The German War (46 page)

The regime drew back from compulsorily dissolving Jewish–Christian marriages, an omission that was key to Victor Klemperer’s survival. But signs of impending measures continued. In March 1943, 1,800 Jewish men married to ‘Aryans’ were rounded up in Berlin. For the next week, the women congregated in the street outside the building in the Rosenstrasse where they were held, chanting ‘Give us our husbands back!’ – until the Gestapo decided to release them.
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In Berlin, less than 10 per cent of the 70,000 Jews who were in the capital at the start of the deportations went into hiding. Those who had been spared during the great wave of deportations clung to the hope that privilege and exemption certificates could protect them. That hope was destroyed on 27 February 1943, when the 8,000 Jews still working in the city’s armaments industries were rounded up. The only chance of survival now lay in going underground. Irma Simon was tipped off the day before the ‘Factory Action’ began and stayed home with her husband and 19-year-old son Fritz instead of reporting to Siemens. Her husband, a vet, had obtained phials of prussic acid to commit suicide. She set off down the Lehrter Strasse with a suitcase in search of rescue. Improbably, she found it, thanks to a shoemaker and his blacksmith brother, the Kossmanns, two middle-aged, working-class men with communist sympathies. They took in the three Jews and hid them. At first the couple split up, the husband staying with the shoemaker and Irma and Fritz with the smith. As Fritz was of military age, they pretended he was unfit for service. When this facade became difficult to maintain, he had to ‘return’ to his unit, which meant in practice hiding him in Kossmann’s dark and freezing allotment shed, where his protector had to bring him food and dispose of his faeces and urine, all without attracting attention. He stayed there for two years. Irma donned the black veil of a widow and adopted the cover story that she was romantically attached to August Kossmann – a tale which in the course of 1943 became real. Against the odds, the Kossmann brothers managed to hide the three Simons until the end of the war, eking out their scanty rations, with August putting in extra hours for local farmers so as to pay off the suspicious block warden with gifts of food.
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The 1,400 Berlin Jews who survived in hiding had to be saved not once but many times. Often, they were supported by those who already possessed clandestine networks and were used to evading Gestapo surveillance. Growing up in Berlin as the son of an Austrian Jewish father and a mother who had converted to Judaism, Gerhard Beck was initially saved from deportation by the Rosenstrasse protests. Once released, Gerhard helped other Jews go into hiding, making use both of an underground Zionist network and one created by his ‘Aryan’ gay friends. Banned under paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, male homosexuals had long become adept at keeping their social circles and sexual lives hidden to escape social discrimination, homophobia and police persecution. It was Gerhard’s Jewish network which cracked first, in early 1945, when a Jewish informant betrayed them to the Gestapo.
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In Essen, Marianne Strauss went into hiding when the rest of her family was deported in October 1943. Rescued by a small circle of ethical socialists which called itself the Bund, she had to keep moving from flat to flat, criss-crossing Germany by train and tram, shuttling first between Braunschweig and Göttingen, and then between Wuppertal, Mülheim, Essen, Burscheid and Remscheid. During the next two years she made between thirty and fifty journeys, each one a test of her survival skills. With no form of ID apart from a post office pass, she had to continuously watch for controls. When police were checking identity cards, she learned the art of moving slowly down the carriage ahead of them in the hope that she could get off at the next station before they reached her. Each of her hosts had to invent a cover story for the out-of-town relative, or explain away the fact that she was not working by turning her into a young mother on a visit – this involved borrowing a child from another Bund member. With so many links, even a chain constructed by dedicated activists could snap at any point, and the odds were stacked against them. What protected them from discovery by the Gestapo, however, were those aspects of their socialist utopianism which did not look overtly political. The Bund members had bought several houses in order to encourage experiments in communal living and many of them were involved in modern dance. Both of these endeavours stemmed from the movement for ‘life reform’ in the 1920s and convinced the secret police that they were not dealing with a political grouping. As dedicated socialists and anti-Nazis, the members of the Bund treated Marianne as a fellow German, rather than as a Jew. As socialist revolutionaries they were also waiting for Germany’s defeat, a political stance which set them apart from others who chose to help Jews.
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The many different individuals who helped hide Jews eventually included Wilm Hosenfeld. On his arrival in Poland in September 1939 he had been shocked by the harsh treatment meted out by the new German masters, and had decided to follow his conscience. First he had helped Polish Catholics. At the start of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942, Hosenfeld heard that the Jews were being killed by mass electrocution. By early September, he had more accurate information: he knew that the camp was called ‘Triplinka’ and that the Jews were being gassed and then buried in mass graves. At first he found it hard to believe that Germans could be capable of such things, but, as the information became ever more definite, he felt deeply ashamed. He started rereading the fifteenth-century mystic Thomas à Kempis, asking himself whether God allowed mankind to go astray in order to bring it back to his teaching of ‘Love One Another’.
