The GEA leaders were painfully aware of the level of concern among the Association's members. As early as the end of April, the president of the Saxon League reported that 'whole groups' had lost the courage to continue disseminating Esperanto, given the political changes.5 6 In May, Paul Christaller, president of the Stuttgart Esperanto Club from the time of its founding in 1905, announced his resignation, also as a member; as a known pacifist, he sought to avoid giving the club difficul- ties under a regime that considered pacifists, like communists, 'enemies of the people'.[311] In July, an activist in Heilbronn wrote that in his city 'the movement is almost entirely stagnant' and that 'these days, we don't
Fig. 3.1 On 1 August 1932, Heroldo de Esperanto, a weekly newspaper pub- lished in Cologne, included a message of greeting from the lord mayor, Konrad Adenauer, to the future attendees at the 25th World Congress, planned to take place in Cologne a year hence. In March 1933 six weeks after Hitler's seizure of power, the Nazis removed Adenauer from office. The Congress did indeed take place, but with far fewer participants than origi- nally anticipated
have a very good reputation around here'.[312] He and probably many oth- ers were waiting for the results of the coming annual meeting of GEA; though there were also numbers of direct protests against the proposed
Gleichschaltung.[313]
For GEA the situation was complicated by the fact that during the first six months of the Nazi regime preparations were proceeding for the 25th World Congress, to take place in the summer of 1933 in Cologne. The invitation had been issued in 1932 by Konrad Adenauer, the Lord Mayor at the time (Fig. 3.1).
When the Nazis expelled him from office, preparations for the congress were thrown into crisis when the new authorities limited their support for the Local Congress Committee (LKK). The organizers also knew that the Nazi press had earlier condemned the idea of inviting an Esperanto congress to Cologne.i 0 The concerns of the LKK were all the greater because as soon as the first news of the reign of terror in Germany was published abroad, many of those registered to attend began to reconsider their participation. Calls came to move the congress to a country where participation could be guaranteed to 'Jews, working people and generally to everyone with differing opinions'.[314] Foreign indignation grew when it was learned that a Slovak businessman traveling through Germany was beaten unconscious by a group of Nazis because he was wearing a suspi- cious badge—the green star of Esperanto.[315]
Nonetheless, the majority of German Esperantists probably favored holding this international gathering in their country, hoping thereby to gain support, or at least less negative pressure, from the new rulers; accordingly, they sought to reassure those foreigners afraid of encounter- ing difficulties during their stay in Hitler's Germany. Particularly Heroldo de Esperanto, published in Cologne, repeatedly asserted that 'today the situation in German territory is quieter and safer than it was before'. [316]Yet such assertions led to protests:[317] early in June the Polish Esperanto Congress, meeting in Warsaw, accepted a resolution that the World Congress 'cannot be attended by Poles'.[318]
In mid-May the president of UEA, Eduard Stettler, urgently asked the LKK whether 'the Congress can take place [...] in complete liberty, without police oversight or the necessity of police protection'.[319] Receiving no reply after four weeks, on 17 June Stettler dispatched a circular to the members of the UEA committee asking for a vote on the question of whether to hold the UEA Congress in Cologne or to abandon it. Of the 20 replies, 14 committee members, all of them German, voted to go ahead; only four members voted against, and two abstained.[320] Although Stettler himself was willing to give up on the Congress[321], such a decision would have affected only the Congress of UEA, traditionally taking place within the larger World Congress. This larger event was fully the respon- sibility of the International Central Committee. In any case, the result of the vote was clear, and in the meantime the LKK was able to commu- nicate to would-be participants that the authorities had guaranteed that there would be no 'difficulties or hindrance to invited foreign guests'.[322]For the moment, the Nazi regime, concerned for its international reputa- tion, chose to put its ideological opposition to Esperanto on one side.
In the end, the Congress attracted a mere 900 participants from 32 countries—approximately half the number earlier anticipated.[323] A British participant noted that 'you felt a somewhat strange atmosphere [in the congress] because of the Hitler paraphernalia'.[324] The Nazi mayor, Gunter Riesen, greeted the Congress wearing a brown shirt, ignored Esperanto com- pletely and expressed his joy that so many foreigners had come to Cologne 'to learn for themselves about Germany as it really is'. He defended the 'National Socialist revolution' as protecting the world against Bolshevism.[325]Subsequently, the Cologne newspapers published the favorable views of a few participants on the harmonious conclusion of the World Congress, adding that in the future the worldwide community of Esperantists would have no ground to believe the 'tales of terror' in Germany.[326]
GEA's annual general meeting took place as part of the World Congress on 29 July. A priority item on its agenda was the proposal for the Gleichschaltung of the association. The delegates—41 groups with 106 votes were represented, though they comprised less than 5% of the total membership—unanimously approved the Gleichschaltung. In the interim, Behrendt assumed the role of 'leader'. Directly responsible to him was a four member Steering Council (pre- viously the executive committee) and the leaders of the groups ('Obmanner'). The annual general meeting would now have only an advisory role.[327]
GEA's new constitution[328] was emptied of any mention of political neu- trality. Drastically illustrating this changed situation were Behrendt's omi- nous words in Cologne to the effect that 'misusers' or people who used Esperanto 'for bad purposes [...] should be punished'.[329] The guidelines did indeed state that people with 'an anti-state attitude' were not allowed to belong to GEA.[330] But, in contrast to the draft guidelines published in advance of the Congress, the final version did not contain the require- ment that 'non-Aryans, Marxists and Communists' should be excluded from leadership positions in the Association. This condition had brought indignant reactions. A long-time member, the Austrian Esperanto pioneer Otto Simon, sent Behrendt a sharply worded declaration of resignation,[331] and numerous protests came from German Esperantists.[332]Although the discriminatory clause had disappeared from the guidelines, Behrendt nonetheless required that a candidate for the function of club leader should provide a written guarantee that he was neither Jewish nor Marxist and that he would report 'anti-state' members to the GEA.[333]
The report on the Congress noted optimistically that 'all concern has been removed because the German Esperanto Association has effectuated its Gleichschaltung .[334] But it soon became apparent that such expectations were mere illusion. To begin with, no government authority named an official leader for GEA, as was required for orderly Gleichschaltung. To curry favor with the regime, Behrendt advised the members that it was everyone's responsibility to use correspondence with foreign Esperantists to provide 'correct information' on the new Germany.i [335] Indeed, this appeal did not remain without echo,[336] nor was there a lack of Esperantist voices from other countries expressing their sympathy for the Nazi regime, including its anti-Jewish policies.[337] In the October 1933 Germana Esperantisto six pages were devoted to an Esperanto-language translation of a speech by Hitler,[338] and the Esperanto Union of Saxon Teachers pub- lished a four-page leaflet, La Nova Germanlando (The New Germania), which was distributed to 70 countries in 10,000 copies. Using statistics in an attempt to prove that Jews dominated German public life, this pamphlet, with its clear anti-Semitic bias, must be numbered among the most odious publications ever produced in the language of Zamenhof.