1938 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

The Nazis in Austria deprive Jews of their civil rights and means of livelihood; they plunder Jewish shops and homes. The Gestapo arrests psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna in June but Freud himself is permitted to leave Vienna for London with all his possessions after his friend and patron Princess Marie Bonaparte pays his "refugee tax." (Freud's study, library, and consulting room at Bergasse 19 are recreated at 20 Maresfield Gardens, but he is terminally ill with throat cancer.)

An international conference convened at Evian from July 6 to 15 tries to organize facilities for Jewish emigration; delegates from 29 nations hold discussions, but nothing is accomplished.

Italy's 40,000 to 50,000 Jews come under pressure beginning in the summer, and the leggi antiebraiche enacted by the Fascist regime November 10 require that alien Jews be deported, prohibit marriage with "Aryans," expel Jewish students and teachers from public schools and universities, and bar Jews from owning businesses or holding public office.

German authorities crack down on gypsies (Roma) in response to local pressure (see 1929). A pronouncement from Adolf Hitler in October states, "All means, even if they are not in conformity with existing laws and precedents, are legal if they subserve the will of the Führer." Local communities regard gypsies as a criminal class, and official decrees now begin making references to the Roma's alleged racial inferiority (see 1942).

The worst pogrom in German history begins November 9 following the assassination of Paris embassy official Ernst Edouard vom Rath November 7 by German-born Polish Jew Herschel Grynzpan, 17, who has heard of the mistreatment of some 17,000 Polish Jews (including members of his own family, whom he has not seen in 2 years) following their deportation from Germany. A student who lives with an aunt and uncle in Paris, Grynzpan received a postcard from his sister November 3, purchased a revolver, enters the German embassy, and fires five bullets at point-blank range; two of them hit vom Rath, who dies 2 days later. The Nazis retaliate by smashing Jewish shop windows ("crystal") in a November 9 to 10 Kristallnacht pogrom orchestrated by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; shops, homes, and synagogues are looted, demolished, and burned, and 20,000 to 30,000 Jews are carried off to concentration camps (see 1939; Dachau, 1933; Buchenwald, 1937).

German Occupation
Resistance to German occupation authorities remained strong in Europe through the darkest years of the war. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.)

The British Committee for the Care of Children from Germany organizes a Kindertransport that will house some 10,000 youngsters aged 5 to 17 in English, Irish, and Scottish homes, with older boys given farm jobs. The first Kindertransport train leaves Vienna for the Channel December 1, and some children are airlifted from Czechoslovakia by planes chartered from KLM and other airlines, but few countries will admit Jews and even Britain does not welcome adult Jews (see 1939).

Civil rights lawyer Clarence S. Darrow dies at Chicago March 13 at age 80; reformer-author-songwriter James Weldon Johnson is killed in an auto accident at Wiscasset, Me., June 26 at age 67; Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo dies at Port Chester, N.Y., July 9 at age 68, having shown in his 6 years on the bench that the Constitution can be interpreted in ways that meet social needs.

The Supreme Court orders equal accommodations for Missouri law students regardless of race December 12 in Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada, Registrar of the University of Missouri (see 1936). Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes reads the decision, four members of the eight-man court concur, but Justices Butler and McReynolds dissent, predicting that Missouri may "abandon her law school and thereby disadvantage her white citizens without improving the petitioner's opportunities for legal instruction," or may integrate her law school and "as indicated by experience, damnify both races." (McReynolds has turned his chair around so he would not face lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston, but his action has produced no condemnation.) Blacks hail the decision as a victory that achieves Houston's principle of equality in education. He tells the press merely that it will open up new opportunities for blacks in the 16 states that bar them from professional schools, but many Southern papers deplore the decision, the Charleston News and Courier states that it will lower standards and reduce higher education in the South "to a lowly estate in public opinion." Missouri's legislature adopts a law making it virtually impossible for the university to implement the decision, and Lloyd L. Gaines will disappear without a trace next year, having either committed suicide, been murdered by white supremacists, or been bribed to move abroad under an assumed name (see Henderson decision, 1949).