The Last Jews in Berlin (2 page)

Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis' forty-five-year-old Minister of Propaganda, a diminutive but flamboyant man whose physical handicap—his left leg was shorter than his right—had diverted his boundless energy to intellectual pursuits, was the most fervent ideologue of the Third Reich. It has been said that Goebbels' cause was revolution itself, that had a Communist of Hitler's genius come to power in Germany, Goebbels would have taken up his cause. Whatever the case, Goebbels had become, in the course of his twenty years with Hitler, at least as impassioned an anti-Semite as his leader, embracing the objective of Jewish destruction with religious zeal and pursuing its commission in every way he could.

In addition to his other duties Goebbels was the Gauleiter of Berlin, the official in charge of that political district. As such he felt particularly humiliated. Here he was, one of the principal exponents of the Final Solution, and his own district had not yet been made
Judenfrei
. On May 11, 1942, he noted in the diary that he kept faithfully, regardless of the press of events: “There are still 40,000 Jews in Berlin and despite the heavy blows dealt them they are still insolent and aggressive. It is exceedingly difficult to shove them off to the East because a large part of them are at work in the munitions industry and because the Jews are to be evacuated only by families.” Six days later he wrote: “We must try to evacuate all the Jews now in Berlin. This is a thing which is unbearable. The cause is that there are many Jewish people in armament. Their families can't be evacuated. I can try to get the order canceled, and will try to get all Jewish people not in industry to be deported.”

In this one instance the Nazis' propaganda minister was as good as his word. Through the summer he pressed Hitler for permission to deport the Jews. Hitler was sympathetic, but he was meeting resistance from other ministers, most notably Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production. Speer's reservations were practical, not moral. He considered the deportations a form of national self-destruction. The electrical industry, in particular, he argued, required not just bodies but intelligent workers; the Jews were the most intelligent workers available.

As fall began, the argument ripened. Hitler had summoned armaments industry experts to a two-day conference beginning September 20, at Wolfsschanze, his underground headquarters in a somber forest outside Rastenburg, East Prussia. The conference had been called to discuss the prosecution of the war, which for the Third Reich, up to that point, could scarcely have gone better. In its quest for Lebensraum for the German people, the Reich—following bloodless conquests of Austria and Czechoslovakia—had won lightning victories in Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Greece. Its thunderous tanks and agile Luftwaffe had made deep inroads into the Soviet Union, seizing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the process; it had swept through Tunisia and Libya, driven into Egypt, and defeated all but a handful of partisans in Yugoslavia. Italian, Hungarian, Rumanian and Bulgarian troops were fighting alongside the German forces, and in the Pacific, Germany's ally, Japan, had an unprepared United States reeling. It was a time when Hitler could well afford to turn his attention to the other great objective of his Reich, the annihilation of the Jews. As the conference at Wolfsschanze neared an end, Hitler himself brought up the question of the remaining Jews in Berlin. He asked Fritz Sauckel, the head of the Third Reich's forced-labor program, whether he could replace the Jews with qualified workers if the Jews were deported.

“Let me have access to the new supplies of laborers,” Sauckel said, “and I see no problem in filling these jobs.”

Hitler then turned to Speer. “What do you want more than this?” he asked. “You have nothing to complain about.”

What can I do? Speer thought. The responsibility was no longer his.

On September 30 Goebbels wrote triumphantly in his diary: “The Fuehrer expressed his decision that the Jewish people under all circumstances have to be taken out of Berlin. What the industrialists say about the fine work of the Jews doesn't impress me. Now all the Jews are praised for the high quality of their work. Always arguments are raised to keep them. But the Jews are not so irreplaceable as the intellectuals say. We can get 250,000 foreign workers. The Jews can easily be replaced by foreign workers. The Jews' fine work will always be the argument of the Semitophiles.”

Over the next five months deportations and deaths, many of them suicides, diminished Berlin's 40,000 surviving Jews—one quarter of the city's pre-Nazi-era Jewish population—by a third. Rumors spread among the Jews by
Mundfunk
(literally “mouthcast,” but a play on
Rundfunk
, which means “broadcast”) spoke of a massive roundup, but no one knew when it would happen, and many Jews refused to believe that it would happen at all, arguing that they were indispensable to the Germans.

