Authors: Roger Moorhouse
were a great source of excitement to Berlin’s children. As many
commentators record, already the morning after a raid few of these
metal fragments would be found as they had all been collected up by
eager schoolchildren. In general, the larger, more jagged or more twisted
the fragment was, the better; others preferred those fragments that
had a threaded section of the screw-in fuse still visible, or those that
were still warm from being fired. Such splinters – often up to 10 centi -
metres in length – would then be taken into school to be shown off
or exchanged in the playground.74
a taste of things to come
157
The pretence of invulnerability in Berlin was enhanced by the speed
with which the authorities set about repairing what little damage had
been done. Very soon after a raid, ‘roof and window gangs’ began
making good all the damage in the capital. Groups of workmen began
to clear the more serious bombsites, boarding them off to escape the
gaze of the inquisitive. Harry Flannery particularly admired the
extraordinary effort that was made after bombs were dropped on the
Tauentzienstrasse, one of the main shopping streets in the fashion-
able west end of Berlin:
Early the next day a monster crew was on the job, working in an
amazing fashion. There were men down in the stricken subway between
the important stations of Wittenbergplatz and the Zoo, others busy
fixing water mains, gas lines, and other public utilities in the street,
and gangs of men up and down the street restoring store fronts and
installing new shop-window glass. In a few days, no one could tell that
any bombs had fallen on the Tauentzienstrasse.75
Perhaps because it was tidied away and repaired so swiftly, bomb
damage became a real novelty in the autumn of 1940 and countless
Berliners flocked to view the aftermath of each British raid. Though
this was, in part at least, a result of a ghoulish fascination with death
and destruction, it is also tempting to see it as a symptom of a more
serious malaise – namely the dawning sense that the Nazi authorities
were not telling the truth about the scale or seriousness of the attacks.
Kurt Radener witnessed the extraordinary popular response after
the house opposite his in Tempelhof was destroyed by a bomb in one
of the earliest raids on Berlin in August 1940. He recalled that it was
‘a sensation’ and that a ‘mass migration began with all of Berlin
coming to Tempelhof to see a bombed-out house’.76
Young Dieter Zimmer recalled that the excitement was also tinged
with the chilling realisation of the fragility of life:
That afternoon, my parents and I went to the affected streets to have
a look at the damage . . . Two houses had been wrecked by high explo-
sives. On one, the whole front had been torn away and lay as a pile
of rubble in the front garden. The furnished rooms were laid bare,
like the rooms in a doll’s house. The middle-class living room, now
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berlin at war
inaccessible and exposed to prying eyes, gave me a profound shock. I
couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights afterwards. Everything could now
be turned inside-out and collapse in on itself. The world had lost its
former solidity.77
As the attacks multiplied, the destruction wrought increasingly
became a part of Berliners’ everyday lives, but this curiosity took rather
longer to fade. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in October 1940: ‘After
each raid, the populace turns out, curious and sensation hungry, to
view the so-called “damage”. They gape at a burned attic here, a few
paving stones dug up there, a half-collapsed house over yonder.’78
The phenomenon was even worse when the city centre was hit.
On the morning of 11 September, for instance, one American
newspaper correspondent reported: ‘The downtown district of Berlin,
especially near the Brandenburg Gate, was jammed today with pedes-
trians who had come to view the damage inflicted in last night’s raid.
Unter den Linden and the other streets . . . were a mass of curious
Berliners.’79 In reality, there was precious little to see, but that did not
serve to keep the crowds away. Instead, they milled around the govern-
ment district, congregating many deep at each of the locations where
a bomb had hit. At one site – an eight-foot crater in the East-West Axis
– a constant stream of Berliners peered solemnly into the hole in the
roadway, as if seeking revelation.
Yet, whatever the material damage inflicted in that early phase of
the bombing, the effect on the civilian population – both in terms of
sleep deprivation and the wider impact on morale – was substantial.
Goebbels summed up the problem in his diary when he complained
that: ‘Late in the night comes the usual air-raid warning. Two aircraft
scuttle over Berlin. And for that, a city of 4½ million people must
take to the shelters.’ ‘Berlin’, he complained, ‘is a tired town.’80
Later that autumn, the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo
Ciano noted the ‘depressed spirit’ in the German capital, which he
attributed to the constant air raids. ‘Every night citizens spend from
four to five hours in the cellar. They lack sleep, there is promiscuity
between men and women, cold, and these things do not create a good
mood. The number of people with colds is incredible. Bomb damage
is slight; nervousness is very high.’81
William Shirer suggested that the effect the bombing was having
a taste of things to come
159
on morale in the German capital, far more than the damage inflicted,
should be the primary rationale for the British. He explained his
reasoning in a diary entry on 26 September: ‘We had the longest air-
raid of the war last night, from eleven p.m. to four o’clock this
morning. If you had a job to get to at seven or eight a.m., as hundreds
of thousands of people had, you got very little sleep. The British
ought to do this every night. No matter if not much is destroyed . . .
the psychological effect is tremendous.’82
By the winter of 1940–41, the air raids – which had been unthink-
able only a few months before – had already become a part of everyday
life in the German capital. As in Britain, ‘business as usual’ was the
order of the day; Berlin society endured the hardships and privations
and got on with life. Yet, for all the pride and stoicism on display, there
was, for many, a profound underlying disquiet; an unspoken fear of
what horrors the coming years might bring. As Ruth Andreas-Friedrich
noted on 16 December:
Now, we are all emerging together from the basement after the fifty-
second alarm. The firing was heavier than usual tonight. ‘They’re getting
in practice’ says Frank pointing to the red glow that stains the western
sky. We join him at the window. The siren of the fire brigade is screeching
in the distance . . . ‘They’re getting in practice’ says Frank again. His
words bring a cold shiver to our hearts.83
8
Into Oblivion
On 1 October 1941, Berlin’s Jews gathered to celebrate the holiday of
Yom Kippur. One of the holiest festivals of the Jewish calendar, it was
a time for reflection, prayer and fasting; a time when man repented
of his sins and asked for God’s forgiveness.
