The Swiss journalist, Hans Unger, who worked in Berlin as a special correspondent to several Swiss newspapers, experienced at first hand the degree to which Heydrich's attitude grew more and more severe. Soon after IEL's yearbook for 1939 appeared, listing him under 'Germany' as its only representative—in this case as a journalist—he was visited by a Gestapo agent. When Unger later met with a dozen or so Esperantists in a Berlin cafe, he was called to the head office of the Gestapo. There, Heydrich personally questioned him, characterizing Unger's contacts with Esperantists as efforts to organize an 'international network' opposed to the Third Reich. When Unger replied that the conscience of humanity would be offended if people were sent to concentration camps simply for the use of Esperanto, Heydrich curtly interrupted him: 'Our conscience is German, and we act only on that basis. The idea of a human conscience is a Jewish creation and is of no interest to us!'[415] Unger later heard simi- lar insults from the mouth of Rudolf Hess, who even went so far as to present him with a fantastic plan for a simplified German language to be forced on a pan-European federation of states under Nazi German
hegemony.[416]
Not long after Unger's conversations with Heydrich and Hess, the Second World War broke out, bringing death and unimaginable suffer- ing to millions of people. Here, there is no need to present the details of the Nazi terror rampaging across Europe, particularly in the east. A less well-known aspect of the enslaving policies of the Nazis was the sup- pression of the communication rights of Jews and Slavs. Hitler himself insisted in July 1942 that the non-German population of Eastern Europe 'should never be allowed a higher education' and that in the schools this population should be allowed to learn 'nothing more than the meaning of traffic signs, at most'. The German language was to be taught to Jews and Slavs only to the extent that it was necessary 'to create the linguis- tic preconditions for our leadership'—so, to explain to such people the meaning of Nazi orders.[417]
The expansion of the Nazis to the east ruled out possibilities for the use of Esperanto, that symbol of linguistic equal rights that found its first enthusiastic support among precisely the Jews and Slavs. Within two or three days of the occupation of Poland, German soldiers appeared among the Esperantists.3 [418] One of the most eminent such Esperantists was the bacteriologist Odo Bujwid, of Krakow, a former fellow student of Zamenhof.[419] Security police searched his house in mid-September 1939; he was subjected to interrogation, also about his Esperanto connections, for three days. Singled out among the first victims were members of the Zamenhof family. On 4 October, shortly after he German army's entry into Warsaw, members of the Nazi security service arrived at the Jewish Hospital asking for Adam Zamenhof, the head doctor in its ophthalmol- ogy department.[420] Adam, son of Lazar Zamenhof, was arrested.
Adam's son, Louis Christophe Zaleski-Zamenhof, is convinced that the Zamenhof family was on a specially prepared list, since the family members were arrested, at various addresses, all on the same day. Given that all Jews and Polish intellectuals were no longer safe in the face of the unbridled harassment of Heydrich's executioners, one could assume that no special order was needed to arrest the Zamenhof family and other
Fig. 4.1 Lazar Zamenhof's three children, murdered by the Nazis: Lidia, Zofia and Adam
Esperantists.[421] But the fact that such a list existed is evident from a report sent by Lothar Beutel, head of 'Einsatzgruppe IV' of the Security Police, to Berlin on 6 October 1939 (one day after the triumphant entry of Hitler into the conquered Warsaw). Beutel mentions particularly that the 'well- known Jewish Zamenhof family' had been arrested and questioned.7 3 Adam Zamenhof was shot dead on 29 January 1940;[422] his sisters Zofia and Lidia, along with Ida Zimmermann, Lazar's sister, were transported from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 to Treblinka, where all three perished.[423]
Many Esperantists were among the numberless victims of mass murder in Poland,[424] some of them probably primarily because they were activists for Esperanto (Fig. 4.1).[425]
On 27 September 1939—a few days before the occupation ofWarsaw— an office was set up in Berlin known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office), which combined the state Security Police, including the Gestapo, with the party's Security Service and as of that date served as the center of power for the discovery and suppression of all opponents of the Nazi system; its leader was Reinhard Heydrich. It seems evident that the arrests of Esperantists in Poland also originated in a carefully prepared plan emanating from that office. In fact, even before the RSHA was created, the preparations for persecution had been elevated to the status of scientific research: as of April 1937, these plans were in the hands of Franz Alfred Six, head of Department II, responsible for 'ideological research'/[426] Six soon became the most important functionary at RSHA after Heydrich and his deputy Werner Best, and faithfully followed the line that maintained that an ideological opponent was more dangerous than the more easily identifiable political enemy.[427] Six was a SS-Brigadefuhrer and, as of 1940, also a university professor. Although he always (particularly after the war) liked to pose as a mere scientific manager, he was well informed about the extermination plans of the Nazis—or, to put matters differently, Six saw no contra- diction between research and persecution. Characteristically, many years later Adolf Eichmann expressed his admiration for the scientifically based work of his former superior Six.[428]
Beginning in 1936, Eichmann worked in Section II 112 ('Jewry'). Another section in Six's department, II 122, was responsible for oppo- nents other than Jews, Freemasons, Marxists and churches, namely lib- eralism, pacifism, emigres—and Esperantists. The head of the Esperanto office was SS-Untersturmfuhrer Horst Kunze, who also remained in reg- ular contact with Theodor Koch, the fervent ex-Esperantist and Gestapo confidant in Bremen.
It was this same Koch who pointed out, following the annexation of Austria, that the annexation presented a unique opportunity to seize not only the 'treasures' of the Esperanto museum but also all papers associ- ated with the AEA. This material had, he maintained, 'the greatest sci- entific significance—also for research on the Jewish community'. Koch attempted to explain matters to his colleagues:
Because the world organization of the Esperanto movement, in addition to its Messianic task of abolishing the languages of the peoples (First Epistle to the Corinthians 13.8), also serves as a political auxiliary force (for exam- ple in the siege of Germany before 1914), all leading Esperantists should be considered not only as cultural subversives but also as international conspirators.[429]
One could certainly conclude that such delusion was no more than paranoia masquerading as science. But Koch seems to have found in the RSHA a ready audience for his favorite topic. We know that Heydrich was fanatically convinced of the omnipresent subversion of the Jews. On 13 April 1940, Koch personally appeared in the RSHA. Kunze asked him to 'compile a summary report on the ideology of the international Esperanto movement' and promised to provide him with confiscated 'Esperanto literature' in support of his studies.[430] Koch seems not to have been particularly dependent on this material because very soon thereafter there appeared, under the title 'Esperanto' and with the date of 8 June 1940, an internal report of 11 typed pages.[431] This remarkable document summarizes the ideological position of the RSHA regarding Esperanto. It was evidently based on Theodor Koch's studies.[432] In the introduction we can read how Esperanto came into being: