Hitler’s Jewish Neighbors: The Feuchtwanger Story

What happens when a dictator's fiercest critic lives right in his backyard? 

Welcome to Honourable Mentions: Hilarious History and the story of Hitler and The Feuchtwanger family. The Jews who lived as his neighbors and who were the relatives of the Nazi Party's Public Enemy Number 1. All without the Fuhrer suspecting a thing.

We look at Adolf Hitler's rise to power and how acclaimed novelist, Lion Feuchtwanger, used his satirical wit to warn the Weimar Republic of the growing Nazi threat—making him one of Hitler's personal enemies. As well as hearing from his nephew, Edgar, and his first hand experience of what it was like growing up as a German-Jew with Hitler living across the road. 

If you love discovering the history they forgot to teach you in school and all told with a laugh, then subscribe so you never miss a future episode. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:10

Imagine yourself as a child, rubbing your eyes with the backs of your hands as the brightness of a new day leaps into your bedroom. You sit up in bed, look out the window, and on the far side of the street, you see the most famous face in all of the world. It's no surprise because the owner of that face is your neighbor. For most of us, history is something found in textbooks or on TV all dusty, safely talked away in the past. But for little Edgar Feuchtwanger, history was tangible but all too real. History was the man in the tan raincoat who lived across the road. Today we're telling the story of terrifying proximity. The small boy, his family, and the man who could and eventually would erase their entire world. I'm Steve, he's Neil, and this is Honourable Mentions Honourable Mentions Hello, listener How are you? I hope you're doing rather well. Shall we see if he's there? Listener Get rid of me. Go on the star attraction. The one we've all been waiting for. The one and only Mr Showbiz himself, Razzle Dazzle. Hello, Neil.

Speaker 3 1:47

I'm here.

Speaker 1 1:49

I'll give you a big buildup. That's as Razzle Dazzle as you get, is it?

Speaker 2 1:55

Hi, how are you, Steve?

Speaker 1 1:58

Neil. Imagine you're on some sort of commercial radio station and you're just introducing little mix.

Speaker 3 2:07

No. But I'd like to say I would love to, as my bucket list, to go to a recording studio where they do the adverts for local radios.

Speaker 4 2:16

Would you? I would just, yeah, I'd love to see someone they're going, Bodyform.

Speaker 2 2:26

Yeah. Just see it when the headphones on and then the people go, no, no, no, no, no. We need a little bit more on the body there. You miss the body, but give it a bit more a bit more feeling because it's about a pantyliner.

Speaker 1 2:38

What about Toast of London? Do you ever watch Toast of London? When he's in the studio. Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango. You never seen that?

Speaker 2 2:46

Oh, I've heard the name Clem Fandango, yeah.

Speaker 1 2:48

You've got to watch Toast of London. It's very good. He does a lot of those. Anyway, Neil, enough of this jiggery pokery, enough of this gay banter. Please complete the following for me if you would. Thank you. New York, London, Paris. Munich. Everybody talk about pop music. Talk about. Pop music. Talk about. Pop music. Dibbi dibbi doob music. Talk about. Pop music. And you get the idea with that. After World War I, the Beer Halls of Munich became a hotbed of political activism and a rising right-wing ideology which eventually solidified with the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Speaker 3 3:32

National Socialist German Workers.

Speaker 2 3:33

Yeah.

Speaker 1 3:34

So do you see why I got to do the Munich song?

Speaker 2 3:37

Pop music. Talk about.

Speaker 1 3:39

Pop music. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, or to use the derogatory nickname their opponents gave them.

Speaker 3 3:46

Mgzuk.

Speaker 1 3:48

You come backwards. Your tape in reverse.

Speaker 3 3:51

That's the initial, isn't it? It goes.

Speaker 1 3:54

National Socialist German Workers' Party, I suppose it is, yes. Which is why they gave them the rather catchier derogatory nickname than the Nazis. Which is an abbreviation of the National Socialists.

Speaker 3 4:14

You had to say that.

Speaker 1 4:15

Yeah. Also, Nazi was a common derogatory nickname in Bavaria for people named Ignaz. And Ignaz was a popular name for peasants used in a lot of jokes to characterize someone as clumsy, backwards, and a country pumpkin type. Much as we would use the name Neil today. Opponents used the term to imply that the party members were uneducated low-class thugs. Much as we would use to obtain Neil today.

