Shortly after his Bar Mitzvah in Berlin’s Kaiserstrasse synagogue on May 1, 1926, Norbert Wollheim became a member of the German-Jewish Youth Community (DJJG; Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendgemeinschaft), a non-Zionist group that was part of the Jewish youth movement in Germany. The focal point of the youth movement was engagement with cultural and philosophical issues. In this process, the DJJG, founded in 1922, sought to organize Jewish life in Germany as part of German cultural life; in the words of one of its founders, Martin Sobotker, it saw itself as “the source of the duality of Germanness and Jewishness.”[1] In these years, Norbert Wollheim was influenced by the writings of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig  a , but hiking in the countryside and commitment to social causes also were central aspects of the youth movement in his life.

The fundamental conviction that it is important to be involved in social causes and help those who are less fortunate than oneself was something Norbert Wollheim acquired at home. His father, Moritz Wollheim, was active in charitable organizations in Berlin’s Jewish community, especially in helping East European Jews in economically precarious circumstances, as well as the Jewish veterans of World War I. Norbert’s mother, Elsa Wollheim, also was involved in charitable organizations.

The teamwork with close friends in the DJJG had a decisive influence on Norbert Wollheim’s later life, and “out of this grew friendships that lasted over the years and even when we were all separated and people went to different countries, it bridged even oceans and countries.”[2] In 1931, Norbert Wollheim, like some of his friends from the youth movement, took up the study of law at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. In these years, the DJJG had begun to work together with the Central Association (CV; Central-Verein), not only in social activities, but also in campaigns against the growing anti-Semitism. At the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, the increasing strength of the National Socialists was more and more in evidence; they disrupted and prevented lectures by professors whom they considered Jewish or viewed as political adversaries, and threatened students. Norbert Wollheim did not know of a single non-Jewish professor who offered any opposition to this.  b  Under these circumstances, continuing his law studies no longer made sense to him, and he quit the program in early 1933.

Now Norbert Wollheim intensified his work in the youth movement and for the social services  of the Jewish Community of Berlin. After the Reichstag fire during the night of February 27, 1933, reprisals against Jews began to mount. The Central Association sent out helpers to visit Jewish families who had been attacked by Nazis. They were supposed to assist them, as well as to find out whether anyone had been taken away and what else had happened. One of these helpers was Norbert Wollheim.

Norbert Wollheim’s close friend Martin Sobotker was director of the Youth Care and Youth Welfare Department of the Jewish Community of Berlin in the years 1933–1939, and in summer 1933 he suggested organizing holiday trips to Denmark and Sweden for Jewish children, as such recreation was already banned in Germany. Norbert Wollheim picked up on the idea and was one of the escorts for the first youth group, which traveled to Denmark and Sweden in summer 1933. There they were warmly welcomed by the local Jewish communities.  c  In the summers of 1934 and 1935, too, Norbert Wollheim escorted Jewish children on holiday to Horserød in Denmark; in his effects, photo albums of these excursions have been preserved.

In December 1933, the DJJG joined with other non-Zionist groups—the Hamburg German-Jewish Youth, the Jewish Youth and Children’s Groups of Berlin, the Jewish Liberal Youth Association, and the CV youth groups—to form the Ring, Federation of German-Jewish Youth (BDJJ; Ring, Bund deutsch-jüdischer Jugend). Norbert Wollheim became the secretary of the BDJJ; he also traveled to relatively small towns as a speaker, to lend moral support there. As of 1935, emigration was a increasingly urgent concern of the BDJJ and its members. Norbert Wollheim started working in a company that dealt in iron and manganese ore in 1935, in the hope that resulting contacts in other countries could be helpful with emigration.  d  In early 1936, the BDJJ, now required to call itself the Ring, Federation of Jewish Youth (Ring, Bund der jüdischen Jugend) because the use of the word “German” in its name had been prohibited by the Gestapo, initiated the founding of an agricultural training center for would-be emigrants in Gross-Breesen in Silesia. It was established by the Reich Deputation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung deutscher Juden) in May 1936. Here, young people were to be prepared for immigration to countries other than Palestine. Preparation for immigration to Palestine, which was severely limited by the restrictive policy of the British Mandate Authority in any event, was handled by the Hachshara, part of the Zionist youth movement. From Gross-Breesen, young Jews later were able to immigrate to Australia, South America, Kenya, and the United States. Gross-Breesen existed until late 1941; the last head of the training facility, Walter Bernstein, was later deported to the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp and murdered there in November/December 1943.

In early 1937, the Ring, Federation of Jewish Youth was banned, but activities of the youth movement continued secretly, disguised as private meetings. Norbert Wollheim took part in them, as well as in public Jewish cultural life.  e  In September 1938, the company where Wollheim worked was “Aryanized” and all the Jewish employees were fired on the spot. Norbert Wollheim took a course to become a welder, as he hoped that a practical occupation would help him immigrate and build a life in another country. At the same time, he became more active again in the social work of the Jewish Community of Berlin, because Sobotker was recruiting helpers from the youth movement in 1935 to support Polish Jews who had been expelled from Germany and taken by the Gestapo via Berlin to the Polish border. This work dovetailed with the assistance of Jewish men who had been arrested by the Gestapo on November 9 and 10, 1938, and carried off to the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. Some of them were released in the following days and weeks. The helpers picked them up at the train station, provided them with clothing and food, contacted their families, and made sure they could get back home.

In the midst of this work, they received a call from Otto Hirsch in the Reich Confederation (formerly the Reich Deputation), saying that Great Britain was willing to take in Jewish children as refugees. Norbert Wollheim and others from the youth movement started to organize the Kindertransporte.

(MN; transl. KL)

Sources

Norbert Wollheim, Interview with Nikolaus Creutzfeldt [Eng.], New York 1986–88 (Heinlyn Productions; produced by Leslie C. Wolf). Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, transcript.

Norbert Wollheim, First Interview [Eng.], May 10, 1991. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, transcript.

Wollheim, Norbert: “Die Mitarbeit der Jugend in der Gemeinde.” In: Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 23 (September 1933), No. 9,  pp. 284–285.

Wollheim, Norbert: “Die Jugendarbeit der Gemeinde.” In: Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für Berlin 27, No. 51, December 19, 1937, p. 5.

Literature

Angress, Werner T.: “Auswandererlehrgut Gross-Breesen.” In: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 10 (1965), pp. 168–187.

Meier-Cronemeyer, Hermann: “Jüdische Jugendbewegung.” In: Germania Judaica 8 (1969), pp. 1–122.

Trefz, Bernhard: Jugendbewegung und Juden in Deutschland. Eine historische Untersuchung mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Deutsch-Jüdischen Wanderbundes “Kameraden.” Frankfurt am Main et al.: Lang, 1999.

[1] Martin Sobotker: “Die Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendgemeinschaft.” In: Von Deutsch-Jüdischer Jugend 1 (September 1925), No. 18, p. II, quoted in Bernhard Trefz: Jugendbewegung und Juden in Deutschland. Eine historische Untersuchung mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Deutsch-Jüdischen Wanderbundes “Kameraden” (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Lang, 1999), p. 88. (Translated by KL)