They were wrong.

Early on the morning of February 27, 1943, units of Hitler's elite corps, the S.S., undertook a lightning roundup of Berlin's remaining Jews. Code name for the roundup was
Fabrik Aktion
—Operation Factory.

On March 2 Goebbels entered a mixed review of the operation in his diary: “We are definitely now pushing the Jews out of Berlin. They were suddenly rounded up last Saturday, and are to be carted off to the East as quickly as possible. Unfortunately our better circles, especially the intellectuals, once again have failed to understand our policy about the Jews and in some cases have even taken their part. As a result our plans were tipped off prematurely, so that a lot of Jews slipped through our hands. But we will catch them yet. I certainly won't rest until the capital of the Reich, at least, has become free of Jews.”

But by March 11 it had become apparent to Goebbels just how difficult a job that would be: “The scheduled arrest of all Jews on one day has proven a flash in the pan because of the shortsighted behavior of industrialists who warned the Jews in time. We therefore failed to lay our hands on about 4,000. They are now wandering about Berlin without homes, are not registered with police and are naturally quite a public danger. I ordered the police, Wehrmacht, and the Party to do everything possible to round these Jews up as quickly as practicable.”

Goebbels was wrong on two counts. First, the Jews who had slipped through the Nazis' hands had not all done so on February 27. Many had been “underground” for months. Second, while some of the Jews were wandering homeless about the city, those who had anticipated the deportations were sequestered in rooms, apartments, homes, shacks, offices and even stores—most often by the grace of Gentile friends and even strangers, sometimes as a consequence of their own ingenuity.

In any case, the hunt for the last Jews in Berlin was on.

I

DOWN TO DARKNESS

1

H
E WAS HANDSOME:
his face was full and smooth and stamped with self-acceptance. But when he was angry it could be a tough face, the mouth set, the jaw pronounced, the eyes hinting at the intractable presence waiting behind his composure. Fritz Croner had publicly cursed the Nazis when they'd first appeared in Deutsch-Krone, the small, picture-postcard German town where he'd grown up. But after the Nazis had come to power he continued his life as though they didn't exist. He was the richest young man in town, with a Fiat limousine and a BMW motorcycle, the biggest one made in Germany, and he loved nothing more than to gun the motorcycle over the rutted roads of the tiny villages, trying to get from Deutsch-Krone to Berlin, 150 miles to the southwest, in under three hours. When he traveled he paid no attention to the signs that said Jews were forbidden entry to restaurants and hotels. He ate and stayed where he pleased.

Even in 1939, when life for Germany's Jews had become all but impossible, Fritz and his wife, Marlitt, went regularly to tea dances at the fashionable Eden Hotel. Fritz had met Marlitt Gelber one day in April 1936 in Sipnow when he and some friends were touring the countryside on their motorcycles to see how other Jewish families were getting along. Marlitt happened to be leaning out of her window, a stunning young woman with blond hair and blue eyes, the typically German looks that had always attracted Fritz. She was three months Fritz's junior, and—all the more ideal—she had been reared in an Orthodox Jewish home. He had coffee in the Gelber home but did not spend time with Marlitt that day because she was in mourning for her mother. When the period of mourning ended he returned to Sipnow regularly. He found Marlitt to be a quiet and private person, which was very much to his liking. Within a few months they knew that they would eventually marry—and they did in March of 1939. The ceremony was performed by an Orthodox rabbi, with all their relatives in attendance. Fritz and Marlitt said goodbye to the wedding party at 9:00
P.M.
and went to the Eden for a drink at the bar. Thereafter, no matter how difficult their circumstances, they went regularly to the theater and cinema. They were young and determined to live.

