It’s seventy-eight years since the Night of Broken Glass, when Goebbels unleashed upon the Jews of Germany the full of violence of Nazi hate. Though he described the subsequent horrors as the unpremeditated and spontaneous expression of the Kochende Volkseele, the boiling public mood, the smashing, burning and killing were co-ordinated across Germany and beyond. Nor was the timing incidental. It’s widely thought that the failure that summer of the rest of the world to increase their quotas for refugees from Nazism gave Goebbels a moral victory, enabling him to claim that nobody else wanted the Jews either, and gave Hitler the green light to act against them as he pleased.

I was in Frankfurt yesterday, where the Jewish Museum hosts an annual evening of study on the day before Kristallnacht. This subject was the rabbis of Frankfurt who fled the Nazis, and their legacy, focussing on my grandfather and his close colleagues. I re-visited his testimony of those terrible years. I read how he preached of his pride in the appellation ‘Israel’ after the Nazis forced all Jews to add it to their name. I stood where the great Boerneplatz Synagogue was burnt to a ruin. My grandfather was outside, summoned by the Gestapo. My father’s uncle’s family were inside; they lived in a flat adjacent to the lady’s gallery. He was arrested and taken to Buchenwald. His pregnant wife and their four children were hastily taken away by relatives, haunted by the sight of the blackened cupola, now visible through the burnt-out doors, of the great house of prayer. The baby died at birth.

Outside, many thousands of memorial tiles line the walls of the ancient Jewish cemetery.
I was shown pictures of the 1930’s, a Sabena aeroplane like that on which my family escaped, the airfield at Croydon where they landed – the very part of London where refugee children have now been arriving.

I sat at length with the director of the Jewish Museum discussing Frankfurt’s Jewish legacy: Ludwig Boerne, ‘the father of modern journalism’, born in the Judengasse, exiled, like Heinrich Heine, to Paris; and Samson Raphael Hirsch the great neo-orthodox rabbi who taught that ‘love your neighbour’ means seeking the same rights and opportunities for every citizen as you want for yourself, irrespective of religion or race. He taught, too, that the moment you abrogate in any way the rights of the stranger, or make the rights we owe each other conditional on any other attributes than the very fact of being human, created in the image of God, you re-open the gates to ‘all the horror of the slavery in Egypt’.

On the train home I passed through the Ardennes, the landscape of Hitler’s bitter last offensive, mercifully thwarted by Allied courage. The route went not far east of the terrible graveyards of the First World War, which we remember this Sunday on Armistice Day.
I followed responses to the US elections on twitter. And, not by any means solely for that reason, I feel afraid. I fear for my children; I fear for the earth. The world, it seems, is reverting to tribalism; maybe fear itself is part of the cause. I don’t know where or why this began, or if it is always thus. My next writing deadline is about the anniversary of the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris.

That is why it is essential to say ‘No’ to racism; ‘No’ to anti-Semitism; ‘No’ to the hatred of Muslims, ‘No’ to the denigration of women.; ‘No’ to xenophobia. That is why we must assert the centrality of the commandments, the very core of faith and humanity, to ‘do justly’, to ‘love compassion’, and never denigrate the image of God in anybody, or act with wanton destruction towards this beautiful world, God’s world, the world of which we must continue to say, conducting ourselves accordingly, ‘And God sees that it is good’.
Jonathan Wittenberg

The year is 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power is imminent. Days earlier and the Nazis had exploited the burning of the Reichstag, home of the German parliament, for votes.

Armed security forces patrolled public buildings. On the streets,  Sturmabteilung (SA) ‘brown shirts’ had their violence legitimised by decree. Political violence and intimidation, however, did not grant Hitler his parliamentary majority. The March 5 elections gave the Nazi Party 43.9 per cent of the vote and 288 parliament seats out 647.

On March 10, 1933, Dr Michael Siegel visited a Munich police station on behalf a client. Dr Siegel was one of roughly 4,000 Jewish lawyers in Germany. They held senior positions in the court system, bar association and justice ministry. In 1933, racist laws pushed saw many lose their jobs. The indignity of this discrimination was was compounded by further arrests and violence.

Dr Siegel had entered a Munich police station on behalf of Max Uhlfelder, the Jewish owner of a large city-centre store. Nazi Party members had taken positions of office in Munich a day earlier. Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander, now commanded the Police Authority. The Swastika flew atop public buildings. Nazi paramilitaries had smashed Mr Uhlhelder’s shop windows and deported him to Dachau concentration camp.

Instead of listening to Dr Siegel’s complaint, the police assaulted him. SA ‘brown shirts’ had perforated Dr Siegel’s eardrum. The force of their punches had broken several teeth. They had cut his trousers from the knee down.

Dr Siegel was then made to walk the streets of Munich bloody and barefooted. Surrounded by ranks of SA paramilitaries, Dr Siegel wore a sign that read: “I will never again complain to the police”.

Some debate the actual wording of the sign. Dr Siegel had told his children that it read: “Ich bin Jude aber ich will mich nie mehr bei der Polizei Beschweren”(I am a Jew but I will never again complain to the Police).

Heinrich Sanden, the photojournalist who immortalised this humiliation, disagreed. Dr Siegel soon became an international symbol of the antisemitic persecution in Germany. He did not learn of the photo until the 1970s.

Despite the growing climate of antisemitic violence and discrimination, Dr Siegel and his family remained in Munich. He had passport revoked in 1934 and reinstated in 1935. Local farmers warned Dr Spiegel about the impending Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. He fled to Luxembourg and returned some weeks later, only to lose his legal license. Few Germans protested this flagrant discrimination.

At the start of 1939, the Siegel family left their home and found other accommodation. Their new ground floor served as an emergency synagogue,  the Nazis had razed the city’s main synagogue. Dr Siegel’s 18-year-old son Peter and 14-year-old daughter Beate soon emigrated to England.

Dr Siegel and his wife Mathilde sought asylum in Peru but were rejected. In a remarkable stroke of luck, a student teaching Dr Siegel Spanish was a nephew of the Peruvian Minister of the Interior.

The arduous road to Peru began in 1940. They travelled through Lithuania, Siberia, Russia and Japan before arriving in Peru. Dr Siegel took up work in a Lima bookstore. In the post-war years, he worked to establish an embassy for the Federal Republic of Germany in Peru’s capital, Lima. He soon became the Rabbi of the German-Jewish community in Lima. By 1953, Dr Siegel could again practise law in Germany, despite the geographical difference.

Dr Siegel helped German Jewish refugees in Peru and other parts of Latin America.

In 1971, at the age of 89, he received the Grand Cross of Merit of the German Republic ‘in recognition of his exceptional services to the state and people’. He accepted the award on behalf of all German Jews in Lima.

In spite of his growing age, Dr Siegel never stopped pursuing restitution cases. He died in 1979 at the age of 96.

Dr Siegel never forgot the ordeal he faced in Munich. In  a 1987 article, The Association of Jewish Refugees retold the story of Dr Siegel’s life and journey to Peru.

The authors, H.P. Sinclair and M.B. Green, wrote that Dr Michael Siegel had one thought in his mind: ‘I shall survive you all’. And he did. But according to Sinclair and Green, he bore no grudge against the German people. For he had known “too many decent ones for that“.

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