Letters from Jenny: A Historical Novel

By Heidi Laird

History tells us that a big lie, repeated often enough, can begin to sound as if it could be the truth.

In her new book, Letters from Jenny, Heidi Laird tells the story of just such a big lie which had a profound influence on world events following the end of the First World War: That Germany in 1918 had not lost, but actually won the war. It was claimed that "treasonous elements in Berlin had banded together with an international conspiracy and stabbed Germany in the back", robbing her of her victory. This lie was repeated over and over until it clouded the thinking of the German population after the end of the war, and many people became convinced that their fledgling democratic republic was weak and corrupt, unable to govern. In the end, a majority enthusiastically welcomed a leader who promised to clean up the corruption, and who told them that they were a superior race, destined to rule the world.

The beating heart of the book is a collection of thirty-one letters written by Jenny, a Jewish woman living in Mainz, Germany, to her twin sister Martha on the other side of the Rhine River, in Wiesbaden. In these letters, Jenny's observations record how a large part of the population resists acceptance of the military defeat and the humiliating Versailles Peace Treaty. The deeply engaging descriptions of Jenny's private life reflect how the country endures famine, a pandemic, military occupation, hyperinflation, assassinations, fierce street battles between opposing political factions - crisis after crisis - until the exhausted republic gives itself over to Hitler and his followers. The events of this period come to life in Jenny's riveting letters and convey an intimate sense of how it felt to live through this crucial period in history leading up to World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885051514

Book preview

Letters From

Jenny

A H

ISTORICAL

N

OVEL

HEIDI LAIRD

Copyright © 2022 Heidi Laird

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2022

ISBN 979-8-88505-150-7 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88505-151-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

The Nuremberg Trials

Jenny’s First Letter

Jenny’s Second Letter

Jenny’s Third Letter

Jenny’s Fourth Letter

Jenny’s Fifth Letter

Jenny’s Sixth Letter

Jenny’s Seventh Letter

Jenny’s Eighth Letter

Jenny’s Ninth Letter

Jenny’s Tenth Letter

Jenny’s Eleventh Letter

Jenny’s Twelfth Letter

Jenny’s Thirteenth Letter

Jenny’s Fourteenth Letter

Jenny’s Fifteenth Letter

Jenny’s Sixteenth Letter

Jenny’s Seventeenth Letter

Jenny’s Eighteenth Letter

Jenny’s Nineteenth Letter

Jenny’s Twentieth Letter

Jenny’s Twenty-First Letter

Jenny’s Twenty-Second Letter

Jenny’s Twenty-Third Letter

Jenny’s Twenty-Fourth Letter

Jenny’s Twenty-Fifth Letter

Jenny’s Twenty-Sixth Letter

Jenny’s Twenty-Seventh Letter

Jenny’s Twenty-Eighth Letter

Jenny’s Twenty-Ninth Letter

Jenny’s Thirtieth Letter

Jenny’s Last Letter

The American Couple

Rebecca

Acknowledgements

Preface

Jenny was my great-grandmother. She was rarely mentioned in my family when I was growing up, because remembering the past was too painful, and it was best to look ahead. Yet, judging from the few stories I overheard as a child, Jenny was a formidable matriarch and a compelling personality. She was born into a Jewish family in 1863, grew up in Imperial Germany, lived through the First World War, the revolution of 1918, the Weimar Republic, and witnessed Hitler’s rise to power. As members of the Jewish community and the well-to-do merchant class in Mainz, Germany, she and her husband presided over a large household in which they raised six children. She was widowed in 1912 at the age of forty-nine, and spent the next two and a half decades living through an emotional terrain of personal grief, ongoing anxieties brought on by famine and a pandemic, financial worries, loss of confidence in the effectiveness of the government, and fear of the unending political crises, which culminated in the catastrophic day, when the Nazi regime dictated the new law of the land.

