Professor Susanna Schrafstetter’s current research on Germans Jews who fled their home country for Italy during the Nazi era was the subject of a piece in a leading German newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The article summarizes the findings of Professor Schrafstetter’s most recent essay in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, one of Germany`s leading journals in the field of 20th-century history. It discusses the question of why German Jews fled to fascist Italy by analyzing the fate of the roughly 400 Jews from Munich who left for the Italian peninsula between 1933 and 1940. The article about the Munich Jewish refugees is a first case study in Professor Schrafstetter’s research about German Jewish refugees in fascist Italy. Her focus is on the experiences of the refugees, rather than on official policy. Using a broad range of sources, she traces the life stories of individuals, conveying a multitude of experiences across time and in different regions of Italy.
The article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung focuses on a few biographies that Professor Schrafstetter discusses in her article in the Vierteljahrshefte. One of them is the lawyer Max Hirschberg ,who fled his hometown of Munich in 1934. Politically, Hirschberg, who was close to the Social Democratic Party, was a known opponent of Nazism and had been imprisoned for a while in 1933. Hirschberg was able to find work in a law office in Milan, where he advised other refugees about emigration matters. Hirschberg considered the Italian people to be absolutely immune against “chauvinism, militarism and antisemitism,” despite the fact that he was observed by fascist informers and heard from many refugees whom he advised about appalling treatment by fascist authorities or police. To him, all this paled in comparison to what he had seen in Germany. However, after the promulgation of the antisemitic racial laws in Italy in the fall of 1938, he and his family left Milan for New York. Hirschberg, like other German Jews who came to Italy in the early 1930s, had managed to rebuild a life for himself and his family in exile but the Italian racial legislation forced him to emigrate a second time.
Others were less lucky. Samuel and Adele Obarzanek and their two children did not leave Munich until the summer of 1939. They boarded a train from Munich to Milan with no more than a few Reichmarks and four suitcases. Like thousands of other Jewish refugees in Italy, they were unable to arrange for their emigration to a third country. Once the Germans started to occupy most of the Italian peninsula in the fall of 1943, the Obarzaneks went into hiding in a small village in the Italian Alps. However, they were discovered, arrested, and eventually deported to Auschwitz. Samuel Obarzanek and his son Emanuel were murdered in Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Adele Obarzanek and her daughter Thea survived.
Professor Schrafstetter’s sobering and important work reflects the broad reach of her interests in the history of modern Germany and the Department of History is proud to celebrate her accomplishments as a scholar.
For those of you who read German, please follow the link below for the article about Schrafstetter’s work.
