The Third Reich at War (13 page)

After all, the victim was a stranger, not an old enemy; he did not speak rudely to him, let alone touch him. Then why this cruel wrath? How is it possible to attack a stranger to me, a man of flesh and blood like myself, to wound him and trample upon him, and cover his body with sores, bruises, and welts, without any reason? How is it possible? Yet I swear I saw all this with my own eyes.
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For many among the occupying German forces, the ghetto offered the opportunity to vent almost unimaginable violence upon the helpless Jews without the slightest threat of retribution.

Some Germans, indeed, regularly drove through the ghetto singling out victims. Others merely came to watch, to take photographs, or on occasion to take posed pictures for propaganda purposes. It was even claimed by the Polish government-in-exile that the Nazi leisure organization ‘Strength Through Joy’ organized tourist visits to the ghetto, where the conditions the Germans themselves had created confirmed visitors in their sense of superiority over the ragged, starving and disease-ridden Jews they encountered.
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Passing a Jewish ghetto in Kutno, Melita Maschmann was shocked to see the lethargic poverty of the people penned in behind the high wire fence. Some children were begging, their hands stretched out through the wire.

The wretchedness of the children brought a lump to my throat. But I clenched my teeth. Gradually I learned to switch off my “private feelings” quickly and utterly in such situations. This is terrible, I said to myself, but the driving out of the Jews is one of the unfortunate things we must bargain for if the “Warthegau” is to become a German country.

She saw some German railway officials going to the fence and gawping at the Jews as if they were animals in a zoo.
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What they saw, though it was the result of German oppression, confirmed their prejudices against ‘Eastern Jews’. As one army NCO wrote on 30 June 1941:

We drove through the quarter of the Jews and the epidemics. I cannot describe the condition of this area and its inhabitants . . . Many hundreds of people were queuing at groceries, tobacconists and liquor stores . . . As we drove by, we saw a man fall over for no obvious cause; it must have been hunger that made him fall, for a number of these riff-raff starve to death every day. A few are still well dressed in prewar clothes, but the most are shrouded in sacks and rags, a terrible picture of hunger and poverty. Children and women run after us and scream ‘bread, bread!’
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Rare indeed was a German officer like Wilm Hosenfeld, who found ‘terrible conditions’ in the ghetto when he visited it on business early in 1941, ‘all an indictment against us’.
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Despite these miserable and often terrifying conditions, the ghetto inhabitants managed to keep some kind of cultural, religious and social life going, even when the pressures imposed by working to survive made observation of the Sabbath difficult, and the desperate state of hygiene and sanitation prevented most Jews from keeping to traditional norms of personal cleanliness. In Warsaw actors and musicians staged theatrical productions and concerts, while in L’d’, true to form, Rumkowski organized all cultural activity himself. Adam Czerniak’w recorded in his diary regular visits to chamber music recitals, and as late as 6 June 1942 he was considering having an opera staged -
Carmen
, or perhaps
The Tales of Hoffman
. One of the most important projects in the Warsaw ghetto was devised by the young historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who gathered together people of many different political persuasions to collect an archive of diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews and documents, and to keep a record of the ghetto’s history for posterity. He even managed to write a serious study of Polish-Jewish relations during the war while simultaneously trying to survive in the increasingly intolerable conditions of life in the ghetto.
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IV

