Fred’s Story

  I wish that I would have had a chance to sit and talk with my father and my grandfather in more depth because then I would know more what to say. Very little was written down with respect to family history and all that I know is what my father told me and what I learned indirectly from other places, including some from my grandparents.

  We know that where the Neuburger name is concerned, that this family came from small towns in Bavaria, and from one town in particular called Mönchsdeggingen, where no Jews lived after 1933 anymore. This is a small town.

There were only a few Jews there, and, as far as I know, my grandfather was active in dealing in hide and felt. Jews at that time were limited in their occupations. They only could deal as merchants or with money. Most people in those small towns did business with the people who lived on farms.

  Later on my grandfather, whose name was Max Neuburger, moved his family to Munich where my father was born in 1871. It was a large family. My father had three brothers, all of whom moved to America in the 1890’s. All eventually settled in Chicago.

As far as I know, the eldest brother, Markus, had first settled in Denver, Colorado. Many Jews in those days after arriving in New York moved on to other areas, especially where mining took place. The main mining areas in those days were in Colorado and Idaho.

   One other brother, Heinrich, who also lived in Chicago, had no family. The third brother, who was Hugo, had one son whose name was Morton. Morton was the one who gave the affidavit for my sister Hanny and for myself.

He did this even though he had no money and had to borrow it. The children of Markus, on the other hand, some of whom were wealthy, did not do anything to help.

Fortunately this one son Morton, who died just seven years ago, had a warm feeling for what the Jews in Germany had to suffer, and this made it possible for us to come over before it was too late.

   Speaking of Morton’s family, he has two daughters, one in Los Angeles, and one in Peoria, Illinois, and one son now living in New York. For that one reason, what their father did for us, we should keep in touch with them.

   Coming back to the history of the Neuburger side from Germany: My grandfather’s wife was born with the name Levinger. She came from a small town called Huerben, a suburb of Krumbach in Schwaben, Bavaria. Jews in those days often did not meet before marriage.

Usually they had somebody as a go-between. They all lived in small villages and this way their marriages in many cases were arranged, and this is what happened in my grandfather’s case.

  After their marriage my grandmother, Jette Levinger and Max Neuburger lived in Mönchsdeggingen, a small town in the northern part of Schwaben near a place called Nördlingen.

In those days almost all the Jews, and this goes back to the beginning of the 19th century, lived in small towns. Only later, at the end of the 19th century, did they move to the larger towns like Munich, Augsburg or Nuremberg, the principal towns in Bavaria.

Centuries ago, there were Jews living in Munich, but they had been wiped out by persecutions.

  My mother’s maiden name was Einstein. She came from a small town near Ulm on the Donau. Her father was born in Laupheim as was his father. My mother’s grandfather came from a small town in Schwaben named Fellheim.

The first Jews who settled in Laupheim came only in the 18th century.

  In those days Jews could not settle where they wanted to. They had to have the permission of the ruler of the particular part of the country they were in. These were called Kurfursten, and they were the arbiters of life and death, and they controlled the destiny of the people who lived in their part of the country.

Later on, when all segments of the country were united under a king, the Kurfursten still decreed under what conditions Jews could live. Only the first born was allowed to marry. The others had to move to different towns to marry.

I have documents from the history of the Jews in Laupheim and it is all written down in detail about how the Jews could live there.

   As to the history of this particular small town, at the end of the 19th century it had a maximum Jewish population of 8-900 people. In the beginning they had a handful of people who all had to live in one house they called the Judenhaus.

There they established a place of worship in the attic. My great grandfather who came from Fellheim, was, according to documents, in that town what was called in German the Judenvorsteher.

In other words, he was in charge of the few Jews who lived in that particular town.  His name was Leopold Einstein. He officiated at all the activities of Jews in their religious life.

The whole life of a Jewish community in those days in the small towns was centered on religious practices.

   My grandfather in Laupheim was dealing in cattle in the country, and he worked very hard at this job. Nevertheless, he went every morning to the synagogue. He observed the religious practices so that he would not work on Sabbath, and his house was strictly kosher.

I know the house they lived in because I was often on vacation in Laupheim. The house was very small even though they had a family of four daughters and one son. What kept all these people going was their religious practice.

If they hadn’t believed strongly as Jews, they could never have survived. Only when they were allowed to move to the big towns did they become more liberal in their religious practices; they were more emancipated, they didn’t stick to the religious tradition as their parents and grandparents did; they did not practice in the strict orthodox sense and the Jewish religion spread out more in the liberal and reform forms as we see it today in this country.

