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Cindy Schweich Handler, "A German Jew's Triumph: Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany" (McFarland, 2025)
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Harry Handler
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Cindy Handler
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Harry Handler
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer
So today I'm privileged to take the opportunity to talk to Cindy and Harry Handler about their new book, A German Jews Fritz Oppenheimer and the Naziation of Germany. It's always hard for me to pronounce this word so, but bear with me. So Cindy work appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Compose, Newsweek, Red Book, the Huffington Post, and a host of other national publications. She is former editor and writer for the USA Today Network. A German Jew's Triumph Fritz Oppenheimer and the Denazification of Germany is based on primary sources such as Fritz Contemporary's World War I diaries, journals kept by his wife Elsbeth, and a Coutheus collection of letters he wrote to her during their long separation after 9 11. Harry Handler, who is here with us as well, decided to explore this inheritance to see whether he could learn more about his grandfather's life. Fritz Fritz Oppenheimer is a personality of a small 53 frame, but of a huge personality as a human being. He was a wealthy Jewish Berliner who fled the Third Reich in the mid 1938, joined basic training in the US army at 45, and ultimately became General Eisenhower's legal aid and translator. A German Jew's Triumph for Trace Fritz Oppenheimer as a figure of extraordinary skill, moral complexity, and intellectual discipline, Cindy Handler preserves his voice, his diaries and the historical record while also inviting readers to grapple with the discomforts of assimilation, of secularization, restraint and ethical judgment under extreme circumstances. I would like to turn here to Harry first and then to Cindy just to ask the question, how was it to start writing about it after you discovered all those treasures that for a while you didn't even want to pay attention to? For you, Harry, how was it to start working with those, what kind of emotions, what kind of thoughts you had?
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Harry Handler
Well, first, you know, it wasn't that I didn't want to know about the past. We didn't even know it was there. You know, my grandmother passed away in 1993, we were going to throw at everything that was in her apartment. We decided to move it from her closet to my closet. And we really started looking at it in the early 2000s. And when we opened it up, you know, here was Hitler's last political will and testament. Here were things that were clearly from, you know, Hitler's bunker and Gestapo headquarters, you know, So I started to wonder, why did we have these? So we started going back and looking at the, you know, looking at the documents. And the fascinating thing was I wanted to learn about my grandfather. I'd heard stories about him from my mother, from his wife, met contemporaries of his, very famous people who adored him. Sometimes his family did not adore him quite as much. So we wanted to know him as a person. And I think the diaries and the letters and the stories that came from the time were really a great way to learn what happened. The stories that people tell much later in life are usually very different from what happens at the time. We were also very careful not to make it just a hagiography of Fritz Oppenheimer. He did have a very interesting life, but he was a complicated person. And we tried to bring that through in the book as well.
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Interviewer
And I think you absolutely did, because I think you pointing out some things that at some moments I was not comfortable with. But I think it's intentional. I think it's important for us to look at people, like people, not just kind of stick figures that perfectly fit in our understanding. So I want to move right now to the questions that I have. And one of the questions that I have is it's for Cindy, more probably than for Harry, the idea that he was a family member. Right. He was your husband's grandfather and. And familial presence in family life. How does personal proximity shape your research and writing process? Were the moments when family intimacy made it more hard for you to achieve critical distance, to interpret his choices? And I am guessing that for Harry, it will be different than for you. But I like to talk to you because you are the one who ultimately wrote the book, right?
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Cindy Handler
Well, for me, it was easier in that I knew really nothing about him when I started. I had heard very little and, you know, had never met him, obviously, so. So I could just use our primary sources to kind of, you know, like, create a picture of, you know, who he was and what his goals were. And he was a wonderful writer, and he wrote, we have, I think, hundreds of letters that he wrote to his wife. She saved everything. He didn't save any But I think, you know, she was his official biographer. So we have letters and journals, and it was a lot to go on.
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Interviewer
Did you feel any issues of being a family member that you wanted to give. I think Harry already addressed the idea that you didn't want to portray him as perfect character. But did you have moments where you felt like, I don't want to go there, I want to leave something out?
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Cindy Handler
No, I really, my goal was to create just a full person who was excelled in some ways, but also had his flaws. Because I think when you feel like you're reading about a person who has come alive, you're more willing to believe him and to take seriously what happens to him. I think if it. If somebody isn't fully rounded as an individual, you're more skeptical, kind of what happens.