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On 25 September 1942, four days after the last transport had left the ghetto for Treblinka, Hosenfeld attended a dinner party which included an SS major, Dr Gerhard Strabenow, and his lover, dressed to the nines, and wearing an outfit Hosenfeld thought was probably looted from the ghetto. As he relaxed over the meal, Strabenow portrayed himself as ‘the lord of the ghetto’. ‘He talks of the Jews,’ Hosenfeld noted in his diary, ‘as if they were ants or other pests. Of the “resettlement”, that is of the mass murder, as of the eradication of bedbugs when disinfecting a house.’ Hosenfeld wondered what he was doing eating at the ‘richly laden table of the rich, while all around it the greatest poverty and the soldiers go hungry. Why does one remain silent and not protest?’ Hosenfeld’s own activities during the great deportation from Warsaw focused on the sports school he ran for the Wehrmacht. He organised a week-long sports competition, which attracted 1,200 athletes and an audience of thousands – a resounding success for military morale, after which he and his wife took a well-earned week of leave in Berlin.
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Unlike the small numbers of clandestine socialists, Hosenfeld took no precautions to hide his opinions from fellow officers. Despite his opposition to mass murder and his increasing readiness to equate the National Socialists, whom he had joined in 1935, with their Bolshevik enemies, he clearly thought of himself neither as a conspirator pitted against a dictatorial regime, nor as a traitor to the German cause. Rather, he told himself, the ‘National Socialist idea . . . is only tolerated, because it is currently the lesser of two evils. The greater is to lose the war.’ Having unburdened himself in several letters to his son Helmut, now serving on the eastern front, Hosenfeld told him how the resilience of German troops from North Africa to the Arctic ‘makes one proud to belong to this nation. One may disagree,’ he added, doubtless referring to the anti-Jewish action, ‘with this or that, but the inner bond to the essence of one’s own people lets one overlook the flaws.’
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It took Wilm Hosenfeld eight months before he went further and gave sanctuary to two Jews in the Wehrmacht sports school he ran. In the meantime, the ghetto uprising had been crushed and the only Jews left in the city were in hiding. One of them, Leon Warm-Warczy
ski, had broken out of the cattle truck of a train bound for Treblinka, and Hosenfeld readily took him in under the assumed identity of a Polish worker. For Wilm Hosenfeld – First World War veteran, Catholic schoolteacher, sometime storm trooper and member of the Nazi Party – helping to hide two Jews in Warsaw was a natural response, the kind of action his conscience finally demanded. But it did not compete with his patriotism, let alone make Hosenfeld wish for Germany’s defeat, the only outcome that might secure Warm-Warczy
ski’s survival.
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Few were prepared to go this far. For Ursula von Kardorff, a young journalist on the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,
helping Jews began with a personal encounter. In the dusk of a November evening in 1942, the doorbell rang and in the dim light of the hall she could see that both visitors were wearing the yellow star. They had come from Breslau, they said, with a painting by her father, a well-known academic artist, which they now needed to sell back. ‘We give them some food and slowly they thaw out,’ Kardorff recounted in her diary. ‘It is indescribable what these people are going through. They want to go underground, before they get picked up, live as bombed-out refugees from the Rhineland.’ Her father bought the picture from them, but, as the young journalist reflected, their visitors needed not just ‘material aid but also pepping up’. Occasional assistance was one thing, but the Kardorffs were not prepared to do more.
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Ursula had her own journalistic work for the cultural review section of the paper. Making up Christmas parcels for her brother and fiancé, both serving in the Caucasus, she decided to surprise them by popping photos of herself next to the illustrated cards in their cartons of cigarettes. However much she might want to help Jews survive, she did not want Germany to lose the war. For the New Year’s cultural supplement of the newspaper she designed a page with photos ranging from the Russian snow to the North African sun to illustrate ‘The German soldier on watch’, and reflecting on the old year, she noted in her diary that, compared to the bombing and rationing, when it comes to the ‘eradication of the Jews, the great mass [of the population] is indifferent or even approves’.
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Gradually, the deportation and mass murder became an event of the past. By the summer of 1943, special teams had disinterred and burned the corpses of those gassed at Treblinka, Sobibor and Beł
ec and the three camps were dismantled during the following months. Even the exhuming and burning of the corpses of those shot in Galicia and Ukraine did not remain a secret from the home front. In the Reich, municipalities started to take down the quaint, out-of-date signs forbidding Jews entry to public libraries, swimming pools and parks.
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9

The Axis alliance emerged from the winter crisis of 1941–42 having added Japan to its allies and the United States to its enemies. The disproportion of economic resources stood at a ratio of 4:1 against Hitler’s Reich. Germany could not hope to wage a successful war of attrition: that was the unalterable lesson of the First World War. As the three army groups on the eastern front struggled to withstand the Red Army’s general offensive, the political leadership of the Third Reich knew that its current defensive efforts did not provide a solution to its strategic impasse: at best, they would lock the eastern front into precisely the kind of war of attrition which, over time, would tell against them.
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