Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (15 page)

1. examples in Meyer,
   Jüdische Mischlinge
   , 117–131; Matthäus, “Interesse.”
   
2. In most cases, the prosecutor files and the court files pertaining to the family law novella seem to have been destroyed and only fragments remain. See essner,
   Verwaltung
   , 204n124. No systematic search in German and Austrian archives for relevant case files has yet been undertaken. Meyer,
   Jüdische Mischlinge
   , traced sixty-six cases for Hamburg, the remainder of a larger collection of files.
   
3. For the only Berlin cases involving Jews in which the courts did not follow the argument of the prosecution, see LAB A-Rep. 358–02 Nr. 55119 and 55245.
   
4. Based on a list produced by the LAB of all 712
   Anfechtungsfälle
   involving Jews or Mischlinge, the following numbers reflect the cases opened by the prosecutor (court verdict often followed one or even two years later): 1938: 47 cases opened; 1939: 51; 1940: 47; 1941: 144; 1942: 218; 1943: 117; 1944: 71; 1945: 17.
   
5. of the 61 persons represented in the case files surveyed, 32 were male and 29 were female. Age distribution is as follows: 1–5 years, 5 persons; 6–10 years, 3 persons; 11–15 years, 2 persons; 16–21 years, 5 persons; (total minors: 15 persons); 22–25 years, 12 persons; 26–30 years, 6 persons; 31–35 years, 4 persons; 36–40 years, 5 persons; 41–45 years, 5 persons; 46–50 years, 6 persons; 51–55 years, 4 persons; 56–60 years, 1 person; 61–63 years (maximum age of applicants), 3 persons. Ac-cumulated for the years 1938 to 1945, the age group up to 50 thus included 86 percent of the applicants in Berlin; in the summer of 1939, the same age group comprised only 48 percent of all Jews in the
   Altreich
   . See “Zur Situation der Juden in Deutschland (Altreich),” world Jewish Congress Paris office, USHMM RG 11.001M.36 (osobyi Archive Moscow 1190–3-7).
   
6. Mischlinge ersten Grades
   , or “Mixed Breeds of the First Degree,” were people with just two Jewish grandparents, also referred to as “half-Jews.”
   
7. From the Berlin case files, it is not clear how many
   Volljuden
   were among the applicants; the available data suggest a ratio of roughly 20 percent. The 66 cases in Hamburg investigated by Beate Meyer produced 54 positive verdicts, including 10
   Volljuden
   (Meyer,
   Jüdische Mischlinge
   , 114–115, 463). This high success rate could be the result of selective destruction of justice files after the war.
   
8. “Richterbrief Nr. 5,” 1 February1943, in
   Richterbriefe. Dokumente zur Beeinflus-sung der deutschen Rechtssprechung 1942–1944
   , ed. Heinz Boberach (Boppard: Boldt, 1975), 78.
   
9. See Annegret kiefer,
   Das Problem einer “jüdischen Rasse.” Eine Diskussion zwischen Wissenschaft und Ideologie, 1870–1930
   (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991); for the inner-Jewish discourse on this issue, see John M. efron,
   Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in fin-de-siecle Europe
   (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
   
10. otto Reche, “Der wert des Abstammungsnachweises für die richterliche Praxis. eine amtliche Stellungnahme des rassenpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP,”
    Deutsches Recht
    9 (1939): 1606–1612 (quotation on 1610).
    
11. “Meldungen aus dem Reich,” 10 August (Nr. 307), 25 September 1942 (Nr. 321), BArch: R 58/174, 175; printed in Heinz Boberach, ed.,
    Meldungen aus dem Reich 1938–1945. Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS
    (Herrsching: Pawlak, 1984), 4058–4060, 4252–4254. The
    Meldungen
    are the secret “situation reports” of the Security Service (
    Sicherheitsdienst
    ) of the SS, published in seventeen volumes in 1984.
    

43. CdSuSD 4 b (I)a 4647/43 to RJM, 3 May 1944, BArch R 3001/489, 110.

1. In the Berlin sample presented here, the only case is LAB A Rep. 358–02 Nr. 55543.
   
2. LAB A Rep. 358–02 Nr. 59650, 21, 268. Here and subsequently in the text, I anonymized the names of applicants and family members.
   
3. For two cases in my Berlin sample in which “Aryans” were reclassified as
   Mischlinge
   

ersten Grades
, see LAB A Rep. 358–02 Nr. 55000, 55125.

47. LAB A Rep. 358–02 Nr. 55753.

48. LAB A Rep. 358–02 Nr. 55695.

1. Meyer,
   Jüdische Mischlinge
   , 137–143.
   
2. LAB A-Rep. 358–02 no number (90a Hs 506/40). For a similar case see LAB A-Rep. 358–02 Nr. 55922 (90a Hs 171/42).
   

51. LAB A-Rep. 358–02 Nr. 55004.

1. karl Unger to Generalstaatsanwaltschaft Berlin, 19 February 1942; expert opinion by Poliklinik für erb-und Rassenpflege e.V. (Dr. Dubitscher), 30 July 1942; note prosecutor’s office 25 August 1942; Unger to Generalstaatsanwaltschaft, 10 November 1942, LAB A Rep. 358–02, Nr. 61995, 1, 9–14, 17.
   
