The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

from academic institutions and who only had bleakness on their horizons. 49 Minister of
Propaganda Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary entry of March 23, 1938 that increasing
numbers of Jews were taking their lives in the Austrian capital. “Previously,” he
claimed, “Germans committed suicide. Now it is the other way round.” 50
Goebbels
declared before an Austrian crowd of 25,000, that it was impossible for the authorities to
“protect every Viennese Jew with a special policeman” to prevent suicide from
occurring. 51
Putting it more clearly into human terms it was reported from Vienna that the
suicide of a Jewish eighteen-year-old musician, Gertrude Wolkner, marked the extinction
of three generations; her entire twenty two member family. All had taken their own lives
with the exception of a brother who died in a concentration camp. Prior to ending her
short and unfilled existence Gertrude left a message requesting that a single grave marker
be placed over the burials of all of the fallen Wolkners. 52 Suicides were not limited to
Germany or Austria. Liesel Wolfe, a thirty seven year old woman from Germany, leapt
to her death from a window on the fifth floor of the Do Hirsch Residence Hall for Young
Women in New York. Unable to provide immigration authorities proof that she would
not become a public charge she was due to be deported back to the Reich on the
following day. 53
49 Jewish Criterion, April 8, 1938, 4. Sources within Germany “reliably reported Jewish suicides are still
averaging 25 daily,” The Sentinel, April 7, 1938, 33.
50 Christian Goeschel, Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 100-101.
51 Time, April 11, 1938, 19.
52 “Young Girl’s Death Reveals 22 Suicides in One Family,” The Southern Israelite, July 1, 1938, 2.
53 “German Woman Jumps from Fifth Floor,” The Southern Israelite, June 10, 1938, 3.
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