By Jan Jaben-Elion, first published in the Leica Historical Society of the UK magazine

 

When German aircraft dropped their torpedoes on the American troopship, “Liberty Paul Hamilton,” approximately 30 miles off the coast of Cape Bengut, April 20, 1944, at least one of the 504 US Army Personnel aboard killed in the immediate explosion and subsequent sinking in the Mediterranean Sea was a brand new American citizen. In fact, he was a German-born Jew who had fled Nazi Germany in 1938. But Cpl. Kurt J. Rosenberg was much more than an unlucky Jewish refugee in the 32nd Photo Ren. Sq. The 5-foot, 7-inch, 154-pound, 28 year old was one of a number of Jewish employees of Leitz, based in Wetzlar, Germany, that was brought by the company to the United States during in the late 1930s.

Indeed, Leitz saved the lives of many German Jews, paying for their immigration to the United States, helping them with the required paperwork, and most importantly, providing them with jobs immediately upon entry. Kurt Rosenberg is only one of these Leitz employees. But Kurt Rosenberg – despite having tragically died as a young man before all of his potential and talents could be realized – left behind hundreds of letters that he wrote and received, original German and US documents, and hundreds of negatives that he took in Germany and America. The actual details of how the company was able to save its Jewish employees, in fact, only came to light in Kurt Rosenberg’s correspondence!

This is Kurt Rosenberg’s story, told through that rich material that he left behind, as well as some of the untold story about the Leitz company in the 1930s and 1940s.

When Kurt was born in Goettingen, Germany, in January 1916, the second son of a Prussian officer who would receive the revered Iron Cross medal, World War I was raging. Two and one-half years later, the German military collapsed. Germany was defeated. Although the semi-autonomous regime of the Second Reich was replaced in 1919 by a parliamentary democracy, Weimar, this was also the same year that the National Socialist German Workers’, or Nazi, Party was created by Austrian-born Adolph Hitler.

Life was hard for most everyone in those dark, depressive days in Germany. Kurt’s mother, Rosel, later wrote that those difficulties were even worse than what she experienced in the late 1930s, before her death due to illness, in early 1939. Still, at least she bore a twin brother and sister in 1921, and her husband Georg had a good job at a Giessen bank, until his forced retirement in July 1934.

Georg was a strong, authoritative husband and father who was quite proud of his service in the German army, and even as the dark clouds of Hitler’s Germany gathered around the family, he believed that his Iron Cross medal of honor would protect him and his family, despite the fact that they were Jewish. When first his eldest son, Hermann, followed by Kurt, talked about emigrating, he was adamantly against it. He saw no need for them to leave the Fatherland. Finally, in 1937, at age 21, when he no longer needed his father’s consent, Herman left for the U.S., where Georg’s brother, Gustav, had been living since the 1920s. Kurt started his emigration process as soon as he, too, reached 21.

Kurt’s emigration was facilitated by the Leitz company. His love affair with Leitz started at the age of 16 when his father enrolled him for a four-year apprenticeship at the main Leitz plant in Wetzlar, starting April 25, 1933. Kurt had an incredible track record with the Wetzlar-based company. As early as November 1935, Kurt writes about the compliments he received for his work, and about his pay-raises. He even invented a Fixed Focus Attachment for the Leica, which, upon his arrival in America, he patented (No. 33130). In 1937, he had a photo exhibit in Frankfurt. Later that year, although he writes that the company agreed to pay all his immigration expenses, he tried to delay his long sought-after travel plans, but that delay was denied. In early 1938, before his departure date, Kurt visited all his friends in Wetzlar to say goodbye. It could not have been an easy “Aufwiedersehen”: He loved his work and he seemed to be well liked. How does a young man leave his friends, his family, the work he loves and his country to immigrate to a place he’d never even visited?

Hitler’s Nazis helped. During the time that Kurt was learning and training for his craft, Germany annexed the Saar region and entered the Rhineland. The Reichstag passed the anti-Semitic “Nuremberg Laws.” Jews had already been dismissed from civil service and denied admission to the bar. Jewish books had been publicly burned. Hitler signed agreements with Italy and Japan, and in the summer of 1937, the Buchenwald concentration camp was opened, although this wasn’t reported at the time. What had seemed like a bright future for this budding photographer in his homeland, increasingly dimmed, until he realized he had to build his future elsewhere.

