In April of 1933, a mere ten weeks after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Arthur Kahn, a 21-year-old German medical student enrolled in Edinburgh University in Scotland, returned to the University of Wurzburg, Germany to pick up his student records. Kahn, who had at one point been involved in an anti-Nazi organization, was noticed by members of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA). He and three other Jews, Ernst Goldmann, Rudolf Benario, and Erwin Kahn, were detained and taken to the Dachau Concentration Camp, whose notorious facilities had been opened just weeks prior. Upon arrival, they were identified as Jews and tortured. On April 12, the four young men were given shovels and marched to the outskirts of the camp, where they were gunned down and killed. Kahn was the first one shot, making him the first victim of the Holocaust according to Timothy Ryback, author of Hitler’s First Victims: The Quest for Justice.
In the early days of Nazi power, a semblance of law and order still reigned. On that April evening, a local prosecutor, Joseph Hartinger, received a call that four men had been killed. The SS prison guards claimed that they had only opened fire after Arthur Kahn had attempted to escape and that the other inmates had then joined him in fleeing. It was Hartinger’s task to establish a commission to investigate all deaths caused through “unnatural causes.”
When Hartinger arrived at Dachau, the ground was still damp from blood and he suspected there were sinister circumstances behind the deaths. When he reported to his superior that a serial killing of Jews had occurred, his superior stated definitively, “Not even the Nazis would do that.” Hartinger, however, persisted. On June 1, 1933, he issued indictments against Dachau’s camp commandant, Hilmar Wackerle, and several SS guards. It was an audacious act and Hartinger reportedly told his wife, “I just signed my own death sentence.”
Miraculously, not only did Hartinger survive but his legal maneuvering also caused a cessation in Nazi murders, albeit temporarily. Dachau’s commandant was removed from his position and Hartinger’s indictments confounded the Nazi legal bureaucracy. Ultimately, their only recourse was to misplace them. The court papers were locked inside a desk drawer and “forgotten.” Hartinger was transferred to a different jurisdiction and the murders resumed.
The Kahn family was shattered by Arthur’s death. Arthur’s father, Levi, had to pay the German government to have his son’s body returned for burial, and his mother, Martha, insisted that their daughter Fanny, return home from her residence in England.
In the ensuing years, the Kahn family, like all of German Jewry, struggled through the increasingly dangerous times. In 1939, Mr. and Mrs. Kahn, together with their sons Herbert and Lothar, immigrated to the United States. Fanny, who had married in the interim, remained behind. Tragically, Fanny was subsequently killed, together with her seven-year-old son.
In the United States, the family settled in New York. In 1943, Herbert was inducted into the U.S. Army and sent to Fort McClellan, Alabama. In a February 1 letter sent to Mike Tress, President of the Agudath Israel Youth Council, Herbert wrote, “Although it is difficult to keep all the issurei Shabbos and some of the other issurim while being in the army, up to this time I had always a chance to put on tefillin, sometimes only for one minute. I shave every day with my electric shaver (Schick) but as I don’t shave on Shabbos, I’ll run into trouble very soon as the inspection on Saturday morning is very tough…
“As most of the food here is made with lard, we eat only bread, butter, milk, jam, corn flakes etc. and fruit… The [Jewish] chaplain here seems to be Reform as he recommended [to] us already a few times to eat pork as [he says] it is pikuach nefesh…
“The training here is very strenuous… I even can’t daven all [of] Shacharith sometimes as we are out at 7a.m. when it is still night… and it is hard to pray while you march and have to listen to orders. But late at night, I manage to learn a bit and so never forget that I am a Jew.”
Referring to his family, he wrote to Mr. Tress, “I don’t know how I ever can thank you for what you did [for] all of us. It is now over four years since I left Germany… Now I have a chance to give the murderers of our people some of the medicine they gave out up to now. I would not mind to be sent over to Europe. As you know, I lost a brother of mine ten years ago in a concentration camp and we did not hear from my sister since November 1941 when she was deported with my nephew to Poland. In a certain way, I feel proud to have a chance to do my part in defeating our archenemy. If I only could keep all the mitzvos, there is nothing I would rather do than fighting Hitlerism.”
Later that month, Herbert was transferred to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, to receive training (for more about the Ritchie Boys, see this column, 1-15-2016) and in April of that year, his brother, Lothar, was drafted into the army.
In a letter that Lothar wrote to Mr. Tress, he too expressed his personal sentiments about fighting the Nazis. “I am glad that I am personally getting my revenge on the Nazis and be of service to this great country and humanity by eliminating fascism and tyranny. Of course, not to forget my duties as a Jew in the fight against Amalek.” He then concluded by quoting the Chumash, “Timche es zecher Amalek, mitachas hashamayim lo tishkach.”
When living in Germany, Lothar, like other Jewish students, had been expelled from school when he was nine years old. That caused him to receive vocational training as a machinist instead. Ironically, that anti-Semitic act would now be turned against the Germans. Due to his skills, the U.S. Army assigned him to the 146th Engineer Combat Battalion who were among the initial wave to invade Normandy on D-Day. Their mission was to destroy all explosives and obstacles that the Wehrmacht (German Army) had placed to prevent the Allied invasion.
Some may refer to the idea of one brother being the first Jew to be murdered by Nazi genocide and his younger brothers playing a role in their defeat as poetic justice. In reality, though, the evidence of Divine orchestration of events is prevalent throughout the Kahn family’s Holocaust experiences. This continued after the war. In 1933, prosecutor Josef Hartinger had failed to bring Arthur Kahn’s murderers to justice, but his attempt was not in vain. In 1945, twelve years after the charges were initially filed, Hartinger’s abandoned indictments were discovered by a U.S. intelligence unit and used as a legal backbone to prosecute Nazis during the Nuremberg trials by proving that the SS had murderous intentions from its inception.
Herbert and Lothar both survived, not only as heroes who had served their adopted homeland faithfully, but also as proud Torah Jews. Their family’s experience reminds us that every individual can make a difference. May this article be a zechus for Arthur Kahn and the 5,999,999 kedoshim that followed.