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Interviewer
Yeah, I certainly felt this way because I felt he came alive to me when I was reading. And that's one of the beauties, I think, of the book, because you look at this character, you think, oh, wow, what he had to go through. So, yeah, so let me jump right way into something you described about him, kind of consistency. I think consistently, I think you talk about him as perennial outsider, a Jew in Christian Prussia, a German in the US army, and his Jewishness seem less a chosen identity than something assigned by the Nazi regime. So how did Fritz himself understand his Jewish identity? Are there diary entries that where he reflects on his Jewishness one way or another? Or was it something that he didn't even think much? Yes, Harry, you want to answer?
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Harry Handler
So, you know, Fritz Oppenheimer wanted to be at the center of the action. He felt he was destined to be a man of history. And his Jewish identity was actually a hindrance to him a little bit. You know, in the Prussian. In the German army, the Prussians did not promote Jews into their officer corps. He wanted to be an officer, so that was difficult for him. So he kept his past. He didn't try to hide it, but he also did not promote it. When he joined the American army at 45, the United States was at war with Germany, and he was clearly German. He had an accent. He could never get rid of his German accent, but he did not play up neither his Jewish nor his German identity. And then the Nazis always said that if we lose this war, we'll be ruled by the Jews. So when he was working on denazification back in Germany, he kept his origin story as being Jewish and German secret because he thought it would make denazification a more successful project. I do have two quotes Which I thought was very interesting with, you know, what he said in World War I. He writes, the commander has left the regiment during a Lutheran worship service, and from which, of course, soldiers of Jewish and Catholic fates were excluded. Colonel von Rosenberg, for whom all men, regardless of confession, must be prepared to give their lives, shook hands with all the officers. It is incomprehensible how it is possible to dress up the farewell of the supposedly secular commander as a confessional celebration. It does not matter if you're not a member of the denomination. So he was furious that he was out there sacrificing, potentially sacrificing his life for Germany, and he couldn't attend the ceremonies. I'll just give one more quick quote. He was talking about when they were in Galicia and he was looking, meeting the Galician Jews. These were. Now it's part of Ukraine, you know, he would talk about, almost as an anthropological study, the old Jews in their long tall robes, reaching the ground, stood about in small groups, engaged in animated discussions, gestulating vehemently. So he was writing about them, you know, as if they were a different people, because he was a German Jew and they were, you know, Russian Orthodox Jews. So it was very interesting to read that in the diaries.
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Interviewer
Yeah. And I think for a non Jewish reader, probably those intricacies will be lost because people sometimes don't understand that Jewish is such a broad idea, broad term. And so we kind of picture them one way or another. I think this intricacies of being a German Jew versus looking at Eastern Jews from a different standpoint. It's actually very interesting. And he. Yes, and he has preserved this almost like scientific, if you can say so, view on this, which is interesting too. So. But doesn't. It doesn't mean that he didn't see himself a Jew. He just. It doesn't really play such an important part for him. Right. Is it correct to say.
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Harry Handler
Yeah, he did not hide his Jewish. Well, he tried. He. He didn't promote it. But he also didn't, you know, he didn't claim that he was, you know, Christian. He certainly acknowledged being of Jewish origin.
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Interviewer
Yeah. Let's move to the next question because I think it leads to the same kind of thought, because I'm talking here about the fact that Fritz emphasized his absolutely. Native German disposition and referred to Jewish heritage rather than calling himself Jewish. So he said, I am of Jewish heritage. How do you read this language? What does it tell you about his either assimilation. We talked about it with Cindy, that it was not real assimilation, but more a secularization does it relate also to self protection or perhaps internalized hierarchy among German Jews? So what do you feel is more representative in this whole idea of presenting himself as absolutely native German and Judaism as Jewish heritage rather than.
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Cindy Handler
Well, I think he would have been very proud to say that he had a Prussian disposition. I mean, not just German, but Prussian. You know, he was very disciplined. You know, when his wife married into the family, she was from the south and she said that she was really surprised that they talked about all topics at the dinner table, including, you know, sex and money and they made jokes and she found it to be kind of actually kind of a little bit cold, like not, you know, kind of warm. And, you know, the relations between the family were kind of not as warm as in her family. And my impression was that, you know, the Oppenheimers, Fritz's family were very secular, you know, and by that I mean, you know, we've talked about this a little bit as opposed to assimilated, where assimilated might mean that you have kind of consciously, I don't know, shed some aspects.
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Interviewer
Yeah.
