Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (25 page)

Individual acts of solidarity and support occurred with public ges-tures of compassion and regret, consternation, and indignation. The National Socialists castigated such people as
Judenfreunde,
“friends of Jews.” Their number is not known. There are also no statistics to disclose the number of courageous women and men who attempted to save Jews. Risking their own lives and acting in secret, these people encountered tremendous difficulties in the face of limited resources and the hostility displayed by neighbors. By the year 2000, Yad Vashem, Is-rael’s “Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority,” found no more than 342 Germans who, after lengthy and thorough investigation, were honored as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
¹²
Clearly, the num-ber of “Righteous Germans” must have been much higher. Between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews were in hidden in Germany; between 3,000 and 5,000 survived, and 1,403 resurfaced in Berlin. The Berlin-based Center for Research on AntiSemitism conducted a large-scale research project on Jewish survival underground. Based on the findings, wolfgang Benz estimates that twenty rescuers and accomplices (
Mitwisser
) were required to secure the “illegal” existence of one Jew.
¹³
If this assumption is correct, then more than 200,000 “ordinary” Germans must have been involved in the rescue of Jews.

The vast majority of Germans responded to the persecution of the Jews with indifference, large sections even responded with approval. when exclusion, expropriation, and expulsion took place in full public view, they did not trigger any spontaneous and massive protests. on the contrary, the National Socialists could rely on a broad anti-Jewish consensus in the population.
¹⁴
Combined with the support of the rul-ing elites, it enabled and encouraged them to gradually implement the program of the “final solution.” The strongest form of public protest found its expression in a late, spectacular demonstration. In February 1943, in the Rosenstrasse in Berlin, a group of German women succeeded in securing the release of their Jewish husbands who had been rounded up as forced laborers in the course of the
Fabrik-Aktion
.
¹⁵
The successful outcome of this late protest suggests that if similar actions at an earlier stage had been carried out throughout Germany, they might have halted the increasingly destructive course of the German anti-Jewish policy.

Nazi persecution and social behavior succeeded in transforming Jews into targets for annihilation well before the regime’s
Judenpolitik
reached the stage of genocide. Indeed, some 10,000 had decided to take their own lives, as suicide became for some the ultimate refuge, an act of both despair and defiance.
¹⁶
Marion kaplan argues: “The social death of Jews and German indifference to their increasingly hor-rific plight were absolute prerequisites for the ‘final solution.’”
¹⁷
Indeed, greatly reduced in numbers and with a preponderance of older people, separated from their families and without neighbors, stripped of all rights and pauperized, undernourished, and exhausted, conscripted into forced labor and denied freedom of movement, herded together in segregated living quarters and marked with the yellow star, the Jews trapped in Germany had become on the eve of deportation a pariah caste that society saw only as a burden and that the Nazi state could dispose of as it saw fit. Public silence reigned virtually undisturbed as 134,000 German Jews were taken from their final living quarters and loaded onto trains that would take them to the extermination sites.
Judenhäuser, Judensiedlungen
, and
Juden-Sammelstellen
(Jews’ collection points) were the last stages for Jews in Germany before death.

German Jews knew of these practices only through history. when, in the eighteenth century, enlightened rulers had lifted the medieval restrictions on housing and movement, on dress and professions, Jews hastened to enter the gentile world, quickly leaving behind their
Ghettokultur
(ghetto culture) and
Ghettomentalität
(ghetto mentality). Many responded with anger or ridicule, especially in the “golden age” of their German-Jewish
Lebensgemeinschaft
during the wilhelmine empire and weimar Republic, when both non-Jews and fellow Jews reminded them of their former ghetto existence. Migration movements had changed the landscape of their residential areas.
¹⁸
Many Jews had moved from rural areas to the cities, a trend which decreased the number of small Jewish communities and increased the concentration in cities and in certain urban districts. This trend intensified after 1933. In the face of open hostility, numerous rural Jews left their homes, either emigrating or moving into major centers and seeking Jewish companionship and assistance.
¹⁹
In 1933, some 525,000 Jews lived in Germany, spread over 2,000 towns of different sizes, and belonging to more than 1,600 official Jewish communities. More than half resided in ten major cities with populations over 100,000.
²⁰
one in five still lived in a rural setting. By 1937, when the number of Jewish communities had decreased to 1,349, 85 percent of all Jews belonged to fifty-two of them.

Long before the National Socialists took power, race fanatics had demanded that Jews once again be confined to ghettos and be stigmatized with special badges. Such calls continued after 1933, when the first steps were taken to exclude Jews from social life and to dissolve personal relationships between Jews and Germans. In the face of growing hostility and in a period of acute housing shortage, Jews encountered difficulty in finding rental accommodation. Housing cooperatives pressured Jewish members to sell their row houses or apartments.
²¹
After the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935, they were expelled from large municipal housing estates. In early 1938, the racial state saw no further need to support Jews with rental assistance.
²²
In Berlin, a large low-rent housing company ordered the registration of all of its Jewish tenants and terminated most of their leases.
²³
economic hardship forced many Jews to leave their spacious dwellings and to search for smaller, less expensive apartments. Some families were constantly on the move, openly harassed or chased away from their current lodg-ing. In many places, landlords were unwilling to sign leases with Jews or were eager to terminate their rental contracts. The landlords could rely on local courts, which “interpreted the tenant protection law of the weimar Republic
against
Jewish tenants or even declared [it] invalid for them.”
²⁴
At a grassroots level, a bombardment of anti-Jewish symbols and attacks targeted the Jews, as Jürgen Matthäus has shown, for their economic, legal, and social stigmatization.
²⁵
Towns and villages set up signposts with inscriptions “
Juden unerwünscht
” (Jews not welcome!), or placed signs on benches or at the entrance to swimming pools or other public venues, with the slogan “only for Aryans!” Seaside resorts, following the traditional pattern of
Bäder
antiSemitism, banned the entry of Jews.
²⁶

