Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (31 page)

1. Martin Riesenburger,
   Das Licht verlöschte nicht. Ein Zeugnis aus der Nacht des Fas-chismus
   , ed. Andreas Nachama and Hermann Simon (Berlin: edition Hentrich, 2003), 58.
   
2. Quoted from Monika Richarz, ed.,
   Jewish Life in Germany. Memoirs from Three Centuries
   (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 471.
   

86. Ibid., 155.

1. See konrad kwiet and Helmut eschwege,
   Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand. Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschenwürde 1933–1945
   (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 1986). on the latest stage of research see Arnold Paucker,
   Ger-man Jews in the Resistance 1933–1945. The Facts and the Problems
   (Berlin: Gedenk-stätte deutscher widerstand, 2005).
   
2. See elisa klapheck,
   Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas. The Story of the First Woman Rabbi
   (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).
   
3. Riesenburger,
   Und das Licht verlöschte nicht
   , 67.
   
4. Hans Lamm,
   Von Juden in München, ein Gedenkbuch
   (Munich: Ner-Tamid-Verlag, 1959), 385f.
   
5. Apart from H.G. Adler’s monumental study on the deportation of German Jews,
   Der verwaltete Mensch
   , see also his earlier book,
   Theresienstadt 1941–1945. Das An-litz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie
   (Tübingen: Mohr/ Siebeck, 1960).
   
6. Gruner, “Lesen brauchen sie nicht zu können,” 306.
   
7. Also the subtitle of his book chapter in Meyer,
   German-Jewish History
   , 334.
   
8. kaplan,
   Between Dignity and Despair
   , esp. 5, 150f.
   
9. See Tim Cole, “Ghettoization,” in Stone,
   The Historiography of the Holocaust
   , 65–87.
   
10. kwiet, “Forced Labour,” 392.
    
11. Interview Beate Meyer with Gunter Demnig, “‘ein Mensch ist erst vergessen, wenn sein Name vergessen ist.’ Die Aktion Stolpersteine,” in Meyer,
    Verfolgung und Ermordung
    , 167–173.
    

    Chapter Six
    

1. B
   et ween
   s
   e Lf
   -a
   ssertion and
   

   f
   orCed
   C
   oLLa Bor ation
   

   The Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939–1945
   

   R
   

   Beate Meyer
   

   In July 1945, the Chief of Police of Greater Berlin dissolved the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany).
   ¹
   Berlin Jews, who had survived the Holocaust, reported to the Soviet occupation authorities and denounced the last head of the organization, walter Lustig, as a Nazi collaborator. Lustig was arrested by Soviet soldiers and killed.
   ²
   In September 1945, the Allied Control Commission outlawed all Nazi organizations, including the Reichsvereinigung.
   ³
   Thus, with the end of the Third Reich, the last remaining Jewish organization in Germany was banned as a Nazi institution.
   

   This ban marked the end of the vicissitudes of German-Jewish organizations in the Nazi state. Various societies, groups, and local Jewish communities (
   Gemeinden
   ) had come together to form the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews) in 1933—changed to the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany) in 1935—and had cooperated in this umbrella organization until 1938. The executive boards and committees of the Reichsvertretung reflected the nature, interests, and goals of the various organizations within German Jewry. This umbrella organization saw itself as representing the interests of the Jews and as serving as a mouthpiece for the entire Jewish community in Germany in its dealings with the Nazi state.
   ⁴
   By the end of 1938, however, the Reichsvertretung was no longer functional because the official Jewish communities (
   Gemeinden
   ) had lost their status as public bodies as they
   

   were forced to become private associations; in the autumn of 1938, the Nazi state formally dissolved the various Jewish organizations that had been members of the Reichsvertretung. Jewish functionaries rushed to establish a successor organization to represent the remaining Jews in Germany, announcing its establishment in February 1939.
   ⁵
   In the same period, the idea that a Jewish organization was an essential element in the implementation of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies had prevailed within the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, or SD) of the SS, the Nazi authority that had taken control of the regime’s Jewish policies in the aftermath of the November 1938 pogrom.
   ⁶
   The result was the establishment of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland in February 1939 and its establishment by law in July of that year.
   ⁷
   Both sides, the SD and the German Jews, expected the Reichsvereinigung to become a useful tool in the promotion of their respective interests.
   

