Read Berlin at War Online

Authors: Roger Moorhouse

Berlin at War (54 page)

clearly had a powerful political echo in the Nazi movement. The best

example of it was the
Sturmabteilung
, or SA, the squads of brownshirts

formed in the earliest days of the movement to protect Nazi meetings

and to disrupt those of its rivals. Many SA units had their own ‘blood

flag’, embroidered with the names of their fellows who had fallen in

the movement’s struggle, and in imitation of the ‘
Blutfahne
’, the swastika flag stained with the blood of those killed in the Munich Putsch of 1923,

which became Nazi Germany’s holiest relic.

The SA’s most famous ‘martyr’ was Horst Wessel. As the leader of

an SA troop in the eastern Berlin district of Friedrichshain, in 1930,

Wessel was targeted by his political opponents, not least because of

his alleged involvement in the murder of a communist activist and an

ongoing rent dispute with his left-wing landlady. Shot in the face by

an assailant, he took fully six weeks to succumb to his injuries. His

lavish funeral drew an emotional eulogy from Goebbels, in which the

streetfighter was hailed as a martyr. The event climaxed with the

singing of Wessel’s own composition, ‘Raise High the Flag’, which

contained the dark refrain:

Kamraden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen,

Marschier’n im Geist in uns’ren Reihen mit
.

Comrades shot by the Red Front and reaction,

march in spirit with us in our ranks.30

Wessel went on to become the Nazi martyr
par excellence
. Raised

almost to the status of a saint, he became the subject of more than

250 biographies, plays and novels during the Third Reich, including a

big-screen outing as the lightly fictionalised
Hans Westmar
. His ‘hymn’

was adopted as the official anthem of the Nazi movement.

The Hitler Youth, too, had its precious martyr. In January 1932, a

twelve-year-old
Hitlerjugend
boy, Herbert Norkus, was distributing leaflets in the Berlin suburb of Moabit when he was set upon by a gang of

young communists. After suffering numerous stab wounds, he bled to

260

berlin at war

death in a stairwell. Like Horst Wessel, Norkus was raised to the Nazi

pantheon; his grave became a place of Nazi pilgrimage, and his ‘sacri-

fice’ was held up as an example for the youth of Germany. His story

was popularised still further when the fictionalised adaptation of his

story,
Der Hitlerjunge Quex
, appeared in German cinemas in 1933. Norkus

was one of twenty-three Hitler Youths to die for the Nazi cause. All of

them were a gift to the Party’s propaganda machine, but they also

served a more sinister function. As the Hitler Youth’s leader Baldur von

Schirach declared: ‘The more who die for the movement, the more

immortal it becomes.’31

With such a rich culture of death within its ideology, one would have

expected the Nazi regime to seek to exploit every military and civilian

casualty to further its cause and reinforce its message. Early in the war,

this was certainly the case; the first civilian deaths registered in Berlin,

for instance, in August 1940, were accorded grand funerals, with honour

guards, speeches and sombre ceremonial. The
Heldengedenktag
commem-

orations, too, always took great pains to make honourable mention of

contemporary casualties.32 In this way, it was thought, bereaved civil-

ians could be drawn into the ceremony, personally and emotionally,

thereby inoculating them against politically damaging sentiments of

anger or futility.

Some still sought to apply the ideological gloss. In an essay from

1942, for instance, Goebbels gave expression to the pseudo-religious

sentiments concerning military losses that were evidently then circu-

lating in Nazi minds. He likened the military struggle to climbing a

towering mountain, and it was the dead who marked the way to

the summit: ‘We bury them along the edges of the steep path’, he

wrote.

They fell in the first ranks, and all who march after them must pass

by them. Like silent directional markers, they point toward the peak

. . . In this way, our fallen enter the mythology of our
Volk
for all time: they are no longer what they were among us, but instead the eternal

models of our epoch. . . . They are the fulfilled.33

As the war progressed and the casualties mounted, deaths became

less an opportunity for the regime’s propagandists and more a liability.

By 1943, the Nazi Party was evidently so concerned about the impact of

the persistent shadow

261

bereavement that it increasingly took on the role of informing bereaved

families of soldiers’ deaths itself, thereby ensuring that the right polit-

ical ‘message’ could be imparted along with the death notification.34

As this memo makes clear, the regime was well aware of the poten-

tial difficulties that it might encounter as the death toll rose: ‘The

survivors should find strength and refuge in our community. We want

to give them fresh heart, as they should never have even the most

fleeting thought that the sacrifice of their fathers, husbands, sons and

brothers had been for nothing.’35

Such measures evidently met with some success, dovetailing, as

they did, with the natural desire among the bereaved to see the death

as serving some higher purpose. Even the rising death toll on the

Eastern Front failed to spark any widespread civilian opposition and

resistance to the Nazis; on the contrary, it engendered a sense of

apathy and depression.36 Nonetheless, as the war ground on to its

conclusion, the patience and stoicism of the Berlin public would be

tested to destruction.

If the commemoration of German dead was fraught with difficul-

ties, that of the capital’s remaining Jews was infinitely more trying.

Where the city once had a number of Jewish cemeteries, by the

middle years of the war only the largest and most prominent of them

– Weissensee – was still functioning in any meaningful sense.

Founded in 1880, the Jewish cemetery at Weissensee, to the north-

east of Berlin, had swiftly grown into one of the largest in Europe,

covering an enormous area of over 40 hectares and containing over 100,000

graves. Not only its sheer size – equivalent to about fifty football pitches

– was impressive: Weissensee also displayed a huge variety of grave-

stones, statues and sarcophagi – ranging from the modest to the opulent,

from classicism to Bauhaus. The large red granite mausoleum of the

Ashrott family, for instance, was designed by the same architect who

created Leipzig’s impressive monument to the
Völkerschlacht
, the Battle

of the Nations against Napoleon in 1813.