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Cindy Handler
To blend in with the overall culture. And I think he and his family were secularized, which just meant that the observance of religion didn't play very much of a role in their lives. And I learned during this process that I think that wealthy Jews from the families that were similar to Fritz's tended to be to consider themselves to be philanthropists and to help their less wealthy counterparts in Germany. But as Harry pointed out, he did not recognize the Eastern European Jews who I guess had not had access to the Bible in any language besides Hebrew, whereas Moses Mendelssohn had translated the Bible into German. And that in the 1700s onward kind of allowed entry into the kind of general culture of Germany more.
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Interviewer
How many languages did he speak?
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Harry Handler
About eight. You know, he went to a classic Liseaux. In addition to, you know, French, German, Russian, English, you know, Dutch, he also, you know, classical Greek, Latin. Yeah, he was very good at languages.
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Cindy Handler
He had a facility for languages, I think.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. So let me move on to a little bit of a different topic, actually maybe closer to the topic of the book to some degree. And as you notice, my focus is not because I attended your lecture, which was wonderful, and I listened to the presentation you did. So I'm not focusing on work so called, but are more like personality culture, you know, what it means to be Jewish or not being manifested Jew in this environment. So those are more my interest in this, but I still have interest, of course, in how did he handle this whole process. And one of the questions I have is that Fritz dismissed Italian fascism as just another exotic. Exotic. Right. And he is. His wife, Elsberg, initially prioritized economic opportunity over Hitler's rights. What does this miscalculation reveal about the psychology of secularized Jews and the danger of treating extremism as temporary or manageable? I even be thinking about contemporary times, too, as I'm thinking about this. Oh, yes.
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Cindy Handler
If I may tie that together. I think that they were very distraught that Hitler had come to power. And I don't think they made a calculation like, oh, we're, we're. Well, I mean, they hated to leave everything that centuries of their family had built there, like a lot of Jews. But I think that it was more a function of, in my opinion, denial than misplaced priorities. I think that, you know, denial is just such a big part of human nature. And as you say, that makes you think of a lot of contemporary news today. It's just the belief that this hasn't happened to my people or nothing on this scale before. And I just. You really don't think that it's going to happen. And I think that they didn't leave in 33 like a lot of Germans did. They did towards the middle of the 30s, start planning kind of an escape route or a backup plan. But, you know, I think it was just kind of, we're gonna try to, you know, stay here until we can't.
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Interviewer
And hopefully nothing will happen. Right.
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Harry Handler
I couldn't really believe the country they were so loyal to and Frick had fought for three and a half years, you know, on the battlefield, would turn against them, they were shocked, I think, every. Every day. But, you know, when they finally came to the realization that, no, this was real and there was no way around it, then. Then they fled. In pieces, but they fled.
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Interviewer
So the question. My next question is about. We talked a little bit about it already about Fritz withholding his Jewish identity. And here's my question, specific to him withholding his Jewish identity. With Cato insisting only his role as patriotic American, what was at stake? Did Fritz believe objectively required suppressing this part of himself? Was this restraint a strength, or did it exact a personal cost? What do you think, Fritz, you know.
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Harry Handler
When he was transporting Field Marshal Keitel, who was the head of all the German armed forces at the time, Fritz wanted personally to tell him where he came from and that he had fought on his side. And after the Germans kicked him out, he was now a commissioned officer in the American army and had this miraculously fine assignment to help him sign the surrender and to guard him on the journey back. But it would not be what Eisenhower wanted. Eisenhower was the supreme commander and just wanted the war to be over. So he didn't say that. You know, it's a tradition that the surrendering general would turn over their sword or their field marshal's baton. So Fritz did pick it up and thought about bringing it back to Eisenhower, but he knew that Eisenhower would not like that. That was not his intention. And the last part is, he said, the American schools are excellent. He was not the only person who used that as a line to kind of hide their origin stories. But also Keitel, if he knew that he was speaking to a German Jew, may have stopped talking and he was interrogating him. So for those three reasons, he couldn't really bring up his origin story.
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Interviewer
Do you feel. Did he ever say that it was some personal cost for him? Did you notice any of this, or was he more like matter of factly? He didn't go into the emotional side of this in any of his notes.
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Harry Handler
He was, I thought he gave. The account of the surrender is written in a long. It's a 12 page document that Fritz sent to his friend who was the assistant Secretary of War, Jack McCloy. And Jack McCloy sent a letter back to him saying, I wish you'd told Keitel who you were and your origin story. He would have jumped out of the plane. But he said that more as a joke. And he did write in cursive on the letter. He said, I'd love to publish the story of the surrender, but we'll keep your background secret. So they all knew that in managing Germany and in denazifying it, they needed to ensure that people didn't feel that now Germany would be ruled by the. Governed, by the Jews.
