by Gertjan Cobelens

“Free Prisoners” poster art courtesy www.wri-irg.org

In the first article of the first postwar issue of The War Resister, the journal of the War Resisters’ International, Herbert Runham Brown offers us a look into what might be described as the WRI’s covert operations [see previous posting below].  In his “Buchenwald and Dachau” (1), Runham Brown not only provides a deeper insight into what the WRI considered to be its role in the world, he also highlights some instances of personal courage in the best Gandhian tradition and sheds new light on the fact that, right from the start, the WRI harbored no illusions about the nature of the Nazi regime. And finally, in passing, his article also challenges the discredited reputation of a Dutch Quaker.

From its inception, WRI has never limited itself merely to an intellectual opposition to war. Equally important was their role as what might be termed a “trade union” for war resisters in general and conscientious objectors in particular. Much of the day-to-day activities were focused on providing legal and moral support to conscientious objectors and on putting moral and legal pressure on governments to release convicted war resisters or reduce their sentences. What is much less known, and what is mostly lacking from Devi Prasad’s otherwise comprehensive study, War is a Crime Against Humanity: The Story of the War Resisters’ International (2) is the story of WRI’s “covert operations” and the lengths to which it went to secure the safety of its members. Runham Brown’s article bears witness to this side of WRI’s concerns, as do the 150 or so files in the WRI archiveon the refugees whom the WRI helped to escape Nazi Germany, (3) and as well the War Resisters’ International “Pool Scheme”, a system set up in conjunction with the British Home Office to maximize the number of refugees the WRI helped flee Germany.

WRI early on spoke out forcefully against the nefariousness of the Hitler regime, but that made it only the more difficult to remain true to a pacifist commitment, a commitment which lost it two of its most influential spokespersons, Albert Einstein and Fenner Brockway (4), and spelled out the end for the Labour Party leadership of WRI’s then chairman, George Lansbury. In his 1939 pamphlet Peace Now! Runham Brown managed to capture this inner conflict and sense of defeat when he wrote: “You have the right to blame us. We bow our heads in shame before you for our part in allowing the tragedy in your life, and in the lives of so many millions, ever to have taken place.” (5) The collective power of the anti-war forces had not been sufficient to stop the war.

What they hadn’t failed in, however, was the rescue of Fritz Küster (6), the secretary of Germany’s oldest peace movement, the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft, and founder of the journal Der Pazifist, after 1925 rebranded as Das andere Deutschland. The story of his rescue is easily summarized.

In 1933, Küster was arrested by the Gestapo in the presence of his fiancée Ingeborg Andreas, and he quickly disappeared into the maze of prisons and newly established concentration camps. Thanks to Ingeborg’s tireless efforts the WRI got involved, but only after they managed to secure a resourceful contact in Germany. Grace Beaton (7), the secretary of WRI and in many ways the heart and soul of the organization, traveled to Berlin to meet a certain contact at the local Quaker center, where they were to come up with a plan. Runham Brown gave this contact the pseudonym, “Willem Van Zuylenstein”, and Van Zuylenstein managed to get an appointment with Himmler as he had, in late 1933 or early 1934, successfully negotiated with the Czech authorities the release of several Sudeten Germans imprisoned for their support of local Nazi leader Heinlein. In return for his help in Czechoslovakia, Van Zuylenstein insisted that Himmler offer fair trials to Germany’s many political prisoners.

In 1935, thanks to Van Zuylenstein’s intervention, Ingeborg Andreas received a permit, the first of its kind issued in over a year, to pay Fritz Küster a visit in Buchenwald. Soon after that the WRI and Ingeborg lost all track of Fritz. And then, in early 1938, Van Zuylenstein persuaded some SS men to sneak him into Buchenwald, where he established that Fritz was indeed being held there. After the Anschluss in March 1938, the situation in Germany deteriorated further. Time was running out and the WRI decided to give it one more try. Grace Beaton and her friend Dr. Brass went to Vienna, Van Zuylenstein’s home. (8) To their dismay the address where they were to meet was the headquarters of the Vienna Gestapo. After an hour of awkward small talk they made arrangements to meet the next day in a popular café. Surrounded by SS men Beaton, Brass and Zuylenstein hatched a bold plan. By now it was clear that only a special permit signed by Hitler himself could suffice to secure Fritz Küster’s release from Buchenwald. It was decided that Van Zuylenstein would try to gain the trust of Hitler’s favorite nephew (9) and persuade him to personally hand the request for the release of Fritz Küster to his uncle. Van Zuylenstein succeeded in winning him over, and eventually Hitler signed the papers for Küster’s release.

