SCHENDERLEIN GERMANY ON THEIR MINDS German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 GERMANY ANNE C. SCHENDERLEIN ON THEIR is is a solid, comprehensive study of German Jewish refugees in the United States, especially in Los Angeles and New York. It is probing and judicious. Michael A. Meyer, Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion MINDS THEIR ON GERMANY roughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German MINDS Jews ed their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of World War II and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. is book carefully traces these entangled histories on GERMAN JEWISH REFUGEES both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the IN THE UNITED STATES AND THEIR Allied war e ort to the course of West German democratization. RELATIONSHIPS WITH GERMANY, 19381988 Anne C. Schenderlein is the managing director of the Dahlem Humanities Cen- ter at Freie Universität Berlin. After receiving her doctorate in modern European history at the University of California, San Diego, she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute from 2015 to 2019. Her research has been sup- ported by numerous fellowships, including the Leo Baeck Fellowship and, more recently, a grant from the American Jewish Archives, where she conducted research on American Jewish boycotts and consumption of German products. She is the coeditor, with Paul Lerner and Uwe Spiekermann, of Jewish Consumer Cultures in Europe and America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Cover photographs: Top, Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Los Angeles, by Felix Lipov, Shutterstock. Bottom, Arriving at Stuttgart Airport, © Archiv Aufbau bei der JM Jüdischen Medien AG, Zürich. Scan courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute. JEWISH STUDIES ANNE C. SCHENDERLEIN berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com Germany on Their Minds This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. Studies in German History Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC General Editor: Simone Lässig, Director of the German Historical Institute, Washington DC, with the assistance of Patricia C. Sutcliffe, Editor, German Historical Institute Recent volumes: Volume 25 Germany on Their Minds: German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 Anne C. Schenderlein Volume 24 The World of Children: Foreign Cultures in Nineteenth-Century German Education and Entertainment Edited by Simone Lässig and Andreas Weiß Volume 23 Gustav Stresemann: The Crossover Artist Karl Heinrich Pohl Translated by Christine Brocks, with the assistance of Patricia C. Sutcliffe Volume 22 Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I Edited by Hartmut Berghoff, Frank Biess, and Ulrike Strasser Volume 21 The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History Edited by Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann Volume 20 The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians Edited by Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, and James J. Sheehan Volume 19 Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany Frank Usbeck Volume 18 The Respectable Career of Fritz K. The Making and Remaking of a Provincial Nazi Leader Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh Translated by Casey Butterfield Volume 17 Encounters with Modernity: The Catholic Church in West Germany, 1945–1975 Benjamin Ziemann Volume 16 Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany Edited by Richard F. Wetzell For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/studies-in-german-history This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. GERMANY ON THEIR MINDS German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 S Anne C. Schenderlein berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 by Anne C. Schenderlein Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schenderlein, Anne C., author. Title: Germany on their Minds: German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 / Anne C. Schenderlein. Description: New York: Berghahn Books, [2020] | Series: Studies in German History; volume 25 | Revised dissertation (Ph. D.), University of California (San Diego), 2014. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019033017 (print) | LCCN 2019033018 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789200058 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789200065 (open access ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jews, German--United States--Social conditions--20th century. | Jews, German--United States--Foreign influences. | Jewish refugees--United States--History--20th century. | World War, 1939-1945--Refugees--United States. | Germany (West)--Foreign relations--United States. | United States--Foreign relations--Germany (West) Classification: LCC E184.354 .S34 2020 (print) | LCC E184.354 (ebook) | DDC 327.73043--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033017 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033018 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-005-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-006-5 open-access ebook An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at knowledgeunlatched.org. This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivatives 4.0 International License. The terms of the license can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. For uses beyond those covered in the license, contact Berghahn Books. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Background 10 Chapter 2. Americanization before 1941 22 Chapter 3. The Enemy Alien Classification, 1941–1944 53 Chapter 4. German Jewish Refugees in the U.S. Military 81 Chapter 5. German Jewish Refugees and the Wartime Discourse on Germany’s Future, 1942–1945 108 Chapter 6. German Jewish Refugees and the West German Foreign Office in the 1950s and 1960s 133 Chapter 7. German Jewish Refugee Travel to Germany and West German Municipal Visitor Programs 163 Conclusion 212 Bibliography 218 Index 237 – v – This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book was written intermittently, over many years and in many places. Numerous individuals and institutions in Los Angeles; San Diego; Washington, DC; and Berlin supported me throughout this project in various ways. I am grateful for the opportunity to thank them here. My first thanks go to my mentors and teachers, to Michael Meyer in Los Angeles, who introduced me to the Jewish Club of 1933, Inc., and the Los Angeles community of German Jewish refugees, and to Frank Biess, Hasia Diner, and Deborah Hertz. I am particularly indebted to Hasia Diner for suggesting the title and for allowing me to use it for this work. Many other scholars contributed to this project, offering advice through con- versations at different stages, opportunities to present my work in their collo- quia, and thoughtful editing help. I am grateful to Michael Berkowitz, Michael Brenner, Judith Gerson, Atina Grossmann, Marion Kaplan, Paul Lerner, Michael A. Meyer, and Cornelia Wilhelm, as well as to three anonymous reviewers. I am greatly indebted to the University of California, San Diego, especially the Department of History and the Judaic Studies Program, for funding my research and writing. Much of my research travel was funded by grants from the Institute for International Comparative and Area Studies at UC San Diego, the UC California Studies Consortium and the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Institute for European Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The New York Leo Baeck Institute’s Fritz Halbers Fellowship allowed me to spend several months in New York for archival research. The Leo Baeck Fellowship, funded by the Leo Baeck Institute London and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, provided me with a year of generous sup- port and rewarding intellectual exchange, especially during discussions with my colleagues in the program’s workshops, which were led by Raphael Gross and Daniel Wildmann. I have also benefited from the insight of the participants of the workshop “Experiences of Modern European Jews: National, Transnational, and Comparative Perspective” at NYU’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and that of the participants of the Institute of Historical Research’s Jewish History Seminar at the University of London.