Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (3 page)

Increased pressure on the Jews in Germany continued through 1938 in the form of arrests, with many sent to concentration camps at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. In october, the SS deported approximately 18,000 Polish Jews who had been living in Germany, even as the anti-Semitic government of Poland tried to block their return.
¹⁷
on the night of 9–10 November 1938, in response to the murder in Paris of a junior Nazi diplomat, ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jewish student from Poland, the regime unleashed the infamous
Kristallnacht
pogrom against the Jewish community throughout Germany.
¹⁸
The Jews were made liable for all of the damage that resulted from the pogrom as the regime imposed a one billion Mark fine on the Jewish community. The aftermath of
Kristallnacht
brought an acceleration of anti-Jewish measures in late 1938 and 1939, as Germany moved closer to war. Jewish communities lost their official status as corporations under public law,
¹⁹
most official Jewish organizations were dissolved, and Jewish newspapers, with few exceptions, were banned. Although religious and cultural organizations were still permitted on a private basis, the Reichsvertretung der Juden in

Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany), established officially in September 1933 as the representative of the major Jewish organizations vis-à-vis the Nazi state, was abolished. In February 1939, it was replaced with the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany), a single body representing all German Jews under the firm control of the SS.
²⁰
Its primary functions were the administration of Jewish welfare efforts and the coordination of an all-out, SS-directed, Jewish push for emigration from Germany.

For Hitler’s regime, the primary purpose of all of these actions was to pressure Jews to leave Germany, without their assets, for destinations preferably outside europe. But the emigration process between 1933 and 1938 was slow and laborious, and did not remove Jews fast enough to satisfy Nazi wishes. During the five years between January 1933 and the beginning of 1938, about 140,000 Jews had emigrated from Germany, and by early 1938, plans were set to annex Austria and, with it, an additional almost 200,000 Austrian Jews. Despite all of the legislation, intimidation, and violence, the emigration process remained essentially voluntary, dependent on the willingness of Jews to leave and the willingness of other countries to accept them. During the 1930s, however, potential receiver countries were reluctant to admit immigrants, particularly those with little or no money. Most of an emigrant’s property was declared “non-transferable” and was confiscated by the state when she or he left Germany.
²¹

Nazi authorities were impressed with the brutal efficiency of the new “emigration” procedures established in Vienna by Adolf eichmann and the SS after the annexation of Austria in March 1938, a process that is perhaps better described as “deportation.”
²²
As a result, those methods were adopted for the rest of Germany with the establishment, in January 1939 in Berlin, of the “Reich Central office for Jewish emigration.”
²³
Under Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, its task was to centralize the entire apparatus of Jewish emigration, including the Reichsvereinigung, under the firm control of the SS and to implement throughout Germany the forced emigration procedures that eichmann had perfected in Vienna. But by 1941, these measures too were rendered irrelevant by Germany’s conquest of most of europe and upwards of nine million Jews. emigration, no longer an effective mechanism for the elimination of Jewish life from German “living space,” was replaced by systematic mass murder of all of the Jews in europe.

In all of this, many German Jews, particularly older people, still found it difficult to contemplate or start the process of emigration from

their native Germany.
²⁴
As loyal and patriotic Germans, mostly integrated into German life by 1933, they found it difficult to imagine living elsewhere. emigration for them posed its own set of dilemmas at that time, and they opted for different responses to the harsh conditions around them.

The Jewish community in Germany was as varied as any in eu-rope during the early decades of the twentieth century. A relatively small group, from orthodox religious to secular Zionists, identified themselves primarily, culturally and/or religiously, as Jews. Those in another minority viewed themselves strictly as Germans, families that had long since converted to Christianity, married Aryan Germans, or were simply secular or atheist citizens with no religious or cultural identity or affiliations as Jews. Most German Jews, on the other hand, were entirely secular and identified themselves as Germans by nationality and culture, while retaining some cultural and/or religious ties to their Jewish heritage and community as “German citizens of the Jew-ish faith.”
²⁵
Some were able to emigrate, some tried but were unable to find countries that would take them; and some survived in Germany by manipulating the often jumbled confusion of Nazi racial categoriza-tion and legislation. others hid with or were otherwise protected by friends, or were able to pass as Aryans, while some adapted in some way to the process of Nazi persecution. About 140,000 German Jews from within the Reich’s pre-March 1938 borders ultimately perished in the “final solution.”
²⁶

Regardless of whether one belonged to any of these or other “categories” in the Third Reich, virtually all were classified as Jews after 1933 and forced to confront difficult, even life and death choices about the future. what were some of those dilemmas, and what were some of the choices made by ordinary German Jews as they confronted those dilemmas? Marion kaplan’s essay “Changing Roles in Jewish Families” looks at the impact of Nazi brutality on the traditional dynamics of gender and age in German-Jewish families. She examines the changing role of women in the family, both economically and publicly, when the men lost their jobs and careers, and their positions in public life outside of the family. Children, moreover, often differed with their parents on how to respond to the developing crisis. Adolescents and young adults not yet finished with their education or established in careers were naturally more inclined to consider emigration, while grandparents and sometimes even parents often had to be left behind. Families that in ordinary times would

have remained in close contact were forced to break up so that some might be saved.