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Interviewer
Interesting, because as I'm listening to you, I almost feel like he finally got vindicated, you know, by what you're doing right now. You know, they were writing this book and it's like, yes, he couldn't do it, but you're doing it for him.
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Harry Handler
So it was a marvelous reversal of fortune. That's the best part of writing this, writing this book.
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Interviewer
Right? So my next question is, Fritz refused to see even his bitterest enemies as less than human, despite the dehumanization of Jews. Was this an ethical commitment, a legal necessity, or something rooted in his secularized worldview? What do you say? How was he able to see his bitterest enemies not less than humans?
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Cindy Handler
You know, I think that he despised them as terrible humans, you know, but. But I always am reminded of this show on PBS I saw shortly after 9 11. And it was a documentary interviewing religious leaders about their responses to 9 11. And a common theme was about how seeing others as less than human, whether it's the Taliban looking at Americans or looking at Jews or, you know, the other way around, certainly the Nazis looked at the Jews as less than human. But any. But they, you know, the religious leaders are saying that is the definition of evil to, you know. And that's another thing that, you know, we see today in some places where, you know, people, because of the color of their skin or whatever, are just not considered to be fully, you know, human. And I think that for Fritz, I think that, you know, he hated the Nazis with a passion, but he didn't need to, you know, see them as anything other than, you know, monstrous humans to do his job.
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Interviewer
Yeah. I always feel that we don't need to fall as low as them. Right. So we don't need to mimic their vocabulary. And to me, it was honorable to some degree because this back and forth insults don't get us anywhere. So I think that to me it was, you know, that's why I want to ask you whether it was ethical commitment or legal necessity, but probably it was both. What do you think?
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Cindy Handler
Right, exactly. Exactly. I think, you know, certainly as. As Harry mentioned, Eisenhower and his superiors wanted him just to do his job. You know, it wasn't his job to, you know, characterize anyone or anything. But also, I think for him, you know, I mean, he felt a righteous, you know, indignation and anger at them. And I think you would be bringing that down by saying, well, I'm just, you know. Yeah, coming down to the same level that they were at.
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Interviewer
I'm like them.
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Cindy Handler
Yeah.
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Interviewer
One question that I have. Oh, Henry, you want to say something?
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Harry Handler
No, I just, you know, there were some, you know, Morgenthau, who was the Secretary of the treasury, wanted Germany to stay in the stone age Germany. Churchill did not have a problem with lining up the Nazi leaders and shooting them. But I think Fritz felt very strongly that the way to bring Germany back to being a member of nations was they wanted to try the leaders. They wanted to take these people and put them on trial and show the world what they've done. And he believed very strongly in justice. And summary execution was not his view of what justice would be.
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Interviewer
But I think he also retained this admiration to some degree of Germany in terms of culture, in terms of ability, in terms of Enlightenment issues. I think he kept it alive. Interesting for me because sometimes we look at the country like, no, it all disappeared. But it doesn't feel like to me, it didn't feel as if he still had the hope that Germany can return to something that was before the war. Is my reading correct or am I putting something that didn't exist there? Right.
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Cindy Handler
No, I think that's exactly true. I think he saw the Nazis as kind of thugs and pretenders who had stolen his country away from him. And it's true, a lot of people went along with that. But I think he looked at Hitler as like a charismatic cult leader and he wanted to have the culture, you know, and the, the history of Germany that he was so proud of restored.
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Interviewer
So the other question I have, and you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but I was wondering about his father, the Ernest who belonged to the association of German Jews. How did that affect Fritz? Because this isn't particularly honorable or. So how do you think it affected. Did he talk at all about it? And if you don't want to, we can leave this question out.
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Harry Handler
No, no, his, his. His wife wrote about it in a contemporaneous diary, which was, which was fascinating, you know. You know, and she said, you know, Ernst not understanding where the Nazis would go. You know, he felt like, you know, he wanted a strong Germany. He was, you know, very loyal to the Kaiser. In time. He had a mustache that made him look exactly like the Kaiser when he got married. So he was a difficult personality. I think Fritz was different. You can't always ascribe the sins of the father to the sins of the son. Was much more believed in a meritocracy. He spent a lot of time associating with people from the tops of society, the middle and the, and the bottom. He was a different personality. But Ernst was, I think, one of these very rigid old Prussians. And his association of German Jews. They didn't understand that the Nazis would never accept them even if they supported some of what they were saying. But yeah, it was a real revelation to see that written in the journals of Elspeth Oppenheimer.