   My grandmother from my mother’s side came from a small town in Schwaben named Ichenhausen where there was for many years back a sizeable Jewish community. Her name was Hannchen Mai.

The reason that I know this is because I still have at home the marriage contract of those days between my grandfather and my grandmother, between Moses Einstein and Hannchen Mai. The contract was made by their parents. In as much as Hannchen Mai did not have a father it was signed by her mother and by his father, Leopold Einstein.

As was the custom in those days, it was written down exactly how much each one brought into the marriage.

   Moses Einstein, my grandfather, had the intention once to emigrate to North America. Many Jews in those days emigrated for one reason, they wanted to get out of being drafted into the German army.

They had to have a permit to leave the country. Obviously for some reason he didn’t leave the country. Two years later he was married.

  Moses Einstein had four daughters and one son. The one son was Ludwig. I remember him from when I was still a child. He died rather young. Of the four daughters, my mother was the youngest. Two of the daughters married two brothers whose name was Holzer.

My cousin, Clara Holzer, is the daughter of one of them. She is the only survivor of her family. The others were all killed by the Nazis.

   The other daughter who married a Holzer was Bertha. She had three daughters. One of them, Hansi, who is now living near Portland. Another, Ilse, is living in Munich.

Ilse only survived because her husband was a Catholic and he refused to divorce her as he was called upon to do by the Gestapo when Hitler came to power. For that reason he was not inducted into the active German army but was treated like a prisoner by the SS and used by the German army to build fortifications in France.

He was only released long after the war ended. Ilse and her husband live at present in a suburb of Munich called Wolfratshausen.

   The third daughter’s married name was Tillie Spatz. Her husband had died, and she lived in Munich with her son. Both of them were deported as far as we know to Riga and were killed there. This was one of the first deportations from Munich.

   Another deportation around that same time was of the Holzer family. Willi Holzer, whose wife had died years before, and one son Benno Holzer, and another son Alfred with his wife, and a daughter Hedwig, all were deported and did not survive.

As far as we know Hedwig Holzer was sent to Auschwitz and died there of typhus. We got this information from a survivor.

   My mother was deported first to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia and then to an unknown destination in Poland where she perished. My father, Benno Neuburger was accused of making a written remark about Hitler. He was arrested in Munich by the SS and finally deported to Berlin.

He was tried in the so-called Volksgerichtshof and executed in Berlin. He had requested to be buried in the large Jewish cemetery called Weisensee, but we could never find out where he was because obviously his last wish was not granted. He was killed in 1942.

   We know all of this because he was allowed to write one letter to my cousin Ilse Schuster, and he wrote about this in his last letter before his execution in Berlin. He also sent the watch he had. This is still in our possession.

My mother I know about because she was allowed to write one card from the so-called collection center in Munich where she was before being deported. They were all sent by cattle cars to the next destination, which was for her at that time, Theresienstadt.

   The history of those Jews who lived in the small towns in Bavaria is almost completely ended because the few survivors are mostly older people who in due time will write the final chapter of the Jews in that part of Bavaria.

EARLY YEARS

  I was born in Munich in 1908. World War I broke out in 1914. I can say that the Jews in Germany were as patriotic as anybody else. 12,000 Jews died on the battlefield for Germany. My father didn’t have to go actively into the German army and fight on the front because of his age. He was, ironically, guarding a munitions factory in Dachau site of the future concentration camp.

My mother and I visited him there once during the war. I remember this very clearly.

   When the war ended my father who had retired before the war broke out figuring that he could live on the money that he had accumulated, lost everything.

This was in part because we had pledged a lot of money on war bonds and on account of Germany losing the war they were worthless. All the other investments on stocks and other things suffered under the terrific inflation that came after the war. All became worthless.

  When Hitler opened his first mass meetings in Munich, I remember very clearly how they were advertised on the kiosks, the advertising columns on the city streets in Munich — in big red banners inviting people in the name of

Adolph Hitler, a man who at that time was complete unknown, to mass meetings simultaneously in the ten biggest beer halls in Munich.

The top of the banners mentioned that Jews were not allowed, and they appealed to anti-Semites to come — hammering home the theme that the Jews were the enemies of the Germans.

   This theme was also proclaimed in Hitler’s new published newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer) which was located only a block from where I lived. Hitler himself lived only two blocks from me.

I passed his house every day and I often saw him at his house on my way to the gymnasium in Munich.

   I went to the Wilheims Gymnasium, a preparatory school for the university. This gymnasium was famous for being perhaps the most nationalistic in all of Germany.

