Winfried Seibert - The girl that could not be named Esther

He had been born on July 10, 1908, the son of a miner in Heeren. After a short interlude as an assistant pastor in Spenge, he was inducted as minister in Wattenscheid-Leithe on April 4, 1937, where he remained until July 31, 1973. He died on September 16, 1976. His first wife, the mother of the Esther I was seeking, had died in 1966.

A call back to the registry office in Gelsenkirchen erased all doubts. The name was correct. Now I had only to find out what had happened to the little girl who had received the name Esther after the war and where the 53-year-old woman was now to be found.

At this point I am going to break off my reciting of the report for my daughter. The end of the story belongs at the end.

He was foster father to Hadassah

— that is, Esther — his uncle’s daughter, for she had neither father nor mother. The maiden was shapely and beautiful; and when her father and mother died, Mordecai adopted her as his own daughter.

The Book of Esther, Chapter 2, verse 7

Marc Chagall, 1960

It happened in 1938, in a critical year for German history, a fateful year for lots of people. 4 › ReferenceIn its Esther decree of October 28, 1983, the Prussian Supreme Court for Civil Matters wrote of a great and meaningful year, great and meaningful for Germany. The Watchword of the Week, a colorful Nazi Party wall poster, celebrated 1938 as a God-blessed year of struggle, which even after a thousand years Germans will speak of with pride and reverence. 5 › ReferenceGreat times, great words.

In October 1938 the Prussian Supreme Court for Civil Matters issued the last word in the Esther case, or at least for all those involved it was the last word: A non-Jewish German girl, daughter of a pastor, whose parents wanted to name her Esther, could not be named after the biblical Queen Esther because the Supreme Court considered the name to be typically Jewish. Such a name was out of the question for a German child.

The Supreme Court did not have an easy time explaining the grounds behind its decision. The very extensive legal reasoning allows us a view into the mental world of the three judges, on whom the God-blessed year of struggle had left its mark.

Such decisions are easy to criticize. From today’s point of view, everything appears clear and readily understandable; Good and Evil can be cleanly separated. People are often smarter in hindsight. Still, a person may ask himself despairingly, how did they come to such decisions, how could they have arrived at such gross and spiteful legal grounds? How did it happen that the presumably quite sharp minds of the judges were so befuddled? In the attempt to understand the decision and those responsible for it, you have to get closer to the spirit of the times, no matter how much you believe that the spirit was evil, embodying the demonic character of those years. You have to consider this spirit of the times because otherwise you won’t understand anything.

Even though the Berlin proceedings concerned only the given name of a Christian girl, the controversy over Esther’s name revolved completely around the Jewish Question. Almost everything at that time revolved around this phenomenon, whose meaning for the party comrades of the year 1938 cannot be grasped from today’s point of view by rational consideration alone.

The Jews in Germany formed a minority of less than 1% of the population. At the last census in 1933, 502,799 persons of Jewish faith were counted, including 94,717 foreigners, mainly Poles. 6 › Reference160,000 of these people, a good third of all the Jews in Germany, lived in Berlin, making up 5.33% of its population. At the beginning of 1938, before the annexation of Austria, the German Reich had 68 million inhabitants, including some 300,000 so-called persons of the Jewish faith. That came to 0.44% of the total population.

It was well known that Jews were heavily represented in several economic sectors and professions. This was based on historical grounds, which were connected with the restricted rights of the Jews in Germany over the centuries. German Jews also contributed to Germany’s scientific fame. Of the fourteen German Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, four were of Jewish origin. 7 › ReferenceOf the Nobel Prize winners in physics, three of the twelve German laureates were Jewish, 8 › Referenceand in medicine, three out of seven. 9 › ReferenceThese were numbers to be proud of, but they didn’t help at all.

By the beginning of 1938 — a good 200,000 Jewish Germans had meanwhile left the increasingly dangerous country — the concentration in Berlin had become even greater.

128,000 Jews still lived in the capital, some 43% of all Jews remaining in Germany. Their proportion of the Berlin population had sunk to barely 3%. 10 › ReferencePropaganda minister Joseph Goebbels exerted deliberate pressure on them, as he noted in his diary on June 11, 1938:

Lectured to over 300 police officers in Berlin about the Jewish question. I really stirred them up. Oppose all sentimentality. Don’t worry about the law; harass them. The Jews must be driven out of Berlin. The police will help me in doing that.

The Germany of 1938 had grown larger. With the annexation of the so-called Eastern Marches (Ostmark – a centuriesold term for Austria), the population of Greater Germany had grown to 76 million. Bringing in Austria had brought in another 180,000 Jews, now totaling 0.63% of the German population. 11 › Reference

And yet this tiny minority stood at the very center of the thinking and aspirations of the National Socialist government. The judiciary was also fixated on this minority in the way it persecuted them, excluded them, and deprived them of their rights. These judicial activities cannot be explained away or excused with reference to loyalty to a positivistic reading of the law, in which the judges were bound to follow the letter of the law literally. The wording of many, many decisions makes it clear that nothing here can be excused.

Seen from a modern foreshortened perspective, the year 1938 was especially notable for the annexation of Austria, the crisis of the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia which ended with the Munich Agreement, and, most significant for us today, the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) with all its fearsome consequences. The Germans of 1938 were unaffected by the persecution; they went about their daily lives. The propaganda machine of the ever-more-arrogant Greater German State churned out reports of successes. There were quite a few of these, serving to distract people from the difficulties of daily life. The economy of the Third Reich was, strictly speaking, heavily indebted, if not over its head in debt. Rearmament and the attempts at full employment had their price, though of course nothing of this appeared in the papers. Foreign policy successes might make people euphoric, but they did not fill the state treasury. From time to time the state needed to throw the dog a bone. The grass roots, the party faithful, demanded their due.

The press reported in much greater detail the August 1, 1938 introduction of the plan for the common people to save for a private automobile than it reported the burning synagogues of November 10. Isn’t this what people actually wanted to know about? All the same, we may still be curious to know what there was to fear, to see, to hear, and to suspect before November 10, 1938.

Life for the non-Jewish Volksgenossen, National Comrades — by definition, there could be no Jewish National Comrades — life for the National Comrades in 1938 went on as normal. To most Germans, conditions may have appeared better than in previous years. This came out in the birth rates. The number of births in 1938 in the country as a whole rose to 1,493,000, the largest number since 1922. That corresponded to 19 births per 1,000 inhabitants (compared to 8.7 in 2005). Still, the Journal of the Office for Racial Policy of the National Socialist Workers‘ Party (the Nazis) noted in a warning tone: