Authors: Roger Moorhouse
to friends and family. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich received a letter from
her friend Margot Rosenthal, who had been deported, in December
1941, to a camp at Landshut in Bavaria. ‘Send us something to eat, we
are starving’, her friend implored, before closing with ‘Don’t forget
me, I cry all day.’27 However bad the conditions may have been at
Landshut, the ghettos in the east were infinitely worse.
In time, the trickle of desperate letters and cards home stopped
entirely. Thanks to the efficiency of the German postal service, letters
sent out to the ghettos would also go unanswered and be returned to
the senders, with the words ‘addressee deceased’ or ‘address unknown’
written across them.28 Hermann Samter recorded this worrying turn
of events. ‘Since the beginning of the year’, he wrote in late January
1942, ‘no news has been heard from Litzmannstadt. Post sent there,
is returned with the note that no postal deliveries are being made in
this or that street. It is suspected that Typhus is the reason.’29 When
the transports bound for Treblinka, or the death pits of Maly Trostinets,
left Berlin later that year, no correspondence was received from the
deportees at all. Samter again voiced the fears of many: ‘Of the thou-
sand people who were supposedly taken to Kaunas on 17 November,
not one of them has written. As a result, the widespread rumour has
emerged that these people have been shot en route, or otherwise
murdered.’30
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berlin at war
As a result the domestic grapevine was alive with tales of the atro -
cities and horrors perpetrated against the Jews. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich
heard the darkest stories in the winter of 1942. That December she
wrote that ‘ghastly rumours are current about the fate of the evac-
uees – mass shootings and death by starvation, tortures and gassings’.31
On the basis of such evidence, some historians have argued that reports
of the mass killings abounded and that the German civilian popula-
tion was under no illusions about the fate of the deported Jews.32 This
seems to be an exaggeration, however. A recent study has concluded
that around one-third of the German population ‘knew in some form
or another about the mass murder’ of the Jews; the figure for Berlin
is estimated at 28 per cent.33
The rumours and the stories, therefore, were certainly not heard by
everyone. Interestingly, as late as January 1944, the Berlin journalist
Ursula von Kardorff confessed her ignorance of the ongoing slaughter.
‘If only one knew’, she wrote in her diary, ‘what was happening to the
deported Jews.’34 It would seem that the majority of Berliners – Jew
and Aryan alike – simply had no idea of the fate of their neighbours,
friends and loved ones. In the absence of any contradicting informa-
tion, they were obliged to accept the official fiction that the deportees
had been ‘resettled’ to camps and ghettos in the east, where they would
be engaged in a programme of hard labour for the benefit of Germany.
One evacuee was informed by a German colleague in January 1943 that
he was: ‘now . . . going to break rocks in Russia’. Lacking information
to the contrary, he believed what he was told.35
Yet, even the estimate that 28 per cent of Berliners knew about the
grim fate of the Jews requires qualification: hearing a rumour is not
the same thing as believing that rumour to be fact. It was all too easy
for Germans to dismiss such horror stories as enemy-inspired propa-
ganda, designed to undermine the regime and the wider war effort.
Though the Nazis never publicly responded to rumours about the
Holocaust, there were enough instances of Allied propaganda stories
being supposedly disproved by Goebbels’ ministry that the seed of
doubt would have been sown, even without the active intervention
of the authorities.
More importantly, however, there was an ‘imagination gap’ with regard
to the Holocaust. Most Berliners would have found it hard to believe
the grim truth of the Holocaust, even had they known it. And those,
into oblivion
175
on both sides, who had an inkling of what was going on were often
unwilling to believe that their darkest suspicions could possibly be true.
The idea that an entire race of people could systematically be killed on
an industrial scale was beyond the imagination of most people.
This disbelief was widespread. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi
recorded the profound and gnawing fear that many Jews had – even
when inside Auschwitz – that, should they survive to tell their stories,
their sufferings would not be considered credible. The enormity of
the Holocaust was such, he realised, that it simply defied belief.36 The
same phenomenon was witnessed when the Polish underground
courier Jan Karski travelled to Washington, DC, in the summer of
1943, to present his evidence of the Holocaust to a group of American
Jewish leaders. After he had finished his testimony – which included
his own eyewitness account of life in the Warsaw ghetto and the
murders taking place at the Izbica transit camp – Karski was addressed
by Justice Felix Frankfurter of the US Supreme Court: ‘Mr Karski’,
he said, ‘I am unable to believe you.’ When a Polish diplomat then
interjected and asked whether Mr Frankfurter was calling Mr Karski
a liar, Justice Frankfurter clarified his response, replying: ‘I did not say
this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a
difference.’37
If the world at large found it impossible to believe the truth of the
Holocaust, even when provided with incontrovertible proof, Berliners
presented with piecemeal evidence, rumour and hearsay were bound
to dismiss such talk as enemy propaganda, or perverted fantasy. As
Ursula von Kardorff recalled after the war: ‘we were realistic and
pessimistic. But Auschwitz?’38
This reaction was bolstered by a profound belief in the fundamen-
tally ‘civilised’ nature of the German state and society. Not only could
the majority simply not conceive of mass killing on the scale of the
Holocaust, they could also not see how – legally and administratively
– such atrocities could be permitted to occur at all. Germany was a
Rechtsstaat
, a state governed by the rule of law, and even the recent racial legislation had the backing of law and was written into the legal framework. The order confiscating the property of those Jews about to be
deported, for instance, cited in its preamble the six pieces of legislation
on which the authority was based.39 Even in Nazi Germany, therefore,
the law was paramount; nobody would have believed that it could
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berlin at war
permit state-sponsored mass murder. As one German Jew recalled, his
reaction to the rumours of the Holocaust was: ‘That can’t be so . . . it’s
the twentieth century and we’re German.’40
For all these reasons, one has to assume that the vast majority of
both Aryan and Jewish Berliners either knew nothing of the Holocaust
or else were unable to believe and accept what little they might have
heard. It is in this light that the spectrum of contemporary reactions
to the deportations must be viewed.