Speaker 3 4:58

Hello.

Speaker 1 5:00

Now, over in Prince regentenplatz Square, right in the heart of Square. That's it. Yes, you know it. Right in the heart of Munich. Talk about pop music.

Speaker 3 5:13

Pop music.

Speaker 1 5:14

Right in the heart of Munich stood number sixteen, an elegant five-story apartment building with a sandstone finish. Do you know it well?

Speaker 3 5:24

Uh no, I know 15 or 17.

Speaker 1 5:26

Oh, but not.

Speaker 3 5:27

On the opposite side of the road.

Speaker 1 5:28

Okay.

Speaker 3 5:28

Yeah, but then 16, the other side of the road, no.

Speaker 1 5:30

The square is anchored by the Prince regent en Theatre, a popular venue for the much-loved drama of Wagner. And his rings.

Speaker 3 5:39

The X Factor. No. The X Factor.

Speaker 1 5:41

No, that's a common mistake. You're talking of someone from about 20 years ago who appeared on the X-Factor for a short amount of time. I'm talking about Wagner, the composer.

Speaker 3 5:55

Oh, okay. Fair enough.

Speaker 4 6:02

Is that Wagner?

Speaker 3 6:03

Oh, right, okay. Yeah. I was thinking of the other ones who sung a few songs.

Speaker 1 6:07

That probably wasn't even Wagner. That was probably some wham or something like that. But I think it might have been. The fountain in the centre of the square pulsed steadily, Neil.

Speaker 3 6:17

Nice, and like a nice steady pulse.

Speaker 1 6:19

And provided a rhythmic backdrop to the conversations of men in sharp collars trench coats and women draped in heavy furs. But it was number sixteen that is SS Guards that drew the eye.

Speaker 3 6:35

SS Guards at the house.

Speaker 1 6:37

And that's because number sixteen in Prince Regent and the Blacks happened to be the private home of the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. From the second floor windows. Adolf Hitler could look out over the whole square.

Speaker 3 6:57

Adolf Hitler?

Speaker 1 6:59

Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 3 7:01

Adolf, as the Americans will call him.

Speaker 1 7:04

He saw the deep crimson of Nazi banners draped from balconies, which colour clashed against the muted greys and creams of the masonry.

Speaker 3 7:16

Take them down or take the building.

Speaker 1 7:18

He did, yes. He watched the neighborhood residents walk by with their heads down, trying not to catch the eye of his SS guards, and he'd have heard the distant rattling chimes of tram cars, barking dogs and shouted orders, the crack of flags on flagpoles, and the rhythmic clack clack of jack boots on the cobblestones.

Speaker 2 7:39

Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.

Speaker 1 7:41

So what I've done there, Neil, see, is I've given you an overall description not only described the place, but I've also gone through the sounds to give you a feeling.

Speaker 2 7:58

Uh-huh. Well done.

Speaker 1 8:01

And soon the Fuhrer would have been familiar with a little boy called Edgar Feuchtwanger

Speaker 3 8:10

Edgar what?

Speaker 1 8:11

Feuchtwanger. Freut Wagner. Feuchtwanger. Wagner. Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 8:18

Frank Warner.

Speaker 1 8:19

I'm not German. Who lived across the way with his well off middle class family.

Speaker 3 8:25

Lovely.

Speaker 1 8:26

Okay. Came to the side, unlike mine. He wore a kind of clothing all his friends wore at the time, Lady Hosen or wool shorts, coloured down button shirt, sometimes paired with a knitted sweater or a small blazer. Sturdy leather shoes and calf high wool socks. Edgar didn't stand out at all. He looked like any other good German boy of the period. I told you that stuff was coming in. Key bumps. No, the the look that Edgar was sporting there.

Speaker 3 9:07

Oh yeah. Well you always wear long socks.

Speaker 1 9:09

I always wear long socks when my leiderhosen and when I go to the shops. And my button-down shirt and my tight little blazer.

Speaker 3 9:19

Weird.

Speaker 1 9:21

This is all well and good. But did you know that the Feuchtwangers were Jewish?