Because so much biographical detail has been lost by three generations throughout a century of upheaval, destruction, and oblivion, I reached for the tools of biographical historical fiction to tell Jenny’s story. Through the process of the author’s sympathetic imagination, I reconstructed the tapestry of Jenny’s personal experiences within the context of the historical events that she witnessed and endured. Her letters, the beating heart of the story, were created through this process as well.

The reader is reminded that in a personal correspondence, factual information is seldom provided in its entirety, and is more often referred to in passing, because the correspondents presumably know the context, and understand each other’s circumstances well enough that they don’t require a background explanation of the issues discussed in the letter. Personal letters are usually written to someone who is familiar with the letter writer’s life and can guess what the letter is intended to communicate, even if there are inaccuracies or inadvertent inconsistencies in the letter’s narrative. This means that readers will at times have to tolerate a certain amount of ambiguity, or use their imagination to supply a missing link which the correspondent neglected to provide. We, the unintended readers of the letters, are, a hundred years later, left with the intriguing task of piecing incidental bits of information together to produce the full panorama of a unique life.

In reconstructing Jenny’s life, I have made every effort to depict the events of the era as authentically as possible. Historians of the 20th Century have produced a massive body of work analyzing the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazi movement, Hitler’s seizure of power, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, resulting in an overwhelming amount of published material, in print and on film. From this vast literature, I found the following resources to be particularly helpful in recreating Jenny’s world.

The most comprehensive documentation which I consulted for accuracy in rendering the sequence of historical events between the final days of the First World War and the end of the Weimar Republic was The Weimar Republic Source Book, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg. University of California Press, 1994.

To gain a clearer perspective on the complex political landscape and the key events which led to the outbreak of the First World War, I studied Christopher Clark’s meticulously researched and sweeping, authoritative book The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to War in 1914, (Harper Collins, 2012).

In To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild, (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2011), has presented a broad perspective of the clash between empires and armies, and offers a warning of how governments, once they become captives of the wars that they claim to control, can turn on their own people next.

I consulted Martin Gilbert’s book The Somme. Heroism and Horror in the First World War, (Henry Holt, 2006), for its focus on the men who did the fighting on all the war’s multiple fronts, month after month, on the field and off, and how it must have felt to be involved in immediate combat, being a witness to the dying of their comrades all around them, expecting to be next to die when the shelling resumes.

Klaus Epstein’s 1959 biography of Matthias Erzberger: The Dilemma of German Democracy, (Princeton University Press, 1959), paints a compelling portrait of this man of complex character and great courage, who stood up to formidable opposition from his fellow parliamentarians and the German population as he conducted the peace negotiations of Versailles in the only way he thought possible for Germany after it had lost the Great War in 1918.

In his engrossing book, Hitler’s First Hundred Days, (Basic Books, 2020), Peter Fritzsche describes in detail how Hitler, step by step, at the head of his movement and elected democratically, wasted no time after his narrow electoral victory in destroying the very pillars of a liberal democracy—freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to free assembly, privacy of postal and telephone communication—and installing in a matter of only a few months a totalitarian dictatorship.

Finally, I was intrigued by Theodore Abel’s book How Hitler Came Into Power. (Harvard University Press, 1938). When I undertook the project of writing Letters from Jenny, I was not aware that as early as the 1930s, research was done which examined the psychological dynamics energizing the enthusiastic followers of dictatorial regimes. This early attempt to study the motivation and the relevant character traits of individuals who are vulnerable to the ideology of totalitarian regimes, predates by more than a decade the landmark study The Authoritarian Personality, by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, (Harper and Brothers, 1950) and the classic California F-Scale.

The Nuremberg Trials

On April 12, 1945, as Nazi-Germany was sinking into total collapse and its capitulation was imminent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died and Vice-President Harry Truman succeeded him as the 33rd President of the United States. As one of his first actions, Truman asked Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson to take a one-year leave from the court and travel to Germany to oversee the creation of an international military tribunal, and to serve as America’s Chief Prosecutor in the first of a series of court proceedings which have become known as the Nuremberg Trials.

