Promised New Zealand: Fleeing Nazi Persecution

By Freya Klier

Police hold placards in front of Jewish, emblazoned with the words "don't buy from Jews;" others put up signs to identify places where Jews are to be denied entry. SA men smashed Jewish shop windows, owners are terrorized into relinquishing their businesses, and home are visited Gestapo who take family members away. The year is is 1993 and this is life in Fuhrer's Germany.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Otago University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781927322321

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Published by Otago University Press,

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www.otago.ac.nz/press

First published 2009

Copyright © Freya Klier 2009

ISBN 978 1 877372 76 6 (print)

ISBN 978 1 927322 32 1 (EPUB)

ISBN 978 1 927322 33 8 (Kindle)

Editor: Georgina McWhirter

Copy-editor: Celia Coyne

Production editor/designer: Fiona Moffat

Indexer: Andrew Parsloe

Ebook conversion 2015 by meBooks

Picture credits: Map on page 12 by Allan Kynaston.

Photos featured are from private collections with the exception of Karl Popper: University of Canterbury Library Collection, Christchurch; Alice Strauss, Karl Wolfskehl and Margo Reuben: Schiller-National Museum/Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (Marbach German Literature Archive); Hitler in Paris 1940, Hitler and the Reichstag, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin: US National Archives.

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

People whose stories are told

Map of Europe in the early 1930s

PART I

1930–1938

1930

A New Zealander in Berlin

The well-mannered Germans

New Pomerania becomes New Britain

1933

‘Adolf Hitler has saved us’

From humanism to homeland and race

New Zealand suffers want

‘Don’t buy from Jews!’

1934

Wool for Germany

To stay or to go?

About ‘Half Jews’ and ‘Eastern Jews’

In the land of Mussolini

1935

‘Spontaneous wrath of the people’

A New Zealand trading missionary

Wedding in Jerusalem

Labour’s day dawns

1936

Olympic peace

Yes or no to immigrants?

Degradation of doctors

Heavenly Jerusalem

‘Aryanisation’

Leaving Vienna

1937

Anti-Semitism in ‘God’s Own Country?’

Touching up Germany’s image

Travelling with Nazi party members

Stopping places in Palestine and Europe

1938

A wedding in Vienna

An Italian ‘race law’

New Zealand’s harshness

Waiting for exile

A Count from Saxony in New Zealand

‘Hans in Luck’

PART II

1939–1945

1939

The end of Czechoslovakia

London – waiting room for overseas

Kindertransports

The doors close

At the edge of the globe

War breaks out

1940

The Treaty of Waitangi

The German western offensive

Winston Churchill’s hour

‘Enemy aliens’

The new farmers

The last refugees

Bar Mitzvah in Berlin

1941

Longing for closeness

Suspicious Germans

Fighting against the Nazis

A Christchurch visit

The Star of David

1942

Japanese expansionism

The Wannsee Conference

Interned for 999 days

The Americans are coming

A country pulls together

Doughnuts for the SS

1943

Worlds apart

The journey to Auschwitz

Liver to Liverpool

‘Terror bombing’

Nylons and jeeps

1944

The course of the war

Competitors

‘Total war’

A family’s stories

‘The Polish children’

1945

The ‘Death March’

Hopes of reunion

Liberation

‘Zero hour’

‘I am the only one who is still alive’

Hunger for life

PART III

1946–1948

1946

New beginnings

The shadows of the Third Reich

The desire to return

British episodes

Dealing with guilt

1947

Fresh encounters

Displaced persons

Setting out and saying goodbye

Feelings during peacetime

New Zealand’s Independence

1948

The last refugees from the Third Reich

The British way of life

The Berlin blockade

Death in exile

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Index

Back Cover

Foreword

Years ago, during a flight, I came into conversation with a woman from Auckland. The meeting was a pivotal experience for me, as I learnt about a situation that was barely known in my homeland of Germany – namely the emigration of German and Austrian Jews to New Zealand.

The parents of the personable lady travelling with me were Jewish refugees; in the late 1930s, my travelling companion’s mother, Dorothea, and her fiancé had arrived separately on the Pacific side of the globe, having fled from a country that was firmly in the grip of the National Socialists. Finding refuge in New Zealand protected them from the Holocaust. They began farming not far from Mercer.

I was perplexed upon hearing this story. Why New Zealand? Although I had heard of Karl Wolfskehl’s New Zealand exile and also of Karl Popper’s, these had seemed to me isolated cases. There was scarcely a mention of New Zealand in German exile research.

With avid interest, I began researching this dramatic and largely unknown chapter – first in Berlin archives and then in those in Wellington and Christchurch. The more I researched, the more clearly an historical interface between the geographical antipodes of Germany and New Zealand began to emerge.

I was deeply affected by the stories of the Jewish refugees whom I was then able to interview. Two had survived Auschwitz. Another arrived in Auckland harbour in 1938, while the synagogues in Germany were on fire. Others succeeded in escaping literally at the last second. Some were stuck in London or in an Italian city – waiting for a life-saving permit for that country in the Pacific with its twin islands, which seemed like Paradise yet had scarcely any concept of the simultaneous murderous reign of terror on the other side of the world.

Finally they settled in all parts of New Zealand – in Russell, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Milton and Invercargill. I was touched by the openness and warmth with which they received me half a century later and the great commitment with which they had contributed their lives and their talents to their new homeland. They brought practical knowhow, innovative ideas and medical skills, along with some European recipes. One of the Jewish immigrants created German sausage meats; another raised New Zealand packaging techniques to an international standard. While one man was able to join the Army in the midst of the war, another, though totally innocent, was left languishing in the internment camp on Somes Island ….

You can discover these stories for yourselves within the book. In the process, you will come across the story of a child born in Belgium and that of a Polish young person – a reminder that Nazi terrorisation was wreaked not just in Germany but throughout Europe.

The arrival of the refugees is of course inextricably linked with World War II. I have featured that history partly out of a personal need to acknowledge the New Zealand soldiers who sacrificed their lives so that we Germans and other Europeans who were born after the war could grow up in peace and freedom.

I especially hope this book will attract younger readers – there is still so much of New Zealand’s history left to explore.

FREYA KLIER

Berlin, June 2009

People whose stories are told

Described as they appear at the beginning of this book.

Adam, Dietrich A 9-year-old living in Berlin with his family, who wish to emigrate.

Adler, Ruth The 4-year-old daughter of Philipp and Margarete Adler, who lives with her family in Hildesheim, Germany, above their shop Magazin Rothschild.

Briess, Frank A 28-year-old businessman from a family of spice and grain merchants living in Olomouc, Moravia (present-day Czech Republic).

Bruell, Fritz A Czech salesman who works for his uncle’s paperware factory in Linz, Austria.

Bruell, Lilly A 24-year-old haute couture fashion designer from Vienna.

Dane, Peter A 13-year-old school student from a family of lawyers living in Berlin.

Eisig, Heinz A 28-year-old athlete from Fürstenwalde in Germany, working in an import and export firm in Berlin.

Filler, Sol A 20-year-old Pole from the small city of Brzozów in southern Galicia (a historic district lying between present-day Poland and the Ukraine).

Grynbaum, Salomon A Polish child who is living in Antwerp when the Germans invade Blegium.

Heppner, Alfred A 38-year-old doctor living in Berlin with his wife Lotte.

Herrmann, Gabriele The 11-year-old daughter of a German actor, living in Berlin near Peter Dane.

Jottkowitz, Hans A 15-year-old secondary school student in Berlin.

Kohane, Minna A 15-year-old girl living in Berlin with her strictly orthodox parents.

Lermer, Herta A 22-year-old singer from Breslau, Germany.

Lochore, Reuel A 27-year-old New Zealand teacher who is preparing to travel to Germany.

Loewy, Alice A 25-year-old former medical student who is about to marry Frank Briess.

Muenz, Peter A 12-year-old school pupil from a left-wing family living in Berlin.

Nathan, Hans A 26-year-old businessman living in Hamburg.

Neuländer, Ernst A 24-year-old medical student in Breslau, Germany.

Popper, Karl A young but well-known philosopher living in Vienna who wishes to find a university position abroad because of the disquieting political climate.

Ruben, Margot A 29-year-old woman from Berlin who joins Karl Wolfskehl in Florence in 1934 as his assistant and soon his companion-in-exile.

Silberstein, Hansi An 11-year-old school pupil living in Berlin with her family, who own a department store.

Silberstein, Fred The 8-year-old brother of Hansi Silberstein.

Wolfskehl, Karl A 64-year-old Jewish poet of renown living in Munich.

