Coping in a Crisis :
The voyage south had forced many to accept and embrace their 'apartness' as Jews, although many wondered why the One God had inflicted so much suffering on his 'Chosen People'; a few had suicided on the way down to Capetown, but the real killer had been a combination of weather and incipient scurvy that killed almost 2,500 on the beaches by that second night - the elderly and frail died fast. Leah Lehmann lost both her parents, partly because - like many other grandparents - they sacrificed clothing and shelter for the sake of the grandchildren.
The Colony had done its best, but although tents and other shelter were sent and a thousand refugees at a time were transferred back to Molloy, Wilhelmstadt and Port Resolution, the transfer was going to take weeks with what ships were to hand. All British ships in the area had been told to rendezvous west of Kerguelen for humanitarian work, but even with the Simonstown squadron, it would take time to bring in transport. Food supplies could be brought in by the ships and the marooned Jews helped to construct better shelter from local materials, but already it was being suggested that there needed to be five temporary Western Fjords Settlements set up in the fjords of Audierne Bay. The liners had not dumped the Jews on the dangerously-exposed West Coast, but had chosen the Audierne Bay area as being safer to heave to in, which had slightly helped the involuntary new settlers.
The German liners were regarded as pariahs by every nation bordering the South Atlantic, heading north as fast as they could steam or motor, their companies regretting taken on the German government charter. Although the liners would be refitted for their normal duties at government expense, the companies were already afraid that transatlantic passengers would go to their rivals at Cunard and French Lines, leaving Hapag-Lloyd trading at a loss. France and Britain were furious, the Irish Free State disgusted, Scandinavia appalled and the USA and Canada were denouncing the inhumanity of what had been done to the Jews. Some commentators remarked that this was an attempt to destroy the Colony by overloading its meagre resources, but few dared to go that far, whilst relief fund donations rapidly grew as a form of common disapproval by the general public.
Hitler sacked Von Papen but hung onto Ribbentrop, advised by Josef Goebbels to limit the diplomatic damage and shed the scapegoat, blaming Von Papen for the whole disaster; instead, Hitler turned to Reinhard Heydrich and instituted the murderous pogrom later named Kristallnacht. The planned transfer of hundreds of thousands of dissidents and Jews to Kerguelen and other outer Antarctic islands was cancelled, in favour of slave labour and extermination schemes. International uproar and protests about 'Germany exporting its problems' had worked, but there had been other impacts; the crisis over the Sudetenland had made the Czechs reject suggestions that they cede it to Germany, the shrewd Benes reminding other heads of state that if speaking German made the speaker's residence part of Germany, then Hitler could claim colonies in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, the United States, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Austria, Hungary and Russia.
Whilst politicians debated, the people of Kerguelen strove to feed and put under cover the unfortunate Jews, moving the weakest to Port Resolution and Wilhelmstadt, where the doctors could set up rough hospital facilities and some receive emergency feeding. Most remained in Audierne Settlements One to Five, under their own leadership; Rebbe Kohn and Mordechai Lehmann in Audierne Four were not particularly special, other leaders emerging due to need, but they were amongst the first to recognise the needs of survival, not waiting for help. The highest deathrates were the thousands who died in Audierne Two and Five, the effect of a lack of fishing knowledge and shelter construction.The Jews in One and Three had formed body-shelters with piles of hundreds of men and women, some warm but half-smothered inside the piles, some half-frozen and wet on the outsides, with people migrating continuously and half-asleep between the extremes. Better shelter and a few small fires heating clay and stone sleeping-platforms made this 'huddling' system more effective, but they all stank after three days and nights. A crude 'bania' or sweat-bath improved matters, as did a wind-powered cavitation-heater for hot water gifted by the Kerguelenvolk, but the Jews recalled the extreme solutions of necessity with a hatred that remained with most of them all their lives.
The Jews' efforts at fishing were soon to make them highly respected by other folk on Kerguelen, for a few Norwegians showed them how to construct fishing lines, haaf-nets, fish-traps, drift nets and drying-racks, using the small amounts of rope, twine, driftwood, whale skeletons and other strandline resources. Audierne One was lucky and found a timber wreck, but others only started to improve and develop when relief ships arrived off Kerguelen and delivered quantities of food, tents, timber and other essentials. A small Jewish community developed in both the British and German settlement-areas, but far more of those who left the Audierne Bay Settlements were to take passage to Tasmania, New Zealand, South Australia and Canada, leaving barely three thousand Jewish settlers and over five thousand graves in the Audierne Bay fjords. A few had died from starvation, but most died of exposure, bronchio-pneumonia and untreated medical disorders related to age and disability. It was a terrible foretaste of the future for Jews controlled by the Nazis and horrified civilised nations.
