The Last Jews in Berlin (8 page)

Whatever the workers' conjecture or Hanne's actual motive, the war had definitely taken a turn against the Germans and in favor of the Allies. The turnaround had begun in Egypt in the fall of 1942, where the British Eighth Army, replenished with fresh troops and armaments—many of its new tanks and planes made in the United States—had not only fought the forces of the “Desert Fox,” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, to a standstill but then put them to rout. Stalingrad was an even more significant defeat, from both a strategic and a symbolic point of view. The city, which lay astride the Volga River, was the gateway to the oil fields of the Caucasus. Hitler's dream was to take those fields and then drive through Iran to the Persian Gulf, eventually joining forces with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. Had he not paused at Stalingrad, dream might have become fact. But he did, not because he needed the city—German troops had reached the Volga and gained control of its traffic—but because the conquest of Stalingrad had become an obsession. And so he attacked the city.

Russian troops fought the German Sixth Army for every block and rubble pile, and then, on November 19, 1942, under cover of a blizzard, the Russians began a two-pronged counteroffensive to the west of Stalingrad, designed to cut off the Sixth Army from other Axis forces. By year's end that effort had succeeded. Hundreds of thousands of German troops had either been killed or captured, and an even larger group of survivors had been left to wonder bitterly over a leadership so fanatical that it would not permit its troops to give up any conquered ground regardless of the cost in lives and human suffering. The defeat was equally devastating on the home front. Germany's civilians found their faith in their country's ultimate victory shaken.

Hans Rosenthal had no time to speculate about Germany's ultimate fate. He was too preoccupied with the task of remaining alive. After Hanne informed him about the roundup of Jewish workers in the Berlin factories on February 27, his own among them, Hans counted up his escapes. First, Fürstenwalde. Next, the orphanage. Then the Jewish youth home. Now the factories. Four times fate had put him a step ahead of the Gestapo. How long would it be before the Gestapo discovered that Hans had not been among the Jews taken on February 27, and trace him to Torgelow?

Then came an episode that made the question all but rhetorical. One day Hanne told Hans to build a storage bin for an extra load of potatoes he had ordered. When the potatoes arrived, Hans loaded the bin and then gave the Russian workers their allotment before they returned to their camp for the night. They were so emaciated that he couldn't stand the sight. He told them that he would forget to remove the key from the storage-bin lock, so that they could come in the night and take more potatoes. They came, and were caught. The next morning two policemen accosted Hans at his workplace. “You don't give potatoes to the lower race,” one of them told him. Then they beat him and threatened to shoot him.

Hanne suddenly appeared at Hans's side and led the policemen off.

Instinct told Hans that it was time for Escape Number Five. Two days later he walked out of the factory, his knapsack on his back, and headed for the railroad station, determined to hazard a trip to Berlin, two hundred kilometers away. He knew he could hide in Berlin, whereas a strange boy in a small town wouldn't have a chance.

Half an hour after the journey began, the police control came into his car.

“Your papers please?”

“I have none. I'm sixteen years old. I have dirty clothes in my pack that I'm taking home to be washed. I work at Torgelow. You can call them.”

The policemen exchanged looks, nodded, and passed on. But at Prenzlau they came into the car again and looked at him. He could hardly keep his teeth from chattering, but he managed to muster the disarming smile that had become his automatic response to any stranger's stare.

“He looks nervous,” one of the policemen said. “We'd better check with control.” Then they walked over to him. “Please come outside,” the same policeman said.

Now it's over, Hans thought. He followed them into the railway station. Then the second policeman said to his partner, “Look, I'm hungry as hell. If we do this checking we won't have lunch. He's just a kid. Let's let him go.”

