his headquarters. The Nazis were furious once they realized what he was doing - from their point of view, cash supposedly for food and clothing could easily also finance anti-government activities. They booted Hughes out of the country with a warning never to return.
Corder Catchpole went even further than Hughes. He began counseling some German youths about resisting the draft, whose restoration was imminent. In the summer of 1935 the Gestapo stopped Elizabeth Fox Howard with a letter from Corder she was attempting to smuggle out of the country - a letter about his counseling work. From the Dutch border they took her back to Berlin, interrogated her, and finally released her. But they made her promise, on her word as a Quaker, that she would not warn Corder or anyone else of what had happened. She kept her word - but went back to Gestapo headquarters the next day to insist, to the astonished officials, that they harm no one mentioned in any of the papers she had. These officials had never expected to see her again - had assumed she was sufficiently terrified to bolt the country. This time they treated her with great deference, assured her that no one would suffer because of her, ii returned her money, address book, and a few other items they had confiscated the day before.
Such assurances could not help Corder. Counseling potential draft evaders was subversion. The Gestapo brought him into headquarters perhaps even before Elizabeth went free. Commissar Nickel, a man with whom Corder had had dealings previously, confronted him with the evidence. He admitted doing it -admitted that he would keep on doing it because he believed it was right. As Corder described the confrontation: "We had a good many laughs in the course of the proceedings, and, ... twice only, for a moment, did Nickel try, not altogether successfully, to be fierce." (APSC) Ultimately Corder received nothing worse than a warning. "More than once," Corder wrote, "after a conversation with touches of sternness in it, he (Nickel) has walked to the end of the corridor and stood chatting at the head of the stairway before shaking hands in farewell." (AFSC) A little later, from his vacation in the Alps, Corder sent Commissar Nickel a picture-postcard.
Impartiality
Corder’s - and the Quakers’ - saving grace, as far as the Nazis were concerned, was their evenhandedness. They opposed not only the Nazi persecution of Jews, but also the Austrian slaughter of Nazis after the unsuccessful Putsch attempt in 1934. Quakers undertook long tern relief efforts on behalf of Nazi families in Vienna. Corder felt they should help organize similar relief to aid children of thousands of unemployed German speaking Sudetenlanders, whose starvation the Czech government ignored.
The Sudetenland in the northern and western borders of Czechoslovakia was a manufacturing area which the depression hurt badly. Malnutrition and its consequences were as rampant there as they had been in Germany itself just after the blockade of the First World War. The British and American public had little interest in financing relief, but the Germans did, and Corder persuaded the Mennonite Bruder-in-Not (Brother in Need) organization to make funds available.
Bruder-in-Not was, however, by no means independent. It would do only what the government permitted, and the government, Corder knew, would give help, if at all on a strictly racial basis, even thoughugh the minority Czech inhabitants of the region suffered equally.
Such discrimination was as unacceptable to Corder as to the Czech government. The task seemed impossible. The head of Bruder-in-Not ceased replying to Corder’s requests at an early stage of the negotiations. The Czech government declared it would take a 20 % profit on any money sent. Bruder-in-Not, when it finally answered, announced its contribution would be in "special Reichsmarks" which would automatically lose half their value on exchange. (AFSC)
If these financial problems did not suffice to bring the id~a to a halt, the political ones should have. Bruder-in-Not refused to give more than 10 % of the aid to Czechs living in Sudetenland, and the Czech government insisted on a minimum of 33 %. Corder’s solution was to change the terms of the dispute slightly. He tried to persuade both sides to accept non-discriminatory aid in any community with 10 /6 or higher unemployment. The Czechs liked the idea. until they figured that would give a German.. to Czech ratio of 82 to 18. Then they countered with non-discriminatory relief to all communities with 9 /6 unemployment - a ratio of 76 to 24. Bruder-in-Not would have nothing to do with that.
The project seemed to have failed. Corder’s time as British representative in Berlin was at an end. He and his family began summer, Jaroslave Kose, a Czech Quaker and director of the Czech Export Institute, was told the government would agree to a ratio of SO to 20. Corder went at once to Prague. Things suddenly fell into place~ The Czech government approved the effort. The bank account was to be established in the name of the Society of Friends, and the name of the project was to be "Quaker Hilfswerk." (AFSC) Bruder-in-Not agreed too.