When the leaders of Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain and Czechoslovakia gathered at Munich to debate German demands for cession of the Sudetenland, Neville Chamberlain had just faced a furious House of Commons and did not dare agree to the demands. It was also asked what the impact would be on the Czechs, President Benes pointing out that it would strip his country of its border defences based on Maginot Line designs; the French President Daladier was firmly against the handover, he and Chamberlain arguing logically with the Italian Duce, Benito Mussolini. Unwilling to offend the two Great Democratic Powers, the vacillating Duce finally agreed with them, pointing out to Hitler that he already had annexed the lands of Austria and suggesting that needed to be digested first. Hitler made threatening remarks, but the others stood firm, for to claim German-speakers were ethnically part of a Greater Germany missed the point - every nation held ethnic minorities and the fate of the Kerguelen Jews was not an example other nations would tolerate. But war was avoided - for the moment - although Britain and France knew they had to re-arm to avoid a worse catastrophe.
Mordechai had emerged as a leader in Audierne Four - now named 'Port Dusseldorf' after a vote on the name - and with Rebbe Kohn had evolved a simple fish-based economy not unlike that of the West Coast Irish and the Faeroese, with the women growing vegetables in enclosures of field-stone, the thin soil enriched with scrap fish, washed seaweed and composted 'night soil'. The Jews were the first Kerguelenvolk to brew beer from Sugar Weed (Laminaria Saccharomyces) one of the few sweet-tasting and carbohydrate-rich plants on Kerguelen, the few farmers managing to grow a little rye and buckwheat for bread-flour on seaweed-fertilised lands inland from Port Dusseldorf and to the southwest of Audierne Bay, although sheep-farming and small-scale chicken breeding were the more productive farming systems. But all this would take time to create, so the donations of fuel, food, shelters and clothing, were vitally essential for the first few months.
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Australia - notably, Tasmania - and New Zealand, were the principal donors of aid, reinforcing their links to Kerguelen and the 'Democratic German Colony', which was seen as a victim of fascism; the Australasian nations bluntly called the spade a spade, accusing Hitler of staging a 'victim invasion' of Kerguelen and murderously dividing Germany against itself. The Jews suddenly became a symbol of freedom in Australasia, respectable, hard-working Europeans, who would help reinforce their countries against invasion, fascism and the ever-present 'Yellow Peril' of China and Japan.
"You don't want 'em - we'll have 'em!" That comment of the Australian Foreign Minister to the German Ambassador was to be widely quoted in the press, but was seen also as a sign of hope by Jews fearful of Hitler's thugs after Kristallnacht and other acts of anti-Semitism. Australian and New Zealand Embassies and Consulates were soon besieged by Jews desperate to leave Germany, Austria, Italy and countries with Axis sympathies; the United States, with Ellis Island a counter to the Statue of Liberty, was far less welcoming and understanding. Kerguelen was a constant reminder of the policies of Hitler, the deaths there over a gruesome month a source of bad publicity, Josef Goebbels in a state of dismay, if not panic, claiming it was a Jewish plot against the Reich.
But the Second World War was to take place, nevertheless, because Hitler wanted to keep the Heer in line and a foreign war with Poland seemed to fit the bill; the Poles were about to re-equip their Air Force, which was on the verge of comparative obsolescence, the Luftwaffe having just modernised its forces, the British and French Air Forces being similarly at a weakened level to that of the Poles. The Kriegsmarine meanwhile was going through half-completed changes, first to counter the French Navy, in a possible war with Poland and Russia, then a fruitless attempt to try to achieve local superiority in the North Sea over the Royal Navy, with a concomitant attempt to draw off Royal Navy reinforcements by attacking the British Merchant Marine with surface raiders and submarines. Raeder and Doenitz knew they had no hope of defeating the Royal Navy battle fleet, but could savage merchantmen and poorly-defended ports by using the tactics developed by Von Spee.
Raeder acknowledged that the Fleet needed massive expansion, but was driven by the shrewd Canaris into construction or conversion of at least thirty fast merchantmen into Handelstorkreuzer or Hilfskreuzer (HSK) auxiliary cruisers for prewar deployment to key 'choke points' such as the Straits of Malacca, the Arabian Sea, the Cape of Good Hope, the Drake Passage, and the approaches to Suez, Aden, Gibraltar and parts of the Caribbean. To shut down Britain's essential Transatlantic trade and reinforce the HSKs, would entail construction of enough Unterseeboote and Schnellboote to provide raiding squadrons or 'wolf packs' at every global choke point, including the mining of approaches to British ports and naval bases. It was an ambitious scheme, and needed Adolf Hitler to approve it; like so many Germans, he found it difficult to imagine using anything but a battleship to kill a battleship, so the successes of the Ostasiengeschwader and the U-9 had to be invoked in explanation. What convinced him was the economy of the operation - the capital costs were at most a few percent of the cost of an unusable aircraft carrier or battleship, whilst the secrecy appealed to his sense of the dramatic.