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Interviewer
Can you talk briefly a little bit for the reader who is not familiar with this association to give them some sense what it was. I don't know, because not everyone was aware of this. So can you just maybe a couple of sentences to.
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Harry Handler
Yeah, it was an association of German businessmen who felt that it was a right wing organization that felt, you know, business can. Can ally themselves with some of These very parties that claim to be strong leaders. And it fell apart very quickly, you know, didn't. It didn't exist long because the Nazis didn't want it. And then the businessmen realized that they would never be accepted. But, you know, that's one of the surprises that you get when you read something about what people were thinking at the time. And Ernst died, you know, this was, you know, 1928, and he died in 1928.
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Interviewer
I wonder how well aware he was at Ant. Probably not.
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Cindy Handler
Probably not. I think.
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Harry Handler
Yeah. The Nazis got 2 to 3% of the vote in 1928, 2029. So unlikely that he felt that they were going to take power in Germany.
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Interviewer
So there's a couple of characters that I want to address, and you might need to correct my pronunciation. So Dr. Daru. How to pronounce it? Emeyer. And he. Fritz considered them fair and trustworthy there, despite their service under the Nazi regime and support for the Enabling Act. What criteria did Fritz use to consider them trustworthy? And where do you draw the line between pragmatism and moral compromise, in Fritz's judgment, when he tried to exclude his people?
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Harry Handler
Let me address that in two ways. Reinhold Meyer was. He was married to Fritz's wife's cousin, who was. So they were relatives. The families were very good friends. We have pictures of them. He was very close friends with Elspeth Oppenheimer's father. They lived near each other in Stuttgart. He was a Christian politician in the 30s. Shocking that he voted for the Enabling act, but he did, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers. But they were very close. He became the minister president of the US zone. So he was actually president of Germany. Fritz trusted him, liked him. They were immediately after the war, when he was in Stuttgart, he had dinner with Reinhold and they toasted to the family's health. So he trusted him and felt he was a man of the old Germany and that was the Germany he was hoping to restore. Brierly was a neighbor of the family. He knew him from before, the Justice Minister. So Fritz, these were the people who Fritz Oppenheimer and the American occupation forces hoped would be the justice system and the face of a new Germany that could be readmitted eventually as a member of the European nation states.
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Interviewer
This is very, very interesting when you think about when we make decisions and when our personal knowledge of people also makes us see the person from a different angle as well. And how often do we realize and do we acknowledge that our decisions might be based on more than what is presented to the public? Because he had to. Had an opportunity, chance to see these people outside of just distance, but much closer proximity. And it probably was very challenging. Actually. That's something that such an intricate kind of condition situation when you are judging not only on the perception from outside, but also on your personal knowledge.
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Cindy Handler
Right. I mean, it can be helpful, you know, to, to have that, that, you know, he had that granular knowledge. But you know, Harry and I always talk about, we, I think every time we talk we get asked this question because, you know, it's hard to imagine people who live through the war that being responsible for their self governance. But I think the Americans were really committed to finding people who would support a democracy. You know, I always think about, you know, after the Iraq war with the Ba' Athist regime, you know, and the feeling is we're gonna get rid of everybody who said that they were a Baptist, but then there was nobody left to run the government. And it's hard to leave.
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Interviewer
Yeah, it's very interesting because we cannot look at this issue unless we're one dimensionally. So there are other things that have to be taken into account. And the fact you were saying that Fritz knew them, these people personally knew other side of these characters. It's really interesting. And that's where he needs to put his trust and actually say, okay, I think it's worthwhile to give them trust again, which is extremely interesting. And I think it's sometimes for people who judge from outside might be difficult to accept too because we theoretically think words are so perfect and we're just gonna make decision regardless of our personal knowledge. But I think having personal knowledge can be beneficial.
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Cindy Handler
Right. And you think about what the alternatives were. I think Morgenthau, the treasury Secretary wanted to. He envisioned Germany being like a farm or something after the war. Just like being completely agrarian and not having any industrial capabilities. But that would have been worse for everybody. I mean, it wouldn't have worked. And you know, you know, so they, they went with what. What was the best option. And I always look at, look at Germany now. You know, if you go to Berlin, like, you know, young people are very peace loving and they've done the memory work to try to understand what happened. I mean, more than other countries.
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Interviewer
So she's proved right. Right.
