Authors: Roger Moorhouse
capital. Despite the pouring rain, only the very young and the infirm
were permitted to use the open trucks supplied by the authorities;
the remainder made the six-kilometre journey through the city on
foot, most of them carrying the 50 kilograms of luggage allotted
to each of them. Upon arrival at Grunewald Station, they were
calmly loaded into passenger carriages, according to a system worked
out by the community elders. ‘Once everyone had taken their place’,
one eyewitness recalled, ‘warm food and hot drinks were distrib-
uted, and the prepared packages of supplies were handed out to
each evacuee.’18 In the early afternoon, their train departed. It would
reach Litzmannstadt, some 250 miles to the east, sometime during
the following day.
More transports quickly followed. On 24 October, a further 1,000
or so Berlin Jews were sent to the same destination, on the 28th
another 1,000 and on 2 November yet another 1,000 were dispatched.
Arriving in the Lódz˙ ghetto, the ‘evacuees’ were descending into a
world they would barely have recognised as human. In the autumn
of 1941, the ghetto was home to approximately 200,000 individuals,
crowded into an area of barely two and a half square kilometres.
The squalor, malnutrition and disease would challenge all but the
most robust. It was a nightmarish world where the emaciated
wandered the streets dressed in rags and the dead lay untended
where they fell. Within just a few weeks, the Berlin Jews who left
Grunewald Station that rainy Saturday in October 1941 would
be dying. Within a year, the majority of them would already be
dead.
This was only the beginning. In the next phase, new destinations
were found for Berlin’s Jews, including the ghettos at Minsk, Kaunas
and Riga. While there was little change in the procedure followed,
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169
there were two minor yet significant differences from the way in which
the early transports had been processed. The first was that the Jewish
deportees were now marched to the Grunewald Station at night,
thereby giving fewer ‘Aryan’ Berliners the opportunity to witness
events. The second change was to the demographic make-up of the
transports. In an effort to speed the removal of those Jews who were
unable to perform manual labour, the authorities now targeted old
people’s homes and hospitals in making up the new transport lists.
The tenth Berlin transport, for instance, which left for Riga on 25
January 1942, had an average age of 58; fully 500 of its complement
of 1,044 were over 61, 103 were over 71.19
On boarding the trains, passengers on these transports would have
noticed other differences too. The veneer of civility – paper-thin at
best – was slipping. Though much of the processing of evacuees was
still done by members of the Berlin Jewish community, the real power
– the Gestapo – was making its malicious presence felt. Casual
brutality increasingly became the order of the day. Moreover, where
the early transports had used the comparative comfort of passenger
carriages, now the deportees – especially those who were disabled or
bed-ridden – tended to be packed into goods wagons, or cattle trucks
covered with a simple tarpaulin. Lacking even the most basic ameni-
ties, such elderly or frail deportees would often not survive the five-
day journey, through the depths of a northern European winter, to
distant Riga.
For those who survived the ordeal, arrival at their destination was
scarcely more comforting. One deportee from Berlin, Heinz
Bernhardt, arrived at the ghetto in Minsk in December 1941. There
he and his fellows were marched to a collection of shabby wooden
huts, all strangely deserted. ‘The wrecked houses looked as if a
pogrom had taken place there’, Bernhardt remembered. ‘Pillow
feathers everywhere. Hanukah lamps and candlesticks laying around
in every corner . . . Later we were informed that this was the Russian
ghetto, whose Jewish residents were shot in early November 1941.’
Those victims were still nearby and were shown to them by an SD
man, who ‘pointed and said: “There, in front of you, a heap of
bodies.” And in fact we saw a hillock with parts of human bodies
sticking out.’20
Those deportees who found their way into the ghetto at all might
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berlin at war
be counted among the lucky ones. All of the 1,006 Jews from the sixth
Berlin transport, for instance, which reached Kaunas in occupied
Lithuania on 21 November 1941, would be murdered four days after
their arrival. The 1,053 Berlin Jews on the very next train, arriving in
Riga on the last day of November, did not even have four days in which
to collect themselves. After their arrival, they were marched straight
off the train and into the nearby forest of Rumbula, where they were
shot en masse in freshly dug pits. Thirty-eight of them were children
under ten years old. They were the first of an estimated 13,000 Jews
murdered at Rumbula that day, the first of 25,000 in total.21
The killing of that Berlin transport at Rumbula was to prove contro-
versial. The officer in charge of the operation, SS-
Obergruppenführer
Friedrich Jeckeln, had initially received instructions to murder the inhab-
itants of the Riga ghetto so as to make room for arriving ‘Reich’ Jews.
While ‘eastern’ Jews were viewed as thoroughly expendable, the attitude
then current in Berlin was that Reich Jews were not to be exterminated
out of hand and were, initially at least, to be housed in the ghetto and
put to work. The reasoning behind this distinction is unclear. It is most
unlikely that Himmler was moved by any residual humanitarian scru-
ples or feelings of sympathy for those people who might have previously
been his neighbours. Rather, it is most plausible that he was concerned
about the effect on public opinion at home, should the true fate of Reich
Jews get out.22
As senior SS officer in the Baltic, Jeckeln would have been well
aware of this policy when he opted to include the Berlin Jews in the
‘liquidation operation’ that was planned for the Riga ghetto. Himmler
was not best pleased, especially after his personal intervention, explic-
itly ordering that the Berlin Jews were not to be liquidated, arrived
too late. He forcefully reminded Jeckeln that Jews were to be dealt
with according to the guidelines given and that ‘unilateral acts and
violations’ would be punished.23 Nonetheless, for all his apparent
displeasure, he promoted Jeckeln to Head of SS Upper Section
Ostland
ten days later.
