Berlin at War (62 page)

enter. In the light of the hall, I see that they are wearing the Jewish

star. They are relatives of a Breslau merchant, who owned one of Papa’s

pictures, which they now want to sell, because they need the money.

We give them some food and slowly they thaw out. It is indescribable

what these people are going through. They want to go underground,

before they get picked up, take off the star and live as bombed-out

refugees from the Rhineland. Of course, Papa buys the picture from

them. I think they not only wanted material help, they also sought a

certain comfort.30

For many, such small-scale acts would be the start of much wider

and more risky involvement. Most immediately, Jewish
Taucher
needed

to find safe accommodation. For some, this most pressing require-

ment was solved by serendipity, by a stroke of fortune or a chance

meeting. Irma Simon, for instance, had little idea where she would

against all odds

295

go when she left her apartment to avoid deportation in the
Fabrik-

Aktion
. Carrying a heavy suitcase, she paused to rest on Lehrterstrasse

in Moabit, where she found her saviour – a young shoemaker and

communist sympathiser who offered her shelter. ‘A person whom

I had never seen in my life’, she later recalled, ‘calmly promised

something that anyone in this city of millions, Berlin, would have

considered insane.’31 The man, August Kossmann, hid Irma, her

husband and her son in his modest apartment for the remaining two

years of the war.

In most cases, however,
Taucher
first approached those they believed

they could trust. Erich Neumann was a teenager when his mother

took in a Jewish friend at her café in Charlottenburg in the winter

of 1944:

Suddenly, that October, Wolfgang S., our accountant and a friend of

the family, stood at the door, saying, ‘Klärchen, please help me, they

are after me!’ Warned by friends, Wolfgang had been able to leave his

refuge in the Drakestrasse in Lichterfelde. Now he stood, with a small

suitcase in his hand in our back room, shaking. The usual yellow star

on his jacket and coat were missing, but the marks where they had

been were still noticeable.32

Wolfgang was washed and clothed, and a small room was set aside

behind the café for him. He was supplied with food and would spend

twenty-three hours a day in his room, only venturing out after dark to

walk the family dog in a nearby park. He stayed for the following five

months. Erich recalled that his mother knew very well that such

behaviour risked the wrath of the Gestapo, if discovered, ‘but she

simply suppressed the thought. She had never left someone in the

lurch, when her help was required . . . For her, it was only natural.’33

Taucher
often preferred not to risk all with one location and one

host, preferring instead a peripatetic existence, sometimes involving

the assistance of dozens of Aryan sympathisers. Max Krakauer, for

instance, compiled a list at the end of the war of all of those Berliners

who had provided him with refuge, accommodation, work and false

papers. He counted sixty-six names.34 Alfred Bornholmer went under-

ground in the autumn of 1942 to escape his deportation, and though

he initially stayed hidden with his aunt, the continued attentions of the

296

berlin at war

Gestapo forced him to seek accommodation further afield. He would

travel right across the capital, even to outlying towns such as Beelitz

and Luckenwalde, rarely staying in the same place twice. Though all

of his close family – mother, brother and sister-in-law – were deported

to their deaths, Alfred would survive the war.35

Another example was Salomon Striem, a friend of the Knirsch family.

He often visited them at their home in the suburb of Pankow, where

he was known to the children as ‘Uncle Fritz’. ‘He was blond’, recalled

Rita Knirsch:

lived illegally in Berlin and did not wear the
Judenstern
. Day by day, he would travel with the railway right across the city, as he had no fixed

address. He would ask: ‘Let me stay with you awhile, but wake me if

there’s an air raid alarm, I don’t want anyone to see me with you!’ Our

mother always let him stay, and reminded me: ‘Rita, you must tell

nobody about this!’ . . . she explained ‘I cannot just turn this poor

hunted man away.’36

In this way, ‘Uncle Fritz’ evaded the Nazi authorities for over eighteen

months, before he was finally caught in a round-up at Alexanderplatz

in the autumn of 1944 and deported.

Those Aryan Berliners who sought to help fugitive Jews could have

any number of motivations – from the political and ideological to the

venal. Otto Weidt was one of those who were more ideologically

inspired. A convinced pacifist and former anarchist, Weidt was manager

of a workshop on Rosenthaler Strasse, which manufactured brushes

and brooms, and was assigned around thirty deaf and dumb employees

from the local Jewish Home for the Blind. When the deportations

began in 1941, he fought for the life of every one of his employees,

visiting the Gestapo offices to argue – in many cases successfully –

that his workers were essential for the war effort and should be taken

off the deportation lists. In time, he became bolder. He bribed Gestapo

officials, hid as many as eight Jews on his factory premises and even

secured the release of one of his workers who had already been

deported to Auschwitz.37 Otto Weidt is thought to have directly aided

fifty-six Jews, half of whom survived the war.38

Other Aryan ‘helpers’ had no specific political affiliation beyond a

sense of shared humanity. Foremost among them were the churches,

against all odds

297

particularly the oppositionally minded
Bekennende Kirche
, or ‘Confess -

ing Church’, a few of whose members collected passbooks and

identity cards, which would be modified by forgers and then passed

on to fugitive Jews.39 Catholic chaplain Harald Poelchau was also active

in this regard. As chaplain of Berlin’s prisons, he was able not only to

provide spiritual succour to those in direst need, he also supplied a

number of fugitive Jews with accommodation and false papers.40

Another remarkable case is that of Otto Jodmin, who was a care-

taker in an apartment block in Wielandstrasse in Charlottenburg.