2. “Charakterologisches Gutachten Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (Leiter Prof. Dr. med. et jur. M.H. Göring),” 1 March 1943, ibid., 25–44. Matthias Göring was a cousin of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and since 1940, president of the German Allgemeinen Ärztlichen Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie. See Brigitte Spillmann, “Die wirklichkeit des Schattens. kritische Überlegungen zu C.G. Jungs Haltung während des Nationalsozialismus und zur Analytischen Psychologie,”
   Analytische Psychologie
   29 (1998): 272–295.
   
3. expert statement Dr. Dubitscher to Generalstaatsanwaltschaft, 29 March 1943, LAB A Rep. 358–02, Nr. 61995, 23–24.
   
4. Decisions Horn, 1 April and 25 June 1943, with copies to Unger, Deutsches Institut; Reichsinstitut (Göring) to Unger, 23 February 1944, with expert opinion by Prof. Dr. Pfahler, Universität Tübingen, 11 December 1943, ibid., 45, 48, 51–52.
   
5. expert advice (“obergutachten”) kwI für Anthropologie, menschliche erblehre und eugenik, 17 July 1944, ibid., no page number.
   
6. Decision Horn, 11 September 1944; verdict Landgericht Berlin, 3 November 1944, ibid., 58–59, 63.
   
7. Statement of Dr. Hinrichs in Case 3 (“Jurists’ case”) at the subsequent US trials at Nuremberg (essner,
   Verwaltung
   , 203); statement by Bernhard Lösener’s colleague in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Culmsee, in Bernhard Lösener, “Als Rassereferent im Reichsministerium des Innern,”
   Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
   9 (1961): 309.
   
8. See Przyrembel,
   Rassenmythos
   , 109–110, 162; Meyer,
   Jüdische Mischlinge
   , 110–114; Schnabel,
   Schatten
   , 4–5, 74–77, 87–88.
   

Chapter Three

J
ew ish
s
e Lf
-h
e LP in

n
azi
G
ermany
, 1933–1939

The Dilemmas of Cooperation

R

Avraham Barkai

The accent on cooperation is almost self-evident for a symposium at the Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies of the University of Vermont. The Center was established to honor Raul Hilberg, one of the earliest and most outstanding scholars of the Holocaust. In his opus magnum of 1961, as well as in its revised and enlarged later editions, Hilberg describes the role of Jewish leadership, including that occurring in prewar Germany, in quite critical terms. He carefully traces the central body of Jewish leadership in Germany and its changing structure and functions between 1933 and 1939, as it changed from a freely established and generally respected Jewish representation, the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews), to become the mandatory association of all persons who were regarded as Jews by the definitions of the Nuremberg Race Laws, the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany), which was created and controlled by the Gestapo.
¹
Hilberg concludes:

The Germans had not created the Reichsvereinigung, and they had not appointed its leaders. Rabbi Leo Baeck, Dr. otto Hirsch, Direktor Heinrich Stahl, and all the others
were
the Jewish leaders. Because these men were not puppets, they retained their status and identity in the Jewish community throughout their participation in the process of destruction, and because they did not lessen their diligence, they contributed the same ability that they had once

marshaled for Jewish well-being to assist their German supervisors in operations that had become lethal. The Reichsvereinigung . . . was the prototype of an institution—the Jewish Council—that was to appear in Poland and other occupied countries, and that was to be employed in activities resulting in disaster.
²

In fact, most of the men and women of the Reichsvereinigung were convinced, in my opinion rightly so, that they still worked for the sub-sistence of the Jews who remained in Germany before the start of the deportations, at a level of life that was little more than wretched, and that they tried to lessen the misery of the deportees afterwards.

It was Hannah Arendt, however, and not Raul Hilberg himself, who derived from his work “the whole truth that, if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.”
³
of course, nobody can be blamed for the way in which his or her work is used by others. Still, Hilberg’s unsympathetic attitude, to say the leastótoward the Jewish Councils, starting not only with the Reichsvereinigung, but also with its predecessor, the Reichsvertretung and Rabbi Leo Baeck, who stood at the head of both organizations, is undeniable. I do not know if Hilberg ever softened his judgment. He may have been convinced to do so by a host of later publications based on internal Jew-ish sources. However, our evaluation of the various Jewish leaderships under Nazi rule has today generally become far subtler than, in comparison, the harsh judgment that was implied in the term “Judenrat,” which was invented by the Nazis. we have learned to refine the distinction between cooperation and collaboration postulated by Isaiah Trunk in his classic book on the subject published in 1972.
⁴

Since I began working in the field of Holocaust Studies, I have sought primarily to understand the Jews and their communities dur-ing the period of their persecution and destruction, rather than focus on the perpetrators. Relying as much as possible on the saved original sources of Jewish provenance, I have tried to explore Jewish life during those horrible times, rather than focus on the fate of Jews as victims, to find out how they coped for as long as they possibly could with the changing conditions and stages of persecution as individuals and as an organized community.
⁵
what I learned from this “paper trail” and from postwar testimonies has led me to conclude that as long as Jews were allowed to live, cooperation with the ruling powers was unavoidable everywhere, and continued up until the bitter end. In Germany,

it naturally lasted the longest and, at least until 1937–1938, Jews had more freedom of decision and room for maneuver than was possible lat-er during the war and in the occupied countries. Therefore, the changing patterns of organized cooperation are probably easier to distinguish in the actions of the Jews in Germany than in other countries.

The Framework of Jewish Self-Help