The writer Kurt Tucholsky, meanwhile, was more struck by the

Prussian precision of the place, the strictly ordered system of plots by

which the graves were arranged. A regular visitor to the cemetery in

the 1920s, where he paid his respects at his father’s grave, Tucholsky

penned the affectionate but gently satirical poem ‘
In Weissensee
’:

262

berlin at war

Each one here meets his lot:

A plot.

And such a plot is named somehow:

‘I’ or ‘U’

. . .

There, where I have often been, in mourning,

there you will come, there I will come, when it’s all over

You love. You travel. You enjoy yourself. You –

Plot U.

It waits in absentia

Plot A

The clock is ticking. Your grave has time,

Three metres long, one metre wide

You’ll see another foreign land,

You’ll get another Gretchen manned,

The winter’s snow you’ll often see –

And then:

Plot P – in Weissensee

in Weissensee.37

Weissensee was associated with the more assimilated, ‘reformed’

Jewish community in the capital: those Jews who felt their ‘Germanness’

just as keenly as they did their ‘Jewishness’. The vast majority of its

graves and sarcophagi, therefore, bore German inscriptions, and the

dates given were almost always according to the Christian, rather than

the Jewish, calendar. In addition, the cemetery contained a small section

where the four hundred or so fallen of Berlin’s Jewish community from

the Great War were laid to rest.

Weissensee would have reminded the visitor of the Invaliden ceme-

tery, just a few miles away down the Greifswalderstrasse. Both contained

those perceived by their fellows as the brightest and the best; both stood

as testament to communities at the very peak of their power and influ-

ence. That is where any similarity ends. From 1939, the fates of the two

cemeteries could scarcely be more different. While the Invaliden ceme-

tery became the scene of state funerals and grand ceremonial,

Weissensee became a last refuge for the desperate.

Because of its large size, Weissensee quickly became overgrown as

Berlin’s Jewish community was decimated, and the manpower required

the persistent shadow

263

to maintain it dwindled. Rachel Becker, who worked there during the

war, recalled the transformation:

In the years before, hundreds of workmen, gardeners, guards, in addi-

tion to the administrative, clerical, funeral and burial staffs, had been

employed to maintain the many thousands of graves and the grounds

. . . even during the war, right until [1943] the modern nursery had still

worked full speed and a few dozen gardeners had tried, in vain of

course, to take care of . . . the graves that were still being visited.38

After the last Jews had been deported from the capital, however,

‘the huge place was suddenly “dead” . . . the vast grounds were empty

of human life . . . the offices, the telephone exchange, the kind old

Rabbi Levy’s flat on the premises – all deserted.’39 Except that they

were not quite so deserted as Becker imagined. Given that it swiftly

became overgrown, Weissensee had become a favoured hiding place

for those Jews who went underground to escape deportation. One

grave site in particular offered sanctuary: the mausoleum of the opera

singer Joseph Schwarz featured a small classical-style temple with

a glass hatch in the roof, through which one could climb to snatch a

few hours of undisturbed rest. The temple carried a prophetic inscrip-

tion from Psalm 90: ‘Lord, You have been our refuge through all

generations’.40

In the increasingly difficult circumstances, the cemetery at

Weissensee struggled on as best it could, chiefly under the remark-

able leadership of Martin Riesenburger. Riesenburger owed his own

survival to his gentile wife, who, though a convert to Judaism, was

viewed by the Nazis as an Aryan. He had worked as the chaplain of

the nearby Jewish old people’s home and, when it was closed by the

Gestapo and the last rabbi deported late in 1942, he emerged as the

de facto
head of the fast-dwindling and increasingly desperate Jewish

community of Berlin.

It is unclear precisely what the Gestapo had in mind for Riesenburger.

His own memoir sheds little light on the subject, stating merely that,

after his arrest, he was called into an interview with a senior SS officer,

Alois Brunner, who instructed him simply to go back to work.41 It may

be that the Gestapo were seeking to use Riesenburger as a ‘lightning

rod’ to attract fugitive Jews, who could then be captured. However,

264

berlin at war

it is also possible that they sought, by leaving him in place, to main-

tain a façade of normality. Perhaps – at the very basest level – they

just wanted a Jew to bury the last remaining Jews.

Whatever his precise capacity, Riesenburger attempted to create

some semblance of normal Judaic life in the very heart of the Third

Reich. Existing in a no-man’s-land between indifference and persecu-

tion, he continued to lead weekly prayer services and ceremonies,

albeit necessarily brief and surreptitious. His last wedding, for instance,

was conducted in June 1943, between a forty-year-old Jewish man and

his thirty-seven-year-old bride. A few days later, the newlyweds were

deported to a concentration camp.42

The vast majority of services carried out by Riesenburger were

funerals. In 1942 he held over three thousand – on average nearly sixty

every week. Most of these were carried out at night in a quiet corner

of the cemetery, with few mourners, makeshift headstones and no

official registration. Increasingly, too, he had to bury those who had

taken their own lives, individuals whose actions, though strictly

anathema under Jewish law, could be overlooked
in extremis
. By his

own estimate, Riesenburger buried nearly two thousand such cases.43

In addition, he sometimes received urns of ashes, supposedly from

individuals who had perished in Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald, which

he was required to inter. Wherever possible, he prepared the remains

for burial and ensured that dignity was maintained, even in the most

trying of circumstances. As Rachel Becker recalled: ‘until the very end’

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