Edgar Feuchtwanger, now 100 years old and living in England, told The Guardian about his experiences in pre-World War II Germany, including how, in 1929, Adolf Hitler became his neighbor, the UK-based paper reported on Saturday.
Hitler, who in 1929 moved homes due to the previous being too small given his rising popularity, with high-ranking SS officers living nearby, and diagonally opposite, lived the Feuchtwangers, a Jewish family, including then-five-year-old Edgar.
He recounts how his family was relatively well-off and employed a chef and a nanny. His father was a publisher and lawyer, and his mother was a pianist.
The Feuchtwangers successfully escaped Nazi Germany, and moved to England in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II.
“Nowadays, I am perhaps the only living witness who saw and experienced Hitler directly and had some kind of contact with him,” Feuchtwanger told The Guardian.
He reminisces that at five years old, he did not exactly know who Hitler was, but knew he was not “well disposed towards us Jews.”
In his household, Hitler was spoken of as “a ridiculous figure” given the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch, when Hitler attempted to lead a coup, before being imprisoned.
He states that his uncle, a famous satirical author, regarded Hitler as “very dangerous” but “saw him as someone to be made fun of.”
Feuchtwanger recounted how his mother first noticed a new neighbor when their milk delivery was missing, as Hitler had claimed it all.
After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, his parents began speaking of “nothing but politics and the danger posed by Hitler,” the Guardian reported. However, “Hitler and National Socialism remained an abstract threat.”
Feuchtwanger stated that the only time he met Hitler face-to-face was in 1933, and the Nazi leader did not identify him as a Jew at the time. “I’m sure we would have been killed in Dachau,” Feuchtwanger states when asked what would have happened if Hitler knew he was Jewish.
As time went on, he noticed that counterdemonstrations diminished, people now stopped outside to salute and shout “Heil Hitler,” and senior dignitaries came to visit Hitler, he recounts.
“We noticed that Hitler was a very clever man, the way he managed everything. It wasn’t good for us either,” says Feuchtwanger.
Due to the Nuremberg race laws in 1935, the Feuchtwangers lost all their staff, because Jews could no longer be employers. His father also lost his job, and schoolmates turned against him because they did not want to be friends with Jews, he stated.
However, Jewishness “did not play a big role in my life before the rise of National Socialism,” he recalls. “It did in my father’s life, because my grandparents were Orthodox Jews. But by my time, that had completely faded away. I didn’t know much about it.”
After Hitler gained power, the family became more conscious of their Jewish identity, he added. “He turned it into something. And I didn’t really understand that. Back then, at primary school, I was like the other children at first. I went along with all the Nazi stuff.”
Everything changed after Kristallnacht
His parents realised they needed to flee in November 1938, when a Jew killed German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris, which was used as a claimed justification for the November pogroms remembered as Kristallnacht, in which synagogues were set on fire, Jewish businesses destroyed and looted, and Jews imprisoned in concentration camps, including his father, Ludwig.
His father was taken away to Dachau, where he was imprisoned for weeks, before being released in a “frighteningly thin” condition and “went to bed immediately.”
His family was able to obtain a visa to England at the cost of £1,000. “The day I crossed the border was 19 February 1939, and it felt as if I had left an evil empire,” he recalls.
Feuchtwanger considers himself lucky, according to the Guardian. “I’m still here at over 100 years old, while most of them are gone. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, they were all wiped out.”
He also denounced the recent success of the far Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the recent federal elections, stating that “It’s very unpleasant that something like this is rising again in Germany. You look at it with fear.”
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