The students in the upper grades came to school already by 1920 wearing swastikas as members of the Nazi Party.

   The first mass meeting of the Nazis took place in Munich already by 1919. In 1919 there was the Rate Republic, and after this Hitler started. In 1919 he had his first meeting in a small beer stube, also about a couple of blocks from where I lived, and where they really started the Nazi Party.

And from then on it went very fast. I know all the places where they had their headquarters in Munich. The first followers were those people who had nothing to lose. They were not successful in their businesses, and they followed those who were pointing to other people, blaming the situation that they were in on the minority, which in those days was the Jews. The Jews were defenseless, as was true throughout history.

   There was a vacuum that was created after the Kaiser abdicated in 1918 and the Weimar Republic was established. There was a very strong element of the German people that was very nationalistic; officers coming back from the war, longing for a situation where the old German Reich like that under Bismarck could be re-established under the banner of the red, white, and black.

They never recognized the new Weimar Republic under the socialist constitution. It was a fertile ground for all nationalistic elements to obstruct the building of a new Germany. So even in this gymnasium that I attended, much of the faculty, professors and part of the students promulgated the old German Reich and not the Weimar Republic.

   Every year, in January, on the birthday of the old German Reich under Bismarck, the whole Gymnasium was assembled under the old flag and speeches were given indoctrinating the students with loyalty to the old Reich.

When the other side of the political spectrum, the more radical element, the communists, who wanted to have something to say in the Weimer Republic lead by a fraction called Spartacus, established for a short time what was called the Rate Republic in Munich under Eisner and Toller, nationalistic elements marched on Munich and executed all of the leaders of this movement. They had lasted only a couple of weeks.

A political vacuum had been created because the Weimar Republic wasn’t strong enough to make it on its own, and this left an opening for the Rate Republic which was then itself ended.

   The nationalistic elements were divided between Deutsch Nationale and the Stahlhelm, a confederation of soldiers who came back from the war. Stahlhelm is the name of the steel helmet worn in the war by the soldiers.

They promulgated the more nationalistic tendency in German politics. But it was all part of the whole picture in Germany that worked against the Weimar Republic, and that of course lead later on to the rise of Hitler.

   This was greatly influenced by the economic conditions in Germany after the war. People had lost their money and their businesses, and Hitler was pointing out how he could make things better — that the loss of the war was not the fault of the German army, but of so-called treachery behind their backs, and that certain people, among them Jews, were responsible for Germany’s defeat and the resulting situation.

Many people who did not really think about it went along.

   They say that Hitler was a hypnotic speaker. I listened personally at one of his meetings, later on, in one of my travels in Germany. He could hypnotize people by the way he spoke.

He didn’t talk very rationally, but he could talk to people and tell them what they wanted to hear in a manner that was convincing.

GLEICHSHALTUNG

  I grew up in Munich in a gentile community. I was a member of a big sport club, 1860 was the name of the club. I was a member of the athletic team and the handball team. As one of several Jews among the thousands of their members, I was regarded as one of them–until 1933.

Then, under the motto of the so-called gleichshaltung, which meant you could only associate with your own nationality or race, the Jews were forced to leave the club. We were excluded from anything that was considered German as we were considered as not belonging to the German race.

Any Jew who was a member of an organization that was not 100% Jewish had to leave it, and the only way you could belong to anything was if it was all Jewish. This is why we started the Jewish sport club in Munich. It was there that I got in contact with people that I never knew before, and we became friends.

I followed the fate of some of those people, some of them I know, like me, were able to emigrate, and some of them could not get out. . .

   In general, the German people were not anti-Semitic before Hitler. But after he came to power many of them sensed an opportunity for advancement and basically adopted Hitler’s philosophy and turned against the Jews.

I had personal experience in that respect with people that I knew at that time who changed the color of their shirt almost overnight and became ardent Nazis. As long as Hitler was successful in fulfilling his promises to the German people, they followed him.

Many directly and indirectly became his followers and were cheering him on. It was disregarded by many of them what he did to the Jews. We were a small minority and were expendable, even though our roots in Germany dated back many hundreds of years.

All of a sudden this didn’t count any more. This should be a lesson. We should never feel safe in a society that tolerates racial discrimination.

   When I traveled for the company and visited sporting goods stores, all of whom had to belong to the Nazi Party, speaking as I did the Bavarian dialect, with no so-called Jewish features, I was accepted by people who didn’t know that I was Jewish.