Only one detail remained. The German Reichsbank had asked for confirmation of the agreements with the Czech bank in writing. The Czech bank assured Corder that the Foreign Office would oblige, and picking up the actual document seemed so trivial that he asked one of the Czech Quakeresses to go in his stead, while he made a visit he had promised to some friends. When the Quakeress arrived at the Foreign Office, the officials began to worry that the Nazis might somehow use the confirmation as propaganda. The Quakeress agreed. Like other members of the Prague Meeting, she was a Czech nationalist, only interested in the fate of the Sudeten Germans because of Corder’s concern for them. When Corder learned what had happened, it was too late to change any minds. Although he still had the original copy of the agreement with the Czech government, it mentioned the bank only incidentally, and the document was in Czech, not German, which would make it unacceptable to the German authorities. Corder realized that the situation was almost hopeless.
Nonetheless, on his own time, with his own money, he returned to Berlin to speak to the head of the Economics Ministry, who pressured the Reichsbank to waive written confirmation, and assured Corder that the German Foreign Office had "leeway in using full value Marks..." (AFSC) The project went forward as suddenly as it had stopped. There were three payments in 1936 and 1937 totaling just under a million Czech Crowns (about $200,000 at the exchange rate of the day), which provided 21,000 undernourished children with one "substantial" meal per day for eight weeks until the end of the 1936-37 school year, plus a "considerable sum" left over for a repetition of the program the following winter. (AFSC) Funding stopped in 1938 when Hitler’s verbal attacks on Czechoslovakia resumed.
Visit to Gestapo
While the Quakers did not undertake aid to the Sudeten Germans for its political advantage, they did not fail to reap that advantage anyway whenever Nazi officials questioned the increasing scale of their programs, particularly emigration assistance. Quakers help everyone - that was the message Rufus Jones brought when he sailed for Germany with D. Robert Yarnall and George Walton, after the kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938. Organized rioters had murdered hundreds of Jews, arrested 35,000, and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property. thousands of Jews who had remained in their Fatherland rather than risk the uncertainties of emigration suddenly changed their minds.
The Quakers had already expanded their program immensely, but the German Ambassador to the United States encouraged them to send a special delegation to Berlin to get official permission. Rufus and company made no attempt to publicize their departure lest the Nazis suspect them of using their request for political propaganda. But when a reporter from the Philadelphia Record telephoned Rufus at sea, and Rufus refused to comment, the reporter wrote "a sensational article" anyway, which "appeared the next morning, built on imagination." The Nazis were furious. Goebbels himself wrote an article mocking the "‘Three Wise Men’ who were coming to ‘save’ Germany. and when Rufus and company arrived in Berlin, the Völkische Beobachter carried a "scathing" article condemning the "Gesellschaft der Freunde" - the German translation for "Society of Friends". (Hinshaw 1951, 278) There seemed to be no point in continuing until one of the German Friends noticed that the article was actually attacking, not them, but a Masonic society with the same name.
Nonetheless, no high official wanted to have anything to do with their request. Finally Raymond Geist, the American Cibsul-General helped, despite his running battle with the Quakers over immigration visas. He used his influence to get an appointment for them
hated lieutenant, the man in charge of the concentration camps. Heydrich himself also refused to speak with them directly. He kept them in his outer office and sent two assistants to hear the statement Rufus had prepared.
"We came to Germany," it read, "in the time of the blockade, organized and directed the feeding of German children, reaching at the peak no less than a million two hundred thousands per day. We were the first to arrive in Vienna after the war, where we brought in eight hundred cows and supplied the children in the hospitals with milk, and brought in coal for the fires in the hospitals. After the different revolutions in Austria we gave relief to the families of those who suffered most in these collisions, always having permission from the existing government to do so. And at the time of the Anschluss we were distributing food to a large number of Nazi families. In all this work we have kept entirely free of party lines or party spirit. We have not used any propaganda or aimed to make converts to our own views... We have come now in this same spirit..." (Hinshaw 1951, 280—281)
Rufus noted a "softening effect" on the faces of Heydrich’s assistants. They might have been among the five million the Quakers had fed - or it could have been Rufus’ own wishful thinking. After a discussion of specific plans, the two retired to Heydrich’s office. Rufus and company were alone. They there to hear them - but they sat instead in silent worship. Twenty five minutes later the assistants returned. Heydrich had granted everything. But when Rufus asked for written confirmation, one of them replied: "Every word ... that has been spoken in this room has been recorded by a mechanism and this decision will be on the record." The benefits of Quaker silence never seemed so obvious. They also promised to telegraph this decision to every police station in Germany, though Rufus doubted that they ever did.