Speaker 2 9:30

No.

Speaker 1 9:31

And there they were, living as neighbours.

Speaker 3 9:34

Opposite Mr. Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 1 9:35

As if he was some sort of sitcom. Edgar's parents called him Borshe, which means little fella or boy.

Speaker 3 9:44

Borshey.

Speaker 1 9:45

Borschey. He was born in Munich on the 28th of September 1924, into a time of poverty and political turmoil in post-First World War, Germany.

Speaker 3 9:58

It was, this boy was.

Speaker 1 10:00

This boy was, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 3 10:03

It'd have been been about the right age for the war, then, wouldn't he?

Speaker 1 10:06

Edgar. His father, Ludwig, was a publisher and lawyer. His mother, Erna, was a pianist. And his uncle was a famous novelist.

Speaker 3 10:20

Stephen King.

Speaker 1 10:21

You're close, it was Agatha Christie.

Speaker 3 10:25

Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 10:26

Despite the times, the family was doing well enough that they employed a chef and a nanny. A chef and a nanny, yeah. They lived at 38 Grillparzerstraße. I think that's pretty good German.

Speaker 3 10:41

That was pretty good German. Grillparzerstraße. That sounds proper German, doesn't it?

Speaker 1 10:46

Which after October 1929, when Edgar was five, enjoyed a direct diagonal view across the second floor flat of their brand new neighbour, uh Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 3 11:00

Mr. Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 1 11:01

And they could watch him eat his pop tarts and glue fur bowls cuffed up by the local cats to that bit under his nose there. Yeah, that bit that went straight down under his nose.

Speaker 3 11:10

Yeah, I wonder what that was.

Speaker 1 11:11

Yeah, that's what he used to do. It was his hobby. If the windows were open, they could hear him repeatedly telephoning Albert Hall to demand the return of his testicle.

Speaker 3 11:21

Yes. Oh well, they've got to keep that, haven't they?

Speaker 1 11:25

I think it's still there, isn't it?

Speaker 3 11:27

Perhaps our man from three or four podcasts ago wanted to eat everything that is perhaps eating Hitler's bollock.

Speaker 1 11:33

It was spare bowl. Because famously, of course, he only had one ball, and the other was in the Albert Hall. So he may have only had one ball, but he had nine rooms in this corner building, Neil.

Speaker 3 11:46

Why did he need nine rooms? That's just pure greed. That's what it was all about, wasn't it?

Speaker 1 11:50

It's long balconies, his staff moved in with him too, and before long, high-ranking SS officers and general arse kissers were flocking to the flats nearby.

Speaker 3 12:02

So trying to build the area up a bit.

Speaker 1 12:05

Now, are you ready? Because we are going to wibble wobble. We're going to wibble wobble back through time now to 1923.

Speaker 3 12:13

1923, let's go then.

Speaker 1 12:15

Ready? On the evening of the 8th of November, this is 1923 right now.

Speaker 3 12:25

Yeah, no it will.

Speaker 1 12:27

Adolf Hitler tried to come to power in Munich in what was called the Beer Hall Putsch.

Speaker 2 12:34

Beer Hall Putsch. The putsch. P. Pusch.

Speaker 1 12:38

P for Papa. P for Papa. Putsch. The Beer Hall Putsch, with his notorious brown shirts, he stormed into the Buggebrer Beer Hall in Munich.

Speaker 3 12:51

Bugabruiker.

Speaker 1 12:53

Told everyone that the government of the German Reich was dismissed and called for a revolution. The push failed, Neil. Hitler was arrested, charged with high treason, and in April 1924 was sentenced to five years in prison, but was granted early release at the end of that year by the Bavarian Supreme Court.

Speaker 3 13:16

That was nice of him.

Speaker 1 13:17

While incarcerated, he started work on his book. Which translates into English as My Book. Which translates into English as Donno, as soon as I know. They know.

Speaker 3 13:37

They don't. That's life. No, oh goodness. My struggle. My struggle. So you're struggling a bit, Mr. Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 1 13:47

It's not a self-help book. He was talking about my struggle to impose my political beliefs upon my country.

Speaker 3 13:56

Oh, okay. So did he actually write Mein Kampf himself?