For Jewish Berliners impotent stoicism was still the dominant reac-
tion to the rumours and to the events that were engulfing them. They
had seen their fellows deported to an unknown fate and would have
felt that the persecution they had suffered in recent years was coming
to a head. In the early months of 1942, for instance, Berlin Jews had
to cope with a flurry of new restrictions and prohibitions. They were
banned from all public baths in January; the following month, they
were forbidden to buy firewood, newspapers and periodicals. In May,
Jews were banned from many areas of the centre of the capital,
including Unter den Linden and Kurfürstendamm. The following
month, all optical and electronic items – such as cameras, typewriters
and binoculars – in Jewish possession had to be surrendered to the
state.41
If such measures appear petty, it is important to realise that other
legislation passed at the same time was much more serious. In a series
of decrees, the isolation and expropriation of German Jewry – a process
begun in 1933 – was finally brought to its conclusion. Jews were
forbidden to sell, loan or trade their belongings and the sale of non-
rationed items to Jews was prohibited. Jewish schools were closed,
and the fit and healthy amongst the community were sent to forced
labour camps, where conditions often mirrored those of the concen-
tration camps. In such circumstances, it is easy to appreciate how those
Jews that remained often found little time and little energy to worry
about their fellows.
Such hardships quickly became the new everyday norm, as can be
gleaned from the poetry composed by a young Berlin Jewish girl, Ruth
Schwersenz. In a leather-bound volume, Ruth collected short ditties and
rhymes, sometimes accompanied by a photograph, written by each of
her school friends as they were deported in the winter of 1941–2. The
entries are not maudlin or sad, rather they are bright, often optimistic
into oblivion
177
– ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’, one of them wrote, or ‘Tomorrow
is another day’. Some are rather more profound. Jutta Pickardt, for
instance, quoted Goethe: ‘You will never stray from the right path /
Just act according to your heart and your conscience.’ Ilse Baer, mean-
while, advised her fellow students: ‘Bring your parents joy / make them
happy through your hard work / Then, with age, you will reap the best
prize of all.’ Though it is too much to expect eleven-year-olds to have
knowledge of the hideous fate awaiting them or their friends, it is still
instructive to see the sheer normality of their verses, composed as if
they were leaving the school, or simply moving away.42
Adults found such optimism more difficult to maintain.
Nonetheless, many reacted with admirable pragmatism, offering help
to deportees as far as they could and seeking to make both the time
spent in the transit camp in the capital and the ‘evacuation’ itself as
comfortable as was possible. Bertha Falkenberg, though herself of
pensionable age, set up a group to help ‘evacuees’ by supplying them
with extra provisions – sandwiches, coffee, water and soup – at the
railheads.43 Some Berlin Jews sought to help the deportees further,
even after they had reached their destination. As Elisabeth Siegel
recalled: ‘When the first letters, or rather postcards arrived from
addresses in Warsaw or Litzmannstadt . . . we collected money, flour,
sugar and tea. This was then wrapped into small packages and
addressed. Then a group of schoolchildren went from district to
district to post the packages in letterboxes.’44
Others – mindful perhaps of the horrific rumours or merely
unwilling to accept the latest impositions – were prepared to fight for
their destiny in any way they could. One approach was to effectively
deny one’s Jewishness. Petitioners would apply to the Reich Race
Research Office in Berlin to claim that they were not actually the
biological child of Jewish parents, but the illegitimate offspring of an
Aryan father. Family photographs would be produced as supporting
evidence, and the testimony of family members would be recorded.
‘Never before’, wrote Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, ‘have there been so
many marital infidelities, and so many daughters and sons ready under
oath to assert their mothers’ vagaries.’45
For all the imagined infidelities, fraudulent testimonies and carefully
constructed genealogies, the Reich Race Research Office operated on
a strictly scientific – or pseudo-scientific – basis. Photographs would
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be minutely studied, and living relatives would be invited for ‘inter-
view’. Then, precise measurements would be taken, comparing the
features of the applicant to those of his or her putative father – the shape
of the nose, the eye and the ear, as well as the relationship of the jaw
to the nose, the nose to the eyes, and the hairline to the forehead. In
addition, phrenological measurements would be made of the shape of
the skull. The Office’s judgements not only carried the weight of law,
they also meant the difference between deportation and the chance to
remain in Berlin and ultimately between life and death. Few applicants,
however, succeeded in their endeavour. All too often the reply would
come back stating that a family resemblance was discernible and that
the application was dismissed.
For some Jews, such legal gymnastics were beyond the pale and,
weary of the barrage of legislation and persecution that they had been
forced to endure, they simply resigned themselves to their fate and
opted to take their own lives when the notice of their deportation
from the capital arrived. For many such cases, the method of choice
was to take an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal, which was rela-
tively easily obtained and promised a swift death.