In Germany itself, conditions for the remaining Jewish population continued to deteriorate steadily in the first two years of the war. Numbering 207,000 in September 1939, according to the official racial classification of the Nazis, it was mostly middle-aged or elderly. Germany’s Jews had been despoiled of almost all their assets. They were effectively ostracized from German society and dependent on their own organizations for the maintenance of any kind of collective life. Many of those younger Jewish men who stayed in Germany had already been drafted into forced-labour schemes well before the outbreak of war. Compulsory labour, often in hard and dirty physical jobs such as digging ditches or shovelling snow, continued through 1940. In the spring of that year, however, the shelving of plans to create a Jewish reservation in the Lublin area, coupled with serious labour shortages in the arms industry, led to a change of policy. Jewish men of military age were banned from emigrating, in case they took up arms against Germany, and all Jews between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five for men and fifteen and fifty for women were ordered to register for labour. By October 1940 there were 40,000 Jews working on forced labour schemes, increasing numbers of them in war-related industries. Indeed, Goebbels noted in his diary on 22 March 1941 that 30,000 Jews in Berlin were working in arms factories (‘who would ever have thought that possible?’). Jewish labourers could be got very cheaply, and they did not require the provision of special accommodation or the hiring of translators, as did Polish or Czech workers.
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Emigration, which had seen more than half Germany’s Jewish inhabitants leave since the beginning of 1933, thus became a lesser priority under the impact of the demand for Jewish labour. Only perhaps 15,000 or so more Jews managed to find refuge in a neutral country in the course of 1940. Around 1,000 got to Brazil with the help of visas arranged by the Vatican in 1939, funded by American donors. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, a Japanese consul stationed variously in Lithuania, Prague and K̈nigsberg in 1939- 41, Chiune Sugihara, whose main function was supposed to be observing military matters, began on his own initiative to issue transit visas to Japan to any Jews who approached him, even though they had no permission to enter the country; out of perhaps 10,000 Jews who obtained these documents, possibly half managed to find their way illegally eventually to Canada, the USA or other destinations.
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Illegal emigration to Palestine continued, encouraged by the Gestapo, but the British mandate authorities in the country began to put obstacles in its path, fearing that it would alienate the Palestinians: in November 1940 they turned away a shipload of Jewish refugees who had come via the Danube and the Black Sea; the refugees were transferred to another ship to take them back to Romania, and only after the ship had exploded and sunk, killing 251 passengers, did the British authorities allow the rest to disembark and settle. The international treaty port of Shanghai, by contrast, imposed few restrictions on immigration, and remained open until December 1941, when the war in the Pacific broke out; by the summer of 1941, over 25,000 Jewish refugees from a variety of European countries including Germany had managed to flee there, travelling through Hungary or Scandinavia via the Trans-Siberian Railway and thence by sea.
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Those who remained in Germany were now overwhelmingly concentrated in Berlin. Despite their extremely difficult situation they were able to continue some sort of social and cultural life not least because of the existence of the Jewish Culture League, which published books and periodicals, staged concerts and plays, arranged lectures and put on film shows. Everything of course had to be approved by its Nazi head, Hans Hinkel, who banned ‘German’ cultural heritage from being disseminated by the League. Under the restrictive conditions of wartime, it was also more difficult to keep going than before, especially outside Berlin.
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The overall interests of the Jewish community in the Reich were represented by the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, which was given the task by the regime, on Hitler’s explicit orders, of dispensing charity, organizing education and apprenticeships, arranging emigration and finding jobs for members of the Jewish community where possible. In January 1939 the Culture League had been effectively integrated into the Association by order of the Nazis, not least in order to make its financial resources available to the latter to assist Jewish emigration. A new executive committee was installed, consisting of representatives of the Association and the Jewish religious congregations of Berlin and Vienna. Nevertheless, despite its depleted funds, the quality of the League’s offerings continued to be high, with performances of classic French plays by Molière and others, symphonies by Mahler and Tchaikovsky, and chamber music groups playing in provincial cities for Jewish audiences. Religious life, for those who belonged to the Jewish faith, continued too, though after the destruction of Germany’s synagogues in the pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, it was obviously on a restricted scale.
