Authors: Roger Moorhouse
enter. In the light of the hall, I see that they are wearing the Jewish
star. They are relatives of a Breslau merchant, who owned one of Papa’s
pictures, which they now want to sell, because they need the money.
We give them some food and slowly they thaw out. It is indescribable
what these people are going through. They want to go underground,
before they get picked up, take off the star and live as bombed-out
refugees from the Rhineland. Of course, Papa buys the picture from
them. I think they not only wanted material help, they also sought a
certain comfort.30
For many, such small-scale acts would be the start of much wider
and more risky involvement. Most immediately, Jewish
Taucher
needed
to find safe accommodation. For some, this most pressing require-
ment was solved by serendipity, by a stroke of fortune or a chance
meeting. Irma Simon, for instance, had little idea where she would
against all odds
295
go when she left her apartment to avoid deportation in the
Fabrik-
Aktion
. Carrying a heavy suitcase, she paused to rest on Lehrterstrasse
in Moabit, where she found her saviour – a young shoemaker and
communist sympathiser who offered her shelter. ‘A person whom
I had never seen in my life’, she later recalled, ‘calmly promised
something that anyone in this city of millions, Berlin, would have
considered insane.’31 The man, August Kossmann, hid Irma, her
husband and her son in his modest apartment for the remaining two
years of the war.
In most cases, however,
Taucher
first approached those they believed
they could trust. Erich Neumann was a teenager when his mother
took in a Jewish friend at her café in Charlottenburg in the winter
of 1944:
Suddenly, that October, Wolfgang S., our accountant and a friend of
the family, stood at the door, saying, ‘Klärchen, please help me, they
are after me!’ Warned by friends, Wolfgang had been able to leave his
refuge in the Drakestrasse in Lichterfelde. Now he stood, with a small
suitcase in his hand in our back room, shaking. The usual yellow star
on his jacket and coat were missing, but the marks where they had
been were still noticeable.32
Wolfgang was washed and clothed, and a small room was set aside
behind the café for him. He was supplied with food and would spend
twenty-three hours a day in his room, only venturing out after dark to
walk the family dog in a nearby park. He stayed for the following five
months. Erich recalled that his mother knew very well that such
behaviour risked the wrath of the Gestapo, if discovered, ‘but she
simply suppressed the thought. She had never left someone in the
lurch, when her help was required . . . For her, it was only natural.’33
Taucher
often preferred not to risk all with one location and one
host, preferring instead a peripatetic existence, sometimes involving
the assistance of dozens of Aryan sympathisers. Max Krakauer, for
instance, compiled a list at the end of the war of all of those Berliners
who had provided him with refuge, accommodation, work and false
papers. He counted sixty-six names.34 Alfred Bornholmer went under-
ground in the autumn of 1942 to escape his deportation, and though
he initially stayed hidden with his aunt, the continued attentions of the
296
berlin at war
Gestapo forced him to seek accommodation further afield. He would
travel right across the capital, even to outlying towns such as Beelitz
and Luckenwalde, rarely staying in the same place twice. Though all
of his close family – mother, brother and sister-in-law – were deported
to their deaths, Alfred would survive the war.35
Another example was Salomon Striem, a friend of the Knirsch family.
He often visited them at their home in the suburb of Pankow, where
he was known to the children as ‘Uncle Fritz’. ‘He was blond’, recalled
Rita Knirsch:
lived illegally in Berlin and did not wear the
Judenstern
. Day by day, he would travel with the railway right across the city, as he had no fixed
address. He would ask: ‘Let me stay with you awhile, but wake me if
there’s an air raid alarm, I don’t want anyone to see me with you!’ Our
mother always let him stay, and reminded me: ‘Rita, you must tell
nobody about this!’ . . . she explained ‘I cannot just turn this poor
hunted man away.’36
In this way, ‘Uncle Fritz’ evaded the Nazi authorities for over eighteen
months, before he was finally caught in a round-up at Alexanderplatz
in the autumn of 1944 and deported.
Those Aryan Berliners who sought to help fugitive Jews could have
any number of motivations – from the political and ideological to the
venal. Otto Weidt was one of those who were more ideologically
inspired. A convinced pacifist and former anarchist, Weidt was manager
of a workshop on Rosenthaler Strasse, which manufactured brushes
and brooms, and was assigned around thirty deaf and dumb employees
from the local Jewish Home for the Blind. When the deportations
began in 1941, he fought for the life of every one of his employees,
visiting the Gestapo offices to argue – in many cases successfully –
that his workers were essential for the war effort and should be taken
off the deportation lists. In time, he became bolder. He bribed Gestapo
officials, hid as many as eight Jews on his factory premises and even
secured the release of one of his workers who had already been
deported to Auschwitz.37 Otto Weidt is thought to have directly aided
fifty-six Jews, half of whom survived the war.38
Other Aryan ‘helpers’ had no specific political affiliation beyond a
sense of shared humanity. Foremost among them were the churches,
against all odds
297
particularly the oppositionally minded
Bekennende Kirche
, or ‘Confess -
ing Church’, a few of whose members collected passbooks and
identity cards, which would be modified by forgers and then passed
on to fugitive Jews.39 Catholic chaplain Harald Poelchau was also active
in this regard. As chaplain of Berlin’s prisons, he was able not only to
provide spiritual succour to those in direst need, he also supplied a
number of fugitive Jews with accommodation and false papers.40
Another remarkable case is that of Otto Jodmin, who was a care-
taker in an apartment block in Wielandstrasse in Charlottenburg.