PART I

1930–1938

1930

A New Zealander in Berlin

In the autumn of 1930, a young New Zealander enrols at the Institute for Foreigners and shortly afterwards in a teacher training course at Berlin’s Humboldt University. His name is Reuel Anson Lochore. New Zealanders are infrequent visitors to Germany in the early part of the twentieth century – the sea voyage is long and expensive and since World War I there has been a certain antipathy towards Germany, the former enemy. This is not the case with Taranaki-born Reuel Lochore, the son of a Methodist minister and a teacher of the deaf. He admires the German language and culture, a predilection he retains throughout his life.

The 27-year-old has studied English, French, Latin, philosophy and psychology at Auckland University and taught at a Wellington college. Now he feels drawn to Europe, in particular to Germany, and wants to continue his studies in languages, literature and philosophy. First, he wants to learn the German language properly in Berlin.

Lochore does not find it too hard to leave New Zealand in 1930: a close friend has died, his teaching colleagues have had their workloads doubled and the country, like so many others worldwide, has nose-dived into a deep economic crisis as a result of Black Friday on the New York Stock Exchange in 1929. The mood is wretched – there is no trace of the slight economic buoyancy of the 1920s that had revived the New Zealand economy for a time. The current three-party cabinet seems to be incapable of solving problems; the Prime Minister, Sir Joseph Ward, has just resigned on grounds of ill health and a resolution of the country’s internal problems does not seem imminent.

Lochore is enraptured by the Reich’s capital. The economic downturn there is comparable to that in Wellington. Bankruptcies, inflation and unemployment dominate daily life – yet the cultural scene and atmosphere of this bustling metropolis fascinate him.

Just a few days after his arrival, knowing only a few scraps of German, the young man from the other end of the world is caught up in an altercation between National Socialists and Communists, which are common in 1930. He is thronged by an angry mob and does not know what the commotion is all about. A young man approaches him with a leaflet and bystanders warn him not to accept it under any circumstances. When of course he takes it – just out of curiosity – a man turns to him and asks whether he is a Communist. ‘No,’ answers Lochore, ‘I am a foreigner.’ At that, men start pummelling him from all sides. He panics.

‘I pitched my whole weight against them and managed to clear a bit of space around me,’ he told the New Zealand historian Michael King, in an interview with Metro magazine decades later. ‘I was ready to have an argument and said clearly, I do not understand what you want. I was ready to prove it, but a man immediately behind me said, Look, get out of here! He cleared a way through the crowd for me to get away. I left. I was not seriously injured. However, it gave me my first inkling of what was brewing in Germany.’

Reuel Lochore actually had no idea what was fermenting there. In this respect he was no different from the majority of Germans at the time, or from the Jewish citizens who could not have conceived what would befall them in just a few short years.

The well-mannered Germans

By 1930 German–New Zealand relationships had already been through sev­eral ups and downs. Before World War I there were few problems, at least not with German settlers in New Zealand, who were esteemed above all for their competence. At the turn of the century, German-speaking immigrants num­bered about 7000 on the twin islands in the Pacific. They constituted the second-largest group of European immigrants behind the overwhelming British majority: 95 per cent of all Caucasian New Zealand inhabitants were Britons. Most of the German-speaking immigrants arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century: Swiss and Austrians; Lutherans from Mecklenburg, Prussia and Hannover; and Catholics from Egerland. All had integrated without any problems.

Before the 1890s, there were sometimes more foreign ships than English ones anchored in Wellington Harbour and a high percentage were German with names like Hertha and Leipzig. Some were warships, although harmony always prevailed between the local inhabitants and the German sailors when they came ashore.

The Germans typically displayed consideration. When the Hertha lay at anchor for several months off the coast of the North Island, the ship’s crew gave a benefit concert for Auckland’s orphanages.

But even before the transition to the twentieth century, the harmonious atmosphere had begun to dissipate. Visits by German warships became increasingly rare against a background of growing colonial rivalry between Germany and England. The German navy represented a growing threat to British naval supremacy in the South Pacific; these tensions carried over to New Zealand, which had no navy of its own and depended on English protection.

German conduct also changed. Along with an increased presence in this distant region, colonial pretensions developed. Germany had previously lagged behind the voracious British Empire, although there had been long-standing German trade missions to Micronesia, Tonga, the Tokelau Islands and Fiji. Bismarck had long been a proponent of free trade and averse to state sponsorship of colonial expansion, fearing little economic advantage and potential political and military consequences. In 1884, however, he yielded to pressure from German settlers and domestic colonial lobbyists. In addition to their involvement in Africa, the Germans took over part of New Guinea, which they renamed ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’s Land’, as well as a couple of nearby islands which they christened the ‘Bismarck Archipelago’ as a gesture of gratitude to the German chancellor. In 1900, the German flag was hoisted in Western Samoa too, with the amicable agreement of the British and the Americans, who held the eastern portion of the archipelago. Although Western Samoa was quite isolated and located amidst American and British acquisitions, the Germans regarded it as ‘the jewel amongst our dependencies’.

