THE UNSPOKEN HOLOCAUST IN FASHION HISTORY

This blog is dedicated to the memory of Paul Meyer and Leonore Freiman, expelled from the German and Austrian fashion industry due to Nazis persecution of Jews.

The M. Meyer & Company in Cologne, producers and distributors of fine lace, was targeted on Kristallnacht . The business was later Aryanised. Leonore Ehrlich Freiman was expelled from the Michel Beuern Fashion School one week after Hitler marched into Vienna because she was Jewish.

"Central Europe in the years before Hitler owed much to the Jewish genius- more than perhaps any other part of the world. The Jews were the 'intellectual cement,' the cosmopolitan and integrative element which added a quintessentially European colour, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Budapest."

MILAN KUNDERA

Between 1933 and 1945 the Nazi's exterminated six million Jews, wiping out its culture and intellectual history. In doing so, the Nazi's have deprived future generations of its inheritance.

When contributions of a group is lost through genocide, apartheid, or discrimination, there is unrecoverable loss to the larger society. So, when the Nazis emptied Germany and Austria of its Jewish citizens, it permanently destroyed an essential part of their own cultural identity. In destroying the Jews, the Nazis destroyed German and Austrian culture.

When Auschwitz-Birkeneau was liberated by the Allies and a terrifying number of bodies were uncovered, another kind of grave was uncovered, too. A grotesque discovery that chills one to the very bone: 348,820 men's suits, 836,525 women's garments, 38,000 men's shoes and 5,255 women's shoes.

It was the Jews who participated in the development of one of the most creative new institutions of the nineteenth century: the department store. In Germany many of them were founded by Jews and evolved into the true department store.

The N. Israel department store was one of many Jewish enterprises that came under attack during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. Nazis thugs attacked the store and destroyed huge amounts of merchandise. By February 1939 it had been decreed as a non-Jewish firm and ownership transferred.

Berlin was once a metropolis of fashion. The majority of creative designers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and publishers of respected fashion magazines were equally determined to initiate a world-class, urban, elegant fashion industry. Paris was adopted, in uncertain times, as their guide to fashion.

Magda Goebbels remarked: "Along with the Jews, elegance disappeared from Germany."

This came about through the disappearance of Jewish fashion creators and the many elegant Jewish customers who bought their clothing in Berlin.

In the archive of Ravensbruck memorial, there is a report by a Jewish woman on her work as a dressmaker:

"You saw only pale women at the sewing machines, anxiously looking around. The nearer the angry, supervisor, an SS man, came, the more nervous and uncertain the tortured people grew. The saying was: the quota! the quota! But once a quota was reached, it was immediately increased and finally reached by beating."

"A person stepped of the train in the morning, in the evening his corpse was burned and his clothing packed for shipment to Germany."

RAUL HILBERG, HISTORIAN

The personal effects taken from the Jews and prisoners went to the "ethnic Germans". Valuable objects like jewellery were exported abroad, in order to generate currency for the purchase of the necessary raw materials.

Very few Jews survived the Third Reich, returned and received back his former property.

Like everything else, the people were completely ruined by war.