Erinnerungen eines Grossvaters III

The file is the third part of the memoirs of Rabbi Dr. Caesar Seligmann of Frankfurt/M. He recounts the hardships of the First World War and the years after. He lost all his savings in war bonds and due to the inflation. He also talks about his involvement with the World Union and its conferences in London and Amsterdam in the years 1930, 1934 and 1936. Further he recounts a meeting with his best friend from school in 1932 who became a Nazi and his reasons after being impressed by a speech Hitler gave. His friend does not take Hitler’s Anti-Semitism serious. He gives reasons for the success of the National-socialists in the humiliation and despair Germans feel and the incredible organizational skills of the Nazis. His first encounter with Nazis was during a lecture in Berlin which was sabotaged and fistfights started which could hardly be controlled by the police. He recounts the events of the Kristallnacht in Frankfurt, the destruction of the community house and its assets and his decision to emigrate to England. He muses that after a hundred years of infighting among the different streams of Judaism in Germany the Nazi’s terror had managed to unify them. In January 1939 he and his wife emigrate to England where their children already reside. He has a hard time settling in, too old to really learn the language and customs. The last 18 pages are a summary of his writings and publications, the last will of an ancestor R. Seligmann who died in 1767, and a wedding document from 1781 between Moshe Lippmann and Voegele Seckel from 1781