Colonisation proceeded comparatively peacefully. Germans were by no means unpopular overseas. Instead of being hell-bent on plundering, as gover­nors they behaved tactfully and on the whole respected the indigenous cultures. When the German governor of Samoa returned to Berlin in 1911, Samoan chiefs pleaded for him to return soon. Trade flourished and Germany became more actively involved. The two cultures intermingled. Even today Samoans with names such as Schaffhausen, Schwenke, Jahnke, Wendt and Schuster are testimony to fruitful relations between the two cultures at the time.

New Pomerania becomes New Britain

The German colonial era in the South Pacific came to an end as peacefully as it began. At the outbreak of war, responding to a request from the British navy, New Zealand captured Western Samoa without firing a shot. The takeover of other German colonies followed a similar pattern. Archipelagos such as Neu-Mecklenburg (New Mecklenburg) and Neu-Pommern (New Pomerania) were renamed New Ireland and New Britain. Australia took over Kaiser Wilhelm’s Land.

New Zealand, a faithful ally of the British crown, entered the armed struggle and found itself enmeshed in an international military conflict for only the second time in its history. More than 100,000 men from a population of just over a million headed for a war that was very distant from its shores. New Zealand and Australia formed the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC).

During the course of the war New Zealanders defended the Suez Canal from Turkish attack, fought in the Sinai-Palestine campaign and in France and Belgium. They fought in the army and the British navy and air force. A contingent of Maori volunteers was despatched, despite the wishes of the British government to keep ‘native’ troops out of a war between ‘white races’. The ANZACs suffered a traumatic defeat on the Gallipoli peninsula.

The former friendship between New Zealand and Germany turned to bitter enmity. When a German torpedo sank a passenger liner the Lusitania in 1915, causing the death of more than a thousand civilians, the windows of a butcher’s shop owned by a German immigrant in Wanganui were destroyed by an enraged mob. Hallensteins and the Bristol Piano Company, which was formerly named the Dresden Piano Company, were then targeted. Lochore was only a child at the time, yet war was the topic of conversation in every home.

In 1916 the HMS New Zealand, a battleship that had been funded by New Zealand and gifted to the British navy, fired on the battle cruiser Moltke during the bloody naval battle of Jutland. When a New Zealand passenger liner was ripped apart and sent to the depths of the sea by a German mine a year later, pure hate emanated from peaceable New Zealanders – those who bore German names were well advised to anglicise them as soon as possible.

New Zealand’s war efforts stretched its capacity. The war took a heavy toll on the inhabitants of these idyllic islands. Apart from the economic burden – around half of the able-bodied male population took up arms – an endless stream of war-wounded returned home. There were lingering emotional wounds inflicted by the war and poignant individual tales of suffering. More than 4000 children were looked after in state institutions temporarily because parents could no longer cope. There was ultimately blind hatred of anything German.

In 1918 New Zealand was on the victors’ side, yet the country had to absorb profound losses. Over 18,000 men died between 1914 and 1918, a loss which in proportion to its population was significantly higher than, for example, that of Belgium. Over 50,000 were wounded. The combined total exceeded more than half of the soldiers involved and peace had barely prevailed when the Spanish ’flu epidemic snatched away a further 5000 lives.

Reuel Lochore saw himself as a loyal subject of Great Britain and a citizen of the world. He went to school in Oamaru and was one of Frank Milner’s ‘Waitaki boys’. The charismatic principal had instilled in them a belief in the superiority of British culture but also a cosmopolitan outlook and a desire to place their gifts at the service of humanity. Lochore retained his school principal’s enthusiasm and took it with him to Germany.

1933

‘Adolf Hitler has saved us’

When the National Socialists came to power in Germany on 30 January 1933, Peter Muenz recalls that he was skating on Lake Krumme Lanke in Berlin: ‘One of my classmates amicably clapped me on the back and said, You know, Hitler has become our Chancellor! I went home and told my mother, who of course had already heard and was horrified. A cloud immediately descended on the home and on our friends as well – Jewish and non-Jewish. They were all left-wing. Then very quickly we decided to emigrate.’

