Hi Olsen,
I agree with your basic sentiment that we should be careful about what we read into stories about history. Here's two minor notes:
Olsen said:
The story has some suspicious historical holes: Jews were free to leave Germany up until 1938. At least.
That doesn't really contradict the story. It means that some of its the more pathetic elements are probably fiction (I cringed at "the symbol of freedom - a new Leica"). It also means that Leitz probably didn't jump through hoops or risk his life to get people out, but that it was still nice of him to find them employment upon arrival in the US, something he wouldn't have had to do. Then again, it would have been stupid not to do it, because that way he got skilled and highly motivated employees for his US branch.
Olsen said:
I think you gravely underestimate the horrors of being a slave worker for Nazi Germany.
Forced labour worked in strange ways. There is currently a (rather inefficient)
International Tracing Service in place in Germany that allows former forced labourers and their family members to track down data and documents from the period of the war. When we were in Ukraine last time, my wife translated a response from this service for the family of a man from the neighbouring village. He had been imprisoned in 1943 during the battles for Kharkov in eastern Ukraine and released in 1945 when the Americans took Munich. Firms could request forced labourers from the army's prisoner-of-war, and this way he had worked at a small gardener's shop in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the German Alps (which shows that usage of slave labour was very widespread in Germany and not limited to big evil industry) until December 1944, when he was reassigned to the BMW factory near Munich, building BMW 003 jet engines. Relatives recalled that he didn't want to speak about this time too much, but that working and living conditions during the time at the gardener's apparently were bearable if not great, while at the BMW factory they were horrible. (This kind of thing is also why my father-in-law regularly has to justify giving his daughter away to a German; it's strange how these things still affect us sixty years later...) The weirdest thing is that during all this time this forced labourer was insured in the German state health and pension insurance system, the fees for that getting deducted from his pay, so that in theory if he fell ill he could have received free treatment (which obviously benefited the employer, who thus could keep his workforce in better shape, rather than the forced labourer himself) and, even weirder, if he had moved to Germany now he would have been entitled to regular German pension payments (in addition to whatever measly sums forced labourers may or may not get in compensation).
I've had very weird experiences in this respect here in Uzbekistan. The sheer number of Soviet prisoners of war during the war (something close to six million, of which at least half died) means that you still meet former forced labourers on a semi-regular basis. I've had several occasions here where I talked to old people on markets or in buses who, on learning that I was German, started speaking German with me, and when I asked them where they learned it they told me in a rather casual way that they had been slave labourers in Germany. (These are situations where I regularly have difficulties finding something to say that is not completely stupid.) Some of them were sent directly to Siberia after their liberation, more or less for no reason other than the diffuse danger of ideological contamination, so that they spent four years in camps digging trenches and building barracks in Germany and another ten in camps building railway lines and roads in the Soviet Union, all under forced labour. Sometimes you can just be amazed at what human beings will do to each other.
Philipp