Badly shaken, Hans went to his grandparents' home as soon as he arrived in Berlin. Grandmother Agnes opened the door. Her somber face registered no surprise; nothing surprised her any longer. In addition to her eldest son, Hans's father, she had lost her two other sons. Ernst, a half-Jew like his brothers, and married to a Christian, had been deported to Buchenwald for refusing to wear a Jewish star; three weeks later he died of an illness, according to a letter from camp authorities. Heinz, the youngest, had lived with a German woman in defiance of the Nuremberg Laws, and had been captured by the Nazis after trying to escape across rooftops. Two weeks of torture in the Gestapo's prison on the Alexanderplatz had so destroyed him that he died at home shortly after his release. So Grandmother Agnes was without illusions. She was happy that Hans was alive but not happy that a new problem had arisen. What showed on her face now was a question: What will we do with him?

*
Every German has his “decent Jew,” Heinrich Himmler remarked to his fellow S.S. officers in 1943 in lamenting why it had often been so difficult to pry many Jews in Germany from their sanctuaries and send them to the extermination camps. In the 1930s, before the mass exterminations had begun, even the Nazis had their favorite Jews: the Zionists. Although their motives could not have been more different, the Nazis
—
Adolf Eichmann among them
—
and the Zionists were united in their desire to see the Jews leave Germany for Palestine
.

II

HUNTED

7

I
N THEIR HASTE
to snare all of Berlin's remaining Jews during their February 27
Fabrik Aktion
, the Nazis seized many Jewish men who were theoretically under the protection of the Third Reich's peculiar racial laws. These laws conveyed a special status on Jews of mixed origin—
Mischlinge
—as well as on Jews married to German Gentiles. Such Jews were subjected to discrimination but usually exempted from deportation because of the hardships and anguish this might cause their mates or relatives. Most Gentiles who had married Jews before 1935, when the Nazis outlawed such behavior, were severely pressured by the party to divorce them, but few did, and while there was no regulation specifically prohibiting the deportation of the Jewish member of a mixed marriage, in practice that person was safe so long as his or her partner opposed it.

Once the Jewish factory workers and their families had been collected at the various concentration points throughout the cities, the “privileged” Jews, as they were known, were segregated from the larger bodies and reassembled at a detention center on the Rosenstrasse, not far from Gestapo headquarters in the center of the city. But they were not released—a strong indication that despite previous custom the Gestapo had every intention of deporting them, along with the other Jews taken in the raid, to the death camps in the east.

And there they might have gone, save for the intervention of the Gentile wives of the Jewish workers. By early the following morning these women finally learned where their husbands had been taken. First tens, then hundreds of the wives assembled on the Rosenstrasse, outside the building in which their husbands were being held. They were soon joined by a crowd of sympathetic bystanders. Attempts to scatter them were unavailing. The women pressed forward, shouting demands that their husbands be released. Each morning for several days the demonstration continued. “We want our men!” the women chorused. Their cries could be heard many blocks away. Finally the Gestapo relented and set the husbands free.

It was not the Tightness of their demands so much as the shock of their demonstration that acted in the women's favor. Since 1933, when the Nazis took power, there had never been a mass demonstration against the government or party, at least not in anyone's memory, and none had ever been recorded. Certainly there had never been a public protest of any kind with regard to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews.

Privately, many Germans had helped Jews from the time the persecutions began. Survivors' reports are filled with stories of Germans slipping food or ration stamps into their pockets under cover of a crowd. For every report of a merchant who refused to serve Jews, there is another of a merchant who befriended them. None of the Jews who went underground in Berlin or elsewhere in Germany could have survived without the help of at least one Gentile benefactor. And yet the indifference of the overwhelming number of Germans to the fate of the Jews was as much a danger to those Jews who had gone underground as were the S.S. patrols sent to find them. If their identity became known, they could expect absolutely no help from strangers; to the contrary, strangers were much more likely to report them to the authorities on the grounds that the underground Jews were in violation of the law.

