Roads to Safety for German-Jewish Refugees

AFTER THE RISE OF THE NAZI REGIME, life in Germany became difficult for citizens of Jewish heritage. Some Jews, like my father, fled immediately after Hitler came to power. Others, like my grandmother, waited, trying to accommodate their lives to the new reality. As conditions for Jews became increasingly dangerous in the Third Reich, emigration escalated. Over the eight and a half prewar years, three main waves of Jewish emigrants left Germany: the first right after the Nazi party came to power, the second after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, and the third wave after the Kristallnacht violence.

A Relatively Easy Process (1933-1934)

In the months that followed Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933, thousands of Jews left Germany.

Most often, these were people who felt strongly that they would never have a safe place in the new regime. They included outspoken critics who feared retaliation and artists (writers, painters, actors) whose work was now considered decadent or subversive, as well as Zionists and Communists. Included among the early emigrees were young Jews, like my father, who suddenly found themselves barred from attending university and thus saw no viable future for education or a career in Nazi Germany.

In the early years, leaving Germany and finding a haven somewhere else was not much more difficult than it had been since World War I. Most countries had some kind of immigration laws and procedures that needed to be followed to get a visa. However, the lower rate of applications, compared to later years (1935 to 1940), made the process comparatively fast. Equally important, German exit taxes for Jews had not yet risen to the astronomical heights they reached a few years later.

Many German Jews who left Germany in 1933 and 1934 remained in Europe, moving to neighboring countries like the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, only to find themselves caught later in German-held territory after WWII started. But the United States was always the dream destination for young people like my father who had ambition and a sense of adventure.

The visa requirements for the United States were strict and complicated. They included registering for a visa, getting a financial sponsor in America, securing documents from local German authorities, sitting for an interview at the American Consulate, and securing passage to the U.S. All of this was relatively easy for my father with the support of his wealthy family and relatives already living in America. The process was accomplished in just over a year.

My father’s passport (Reisepass), issued to Friedel Max Lang, has no stamp that identifies him as Jewish. He received his U.S. visa on June 15, 1934, and a month later, on July 16, he landed in New York. From there he traveled to Chicago, where the uncles who had signed his financial affidavit lived. Friedel, who immediately adopted the more American name of Fred, attended a couple of evening classes at the Chicago Institute of Art, studied English at the Berlitz school, and worked days in customer service at his uncle’s mail-order firm. Through it all, he dreamed of going west, and a year later he was there, starting over again as an unemployed immigrant in California.

A Road to Safety for Young Women: The British Domestic Service Visa.

My aunt Edith became part of the next wave of Jews who finally had enough of the Third Reich. Faced with the criminalization of her love for an Aryan man, Edith refused to remain in Germany.

The Nuremberg Laws of September of 1935 set off the second mass exodus of Jews from the German Reich. These Draconian laws cancelled Jewish citizenship and forbade relationships between Jews and non-Jews. Most frightening, they included a detailed definition of who was considered a Jew. Three Jewish grandparents earmarked anyone as Jewish, and Edith had four such grandparents.

Luckily, she had prepared herself for emigration. After gymnasium (the German equivalent of high school), she attended a domestic school where she studied cooking, sewing, and household accounting. Later she earned a certificate in dressmaking and worked as a nanny. Edith was a perfect candidate for the British Domestic Service Visa. All she had to do was find a job in England.

In the modern economy between the wars, young Englishwomen from the country moved to the cities to find jobs that offered a better wage and more autonomy than the life of a servant. This created a shortage of domestic help in England. The UK’s Domestic Service visa was meant to help British families find maids and cooks. Though not intended to relieve the refugee crisis, it became a lifeline for many German-Jewish women.

Between 1933 and 1940, approximately 20,000 women, mostly Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, used this visa to escape discrimination in their homelands. Mainly an avenue for healthy, single women under the age of forty-five, few men received the visa.

The Domestic Service Visa was strictly administered by the British Home Office, which oversaw immigration and passports.

To hire a foreign national, the employer had to apply for a permit from the Ministry of Labor. They were required to offer room, board, and a fair wage. The employee was required to live with and work directly under the person who secured the permit, and, in order to switch jobs, the immigrant needed permission from the Home Office.

Many of the women who came to England on a Domestic Service Visa were middle- and upper-class women who had no experience in domestic service. Some had employed maids and cooks of their own and had never needed to lift a broom or a saucepan. Now they were cast into the servant class in a new environment, living in attic rooms, wearing uniforms, and scrubbing and cleaning. In Germany and Britain, Jewish agencies set up classes to teach these newly minted servants the skills of English cooking and housecleaning.