Speaker 1 14:00

That's a good question. He dictate some people say he dictated it to someone else who wrote it down. It could have been a collection of a few different minds coming together, but it was certainly published in his name. So yes.

Speaker 3 14:17

Yeah. I asked someone if I could use a dictaphone, and she said, No, you should use your finger like everyone else.

Speaker 1 14:24

I've got a joke before you even come out and say it. In the Feuchtwagner household, Neil, and a Mom and their social circle, Adolf Heil Hitler, to give him his formal title, was spoken of as a ridiculous figure because of his failed coup d'etat.

Speaker 3 14:41

Yeah, and his stupid moustache, I suppose.

Speaker 1 14:43

And his stupid moustache, yes. And his fondness for pop tat. People believed he was nothing more than a temporary phenomenon, a flash in the pan.

Speaker 3 14:53

Hmm. Well, he was in kind of a way, wasn't he?

Speaker 1 14:58

In the grand scheme of all of history and time. Yes, but they were thinking that he was nothing more than a little irritant and that he was never going to go anywhere. Do you remember Edgar's novel writing uncle, please now?

Speaker 3 15:13

Agatha Christie.

Speaker 1 15:15

Well, I must have told you little fib there. Because we're going to Wibblewobble forwards in time to meet him now. You ready? Oh. Now, I said his name was Agatha Christie, didn't I?

Speaker 3 15:32

Yes, you did, yes.

Speaker 1 15:33

Yes, I did. And you guessed it may have been Stephen King. But we were both wrong.

Speaker 3 15:37

Yes.

Speaker 1 15:37

Because actually his name was Lion.

Speaker 3 15:41

Lion.

unknown 15:41

Great name, isn't it?

Speaker 3 15:43

His name was Lion.

Speaker 1 15:45

His name was Lion Fechtwerner.

Speaker 3 15:53

Lion must mean something else in German.

Speaker 1 15:56

Well, it's a Jewish, I think it might come into the Jewish one rather than the German one here. But I don't know. His name was Lion, and one of the books he wrote was a best-selling satire called Success, which was published in 1930. In it he lampooned Hitler as an hysterical man named Kutzner, who tries to seduce the people with nationalist ideas, but ultimately fails. And this is quite poignant for our current times.

Speaker 3 16:28

Yeah.

Speaker 1 16:29

In later life, Edgar remembered of his uncle. Although he regarded Hitler as very dangerous, he saw him as someone to be made fun of. Hitler was supposed to continue as a ridiculous figure, and then would somehow disappear from the scene. Shall we see how that panned out?

Speaker 3 16:46

Yeah, please.

Speaker 1 16:47

Yeah, I don't know how much you know about this part of history now. But spoilers may lie ahead. When Hitler became Reich Chancellor in 1933, it was a matter of luck that Lyon was on a reading tour in the US of States. And look is a reading tour? Yes. Could be a Reading tour.

Speaker 3 17:07

Yeah, tour in Reading. That's probably about more likely.

Speaker 1 17:10

He could have gone to Reading in in our country and then looked at Reading in America and then he was coming home.

Speaker 3 17:16

Just would walk around the streets going, Great to be here.

Speaker 1 17:19

Yeah. Leeds Reading Festival. Could have been to play in that.

Speaker 3 17:24

Oh, he could have started it.

Speaker 1 17:26

And then he went over to America to do it there as well. I think that's pretty more, yeah. So Lyon was on a Reading tour in the USA, and luckier still that the German ambassador of the States was not a Nazi.

Speaker 3 17:40

Nice lucky.

Speaker 1 17:42

He was the guest of honour at a dinner hosted by the ambassador on the 30th of January 1933, which was the same day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

Speaker 3 17:52

They must have had Frere Rochers.

Speaker 1 17:54

Yes. They must have had Frera Rochet's.

Speaker 3 17:57

Because it was the ambassador's favourite.

Speaker 1 17:59

And they were spoiling them with the ambassador realized immediately that Lyon couldn't go back to Germany before he would be killed. While he was on his American tour, his house was ransacked by Nazi government agents who stole or destroyed many items from his extensive library, including invaluable manuscripts of some of his projected works, and in the summer of 1933, Lion Feuchtwagner's name appeared on the first of Hitler's lists of Germans deprived of their citizenship and rendered stateless because of his disloyalty to the German Reich and the German people. So Hitler considered him a personal enemy, and the Nazis named Lion as the enemy of the state number one.

