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Editorial

September 2025 marks exactly 90 years since the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws. Specifically, this took place on 15 September 1935, being announced at a special meeting of the Reichstag during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. They marked an escalation in the persecution of the Jews.

“According to the Nuremberg Laws, a person with three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew. A grandparent was considered Jewish if they belonged to the Jewish religious community. Thus, the Nazis defined Jews by their religion (Judaism), and not by the supposed racial traits that Nazism attributed to Jews.

The laws also categorised some people in Germany as ‘Mischlinge’ (‘mixed-race persons’). According to law, Mischlinge were neither German nor Jewish. These were people who had one or two Jewish grandparents.

The Nazi regime required individuals to prove their grandparents’ racial identities. To do so, people used religious records. These included baptism records, Jewish community records, and gravestones.” ¹

Our two feature articles reflect on this moment of history. G2G presenter Gerry Hahlo tells the story of his father and grandfather, endangered by the Nuremberg Laws despite a previous generation of the family having converted from Judaism. Dr Agnes Kaposi describes her experiences visiting Nuremberg two years ago and witnessing how that city is dealing with its uncomfortable legacy.

Vivienne Cato

1 From  https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-race-laws

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In June 2026 Generation 2 Generation will celebrate its tenth birthday!  June 2016 was the month during which our founder members, Bernice, Helen, Lesley and Sharman first met to discuss how descendants of survivors might tell their family Holocaust stories and ensure the continuation of Holocaust testimony.  

We have come a long way since then. In January 2020 we became a charity. We are now working with 41 speakers and there are a further 23 speakers in development. We have eight additional volunteers, a planning committee and a board of trustees to guide our work.  We have to date delivered 1400+ presentations to more than 130,000 people.

This year with the HMD Theme of ‘Bridging the Generations’ we will be announcing a big fundraising drive, planning several events and a special celebration in June.   As we move from the Holocaust being a living history, we believe that our work becomes more and more important.  We hope you will support us and join our activities throughout the year.  To donate now, click here.

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One night in September 1935 my father Dieter went to bed and waited for his mother to tuck him in. She came, but this was not a normal bedtime. She had shattering news: the Government had decreed that Dieter had Jewish blood.

Dieter was bewildered. He didn’t even know what being Jewish meant. All he knew was that Jews were not well thought of. And so it proved. From that moment, the pressure of being thought of as Jewish became suffocating.

The Hahlo family was not Jewish, not anymore. In 1892 Dieter’s grandfather, along with his siblings, had converted to Protestantism. It is not known if this was for business or personal reasons; it was most likely both, that led them to believe it would be better to be part of the majority faith. Their cultural identity became solely that of German patriots.

Dieter’s father, Georg Hahlo, grew up as a Christian in Oldenburg in northwest Germany. When war was declared in August 1914 Georg and his schoolmates rushed to sign up for Oldenburg Regiment No. 91. He almost paid for his enthusiasm with his life. Georg was wounded three times. Each time he recovered in hospital and went back to fight again, meaning that four times he went to the front to fight for his beloved fatherland. He was awarded the Iron Cross for remarkable valour on the battlefield. His official portrait shows the ribbon in his second buttonhole, and he is holding his ceremonial sword. Georg and his parents were extremely proud. 

Georg’s war record did not save him from persecution. On 7 April 1933, less than one month after the National Socialists won the election, the first laws appeared that actively discriminated against Jews. One stipulated that senior government officials were to be ‘pure blood Germans’. Georg should have been safe because the law did not apply to war veterans and only to people who were actively Jewish. Georg was not only a war hero, but also was not Jewish and never had been. But he lost his job because local officials interpreted new rules as it suited them and were keen to demonstrate loyalty to the new regime. On 31 May, less than two months after the laws were introduced, Georg received a letter announcing he had been dismissed without further notice. The reason stated was that he had become ‘politically unreliable’.

Dieter was aware that his father was having difficulties because the family was forced to move to new cities in the search for work. He didn’t understand why misfortune had befallen his once-successful father, his parents having shielded him from the implications of Georg’s Jewish descent. In 1935 Dieter’s world was turned upside down by the Nuremberg Laws. These made it clear that it was not only Georg who was in trouble but also my father Dieter and his sister.

The Nuremberg Laws defined who was and who was not Jewish on the Government’s terms. The diagram is in German and minute font but bear with me. In the far left column are Aryans, deemed to be pure blood Germans because they have four German grandparents, denoted by four clear circles. In Nazi terms, pure blood had to go back three generations. In the right-hand column are Jews with four Jewish grandparents, shown by four black circles. My father and his sister were in the highlighted column because they had one grandparent who had been Jewish. The Nazis called them ‘mischlinge’, which means half breeds, like dogs. My father could not believe he might be considered Jewish because he had one grandparent who had been Jewish in the century before.

He might not have known what being Jewish meant but he soon learned how it felt. Life became uncomfortable as regulations appeared saying what Jews could not do. It was chilling how quickly the new rules were normalised. Most German people were happy that Jews were kept out of their neighbourhood, their parks, their cafés and restaurants, their swimming pools, their cinemas and theatres, their train carriages and their sports clubs.