Emigration work
People flooded into the Quaker offices. Their reputation from the child-feeding, plus rumors a Dutch newspaper started that the Berlin Secretariat was the center of all child emigration for the Reich, combined to flood the offices with more people than they could handle. They established a second office just for emigration but, wary of legal entanglements the government could use against them, they actually only used offices rented in the name of Pastor Gruber. Whenever possible, they referred supplicants to the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Roman Catholic agency, or to Protestant Pastor Gruber himself. These people would help only full blooded Jews, or baptized Catholics, or Protestants. The Quakers turned no one away because of’ their religious beliefs or lack of.
The Quakers needed many volunteer helpers too, though some of these may ultimately have been more trouble than help. They were often people anxious to escape, who felt that working for the Friends would secure special aid. One woman, Herta I..., was quiet when Howard Elkinton, American representative to the Secretariat was about, but she domineered otherwise. She talked the young British Friend left in charge while Howard was on a trip to France into acquiring a third office - and Howard had to fly back at once, an uncommon experience in those days, to straighten matters out.
She persuaded Hans Albrecht to surrender his key to the Secretariat, which upset those members of Berlin Meeting who had greater need of it than she. and when Howard made her give that back, she obtained another from Gwen Catchpole, Corder’s wife, which Howard also forced her to release. She had no need for a key at all, since her work was in new offices, not the Secretariat. And she was only supposed to be handling the mail, "which she completely neglected - too busy nosing into other things." (AFSC)
There were, however, some selfless volunteers as well. Shortly after Kristallnacht, "(a) very distinguished woman, Frau Dr. Luders, turned up offering services." (AFSC) She was a former member of the Reichstag, familiar with social work, and an Aryan with no apparent interest in emigration. And of course, German Friends, particularly Olga Halle.
The case came up of an elderly Jewess in southern Germany. A Swiss Catholic relief worker had thought that baptizing the woman would protect her. In fact it meant that neither the Jewish nor the Catholic agencies felt she was their responsibility. But the Quakers discovered she had been born in America, and could reclaim her American citizenship if they could get her to the embassy in Berlin. She would not travel on her own - she was too frightened after Kristallnacht - and Olga had to go fetch her. On their way north, guards entered the train compartment to inspect papers. The woman was too frightened to speak, but Olga chatted with them at length, told them this was a deaf relative she was bringing to Berlin, and after a while the guards wished them a happy journey and continued on their way. The woman reached the U. S. via Portugal, some months later.
Between 1935 and 1941 the Berlin Secretariat helped 1,135 people to emigrate from Germany. (AFSC) Of these, 960 left in the three years between 1938 and 1940, 84 % of the total, but a small percent of those who came to the Friends for help. These figures do not include people who used the clinic, or the counseling of people like Frau Dr. Luders, or those whom the Friends placed with other agencies, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish - nor does it include the Vienna Secretariat, where British, American, and Austrian Friends operated nor certainly those many Germans who slipped across the border themselves only to apply for help at the Quaker offices in Paris or Prague.
The Quakers did not try to foist people onto any country that would have them. They sought to place people where they could use their skills and settle permanently, in so far as that was possible.
The draft
German Quakers first faced the possibility of war with the reintroduction of the draft in 1935. People had known it was coming for some time, and as early as April 1934, the executive committee of the yearly Meeting prepared a letter to the government that, while admitting the peace testimony, assured them that Friends "have certainly never bound their individual members to obey in their own conscience. ..." (AFSC) Of course, "certainly never" did not reflect the habit of many Meetings in the 18th and 19th centuries of disowning members who accepted military service, but historical honesty was not this committee’s first priority.