Exploiting his position of not inconsiderable influence, where he was

responsible for much of the administration of the building, he allowed

individuals or small groups of refugees to use the cellars – to which

only he had access – until they could find more permanent and secure

shelter elsewhere. In addition, he falsely registered Jews as Aryan resi-

dents, or bombing victims, thereby enabling them to get access to

identity papers and ration cards. He did all this, he said, because he

had been brought up to show compassion to others. ‘I simply had to

do it’, he later recalled, ‘there was nothing else for it, there was no

other way. I did not even think long about it, not at all . . . I just

couldn’t act in any other way.’41

Housewife Maria Nickel, meanwhile, was moved to act by her

opposition to Hitler. Appalled by the rise of the Nazis and their ‘intoler -

able’ anti-Semitism, she had made a vow in the autumn of 1942 that she

would attempt to save ‘at least one Jewish life’. She began rather modestly,

befriending a Jewish woman, Ruth Abraham, and supplying her with

groceries. As the friendship progressed, however, Nickel was inexorably

drawn into the task of saving Abraham’s family from deportation,

supplying false documents and helping them disappear into the under-

ground. In the end, she helped to save, not one, but three lives.42

Others hid Jews for love. Gerda Wiener moved in with her Aryan

lover, Gerhard, in the spring of 1943, and would remain with him,

hiding under the bed or in the wardrobe whenever guests came, for

the remainder of the war. The greatest peril, however, was having to

hide her Jewishness and fugitive status from Gerhard’s mother, who

lived with them. ‘We had to come across carefree and happy with

her’, she wrote, ‘as she would most certainly have informed the Gestapo

if she had had any idea of our double life.’43

The most famous example of this sort in Berlin, however, is the

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berlin at war

wartime affair between Berlin housewife Lilly Wust and the feisty

Jewish fugitive Felice Schragenheim. Though Wust was a Nazi sympa-

thiser, with four children and a husband fighting on the Eastern Front,

she fell for Schragenheim when the two first met in a Berlin café in

November 1942. By that time, Schragenheim was already living as a

Taucher
, having faked her own suicide when her deportation notice

had arrived and subsequently resurfaced under false papers. The two

began a lesbian relationship, evidently made all the more passionate

by Wust’s desire for adventure and Schragenheim’s need for protec-

tion. Captured by the Gestapo in the autumn of 1943, Schragenheim

would ultimately meet her end on a death march in the final days of

1944, despite Wust’s desperate efforts to secure her release. ‘She was

my other half’, Wust said shortly before her death in 2006, ‘literally

my reflection, my mirror image . . . I have never stopped loving her.’44

Though the primary and most deadly risk was certainly run by the

Taucher
in wartime Berlin, the tribulations endured by their Aryan

helpers should not be forgotten. While it is not realistic to blithely

assume that any Aryan Berliner caught hiding or assisting a Jew would

automatically face the death penalty, neither is it accurate to claim

that most of those caught helping
Taucher
would receive nothing more

than a ticking-off from the Gestapo.

It is true that there was no specific crime in Nazi Germany which

approximated to ‘aiding Jews’, hence there was no automatic penalty.

However, there were a number of offences – ranging from ‘racial

defilement’ to ‘rationing irregularities’ to ‘undermining the war effort’

– with which Aryan helpers could be charged if they were caught.

In the majority of examples, discovery by the authorities would mean

at the very least an interrogation and a temporary imprisonment. In

repeat cases, meanwhile, or those with aggravating circumstances, a

stay in a concentration camp could be the result, which could mean

–
de facto
if not
de jure
– a death sentence.

For this reason, perhaps, some of those Berliners who aided Jews

preferred not to know the identity and racial status of those they were

helping; after all, ignorance could at least be some token defence in

the event of capture. They were often happy to assume – whether they

really believed it or not – that their temporary residents were simply

refugees, deserters or those bombed out and waiting for new accom-

modation and paperwork. Similarly, Jewish fugitives were often content

against all odds

299

to collude in the deception. Though the majority of
Taucher
tended to

reveal their Jewishness when they initially went underground, they soon

learned that such candour was not always beneficial. In time, it seems,

many of them pretended to be Christians.45

In addition to the ever-present fear of detection or betrayal, there

were everyday practical concerns to consider. Once underground,

those Jews who did not manage to find a new identity and new papers

would not receive any ration allocation, meaning that they had to be

fed from the already meagre food supplies of their hosts. As a result,

some of those Berliners who hid Jews did so – in the first instance at

least – for material or financial reward, thereby rather denting the

altruistic ideal. In many such cases, the financial aspect served only

as a sweetener, soon to be replaced with genuine concern for the fate

of the unfortunate
Taucher
. But, in a few examples, it remained the

primary motivation, and if the Jews could not pay, they would be

betrayed to the Gestapo. In one instance, a woman in Schöneberg

informed the local Gestapo about the mother and daughter she had

been hiding in her flat.46 Her motivation for doing so is unclear, but

it is possible that her Jewish ‘guests’ had simply run out of money.

Whatever their precise motivation, the Aryan helpers of fugitive

Jews were making a hard choice. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, who was

herself active in assisting Jews in the Berlin underground, claimed in

1944 that ‘No one who has not seen it himself can imagine how diffi-

cult even the simplest act of assistance may be.’ Nonetheless, she

went on:

If ever anyone risked his life for his Jewish brothers, it has been the

German Aryans – hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, risking their

necks every day and every hour for a few wretched bread stamps, a

lodging for a night or two. A little bit here, a little bit there, and still