   The organization was directly subordinate to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main office, or RSHA). The Reichssicherheitshauptamt installed the same functionaries that had worked in the Reichsvertretung: Leo Baeck, otto Hirsch, Julius Seligsohn, Paul eppstein, to name just a few. Serving as department heads one step down in the hierarchy were numerous women, such as Martha Mosse, Cora Berliner, Hannah karminski, and Paula Fürst.
   ⁸
   But the apparent similarities between the Reichsvertretung and the Reichsvereinigung concealed a rapid process of transformation that gained momentum in the years that followed.
   ⁹
   Rather than consisting of local Jewish communities and a broad spectrum of Jewish organizations, the members of this new umbrella organization were now individuals who were deemed Jews according to the Nazi regime’s “racial” definition. For them, membership was mandatory. All foundations, associations, and societies, as well as the smaller Jewish communities, lost their independence, were integrated into the Reichsvereinigung, and, most significantly, were forced to relinquish their assets, effectively securing centralized access to this property for the Nazi state. The chief tasks that remained in the domain of the Reichsvereinigung were facilitating emigration and serving the needs of those Jews who remained in Germany, specifically in the spheres of education, vocational training, and public welfare. The organization was by no means free to fulfill these tasks independently, but was instead subject to detailed rules and instructions.
   

   The work of the Reichsvereinigung can be divided into three phases: from 1939 to october 1941, it was involved in the “enforced
   

   emigration” of the Jews from Germany; from october 1941 to June 1943, the Reichsvereinigung increasingly became an instrument of the RSHA and the Gestapo in organizing deportations of German Jews to the east; and in the summer of 1943, upon completion of the deportations, the Reichsvereinigung was officially dissolved, but continued
   de facto
   to exist as it cared for the needs of Jews who were married to non-Jewish partners.
   

   The “Enforced Emigration” (1939–1941)
   

   In the first phase of the life of the Reichsvereinigung, which lasted from 1939 to the fall of 1941, the interests of the Nazi state and those of the Jewish organization coincided in one central aspect, namely, the efforts to facilitate mass Jewish emigration. while the Nazi state plundered the Jews financially, harassed and arrested them, and tormented them in concentration camps, Jewish leaders feverishly sought any legal, as well as—from the perspective of the countries of immigration—illegal means to aid the emigration of Jews from Germany. They appealed to well-to-do emigrants to cover the emigration costs of the less wealthy, to those who had already left for donations from their blocked German bank accounts, and to foreign aid organizations for the payment of ship passages. They informed readers of the
   Jüdische Nachrichtenblatt
   about the few remaining opportunities for asylum in South America, the Caribbean, or Shanghai, when more sought-after countries had stopped admitting refugees. Thus, most of the people who left Germany were either relatively young, affluent, equipped with the necessary language or desirable professional skills, or had relatives abroad. Besides people who chose not to emigrate for political or emotional reasons, the majority of those who stayed behind were elderly, ill, or unable to work. Caring for these people absorbed a large part of the resources of the Reichsvereinigung, which was obliged to set up in large numbers asylums, homes, and soup kitchens.
   ¹⁰
   The RSHA granted the larger official Jewish communities permission to continue their work as local chapters of the Reichsvereinigung. Beyond the tasks already mentioned, these local communities also continued to care for the religious needs of the Jewish population. Communities that declined in size to fewer than one thousand members were dissolved as independent organizations and incorporated into the Reichsvereinigung. By the end of 1941, fourteen regional offices of the Reichsvereinigung, the organization’s
   

   headquarters in Berlin, and seventeen larger local Jewish communities were still in existence.
   