The purpose of the Nuremberg Tribunal was to invent a new way to end a war. Instead of the lawlessness, summary executions, ransacking, looting, and unchecked revenge killings which have traditionally followed the end of a war, a lawful process was to be developed, which would serve as a definitive way to mark the outcome of a war, identify and punish the perpetrators of atrocities as war criminals, and create the foundation for a lasting peace. Wartime atrocities would henceforth be recognized as war crimes, and future military commanders were put on notice that there was now such a thing as a war criminal.

Justice Robert Jackson accepted Truman’s appointment and served as Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, where the top officials of the Nazi regime were charged for the first time in history with crimes against humanity. Justice Jackson was assisted by a staff of attorneys from the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps, which prides itself on its history of serving as the legal arm of the U.S. Army since 1775, when General George Washington foresaw the need for military officers trained in the law to provide legal services to the Army in the resolution of conflicts at all levels of command.

The first of the Nuremberg Trials began on November 20, 1945, and went on for a total of two hundred days in court, including a month of deliberations by the eight international judges, and ended on October 1, 1946. Out of twenty-two men charged with having committed war crimes, nineteen were found guilty. Twelve were sentenced to death by hanging, three received life sentences, and four were given prison sentences from ten to twenty years. Three of the accused were found not guilty. The death sentences were carried out on October 16, 1946.

Among the dozens of JAG Corps attorneys who had been assigned to assist in prosecuting the case against the Nuremberg defendants was Captain Milton Cramer. He had been drafted in late 1944 when he was in his mid-thirties, which shocked his wife, Ruth, since she had convinced herself that after the arrival of their third child, Milton would surely be exempt from the draft. Milton and Ruth, both born in 1910, had grown up in the same neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, and met in high-school, where they were on the debating team. They saw each other occasionally while he was attending the University of Pennsylvania, and she was a student in the nursing program at the University of Maryland. She graduated as a registered nurse, just as her German mother had done in Berlin many years earlier, and she took a job at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, where her father had taught for many years before opening a practice in general medicine in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Baltimore. During the summer between the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School, Milton and Ruth found themselves falling in love with each other after years of friendship, and they married on the day after he received his law degree. Ruth kept her nursing job until she expected her first child, and dedicated herself to raising the child, and its hoped-for younger siblings, with vague ideas about returning to nursing some day in the future, when the children were grown. By 1944, Milton and Ruth were settled with their young family in their home in Baltimore, where eight years earlier, Milton had started his own law firm with a friend from law school. He returned to Baltimore after the conclusion of the first Nuremberg Trial in late 1946 and left military service at the end of that year in the wake of the general demobilization of American forces following the end of World War II.

When Milton first received the letter from the draft board, he felt a vague sense of dread, which, to his surprise, was mixed with a feeling resembling relief. He had been troubled throughout the war years whenever he heard about friends and acquaintances, former neighbors and long ago high school team mates fighting in Europe or in the Pacific, and he knew that many of them had been injured and some were returning in coffins. Milton had thought many times about joining the military and fulfilling a patriotic duty which he was taking seriously, but he was also very aware of his responsibility as a husband and father, and so he made it a practice, as a way of contributing to the war effort, to offer his services pro bono when he did legal work for families who had members serving in the military.

After basic training, Milton was assigned to the JAG Corps and shipped to France in late January 1945, with orders to report to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Reims, where General Eisenhower was planning the final phase of the war in Europe. The American troops had just defeated the Germans in the infamous Battle of the Bulge in Belgium a few days before Milton arrived, and the push forward across the border into Germany was about to begin.

Milton found himself attached to an administrative unit of the U.S. military occupation authority, which was to remain in Reims and work out the details of how it would function as the de facto government in the American Sector of Germany after the official Nazi capitulation. His assignment as a member of the JAG Corps consisted of researching legal aspects of the occupation of enemy territory after the enemy’s government had formally ceased to exist. The planned headquarters of the U.S. military government was to be located in the internationally renowned spa city of Wiesbaden, which, for the purpose of providing ready housing for the soon-to-be-arriving occupation troops and administrative personnel, had been exempt from the devastating bombing raids which had leveled so many other German cities, such as the ancient cities of Frankfurt to the east, and Mainz directly across the Rhine river from Wiesbaden.