I had all kinds of experiences in that respect about their feelings about Jews and how tolerated we were only to the extent that they didn’t know we were of the Jewish race as they said.

   Even some of the people that I worked with saw the opportunity to grab what the Jews lost and turned directly or indirectly against us.

I know of many circumstances where people who I knew personally very well underwent a change of heart and followed the new doctrine.

MOUNTING PRESSURES

   I still remember the day Hitler came to power in 1933. After that there was no way out. And yet, we were always hopeful. I only talk in this way about the German Jews since all this movement and all this propaganda naturally only affected German Jews — Hitler had no influence at that time outside the borders of Germany on events which would later prove to be so disastrous for Europe.

But for us German Jews, at least until 1933 there was still a hope that even if he should come to power that it would not be as serious as it was being proclaimed.

   What indirectly helped Hitler of course, was the way that the Germans were disenchanted with their economic conditions and how the Versailles Treaty made it impossible for Germany to recover.

They felt that an injustice had been done to them, and those elements in Germany who felt that they could correct the situation, they saw in Hitler their salvation, and they followed him.

   In 1933 the elements that were still against Hitler and had the power to negate him the access to power, like Hindenburg, gave in, and Hitler was elected. From that moment on then, the history of the world was turned around.

And then, the other world powers which had it in their means to stop him, didn’t.

   In 1925 I left the gymnasium. Because of the economic conditions my parents were in I could not go on to study at the university, so I had to start doing something to make a living.

I entered commercial life with a company in Munich, first as an apprentice, and in the second year, even as an apprentice, they decided to send me on the road.

   From 1926 on I was travelling by car, first through the southern part of Germany and then later on, gradually, to the northern part of Germany, the middle part, and all over.

That is how I got more acquainted with the political situation — through the personal experience I had with those people.

   Many people that I met openly declared themselves in favor of Hitler. Others were strongly against him. All of them knew that some change had to take place.

I talked to people who were very active in the Social Democratic Party and to people who were active in the Communist Party. Many of those people later became associated with the Nazi Party because they thought it would better their own existence. What happened to the Jews was of minor concern to them, or irrelevant.

That shows that what subsequently took place, the destruction of German Jewry, was not opposed by any sizeable segment, openly at least, of the German people.

   In other countries where the German army entered, the opposition to their program was not sufficiently strong to obstruct the plans Hitler had in regard to Jews.

   So in 1933 a new chapter began in the life of the Jews in Germany. Some Jews were, of course, very anxious to leave. Some left very soon. There were less restrictions in those days, and they managed to get some money out.

But many others felt they would stay and see what would happen over the next few years. As things approached 1938 where the German propaganda machine in regard to Jewish policy became very obvious, many tried desperately to get away.

LEAVING

   I lived under Hitler from 1933 to 1938 under trying circumstances. I had to be very careful traveling as I did all over Germany, being in contact as I was with my customers who were almost all Nazis.

Many of them knew that I was Jewish and I never knew, with all the propaganda being propagated against the Jews, if one or the other would for some reason denounce me as they did with other people who then disappeared in the concentration camps.

   When I finally did have the good luck to leave Germany, and had to leave my parents and so many other people behind, it was with a heavy heart.

We didn’t know if we would ever see each other again.

Some of the young people who I grew up with in Munich left even before Hitler came to power for what was at that time Palestine.

But very few people had the foresight to leave Germany in those days because they just couldn’t believe that things would get so critical. Also, conditions in the world were economically not that good such that someone could expect to make a living in a strange country.

   As it turned out later almost everyone was willing to go under any circumstances because the most important thing is not economic survival but physical survival.

   We got, finally, a visa for my sister Hanny to leave. I brought her personally with a car to Hamburg. I went with her to the boat. Even as she left, not knowing, living under the danger that we lived under in Germany, still somehow I was optimistic.

No matter how trying your circumstances you try to think of the best, even in the face of great uncertainty.

   I was still travelling in 1938. I knew that sooner or later I would be called to

the consulate in Stuttgart, the American Consulate, for the examination that you have to have before you were able to get a visa for the United States.

When I finally got word from my parents I was in Breslau which is the main town in Silesia. The news had come from the American consulate that I could take my physical examination in order to get the visa, and I decided that same day to return even though I was on a business trip far from Munich.

I travelled all night to Munich, and I arrived in the morning and made all the preparations for my emigration. As soon as I got my visa I would have the possibility to leave, and I wanted to leave as soon as possible.

   At that time the restrictions on Jewish emigration were very tight. We had to declare everything we would take along, all our clothes — money we could not take — and we had to pay the German government the equivalent money value of what we took along.