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Harry Handler
You know, just one point to be made too is I think people forget how truly horrible the cond in Central Europe in 1945 when people had to make these decisions. The Czechs and Poles and Yugoslavs had expelled, you know, in many cases killing, you know, many people, 5 million Germans were flooding back into, you know, Germany. And Jews tried to return to their home in Poland. And there were pogroms again where, you know, the neighbors were killing the Jews trying to return and take their property back. So they were sent back into, into Germany as well. So conditions were very bad, you know, there. Germany had been bombed to rubble. There was very little food, There was very little shelter. And the Allies needed to make decisions to bring Germany to its or Central Europe to its feet again because the fear was if people had no food and shelter, they would vote communist.
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Interviewer
Provided the chaos. Right? Yeah.
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Interviewer
So another question that I don't know how comfortable this, but let's go there. Fritz believed that Nazi rule was a tragic aberration. We kind of talked about it too, and that only a few leaders bore real responsibility. Given how few Germans are recognized as righteous among the nations, how do you assess his claim? Was he minimizing collective complicity?
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Cindy Handler
Well, that's a good question. I know the Germans hated the idea of collective guilt, but I think as we discussed, he felt that, you know, this, you know, there, there was, you know, terrible inflation everywhere. The country, you know, was being punished after World War I. I mean, they're very punitive, kind of, you know, reparations they had to make. And I think that this charismatic cult person came along and kind of stole his country. And I think he felt that, you.
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Interviewer
Know.
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Cindy Handler
He just had to, you know, restore. He wanted to see the Germany that he loved be restored again.
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Harry Handler
You know, the trials, they, you know, the Nuremberg trials, which got so much publicity, was the top 24. But those trials continued. SS officers were tried, thousands of them. So there was a sense of. And Fritz Oppenheimer strongly believed that if you were guilty of mass murder or atrocities, you should be tried for those. He didn't hold Germany collectively or just a membership in the Nazi party, which you needed to be to be practicing lawyers and judges and professors. He didn't hold everybody Guilty for those situations. He thought that justice meant people should be tried for their crimes. And that was part of his belief. Belief, you know, that was the way they structured denazification.
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Cindy Handler
Right.
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Interviewer
What about regular people? What about this idea? What the question was about the fact that there was not too many Germans who were so called righteous who tried to save Jews. Did he have to talk about this part?
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Harry Handler
He didn't. He supported the people who, like Reinhold Meyer who was a politician but then just went back to being a lawyer, you know, a family lawyer, you know, practicing in, in Stuttgarten people would stay to be, you know, professors, but they didn't hold any role in the Nazis. You have to remember that the Nazis executed their opponents.
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Interviewer
That's right.
- [38:46]
Harry Handler
Good friend of his and lawyer, you know, James von Moltke, who was leader of the Krisa Circle was hanged by the Germans in April 40. Another friend, Pupizar, who was the angel of Ravensbruck, fled in 1943. So there were a few people who, who, who pushed, pushed back on the Nazis, but they were ruthlessly eliminated. And the, the very few people who helped the Jews. Tragic. But yeah, there weren't, there weren't many. And Fritz needed to pick to help choose amongst those who were there and had some abilities to help rebuild the country.
- [39:33]
Cindy Handler
I mean they had a form that was widely used that Fritz also used called the Fragabogen, which I think there was something like 140 questions that people had to answer to gauge their level of complicity. And for a lot of people who just had to get a Nazi card to join a club or something, you know, that was considered differently from people who, as Harry said, had actively, you know, committed crimes that would, that in any culture would be considered crimes, you know, and then. And so they would be punished, you know, according to level of their, you know, crime.
- [40:12]
Interviewer
But there are some figures he defended and again, I might mispronounce. Last name Tyson and IG Ferben. T H Y S S E N One of them and another. Yeah. And then Farben. Why was he defending them?
- [40:30]
Harry Handler
So, you know, after the couple things, you know, after the war, the Nazis had combined most of their corporations into you know, massive cartels. So IG Farben was the chemical cartel and Tyson was part of the steel cartel. The plan was to break up these cartels decarbolization and have them, you know, the leaders, you know, went. Thyssen and Krupp, you know, went to, went to prison. Now they were let out. They were mostly given 10 year sentences. And the allied high Commissioner let them out after five years, so they didn't suffer all that much. But. But decartelization, what Fritz worked on after he served in the State Department, the plan was to break up all these. These companies. It was moderately successful. They went to. They hoped There were maybe five cartels, and they hoped to have approximately 40 companies, but they ended up with 15 or so. So they were only moderately successful at doing that. But IG Farbin, which, you know, manufactured the Zyklon gas, they were broken up into basf, Bayer, some of the companies that you see today, those were the result of breaking them up. So Fritz did work in German corporate law. He wanted to be an American lawyer. And the New York Bar association was anti Semitic at the time, said, oh, you have to go back to law school. So he practiced in Germany.
- [42:07]
Interviewer
Bit ironic, if you think about it. Yeah. Do you think that he felt personally rewarded for all his efforts? Did he ever say something in any of this correspondence anywhere? Because he put so much online for first for Germany and then for tennis application. And did he feel that his efforts were ever fully recognized and rewarded?
- [42:30]
Cindy Handler
I think so. Don't you, Gary? I think he was really tremendously proud of what he did. He got. What was the designation that, you know, he got some medal?
- [42:44]
Harry Handler
Well, he got the Bronze Star. Eisenhower gave him the Bronze Star for his work at the German surrender in World War II, and then General Clay gave him the Legion of Merit for his work on denazification. He could not be promoted in the German army to be a commissioned officer. The United States made him a commissioned officer, and he left the army as a lieutenant colonel. So that was, you know, only two levels below general. I think he was immensely proud of that. He was certainly aware of the irony of the fact that, you know, it was his pen that Keitel signed the surrender with in Berlin. His wife called it the high point of his career. So I think he was. I think he felt successful. He perhaps would have if it had served what his supervisors wanted. He would not have minded getting more credit for it, but he needed to keep his origin stories less obvious, and that's why he was interviewed less by the press.
- [43:58]
Cindy Handler
Yeah. And nothing gratified him more than being in the center of the action.
- [44:02]
Interviewer
I mean, being restless, such a restless person. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So I am nearing the end of my question, so I want to ask you, unless you have anything else you would like to address, but my question, my last question is, what were your hope for the readers? What did you want readers to learn, discover, or question when you were writing this book. And another question is, second part of this is, who is your ideal audience and who do you want to reach the most?
- [44:39]
Cindy Handler
Right. Well, I feel that we really want to because of the kind of unusual nature of everything that Fritz went through, and then being in the position of the surrender to take cop Nazis into captivity and interrogate them in the marvelous reversal of fortune aspect of it, which I think he called it, that I wanted people to think that even in the darkest of circumstances, you know, individuals make a difference. I mean, even, you know, we see now, I mean, I think about, you know, what's going on in Minneapolis now, just that, you know, people, you usually have some agency at most points in your life, you know, hopefully, and you can make choices to change the future. So that's. I wanted to use his story as an illustration of that. And for the audience, generally, like the broadest possible audience, I think would be, you know, I would love to have read. I mean, anybody who. I think when you have fully fleshed out characters, which I hope I've done, and you read their stories, if you can relate to them, which you hope that readers will, you know, it makes people think more about, you know, what would I do in that situation and how did this happen? And it just. People who wouldn't even usually read history can, you know, can be drawn to a good story. So I hope people like good stories. You know, also, if you're interested in historical biographies and in particular about World War II, which to me always seemed the closest to black and white, good and evil. You know, I mean, there. There are other stories with, you know, dramatic wrongs that happen to people. But I've always been drawn to stories about World War II, you know, also about, you know, Jewish studies. If, you know, you've asked very thought provoking questions about, you know, the role of somebody who is Jewish. You know, things happen to them, but what can they do? Also.
- [46:59]
Interviewer
Yeah, I want to ask a question about the title, because the title is A German Jews Trial. And so to me, this is very, very important. The title itself. Can you talk a little bit about the title? Because I think you talk about many things that would kind of move around being Jewish this way or this way. And. Yeah. That the title says A German Jew.
- [47:25]
Cindy Handler
Right.
- [47:26]
Interviewer
How do you think he will feel if he will see the book, if.
- [47:29]
Cindy Handler
You were to read the book?
- [47:30]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [47:34]
Cindy Handler
You know, I don't. I don't think he would have a. I mean, he. You know, I must confess, we did not come up with the title. The Publisher did. But I think that they were trying to think of what gets right to the heart of what this is about. And, you know, a lot of times, I think when you read about German Jews, you don't think, oh, they were the ones who were in a position to be triumphant. So right away, there's none of that dissonance. You know, he's, you know, he's a German Jew, but he's also triumphing. So I think the triumph part would very much appeal to him. And, yeah, I think he, you know, I mean, probably, you know, if you. If you asked him, you know, describe who you are in a few words. I always thought probably the first thing that would come up would be international lawyer or something, because he really defined himself by his achievements. But I never saw any evidence that he shied away in any way being thought of as a Jew, too, and German.
- [48:41]
Interviewer
Certainly you had Hitler's documents. He says, yes.
