Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (24 page)

1. 1. See for example
      Der Schild,
      1 June 1934.
      
   2. CZA: AI42/47/7, “Zionisten und RjF, insbesondere ihre Mitarbeit in der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden,” von Leo Löwenstein, 23 July 1934.
      
   3. See Yehoyakim Cochavi, “Georg kareski’s Nomination as Head of the kulturbund. The Gestapo’s First Attempt—and Last Failure—to Impose a Jewish Leadership,”
      Leo Baeck Institute Year Book
      xxxIV(1989): 227–246; Herbert S. Levine, “A Jew-ish Collaborator in Nazi Germany. The Strange Career of Georg kareski, 1933– 1937,”
      Central European History
      8 (1975), 251–281; and Nicosia, “Revisionist Zionism II,” 231–267.
      
   4. CZA: AI42/47/7, ZVfD Berlin (Meyer) to die Zionistischen ortsgruppen und Vertrauensleute, 26 July 1934.
      
   5. See for example CZA: F4/1o0, württembergisches Innenministerium und württembergische Politische Polizei to das Reichsministerium des Innern, Nr. 3/1376/33a, 4 September 1933.
      
   6. See for example CZA: S7/93, Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland to die Zionistischen ortsgruppen und Vertrauensleute, 24 october 1933.
      
   7. CZA: Ll3/138, Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland to die Zionistischen ortsgruppen und Vertrauensleute, 8 February 1934.
      
   8. CZA: A222/98, Robert weltsch, Berlin kurt Blumenfeld, Jerusalem, 6 December 1935.
      
   9. CZA: S7/689, Martin Rosenblüth, Berlin to werner Senator, London, 6 May 1938.
      
   10. CZA: S7/902, Benno Cohn, Berlin to Georg Landauer, Jerusalem, 22 November 1938.
       
   11. CZA: S7/493, Martin Rosenblüth, London to Nahum Goldmann, Paris, 6 october 1936.
       
   12. See Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich (IfZ): Beweisdokumente, eichmannproz-ess, No. 742, interview with Dr. kurt Jacob Ball-kaduri by Hans Friedenthal, March 1957.
       
   13. CZA: S5/2194, ZVfD to die executive der Jewish Agency for Palestine, Jerusalem, 13 october 1936.
       
   14. CZA: S5/432, Franz Meyer, Berlin to das Büro der exekutive der Jewish Agency for Palestine, London, 13 July 1938.
       
   15. CZA: S5/432, Franz Meyer, Berlin to die Jewish Agency for Palestine, London, 29 July 1938.
       
   16. See Salomon Adler-Rudel,
       Jüdische Selbsthilfe unter dem Nazi-Regime 1933–1939.
       

       1m Spiegel der Berichte der Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland
       (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1974), 177ff. See in particular the memorandum from the Reichsvertretung to Hans Heinrich Lammers, the State Secretary in the Reich Chancel-lory, of January 1934 in which the disastrous economic consequences of unemployment and loss of livelihood among Jews is described. The memorandum is reprinted Adler-Rudel,
       Jüdische Selbsthilfe
       , 188–191.
       

   17. CZA: S7/93, Michael Traub, z. Zt. Paris to Martin Rosenblüth, London, 21 october 1933.
       
   18. CZA: S7/357, Aufzeichnung von S. Adler-Rudel, z.Zt. in Genf über die Lage der Juden in Deutschland, 29 November 1935.
       
   19. CZA: S 7 /689, Benno Cohn, Berlin to Georg Landauer, Jerusalem, 3 August 1938.
       
   20. CZA: S7–902, Georg Landauer, Berlin to Arthur Ruppin, Jerusalem, 17 February 1939.
       
   21. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin (hereafter PA): Ref. D., P05 Ne adh 6, Nr. 4, Bd. 2, “Zusätzliche Bemerkungen zur deutschen Judenfrage,” 13 September 1933.
       

