“Postcards to Hitler:” A Story of Individual Resistance

In the 1980s, Bruce Neuburger was given a sheaf of letters by his father, which contained correspondence from his grandparents, Benno and Anna Neuburger. The exchanges took place between late July 1938 to 1941. Bruce’s father and aunt had successfully made it out of Nazi Germany; his grandparents didn’t. They became part of the murdered masses.

Benno’s death was unique, as Bruce would learn in the early 1990s when his aunt shared with him a transcript of Benno’s trial by “The People’s Court” of the Third Reich. Those records became available after Germany’s reunification when the East Germans released court documents formerly in their possession.

It was then that Neuburger learned Benno’s death by guillotine was the result of a guilty verdict for high treason. His grandfather’s crime was writing and mailing a succession of postcards with messages attacking Hitler for the treatment and ensuing genocide of the German Jews.

The book is divided into three sections: “The Family,” “The Jews Are Our Misfortune,” and “Despair Becomes Defiance.” Neuburger used research culled from materials in the Bavarian and Munich archives, interviews with family survivors, court evidence, and information from German historians to weave together what he calls “the social environment of that period.”

Neuburger gives readers a primer on German history, from the depression, which began in 1873, to the country’s subjugation in World War I. “Leftists and Jews” were blamed for the defeat. The anti-Jewish sentiment emanated from the view of Jews as “war profiteers.”

The book echoes current political themes, including population migration. There is a look at the immigration of Jews from Russia, East Poland, and Galicia into Germany. In Munich, 20 percent of the Jews were from the East (15 percent nationwide). Some were in transit to the United States. However, those hoping to stay in Germany were at higher risk of deportation.

The Jewish Women’s Association in Munich, which Anna joined, was proactive in trying to help these Jews assimilate into the German Jewish community by finding them housing and jobs. Many established German Jews saw these poorer Jews trying to escape the upheaval and poverty of their homelands as a threat to their standing within the larger German society.

Neuburger shapes the narrative to situate the reader into the atmosphere that would lead to Nazi power—including references to Kurt Eisner, Munich politics, the Bavarian Parliament, and a militia called the Freikorps.

The Freikorps particularly caught my attention. Neuburger writes that they self-identified “as a fortress of order and masculinity in what they considered a hostile world of democratic egalitarianism, communist internationalism, feminism, and gay rights.” They also weren’t enthusiasts of the Jews and their perceived influences. The Freikorps fomented disinformation garnered from the German military, insinuating that “Jews were complicit in Germany’s defeat in the war.” The Freikorps soldiers were also the first to use the swastika symbol on their helmets.

Neuburger’s father, Fritz (later Fred), and aunt, Hani, are explored in greater depth during the 1920s period. Hitler has entered the picture, and Fritz and Hani are experiencing antisemitism at school. In November of 1923, Anna witnesses a march with participants calling “to drive out the Jewish Marxist bastards and the other Weimar criminals.” The constitution of the Weimar Republic gave women the right to vote and access to birth control, freedoms that Hitler’s supporters did not appreciate.

Events accelerated after Hitler’s failed Munich Putsch—the coup attempt which led to a conviction and jail time. It was during these proceedings that Hitler announced that after he overthrew the Weimar Republic, he “would establish a dictatorship.”

Reading Postcards to Hitler: A German Jew’s Defiance in a Time of Terror during the first one hundred days of the Trump regime, it was impossible not to see the equivalencies to America and to feel inquietude at the parallels.

When Trump announced his takeover of the Kennedy Center, which initially seemed out of the blue, reading the section “A Movie in Munich” brought together so much for me. The sequence describing the screening of The Threepenny Opera knitted together many elements. Outside of the theater, brown-shirted Nazis were intimidating those waiting to buy tickets. Aside from calling the film “filth meant for the sewer,” they barked at the crowd, “…only a Jew could love this trash.”

Like the Nazi oppression of artists and the display of their works as “degenerate art,” Trump’s desire to drive the cultural course of America is transparent. When he purged the Kennedy Center’s leadership and dismissed their programming as “woke,” it was not a standalone incident. American museums were shocked to discover that they were next on the list. Trump has continued this playbook to attack public broadcasting.

As Hitler achieves the Chancellorship, the pace of Germany’s shift to fascism accelerated. Neuburger underscores the word Gleichschaltung, which means “coordination.” He explains it as the Nazi methodology for a push to “reshape all of Germany’s political, social, and cultural life to conform to a racialized view of history and society.” The catchphrase was, “Restore Germany to national greatness.” In essence, it was the Nazification of Germany.