- [48:48]
Harry Handler
There were so many people. When we go give this lecture, we've been on a book tour for a year now, and this was before it was a lecture on a college course. Used to call it a terrible half century. Then it was the rise of autocracy. So I think it's important to get this story out to so many people. One thing that's interesting when you tell the story is people come up and they say, if it's a story and it's about Germans and Jews In World War II, it was. They fled. It was terrible. They were taken to the camps. It was degrading as humans. Almost every story ends sadly. Or it was a terrible story, this one. The reversal of fortune is the aspect of it which makes it different. And I think Fritz Oppenheimer would be immensely proud to see his picture. We did put the picture on the front. Is Fritz Oppenheimer as a teenager in a German uniform. He's got the German helmet on it. So we do want people wondering, why is somebody wearing a German uniform? Indian? German Jews triumph. And that's the, you know, the irony and the reversal of fortune aspect of the story, which makes it so compelling.
- [50:04]
Cindy Handler
Yes, he did fight in World War I. We should say, yeah, got a couple of iron crosses. I do want to, like, interject, if you don't mind. I mean, I don't mean to imply in any way that, you know, people who suffered, like, the worst fates, you know, that I had any. I mean, there are many, many people who didn't have choices open to them. And, you know, it's not like, you know, I'll choose from 10 things to do. There's a lot of people had no choices. But in Fritz's case, he was fortunate that he could be in positions of responsibility.
- [50:37]
Interviewer
But let me ask you something unrelated to book somewhat with. We are pretty well aware there is increasing of antisemitism in the world. Right. So don't you think the portrayal of Samuel Lakretz is actually positive response to. You don't have to always be weak, persecuted, degraded. Right. What do you say? How. Go ahead.
- [51:00]
Harry Handler
Oh, I think that's exactly, you know, what I would say. You know, you know, he fought. You know, I remember learning the story of the Holocaust and what happened in World War II in. In Sunday school when I went very young and just thought, it's like, why didn't they fight? You know, why didn't more people, you know, fight back? And people did fight back, but Fritz was an excellent opportunity. Is. Is, you know, he. He fought, he, you know, was persecuted. He left, he joined the army, he came back and he. He fought again. So he did. He did something about it. And he was a man with a great deal of agency. And the fact that he ended up at the center of world events was great, but he would have been just as happy to be storming the beaches at Normandy as he was to be at Eisenhower's headquarters in London.
- [51:55]
Interviewer
All right, so anything else you want to add or any other question that you think I should have asked and I didn't ask.
- [52:01]
Cindy Handler
I think they were pretty comprehensive, Harry.
- [52:04]
Harry Handler
Yeah, no, I think those were excellent questions. And I have to say that when we give the talk, so many people do ask, you know, the choices that he made immediately after the war, you know, you know, they're a little surprised that, you know, he was in with the Germans and helping to rebuild the country. I think, one, you needed to understand the time and how terrible the situation was on the ground at the time. And also over time, it was very interesting. The prosecution of many of the leading Nazis didn't happen even in Israel for another generation. There was the next generation that tried to take more of the perpetrators and to try them. And, you know, right after the war, there was just a feeling as we have to move on with our lives. So I thought your questions were excellent because they get at how could this happen? What did somebody have to do? But it's also surprising some of the choices that people had to make at the time. And that was what the book is about.
- [53:18]
Interviewer
And I think one of the leading ideas to me was his belief that Germany doesn't have to be this way, Germany can return to its ideas of enlightenment. And that's what I think, to me, was the driving force why he was so involved in the whole process of denazification, because bringing back Germany to how it was before, and I think this belief in this. And there's all kinds of questions about patriotism, and I left them out, but I think those are important things to consider when you think about it. So anything else you would like to add?
- [53:57]
Cindy Handler
Well, we appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk about the book. It's available online, and I don't know, it is really. It's interesting how it's like a perennial kind of. I mean, that was a theme that we also had going through the book that, like, the fight against fascism never really goes away. I mean, it keeps. You know, it goes away for a while, but then it comes back. So it's good to have your eyes open, right?
- [54:29]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. And we talked about it then. Initially, they didn't, and we. They were trying to think that it's just a fluke at the moment, and we repeat it a lot of times, so unfortunately. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. We need to keep our eyes open to be aware and do something about it, too.
- [54:49]
Harry Handler
Just.
- [54:49]
Cindy Handler
Right.
- [54:51]
Interviewer
All right. Thank you so much.
- [54:53]
Harry Handler
Thank you, really.
- [54:55]
Cindy Handler
We really appreciate it.