The emigration permit was issued on the basis of having paid this money. So I left Germany practically without anything.

  This friend of mine who lived in San Francisco, Mittleburger, who died a year ago, who has a brother in New York who I saw there in June, they both came over at about the same time.

I was very close especially with the brother in New York. We were together in the Jewish sport club, and we were together just prior to our emigration.

   I went with Frank Mittleburger when we went to get our luggage inspected prior to leaving Germany. We had a moving company pick up a wooden box in which I had a carpet and a small piece of furniture that my parents had given me to take along and which I could not get into my suitcase.

I had rolled a couple of movie cameras into that carpet. I had a few gold coins which I had rolled into a stocking. The man who was employed by this company that picked up the box with the furniture assured me that there would be no inspection.

We were asked to show up as a formality to sign some documents at the moving company. This friend of mine also had some piece of furniture to ship. When we came into that moving company, to our surprise there was a Nazi inspector who ordered us to open up the boxes! If they had found any of the gold pieces or the cameras I would have been put in a concentration camp. They didn’t.

   I found out later that the man from the moving company, even though he was Jewish, was a collaborator with the Nazis.

   We were lucky. We were in a state of shock that this inspection had taken place. We still talk about that experience we had together — just the last time I saw Mittleburger in New York we talked about this.

   The two Mittleburger brothers were at the small wedding that we had in the Rabbi’s study when Kate and I got married in March, 1941.

  Frank Mittleburger was an engineer. He studied engineering in a prestigious school in Germany and had a recommendation from a Nobel prize winner, a professor Willstaetter and he got a scholarship to MIT in Boston.

He became a successful engineer. He just sold his company that he had established in New Jersey. His brother, Ernest, who was in San Francisco, was in the wine business and subsequently established the wine museum.

Ernest has a son and a daughter. His wife still lives in San Francisco.

THE MOVE

  I left Germany at the end of July, 1938. I had a railroad ticket to Paris. I stayed a few days in Paris and then boarded an English ship in Cherbourg that was part of the Cunard line. Prior to this, a friend of mine from Munich who was half Jewish — his father was Jewish but not his mother — was allowed to leave Germany and accompany me to Paris. His name was Kohn.

I paid him to accompany me to Paris because some of the luggage I didn’t declare, and he could take some things along. Thus it was easier for me to get some more clothes out.

   I spent a few days with Kohn in Paris. He spoke French. I had even paid him before to bring some luggage to Paris, and to leave it with a relative of mine, Simon Vogel (who subsequently also came to the United States).

Simon was a cousin of my mother who came from Laupheim. He lived in Paris at that time and was the head of a chemical concern which had its main office in Paris. (Simon Vogel attended my daughter Linda’s wedding in Long Beach and died several years after the wedding).

   At that time, as I have said, I was lucky to get out on that ship. I was able to pay for a first class ticket with the money that I had. If you travel first class, even if you have no money at all nobody knows.

You paid the ticket and you are with people who have all the money in the world, like rich Americans travelling across the Atlantic. In those days there was only steamship travel. It was a journey of about 8 or 10 days. I still have the passenger list at home.

   Only when you leave a country like this — even though it was with a heavy heart because I had to leave my parents, and even though the economic conditions in the United States in 1938 were anything but good — can you understand how glad I was to get away?

   I arrived in the U.S. in the beginning of August, 1938. My sister Hanny and her future husband Ludwig were on the dock in New York when I arrived. One week later my sister got married in New York.

She had moved from Chicago where she had first lived after coming from Germany one year earlier, in 1937. Hanny and Ludwig got married in New York which is why I stayed in New York.

  I was willing to do anything. My knowledge of the English language was not so good because I was never forced to speak English like you are when you live in a country. The conditions for finding a good job were not good.

I got a job in a place in downtown New York where they employed many of those men who had come over from Europe on account of Hitler. I stayed there for almost two years, sometimes working for as many 60 or 70 hours a week, 6 days a week.

THE SHUT DOOR

  The life of the Jews in Germany was made gradually so unbearable that those who were not lucky enough to emigrate had really no life at all.

We tried everything to get my parents out of Munich. We even bought them a visa to enter Cuba because their entrance number at the American consulate in Stuttgart was so high that they had no chance of being called in under the quota before the war broke out.

   We paid all the money we had at that time to buy the visa, but the money was kept and never returned. My parents had no means to go anyplace. They were deported and killed.

The last contact we had with them was in 1941. We tried to get the visa to get them out after the war broke out, but the conditions were so bad. I still have all the letters up to the last.

