Authors: Roger Moorhouse
Ursula von Kardorff recorded one such suicide in the spring of 1943.
‘Mrs Liebermann is dead’, she wrote in her diary, ‘they actually came
with a stretcher to collect the 85-year-old for the transport to Poland.
At the last moment, she took Veronal and died a day later in the Jewish
hospital without regaining consciousness.’ The agonising final hours
of Hans Michaelis, a retired lawyer living in Charlottenburg, were
recorded by his niece, Maria:
I hear from Uncle Hans and hurry to say farewell. He is grateful. He
looks at me and asks – glancing at the clock before him –
‘Maria, I don’t have much time. What should I do? What is easiest,
what’s the most dignified? To live or to die? To suffer a terrible fate,
or to end one’s own life, to kill oneself as quickly as possible before
the horde of swastika-wearing SS fetch me? And – my friends say – this
will be in the next day or two!’
We speak. We examine both possibilities. We ask ourselves what his
late wife – my dear Aunt Gertrud – would have advised. Again he grabs
the clock.
‘I have 50 hours left here, at most! . . . Thank God that my Gertrud
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179
died a normal death, before Hitler. What would I give for that! In bed,
surrounded by a doctor and nurses. Or a soldier’s death, amongst my
former comrades. . . . Maria, see how the time flies!’
My heart is racing. Racing and hammering. I’m racking my brains
for the right words. Can’t God inspire me? It seems not. We are both
hot and we have to escape the room. We go down in the lift to get
some air at the front door. There, we somehow say our farewells. ‘Uncle
Hans, you will know the right thing to do. Farewell.’46
Two days later, Maria heard that her Uncle Hans had taken his own
life.
In some cases, a suicide pact was agreed. Helmuth James von Moltke
related an example in a letter to his wife. ‘Yesterday’, he wrote, ‘I said
goodbye to a once famous Jewish lawyer who has the Iron Cross First
and Second Class, the Order of the House of Hohenzollern, the
Golden Badge for the Wounded, and who will kill himself with his
wife today, because he is to be picked up tonight.’47 Another Berlin
diarist recorded the heart-rending case of a young half-Jewish girl,
who administered poison to her Jewish mother, when notice of her
deportation came through. ‘I loved my mother so much’, the girl said,
‘that I have killed her.’48 The total number of suicides among Berlin
Jews is unknown, but some estimates suggest that fully one in four
Jewish deaths in Berlin at this time were suicides, and that around 10
per cent of those who received their deportation notices opted to meet
their fate in this way.49
Other Berlin Jews – especially the young – sought a different form
of escape: they went underground. Though a drastic move, it was
one that in many instances would have developed gradually, evolving
from the common practice of avoiding the authorities by staying
temporarily with friends or relations. In time, some decided to make
such arrangements rather more permanent. Sympathetic friends
would be sounded out; possible hiding places – lofts, garden sheds
or eaves cupboards – would be investigated.
For others, the transition to a life ‘underground’ could be rather
more precipitate. Twenty-year-old Joel König was virtually pushed out
of the door of his home in August 1942, when his family’s deport a-
tion notice came through. ‘The last thing we need is for the Gestapo
to find you here’, his mother told him. ‘Get on your way . . . make
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berlin at war
sure you get to Switzerland!’ With that, he recalled, ‘she ushered me
out of the door without a kiss or a shake of the hand’. He would
never see his parents again.50
Those who took the plunge were generally known as
Taucher
,
‘divers’, or, more colloquially ‘U-boats’ – because they slipped beneath
the surface of Hitler’s Reich into the invisible depths of wartime
society. Unlike their namesakes, however, these human U-Boats were
not self-sufficient and were almost always entirely reliant on the help
and support of their Aryan neighbours and friends. In one example,
a Jewish doctor named Arthur Arndt approached his old gentile friend
Max Gehre to ask for help. He had been unsure of what response he
would get, but after tentatively asking whether his friend might be
able to help him find somewhere to hide, he was relieved to hear the
reply ‘You will stay with us’. Gehre offered Dr Arndt and his wife and
two teenage children his daughter’s bedroom. It was the first step on
an underground odyssey that would ultimately save all four of them
and would involve at least fifty Berliners risking their own lives to
help.51
For all their bravery and sacrifice, however, the number of those
who actively helped Berlin Jews was rather small. The majority would
have been ignorant of the true fate of the Jews who disappeared from
their midst. Other factors served to inhibit Aryan acceptance of the
truth of the Holocaust. The first was self-censorship. Given that Nazi
Germany was a dictatorship, one was profoundly ill advised to ask
searching questions regarding the fate of the deported Jews. Ordinary
Berliners, even if they broadly supported the Nazis, would have
known very well that that regime had teeth, and so tended to avoid
behaviour that might bring them into conflict with the authorities.
Self-censorship, therefore, and an element of political and social condi-
tioning, played an important role for the civilian. Even those who
heard the rumours of the Holocaust would instinctively have blocked
them out, and turned a blind eye, so as not to compromise them-
selves or their loved ones. As one historian has pithily summarised,
‘they knew enough to know that it was better not to know’.52 Tellingly,
in this regard, one Berliner recalled: ‘My husband told me about [the
killing of the Jews], but I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody else. Had I done
this, my husband would have been put up against the wall, I would
have been sent to a concentration camp, and I would never have seen
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181
the children again. One had to keep quiet.’53 Far from being cowardly,
such reactions were all too human.