Once Allied victory was declared and Nazi-Germany had officially accepted its unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, the military government of the American Sector in western Germany was installed. When Captain Cramer and his JAG Corps unit arrived in the fully intact but clearly war-weary city of Wiesbaden, office space had already been prepared for them in one of the city’s formerly splendid hotels across the boulevard from the shuttered casino; for his lodging, he was given the key to a large, high-ceilinged room with a balcony draped by a leafless vine on the second floor of one of the many turn-of-the-century villas in the hills above the city, with views of the casino and the ornate pavilion, now boarded up, which was built to shelter the hot mineral spring from the elements. In contrast to the villa’s atmosphere of opulent nostalgia and genteel neglect, the furnishings in the room were spartan, consisting of a narrow bed, a wooden table, and a single chair. Captain Cramer was not a demanding person, but he did fill out a request for a suitable piece of furniture in which he could store his personal belongings, including his shirts, socks, and underwear, so that they would be in order for quick retrieval as needed, instead of remaining in their current state of being compressed into his large duffel bag.

On the following day, while Captain Cramer was reporting to the JAG Corps offices, and had his first meeting with the German translator assigned to him, a desk was delivered to Captain Cramer’s room by military procurement personnel. When he returned to his room in the evening, he was astonished to find in the center of the room a beautiful, dark-stained oak desk with a satin finish high-lighting a carved frieze along the edges of the writing surface, the intricate joints and fittings of the three deep drawers on each side evidence of the fine craftsmanship of the furniture maker. When Captain Cramer walked around the heavy desk before pushing it against the wall next to the glass door to the balcony, he noticed stenciled letters in blue paint on the back of the desk: Property of the U.S. Military. What Captain Cramer did not know was that this piece of furniture, along with thousands of others, had been requisitioned from the houses and apartments of the German civilian population of Wiesbaden as they were being evicted by the U.S. Military, and their homes converted to housing for the soldiers of the American occupation forces.

The desk was large enough to hold all of Captain Cramer’s belongings, and served as his writing surface and home away from home during his tour of duty. He knew that in the coming months, his sole purpose was the harrowing task of reviewing and sorting an unending flood of dutifully typed and officially stamped print and photo documentation which traced the course of the persecution and killing of the Jews in Germany and in the Nazi-occupied territories. He came to dread the long lists of the names and functions of the officials in charge of implementing the murderous Nazi policies, with their huge staff, down to the lowest-ranking guards, and the descriptions of the Nazi death camps, their construction drawings, and their schedules of operations.

All this evidentiary material had been recently retrieved from fastidiously catalogued Nazi archives, and needed to be organized for review by Chief Prosecutor Jackson’s staff as they prepared for the upcoming trial in Nuremberg. Captain Cramer, his JAG Corps colleagues, and their translators, did this work day after day in the hotel rooms converted into U.S. Military Headquarters, reading page after page of files describing the acts of merciless concentration camp commandants, barbarous executioners, efficient organizers of slave labor in leading German manufacturing plants, sadistic jailers and coldly calculating designers of efficient gassing facilities and ovens for the burning of countless, nameless corpses. In the evenings, the lawyers dispersed to their respective living quarters all over town, and reassembled the next morning to review more material. The towering stacks of documents which this team of lawyers reviewed and annotated was sent on to the trial lawyers in Nuremberg via a special courier detachment several times a week.

Almost every night, Captain Cramer sat down at his desk and wrote letters to his wife. He wanted to tell her about the gruesome documents he was reviewing every day, but he was unsure how much detail to include in his descriptions, because he knew that the contents of these documents would have a very personal meaning for her and would traumatize her. So instead of dwelling on descriptions of his work, he often wrote about the adventures of his translator, Bernhard Hirsch, a German Jew with a gallow’s humor, highly educated and fluent in three languages, who had managed to survive the Nazi terror through a mix of daring escape maneuvers, clever juggling of false identities, and sheer luck.