   They always kept their hope that they could get over to this country, but due to the very narrow minded restrictions of the various countries which had the opportunity and the means to absorb them, at least on a temporary basis until they could go to the U.S. — I can mention for example Canada and Australia –they could not escape the fate that awaited them.

   One ship that was known all over the world, its name was the St. Louis, sailed to the Caribbean, but it was not allowed to land there nor in the U.S., and it subsequently had to return to Europe. Most of the people on that ship perished afterward.

This was a German ship which was carrying refugees. After it was refused permission to land in Cuba it approached the coast of Florida. When it was not allowed to dock there it had to turn back for Europe. That was in the year 1940.  A lot of people could have been saved in those days.

   I was lucky enough to have left in 1938, before the so-called Crystal Night in November, 1938. On that night most of the Jewish males were put in concentration camps, including my father who was put into Dachau and later released.

   When this situation came up with my parents, that they probably could leave on a Cuba visa, I had just gotten married. We took all of our money, $840, a lot of money then, and we spent it on a Cuban visa.

That money was never paid back by the Cuban government even though they couldn’t leave Germany by then. But I would never forgive myself to this day if I hadn’t done this, because at least I know that I did my best to bring them out.

   I met Markus’ wife Sarah. She was still alive when I came to this country. (Markus was an uncle who had come over in the late 1800’s from Germany).

I met Sarah in Chicago and I also met some of her children. None of them are alive today. They tried to help afterwards when I was here, and we were trying to get my parents over here. I have a letter that this cousin of mine, Markus’ daughter, sent to the Jewish congressman from Illinois, his name was Sabath.

She asked if he could do something in regard to procuring an early entry visa to the United States, but the immigration stuck strictly to their quota and the number that they had.

Sabath wrote back and sent me a letter from the American consulate in Stuttgart where they said that they would do the best they could as soon as the number came up. There was never any change in the quota.

   As I mentioned before, my mother had two sisters who were married to two Holzer brothers. They lived in Traunstein. There was a third sister, the oldest one who never married, and her name was Mina Einstein.

She was the one who took care of my mother’s father until he died. She lived in her parents’ house in Laupheim, and I knew her very well because, as I said, I used to spend some vacations in Laupheim.

   The tragic fate that befell Mina Einstein was only known to me after the war ended. The few Jews who were left in Laupheim, most of whom were older people, were brought into one house that they called the Judenhaus. Shortly before their deportation to the death camps they were moved into an old railroad car that was left in a gravel pit outside of Laupheim.

They had to spend their last days and hours there before they were put into the freight cars and transported to the death camps. That was the end of a Jewish community that dated back to the beginning of the 18^th century when the first Jews came to Laupheim and lived in the attic and with the permit of the local ruler established a flourishing community.

   The synagogue there was burned down in 1938, on the Crystal Night. The Jewish cemetery still remains being taken care of by two men, one who lives in the United States, and one who lives in Switzerland by the name of Steiner.

   The mayor of the town got a hold of my address from a man named Bergman who comes from Laupheim and who now lives in Westchester County. And Bergman is the one who got me the background and the family tree of my grandfather dating back to Fellheim in Schwaben.

He made it his business to research all the Jews and their backgrounds and what happened to them in Laupheim.

   Every New Year I get a note from the mayor of Laupheim in the name of the city of Laupheim.

   I have the whole history of the Jews in Laupheim, in detail. Schwaben and Wurttemberg are close geographically and many of the Jews, like Albert Einstein, who was born in Ulm on the Donau, came originally from a place called Buchau.

There were also many Jews living there from way back and somehow some of those Einsteins were related, how I don’t know. I was told by Simon Vogel about this. Originally Simon was training to be a rabbi and he switched over.

He was a very learned man and obviously he got his information from some source and he told this to me . . . Some other relatives who emigrated we have lost contact with. But any close relatives no longer live except those I have already mentioned, from my side of the family. From (my wife) Kate’s side, of course that is another story.

   I might mention that there was a cousin of my father whose name was Willi Levinger who was a lawyer in Munich. He moved to New York and later died there. He never married. His brother Siegfried Levinger, was a doctor, a throat, ears, and nose specialist in Munich who later moved to Palestine to join his son who had moved there before 1933.

Siegfried had a daughter who suffered from a mental disorder. Siegfried died in Palestine.

IN THE U.S.

  When I first got here, in the first few weeks, I tried everything to get work. I went to the employment office in New York, I paid them a few dollars and they asked me if I wanted to become a baker. I said that I would do anything, so they sent me to an old Jewish bakery in Brooklyn.