That October day, many hundreds of Berlin Jews squeezed into
the large synagogue on Levetzowstrasse, in the suburb of Moabit.
There they prayed, perhaps with special fervour, for those family and
friends, who had managed to leave Germany – but also for themselves.
There were many reasons for prayer in the autumn of 1941. Life for
most German Jews had deteriorated markedly in the past year. Already
subjected to a programme of persecution, they had been systematic -
ally expropriated, demonised and marginalised. Prohibited from state
employment and removed from most of the professions, the areas of
legitimate activity open to them had dwindled to nothing. And new
legislation now sought to remove what few comforts remained to
them: radios were to be confiscated, and the keeping of pets was to be
forbidden.
Perhaps the most visible sign of this process of ostracism and perse-
cution was the introduction of the
Judenstern
, or ‘Jewish star’. From 18
September that year, all Jews over the age of six were obliged to wear
a yellow cloth star when out in public. According to the legislation
that accompanied the measure, the star, which bore the word
Jude
, or
‘Jew’, in black Hebrew-esque lettering within a yellow Star of David,
was to be worn firmly stitched to the left breast and had to be visible.1
Those who dared to contravene the order, or who covered the star in
any way, would receive a fine or imprisonment.
While most ordinary Berliners reacted with indifference or occa-
sional sympathy,2 the effect of the new measure on the city’s Jews was
into oblivion
161
profound. At a stroke, any anonymity that they could have enjoyed
was taken from them; their public humiliation was complete. As the
philologist Victor Klemperer noted, the day of the
Judenstern
’s intro-
duction was ‘the worst day for the Jews during those 12 years of hell’.3
For all the uncertainty of the times, however, there was much about
Yom Kippur that October that had the comforting ring of familiarity
about it. For one thing, the service was led by the well-known rabbi
Leo Baeck. Born in Posen in 1873, Baeck had studied in Berlin and
Breslau and had emerged as an eminent Jewish intellectual in Germany.
After service as an army chaplain during the First World War, he had
returned to Berlin to serve as a rabbi and had become one of the
pillars of the Jewish community there. As head of the
Reichvereinigung
der Juden
, the ‘Reich Organisation of Jews’, he was a respected authority on Jewish affairs. His white hair and kindly, bespectacled face were
reassuringly familiar to many in the congregation that evening.
The location, too, was held in special regard. Built during the First
World War, the synagogue on Levetzowstrasse was one of the largest
of the thirty-four synagogues in the German capital, capable of accom-
modating over two thousand worshippers. Built in the classical style, it
was an elegant construction, presenting clean lines in sandstone, a high,
saddle roof and little of the architectural complexity and exoticism of
conventional orthodox synagogues. Those entering the building would
pass through a high pillared portico, with a Hebrew inscription from
the Book of Isaiah emblazoned above: ‘O house of Jacob, come ye, and
let us walk in the light of the Lord.’4 Inside, there was a large main hall,
almost square in outline, flanked on three sides by raised galleries, all
of which were laid out with elegant wooden pews. At the eastern end
of the hall, beneath a decorated Risalit, was the ‘Holy of Holies’, where
the Torah scrolls were kept.
Though it had been damaged in the
Kristallnacht
pogrom of November
1938 – in which most of Berlin’s synagogues had been seriously damaged,
desecrated or destroyed – the building in Levetzowstrasse was the only
large synagogue in the German capital to have survived more or less
unscathed. Where many of Berlin’s Jewish community were thus forced
to congregate in the remaining private prayer houses, or in their own
homes, the Levetzowstrasse synagogue offered its congregation a familiar
refuge from an outside world which had turned decidedly hostile.
The services and rituals held for Yom Kippur that day took the
162
berlin at war
traditional and familiar form. It had begun with the moving
Kol Nidrei
service, the previous night, in which the Talmudic Scrolls were held
aloft and the congregation had prayed to be released from the vows
that they had made during the previous year. The day of Yom Kippur
itself was taken up almost exclusively with prayer and fasting. One
highlight was the
Minchah
service in the afternoon, which included
the reading, in its entirety, of the Book of Jonah with its well-known
parable of the prophet and the whale. The story’s message was clear:
it is impossible for man to escape God’s will. The day closed with
the evening service of
Ne’ila
, when the final prayers of repentance
were offered. Thereafter, the
shofar
horn was sounded and the faithful
were sent out into the dusk – with joy in their hearts – to end their
fast.
But even as the congregation was leaving the Levetzowstrasse that
evening, events were taking a sinister turn. At that very moment,
Gestapo officials appeared at the synagogue, demanding the keys to
the building. Jewish community elders were then ordered to go to the
Gestapo office on the Burgstrasse, where they were informed that the
‘resettlement’ of the Berlin Jews was soon to begin. They were told
that the Jewish community itself was required to cooperate fully in