Captain Cramer was concerned about the effect which his letters might have on his wife, because her mother was from Germany. Ruth’s parents, Joseph Danziger from New York and Luise Sichel from Mainz, both Jewish, met in Berlin when he was a medical student training at the famous Charité Hospital, and she was working there as a nurse. They fell in love and married in 1906, when Joseph was 31 years old and Luise was 27. Within the year, Joseph had completed his work at the Charité, Luise had received her parents’ blessing for her emigration to America, and the couple booked their passage on one of the more modest ships of the Holland America Line, where they found themselves in the company of many other Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, who had left behind poverty and the ever-present fear of pogroms, and were hoping for a new start in New York. Joseph’s and Luise’s destination was Baltimore, where Joseph had been offered a teaching position at Johns Hopkins University.

In early March, 1946, in Nuremberg, after seventy-six grueling days in court, the case for the prosecution—accompanied by film footage of what the Russian Army had found when they liberated Auschwitz in the previous year—was complete. Although this relieved some of the intense pressure on the JAG Corps team in Wiesbaden, most of the lawyers remained in their assigned positions for the remainder of the trial, until late November, 1946, when their tour of duty ended, and they returned to the United States.

On the last day of Captain Cramer’s assignment in Wiesbaden, he was informed that there was a space available on an Air Force cargo plane to Langley Field in Virginia, if he could get to the Rhein-Main Air Base in nearby Frankfurt before midnight. He managed to find a driver, stopped by his villa on the way to the air base, ran upstairs to his room to quickly pack up his things in his duffel bag, and noticed for the first time that behind his socks on the bottom right drawer there was a neatly wrapped package tied with string, containing what looked like handwritten letters. The driver was waiting in the jeep with the engine running, and in his hurry Captain Cramer decided—reluctantly—that there was no time to deliberate the ethical ramifications of taking the letters along, and he quickly squeezed the package between his shirts into the duffel bag, tied up the bag, and left without looking back. He was eager to get back home to his family and to his law firm, where his partner was impatiently waiting for him to finally pick up his share of new clients, and life could return to normal.

Milton Cramer never forgot the jubilant reunion at the Baltimore railroad station with Ruth, six-year old Rebecca and five-year old Benjamin, both of whom had often drawn pictures for him on the back of their mother’s letters, and suspicious three-year old Ella clutching a fold of her mother’s skirt. Milton recognized the signs that life at home with his family would quickly feel normal again, as he watched Ruth take charge of unpacking her travel-weary husband’s duffel bag to wash and sort his clothes. When he later played ball with Rebecca and Benjamin in the back yard, he found that the children were already starting to overcome the awkwardness of the first few hours of having their father back at home. He was not surprised, just a little sad, that Ella had wanted to stay in the house with her mother, and obviously needed more time to adjust to having a father in the house whom she did not remember.

In the course of unpacking Milton’s duffel bag, Ruth came across the package and felt a moment’s dread when she saw that it contained a stack of handwritten letters, the classic piece of evidence in the age-old drama of the lonely soldier far from home having an affair with another woman. However, Ruth was quickly reassured that her fears were unfounded. The letters were written in German, and she knew that Milton did not speak German when he was drafted, had not had the time nor shown an interest in learning the language of the war criminals, whose unimaginable cruelty he was reviewing and documenting every day of his assignment in Germany. Ruth also immediately noticed that the letters were written in an antiquated script on yellowing pages which were brittle where the paper had been folded. The dates on the letters indicated that this correspondence began in 1918, continued until 1922, at which point it broke off, but then resumed in 1932 for one more year.