   Although all functionaries in the Reichsvereinigung considered emigration to be their primary goal, there were great differences among them about how to pursue this aim. Larger communities wanted to negotiate directly with aid organizations and seek donations, whereas the Reichsvereinigung favored a centralized scheme under their control. In the Berlin headquarters, a group of representatives led by Paul eppstein hoped to implement an organized scheme of emigration in cooperation with destination countries that would span a period of several years.
   ¹¹
   Following the failed conference in evian-les-Bains in July 1938, however, and in particular after the war had begun and Germany’s borders had been closed, this idea proved to be utopian. The Zionist organizations had set up
   hachschara
   sites where young people, whose physical stamina and character had been tested, were trained primarily in agriculture and the trades in preparation for emigration to Palestine. These young emigrants were to build
   Eretz Israel
   and fight in the Haganah for a Jewish state. According to the Zionists’ plans, at least 70 percent of each transport to Palestine was to consist of people whom they considered suitable for these tasks and who were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. As long as other opportunities for emigration still existed, this selection procedure was not controversial. Such alternatives, however, gradually disappeared. If the Reichsvereinigung could secure immigration certificates, then these could be used to effect the release of Jewish prisoners from concentration camps. when the only remaining immigration certificates to be had were for Palestine, demands swelled to open these transport lists to include older people and those who had not completed
   hachschara
   .
   ¹²
   once the war began and Polish Jews were also being rounded up, brought to concentration camps, and were dying there in great numbers, the conflict escalated further over whether it was preferable to make use of the few remaining opportunities to save German Jews rather than to save eastern european Jews.
   ¹³
   Among the ranks of Zionists, there were controversies over other fundamental issues as well. From the outset, Austrian Jews hired agents to organize illegal immigration to Palestine. German Jews, in contrast, wanted to organize things on their own. They managed to adhere to the principle of legality until they were forced to change their strategy because no legal immigration opportunities remained. Paul eppstein, in particular, refused to fund transports in advance that sent emigrants on unapproved routes with unseaworthy ships. There have been rumors
   

   that his colleagues spent part of their energy on misleading him with respect to the actual nature of some transports.
   ¹⁴
   The Gestapo, in contrast, insisted on illegal emigration. when eppstein refused to agree to a risky transport to Palestine in 1940, they arrested him and detained him for four months.
   ¹⁵
   Following this arbitrary act by the Gestapo, eppstein’s predilection for legalism was transformed into something more like anticipatory obedience. For the purposes of this essay, these brief references to policy conflict with respect to emigration policies must suffice.
   ¹⁶
   what is important is that German-Jewish functionaries saw themselves
   simultaneously
   facing emigration as well as expulsion and deportation in these transition years between 1939 and 1941.
   

   In this period, the Nazi leadership as well as the individual Gauleiter (Nazi district leaders) repeatedly ordered that Jews be deported, pur-portedly either for military reasons or as part of “settlements” policies. In october 1938, 17,000 Jews of Polish origin were expelled from Germany to Poland. In further operations after the war began, Jews were brought to the Lublin District in the General Government in Poland and to Gurs in unoccupied France.
   ¹⁷
   The Reichsvereinigung usually learned of these deportations accidentally, at the last minute, or even after the fact; their protests were generally futile. I would like to il-lustrate this by retracing briefly the deportation of Jews from Stettin in 1940.
   

   on 12 February 1940, more than one thousand Jewish residents of Stettin were ordered to pack their belongings within a few hours. These orders came as a surprise, and yet the Stettin Jews had been anticipat-ing this kind of operation from one day to the next. on 1 January 1940, the rabidly anti-Semitic Gauleiter, Franz Schwede-Coburg, and the local mayor had announced in writing to the Jews of Stettin and Pomerania that they would be obliged to move into an empty department store within two weeks. Paul Hirschfeld, a member of the board of the Stettin Jewish community, had been informed of the impending move, but he did not pass this knowledge on to the Reichsvereinigung headquarters, which learned of these occurrences from a Jewish woman who had been ordered to move. The Berlin office intervened successfully with the RSHA, which had not been in charge of the operation but subsequently did halt its implementation.
   

   The Jewish residents of Stettin feared—quite rightly—that the Nazi Party authorities would not accept this change of plans. Indeed, a sec-ond attempt was undertaken; this time, the RSHA was included in the plans from the beginning. Heydrich announced on 30 January 1940
   

   that the Stettin Jews would be deported shortly. Less than two weeks later, police, SS, and SA appeared and arrested all Jews, except those who were married to non-Jews. The people rounded up were deported to the Lublin District in Poland in a train transport that also included Jews from Pomerania. Many of those deported died in transit, and some 30 percent of the survivors died within six months due to inhuman living conditions.
   ¹⁸
   The Reichsvereinigung was not informed and had no opportunity to intervene. Paul eppstein, who was obliged to ap-pear at the RSHA for regular meetings, pointed out “that this kind of transport seriously threatens the work of the Reichsvereinigung.”
   ¹⁹
   He was told that the RSHA was also opposed to such transports and that further operations of this kind “would presumably not occur.”
   ²⁰
   All this was in spite of the fact that Heydrich had been involved in the decision-making process! Moreover, the Gestapo was already planning the next deportation from Schneidemühl. Apparently, the lower-ranking representatives of the RSHA with whom eppstein negotiated were no better informed than the representatives of the Jewish organization.