Though deportations from the Reich continued into January 1942
– including three transports from Berlin, each of over a thousand
Jews, bound for Riga – thereafter the process slowed. Between then
and June 1942, only two more transports left the capital; one in March
bound for the ghetto at Piaski in south-eastern Poland, and the other
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171
in April bound for Warsaw. One of the factors behind that slow-
down, one must surmise, is that the authorities were struggling to
find suitable locations for the many Reich Jews that were still awaiting
‘evacuation’. It would take until that summer before new destin a-
tions could be found and for the deportations from Berlin and else-
where to begin once again.
One of those new destinations was Theresienstadt in northern
Bohemia. Formerly a Habsburg fortress, Theresienstadt had initially been
established as a camp for Jews from the Czech lands, but was later trans-
formed into a ghetto for elderly Jews from the Reich, as well as those
designated as ‘privileged’, such as veterans who had received a combat
decoration in the First World War. Theresienstadt played primarily a
propaganda role, serving as the quasi-acceptable face of the deportation
of the Jews from the Reich, a place whose comparatively tolerable condi-
tions could be trumpeted so as to assuage the concerns of the inter-
national community and the Red Cross.
The first transport from Berlin to Theresienstadt departed in the
early morning of 2 June 1942. It contained fifty elderly Berlin Jews,
almost all of whom were former inhabitants of the Jewish old people’s
home on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, which – like the Levetzowstrasse
synagogue – had now been transformed into a transit camp. The
deportees were taken by tram to the Anhalter Station – one of Berlin’s
busiest rail termini – where they were loaded into closed passenger
cars, which were coupled to the scheduled service towards Dresden
and Karlsbad. Departing early in the morning, usually around 5.00 a.m.,
the deportees would generally reach Theresienstadt by evening, and,
as one eyewitness recalled, the journey was carried out ‘under quite
tolerable conditions’.24
This process continued into the autumn and winter of 1942. Every
few days another transport was formed taking between 50 or 100 indi-
viduals to Theresienstadt. By the end of that year, 82 such transports
had departed from the capital, carrying over 9,000 elderly, infirm and
juvenile Berlin Jews to the camp.25 Those deportees from the capital
had little inkling of their fate. Even if they had believed the propa-
ganda about Theresienstadt, they had no idea that, for the vast majority
of them, that camp would not be their final destination. Theresienstadt
was not all that it seemed. Though it would be periodically buffed
and polished for the benefit of press photographers or outside
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berlin at war
observers, it was little more than a transit camp, briefly accommo-
dating its inmates prior to a second deportation to other locations
further east.
In June 1942, for instance, as the first transports were arriving from
the capital, another transport with over 1,000 unfortunates on board
was departing from Theresienstadt for the newly built extermination
camp at Sobibór. In July, 1,000 more were sent to the ghetto in Minsk,
and another 1,000 to Baranowitschi, both in former Byelorussia. The
following month, another 1,000 were dispatched to Riga. Clearly, what-
ever scruples had conspired to stay the hands of German executioners
the previous winter had now been overcome. In the majority of such
cases, arriving Jews would be marched by the thousand into the nearby
forest and murdered. Their bodies, limed to speed decomposition,
would be left to rot beneath a thin layer of soil.
In time, new techniques were developed. At Treblinka – a small,
unassuming town on the rail line north-east of Warsaw – gas cham-
bers were installed that autumn, using carbon monoxide from diesel
engines, which could ‘process’ over 300 individuals in one hour. In
September, 10,000 Jews in five transports left Theresienstadt bound
for this then-unknown destination; 8,000 more followed in October.
By the time the camp that has become synonymous with the Holocaust
– Auschwitz-Birkenau – was brought on-stream as an extermination
centre that winter, the vast majority of the 29,000 Jews already deported
from the German capital were dead. In the following months and
years, a similar number would follow them to a similar fate.
In June 1943, Joseph Goebbels declared that the German capital was
now
judenrein
– ‘cleansed of Jews’. It was a rather premature announce-
ment, for many thousands of Jews remained in the city, either in
hiding, or in mixed marriages, or in the remaining Jewish hospital.
Yet, though the factual basis of the announcement was misleading,
its ‘tone’, its sentiment and its fundamental message were absolutely
correct. Berlin’s Jewish community – one of the most numerous and
vibrant of all Germany – had been destroyed.
How much did ordinary Berliners – and, indeed, Berlin Jews – know
about the Holocaust?
There
were
rumours. Despite being top secret, any event of the
scope and emotional magnitude of the destruction of the Jews was
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173
bound to find an echo in the domestic rumour mill. Soldiers in the
east heard rumours of the mass killings and, in some instances, these
would be relayed to friends and family back in Germany. A few of
them might have seen proof – in the form of grainy photographs of
mass shootings and the like – or perhaps even themselves been witness
to ‘actions’, round-ups or massacres. The experience of the later resist-
ance member Philipp von Boeselager was perhaps typical. He heard
news of the Holocaust after a fellow officer shared a train carriage
with some drunken SD men, who had boasted that they had murdered
250,000 Jews in the rear areas of Army Group South on the Eastern
Front in 1941.26
Surprisingly perhaps, some information about what was going on
was transmitted by post. Given that limited communication was
possible between those incarcerated in the ghettos and those back
home in Berlin and elsewhere, news of the awful conditions and hard-
ships experienced by deported Jews was occasionally able to seep back