At the end of January 1938, Kurt left for America, crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Hansa, arriving in New York on an early February morning. The night before his arrival, “I was the last to crawl into bed, as I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. At 5 a.m. Saturday morning, I was on the deck and I didn’t need to regret getting up so early,” Kurt wrote home to his family in Frankfurt, Feb. 20, 1938. “The boat was sailing at half-power into the New York harbor, right and left thousands of lights and in front of us the skyscrapers of Manhattan. It was a quite fabulous view, and I was sorry that it was still too dark for taking pictures.”

Arriving on Lincoln’s Birthday, Kurt had immigration problems and was not at first allowed to disembark. Quickly, he gave to his fellow Leitz refugee, Paul Rosenthal, all his valuables: “my Leitz papers, my ring and everything else that they could have charged me duty for. Then I was called to customs. Five people were going through my things and they were especially meticulous with my photographic equipment. I had to pay a total of $4 in duties. When they asked me how long I had had the camera and I answered, ‘one and one-half years’, one customs officer said in German: ‘The old song.’” Eventually, everything was straightened out, but Kurt, the budding writer, wrote his family that the experience could be entitled, “Immigration with Obstacles.”

Kurt was met in New York by friends who helped him find a place to live, and in general, showed him hospitality. He was invited to dinner at friends in the Jamaica neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. “As I got off the subway, I nearly fell down: a suburb like Wetzlar – peaceful, rather small one-family homes, trees and gardens. I hadn’t thought that there is such a place ‘only’ 25 km. away from New York, for 5 cents and a 30-minute ride on the subway.”

The following day, Kurt showed up for work. Later that day, immigration called looking for him. They noted that both he and his friend Paul Rosenthal who had met him on board, worked for Leitz. “Since not only my fate but also that of the company was on the line,” and the company was afraid it wouldn’t be able to get any more people from Wetzlar, “I was asked by the deputy director, to go to San Francisco, to the company branch there, eventually working there for four weeks and then ask through that branch for a job in New York.”

Kurt’s letters are filled with his homesickness and loneliness in a new country, as well as news to his family back in Germany, relating information about several people from Leica. Indeed, in addition to fellow refugees, Kurt found an extended “family” in his Leica colleagues. He also kept his family up-to-date on what he was learning at work. On the back of one of his self-portraits that he sent to his older brother, he wrote: “…my instructor says that the light over the shoulder is very European and I should get rid of it.”

Interestingly, among the correspondence Kurt received and kept were letters from a friendly Nazi, H. DeLaporte, who kept Kurt apprised of what was happening in Wetzlar.

Meanwhile, it didn’t take long for Kurt to settle into his job of mounting and repairing cameras, and immediately he was working on ways to bring his younger brother and sister to the United States. There were a number of obstacles to surmount. First of all, their father didn’t want them to leave Germany. Their mother, however, was extremely anxious. She wondered if she were going crazy, if she was the only one who could see that things were not going to get any better in Germany. She begged her husband to let the twins leave the country.

In the U.S., Kurt and his older brother Herman were doing all they could to help the family back in Germany: sending them food and money, plowing through the paperwork to get the proper guarantees for their younger siblings. Meanwhile, they were hearing increasingly bad news from home. Their father, Georg, wrote on May 10, 1938: “The last few weeks brought us here all kinds of unpleasantness. It seems as if Frankfurt had the ambition to take the lead (in applying the anti-Jewish laws), and although we have not been personally hurt by it yet, the fate of our friends and acquaintances does not leave us indifferent. This takes a serious toll on the nerves, especially since something much worse seems to be building up than what is already there.”

Finally in October 1938, the affidavits for the children came through, with the summons to appear before the US consulate in Stuttgart to follow within six months. Meanwhile the children were practicing their trade skills and preparing for their new lives in America. Both studied English, while Ursula trained for tailoring, and Gerd, following in his brother’s footsteps, studied photography. “Gerd is learning a lot in his profession. He made a number of very nice room-photographs at home that got an A in the opinion of his very critical boss,” wrote the parents to America.