       

   22. PA: Inland II A/B, 83–21, Bd.1, “Äusserung der Zionistischen Vereinigung für Deutschland zur Stellung der Juden im neuen deutschen Staat,” Berlin, 21 June 1933.
       
   23. Large,
       Berlin
       , 289–290.
       
   24. CZA: S7–93, eliezer Liebenstein to Georg Landauer, 7 November 1933.
       
   25. See BArch: R8150, 31, Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, organisation Auswanderung 1933 bis 1941, 8.
       
   26. osobyi Special Archive, Moscow (osb): 713–1-32. ZVfD/Berlin to die Zionistischen Vereinigungen und Arbeitsgemeinschaften und to die Mitglieder des Landesvorstandes der ZVfD, 21 February 1938.
       

Chapter Five

w
ithout
n
eiGhBors

Daily Living in
Judenhäuser
¹

Konrad Kwiet

Neighbors in the Polish village of Jedwabne slaughtered hundreds of Jews in July 1941 before Nazi killers arrived to wipe out the Jewish community.
²
Such neighbors did not exist in Germany, not even in November 1938, when the inflamed “wrath of the people” vented itself in a bloody pogrom commonly known as
Reichskristallnacht
(Reich Crystal Night, or Night of Broken Glass). while some neighbors criticized the destruction of property or complained about “illegal” excesses, only a few had the courage or inclination to support or help the persecuted.

In 1933, the new Nazi racial state had entrusted officials with the task of carrying out its
Judenpolitik
, the anti-Jewish policy designed to remove the Jews from Germany once and for all. As early as 1919, Adolf Hitler, entering the world of politics in Munich, had prophesied that the final aim of his anti-Jewish policy would first lead to the revocation of Jewish emancipation and then to an “uncompromising removal” (
Entfernung
) of all Jews from Germany.
³
within the vocabulary of the Nazis,
Entfernung
and
Entjudung
(de-Jewification) were identical, with several meanings, each of which later defined the stages of a gradual process of persecution. “ordinary” Germans were invited to participate in and profit from the exclusion, expropriation, and expulsion of the unwanted Jews, especially from the “Aryanization” or robbery of Jewish property. As Frank Bajohr points out, it was an enterprise that “developed into the single greatest exchange of property in modern German history.”
⁴

This essay explores the termination of the cohabitation of Germans and Jews, and sheds light on Jewish daily life in segregated living quarters. The physical segregation of Germans and Jews, a crucial element in the program of the “final solution,” did not require the establishment of ghettos. I will argue that as the German Jews were to be expelled as quickly as possible, there was no need to relocate them into ghettos that had been set up and guarded in districts of German cities and towns, or on their outskirts. Moreover, as they were already living without neighbors, there was no need to confine them behind walls. A
de facto
ghettoization, in fact, did take place, forcing the Jews to live, using the term coined by Avraham Barkai, in a
mauerlosen Ghetto
,
⁵
a ghetto without walls, until they were called up for deportation. In his classic study
Nazi Germany and the Jews,
Saul Friedländer also refers to “the New Ghetto” when shedding light on the early years of persecution.
⁶
The creation of
Judenhäuser
(Jews’ Houses) and
Judensiedlungen
(Jews’ Settlements) served as preparatory or transi-tional measures toward expulsion, deportation, and murder. Together with two other historical models
—Judenbann
(ostracism of Jews) and
Judenstern
(Jews’ star)—once imposed upon pre-emancipation Jewry, and the introduction of forced labor, the
Judenhäuser
radicalized the anti-Jewish policy by accelerating and achieving complete isolation and de-personalization, concentration, and control of the Jews. Some German Jews had experienced the feeling of living without neighbors at an early stage: That we live in the ghetto now begins to penetrate our consciousness. This ghetto clearly differs in many ways, in terms of what is still to happen and what is reality, from what we understood up till now . . . The ghetto is no longer a geographically defined district, at least not in the medieval sense. The ghetto is the “world.” It has no visible sign. The sign is: being neighborless. This is the fate of the Jews: to be neighborless. Perhaps this happens only once in the world, and who knows how long it must be endured: life without neighbors.
⁷