Brochures attracted visitors with the owners’ claims of recreational areas already “free of Jews.” In many places, Nazis staged noisy demonstrations in front of Jewish homes and shops demanding the departure of the inhabitants or owners. “
Juden raus!
” (Jews out!) was a popular slogan that called for their expulsion. “
Juda verrecke!
” (death to the Jews!) indicated the aim of the murderous campaign. Texts, photo-graphic images, and caricatures displayed on billboards, posters, and, in
Stürmer-Kästen,
the showcases of the
Stürmer
weekly, disseminated this anti-Semitic symbolism. Jews and their
Judenfreunde
(non-Jewish friends) were pilloried to punish and degrade them, and to deter neighbors from maintaining contact with them. Together with the flood of anti-Jewish pamphlets and speeches, this anti-Semitic violence isolated, dehumanized, and demonized the Jew and created the image of a
Volksfeind
(enemy of the people), a
Rassenfeind
(enemy of the [“Aryan”] race) who, as the
Todfeind
(mortal enemy) of the German people and of the “Aryan” master race, had to be eliminated.

The
Anschluss
of Austria in March 1938 formed the prelude to the expulsion of Jews from their homes and apartments. The strategic plan-ners of the “final solution” designed a ”Viennese Model” that acceler-ated the exclusion, expropriation, and expulsion of the Jews.
²⁷
“Boot the Jews out of the good cheap apartments!” This was only one of the popular slogans heralding the beginning of the exclusion of Jews from the housing market in the Greater German Reich.
²⁸
within a short period of time, thousands of Jews were evicted and herded together in temporary housing estates. Barrack camps, classified as
Arbeitslager
or
Selbsterhaltungslager
(workcamps or self-maintenance camps), sprang up like mushrooms, incarcerating the first Jews conscripted to forced labor.
²⁹
In some places, Jewish families were taken from their homes and escorted to railway stations to be dumped across the Reich border. This procedure soon became standard practice. In a strategy paper, “Treatment of Jews in Berlin,” compiled by the Gestapo in May 1938 and presented to Joseph Goebbels,
³⁰
the issues of stigmatization and ghettoization were addressed. The Gestapo officials favored the idea of marking Jews as a “desirable,” even “absolutely necessary,” step for the implementation of “certain measures.” Less optimistic were the views on ghettos. Under the heading
Zuzug,
referring to the arrival and settlement of Jews in Berlin
,
the introduction of police permits was suggested in order to regulate and restrict the numbers of unwanted Jews. Permission was restricted to those preparing for their emigration, since those people needed only a temporary residence permit.
³¹

The establishment of ghettos was regarded at that point as “imprac-tical.” Police permits, however, could be used to prevent Jews from tak-ing up residence in certain districts. It was hoped that, in the long term, through this exclusion and the concentration of Jews in other districts, a “kind of ghetto” would be created, a ghetto incarcerating those who were unwilling or unable to emigrate.

Besides the “experts” in Jewish matters in the SS
,
other Nazi leaders quickly emerged as key players in destroying the cohabitation of Germans and Jews. Albert Speer played a pivotal role in this process. Installed by Hitler as General Building Inspector, he was entrusted with the mammoth task of redeveloping Berlin as
Germania,
the future metropolis of the Great Germanic empire that was to be
judenfrei
.
³²
In September 1938, he presented his plan for a
Judensiedlung
to be built on the outskirts of Berlin. The project foresaw the construction of 2,700
Kleinwohnungen
(
small dwellings) to accommodate Jewish families. The intent of the project was to evict these families from 2,500
Grosswohnungen
(large dwellings) located in the city center and on prime real estate. Speer hoped to gain economic advantages from the “exchange” (
Austausch
), the removal and relocation of Jews, both in the housing market, and in the acquisition of open space for his city planning. The project failed. The events of the November pogrom offered him and his staff new possibilities in the appropriation of Jewish homes. The end of November 1938 saw not only the establishment of the right of first refusal in the selling of the properties, but also the decision about which Jewish properties were to be leased and which were to be sublet.
³³
Speer wasted no time using this authorization and, in a number of
Grossaktionen
(major campaigns), acted promptly to drive the Berlin Jews from their properties. All of the personal information recorded—the names and addresses of the evicted, who were now placed in
Judenhäuser
—was handed over to the Gestapo for rapid “round ups” and later for “resettlement” in the east.