Recently, in TAP 24/3, I described my encounter with Nazi storm troopers as they marched through the Tiergarten and the Brandenburger Tor brandishing flaming torches on their way to salute Hitler, the new German chancellor, on the evening of January 30, 1933. I have sometimes thought, grandiosely, that I was able to review them before he did.
A few weeks later, one of the torches seems to have found a delayed target quite close to their line of march. Two friends and I, all of us American medical students, were having dinner near the Reichstag when word reached us that it was on fire. We did not delay long after dinner and were soon in the milling, shouting crowd around the Reichstag. At that time a German election was impending and it seemed obvious that Hitler was seeking a mandate from the German people rather than continuing in the humiliating position of an appointee of Hindenburg and the royalist tradition.
But, this was by no means obvious to the crowd, which, having gathered with speed and precision, was loudly blaming the Jews, who certainly had nothing to gain by destroying the bastion of democracy the Reichstag represented. “There ought to be a Jew,” they chanted, “hanging from every lamp-post between here and Munich.” Seeing no point in remaining part of this pageant, my friends and I soon departed.
Hitler, of course, won the election by a large margin and the Nazi revolution was under way. Jewish professors and students began disappearing, though not yet to concentration camps. Instead they were fleeing the country. This exodus was not confined to Jews. I had a good Catholic friend, a medical student, who would visit my room on occasion. He was intrigued to find there a copy of The Communist Manifesto (probably, according to my ideas of arrangement, alongside Mein Kampf). It was the former he wanted to borrow, and I let him take it. When we met again, he told me he had seen Nazis in uniform visiting some of his neighbors and, in a panic, had torn up the Manifesto and flushed it down the toilet. Not long after, he wrote me a letter from Prague, where he had fled to continue his medical studies. I only hope he managed to get out before 1938.
My two friends and I began to spend evenings together, often extending far into the night, in cafes on the Kurfuerstendamm, the Great White Way of Berlin. We would not have admitted there was anything self-protective about this, but probably there was. Was it patriotism that always made us end up at Quicks, an American-style automat, before going home? At any rate, our conversations usually turned to psychiatry, especially Freud (the three of us were all to become psychiatrists and are still alive today). Probably a similar desire to be among Americans motivated us to join the Harvard Club—we all had Harvard degrees. On the one occasion we attended, the American ambassador predicted that thanks to Hitler there would soon be law and order in Germany once again. The real treat of the evening was a piano recital by Putzy Hanfstengel, a German alumnus of Harvard who on several occasions had lulled Hitler to sleep by playing the chancellor's favorite pieces. I don't remember how long we stood this.
One day in early spring of that year we decided to take a riverboat excursion to Werda, famous for its spring wine festival, similar in spirit to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The captain, apparently of Nazi sentiments, was about to shove off without us, when an extremely attractive fraulein, very Nordic-looking, forced him to let her off. She ran up to us and whispered, “We are not all like that,” and then darted back to the boat just in time for it to pull out into the river leaving us standing at quayside. Somewhat cheered by this charming if fruitless intervention, we were debating how to spend the rest of the day when another boat pulled up and without incident took us aboard. When we arrived, Werda and its famous hospitality quickly confirmed the fraulein's reassuring words.
The meatier business of my life eventually required me to appear before the medical school dean to obtain permission to take my examinations. A militant Nazi, he demanded to know my origins. I put off answering and departed posthaste for the office of the American consul general a few blocks away. To my surprise, I was immediately admitted to his presence. Listening to my story, he informed me that Berlin was a dangerous place (surprise, surprise!) and advised me to leave as soon as possible. My answer to this expected advice had long been prepared. I told him I would write three letters that day—one to the Secretary of State, one to the editor of the New York Times, and one to my parents—to describe how the interests of American students were being looked after by the U.S. consul general in Berlin.
Unperturbed, he said in a conversational tone that I should not do that. He would see what he could do and told me to call on the dean again in two weeks. I don't recall if I flashed a boyish grin at him or not, but I felt I had it in the bag. So it proved when I called on the dean two weeks later. He shook hands with me most affably and said he could see no reason why I should not take the exams.
These I had no trouble with, but for one detail that should not be omitted. I knew I was not really up to writing the dissertation in German and so called on my professor, another well-known Nazi, who was laid up with the flu. I hoped he could recommend someone to assist me with the writing. He suggested that I leave the paper with him (it was on the subject of sleeping-drug addiction). Soon after, I received a telephone call from his wife, who a short time later handed me as accepted the dissertation, which the professor had himself translated. He joins the young lady from the riverboat as living proof that there were some very nice people in Germany, even under Hitler.
Soon my friends were giving me a dinner at Kempinski's, a famous Berlin restaurant, as the first American medical student granted his degree in Berlin under the Third Reich. I took deep satisfaction in the knowledge that my experiences had smoothed the path for others.
Dr. Mark Kanzer was one of the original group of training analysts who created and led the Psychoanalytic Institute at the Downstate Medical Center, now the Psychoanlytic Institute at the N.Y.U. Medical Center in 1949-50. He was the director of the Downstate Institute from 1962-1965. He established the Mark and Viva Kanzer Fund of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association which has been of unique value for the scholarly and scientific interests of the American.