Anti-Semitism aside, the most formidable problem faced by the renegade Jews was the slavish penchant for obedience to authority that seemed to exist within the mind of every German. In
Berlin Diary
, his eyewitness account of Nazi Germany between 1934 and 1941, William L. Shirer writes of “the highest state of being the Germanic man knows; the shedding of their individual souls and minds—with the personal responsibilities and doubts and problems—until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the Germanic herd.” To compound matters, Shirer points out, the Germans' sense of judgment derived from narrow provincial concerns. Their preoccupation with their own point of view to the exclusion of others' interests was at the very heart of Hitler's appeal. He told them that Germans, by virtue of their superiority over other Europeans, were entitled to more Lebensraum, or living space. He did not need to convince them. They believed that they had proved their superiority by virtue of their courage and their enterprise.

Hitler's attacks against the Jews fitted neatly into the Germans' propensity for self-absorption. Had there been a plebiscite on what to do with the Jews, Germans would have overwhelmingly opposed genocide, but they condoned and even accepted the visible anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich. Most Germans agreed, if only tacitly, that Jews had played too great a part in national life. While Hitler's allegations about Jewish dominance were wildly overstated, Jews had been prominent in commerce, dominated a number of banks, owned important newspapers, and played a disproportionate role in Berlin's spectacular cultural explosion of the late 1920s. So the Germans were not displeased that the so-called “Jewish influence” was being removed. For some Germans there were practical gains as well. They could default on their debts to Jews, buy Jewish businesses and possessions at distressed prices, secure dominant positions in markets where Jews had once been their competitors, profit from what, in effect, was slave labor, and take over dwellings once owned or occupied by Jews. Finally, as Richard Grunberger points out in
The Twelve-Year Reich
, the Jew served a necessary psychological function. “Just as primitive man's concept of God supposed the existence of the Devil, so the German's progressive self-deification during the Third Reich depended upon the demonization of the Jew. The white outline of the Germans' image of themselves—in terms of character no less than of color—acquired definition only via the moral and physical darkness of its Jewish anti-type. Metaphysically as well as materially, the roots of the German heaven were deeply embedded in the Jewish hell.”

An even more sinister enemy for the Jewish fugitives than the loyal Germans were the turncoats in their midst, fellow Jews embarked on a tragic enterprise. “Catchers” they were called—men and women either without conviction even in normal times or normally moral persons frightened out of their wits by the threat of deportation. They worked directly for the Gestapo, operating out of a so-called “Jewish Bureau of Investigation” located on the Iranische Strasse. Their pay was their freedom; as long as they could find and present “illegal” Jews to the Gestapo for deportation, they could avoid deportation themselves.

The catchers would walk through the city each day without their stars, on the lookout for underground Jews. If their prey was an old acquaintance, they would feign joy at seeing him or her and confide that they too were “illegals.” If the prey was simply someone they suspected of being Jewish, they would confide their “secret” in the hope of eliciting a similar confession. Once they had their information, they would make a discreet telephone call, and the Gestapo would soon show up.

The Gestapo had been employing catchers for some time now to find Jews who were not wearing their stars or were living with false papers, but the operation intensified after the February 27
Fabrik Aktion
. Joseph Goebbels had vowed that he would not rest until Berlin was free of Jews; he had called on the police, the Wehrmacht and the party for assistance, but searching for Jews required extraordinary measures. Who could better ferret out these illegals than their own kind?

Months before he took his wife, Marlitt, and baby daughter, Lane, for an evening stroll into the underground, Fritz Croner, the resourceful young jeweler with the forbidding countenance and the iron determination to survive, had already had his first frightening, and bitter, experience with a fellow Jew.

The Croners' steadiest contact for black market food at that time was Fedor Friedlander, a tall, extremely handsome young man of Russian descent who was exactly Fritz's age. Fritz and Fedor had gotten to know one another while working on the same railroad gang. Fedor told Fritz that if he ever needed anything he, Fedor, had the contacts. At the time Fritz was buying on the black market to feed his own family, his parents and uncle. Several times a month Fedor would show up at the Croners' apartment with the food, and the Croners would dig into a sack of rice in which they hid their money and jewels.