Lone Wolf for a Good Cause?

 I encountered a small statue in a garden on a walking tour of Konstanz, Germany. Our guide explained the significance; this was a bust of Johann Georg Elser (1903-1945). As she recounted the story, it seemed familiar. Then I remembered--I read about the incident in Agent Sonya by Ben McIntyre.

Georg was a German carpenter and craftsman who valued freedom and rights for the workers in the Third Reich. He sympathized with the needy since he grew up in a family that struggled economically. He worked in Konstanz, Germany, reportedly some of the happiest years of his short life. 

He managed to resist the Nazi party with small acts, such as refusing to listen to radio broadcasts of Hitler's speeches and to salute with arm extended. As a biographer of Hitler, Ian Kershaw said, "he was a single person, an ordinary German, a man from the working class, acting without the help and or knowledge of anyone else." 

Georg Elser's actions remind one of the question of the morality of exposing innocent victims to danger in the cause for good. Are accidental deaths as a result of an assassination of an evil leader justified? Mr. Elser engaged in other forms of protest which obviously were insufficient to counter the rise of Hitler. 

Disgusted by the Nazis, he meticuously planned and nearly executed a bombing on November 8, 1939 that would have killed or seriously injured Hitler and other highly placed Nazi officers. Hitler gave a speech at a beer hall in Munich every November 8 to commemorate his attempted putsch on that date in 1923. Unfortunately, Hitler left the beer hall (one of his favorite) before the bomb detonated, ostensibly to catch a train. Several people were killed, none were the brass of the Nazi regime.

Georg was long gone when the bomb exploded. He was arrested, in Konstanz, for smuggling, while  attempting to cross into Switzerland. When his knapsack was searched, police found tools and a postcard of the beer hall, incriminating evidence. Georg was sent to Munich and then Berlin where he was tortured by high ranking officials. Then shipped off to Sachsenhausen, where he spent years, until he was executed at Dachau in 1945. The Germans kept him alive as a symbol of British intelligence involvement rather than German resistance. Hitler was certain that Esler alone could not have carried out a plot to assassinate him.

Evidently, the Germans remained convinced. Finally, in the 1960's interrogation transcripts were found. Not until the 1980's was Georg Elser memorialized as a hero. Georg himself wrote of his misgivings about the killing of innocent victims for the purposes of freedom and destroying evil. He said, "I wanted to prevent the war!" 

https://www.fritz-bauer-forum.de/en/datenbank/johann-georg-elser-3/

https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/recess/topics/7-georg-elser-and-the-assassination-attempt-of-november-8-1939/

https://www.dw.com/en/hitlers-would-be-assassin-a-lone-wolf-who-acted-on-his-ideals/a-51156209

Note: Any mistakes are my responsibility. It is difficult to ferret out fact from fiction in the numerous accounts of this story.

©Karen Levi 2023

Two Emmas

 When I heard the name Emma Lazarus at a Holocaust remembrance program in Frankfurt, Germany, I immediately thought of the Jewish/American poet whose sonnet is installed on the Statue of Liberty. But I was incorrect. There was another one and probably thousands more. The Emma Lazarus I heard mentioned in Germany married Henry Budge in the latter part of the 19th century, both Jews. 

Henry was born in Frankfurt in 1840. He emigrated to the United States in 1866 and became a successful businessman. He must have returned to Germany to marry Emma. Both moved to the United States and became citizens in 1882. For some reason, they relocated to Hamburg, Germany in 1903, where they were great patrons of the arts and charitable foundations. During World War I, they lived in 

Emma Lazarus Budge

Switzerland to avoid conflicts of loyalty. 

One of the foundations established with their money was named after them--the Frankfurt Henry and Emma Budge Foundation. The purpose of the foundation was the "care of men, women, and children in need of recreation, without distinction of sex, age, and religious confession," a forward thinking mission for the times. The Budges agreed to use capital from their foundation to alleviate a housing shortage in 1928, in Frankfurt, specifically for a "retirement home for the middle class." The residence was built in 10 months and ready for the first inhabitants in 1930. Ernst May, of the Frankfurt building department, selected the Bauhaus style of architecture for the structure. Three avant-garde architects assisted him, most notably Mart Stam.

                                            Example Bauhaus architecture     

The result was a masterpiece of an open light-flooded building with 100 apartments. Each had a private balcony or patio with a view of wooded areas. The common rooms had movable walls for flexibility. Meals were taken in a dining room and prepared in a modern kitchen with a dishwasher and other avant-garde appliances. The founders and architects envisioned a "collectively managed pensioner's hotel" for older middle class individuals of Jewish and Christian religion. Innovative, the interfaith aspect and the free atmosphere of men and women interacting socially proved to be without historical role models. 

Utimately tragedy occurred when the Nazis took over the foundation and home. The Jewish residents were forced out and moved to various sites in Frankfurt. It is unclear how many Jewish residents lived at the Budge Home, but 23 were murdered by the Nazis. The victims have been memoralized at various sites in Frankfurt. 

One of those residents was my great grandmother Elise Hofmann. She was deported at age 70 in 1942 to Theresienstadt and murdered at Treblinka, an ungodly end for a respectable, modern woman. 

Back to our American Emma Lazarus--a Sephardic Jew--who wrote the sonnet "The American Collossus," which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty. At the time, she worked with Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Their plight and the new statue inspired Emma to write her famous lines.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand           
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

                                                         Emma Lazarus

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The poem, written with no notion of Nazis but yet a knowledge of antisemitism, rang true in the 1880's, 1940's, and now. 

Photo of Emma Lazarus from https://jwa.org/womenofvalor/lazarus

Photo of Emma Budge https://www.dasjuedischehamburg.de/bilder/budge-emma

Content from research done by Gudrun Jäger 2023

©Karen Levi 2023