Marcel Krueger on Hertha Nathorff and Berlin’s Kindertransport program…
At six in the morning we brought our boy to Schlesisches Tor to be taken on the Kindertransport to England. How horrifying it was! […] And the people I met there this morning! A colleague in deep mourning – her husband died three days after being released from the concentration camp. She is sending her boy away. A patient of mine brings her little four-year-old daughter…
—Hertha Nathorff, Diary, March 2, 1939
When exiting Friedrichstraße S-Bahn station from its southern side, it’s hard to miss the large bronze monument at the intersection of Georgenstraße and Friedrichstraße: On a stone pedestal resembling a small perron stand two groups of children, numbering seven all together.
Two of them, a boy and a small girl, seemingly made from a lighter, more reddish tone of bronze, face towards the west with smiling faces. He is carrying a fully packed suitcase; she has a teddy bear in her arms and a school satchel over her shoulder. On the other side of the monument stand the other five: two tall girls and three smaller boys, all set in darker bronze and facing the east; behind them lies a pile of discarded, empty suitcases.
This monument is called “Züge in das Leben – Züge in den Tod; trains to death – trains to life 1938–1939”, and was created by German-British-Israeli sculptor and architect Frank Meisler (who died in 2018). It was erected here in 2008 as a memorial to the years when the station served as a starting point for the capital’s Kinderstransporte program.
During the night of November 9th, 1938, almost 100 Jews were killed and hundreds more injured, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned, almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, cemeteries and schools vandalised. Around 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps (in Berlin, around 3,000 Jewish men were deported to Sachsenhausen and many more were detained in jails for days).
Jewish areas like Ku’damm and Alexanderplatz were trashed, all part of a nationwide pogrom organised by the Nazi leadership and executed by local SA gangs. The pretext for this murderous rampage was the killing of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on November 7th, by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew, in Paris.
The pogrom was a turning point in Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews in that it moved from a policy of economic, political, and social exclusion to one that included physical violence and murder. It also marked a turning point in the international reaction to the persecution of Jews in Germany and Austria, annexed by Hitler in March 1938—especially in the United Kingdom.
The international reaction to the increasingly disastrous pligh…