This isn’t where the story ends, though. In an ironic twist of fate Van Zuylenstein, the “hero” of Runham Brown’s article, is in all likelihood a man who has often been portrayed as a dubious profiteer. (10) Circumstantial evidence of his probable identity is to be found also in the WRI archive, in a folder that deals with the WRI assistance to German and Austrian refugees. The file on A.L. Levine (11) includes a memo that records a conversation between George Lansbury and Dr. Perl, an Austrian who had managed to flee to Britain through the help of “Gildemeester, who claims he can get most Jews out of Germany, if the German authorities will only allow him to set up a concentration camp somewhere on an island or a tract of land.” Several reasons have emerged for considering Gildemeester to have been Van Zuylenstein. Although little is known about the life of Frank Van Gheel Gildemeester, the few biographical facts that two researchershave managed to piece together do seem to fit in with Runham Brown’s description. (12)

In an interview with The New York Times dated 27 March 1934, (13) we know, for example, that Gildemeester was busy negotiating the release of Nazi supporters in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, at the same time that Van Zuylenstein was purported to have been there doing the same, as we mentioned above.  The Times interview further describes him as a Dutch Quaker who had spent 12 years working for the release of 3.5 million political prisoners in Central and Southeastern Europe.  Gildemeester stated, “As Quakers we know no distinctions of country or political feeling. I have obtained the release of socialists by the Nazis in Germany and expect now to get amnesty for Germans in Czechoslovakia who were imprisoned by the Czechs as Nazi sympathizers.” The first meeting between Grace Beaton and “Van Zuylenstein” took place in 1934 at the Quaker center in Berlin and the second in 1938 at the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna. (Gildemeester had become a Quaker in 1915, as we state below.) Gildemeester further secured an office at the Gestapo premises a year later, putting him there at the time of Grace Beaton’s visit, but even before that he was a daily visitor, and very well connected to the local Nazi elite due to his assistance to Austrian Nazis who, before the Anschluss, had been imprisoned by the Social Democrat government. (14) In 1938 Van Gheel Gildemeester was also the founder of the Aktion Gildemeester, an organization of some controversy to this day (see remarks below), which attempted to help German and Austrian Jews emigrate abroad. Lastly, Gildemeester was also to cooperate in the WRI’s Pool Scheme, wherein WRI acted as a guarantor for refugees, with approval from the UK Home Office.

Who was Gildemeester? Frank Van Gheel Gildemeester was born in 1881 in the Netherlands to a wealthy Dutch family. His father, Francis Van Gheel Gildemeester, was an influential protestant minister, although notorious for his anti-Semitism. In his article “The Gildemeester Organisation” (15), Peter Berger retraced some of Gildemeester’s early life. During the First World War he lived in Chicago, and in 1915 he joined the Society of Friends. In 1918, working for Herbert Hoover’s relief mission, he was sent to Vienna, and stayed on to devote himself to his work for political prisoners. After the German occupation of Austria on 12 March 1938, when life for the 165,000 Jewish citizens of Vienna took a dramatic turn for the worse, Gildemeester re-emerged as the founder of the Gildemeester Auswandererhilfsaktion für Juden.

His organization drew little attention until, in September 1938, he renamed it the Aktion Gildemeester, its stated purpose being to assist Jews possessing 100,000 Reichsmarks or more [c. EUROS 600,000 in today’s money] who were seeking to leave Austria and willing to donate a tenth of their wealth to the Aktion. In turn, Aktion was to be used to finance the emigration of poor “non-Aryan” families. Questionnaires were another major source of income. They cost 60 Deutschmarks each and every prospective client had to fill one out. In the summer of 1938 Aktion also came up with a scheme to buy the Ethiopian province of Harrar for the mass relocation of Jewish citizens. The land was to be paid for by the first 13,000 prospective emigrants. A year later, while Gildemeester was still negotiating the land purchase with the Italian government, the Nazi regime arrived at the conclusion that a lot of money was to be made by taking the emigration of their non-Aryan citizens into their own hands. This, together with the fact that Eichmann and others got fed up with Gildemeester’s constant fights for the rights of refugees, spelled the end for the Aktion Gildemeester. In the fall of 1939 Gildemeester was accused of anti-Nazi propaganda and was subsequently branded an undesirable person. In January 1940, his organization was disbanded and he was forced to return to the Netherlands, where he died in 1952.

In 1946, the Salzburger Nachrichten  estimated that 26,000 Austrian and German Jews had successfully emigrated thanks to the Gildemeester Aktion. (16) After careful calculations Peter Berger arrived at an even higher number, roughly 30,000. (17) Although some historians have disputed Gildemeester’s motives, and have portrayed him as a “profiteer”, (18) Peter Berger makes a convincing case that, although appearances may have been against him, Gildemeester had never financially benefited from relief work. Whether, in the light of Runham Brown’s article, we can definitively say that Gildemeester and Van Zuylenstein were one and the same, we can at least propose that Gildemeester is the likeliest candidate.