At the same time, Kurt borrowed $1500 in a private loan from a Mr. Seligmann from Wetzlar to have proof of a good bank account in order to be a guarantor for his parents’ entry visas into the U.S.

In early November, their mother Rosel was in and out of the hospital. Days later, on Nov. 9-10, the government-organized pogrom, known as Kristallnacht, struck German Jews. Thousands of synagogues, Jewish-owned business and homes were destroyed. More than 26,000 male Jews were rounded up and put in the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. At least 91 Jews were killed. One of the subsequent cables sent to America in cryptic words - informing Kurt and Herman that their father had temporarily been sent to Buchenwald, but released because of his age - was sent directly to Kurt at the Ernst Leitz Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York.

A letter-writing campaign to cousins in Brighton, England, about ways to get the twins out of Germany, quickened its pace. Money was sent from America to the Midland Bank Ltd. in Brighton, for the guarantees. The Refugee Relief Council in Brighton and the Committee for the Care of Children from Germany, on Bloomsbury Street in London, helped orchestrate the process. All to get the 17-year-olds from Germany to the UK, where they would stay until they could travel on to their older brothers in the US. The plan was for the children to get to the UK first, followed by their parents.

Then, in March 1939, Rosel, the children’s mother, died. She didn’t live to see her youngest children safe out of Germany. With the weight of the responsibility for the children on his head, Georg panicked. As their Brighton cousin, Charlotte Tuchmann, wrote to the German Jewish Aid Committee March 30, 1939, about the twins: “Their father has been in a concentration camp and though released, seems to fear that he may be detained again. The mother of the children died a fortnight ago, her sudden death at the age of 43 being more or less the outcome of the continuous nervous torture under which these people are living. Should the father be taken to a camp again, the children would be left completely helpless. Besides, they are both of the age where they may be put in a labour-camp and once there, there would be no question of getting them out for a long time.” She further explains that the children have low US quota numbers that could be called at any time, but meanwhile she begged that the children be allowed “to spend these last dangerous months here in safety.”

That July, the twins arrived in London on one of the “kindertransports.” In Gerd’s first letter to Kurt after escaping Germany, he wrote: “At half past five, we arrived at Emmerich on the border. My suitcase with the photographic equipment was, of course, opened and I had the fright of my life. But after seeing the detailed lists of all my things, he did not say anything more.” Camera equipment, of course, could be taken out of Germany, whereas hard currency could not. Not long after the twins arrived in England, one of Kurt’s letters back to his family noted that Anton Baumannof, 38, fell to his death as he was taking pictures. Kurt called the accident a “great loss” to the company.

After the children had been in England a number of months, waiting for their quota numbers to be called, they finally sailed for the US the following March. Just a few months after the twins were reunited their older brothers in California, Gerd, who had childhood diabetes, hanged himself. His twin sister Ursula discovered his body. During the times when Kurt was forced to deal with his mother’s, then brother’s, deaths, his Leica work was his refuge and solace.

Tragedy upon tragedy continued to fall on Kurt’s family. His father was deported to a concentration camp in 1941, the same year Kurt decided to enlist in the US army. The last anyone heard from Georg was August 1942. Kurt’s aunt and her two young daughters were deported and (later) declared dead in September 1942.

Kurt was inducted into the US Army in April 1943, after his company had tried to defer his draft classification because of his “special” factory training. A year later, he was killed in action in the Mediterranean Sea. Today his sister Ursula is nearing her 80th birthday. All of Kurt’s relatives who remained in Germany were killed in the Holocaust. The cousins who left for Palestine have since died as well, although their descendants are still alive. What remains is Kurt’s and their story, carefully crafted through sometimes-daily letters, often carbon-copied and providently protected, along with hundreds of documents, and the photographic legacy of a young Leitz employee.

In subsequent articles, we will learn exactly how Leitz managed to save its Jewish employees, how its operations served both the US Army as well as the Luftwahfe, how the US operation tried to get replacement parts from Germany, and more about Kurt’s actual work for Leitz as well as his response when the New York police discovered the perpetrator of an amazing theft of camera equipment.