In concentration camps, workers continued to teach Esperanto wherever they could, though it seems that increasingly such courses served primarily as secret fora for political discussion.[393] As the years passed, the opportuni- ties to work for the spread of Esperanto were reduced to a minimum. For example, a Berlin GLEA club spawned an anti-fascist resistance group that succeeded in surviving until 1944; its core consisted of Esperantists, but little by little, and in increasing numbers, new members joined primar- ily to participate in its underground activities; these new members were either not competent in Esperanto or had no knowledge of it at all.[394]
To what extent did the resistance of worker Esperantists have an effect on GEA? How did they relate to the 'neutralists' in the shadow of Nazism? In June 1933, SAT members were reminded by their leader Lanti of advice he had given a few years earlier, in August 1929, to mem- bers in countries where SAT was banned. 'Where our members can- not gather under the red flag', Lanti advised, 'they must simply shelter under the green one; they must participate in the neutral, bourgeois, even fascist Esperanto movement'.[395] Although Lanti had in mind activi- ties in countries suffering under 'white terror'—countries which, unlike Hitler's Germany, were not in principle opposed to the neutral Esperanto movement—part of the German SAT membership certainly followed his advice and joined GEA 'to stay in contact and to avoid losing our knowl- edge of the language'.[396]
But certain facts argue against widespread infiltration of the associa- tion by socialists and communists. First, GEA itself, for its own protec- tion, had no wish to tolerate widespread membership in the association by people earlier known as adherents of the workers' organization. Secondly, those who followed Lanti's call were warned by SAT not to engage in political activity within a neutral association. Thirdly, some SAT members were critical of Lanti, suggesting that he 'has forgotten that the Esperanto movement in Germany is no longer "neutral" but "fascist"' and that to such a movement 'our adherence is not possible'.[397]Diehard resisters accordingly could not regard GEA as a suitable forum for their activities.
The conclusion that GEA was banned because it failed to free itself of members hostile to the regime is contradicted by a further consider- ation—namely that Heydrich intentionally exaggerated the possibility of the existence of Marxist elements in the German Esperanto movement because he hoped in that way to achieve more rapidly something to which the conservative bureaucracy (and apparently even the Ministry of Propaganda) was still disinclined: the complete destruction of the entire
Esperanto movement. Undoubtedly Heydrich's agents kept him well informed of the internal structure of GEA and the apolitical viewpoint of most of its members. The question of whether more or fewer Marxists were active in it had little essential influence on his conviction that Esperanto was the invention of a Jew and therefore had to be exterminated. To him, all active Esperantists were enemies of the state by their very nature, because only such people could possibly be interested in, as he wrote in June 1935, 'the propagation, entirely superfluous and from a nationalist point of view utterly repulsive, of a universal language for individuals of all peoples and races'.[398] Heydrich's insistence on the destruction of the Esperanto movement might also be considered an element in the struggle of the Gestapo and the SS for a stronger position in the state. Himmler and Heydrich achieved this goal with the establishment, on 17 July 1936, of the institution Reichsfuhrer SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei.[399] Three days later the definitive demise of GEA was decreed.
It remained unclear whether the Nazis were willing to tolerate Esperanto as a language. Fritz Thieme, the last leader of GEA, informed the members in July 1936 that Himmler's decree was not directed 'against the application' of Esperanto 'through the spoken and written exchange of ideas with speakers of foreign languages'[400] and that 'Esperanto itself is not forbidden in Germany'.[401] Heydrich also noted under the date of 27 August 1936: 'The use of Esperanto in private correspondence cannot be opposed, as long as it does not take place with negative intentions against the state or to advance the unity of the Esperantists.'[402] In the following year the Gestapo confirmed that 'a ban on the application of Esperanto has so far not occurred and probably will not occur in the future'.[403]
Indeed, after the dissolution of GEA many Esperantists—those who did not fear persecution for political activity—continued their private involvement with the language, corresponding with foreign friends and subscribing to neutral magazines. However, permission for the private use of Esperanto often had only symbolic value: the permission was not widely known, nor did it hinder individual denunciations on the part of local Gestapo members. Thus, on the one hand, we know of Esperantists who never suffered hindrance, and even a few Germans who fled to Switzerland having secretly learned Esperanto.[404] On the other hand, there were those who were called in for questioning by the police for receiv- ing foreign Esperanto magazines, were given written orders 'to desist from all activity for the Esperanto language'34 or were threatened with punishment after having participated in an informal meeting at which Esperanto was spoken.3 5 On one occasion an Esperantist in Antwerp received a recommendation from the German ambassador to Belgium that he cease correspondence in Esperanto with his German friend,[405] and on another occasion, when a Chinese Esperanto journal published the names of two financial contributors and indicated that they were from the no longer existing Austria, the Gestapo did not neglect to take an interest in their identity.[406]
In April 1938 Theodor Koch, the Gestapo informer in Bremen, reported that, according to German regulations, 'only organized Esperantism is forbidden in Germany'; in his view, this fact was cleverly exploited by Esperantists in Germany and abroad.[407] But the office of the Reichsfuhrer SS confirmed the actual situation, noting in June 1939, that 'the dissemi- nation of Esperanto in Germany is forbidden'.[408]
Of the European countries annexed by the Nazis or under their grow- ing influence, Austria was the first to discover that a legal Esperanto movement was no longer possible. The workers' Esperanto movement in Austria, as in Germany, was much stronger than the neutral movement. At the end of 1933 the social democratic Austrian Workers Esperantist League (ALLE), whose guiding force was Franz Jonas, postwar federal president of Austria, numbered over 1700 members, while the neutral Austrian Esperanto Association (AEA) had only around 500. Following the unsuccessful workers' uprising of February 1934, the dictatorial regime of Engelbert Dollfuss banned ALLE, along with all other workers' organizations. This did not change the traditionally favorable attitude of the Austrian authorities toward Esperanto. When in 1936 the 28th World Congress of Esperanto took place in Vienna, its honorary com- mittee included large numbers of well-known figures—from the Federal Chancellor to the president of the Danube Steamship Company.[409]
On 12 March 1938 Austrian independence came to an end. As early as 20 March, members of the SA closed the International Esperanto Museum in Vienna.[410] Individual Esperantists suffered exploratory visits by Gestapo agents.[411] On 1 August, instructions from Berlin decreed the end of the organized Esperanto movement.[412] Significantly, the instruc- tions made a distinction between the AEA, characterized as primarily Catholic and rightist,[413] and the competing organization, the Austrian Esperantist Federation, founded in 1936 and, according to the Nazis, headed by former Socialists. The former was 'requested' to disband itself, while the latter was forcibly dissolved. After the annexation of the Sudetenland, the German Esperanto League in Czechoslovakia too was dissolved on 16 December 1938, as a result of a local initiative, before the order came from Berlin.[414]