New on dunera.de 28 January 2025

The fact that the passports of Jews in the German Nazi Reich were stamped in red with the letter “J” is not only known from Felix Nussbaum’s famous self-portrait. Less well known, however, is the story of how this defamatory marking came about: the background to this was that Switzerland imposed a visa requirement for all Germans in order to prevent Jewish refugees from entering the country. The Nazis, in turn, wanted to prevent this. After months of negotiations, the Nazis offered to mark Jewish passports so that the Swiss authorities (and other unsupportive states) could send Jews back at passport control. Sweden was not the only country to benefit from this:With pretended “neutrality”, an appalling anti-Semitism was not only “cultivated” in the government there and Jews were kept out of the country. Rather, in the spirit of anti-communism shared with the Nazis, Sweden presented itself as a “neutral” deployment base for German troops against the Soviet Union and supplied the economically isolated Nazi Reich with mineral ressources vital to the war effort.

Thanks to the J-stamp in the passport (here of Dunera Boy Ladislaus Wieselmann), many countries were able to prevent the entry of unwanted Jewish refugees. Source: National Archives Australia NAA_ItemNumber7019841.

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Wolfgang Kittel cannot really be described as a Dunera Boy.The temporary diplomat was allowed to leave the Dunera in Cape Town for England “on his word of honor”. Kittel’s Wikipedia biography explicitly states that he fought in the Freikorps against democratic aspirations after the First World War. Later he researched the Aryan “purity” of his family tree in order to get a job abroad with Lufthansa in 1938. The same Wikipedia entry also falsely claims that there was a mutiny on the Dunera, which the NSDAP member Kittel put down on the side of the British guards. On the contrary, he was even accused by others of wanting to organize a mutiny.

Wolfgang Kittel; Photo: Lufthansa-Media.

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