That was the message Rabbi Joachim Prinz of Berlin disseminated in April 1935, two years after the National Socialists had assumed power and terminated the German-Jewish
Lebensgemeinschaft
(coexistence). Seven months later, the rabbi raised his voice again. Responding to the Nuremberg Race Laws sanctioning the
reinliche Scheidung
, the clear parting of the ways, of Germans and Jews, he proclaimed: “The new ghetto is a life within four walls . . . It is a life without material things, without any echo, without ‘life.’”
⁸
The spiritual caretaker and communal leader of the Berlin community sought refuge in the US, the “new world” for Jews, the “Golden Medina.”

Initially, German Jews discussed at length the alternatives of home and exile, whether to stay or to leave.
⁹
A minority left at once: those in danger for political reasons, Zionists, and those driven out of their professions. The majority decided to stay and to adapt to the racial state. The title of Marion kaplan’s classic study,
Between Dignity and Despair
,
¹⁰
typifies Jewish life in Nazi Germany. It took a direct threat to their lives to make most German Jews realize that their ties to Germany could no longer be maintained. The November pogrom in 1938 deeply seared their consciousness and memory. Most Jews gave up the notion that they still had any right to domicile in Germany and abandoned any hope for better times, for the rapid return of democracy, and for their German-Jewish
Lebensgemeinschaft.
Panic ensued, causing mass flight.

By the autumn of 1941, almost 300,000 Jews had escaped Nazi terror, two-thirds of the Jewish population of 1933. Most of the Jews trapped in Germany still intended to leave, and desperately waited, hoping for the arrival of life-saving landing permits and visas. Thousands of applications lay unprocessed on desks in London, washington or other cities in the “free world” that had already closed their doors to immigrants. The assumption, or the old accusation, that German Jews felt unable to bid farewell to a country that they and their ancestors had lived in for generations and where they had felt at home, falls into the realm of historical legend.

The neighbors to whom Joachim Prinz referred in 1933 played their part in the program of the “final solution,” at all stages, at different lev-els, and with an array of motivations. The perpetrators who performed relevant functions within the Nazi machinery of destruction, as a rule with great efficiency, came from all strata of society. Next to the architects and executors of the anti-Jewish policy, representing state, party, the SS, and other institutions, stood the large cohort of
Volksgenossen
(national comrades), who gave vent to their Jew-hatred in public. Their aggression manifested itself in a series of assaults and attacks, as well as in widespread denunciations. The wave of denunciations reached a peak twice—first after the November pogrom, and then at the beginning of the deportations when Jews attempted to escape by going underground. House and block wardens, shopkeepers and passersby in general, and neighbors in particular, hastened to denounce Jews as
Volksfeinde
(enemies of the people). once the race war was unleashed in September 1939, an army of officials embarked on their journeys
zum auswärtigen Einsatz
(for deployment abroad). Many of them carried, along with their campaign kit, not only a predisposition to racial ideology, but also first-hand experience gained in the exclusion, expropriation, and expulsion of German and Austrian Jews. Both elements encouraged and assisted them in implementing, beginning in 1941, the “final solution” in conquered territories. It occasionally happened that Nazi killers met German and Austrian Jews in ghettos, at killing pits, or in camps, and remembered that they had once lived with them in the same neighborhoods and had grown up together. when in June 1941, in the Lithuanian border village of Garsden, 201 Jews were shot by a mobile killing unit sent from nearby Memel, one victim, a Jewish refugee, recognized a marksman. Before he was shot, he addressed his former friend and neighbor: “
Gustav, schiess gut
!”
¹¹
The man’s marks-manship was poor. other policemen had to step in and finish off the former Memel neighbor.