Speaker 3 19:05

He was the very first one. I'm an enemy of the state number one. I don't know if you saw what I just did there.

Speaker 1 19:19

It's like in New America's, of course, they had public enemy number one.

Speaker 3 19:24

So you had people like Did they ever get to number one?

Speaker 1 19:28

Public Enemy. I don't know what they did in America. But in America, they had Public Enemy number one. So you had people like John Dinninger and Babyface Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd and those sort of people. Well, they were a bit before. But yes, those sort of people were public enemy number ones. So think of him like that, Neil, please.

Speaker 3 19:54

Okay, yeah, we'll do. The Green Goblin, he would have been one of them as well, wouldn't he?

Speaker 1 19:58

He would have done, so it makes it easier for you to remember, yes. Now, as Leon was enemy of the state number one, all the while his brother and family were living as Hitler's neighbours. It was October 1929 when the Foyt Werners first noticed that they had a new neighbour, and it was all because of one banal little incident.

Speaker 3 20:21

Oh.

Speaker 1 20:22

You'd have to guess what that was.

Speaker 3 20:24

Um he saluted them instead of doing the highlight there.

Speaker 1 20:32

No, no, this is how they first noticed they got a new neighbour in the first place. I'll do your clue that would have probably used it on his cocoa pops.

Speaker 3 20:41

Mm-hmm. He would have used some cocoa pops.

Speaker 1 20:44

Yes, it would have turned it brown, his cocoa pops. Milk. Their morning milk delivery went missing.

Speaker 3 20:51

Ah.

Speaker 1 20:52

Her couster the milkman explained to Edgar's mother that someone called Heil Hitler, over at number 16, had claimed it all for himself, and that wasn't even the worst thing he went on to do, Neil.

Speaker 3 21:07

Yes, dirtiness, isn't it?

Speaker 1 21:09

Edgar would walk to and from school every day and pass directly outside the home of Hitler's personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman.

Speaker 3 21:18

Her name's ring is the bell.

Speaker 1 21:21

That's a name. You won't want to say he had bad breath, isn't it what's on the name, please? Heinrich Hoffmann. Bloody ignore it.

Speaker 2 21:27

Phew, milk my teeth.

Speaker 1 21:29

Edgar had to swerve his way through armed guards and other high-ranking Nazis littering the pavements. But one day, as the small boy walked past, he saw Hitler lying in a deck chair in Hoffman's garden. It all seemed quite normal and unthreatening, he recalled.

Speaker 3 21:46

Yeah, you imagine he would be if you just saw the leader of the Nazi Party laying in a deck chair. Well, this looks quite normal.

Speaker 1 21:53

Yeah, there he was, just laying in a deck chair enjoying the sunshine. It was in 1933 when Adolf Hitler was now right. Chancellor that Edgar met him face to face for the first time. Edgar said, down from Prince Regent Platts, you could go out onto the meadows and get some fresh air. Once, when we're on our way, Hitler had just come out of his house. There was a car that he obviously wanted to get into, and he saw that we had stopped to let him pass, and he thanked us. Until then, the closest Edgar had ever seen him was in that garden deck chair. Now here he was, the Fuhrer himself standing right in front of him. Edgar says he was actually just an ordinary person. There was nothing special about him. Hitler didn't know who he had just thanked. He saw a woman with an ordinary looking small boy unaware that that boy was Jewish, let alone the nephew of Lyon Fechtwerner, public enemy of the state number one.

Speaker 3 22:58

Number one.

Speaker 1 23:01

If he'd have known all this, Edgar said, he would have done something without a doubt. I'm sure we would have all been killed in Dakel. Meanwhile, while one Fechtwerner was having his hair tous off by the Fuhrer, another had decided to leave the USA and return home.

Speaker 3 23:22

Yeah.

Speaker 1 23:24

He and his wife Marta settled in the south of France, but when France declared war on Germany in 1939, Lion, as a German national, was interred in a prison before being released, only for the Germans to invade France in nineteen forty, when he was captured and imprisoned again at the same place. Luckily, they never did quite realise they had Hitler's least favourite best-selling writer of Nazi distracts.