The draft did not actually affect any of the German Quakers until the summer of 1937, when a young man, who had just applied for membership, found he had to enter the officers training program at his school. After a bitter debate, the Yearly Meeting reaffirmed that it would leave the question of military service entirely to each person’s conscience. Many draft age Friends fled the country. It was the only way to resist conscription. The Nazi government wasted no prison space on conscientious objectors. Draft refusal meant death by firing squad. (AFSC)
There was only one exception - Gerhard Halle. For a long time, Army officers who remembered Gerhard’s distinguished record from the First World War and knew also of his pacifist conversion, arranged that he not be called up. But such postponements could not continue indefinitely. When the notice of induction came, he told the authorities of his refusal. He was prepared to die for his beliefs, and he meant to show the same courage as those men in the First World War whom he had sent to face the firing squad of the French artillery. But the Army granted him a full exemption - an exemption based officially on the lasting effects of four wounds, though none in fact now caused him any disability.
He was "not too satisfied with the release." (AFSC) The reason for it was wrong. and it did not salve his conscience to be able to continue working in an airplane parts factory, as he had to, to support his family. That was almost worse than joining the army, because a soldier could at least refuse to use his weapon. As the war continued and stories of atrocities in Poland grew, Gerhard decided that he could do more good there, as a soldier, than in his factory job tuning out parts to help the Luftwaffe’s bombing runs. He volunteered for the occupation forces. That too was suicide, almost as surely as his earlier draft refusal. His family knew he would never obey the orders of his superiors, and there would be no one to save him from execution. For three weeks they had to wait. Then the notice from the occupation forces came - a refusal. An Abwehr (military intelligence) officer who knew Gerhard’s family had saved him by persuading the Gestapo it was best to keep him in Berlin where he could more easily be watched.
Other German Quakers, and their children, had to serve the German military. Gerhard’s own son, Ernst Hale, though he found a way of avoiding the draft by volunteering for the navy after two others had done so from his work group in the factory. He reasoned that the factory manager would fight against losing three from one group, and while they were trying to keep him, as the last volunteer, he could tell the army he was already on the lists for another service. In a less chaotic society than the Third Reich, it might have worked. But the Navy accepted him alone, ignoring the two prior volunteers, and the factory manager made no complaint.
The war years
The war did not change the nature of Quaker relief, only its scale. Although the French border closed In 1939, the SWISS remained open, and refugees could still pass through , across France and Spain to Portugal, the main embarkation point for New World immigrants.
When the last of the American Quakers, Howard Elkinton, left the Berlin Secretariat in 1940, Olga Halle carried on the emigration program. But it was not 5 % of its former self. Travel of any sort grew more and more difficult, particularly once the British and American bombing raids began. She could do no more than finish the work on a few of the cases begun earlier.
Relief of any sort became a local, even individual concern. The Rest Homes closed, but Berlin Friends persisted in their "Tea Parties" for Jews and others out of favor with the state. Young Friends gathered books and clothing for prisoners of war, and German Quakers sent food from their own meager rations to inmates at Theresienstadt concentration camp. But they could never be sure how much would reach the prisoners themselves. A.s a precaution, one Berlin Quakeress sent each package from a different post box.
It was during the first years of the war that the round-up of Jews began on a scale none had anticipated. A.s trainloads headed east, Berlin Friends offered warm clothing, knowing it too would be stripped from the transportees at their destination.
In Mecklenburg, Margarethe Lachmund, and in Munich Elizabeth Helms both took care of agreeing with the authorities to take in Arayan children as well. Elizabeth Heims died in an extermination camp beside those she had cared for.
Nor was hiding Jews uncommon. One Berlin Quakeress did not wish to lie to the Gestapo when they came searching for the Jew she had in her apartment. She flung the door open wide - with the Jew hidden behind it - and told them to look for themselves. While she led them into the back, he escaped out the front door.
