JEWS IN NAZI BERLIN: FROM KRISTALLNACHT TO LIBERATION
Edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon and Chana Schutz
University of Chicago Press, $40 391 pages
REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES
Hard as it is to admit it, all significant historical events - even the ghastly Holocaust - tend to flatten and diminish as time draws us away from the moment they occurred. This meticulously researched book forcibly yanks us back with a fresh, close confrontation with what it was like to face the full horror of the Nazi state’s extermination campaign - and to survive it.
This is not by any means a rival to the magisterial two-volume “Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945” by Saul Friedlander, which is the standard reference on the inexorable evolution from harassment, to expropriation and to final extermination that Adolf Hitler and his henchmen visited on Germans who because they were Jewish, or were otherwise undesirable, lost all of the protections we associate with civilization, law or simple humanity.
Rather, while the onrushing reality of mass murder hangs as an evil storm cloud over this narrative, this book chronicles the equally harrowing story of what it was like to live in the heart of the Nazi beast and what one faced in the simple, instinctive struggle to stay alive, to protect one’s loved ones, to bargain with and finally evade the Nazi killing machine. The book itself is a compilation of an exhaustive archival research project shared by two postwar institutions dedicated to gathering, preserving and making sense of the personal documents, photos, diaries, letters and government records of a once great Jewish community that had flourished in the capital of what was believed to be one of the most cultured, civilized nations of the world.
Beate Meyer is a researcher at the Institute for the History of German Jews in Hamburg, while Hermann Simon is director and Chana Schutz is vice director of the New Synagogue Berlin-Centrum Judaicum Foundation. Here is how the editors sum up the stark story line: “Berlin was the largest of Germany’s Jewish Communities. Of the 522,000 German Jews living in Germany in 1933 (566,000 according to Nazi racial definitions), more than 160,000 lived in the capital. By May 1939 roughly half had fled the country. In the summer of 1941- that is, on the eve of the first deportations - the Berlin Jewish community still counted about 65,000 members. To this 9,000 more were added, people who did not consider themselves Jewish but whom the Nazis nonetheless persecuted as such.”
The deportations were, of course, first masked as efforts to resettle the deportees in new agricultural communities in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe and Russia; very quickly it became clear to all that a campaign of systematic killings was under way. Between October 1941 and March 1945, more than 55,000 Berlin Jews were shipped to death camps such as Auschwitz or to bogus holding areas such the showplace camp at Theresienstadt; it made little difference, for in the end most were killed outright while those who were not faced the slow death of starvation, disease and brutal treatment. Only 1,900 of the Berlin deportees lived to return to their city after the war.
But despite frenzied efforts, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister and the capital’s Gauleiter, remained frustrated in his pledge to make the city completely judenfrei. There were those who stayed on. Between 1,400 and 1,500 “U-Boote” (“submarines”) survived underground in the city, and an additional 4,700 people were protected through their marriages to important or wealthy non-Jews.
This is where the story fills with the harsh complications and ambivalence that faced those who were awaiting the bureaucratic lottery of deportation and those determined to escape certain death by whatever means.
Some of the stories documented here are the stuff of adventure films, full of love’s determination to survive and the brave generosity of strangers. Walter and Leonie Frankenstein were a young couple who married in early 1942, determined to spend what time they had left together. They not only survived the war, but had two children during their life underground, a world of forged papers, scant rations, risky shelter provided by a tiny network of resisters and just sheer random luck.
There was even more luck involved and even greater bravery by three older women who housed the orphaned teenager Hans Rosenthal in a succession of garden sheds for three years where he listened to a clandestine radio as his only contact with the world; he later became one of Germany’s most prominent news broadcasters.
Yet it would be both unreal and unfair to expect all Jews to be both brave and lucky. There were still several thousand “U-Boote” Jews on the run in Berlin by June 1943, when Goebbels publicly announced that Berlin was at last free of all Jews. At that point, the Gestapo assigned top priority to making the declaration a reality by any means necessary. Using the threat of instant deportation as bait, the Nazis recruited so-called “Greifer” - or “snatchers” - among the remaining Jews in the city to locate the addresses where those living underground either found shelter or congregated to secure the latest forged passes and ration cards.
The most dramatic of all the “snatchers” was a gorgeous blonde named Stella Kubler who aggressively roamed the streets of Berlin spotting Jews she knew to be hiding and coolly handing them over to the Gestapo. After the war, she argued unpersuasively that she had been unwilling, but had bent to intense physical pressure and the promise that she and her parents would be spared deportation, a promise that was broken in her parent’s case.
Nor was “the Blonde Phantom,” as she was known, a lone example of Jews who found themselves unwilling yet active participants in the bureaucratic machinery of Nazi extermination operations. Jewish marshals accompanied Gestapo agents on raids to suspected hiding places; others acted as guards on the transport trains, still others were forced into menial day labor for the war-production industries. Even senior Jewish community officials who had started out as negotiators in defense of their people at the start of the persecution found themselves charged with being collaborators by survivors after the war.
As the editors sum up the angry debate that festers even now, “For these individuals, the ’breakdown in civilization’ into systematic mass murder was not only outside the breadth of their experience, but also the bounds of their imagination. Even in retrospect there seems to be no alternative strategy that would definitely have been more successful. To claim that demonstrative refusal, open resistance, and a mass movement underground would have enabled a greater number of people to survive is mere speculation - and assumes that the majority of German Jews would have been prepared for this.”
This book makes that dilemma and its fatal consequences grippingly clear.
James Srodes is a Washington journalist and author. His email address is: srodesnews@msn.com
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