Speaker 3 23:56

Right, right under the noses.

Speaker 1 23:58

Along with all the other prisoners, Lyon was moved to a makeshift tent camp near Nîmes. I'm saying that right.

Speaker 3 24:06

Yes, his names, yes. You're right, it's his Nîmes.

Speaker 1 24:09

N-I-M, yes. From there, he was busted out by Martyr, smuggled to Marseille, disguised as a woman, moved through Spain and Portugal, and eventually returning to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. You were the same man.

Speaker 3 24:28

So that went well, didn't he?

Speaker 1 24:30

He left the United States, got into a bit of bother, a bit of a scrape, and then uh ended up back there, but with his wife.

Speaker 3 24:38

No, she walked past Hitler in the street.

Speaker 1 24:41

No. No, no, you know. You're not keeping up with this, are you? This is Lion. This is his uncle, the author.

Speaker 3 24:48

Oh, his uncle, yes. Sorry, yes. Not Edgar.

Speaker 1 24:51

The author the small boy.

Speaker 3 24:53

Okay.

Speaker 1 24:54

Fair enough. Yeah, right. You keep up with it? Yep. Yep. Yeah, here, yeah. They've all got similar names. But back home in Munich.

unknown 25:02

Hmm.

Speaker 1 25:03

So we're back home in Munich now, Edgar's parents spoke of nothing but politics and their danger now posed by their neighbour.

Speaker 3 25:11

Who is? Who is Who's the neighbour?

Speaker 1 25:20

Hitler. Oh no, of course it was. Sorry. Yeah, do you remember him?

Speaker 3 25:26

Yes, I do remember him, Adolf.

Speaker 1 25:28

Mr. Hitler. Who does he think is kidding? They noticed there was no dissenting voices anymore. Now people only stopped in front of the Fuhrer's apartment to throw out the straight arm and shout, Hi Hitler. Really? And the hustle and bustle of the square would always snap into an instant silence whenever a motorcade arrived or left, because it could be him. Or another neighbour. It doesn't really say who this neighbour was that was causing him problems. It could have been Mr. Robinson from down the road who was posting his bags of dog poo through their letterbox. But where I was saying it was Adolf Hitler.

Speaker 3 26:08

Let's go with I think it's it's a safe option.

unknown 26:10

Yeah.

Speaker 1 26:11

But Neil.

Speaker 3 26:13

Yes, Save him.

Speaker 1 26:14

Hello, Neil.

Speaker 3 26:16

Bonjour.

Speaker 1 26:18

In retrospect, do you know what really got stuck in their goat? Stuck in their craw, curdled their cream, flicked the underside of their dangly ball bag.

Speaker 3 26:29

No, don't.

Speaker 1 26:30

It was how drab it all was, how normal, how routine.

Speaker 3 26:37

Yeah.

Speaker 1 26:38

The folk family looked out from their window and they saw an ordinary man, a neighbour. There were no thunderclaps, no bellows of evil laughter, just some bloke who, yes, had a private SS guard, but who also had a silly moustache. He'd had to wipe his bum, he'd get annoyed when he'd drip cocoa pop milks down his clean shirt. But he shouldn't have stolen that down, should he?

Speaker 3 27:03

That's the worst thing, everything.

Speaker 1 27:05

He'd come and go, not bothering anybody. But at the same time, he was plotting his way to become one of the most evil men in all history.

Speaker 3 27:13

If not the most evil man.

Speaker 1 27:14

That's right. It was all so mundane, yet ultimately catastrophic for millions of lives. But the Feutwalders, the Jewish family living in plain sight of the architect of the Holocaust, had no intention to emigrate. They were far more connected to German culture than Jewish life.

Speaker 3 27:33

So they weren't going to move, even though they lived next door to him.

Speaker 1 27:35

But they considered themselves Germans rather than Jews. So they weren't practicing Jews. But they were of Jewish birth.

Speaker 4 27:46

Right.