Dieter’s life was disrupted by moving home and it was hard to make friends. The stress ratcheted up when Dieter turned ten and arrived at a new school in Hanover. He could not let on to his classmates that he was classed as a part-Jew because he would be ostracised and probably beaten up. Every pure German boy aged 10–18 was required to join the Hitler Youth. This was an organisation created to promote Nazi ideals of physical fitness, sporting prowess and military skills such as shooting. But my father was not allowed to join.

This created immense pressure on a young boy. Every day at class register, the form master would check that each boy was in the Hitler Youth, and every day Dieter had to come up with an excuse. In his own words:

Somehow, he got away with it.              

And so, remarkably, did the family. Georg evaded imprisonment during the pogroms of November 1938 only because the police had not filed his registration papers. Georg knew that they would find him eventually, so he marched into police headquarters, announced who he was and persuaded the officer in charge to grant him a permit to travel. It was brave to the point of reckless, but it worked. And so my family escaped the worst excesses of the Nazis, their lives saved by good fortune and a willingness to risk all in extreme circumstances. My father arrived in England in December 1938 on the second Kindertransport train to leave Germany.

I am doubly fortunate because Georg and my father Dieter shared their stories, which enabled me to write an account of their lives – The Boy on the Train (available on Amazon, all proceeds to the Wiener Holocaust Library). It started as a family project, but I came to realise that writing is not self-indulgent – it is part of ensuring that more people know the stories of the past and can be part of a movement towards a better future. By sharing our stories we make sure that the past is not forgotten and, we pray, not repeated.

Based on a conversation with Vivienne Cato in August 2025.

In 2023 I was the keynote speaker at a conference at the University of Munich. Called ‘Liberation, Loss, and Trauma’, it was held on the anniversary of VE Day (8 May). I asked the professor chairman, ‘What business is it of yours to have a conference on liberation on the day you lost the war?’ So that’s when I became more closely acquainted with German attitudes to the Second World War.  It was also the start of an important association: she and I have just finished writing a book together. 

The conference offered me the chance to travel to Nuremberg, which is a hundred miles or so from Munich. Visits were set up for us by the professor who chaired the Munich conference, and we were conducted around, not as tourists, but as academic visitors. Nuremberg is important to me not only because of its Second World War history but also because The Meistersingers of Nuremberg is my favourite opera. 

The first place we went to was the museum, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, which over the next few years is being redone and extended. They display the history of the Nazi Party decade by decade. It is in a large room, but not large enough. Every decade is given a stand, quite a big stand, whereas what they will have in the rebuilt museum is a large display room for each individual decade.

The museum is linked to the Zeppelin Platz [place] where the Nazi rallies were held. The curator who was conducting us around the museum took us to the Zeppelin Platz; and I even have a photograph of me standing on the spot where Hitler addressed the huge crowds . The rallies stopped when the war broke out, because then the troops had something else to do instead of displaying their military might. The building of the stand runs along one side of the arena, which is enormous, 11 square kilometres, many times the size of a football pitch. It held around 700,000 people.

The stand along that one side is still there. It’s concrete, very ugly and crumbling. There are large, built-in swastikas here and there, which were part of the structure. Photographs of those times show that there was an enormous swastika in the middle, about where Hitler was addressing the people, which is not there anymore.

Later, I gave a talk at a secondary school in the city. Thanking me afterwards, the headmaster said, ‘This is such an opportunity for me, the first time I am meeting a Holocaust survivor to talk to. May I ask you to advise us: what should we do with the Nazi monuments which are left behind? We had to pull down that huge swastika in Zeppelin Platz, but there are lots of the smaller swastikas and other Nazi symbols all over the city.  Should we take them all down, or should we restore them, as historical monuments, and include them in any education material which we are preparing for when visitors start coming?’

Where are the visitors, by the way? The headmaster was aware that the city might be a place of scholarship and commemoration visited by crowds, but it isn’t. It’s not that there are no tourists at all, but in relation to the significance of the place there are but few.

Replying to his question about Nazi remains, I could only say “I can see the dilemma.”  Whatever they do, they will be criticised. They will be called vandals if they pull down historic monuments, or neo-Nazis if they retain and restore them. And he said, ‘If you were the chairman of the council, it would be your role to guide the decision-making process.’ All I could say was that I would have to have a much deeper understanding of the implications. I didn’t know. And to this day, I don’t know what I would do.

                         Zeppelin Platz, site of the Nuremberg Rallies

At the school, I was talking to a class of 16– and 17–year–olds. There were about 30 or 35 of them. They wanted to know my life story. As always, I tried to build a link in my presentation between my story and their lives, referring to the culture and history of the place where they lived. I said ‘You have the privilege of living in a historical city; I have already seen two of the important instances of this, your museum, and the Zeppelin Platz.’ And then I became aware that not only were they attentive, but many of them, both boys and girls, were tearful.  I must say I was disturbed. I know how to engage an audience and create an atmosphere; but such an emotional and extreme reaction was new to me, I never came across it anywhere, before or since. So when I finished, I said, ‘I was not trying to make you sad, and if I caused you pain, I’m sorry.’ They then queued up, they all wanted me to sign their little notebooks, and I even found myself comforting some of the ones who were by then sobbing. You may explain this extreme reaction by their living in such a historical place, and perhaps my story made them realise more fully the weight of history upon themselves. 

Holocaust survivor Dr Agnes Kapos MBE, FREng is the author of an autobiography, Yellow Star-Red Star, and the forthcoming Harmage and Hope, co-authored with Professor Dr Anja Ballis.

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