In his essay “evading Persecution: German-Jewish Behavior Patterns after 1933,” Jürgen Matthäus considers the complicated survival tactic of “evasion by compliance” as part of the spectrum of Jewish behavior during the Nazi years. This involved using the Nazi system of racial classification and family law, a reality with which all Germans in theory were required to comply, to legally deny the stigma of being classified as a Jew, and thus undermine the basis of Nazi Jewish policy, namely, the definition of who was a Jew. Matthäus brings to light the efforts of Jews who used the system and risked the necessary legal steps to secure their own racial reclassification by posing as “Aryans,”
Mischlinge
, or “privileged” Jews, in order to avoid “social death” prior to 1941 or “their physical annihilation” thereafter. The system did potentially threaten Nazi efforts to establish a “racially pure” state by permitting Germans of Jewish ancestry to infiltrate the
Volksgemeinschaft
via successful reclassification applications. However, Matthäus keeps his focus on the efforts of the relatively few who were in a position to risk contesting their racial classification through established legal channels as they sought to conceal their Jewish ancestry.

Avraham Barkai’s contribution, “Jewish Self-Help in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939: The Dilemmas of Cooperation,” addresses one of the most sensitive and highly debated aspects of the larger question of Jewish responses to Nazi persecution, namely, the behavior of Jewish leaders in their dealings with the Nazi state. During the 1930s, did Jewish leaders in Germany have any alternatives to cooperating with Nazi officials in the process of reversing Jewish emancipation and assimilation, and pushing Jews to emigrate? Here one confronts perhaps the most fundamental dilemma faced by German Jews, namely, the necessity of working with the Nazis to achieve an outcome that was both undesirable yet tolerable given the alternatives. Barkai’s focus is on the Zionists and their efforts to achieve what they had always sought to achieve, namely, an orderly and economically viable emigration of Ger-man Jews from Germany to Palestine. And this required a working relationship with the German state, both before 1933 and after the Nazis assumed power. He recognizes the dilemmas of cooperation with the perpetrators, and the fact that there were no doubt instances when cooperation “indeed turned into condemnable collaboration.” But he also recognizes the inevitable “pitfalls of historical hindsight” when making

judgments about the victims and their responses to the dilemmas they faced “under extremely inhuman and desperate conditions.”

Francis Nicosia’s “German Zionism and Jewish Life in Nazi Ber-lin” follows Avraham Barkai’s analysis of German Zionist leaders and their relationship with the Nazi state, with an examination of the ways they sought to transform the political and cultural life of Berlin Jews between 1933 and 1941. Both as a traditional and comprehensive response to antiSemitism in Germany, as well as an immediate political and institutional response to multi-faceted Nazi persecution after 1933, the Zionists hoped to be able to transform German-Jewish culture in preparation for an orderly and economically viable immigration to Palestine. Much of this effort was focused on Berlin, where Jewish organizations and a third of the German-Jewish population were concentrated, and on Jewish youths, the age group that had traditionally been most responsive to the Zionist message and program. In education and occupational training and retraining in particular, the Zionist movement quickly became a dominant force among Jews in Berlin in its efforts to transform the ethos of Jewish life in Berlin. But, in the end, and in spite of dramatic achievements among German-Jewish youths in Berlin and throughout the Reich, Zionist efforts soon unraveled into a scramble to secure the departure of as many Jews as possible from Berlin and the rest of Germany, as quickly as possible, regardless of their individual identities, cultural inclinations, or their commitment to Zionism and Palestine. By the outbreak of war in 1939, Nicosia concludes, the idea of rescue had replaced the ambitious goal of reeducation and orderly emigration as the imperative in the efforts of the Zionist leadership in Berlin.

In his essay “without Neighbors: Daily Living in
Judenhäuser
,”

konrad kwiet examines those German Jews who were made homeless in Nazi Germany and were unable to emigrate after the outbreak of war in 1939. In the case of these victims, it was not a matter of facing dilemmas in making decisions about how to survive; rather, it was merely following what for them had become their only option. In describing the
Judenhäuser
(Jewish houses) and
Judensiedlungen
(Jewish settlements) in Germany
,
kwiet likens the fate of the German Jews who inhabited these places inside Germany to that of Jews in the ghettos and extermination camps in the east. They were designed to separate Jews by placing them temporarily “into a new ‘Jewish’ place, a segregated Jew-ish living quarter.” Comparing the
Judenhäuser
to the ghettos that the Nazis created in occupied eastern europe, kwiet emphasizes that they

were meant to absorb large numbers of impoverished and unemployed German Jews who would be used as forced laborers in the Nazi war economy. In likening this wartime reality for some Jews in Germany to the ghetto system established for Jews in the east, kwiet defines them as “self-contained units, separated from the main body of workers.” And, like the Jews in the ghettos in Poland, the liquidation of
Judenhäuser
and
Judensiedlungen
began when the decision was made to murder their inhabitants. These German Jews shared the fate of Jews in the east, kwiet observes, and concludes that, “within the Nazi system, based on racial hatred and mass murder, ghettoization and forced labor were only steps along the path to genocide.”

Returning to the issues raised by Avraham Barkai, Beate Meyer’s contribution, “Between Self-Assertion and Forced Collaboration: The Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939–1945,” examines the motivations and strategies of Jewish leaders who assumed the responsibility of working with the regime during the war years and the implementation of the “final solution.” She takes issue with earlier assertions that a sense of responsibility, a high degree of self-confidence, and irresistible Nazi coercion explained the motivations and actions of German-Jewish leaders. Meyer uses the example of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland and its leadership, which was established in February 1939 as a body representing all Jews remaining in Germany and through which the regime might better force Jews to do what it expected of them. Since many of those leaders were professionals who held high positions in the German bureaucracy before 1933, they followed a more traditional style of governing with rules that they believed “would act as a counterweight to arbitrariness, violence, and murder.” It did not occur to them, Meyer argues, that such methods not only would not preclude mass murder, but might in fact enhance its implementation. She concludes that preserving a Jewish administration in the Reichsvereinigung that followed the old rules “proved to be a pitifully helpless strategy for averting what Dan Diner has termed the ‘rupture of civilization.’”