Exploiting his position of not inconsiderable influence, where he was
responsible for much of the administration of the building, he allowed
individuals or small groups of refugees to use the cellars – to which
only he had access – until they could find more permanent and secure
shelter elsewhere. In addition, he falsely registered Jews as Aryan resi-
dents, or bombing victims, thereby enabling them to get access to
identity papers and ration cards. He did all this, he said, because he
had been brought up to show compassion to others. ‘I simply had to
do it’, he later recalled, ‘there was nothing else for it, there was no
other way. I did not even think long about it, not at all . . . I just
couldn’t act in any other way.’41
Housewife Maria Nickel, meanwhile, was moved to act by her
opposition to Hitler. Appalled by the rise of the Nazis and their ‘intoler -
able’ anti-Semitism, she had made a vow in the autumn of 1942 that she
would attempt to save ‘at least one Jewish life’. She began rather modestly,
befriending a Jewish woman, Ruth Abraham, and supplying her with
groceries. As the friendship progressed, however, Nickel was inexorably
drawn into the task of saving Abraham’s family from deportation,
supplying false documents and helping them disappear into the under-
ground. In the end, she helped to save, not one, but three lives.42
Others hid Jews for love. Gerda Wiener moved in with her Aryan
lover, Gerhard, in the spring of 1943, and would remain with him,
hiding under the bed or in the wardrobe whenever guests came, for
the remainder of the war. The greatest peril, however, was having to
hide her Jewishness and fugitive status from Gerhard’s mother, who
lived with them. ‘We had to come across carefree and happy with
her’, she wrote, ‘as she would most certainly have informed the Gestapo
if she had had any idea of our double life.’43
The most famous example of this sort in Berlin, however, is the
298
berlin at war
wartime affair between Berlin housewife Lilly Wust and the feisty
Jewish fugitive Felice Schragenheim. Though Wust was a Nazi sympa-
thiser, with four children and a husband fighting on the Eastern Front,
she fell for Schragenheim when the two first met in a Berlin café in
November 1942. By that time, Schragenheim was already living as a
Taucher
, having faked her own suicide when her deportation notice
had arrived and subsequently resurfaced under false papers. The two
began a lesbian relationship, evidently made all the more passionate
by Wust’s desire for adventure and Schragenheim’s need for protec-
tion. Captured by the Gestapo in the autumn of 1943, Schragenheim
would ultimately meet her end on a death march in the final days of
1944, despite Wust’s desperate efforts to secure her release. ‘She was
my other half’, Wust said shortly before her death in 2006, ‘literally
my reflection, my mirror image . . . I have never stopped loving her.’44
Though the primary and most deadly risk was certainly run by the
Taucher
in wartime Berlin, the tribulations endured by their Aryan
helpers should not be forgotten. While it is not realistic to blithely
assume that any Aryan Berliner caught hiding or assisting a Jew would
automatically face the death penalty, neither is it accurate to claim
that most of those caught helping
Taucher
would receive nothing more
than a ticking-off from the Gestapo.
It is true that there was no specific crime in Nazi Germany which
approximated to ‘aiding Jews’, hence there was no automatic penalty.
However, there were a number of offences – ranging from ‘racial
defilement’ to ‘rationing irregularities’ to ‘undermining the war effort’
– with which Aryan helpers could be charged if they were caught.
In the majority of examples, discovery by the authorities would mean
at the very least an interrogation and a temporary imprisonment. In
repeat cases, meanwhile, or those with aggravating circumstances, a
stay in a concentration camp could be the result, which could mean
–
de facto
if not
de jure
– a death sentence.
For this reason, perhaps, some of those Berliners who aided Jews
preferred not to know the identity and racial status of those they were
helping; after all, ignorance could at least be some token defence in
the event of capture. They were often happy to assume – whether they
really believed it or not – that their temporary residents were simply
refugees, deserters or those bombed out and waiting for new accom-
modation and paperwork. Similarly, Jewish fugitives were often content
against all odds
299
to collude in the deception. Though the majority of
Taucher
tended to
reveal their Jewishness when they initially went underground, they soon
learned that such candour was not always beneficial. In time, it seems,
many of them pretended to be Christians.45
In addition to the ever-present fear of detection or betrayal, there
were everyday practical concerns to consider. Once underground,
those Jews who did not manage to find a new identity and new papers
would not receive any ration allocation, meaning that they had to be
fed from the already meagre food supplies of their hosts. As a result,
some of those Berliners who hid Jews did so – in the first instance at
least – for material or financial reward, thereby rather denting the
altruistic ideal. In many such cases, the financial aspect served only
as a sweetener, soon to be replaced with genuine concern for the fate
of the unfortunate
Taucher
. But, in a few examples, it remained the
primary motivation, and if the Jews could not pay, they would be
betrayed to the Gestapo. In one instance, a woman in Schöneberg
informed the local Gestapo about the mother and daughter she had
been hiding in her flat.46 Her motivation for doing so is unclear, but
it is possible that her Jewish ‘guests’ had simply run out of money.
Whatever their precise motivation, the Aryan helpers of fugitive
Jews were making a hard choice. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, who was
herself active in assisting Jews in the Berlin underground, claimed in
1944 that ‘No one who has not seen it himself can imagine how diffi-
cult even the simplest act of assistance may be.’ Nonetheless, she
went on:
If ever anyone risked his life for his Jewish brothers, it has been the
German Aryans – hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, risking their
necks every day and every hour for a few wretched bread stamps, a
lodging for a night or two. A little bit here, a little bit there, and still