They wanted me to stay there. Upstairs they had a room, dirty, filthy. I spent only one night there and that was enough. The way they treated me, and what they wanted to pay me — after the second day I said no, I won’t stay here.

That was the end of my plans to become a baker here in the United States. They finished it. Fate. If they would have been nicer and treated me better maybe I would have become a baker. I didn’t care what I was going to do as long as I could make a living.

   Then I entered Kleins on Union Square in New York. I worked in Kleins for almost two years.

   Hanny met Ludwig in Chicago. Ludwig was born in a small town near Frankfurt. He managed to get out earlier, at a time when you could still get money out. He had one brother and one sister. His brother subsequently moved with his family up to Canada.

He died up there. Ludwig’s sister lost her husband — she had married about the same time as I arrived in New York. She later remarried in New York and still lives there.

   Ludwig made his living back then selling linen and tailor supplies. He took them around in a suitcase. He didn’t have a car, so he went by subway to different places. In New York tailoring is very big. A tailor has a wall shop. Most of them were Europeans. They had been tailors by profession from way back before they came to this country.

In New York they did tailoring, and at the same time they did pressing and dry cleaning in their shops. So Ludwig was calling on these people and he asked me, why don’t you do this? I was sick and tired of Kleins, you know picking up dresses and that, and I knew this was no future for me. So I went out a couple of days with supplies in my suitcase and visited those tailors.

   At one of the tailor shops they said that no one was coming around selling the signs that they needed for the windows to advertise what they were doing, cleaning and dry cleaning and tailoring, and so on. Because of the steam, the paper board signs deteriorated fast, and they needed replacements.

So I figured I’d like to see what was going on, so I went to the company that was making the signs and I found out that you could make over 100% by selling them.

But you couldn’t carry them around, you needed a car. So I bought an old car, an old Ford, a model T or something, it cost $200 or so. I put the signs in there and drove around. It was pretty easy, but I worked hard.

   Not long after I met Kate and we decided to get married. We had met in December, and we already had the wedding in March.

   Later Ludwig got signs, a car, and did the same thing that I was doing.

   I had a friend who I met in Kleins. He lived in Astoria. He was also from Germany. He had a nephew who lived in Chicago, and this nephew bought supplies for beauty shops, brushes, aprons, and so on.

And he told this friend of mine, why don’t you buy this and go around to the beauty shops? So he got this stuff, and he went with me because he didn’t have a car. He went to the beauty shops, and I went to the tailor shops.

We went over to New Jersey and other places. Later I put beauty supplies also in my car and I traveled to New England and went to the beauty shops and to the tailor shops and sold this merchandise.

   I knew I was going to be drafted after I got married. The war had broken out, first in Europe, then in the Pacific. It was just a matter of time. I couldn’t make plans. When I was actually called up I sold the car and Ludwig took over the sign business.

   When I came back from the war I knew I wouldn’t go back into the sign business. I took up beauty supplies again with this friend. We sold hair ornaments, until I decided to move to California.

THE WAR

  I was inducted into the service. First there was the physical at Grand Central Station which was the main induction center at that time. After passing the physical I was assigned.

For some reason, I don’t know why, they said I was to go to the Navy CBs. They sent me there even though I was an alien and I know that the Navy throughout its history never took people who were not citizens.

But I was called over to the CBs and I was told to report the next week to the Penn station to be sent to boot camp.

   At that time the CB boot camp was at Camp Perry Virginia. But the train went south to the regular navy base at Newport. I went through boot camp there. I found out that the training had been carried out with people who were on so-called limited assignment because they had some kind of defect that did not qualify them for full shipboard duty.

To serve on a ship you had to be in perfect health. They were later used as replacements for people serving in different naval depots.

   When my assignment came through I was called in to the Naval supply depot in Norfolk, Virginia. That assignment was canceled the next day. I was called up before naval intelligence and questioned about all my ancestors.

They found out that there was a group of six or eight of us who were not citizens, and they found out that they could not use us in the navy for sensitive assignments. So they decided to send us where we should have gone in the first place, the navy construction battalion, the CBs.

   We were sent to Camp Perry, Virginia. When we got there they didn’t know what to do with us, so they sent us through boot camp for the second time. After a short time at Camp Perry, the whole group was sent out to the west coast, the whole battalion with our small group of Germans. We were sent to Camp Shoemaker.