Jews were not, however, the only concern of Friends. While a young Quakeress, Käte Jürgens, was caring for some mongoloid children, the Nazis decided to let them starve rather than waste supplies the army needed. She secretly fed them from her own allotment of food, until the authorities transferred her to a different job. When Gerhard Halle learned about this euthanasia program, he wrote to the Nazi political chief of his neighborhood: "The information of this mass murder filled me with deep revulsion. I feel my conscience requires me to speak out on my passionate loathing for such a deed. ..." The neighborhood Nazi chief simply set the protest aside - which saved Gerhard’s life once again.
Effects on Friends
In 1933, 24 members withdrew to avoid being linked to a group viewed as in opposition to the government, though others joined. Of about 200 members, 56 were unemployed, many having been laid off for their views, and 55 were housewives. Thus over half the membership were without income.
Toward the end of the war, German Quakers suffered no less- than their fellow countrymen. Many lost their homes, either to the bombing or to the Russian advance. In Frankfurt, Alfonse Paquet, a Quaker and noted poet, wrote his last work on the destruction of his city during the night of August 10, 1943, and he himself died in a raid six months later.
Eight Friends were in prison or concentration camps at the time of capitulation, one had died there, nine others had been arrested but gained release. The Yearly Meeting ceased to function with the arrest of its treasurer in 1942. Yet Meetings continued, as did the work of Friends.
Membership in German Yearly Meeting grew during and after the Nazi era, as shown in the table below:
Year Members Established 1925 40 1932 199 1940 273 1951 475 1961 534
Divided 1970 511 1975 459 Meetings in Germany and Austria Friends in East Germany formed their own Yearly Meeting in 1970, with about 50 members. These are included in the figures shown for 1970 and 1975.
A comparison
The Quaker response did not bring Hitler down. Once again, as in the First World War, Friends had the good fortune to be on the side with the mightier armies, the bigger bombs. But neither did Friends fail to face Hitler, on their own terms, by their own principles. and there, at least, they won a victory. Of all the attempted coups and reputed calls to rebellion that historians have distilled from those final desperate years of the Third Reich’s collapse, not a one had the measure of success the Friends enjoyed. The coups failed, the rebellion failed, and in their failure brought even greater repression, torture, and death. The Friends saved lives. A. few thousand lives - nothing like the millions the Nazis gassed. But the value of each of those lives was what the war was said to be about.
Postscript
After the war, British and American Quaker assistance to people in need in Germany resumed, with the aid of German Quakers. Displaced persons were helped. Feeding centers for children (on a more modest scale than in the 1920’s) were opened. Clothing, medicine, food., and books were distributed. Work with prisoners was undertaken. They reopened the two rest homes for people who had been in concentration camps.
It was for these efforts that the American Friends Service Committee and the British Friends Service Council received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949.
REFERENCES
FASC. American Friends Service Committee archives, at Haverford College, Haverford PA.
Brandt, Willy and Richard Lowentha1 (1957). Ernst Reuter: Bin Leben für die Freiheit: Eine politische Biographie. Munich, Kincilar.
Fry, Joan Mary (1944). In Downcast Germany, 1919-1933. London, James Clarke.
Hinshaw, David (1951). Rufus Jones, Master Quaker. New York, Putnam.
Jones, Mary Hoxie (1971). Swords into Plowshares: An Account of the American Friends Service Committee 1917-1937. Westport CT, Greenwood Press.
Otto, Heinrich (1972). Werden und Wesen des Quëkertums und seine Entwicklung in Deutschland. Vienna, Sensen Verlag.
Peetz, Otto and Margarethe Lachmund (1963). Allen Bruder Sein: Corder Catchpole(1883-1952): Ein Englisher Freund in Deutscher Not. Bad Pyrmont, Religiöse Gesellschaft der Freunde.
Michael Seadle is a member of Detroit Friends Meeting. He graduated from Earlham College in 1972. This essay he condensed from his Ph. D. Dissertation in Modern European History at the University of Chicago, "Quakerism in Germany: The Pacifist Response to Hitler." June 1977 which is available from the University of Chicago Photoduplication Service.
The study is based on research in Quaker archives, especially at Haverford PA, London, England, and Bad Pyrmont, Germany, and on interviews with 13 participants in the Quaker activities described.
June 1978
Progressive Publisher
For more information about the German Quakers during this time, see Living the Truth
Added 1st Month 24, 1999
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