It wasn’t long before riots against Jews occurred. When Hitler designates Munich as the “capital of the Nazi movement, Benno’s family becomes submerged in the maelstrom of the new Aryan culture. The Nazis realized that street violence wasn’t sufficient to implement their agenda and that they needed to codify anti-Jewish sentiment into law. Other minority groups would be included in the drive to separate “racial Germans,” who would remain citizens, and all others. Through “legal” means, those other groups could be legally oppressed. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. Germany was firmly on the path to irrevocable transformation. Neuburger chronicles each new act of legislation as the Third Reich takes control of the judicial system.

Neuburger focuses on his grandfather’s acts of defiance in the face of an overwhelming and crushing situation where his nation, Germany, “was now his deadly sworn enemy.”

There are conversations between Fritz and Hani about the German population and their response to Hitler, which they identify as ranging from complacency to fear. Consumed by anxiety about the circumstances in Germany, Hani began the process of contacting her uncles in Chicago for help in emigrating. Anna and Benno, 60 and 66, respectively, didn’t think they had the wherewithal to leave. They believed they could weather the storm. Hani got out first. Neuburger’s father would depart in 1938. They would meet in Astoria, New York, where Hani and her new husband had relocated from Chicago. The letter exchanges between parents and children created the seed for Neuburger’s book. When Kristallnacht occurs, Hani and Fritz are aghast to read about it in the New York Daily News.

An interesting sidebar delves into the efforts of Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle, who left Laupheim, Germany, for the United States in 1884. He worked tirelessly to get Jewish residents from his hometown out of Germany, with guarantees to employ them upon their arrival. However, as Neuburger comments, “Beginning in 1937, the U.S. State Department began throwing obstacles in Laemmle’s path.” Meanwhile, in Germany, the noose had tightened. By the middle of 1939, over 300,000 German Jews waited for American visas. It was the same year that Germany’s population of Jews had diminished to half of its size as a result of prison deaths, executions, and the exit of those Jews lucky enough to escape the country.

Benno wrote his first postcard in September 1941. It stated: “THE ETERNAL MASS MURDERER, HITLER, I SPIT ON YOU.” His second missive was mailed ten days later.

As prospects for a visa to Cuba become more remote, and extended family members are sent to Riga, Latvia, by train to meet their deaths in the 1941 Kaunas murders, Benno recommenced his postcards. The messages use words describing Hitler as a “Tyrant” written across his face on the stamp, along with the phrase “a pile of rubbish.” By January 1942, Benno is composing postcards number eight and nine. In February, his language becomes more aggressive. He indicts Hitler with the phrase, “Murderer of 5 Million.”

In anger and distress about the escalating disaster, Benno failed to notice that his address was imprinted on one of the cards. This information would lead to his arrest.

The Reich evicted Benno and Anna from their apartment during the first week of March 1942. After their home and all its contents were appropriated, the couple was taken to the transit camp Milbertshofen. On March 24, the “special police” arrested Benno.

Benno was photographed for Nazi records in April while in prison. Authorities decided that although he was a sole actor, his actions represented a thread of defiance that, if emulated, could have larger repercussions. (German historians have now recognized Benno’s actions as those of a resister and a potential influencer on the White Rose organization.)

Benno had authored and mailed a total of fourteen postcards. His “trial” in Berlin’s People’s Court was staged to serve as a lesson and example to the German people. The Nazis implemented the Court in 1934, and those accused of crimes were never afforded the presumption of innocence. An appeal was of no avail. It is a warning of what happens when a country’s legal system is co-opted and perverted.

Benno was executed on September 18, 1942. His wife Anna was killed the following day in Treblinka.

I was able to interview Neuburger, who was open to discussing all my questions about analogies to contemporary America, world events, ethno-nationalism, and the need for citizens to be proactive in responding to these threats.

Neuburger detailed how the book reflected his outlook on social and political structures. He qualified Fascism as a “death sentence” for humanity, as it builds “iron walls between human beings.” He said, “It takes cultural differences and makes them into absolutes.” When we spoke about “nationalism,” the conversation shifted to Gaza and the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian population. Neuburger explicitly delved into the racialization of the Jews, who before the Nazis were “viewed as a religion.”

During a recent book tour to Germany, including Laupheim (Anna’s birthplace), Neuburger gave remarks to a diverse audience at a girls’ high school. His speech’s conclusion emphasized his feelings. He was in the country to honor the memory of his relatives, “not in the name of one group, or one religion, but in the name of that sentiment that demands dignity and rights of all people.”

When I expressed my concerns about the future of America, Neuburger maintained, “There was no mass movement in Germany to counteract the Nazis.” He underscored, “We know about German Fascism. The onus is on us. There is a lot of resistance here already. This has to be our determination.”

His final thought was concise: “Fascism creates division. We have the capacity to cooperate.”