Anti-Semitism also played a vital role, and there were undoubtedly
some Berliners who openly celebrated the removal of the Jews from
the city. One such example occurred as a group of Jews was being
assembled for deportation; ‘Unfortunately’, one German woman
recalled, ‘I must also report that many people stood in their doorways
and in the face of this procession of misery, gave expression to their
joy. “Look at the impudent Jews!” shouted one. “Now they are still
laughing, but their final short hour has rung.”’54 In another instance,
a young Jewish woman noted events at a transit camp for Berlin Jews
in the northern district of Wedding, where ‘a hateful crowd of people
. . . had gathered in front of the building and were gloating over the
misery that had befallen their fellow citizens – the Jews.’55
Such reactions were primarily the result of the anti-Semitic climate
in Nazi Germany, but in some cases were also stoked by greed. As has
recently been argued, there was a peculiarly ‘kleptocratic character’56 to
Nazi Germany, in which the public was encouraged to become complicit
in the expropriation of the property of the Jews. Anything formerly
belonging to them was minutely listed and inventoried and everything
– from the building itself to the crockery and carpets – would pass to
the state, where it would then be used to supply those who had been
bombed out.
Dieter Borkowski witnessed the clearance of Jewish properties in
the spring of 1943. The fourteen-year-old used occasionally to accom-
pany his uncle on his driving jobs, but one day the pair were joined
by a Nazi Party functionary, brandishing a list. As Dieter recalled, his
normally talkative uncle was strangely quiet. They made their first
stop at the corner of Bülowstrasse and Potsdamer Strasse in the district
of Schöneberg. ‘It was strange’, he recalled:
there was no one in the flat, no one to hand the furniture over to us,
and the household items had not been packed into crates. The flat
appeared as though the owners had just gone shopping and would be
back soon. I thought it had to be a mistake, but the Party man had a
list in his hand. He ordered that Uncle Alfred was to clear the flat. I
was amazed when he took some large crystal vases and silver candle-
sticks for himself and put them in the van in a special crate. Some oil
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berlin at war
paintings disappeared into there too. It was a magnificently furnished
apartment, perhaps belonging to a lawyer or a doctor . . . Then we
drove to the next flat, and to my astonishment it was the same as
before. . . . Again no owner there to meet us, and it appeared as
though the people there had got out of bed and had had to leave the
flat in a tremendous hurry.57
Aside from those treasures squirrelled away by the Party functionary,
most other items would pass to the regime and would, in due course,
be used to the benefit of the Aryan victims of the war. It was a policy
that Joseph Goebbels, as Gauleiter of Berlin, had made plain in 1942.
Jewish property, he noted, was to be kept ‘for the purpose of supplying
[our] ethnic comrades who suffered damage in bombing raids and as
a reserve supply against possible future damage’.58
Some of that Jewish property also went for auction. There, as one
commentator put it, ‘good Aryans fought like jackals over a carcass
to buy shabby objects [that] the Russian war had made scarce’.59 Notices
in the newspapers would alert the public to upcoming sales. As the
American Howard Smith recalled, such auctions could even be carried
out in the abandoned homes themselves, and in one instance ‘one
could see on the table inside two tea-cups still half filled with brownish
water. The two old women had been having a night-cap of ersatz tea
when the Gestapo arrived, and were not given time to finish it.’60
Those Berliners who participated in such auctions would clearly have
been under few illusions that they were bidding for the property of
Jewish deportees. Whether out of greed or necessity, they were being
made complicit in a crime whose true extent they could barely have
imagined.
In some instances, Jewish properties passed directly into the hands
of Party members or SS men. In one example, a Jewish doctor was
obliged to show a Nazi official around his family’s apartment on the
very day his mother and sister had been deported. The official, obvi-
ously pleased by what he saw, grew increasingly excited as they moved
from room to room. Finally, he burst out: ‘All my life I have always
dreamt of furniture like this!’61 With that, it became abundantly clear
who the next inhabitant of the apartment was destined to be.
Yet, both those who helped Jews and those who revelled in their
deportation constituted a minority of the Berlin population at large;
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183
the vast majority of Berliners reacted towards the Jews in their midst
with indifference.62 It seems that the barrage of anti-Semitic legislation
in Nazi Germany had so marginalised the Jews from German public
life that they were effectively erased from the consciousness – and
indeed the conscience – of most ordinary Germans. Their physical
destruction had been prefaced by a lingering social death.63
Many years after the demise of Hitler’s Third Reich, a memorial book
for the Jews of Berlin was published. The
Gedenkbuch Berlins
drew on
the available documentary sources to list as many as possible of those
Jews deported from the German capital between 1941 and 1945, who
subsequently died at the hands of the Nazis and their accomplices.
Each entry begins with the victim’s name in bold, followed by a date
and place of birth, a date and destination of ‘evacuation’ and finally
a date of death. The very first entry is that of Jutta Aal, born in
November 1860 in Bavaria and deported to Theresienstadt in the
autumn of 1942. Already eighty-one at the time of her deportation,
Jutta survived in the ghetto for barely two weeks.
From that entry, the victims proceed – around forty per page – for
nearly 1,400 pages. Entire extended families are listed; children along-
side parents and grandparents, the great and the good alongside the
unremarkable and unexceptional. Some are listed simply as ‘declared
dead’ or as ‘
Schicksal ungeklärt
’, ‘fate unknown’. Most entries, however, just state that the individual is ‘
verschollen
’, ‘missing’. There are 6 pages of Abrahams, 11 pages of Hirsches, 12 pages of Levys and 13 pages of
Wolffs. The final entry is that of Leo Zyzman, who was just sixteen
when he was sent to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. The total
number of victims listed is 55,696.64