The Virginia Plan: William B. Thalhimer & a Rescue from Nazi Germany

by Arcadia Publishing

Overview

With a forward by Elizabeth Thalhimer Smartt, learn about William Thalhimer's elaborate plan to save Jewish Germans from Hitler and the Third Reich.

During Hitler's rise to power in the 1930's, Richmond department store founder, William Thalhimer and his family traveled to Germany to visit relatives and business contacts. Thalhimer was deeply disturbed and increasingly alarmed as the anti-Semitism that he and his family witnessed escalated into the violence Brown Shirts and Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Thalhimer became determined to aid Jews fleeing from Germany, and he eventually met a representative of Gross Breesen, a German-Jewish agricultural training institute. The mission of Gross Breesen, and eventually Thalhimer, was to train young Jews in agriculture in hopes that the expertise gained would ensure the students' successful emigration from Germany. Thalhimer purchased a farm, Hyde Farmlands, in Burkeville, Virginia to give the students a home in Virginia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609491710
Publisher:	Arcadia Publishing SC
Publication date:	03/18/2011
Series:	American Heritage
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Bob Gillette's entire professional career revolved around young people. For forty years, he was a public school educator. He was nationally recognized for his high school program OTO, Opportunities to Teach Ourselves, in Fairfield, Connecticut. For his innovations in experiential education, he was awarded the Mary Gresham Chair, a $300, 000 grant by the New England Program of Teacher Education and the Department of Commerce. He has spoken and consulted nationally on educational topics. Simultaneously, he directed religious education programs and created curricula in Jewish education. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University, earning a BA and an MAT, and he studied at the Hebrew Union College, the Reform Jewish rabbinical seminary. An avid canoe and kayak paddler, his first book, Paddling Prince Edward Island, a Falcon Guide, was published in 2006. Bob and his wife, Marsha, paddling partners for fifty-one years, live in Lynchburg, Virginia. They both were smitten with the Hyde Farmlands story and its people. Together they interviewed several of the surviving students. As Connecticut Yankee transplants, they are both committed to discovering their new "southern Jewish roots." They have three sons, daughters-in-law, four granddaughters, a grand-cat and two grand-dogs.

Table of Contents

Forward Elizebath Thalhimer Smartt 9

Acknowledgements 11

Introduction 15

1 Hope 17

2 Finding a Farm: Late Winter, 1938 21

3 Bondy's First Consular Meeting 29

4 Immigration Granite Walls 37

5 The "Virginia Plan" Begins 43

6 Visa Considerations: Round One 49

7 State/Labor Deliberations: Round Two 53

8 Germany in the Fall of 1938 57

9 Kristallnacht: November 10, 1938 61

10 Waiting for Immigration, 1939 75

11 "Root Holds," 1939 81

12 Visa Deliberations After Kristallnacht 97

13 Journey to Hyde Farmlands, 1939-1940 107

14 Bleak News from Europe 113

15 Hyde Farmlands Expands, 1939-1940 117

16 Neighbors and Helpers 131

17 Nearby Towns 137

18 Encounters with a New Racism 139

19 A Community in Transition, 1940 141

20 1941: A Fateful Year 153

21 After Hyde Farmlands 163

22 The War Years and After 169

23 A Final Accounting 181

24 Misconceptions 183

25 Shareholders for Life 185

Abbreviations 189

Notes 191

Bibliography 197

Index 203

About the Author 207