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No ghettos as such were set up inside the Reich, but in the course of 1940 and 1941, Jews began to be evicted from their dwellings and moved into ‘Jews’ houses’, where they were forced to live under increasingly overcrowded conditions, an echo of what was simultaneously happening on a much larger scale and in a far more brutal manner to Jews in occupied Poland. Basing their actions on a law of 30 April 1939 that allowed landlords to evict Jewish tenants if alternative accommodation was available, municipalities began to concentrate the Jewish population, using further powers created in the same law to compel Jewish homeowners to take in Jewish tenants. In many cases the alternative accommodation was found in disused barracks and similar buildings: in M̈ngersdorf, near Cologne, 2,000 Jews were put into a dipalidated fort, twenty to a room. Some thirty-eight such ‘residence camps’ were created after the outbreak of war. War also brought the confiscation of all radio sets from German Jews, followed in 1940 by telephones. New taxes were imposed on their now-meagre incomes. Ration cards for shoes, clothing and fabrics were withdrawn from the Jews. A host of new police regulations and decrees made their lives more difficult and increased their chances of falling foul of the law. Immediately after the outbreak of hostilities, German Jews were subjected to a curfew, and severe restrictions were imposed on the hours during which they could go shopping. They were only allowed to buy supplies in designated, Aryan-owned shops at particular times (there were no more Jewish-owned shops). They were allotted lower rations for food and clothing than non-Jews were and banned from buying chocolates. Himmler announced in October 1939 that any Jew who contravened any regulation, failed to obey any instruction, or showed any kind of resistance to the state and its dictates was to be arrested and put into a concentration camp. The powers of the police and other authorities to harass and persecute Jews grew correspondingly: in the Rhenish town of Krefeld, for instance, cases involving Jews, which had made up 20 per cent of all cases handled by the Gestapo before the war, rose to 35 per cent after the war had started. And in the spring of 1941, Himmler announced that any Jew imprisoned in a concentration camp would remain there for the duration of the war.
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Already in October 1940 Hitler personally ordered the deportation of two particular groups of German Jews who lived in the south-western states of Baden, the Saarland and the Palatinate. The Reich Security Head Office was put in charge of the operation. The Jews were rounded up on the basis of detailed lists compiled by the police and put on to buses. They were allowed one 50-kilo suitcase each, bedding and food supplies. They could take a maximum of 100 Reichsmarks each; their dwellings, furniture and valuables had to be left behind and were taken over by the Reich. The same fate had already befallen the Jewish population of Alsace-Lorraine on 16 July 1940, when it was occupied by the Germans after the defeat of France. The Saar, the Palatinate and Alsace-Lorraine were to be put together to form a single new Nazi Party District, which was to be entirely ‘Jew-free’. All these people were driven across the French border and dumped into camps in the unoccupied zone; later, more were taken to the General Government. The French authorities promised that the rest would shortly be deported to the French colony of Madagascar. For the time being, these were the only Jews deported from German territory, along with the Jewish inhabitants of Schneidem̈hl and Stettin, who had been forcibly taken to Lublin the previous February, and the Jews taken from Vienna and the Reich Protectorate to Nisko.
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Alongside the remaining Jewish population in the rest of Germany, there was also a significant group of people defined as ‘mixed-race’, that is, half-Jewish or quarter-Jewish. They were subjected to some of the discriminatory measures introduced by the Nazis over the previous six years, but not all of them. They could not work in state-funded jobs, including schoolteaching and local administration, but they could, until 1941 at least, serve in the army; if they were half-Jewish they were not allowed to marry a non-Jew, and if they practised the Jewish religion they were classified as fully Jewish. On the other hand, a Jew who was married to a non-Jew could escape most of the regime’s antisemitic policies provided the couple had children who were not brought up in the Jewish faith; and even if they had no children, they were to some extent exempt, so long as they did not practise the Jewish faith themselves.
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One such couple were Victor Klemperer, a retired Jewish professor of French literature, and his non-Jewish wife, Eva, a former pianist, whose lives in this period can be reconstructed in great detail thanks to the survival of Klemperer’s voluminous diaries. Klemperer had lost his job ostensibly not because he was Jewish but because his post had been declared redundant, so he had a small pension to live off. By 1939, he was no longer allowed to use the libraries in Dresden, where he lived, he was barred from most public facilities in the city, and he had to carry a Jewish identity card with the name ‘Israel’ added to his own. Writing his memoirs and his diaries and tending his house and garden in the Dresden suburb of D̈lzschen were virtually the only remaining activities open to him. He also devoted himself to compiling a list of the linguistic expressions of Nazism, which he called
LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii
, the language of the Third Reich. His manuscripts and diaries he deposited regularly with a non-Jewish friend, Annemarie K̈hler, a doctor who ran a clinic in Pirna, outside Dresden.
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