Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (33 page)

Although the Reichsvereinigung could hardly influence the course of Nazi persecution of the Jews, it did have—for the moment—an important function in protecting its staff. even after the deportations had begun, the organization and its many branches offered several thousand Jews the opportunity to provide evidence that they had paid or unpaid employment. This evidence protected the employees and their families from being deported. In 1942, in Berlin alone, the Reichsvereinigung had more than 1,500 employees who worked in the administration, in hospitals, schools, daycare centers, orphanages, training centers, soup kitchens, or clothing rooms.
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when departments were dissolved, as was the case with the kulturbund (Culture League) in September 1941, or the schools department in June 1942, the Reichsvereinigung sought to transfer these employees to other sections. Until the spring of 1943, the department that was involved in the deportations was still expanding.

Although the RSHA repeatedly pressured the organization to fire staff members, the total size of the staff declined very slowly. Finally, the RSHA forced the department heads to select “expendable” employees who were to be deported with their families. Nearly 900 people were deported.
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Shortly thereafter, deportation expert Alois Brunner and his henchmen were sent from Vienna to Berlin and the situation escalated further. This group conducted raids in residential areas, ordered the deportation of the occupants of entire orphanages, elderly homes, etc., or all members of a certain profession. They transformed the assembly camp into a prison, and reorganized the marshals. The response to these occurrences was the first wave of Berlin Jews going underground.
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The top-level functionaries remained in their posts despite the fact that, as highly exposed persons, they lived in constant danger. Many had already been murdered because of alleged offenses, among them Conrad Cohn, Cora Berliner, and Paula Fürst. Some eleven thousand “armament Jews” fell prey to the so-called factory operation. Berlin Jews employed in the weapons industry were rounded up in late February and early March 1943 in factories, on the streets, and in their living quarters, and were deported.
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The second wave of Berlin Jews went into hiding.
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The heads of the Jewish communities and the Reichsvereinigung were unable to react to these developments because they had been deported in January 1943. In 1942, the RSHA had warned the local Gestapo offices not to deport the highly useful Jewish leaders. one year later, it was of the opinion that their tasks had been nearly completed. According to survivor erich Simon, the leading functionaries were brought to the “privileged camp” in Theresienstadt as a “reward for trouble-free cooperation.”
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The Nazis deceived the deportees again, as they had before with respect to the functionaries’ opportunities for emigrating. when Paul eppstein was appointed head of the ghetto in Theresienstadt, the RSHA deceived him into thinking that this was simply a continuation of his position as head of the Reichsvereinigung in Berlin. He was told he would remain on the Berlin executive board as an “absentee,” maintain his residence in Berlin, and be permitted to travel there for important meetings. eppstein never returned to Ber-lin.
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Leo Baeck and other functionaries were forced to “relocate” to Theresienstadt together with eppstein. Six months later, in June 1943, their successors, kurt Levy and Moritz Henschel, arrived in Theresienstadt together with their families and the heads of the now-dissolved regional offices.

f
Igure
6.2.:
Paul eppstein, elder of Jews in Theresienstadt, August/September 1944.
Courtesy
: Stadtarchiv Mannheim, Nachlass Paul eppstein.

once they had recovered from this rude awakening, Paul eppstein and the other German functionaries found that in Theresienstadt they could—and according to their own understanding, were obliged to— continue their activities in the interests of those entrusted to them. This now involved assembling transports to the extermination camps on orders from the SS. The SS fixed the total number of people per transport as well as which groups were to be included and which were not. There was also a list of the Jews who were to be deported without fail.
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The German-Jewish functionaries were now making decisions they had never wanted to make. while still in Germany, they had contributed to the Nazi regime’s preparations for deportations; in Theresienstadt, they were
themselves
compiling the deportation lists. Although they were following strict orders,
they
prepared most of the lists, the people selected appealed to
them
, and
they
checked off the names before the transports left.

Until the fall of 1944, the Jewish functionaries were spared deportation as “important persons.” At this point, however, the tasks that Paul eppstein and the other members of the executive board were supposed to fulfill were finished in Theresienstadt as well. Paul eppstein was

apparently shot on 28 September 1944. Most of the others were sent to Auschwitz in the large-scale transports that left Theresienstadt in october 1944. Very few people in these transports survived.
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Did the Jewish functionaries know that, from october 1941 on, the deportations meant a death sentence for those involved? Perhaps, but in this early phase, German Jews were dying in large numbers as a result of the life-threatening conditions, whereas the victims of mass executions were Jews from the occupied territories in the east. By the spring of 1942, this had changed, and news had arrived that made it quite clear what was happening at the destinations of those who were deported. Most functionaries preferred not to see the terrible truth. Did they know in Theresienstadt that the people who were being transported elsewhere faced certain death? Probably. Leo Baeck, who was informed in Theresienstadt about the gas chambers in Auschwitz, decided not to pass on this knowledge in order to make the situation more bearable.
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After the war, other survivors, such as erich Fabian and Moritz Henschel, insisted that they had not known what was happening.
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The Intermediaries (1943–1945)