Ruth was able to read and understand initial short passages of these letters, and to her delight, she could even decipher the quaint script in which they were written, because her grandmother had used that same script when she wrote her long letters to her daughter and granddaughter in Baltimore. Holding the letters in her hands, Ruth felt herself transported back to the summer of 1921 when, as an eleven-year old, she and her mother, Luise, had traveled on a transatlantic passenger ship from New York to Rotterdam, and from there on a train along the Rhine river upstream until Mainz to visit her maternal grandparents, Ernst and Alice Sichel. Ruth had loved staying with her grandparents in their spacious old-world apartment with its tapestries and potted palms, tall doors and windows, filled with light and music and books. She had loved her grandmother’s cooking and the daily walks with the family through the historic streets of Mainz, through the busy market in the shadow of the massive walls of the medieval cathedral, and along the Rhine, where her grandfather never tired of pointing out the strings of long, narrow river barges towed by sturdy tug boats flying Dutch, Swiss, French, and German flags. Ruth had resolved right then and there to learn German and live in Germany some day.

In 1926, when Ruth was sixteen, her mother contracted tuberculosis and followed her doctor’s recommendation to spend a year in the hot, dry desert climate of Tucson in the American Southwest. Ruth was able to persuade her parents to let her live with her grandparents in Mainz during that year and attend school there, an experience which proved to be even happier than Ruth had expected. She settled into her grandparents’ household routines, helped her grandmother cook the foods which her mother had grown up with, volunteered to clean up after dinner, made herself at home in the language and learned new words effortlessly like breathing in fresh air, made friends in school, and impressed her teachers with her ability to adapt to unfamiliar situations. When Ruth announced to all who asked, that she wanted to live in Germany permanently some day, she was taken seriously, and there was no reason to think that this might not be a good plan.

Ruth looked at the letters again, found several from the year 1921, and hoped that she might find references there to things which had happened in Mainz during her first visit with her mother. She thought about the letters she had received from her grandparents in their awkward English when she was a young child and needed her mother to read them to her, and she experienced once again the familiar sharp regret that she had not kept them. She also felt the unrelenting deep pain that was now a familiar presence in her life, the pain that started when contact with her grandparents was lost in December 1941, after the Sichels’s home in Mainz, with all their possessions, had been confiscated by the Nazi authorities, and they had just moved into a small rented room in Frankfurt. Luise’s frantic efforts to find out about her parents’ whereabouts led nowhere, and were followed by inexpressible anguish when a family friend wrote after the end of the war that Alice and Hermann Sichel had been deported to Auschwitz soon after their arrival in Frankfurt, and that they had not been heard from since then and had probably not survived. Although Ruth never talked about this, she knew that her grief, horror, anger, and fear had settled in for the long term, and that these feelings were influencing how she would see the world from then on.

Milton was a man with a kind heart, and he could tell that these letters touched Ruth deeply. He had completely forgotten about them in his elation at having finally completed his military service and being able to return home after the long separation from his family; now he revisited the moment in his room in Wiesbaden when, in his hurry to catch his flight home, he set aside his uneasy conscience and tucked the packet into his bag, although it did not belong to him. He was not given to mystical speculation that fate had guided him to take these letters to America, but it did occur to him at this moment that something good could come of his having taken the letters, if Ruth could read them and find in them a clue as to their rightful owner, to whom the letters could then be returned.

Ruth started reading the next day, and was delighted that she could follow the general themes of the letters’ contents, until she landed at the inevitable dead ends when she could not decipher a key word essential for understanding the context. There were also times when whole sentences and entire passages eluded her, no matter how many times she reread them. After patiently struggling through several letters in the hope that the task would become easier with practice, Ruth accepted with some chagrin that she would need help if she wanted to understand these letters in their entirety. Her German had once been fluent after she returned from her year in Germany, but that was twenty years ago, and in the meantime Germany had become the enemy, and there had been no occasions for practicing her German in a long time.

What Ruth was able to establish was that all of the letters were written by the same person, Jenny, a Jewish woman of her grandparents’ generation, living in Mainz, and addressed to