Latest news with #GermanJews
DW
09-07-2025
- Politics
- DW
Trump's attack on citizenship by birth echoes Nazi Germany? – DW – 07/09/2025
Donald Trump wants to take citizenship away from the US-born children of temporary or undocumented immigrants. Did something similar happen to German Jews under the Nazis? When incoming US president Donald Trump moved to revoke birthright citizenship, stripping people born in the country of their US nationality if their parents are non-citizen immigrants, some saw echoes of Nazi Germany. However Germany, a nation formed in 1871 from diverse independent states, never gave automatic citizenship to those born in the country. Citizenship was ruled by the right of blood, based on the idea that German nationality was inherited, meaning one or two parents had to be German. Yet citizen rights did not depend on race and religion. Some 400,000 Jews in the country, or 80% of the population, held German citizenship when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. And foreigners were able to become citizens after remaining for 15 years in Germany. But this changed soon after the Nazis came to power. The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 revoked the the citizenship and basic rights of German Jewish people. The statute was soon expanded to make Roma and Black people stateless. But is Trump's attempt to strip citizenship from US Americans whose parents were temporary or undocumented residents really comparable? Birthright citizenship was enshrined in the US constitution in 1868 by Republicans whom, after the civil war, wanted to give citizen rights to formerly enslaved African-Americans. The resulting 14th Amendment has become a defining symbol of a tolerant, multi-racial society — explaining why US states have successfully sued to block Trump's executive order that seeks to revoke the law. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video "We are the only country in the world that does this with the birthright, as you know, and it's just absolutely ridiculous," said Trump when signing the order. The fact-checking website Politifact said the president's claim was false. It noted that numerous countries in the Americas from Brazil to Argentina enshrined birthright citizenship; partly since they are former colonies that wanted to attract new citizens with lenient naturalization laws. According to World Population Review, 35 countries in the world automatically give citizenship to people born there, irrespective of their parents' residency status. Germany's birthright citizenship, for example, is restricted. Canada and the US are the two only countries with unrestricted birthright citizenship that are also in the top 20 economies. "Citizenship stripping is, of course, a hallmark of authoritarianism," said Jamie Raskin, a US congressman from the Democratic party, during a committee debate on 14th Amendment in February. He referred to the "Reich Citizenship Law," a subsection of the Nuremberg Laws that revoked both citizenship and civil rights for German Jews in 1935 — a move soon introduced in other fascist states like Italy under Mussolini's rule. "To this day, authoritarian countries deprive people of citizenship to punish them for political activism or dissent," the lawmaker added. Preserving the sanctity of citizenship by birth was something that made the US unique, he said. "Privileges of citizenship are shared by all people born in our country, not just people who fall within a certain hereditary classification by race or national origin." In recent years, Germany has updated its naturalization laws to make it easier for people born in the country to non-citizen parents to become German citizens. But now that Germany's new conservative government wants to tighten immigration rules — with the controversial support of the far-right AfD party — Chancellor Friedrich Merz also wants to reintroduce citizenship restrictions. Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court decided in June that the temporary injunction prohibiting the administration from scrapping birthright citizenship was unlawful. That said, the court is yet to rule on the merits of Trump's attempt to revoke a core tenant of the constitution. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The ugly truth of Trump's America first agenda
The United States became the undisputed leader of the "free world" after World War II for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important was the fact that so many of the most renowned scientists who had been displaced during the war came to America. This was especially true of German Jews and some of their comrades who were chased out of Germany when the Nazis took power. It was a massive brain drain that hobbled the German war effort and benefited the Allies greatly. As reported in the book "Hitler's Gift" by Jean Medawar and David Pyke, Germany had long been the acknowledged world leader in the hard sciences. Between 1901 and 1933, it had won a full one-third of all the Nobel Prizes. Between 1933 and 1960, it won only eight. According to the book, 'some 2600 scientists and other scholars left Germany within the first year [alone], the vast majority of them Jewish. Twenty-five per cent of all physicists were lost from German universities in an insane squandering of talent.' Almost all of them emigrated to the United States and the U.K., winning a vast number of Nobel prizes in the ensuing years. They included such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, Hans Bethe and Stanisław Ulam among many others. This ended up being Hitler's gift to America which spent the next 90 years welcoming the very best minds from around the world to study here and do the research that made the U.S the world's leader in physics, medicine, chemistry and economics which has led to the astonishing innovations such as this contraption you're reading this on right now. The alliance between the federal government and the great American research universities is one of the most successful public-private partnerships in history. The parallels between what happened to Germany's scientific community and what is happening here isn't perfect, but it's close enough. The Trump administration has embarked on a concerted effort to end America's role as a world leader in science and innovation. They aren't singling out Jewish scholars, although plenty of Jews will be caught up in it. They are instead using a blunderbuss to blast the whole system by targeting foreign students for deportation and defunding the research that will lead to the breakthroughs of the future. There is no logical reason for any of this. Their reasons change day to day. One day it's because the research is "DEI" which simply means we have no need to understand anything about