Edith, who had already been trained in these areas, was luckier than many. When she arrived in London at the age of twenty, she found her employer to be kind and her duties as an au pair pleasant. Her biggest struggle was perfecting her English. She spent hours listening to the BBC, copying the speech of the radio announcers. When her first employer no longer needed her, Edith got permission to change jobs. She moved up to a better-paying position as a housekeeper and received permission to live on her own in an apartment. When Edith fell in love with an Englishman, her marriage improved her situation even further.

English law was, in essence, patrimonial. Thus, when Edith married George Collett, a British citizen, her resident alien status ended. She was instantly declared a British citizen. No longer bound by her Domestic Service Visa, she did not have to apply for naturalization or wait out a residency rule. Best of all, with a British passport, Edith could, in relative safety, travel to visit her mother in Germany, even after the violent events of Kristallnacht.

During a visit in the early spring of 1939, Edith and her husband pled with Clara (my grandmother) to leave Germany and join them in London while she still could.

A Last Chance for Some: The UK Transit Visa

The third and most frantic Jewish exodus began after the November 1938 violence of Kristallnacht. When the broken glass had been swept from the streets, my uncle Herman knew it was time for him to leave his homeland. His mother, my grandmother Clara, finally fled six months later, only weeks before World War II began.

By now conditions for leaving Germany were fraught. Jewish passports were stamped with a large red J, and the Jewish names of Sara or Israel were added to the documents. The paperwork for a German exit visa was prohibitive, and bank accounts were frozen. German exit taxes stood at 95% of a Jew’s net worth, and the amount of money an emigrant could take out of Germany had fallen to 10 RM (about $5 with less purchasing power than $100 in 2026). Many countries had closed their doors to more immigrants, and those that still accepted refugees had strict, heavily impacted quotas that resulted in long waiting lists. The waiting period for a US immigration visa stretched into years.

For any Jew still in Germany in 1939, the chances of escaping were bleak. Still, Herman and Clara made it out of the Third Reich because they possessed two things many others did not—relatives who were British citizens and a UK Transit Visa.

Before 1938, travelers on a German passport did not require a visa of any kind to travel to the UK. But after Hitler annexed Austria, the British Home Office initiated tight restrictions for entry from Germany. However, they also established a travel document known as a Transit Visa.

The Transit Visa allowed refugees to pass through the United Kingdom on their way to another country. It was strictly governed and only allowed the holder to stay in the UK until such time as they could travel onward. Many who used the Transit Visa to enter were Jews on the long waiting list for a U.S. immigration visa. While in Britain, the holder of a Transit Visa needed a financial sponsor, must register their address with the local police, and was forbidden to seek employment.

Herman and Clara, both in the UK on Transit Visas, were also on the official US waiting list. They knew they would have to leave as soon as their American visa was issued. Herman’s US visa came through in November of 1939. He went first to the Chicago relatives, then followed his older brother to California. In 1941, Herman was drafted into the U.S. Army, applied for expedited citizenship, and was trained as an intelligence officer and interrogator.

My grandmother Clara’s US visa took much longer. For five years she lived as an enemy alien in wartime London. Surrounded by the love and warmth of her daughter’s growing family, Clara experienced the dangers of the Blitz and the deprivations of wartime rationing. She cared for her two young grandchildren while their mother worked and her son-in-law fought in Normandy and North Africa.

In September of 1943, in the middle of the war, as Clara was beginning to feel almost English, her US visa arrived. She had no choice but to leave England. She was fifty-five years old, and once again, she would have to leave her home and start a new life. Tearfully, she said goodbye to her daughter and the grandchildren she had cared for since their birth and journeyed across the U-boat-infested North Atlantic to America. Clara arrived in California, where a daughter-in-law she had never met and two equally unknown granddaughters waited.

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During the pre-war years of upheaval and mass refugee movement, while Jews fled Germany, Britain’s record for taking in immigrants was commendable.

Between 1933 and through the war years, with the aid of the Domestic Service Visa and the Transit Visa, Britain sheltered approximately 80,000 Jewish refugees. According to statistics, Great Britain took in the second largest number of refugees during this period, falling short only compared to the United States. This record is even more impressive when one remembers that during WWII, England was an island fighting for its very existence against the Nazi juggernaut.