Speaker 1 27:47

Then, Neil was still with it. Then in 1935, things took a bothersome turn. Laws were passed that banned Jews from being employers. So Edgar lost his nanny and the household lost their cook, who was a dear friend. They were also forbidden to enter shops, and Ludwig lost his job at the publishing house. Edgar said his school teacher was very pro-Nazi. When he was eight, he drew a huge swastika on the first page of his school exercise book 'cause he wanted to do what she told him and he wanted to fit in. She dictated poems and had children write birthday greetings to Hitler and make drawings of the true map of Germany, including the regions that the teachers had been stolen from them. So the Sedaten lands and that sort of stuff that he later went and doubted himself too. In later life, Edgar told a reporter, Jewishness didn't play a big role in my life before the rise of the Nazis. It did at my father's, because my grandparents were Orthodox Jews. But by my time that had completely faded away. I didn't know much about it. Hitler turned into something, and I didn't really understand it. Back then at primary school, I was like the other children. But sadly, Edgar's school friends turned against him because they did not want to be friends with the Jew. His parents didn't want trouble and they instructed him not to fight back. So he was going to school every day, eight years old, whatever he was, and getting bullied and ostracised and having the living crap kicked out of him just because he was a Jewish person. The same person they knew on the Monday before. But now because you're not supposed to do that, he's now on the following Monday enemy number one within the school. Yeah. Are we funny people? Then Neil. But then on the nights of November the 9th and 10th, 1938, everything ratcheted up in another notch when all across Germany annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, roughly the Czech border with Austria and Germany. That's all that is. There was a wave of intense anti-Jewish violence, recorded in history as Kristallnacht referring to the shadows.

Speaker 3 30:21

Kristallnacht.

Speaker 1 30:22

Referring to the shards of shattered glass that littered the streets from the windows of Jewish owned homes and shops and synagogues. At the time it was said to be a spontaneous uprising. But now we know it was orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels. And even the Freutwarner's ordinary little labour. Mr. Hitler. The Nazi government forced the Jewish community to pay a fine of one billion Reichsmarks for the damage. We'll go out, smash up your properties, and then you pay for it. Yeah. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 31:04

So that makes it makes pure sense, doesn't it?

unknown 31:06

Yeah.

Speaker 1 31:07

Effectively seizing all the insurance payouts they were entitled to. It was the first time the Nazi regime incarcerated people on a massive scale simply for being Jewish, and shifted the plan from making life so miserable that Jews would voluntarily emigrate to one of violence, intimidation, and murder. Murder when they met, it was Moira. On November 10th, 1938, the morning after the riots of Kristornacht, Edgar was woken by the sound of a terrific banging.

Speaker 3 31:43

Was that it?

Speaker 1 31:44

And then shouting as the Gestapo arrived at his home to arrest his father. Ludwig was dragged off to the Dachau concentration camp where he was imprisoned for six weeks and suffered significant weight loss and an alarming physical decline. But like many of the Jewish men arrested during Kristallnack, there was no basis in law yet, in brackets, for a charge, and so he was eventually released on the condition that he and his family leave Germany immediately never to return. And so in early 1939, the Feuck Warner family from 38, good old Barnes managed to secure visas for the United Kingdom. Edgar was sent ahead on the train, and his parents joined him shortly after. Now Edgar lived to be a hundred, dying on the 22nd of August, 2025, in Quinchester, England. He had been a globally respected historian at Southampton University and was awarded an OBE, as well as the Federal Cross of Merit in Germany. He published 14 widely read books and autobiographical works about his early years as a member of a Jewish family with Adolf Hitler as their neighbour.

Speaker 3 33:19

As a neighbour, yeah.

Speaker 1 33:22

If we were to visit Prince Regent and Brandt today in Munich, New York you'll find it looks pretty much the same as it ever did. Both 38 good old Pars and Strasse and 16 Prince Regent and the Pratt Square still stand. Right. But to prevent morbid tourism, the latter is used by the Bavarian State Government and Police Administration. So it's a police building.

Speaker 3 33:51

Which means you can't go in there.

Speaker 1 33:53

People can't just go in there.

Speaker 3 33:57

It's a shame.

Speaker 1 33:59

It's a shame.

Speaker 3 34:00

Yes it is. I'd like to have done a poo in the sink and left it.

Speaker 1 34:04

You probably still can. It's an operational building with a police in there. Like an anarchistic statement, isn't it?