diverse populations. Another day it's withholding money for universities allegedly because of antisemitism and revoking Harvard University's right (and probably others in the future) to enroll foreign students. Now we've gone into full red scare McCarthyism toward Chinese students and scientists. Listen to the Secretary of Homeland Security speak about it over the weekend: That's just ignorant smearing by someone who doesn't even know what habeas corpus is. But it's a problem since our secretary of state has just announced that he will 'aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students." There are over a quarter of a million of them studying in the country as well as other Chinese and Chinese-American researchers who are very heavily represented in the scientific fields. They are now being hunted, apparently because our government doesn't value scientific innovation and wants them to go elsewhere to share their talents and ambition. According to the American Association of Universities: [A] recent brief from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) found that the NIH has canceled $1.9 billion in funding across hundreds of grants over the past few months. 'This year's terminations of biomedical research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health are unprecedented in the history of the agency,' stated AAMC in the brief. Every day, there are stories of researchers seeing their life's work being capriciously destroyed without any thought or consideration for the value they bring to the country's economic and social well-being. Foreign scientists working in the country are harassed by ignorant customs officials and, in some cases, thrown in prison on spurious grounds. It's impossible not to see this as another example of an authoritarian government purging the country of its finest minds simply as a way of exerting control. To make matters even worse, we seem to be also intent upon replacing our scientific community with woo-wellness influencers and conspiracy cranks, led by none other than the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr. It's a lethal one-two punch. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is eagerly anticipating that they will reap the benefits of "Trump's Gift." According to Politico, he has sparked Europe's "New Enlightenment." European universities and top politicians have mobilized in response to Trump's domestic measures, creating new initiatives aimed at attracting top foreign talent to Europe by offering generous grants and greater academic freedom. Earlier this month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled a €500 million plan named 'Choose Europe for Science' aiming to lure foreign researchers to the EU.[...] The Commission last month announced plans to accelerate visa procedures to attract U.S. researchers and EU research ministers met in Brussels on May 23 to discuss how to increase Europe's competitiveness in science and innovation. China and India are also stepping up efforts to lure foreign talent and keep their own at home. All of this is going to affect not just the cutting-edge medical advances, but it's also going to affect U.S. business competitiveness and the jobs of the future. The dynamism of the American economy has been the envy of the world for decades, but we are throwing away the very engine that drives it. But then, the Trump administration keeps insisting that Americans yearn to work in factories and eschew material things in order to engage in more spiritual pursuits, so perhaps our future really lies with supplying the rest of the world with consumer goods while they engage in the services and investing that made America wealthy in recent years. In some ways, it's odd that Trump would go along with all this. He's always been a big admirer of the MIT big brains like his uncle, who taught there (which he often uses as validation of his own alleged genius), and he went to Penn as did Don Jr., Ivanka and Tiffany, and it's an Ivy League school. But then he does have tremendous status envy, which was exacerbated during the pandemic when he commonly made a fool of himself with his attempts to discuss serious scientific subjects. And he certainly senses how much his followers loathe the intellectual elite. At this point, the battle with Harvard is simply a battle of wills. He wants to see them crawl. Whether they do or not, much of the damage is already done. The top scientific talent from around the world is already seeking opportunity elsewhere and they are being offered plenty of incentives. It's only a matter of time before American talent does the same because they won't have the support or the resources to do their work here anymore. It's a hell of a "gift" to the rest of the world. So much for America first.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
German president recalls hostages' plight on visit to kibbutz Be'eri
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has pledged further assistance to Israel to free the hostages still held in the Gaza Strip, as he paid a visit to kibbutz Be'eri, one of the Israeli communities ravaged during the October 7 attack. "Their fate is an open wound," Steinmeier said of the 58 hostages still being held by Palestinian extremist group Hamas in Gaza. "Germany will not forget them, I will not forget them. Our voice will not be silent as long as they have not returned." The German president also noted the suffering of the civilian population in the war-torn Gaza Strip, which Israel has cut off from humanitarian aid for more than two months. Kibbutz Be'eri is located some 4 kilometres from the Gaza Strip. Some 130 of the community's 1,300 inhabitants were killed when Hamas-led militants launched their unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. More than 50 people from the kibbutz were abducted to the Gaza Strip that day. In total, over 1,200 people were killed and some 240 taken hostage to Gaza during the attacks, with 58 still believed to be held in the coastal area, including the bodies of six people from Be'eri. Steinmeier was joined by Israeli President Isaac Herzog and their wives, Elke Büdenbender and Michal Herzog, in commemorating the victims of the attack. Germany is providing financial support to aid the reconstruction of kibbutz Be'eri, co-founded by German Jews. Berlin is providing some €7 million ($7.8 million) for a new cultural and community centre set to be build at the site of a former art gallery that was destroyed in the attack. Herzog said: "The fact that we are rebuilding this building as a place of the spirit gives us hope." Steinmeier was in Israel for a second day as the two countries mark 60 years of diplomatic relations. To celebrate the historic milestone, Herzog visited Berlin on Monday.
Wall Street Journal
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Eminent Jews' Review: Pushing the Boundaries
The title 'Eminent Jews' naturally evokes 'Eminent Victorians,' Lytton Strachey's takedown of Victorian culture through crushing biographical essays on Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and Charles George Gordon. Unlike the Strachey volume, David Denby's 'Eminent Jews' has been written not to crush but to celebrate Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein. The celebration does not come off. Mr. Denby hopes his book will exhibit 'a composite picture of the ideology and practice of postwar Jewish cultural achievement.' Yet even though Mr. Denby is himself Jewish, his 'Eminent Jews' could as easily be read as promoting antisemitic stereotypes—the book's cover features the prominent, or as I think of them the chosen, noses of its four subjects—emphasizing as it does Jews who specialized in vulgarity (Mel Brooks), intractable leftism (Betty Friedan), relentless self-promotion (Norman Mailer) and flamboyant egotism (Leonard Bernstein). Not, any of this, likely to bring much pleasure in the offices of the Anti-Defamation League. All four of Mr. Denby's subjects were ostjuden, or Eastern European Jews, and thus Ashkenazi. Eastern European Jews, who came to the U.S. in profusion in the last two decades of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th centuries, were once viewed in contrast to the more determinedly assimilationist German Jews, whom the Eastern European Jews called yekkes—Yiddish for jackets—denoting the formality of the German Jews in never removing their suit jackets. A joke of the time asked, 'What is the difference between a yekke and a virgin? The answer: A yekke remains a yekke.' Mr. Denby devotes roughly 80 pages to each of his four subjects. He begins with Mel Brooks, whose specialty was to go up to the line of bad taste—and cross it. For Mr. Denby, Mr. Brooks 'was a more complicated Jewish clown than the world was ready to acknowledge' and 'a significant figure in Jewish history.' At one point he compares Mr. Brooks to Franz Kafka. Informed of the comparison, one imagines Kafka, not a man given to mirth, would have enjoyed a hardy, falling-off-the-couch laugh.
New York Times
17-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
They Asked for Help to Escape the Nazis. Their Pleas Went Unanswered.
In late November 1939, when life for many Jews in Europe was dissolving, Jakob Aufrichtig in Paris penned a letter to the Committee for Jewish Refugees in Amsterdam. He was gravely concerned about his mother, Rachela, who was in her 50s and living alone in Vienna. German officials had ordered her to vacate her apartment, threatening to deport her to Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp, if she didn't. Aufrichtig asked the committee for its help in relocating her to the Netherlands. 'Although it is my greatest wish, I cannot bring her here,' Aufrichtig explained. 'I am totally desperate, and if I can't save my mother, I will take my own life. The frantic efforts of terrified Jews in Germany, Austria and other parts of Europe trying to escape persecution filled letter after letter that came in to the committee. Thousands of German Jews had already emigrated to the Netherlands, the closest safe neighboring country after Adolf Hitler's election as German Chancellor in 1933. Among them were Otto and Edith Frank, and their daughters, Margot and Anne Frank. But after May 1938, requests for entry to the Netherlands would be rejected because the country had already closed its borders to refugees. 'If you look at the results of this heartless policy, they are terrifying,' said Emile Schrijver, director of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam. Aufrichtig's letter is one of some 200 anguished, and ultimately unsuccessful, requests for help that were found in an Amsterdam attic more than four decades ago by a Dutch-Israeli documentary filmmaker, Willy Lindwer. The letters depict a landscape of despair as the depths of Nazi depravity began to become clearer, but the options for escape had dwindled. Now several dozen of them are featured in a new book by Lindwer and the Dutch historian Aline Pennewaard, 'Ik weet me geen raad,' which translates to 'I'm at a Loss for What to Do,' published last month. Lindwer, an avid collector of war-era documents and Judaica, said the building where he found the bundle of letters was being cleared. He doesn't know how they came to be left in the attic. But when he opened one and started reading, he said, 'It was chilling, really moving.' Also familiar. Lindwer's parents, Jewish refugees from Ukraine, had arrived in the Netherlands in the early 1930s, leaving behind family members who would later be murdered by the Nazi mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen. Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, and the Holocaust would ultimately claim 75 percent of the Jews who lived there. But not Lindwer's parents, who went into hiding and survived. Lindwer didn't know exactly what to do with the letters when he found them, so he put them in a drawer, where they stayed for more than 40 years. When a new National Holocaust Museum opened in Amsterdam last year, he planned to donate the bundle. But first, he and Pennewaard, his longtime creative collaborator, decided to try to research what had happened to the letter writers and publish their stories in a book. Pennewaard was able to track down what happened to about 100 of the correspondents, and included 35 stories in the book. Most of the letters were written in German and sent to either the Jewish Community in Amsterdam (an official municipal group), or to the Committee for Jewish Refugees (a Jewish-run aid organization established in 1933). But by 1938, these groups could offer little hope, because the Dutch government cut off most paths to legal immigration. Hendrik Colijn, the country's prime minister, justified this decision by arguing that accepting Jewish refugees would increase antisemitism at home. 'If we were to admit here an unlimited stream of fugitives from abroad,' he said in a speech to Parliament, 'the necessary consequence of this would be that the feeling in our own country with regard to the Jews would swing in an unfavorable way.' As the world dealt with the lingering effects of the Depression, the Netherlands was not alone in deciding against expanding refuge for Europe's Jews. In July 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened an international conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, with delegates from 32 nations, to discuss the refugee crisis. But few countries agreed to ease their immigration rules, and nearly all refused to admit more refugees. The U.S. quota for German and Austrians stayed fixed at around 27,000 a year, and the waiting list for entry visas reached 140,000 in 1938, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Lindwer said it's not hard to make a comparison between the difficulties faced by refugees in the 1930s, and those who are trying to escape persecution in their home countries today. 'This refugee problem is a problem of our times,' he said, 'and with the chaos we have in the world today, I'm afraid it will only get worse.' Despite the 1938 border closing, thousands of desperate letters continued to flood into the Netherlands. 'They all got an answer,' said Pennewaard, but it was usually a standard form letter, saying no aid was available. The plight of the writers can be read in the exclamation points. 'Extremely urgent case!!!' wrote Blima Bierzonski, on Dec. 13, 1938 seeking entry for herself and her 7-year-old daughter, Gerda. Her husband, Viktor, had left earlier that year for the United States, where they hoped to join him. But now the Nazis gave her just a few weeks to leave the country or be deported. Any stay in the Netherlands would be temporary, she promised. 'I will really not be a financial burden to anyone,' she said. Blocked from the Netherlands, she and Gerda fled to Belgium and moved from country to country for the next few years, finding no safe place, until Bierzonski was forced to leave her daughter with a family in Switzerland. They would not reunite again until 1946. One tragic tale that Pennewaard tracked concerned a 33-year-old father, Nathan Awrutin, from Berlin, who wrote begging for temporary entry. He only wanted to wait in Holland until his family received papers that would allow them to join his parents in Palestine. The German police had ordered his family to evacuate their home by Jan. 1, 1939, he said. But he, his wife, Hertha, and their 5-year-old son, Ronald, had nowhere else to go. 'We've tried every possible means to emigrate from Germany, but without any success,' he wrote. 'My family and I place all our hopes on you, because you are the only one who can help us. My wife and I aren't able to sleep at night, because we worry about what will become of us. I cannot provide for my family here, and my son has become malnourished.' Searching public records, Pennewaard found only a few documents about the Awrutins. The couple, she discovered had had a second son, Simon, born in 1942, but she could find no record of their whereabouts at that time. Then she scoured a list of people taken on a transport from Berlin to Auschwitz, the death camp. On the list, dated July 12, 1944, were all four members of the family. Hertha and her two sons were murdered on arrival in the gas chambers. Nathan was selected for 'work duty,' and had prisoner number 42921 tattooed on his arm. Nathan survived there until the Germans evacuated Auschwitz in January 1945, and made prisoners march to Natzweiler, a concentration camp, where he was forced to work until he died on Feb. 19, 1945. No photos or other documentation of the family Awrutin were preserved. Feige Bisseleches, a 76 year-old widow living in Vienna, had no better luck. 'I am totally alone,' she wrote in her letter, 'and now I have to leave my home where I've lived for 46 years because it has been given to strangers. I cannot stay here as a Jew. I am desperate and completely helpless. In view of my situation, I ask the committee to have mercy on me.' Bisseleches received no help. Two years later, she was deported to Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia, where she managed to survive 14 months until December 1942, when she was transferred to the camp's hospital and died. The Aufrichtigs were luckier. Although Aufrichtig's request to the Netherlands on behalf of his mother, Rachela, was denied, he kept reaching out to other countries Finally, she was granted a domestic worker's visa to Britain, and was allowed to enter the country as a housekeeper. Eventually, mother and son reunited in New York. Rachela lived to be 91. Her son's first letter had not saved her, but he kept writing.