The 12-year-old is deeply affected as he thinks of himself as a Communist. He has frequently been knocked around because of this – no one else has Communist leanings at his school, which is near the railway station at Wannsee, and this makes things difficult. The parents of his classmates tell their children that Communists are terrible people who want to ruin Germany and say that Peter deserves a hiding. Fortunately word has not yet spread that Peter is Jewish as well.

Peter’s family on his mother’s side came from Chemnitz, Germany. His Jewish grandfather, who was loyal to the Kaiser, owned a textile factory in the vicinity. His four children are a curious bunch. One uncle is a conductor, another is a Zionist who emigrated to Palestine in 1924. His aunt is a Com­munist and later mounts the barricades in the Spanish Civil War. Peter’s mother abandoned her study of national economics in Leipzig to marry Leo Muenz.

During World War I, Peter’s father was a doctor with the German forces and he continued to work in this capacity as a French prisoner of war. At the end of the war, he settled in Chemnitz and practised as an eye specialist. Leo Muenz was cultured and well read and came from a long-established Jewish family. He was a pacifist, Social Democrat and one of the founders of the Workers’ Samaritans Association. Peter clearly remembers, ‘I must have been three years old when he took me to a workers’ demonstration on the 1st of May with black, red and gold flags. It must have been in 1924. I was dwarfed by the tall men around me.’

Peter’s father died of an illness in 1928. His mother sold the practice and moved to Berlin with the children. She purchased a small house in a Bauhaus complex in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf. Peter spent the summer at an Italian school and the winter at a German one. This is now over. In March 1933 the Muenz family decide to emigrate, together with a friend of his mother’s and her daughter. They rent a house by Lake Maggiore in a small place near Ascona, in Switzerland.

Peter’s last schoolboy memory of Germany is of the Reichstag fire on 23 February. Many Berlin schools organise school trips to the city centre the following day. Peter’s class also goes to see the gutted Parliament building, which is supposed to serve as a warning to show what the Communists would do to the whole of Germany if they were to come to power. ‘Adolf Hitler has saved us,’ the teacher remarks. ‘Otherwise it would be like this all over Germany.’

The chill wind that has blown through the country since the regime change is also felt by 15-year-old Hans Jottkowitz. Hans belongs to the German-Jewish Youth League, a liberal group whose members value being Jews in Germany. They see themselves as Germans first of all and differentiate themselves from the Zionists in this respect. The Jewish community owns a house in Lehnitz not far from Berlin and Hans Jottkowitz is spending a beautiful spring weekend there with his youth group. The young Jewish girls and boys have not properly grasped the changed political climate in the country. This ceases when the young people are lying in bed late at night and doors are flung open – the Sturmabteilung (SA) is having a raid. Men in brown uniforms take possession of the building, yelling. Petrified and paralysed with fear, the young people watch this transpire.

What else could happen to them? Hans is in year 11 – the Obertertia – at the Hohenzollern-Gymnasium, a secondary school, and is intending to study law. However his parents urge him to leave school:

We spoke about it openly at home. My parents said, ‘It is better to have an occupation that is in demand throughout the world.’ So I left the Gymnasium in the summer. In the last weeks there I hardly had any interest in lessons and dropped behind a bit. When it came to report time, my Christian fellow students told the teacher to ‘Give Hans some higher grades!’ One of my classmates rang me and apologised for joining a Hitler Youth Group. Despite this we remained friends, even after I left school. I considered becoming a chef, however there were no apprenticeships open to me as a Jew.

Hans finally obtains an apprenticeship in a long-established Jewish textile dyeing factory.

From humanism to homeland and race

The young New Zealander Reuel Lochore also remains in Germany in 1933. He has mastered the German language perfectly by now and his image of Germany has been shaped by the cultural outings and courses that were offered by the Institute for Foreigners when it embraced the spirit of the Weimar Republic. When he was in Berlin, he may have sat in the same theatre as Hans Jottkowitz, whose family had a concert and theatre subscription. In contrast to the young German Jew, who is now increasingly ostracised, the New Zealand guest gains his impressions in 1933 from an opposite perspective. He is warmly welcomed and is entertained by Nazis and so he does not perceive the increasing number of torch-lit processions and demonstrations as threatening.