Speaker 3 34:13

Yeah. I might go and get a testicle from the mortuary and stick it on the wall.

Speaker 1 34:17

There it is. You can just not walk into mortuaries and just nick a testicle here and there, can't you? Yeah, you of course you can. As for Adolf Hitler, he never did retrieve his last testicle from the Albert Hall. And he ended up coming a clopper when he got stuck in the bunker during a round of golf.

Speaker 3 34:39

Right. You sure that's right?

Speaker 1 34:42

Yeah. He died in the bunker. I read it on Wikipedia.

Speaker 3 34:46

Oh, it must be true then.

Speaker 1 34:48

Yeah. I made it with a bit about the golf, but I presume it's what he was doing if he was in a bunker in the middle of Berlin.

Speaker 3 34:55

Can't think of any other bunker.

Speaker 1 34:56

Anyway, it serves it right in that little man, doesn't it?

Speaker 3 35:00

Yes, it does. Horrible person.

Speaker 1 35:02

Horrible person. So there he was, with his pop tats and his cocoa pops, living away there, a very ordinary life, opposite the Jewish family, the Feuchwarders.

Speaker 3 35:13

Yeah, right next door to them. Oh opposite them.

Speaker 1 35:16

Ha ha ha. There they were. And he didn't even realise that when he was seeking the brother or the uncle, old lion, that his family were living just across the road from where he was.

Speaker 2 35:33

Love it.

Speaker 1 35:34

There's the ultimate finger, then there it goes, up yours, Mr. Hitler. So what did you think to that listener? A very entertaining episode all about the Fortweigner family.

Speaker 3 35:45

Quite interesting. You got very interesting.

Speaker 2 35:53

You'd probably scoured the whole of Europe to get this. I want him, where is he?

Speaker 1 35:57

Yeah, and imagine all those German soldiers in France probably all got shot because they found out that Lion Fortwiler was actually in there and they let him go.

Speaker 2 36:07

If you just look over the road.

Speaker 1 36:11

Sorry, my fear. He would have gone, gotten stop old, top on Hitler does. Was that German?

Speaker 3 36:18

Yeah, I don't know what it meant. That's what it sort of says hair flicking everywhere.

Speaker 1 36:28

Is it you were doing there?

Speaker 3 36:30

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 36:31

Okay. Well, this one thank you very much for listening to that little slice of history brought to you by Honourable Mentions here. If you do happen to come across Albert Hole in London, and find Adolf Hitler's Missing Testicle, then please do let us know on honourable mentionspod at gmail.com. Or you can get us on social media such as NeilBlease.

Speaker 3 37:02

Uh we're on social medias like uh Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and Discord.

Speaker 1 37:11

Uh yes, we're on Reddit as well, actually, if you want to give us a shout over there.

Speaker 3 37:14

We're on Reddit as well, as if you want to give us a shout on there.

Speaker 1 37:17

Yeah, well done. Um on all sorts of places.

Speaker 3 37:20

And we're in all sorts of places. Can I just say if you have an enemy or someone that you don't like, just firstly check in your street or over the road just in case they live there. As a little tip for you.

Speaker 1 37:32

So thank you, listener, for listening in to myself and my colleague. Hello, dear.

Speaker 3 37:39

Hello.

Speaker 1 37:41

Steve. We'll be back next week for more adventures through history in Honourable Mentions. It's not the best you got.

Speaker 3 37:50

Well, you can maybe jump.

Speaker 1 37:51

Did I?

Speaker 3 37:53

You didn't expect it. Do it again. Say it again one more time, try two, one. Oh honorable mentions.

unknown 38:00

Thank you.

Speaker 1 38:01

So, listener, so long farewell, LV design. Goodbye.

Speaker 3 38:07

Let's talk about pop music. That's it, yeah. I've got do it got the something wrong with that one. Bye. Bye.

Speaker 38:17

Well, how about that listener? Right there under any time. If you enjoyed an episode of Honorable Mention, celebrate his history, then you would miss wave number time and subscribe right away. So you don't miss another more. And one leave of stumble review, too. Because the chapter pick up your listeners and the top of the bumping mountain. If you know that the whole episode was researched by Stephen Webbinson and Cover Brothers production. And if you want to cut some independence. You never know what they may be up to.