They looked German, which helped their masquerade. Marlitt, especially, had exactly the structure and coloring the Nazis extolled in their propaganda in behalf of the “master race.” Fritz's appearance was not so singular; you would never suspect him of being Jewish, but once you learned that he was, you wouldn't be surprised. It was his attitude that transformed him: although he was a devout Jew who even observed the dietary laws, he felt German to his marrow. To family and friends, who were aghast at the chances he took, he would say, “Look, I'm part of this country. No one has the right to push me out. I don't allow anyone to tell me what I can't do. I'm German.”

To Fritz, German identity was his not simply by right of birth but by virtue of historical fact. Deutsch-Krone, his birthplace, was in the northeast corner of Germany, not far from the Polish border. No one knew exactly how long the Croner family had lived in this flat, lush lake country, with its harsh winters and miraculous summers, but there were indications that it had been centuries. Five hundred years before, “Krone” had been spelled with a
C
, and the Croners believed that their ancestors had adopted the name of the town. Fritz's great-grandfather, born in 1804, was buried in Deutsch-Krone's Jewish cemetery, proof to the Croners that their roots descended at least to the eighteenth century. However deep they were, they supported a substantial presence. Fritz's father, Willy Croner, was Deutsch-Krone's leading merchant, as proud of the Iron Cross he had won for service in World War I as he was of his officer's post in the synagogue. A leg wound had crippled him so badly that he had to use a cane, but his limp was, if anything, further proof of his devotion to the fatherland. Fritz's maternal grandfather had also been wounded in service to his country during the Franco-Prussian War. He subsequently became the president of a disabled veterans' group as well as a city official, and when he died, several hundred townspeople, half of them Gentile, came to the Jewish cemetery, where his comrades fired a volley over his grave.

That was Fritz's real birthright: a sense that he belonged. What forces had conspired to give the Jews of Deutsch-Krone such a vivid feeling of permanence Fritz never knew. It was a fact of life he accepted, and until the coming of the Nazis it had never been challenged. As a child he had played in the homes of his Gentile friends, and they in his. He had never had troubles with his classmates, nor had he ever heard an anti-Semitic remark.

There were 300 Jews in and around Deutsch-Krone, out of a population of 12,000. Except for the time and manner of their worship, nothing set them apart from the rest of the community. They were totally comfortable, accepted without question in all aspects of community life. Anti-Semitic episodes flared from time to time among a fringe element of the population, but these activities were disavowed by the majority and had no impact on the lives of the Croners or on any other Jewish residents.

By the standards of Deutsch-Krone, the Croners were rich. Their clothing-and-textiles store was the most prosperous in the community. Willy Croner was extremely active in Deutsch-Krone's Jewish life, but he mixed as easily with non-Jews as with Jews. He was not much interested in politics, and neither was his son. They were partial to the Social Democrats but, until the coming of the National Socialists, not in the least bit active. That changed on March 31, 1931, the first day that the Nazis of Deutsch-Krone went public. Wearing their brown shirts and swastikas, they marched to the memorial to the sons of Deutsch-Krone who had fallen in World War I. While members of the other political parties hooted, the Nazis laid wreaths with swastikas attached to them at the foot of the memorial. “Death to the Jews!” they chanted.

“Death to Hitler!” someone shouted from the crowd. It was Fritz, eyes glowering and compressed to tiny apertures.

Several hours later he was picked up by the police, charged with disturbing the peace, and warned that such outbursts would not be tolerated in the future. Later that day he was released.

By the end of 1932 it had become obvious that more and more members of the community were beginning to support the Nazis. The population of Deutsch-Krone was largely Protestant, and the Protestants had a greater tendency to affiliate with the Nazis than the Catholics.

By this time Fritz had become, if not a political activist, an aggressive anti-Nazi. At night he would help the Social Democrats affix their campaign signs to walls and posts around the town and tear down the signs of the Nazis. Inevitably there were clashes with the Nazis, and Fritz did his share of the fighting, a fact that disturbed his father, who thought the Nazis should be scorned rather than fought.

Fritz and his father were in agreement on one matter as 1933 arrived. They both felt that the only way to get rid of Hitler was to let him come to power, so that he could demonstrate his incompetence. The trouble in the streets, especially for Jews, had reached serious proportions; better, they said, to have an end with terror than terror without end.