Endnotes:

(1) Runham Brown’s article, posted here on the same date, can best be accessed at this link. The article first appeared in The War Resister, issue 50, Summer 1945, pp. 3-6.

(2) Devi Prasad, War is a Crime Against Humanity: The Story of the War Resisters’ International, WRI; London, 2005.

(3) WRI Archive Box 136-143. The archive is housed at the International Institute of  Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

(4) Fenner Brockway, a Labour MP from 1926 to 1929, had been one of the leading intellectuals in the British pacifist movement.

(5) Herbert Runham Brown, Peace Now! WRI; London, 1939.

(6) Fritz Küster (1889-1966) was born the illegitimate son of a poor housemaid. After his studies at a Baugewerbeschule he became a railway engineer. In 1919 he joined the Deutschen Friedensgesellschaft and founded the pacifist publication Der Pazifist. In 1925 he renamed it Das Andere Deutschland, which was immediately banned as soon as the Nazi’s came to power. In 1938, after his release from Buchenwald, he married Ingeborg Andreas. In 1946, he regained his position as chairman of the Deutschen Friedensgesellschaft and a year later revived Das Andere Deutschland. He died in Hannover at the age of 77.

(7) Grace Beaton joined the WRI staff in 1926. In 1933 she became the WRI secretary, a position that she held until a year before her death in 1957. Next to her secretarial work she authored many reports and was deeply involved in her work with refugees, about which she wrote: “It is a rare privilege to do such work as this. We have endeavored to preserve an individual and personal touch in it all; we do not wish to be thought as a charitable institution making grants, but as members of a family giving mutual help in time of need.” Grace M. Beaton, Four Years of War, WRI; London, 1943; p.18.

(8) In his “Foreword” in the Summer 1938 issue of The War Resister, No 44, p. 2, Runham Brown makes an explicit reference to Grace Beaton’s secret mission: “Grace traveled back through Berlin. All she did cannot be reported here. She undertook a very difficult task and has done it well. I know no one else who would have done it so well. She is indomitable.”

(9) Although no name is mentioned, this “favorite nephew” must have been Leo Raubal, the son of Adolf Hitler’s half sister Angela, who resembled his uncle so much that he sometimes served as his double.

(10) See for instance Hans Safrian Die Eichmann-Männer, Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1993, p. 36, or Hans Schmitt’s Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light and Outer Darkness, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, p. 137. Schmitt discusses Frank Van Gheel Gildemeester, “whom some contemporaries identified as a philanthropist while others viewed him as a racketeer who primarily protected Jews who could pay for his services”.

(11) WRI Archive Box 140: Folder 1, Subfolder 9.

(12) See Peter Berger, “The Gildemeester Organisation for Assistance to Emigrants and the expulsion of Jews from Vienna, 1938–1942” in Business and Politics in Europe, 1900–1970: Essays in Honour of Alice Teichova, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. and Jonny Moser, “Die Gildemeester-Auswanderungshilfsaktion” in Jahrbuch des Dokumentationsarchivs des Österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna, Lit Verlag,1991.

(13) “Millions in Europe’s Jails for Their Political Views”, The New York Times, March 27, 1934.

(14) In Dr. B.A. Seijs, Studies over Jodenvervolging, Assen, Van Gorcum & Co, 1974, p. 18, Norman Bentwick is quoted as saying: “Gildemeester was a well-meaning but eccentric Dutchman. […] A social worker who had gained the favour of the Nazi’s when he befriended Austrian Nazi’s during the social-democratic regime”.

(15) Peter Berger, op. cit., p. 215–24.

(16) Ibid, p. 230.

(17) The article in the Salzburger Nachrichten is quoted in: Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, Het Weinreb-rapport deel II, Amsterdam; NIOD, 1976, p. 1230.

(18) For historians with a negative view of Gildemeester see especially, Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer, Vienna,  Europa Verlag, 1993; Theodor Venus and Alexandra-Eileen Wenck, Die Entziehung jüdischen Vermögens im Rahmen der Aktion Gildemeester. Eine empirische Studie über Organisation, Form und Wandel von Arisierung und jüdische Auswanderung in Österreich 1938–1941, Wien: Oldenbourg, 2004; Hans Schmitt, Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light and Outer Darkness, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Gertjan Cobelens is our Pacifism Editor. For the past year he has been researching the War Resisters’ International archive, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands by the International Institute of Social History. Further results of his research may be accessed via our WRI Project category.