By June 1943, the Reichsvereinigung had become superfluous in the eyes of the Nazi regime. The only Jews remaining in Germany were some 16,600 people married to non-Jewish spouses.
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The RSHA decreed that their affairs should be placed in the hands of the rump Reichsvereinigung, which was to organize their deportation when the marriage ended due to death or divorce. To this end,
Vertrauensmänner
(intermediaries) were appointed for the organization’s headquarters and its regional offices. They were primarily Jewish physicians or lawyers who were partners in mixed marriages, had worked for the Reichsvereinigung before, and who were accepted by the Gestapo. They were obliged to negotiate with the local Gestapo, supply statistical reports on a regular basis, and complete deportees’
Heimeinkaufsverträge
for Theresienstadt. Moreover, they served as a clearing-house for all applications that spouses in mixed marriages wished to submit to the authorities. Most of these
Vertrauensmänner
, in particular wal-ter Lustig, the head of the Berlin office, were reputed to be willing henchmen or accomplices of the Gestapo. But there is little evidence to support this allegation. Instead, existing documents indicate that most of these men tried to follow the Gestapo’s orders without exception,

while at the same time attempting to protect their fellow Jews, resisting growing tendencies to centralize the administration, or trying to save their personnel from deportation. with the increasing disintegration of Nazi rule and the effects of Allied bombings, Germany’s devastated infrastructure and non-existent communication channels provided the
Vertrauensmänner
with an excuse for acting on their own authority. But until May 1945, these intermediaries were subject to the control of both the Reichsvereinigung’s own Berlin headquarters—which had to secure the RSHA’s approval for all its activities—and of local Gestapo authorities. This meant that their room to maneuver was severely limited.
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In February and March 1945, the RSHA ordered that the deferred Jewish spouses in mixed marriages were to be deported. Despite the fact that the end of the war was obviously imminent, the Nazi regime planned to deport the last remaining Jews from Germany. Most of those deported in these final transports and a majority of the
Vertrauensmänner
survived the Third Reich.

The lives of some
Vertrauensmänner
were in danger once again when

Allied troops marched into Germany. As noted at the beginning of this paper, walter Lustig’s compliant cooperation with the Gestapo cost him his life. other former functionaries also faced the bitter lesson that the dangerous posts they had taken on under duress—positions that had conferred upon them real or supposed power over their fellow-Jews—now proved to be disadvantageous. The occupation forces of the United States, for example, found the Jewish
Vertrauensmann
in Munich guilty of being an informer. He was sentenced to ten years of forced labor and released from prison after three years. The Dresden intermediary, who was also sentenced to several years of hard labor by a Soviet tribunal, died in a camp one year after his colleague from Munich was set free.
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Bureaucratic Rules as a Bulwark Against Murder?

A Few Concluding Remarks

In my opinion, H.G. Adler is mistaken when he apodictically declares that by the time the deportations began, the leading Jewish functionaries were already completely paralyzed and did not know “what they were doing.”
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Despite increasingly difficult conditions in the period between 1939 and 1941, Jewish functionaries organized emigration for thousands of Jews in order to rescue them from Nazi terror. The

realization that there was nothing they could do for those who had already been deported led them to intensify these efforts. when mass deportations began in 1941, Jewish functionaries cooperated in organizing them. They hoped to regulate and thus make more tolerable what had previously been a chaotic and violent process. They assumed that a Jewish community would still exist at the end of this process, and they became increasingly co-opted by the Nazis’ plans as they continued to pursue this strategy, long after they had forfeited previous minimal opportunities to influence the course of events. They continued to respect the secrecy requirement imposed by the Nazis, and struggled to obey all orders to a fault, leaving the Nazis no reason to take over these tasks themselves. In this respect, I consider Raul Hilberg’s assessment to be correct, namely, that the Reichsvereinigung was a kind of Jewish Council,
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even if the German Jews did not live in a ghetto.

Hannah Arendt’s critique goes far beyond this position. In her opinion, the German-Jewish representatives were “voluntary custodians of the secrets” that the Nazis obliged them to keep and helped guarantee peace and order during the process of extermination. without their cooperation, chaos and misery would have reigned, but the total number of victims would have been lower.
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one can counter this position by pointing out that all of the existing documents and survivors’ accounts provide some indications of the efforts made by functionaries to ward off disaster and rescue at least some of the Jews. Their concern for the Jewish community led them to adopt a strategy of cooperation.
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Germany’s Jewish population had a large portion of elderly people who depended on assistance. In my estimation, it is highly unlikely that, had the Jewish functionaries refused to cooperate, a considerably high-er number of German Jews would have been able to save themselves. German Jews could neither flee to neighboring countries, nor could they have fled into the forests to join partisan groups. They lived in the midst of the German population, robbed of their financial assets, socially isolated, and controlled from all sides.