The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler. Bruce Henderson
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The next day, Martin took a train to Nuremberg, where he was met by his mother’s sister, Isa Laub. He learned it was Aunt Isa who had secured his release from Dachau; she had sent to the authorities documentation showing he had been accepted to a large, newly formed Jewish refugee camp in England and could emigrate immediately. She told Martin he would be allowed to remain in England until he was able to secure a visa to the United States.
Shortly after his mother’s death in 1936, Martin had applied for a visa to the United States and had begun learning English at a private language institute. The other students were all Jews, who hoped similarly to reach America. With so many wanting to flee Germany, his name was still on a long waiting list for America.
Aunt Isa, who invited Martin to stay with her until he left for England, had some tragic family news. Martin’s father’s brother, Siegfried Selling, a bachelor in his fifties, had been arrested in Nuremberg on Kristallnacht and kept for two days at Gestapo headquarters. There, he had been questioned about his non-Jewish housekeeper, a violation of one of the Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited Jews from employing non-Jews, and badly beaten. When Uncle Siegfried was released, he returned to his apartment and took his own life by hanging. Aunt Isa had also heard about her late sister’s house in Lehrberg being sold. Martin told her about the papers he had been forced to sign in Dachau.
Martin had a picture taken, which showed his telltale concentration camp haircut, and took it to the passport office in Nuremberg. On the visa application form, he wrote his full name, Martin Ignatz Selling, and checked the box for Jude. The passport clerk rejected his form, explaining that under the Nuremberg Laws, his middle name must be recognizable as Jewish. The clerk did not think Ignatz qualified. In the absence of such a middle name, he said, all Jewish males must use “Israel,” and all females “Sarah.”
Martin had not been overly alarmed when the Nuremberg Laws were first enacted in 1935. At the time, he was leading an unobtrusive, simple life working for a Munich tailor, and had no interest in politics. He was terribly wrong, he knew now. These dangerous laws declared Jews and other non-Aryans racially inferior and robbed them of their German citizenship. The laws were designed by the Nazis not only to discriminate against Jews; they were meant to keep the Aryan race pure by outlawing racially mixed marriages between Germans and Jews. Martin had seen the disastrous results of the prejudice and hatred they bred, both in and out of Dachau. He had seen the brutality of the Nazis close up, witnessing innocents being killed for no reason except that they were Jews or other “enemies” whom Hitler and his henchmen considered inferior and undesirable. At Dachau, he had believed he would end up a victim, too. Even though he had been among the lucky ones to make it out of the concentration camp alive, he knew he was still not safe.
The wait to pick up his passport grew nerve-racking as his scheduled departure date inched closer. Less than two weeks before he was to leave, Martin was finally able to pick up his new passport. His name was listed as “Martin Israel Selling,” and there was a big red “J” stamped next to his grim picture. Also stamped on the passport: “Gut nur für Auswanderung!” (Good For Emigration Only!) Martin hurried to the foreign consulates to get visas to transit Belgium and enter England.
In late June 1939, Martin joined a group of eighty German Jews assembled in Cologne by an international relief agency. Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city, spread along both banks of the Rhine less than fifty miles from the border with Belgium. The plan was for the men to travel together in a special passenger rail car attached to an express train, cross into Belgium, and head directly to the coastal city of Ostend, where they would take a ferry across the English Channel to Dover. A bus would then take them to the refugee camp in Kent, England.
But when the train was halted at the border with Belgium, the German authorities ordered that the rail car with the Jews be detached and pushed onto a siding. Soon, it was swarming with Gestapo agents in black leather coats and helmeted SS soldiers, who ordered everyone out. Martin and the other men were taken into a nearby warehouse and subjected to thorough body searches; their luggage was opened and rifled through. While this was happening, the interior of the rail car was checked for hidden contraband.
This went on for close to six hours. At last, they were allowed to reboard, and the rail car was coupled to another train about to depart. Within minutes, they had crossed the border into the lush, rolling countryside of eastern Belgium. Their destination, the port of Ostend, lay three hundred miles to the west.
Only now did Martin allow himself to believe he was out of danger. At the border, he had been dead certain he and the others were about to be taken into custody. Since his arrest on November 10, 1938, he had been trapped in an unending nightmare. His release from Dachau had not relieved the tension and anxiety he felt living in the country he had once thought of as his homeland. But now that he had finally made it out of Nazi Germany, he was both relieved and exhausted.
Mesmerized by the clickety-clacking of the tracks, his body went limp. He fell into a stupor, the deepest sleep he had enjoyed in months. He stayed sprawled across the seat until the conductor gently shook him awake; the man wanted to know, strangely, whether he was all right.
“I am now,” said a groggy Martin, who then went back to sleep.
Growing up in Berlin, Werner Angress often wondered why he was blond and blue eyed and the other Jewish boys were not. And why did he do well in athletics but not academics, like so many of them?
Born in 1920, Werner was the oldest of three boys. His brother Fritz was younger by three years, and Hans by eight. His parents, Ernst and Henny Angress, were third-generation Berliners whose forebears had been bourgeois Prussians. They had married relatively late, at thirty-six and twenty-seven, respectively, and were solidly middle class with little formal education. In other ways, they were a study in contrasts. Henny was outgoing and fun to be around. She loved to give parties, dance the polka, and sing Schubert songs at the grand piano in their apartment. A brunette with dark brown eyes, she was always well dressed and coiffed. In contrast, Ernst was balding and rotund, the managing director of a bank. He favored conservative three-piece suits and was a conscientious businessman who espoused Old World virtues and demanded precise accounting, even of household expenditures. Though he could be upset by something as small as the cost of dinner ingredients, he was incapable of denying his attractive wife a new dress or sweater.
At the same time, he managed to teach his sons the value of money. When Werner was ten years old, he asked what it meant to be Prussian. His father didn’t hesitate. Responsibility, he told his son. Honor. Thrift.
For young Werner, who wanted so much to please his father by striving for those upstanding qualities, meeting them in his schoolwork did not come easily. Though he earned high marks in reading, writing, and gymnastics—even leading his school squad to a regional championship—he earned Ds and Fs in geometry, algebra, physics, and chemistry. In middle school, he was barely promoted to the next grade, and his parents received a letter warning that he would have to repeat eighth grade if his work didn’t improve.
Going to school became even more uncomfortable for Werner after January 30, 1933. On that cold, rainy Monday, he rode his bicycle home past the newsstand at the Botanical Garden train station and saw blaring headlines announcing that Hitler had been appointed chancellor. On the same day, three hundred miles away in the hamlet of Josbach, Manfred Steinfeld was hearing the “wonderful” news from the physician treating his sick grandmother.
When Werner reached the apartment, he was surprised to see his father home early from work. A friend of his father’s was visiting, and both men, along with Werner’s mother, were in the living room, cracking jokes about Hitler.
“Hitler was running back and forth in the state chancery opening all the desk drawers and cabinets,” said Werner’s father. “When asked what he was looking for, Hitler answered, ‘My government program.’ ”
Ernst added confidently, “He won’t last two weeks,” expressing a point of view about Hitler that many Germans held at that time.
His mother said she had heard a good one at the fish store. “Know what a Hitler herring is? You take a herring, remove its brain, tear its mouth wide