It appears to escape his notice that all the Jewish lecturers are being dismissed from Bonn University, where Reuel Lochore is enrolled in Romance Languages and Literature. The descent of the Mainz Institute for Social Geography, where he is a guest, into national narrow-mindedness similarly eludes him. What is happening at a fast tempo at the Citadel of Mainz, where the Institute is located, will later threaten all Germany’s educational institutions. In place of an internationally oriented education, ‘Our Genetic Inheritance as Nordic Peoples’ suddenly appears as part of the curriculum; instead of the humanist tradition, there is a radical about-turn toward Volk themes such as ‘homeland and race’. The art of teaching is transformed into training, a love for peace into a readiness to take up arms in defence of the homeland. ‘Inferior genetic make-up’ is set against ‘Superior racial origins’ and there are many posters and family trees with photos of alcoholics, the ‘feeble-minded’ and criminal families on display, warning of the dire sins of the liberal Marxists, who had just been voted out. The Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), its subdivision the Jungvolk, and Storm­troopers (SA) regularly parade in the grounds of the Mainz Citadel. A new spirit of popular nationalism is being created through song, dance and gymnastics.

Of course, there is singing, dancing and gymnastics in communities in New Zealand, too. However, it is the first time that Reuel Lochore witnesses such military-style parading. The taut, ardent facial expressions fascinate him.

The land is split into two different worlds, one for those who ‘belong’ and one for those who do not. With every previously accepted paradigm overturned, friendships and work relationships unravel ….

The circle that had gathered around the poet Stefan George, which at the turn of the century juxtaposed the individual and the few against the ‘mob’, the ‘crowd’ and the ‘riff-raff’, is not immune to this schism. The select and somewhat detached circle always saw itself as an élite group and a counterbalance to the commercialisation of culture and the shallow-minded majority.

The Jewish poet Karl Wolfskehl also belonged to this élite group. Son of an old, highly respected patrician family from Darmstadt, he had contributed to Blätter für die Kunst ( Journal for the Arts) from 1893 to 1919, and around the turn of the century jointly edited the three-volume poetry collection Deutsche Dichtung with Stefan George, whom he held in high esteem. Wolfskehl’s home in Schwabing was one of the centres of the ‘George Circle’. The Munich Cosmic Circle, which Wolfskehl founded along with Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages amongst others, also met there.

However, this was before 1933. With the introduction of the innocent-sounding ‘Act for the Restoration of the Civil Service’ in April, the chosen ones are hurtled into the mundane world, either to the ‘centre’ or to its ‘margins’ depending on their descent. Now race rather than genius counts. This law effectively provides for the dismissal of all Jewish professors and lecturers and a considerable number of the members of the George Circle are affected. The Circle does not live up to its claims when tested in reality. While some fall under the Teutonic spell, others lapse into silence and the Jewish members seek sanctuary abroad.

Karl Wolfskehl, who was living in Munich, belonged to the latter. In April 1933, he is no longer in Germany. In a distraught state, he took the midday express train to Basle the day after the Reichstag fire and a few weeks later moved on to Swiss Tessin (Ticino). From there the 64-year-old watches developments in Germany with concern. His wife, Hanna, who is Dutch by descent, and his two daughters, Judith and Renate, remain in Germany.

New Zealand suffers want

What about the country that Reuel Lochore left behind a few years before? While in Germany a strong leader promises a way out of the economic crisis, New Zealanders are less optimistic. The country is sunk in depression. The consequences of Black Friday on Wall Street are devastating for a nation that almost exclusively produces agricultural products and is highly dependent on overseas markets. Markets abroad destabilised during the 1929 worldwide economic depression. Wool prices fell so much that sales barely covered transport costs. Within three years New Zealand’s national revenues had plummeted from £150 million to £90 million; export returns had fallen by 40 per cent and the standard of living dropped.

The halcyon days of New Zealand history, when gold rushes and gum-diggers, scientific expeditions and missionaries, large-scale clearing of forests and construction of an impressive rail and road network stimulated the economy, are soon forgotten. As if economic depression were insufficient, nature too seemed to conspire against the people. In 1931 a devastating earthquake struck Hawkes Bay, one of New Zealand’s leading farming regions. More than 250 people lost their lives in Napier, Hastings and Wairoa and the cities of Napier and Hastings were devastated.

But the most pressing problem in 1930s New Zealand is increasing unemployment. Architects and teachers can be seen chipping weeds on the footpaths and war veterans can be seen begging in front of pubs. The very old are reminded of a time well before the turn of the century when ragged groups of men queued for the dole. For the first time, the government is confronted with rioting and looting.

New Zealand has 81,000 unemployed at this point. This is a high number for a total population of around one and a half million. Mass unemployment on this scale had been unimaginable previously. Feverishly the government, a liberal-conservative coalition, tries to find a solution. In 1933 an unemployment law is passed for the first time in the country’s history. It is linked to