(Dublin, California) A short time afterward a call came through for replacements for the Gilbert Islands. They needed a CB battalion and they selected all of us who were not citizens. They brought us over to the embarkation point at Treasure Island.

We were supposed to go the day after our arrival on the big American troop ship, the former liner America which had been converted to a troop ship. But one of the fellows with us said, “I’m not going overseas, I want to be a citizen first”.

He went to the chaplain who was in charge of the whole port area and told the chaplain what had happened, that we had only gotten as far as we had because we were not citizens. And the chaplain could appreciate that we wanted to be citizens first. So right away they had to call for replacements for our battalion.

We were put on KP duty until all the papers were cleared to make us citizens.

   We made history. We were sworn in at the courthouse in San Francisco. There were photographers there from the navy because it had never happened before in their history that non-citizens were sworn in while serving in the navy.

   Then we went back to the old battalion, which was sent down to Port Huaneme, at the CB base near Oxnard. Since our commander there had pull with the CB high command, instead of moving right away to Hawaii for further training we stayed there one year on all different assignments until we moved out into the Pacific by way of Hawaii.

That was in the beginning of 1945.

   We went to the Leaky Islands which was the staging area for the invasion of Okinawa. Okinawa was already being attacked by the marines and the infantry and ship bombardment before we arrived.

The real assignment for our battalion was on le Shima. The day before we arrived there Ernie Pile was killed (April 18). One of our landing party was killed. It was too dangerous.

For another week we went back and forth trying to land there, but it was too hot. We saw right in front of us the Japanese were all dug in there in the mountain at the center of the island.

   Finally we were able to land on Ie Shima, and we dug in on the beach still under bombardment by kamikaze planes. The island was not secured yet. There were still snipers around and we had to have guards all around the perimeter. And then the big flood came. They were warned. The big rains came at the beginning of May.

The whole camp ended up completely under water. We lost everything. We had to move to higher ground, closer to the mountain which was secured now. We stayed there until the war was over, in October. In November we went back to the States. But in those few months there was a lot of experience.

   In the beginning, the fellows did not believe in bomb shelters. They said, what do we need a shelter for? But I knew how dangerous it was. Then one day, a replacement to our medical staff came through.

While the commander was showing him around the island, during the daytime, a Japanese plane came over and all the guns opened up. This young medical replacement was hit with shrapnel, and they had to amputate his foot. When the word got out about what had happened the guys got wise to it.

   I had built myself a bomb shelter. The fellows around the foxhole said, “we don’t want a bomb shelter, because we don’t need it”. I said to hell with it, I’ll build it myself.

I built one with sandbags. The next time a kamikaze came over and the guns opened up and I wanted to get in the shelter, well it was all full — all those fellows that said we didn’t need a shelter were in there!

   The kamikaze had all the ships around the island real jittery. One day a plane came over the area and they shot it down. It was one of our planes.

   Most of the time these suicide planes came low over the island on their runs. They came from Japan. We were on the northernmost island before Japan, north of Okinawa. One night I was unloading high octane gasoline for the airplanes. The attack alarm rang.

A boat came around putting up a smoke screen — one bullet at the ship we were unloading would have been enough to set it off.

   The first day I landed on the island, I remember that I was on a mission to unload supplies. I was unloading our supply ship. We came under attack, and I dived under the first truck I came to and it turned out that it was loaded with dynamite.

   Most of the natives were killed in the bombardment. The houses where the natives lived were almost all destroyed in the bombardment. Those natives that were left were taken off to Okinawa. These natives lived together with their cattle in the same huts.

I remember the flies on the island were so thick that when you ate your food it got covered with flies, completely covered. Then planes came over spraying the island for the mosquitos. After a time the flies were eliminated because the spraying was so heavy.

  Every night the sky was lit up with the fires from the battle in Okinawa. This was the island where the peace mission later came to from Japan.

   The news of the atom bomb came in September while I was still on le Shima. Then, shortly after the surrender came. The peace mission on their way to McArthur in the Philippines stopped on this island.

They transferred from one of their planes to an American plane. The airfield that they landed on had been built for the fighter planes which accompanied the bombers, the B 29s from Saipan. The B 29s flew over our island and were joined by the fighter planes on their run to Japan. They came over wave upon wave.

There were so many that in my opinion there was no need to drop the atom bomb. This is my firm opinion. The bombing runs went on every day. The Japanese cities at that time were all wooden structures which went up in flames.

I think dropping the bomb over Japan was a terrible mistake.

   When we heard the news of the surrender, naturally everyone was glad it was over.

Interview conducted in San Francisco, September, 1983