The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (25 page)

The most intricate issues remained those regarding mixed breeds, and not only in the Wehrmacht. Frequently Hitler intervened. At times, however, he gave instructions that he later postponed for reasons that remain unclear. Thus, on May 7, Hans Pfundtner, state secretary at the Ministry of the Interior, informed various agencies that the Führer wished to forbid sexual intercourse (
ausserehelicher Verkehr
) between
Mischlinge
of the first degree and full Germans, or among
Mischlinge
of the first degree themselves. But on September 25, 1941, Lammers advised Frick that Hitler wanted the matter to be deferred.
⁴⁶
No explanation was offered.

Some of the mixed-breeds issues that the Nazi leader had to decide about, on the eve of the campaign in the East, were straightforward: In April 1941, Lammers informed the minister of Agriculture, Walther Darré, that Hitler did not object to
Mischlinge
of the second degree owning racehorses or stud farms; therefore the stud belonging to the quarter-Jewish Oppenheim brothers, a horse called Schlenderhan, could be sold to the Reich studs’ administration.
⁴⁷

The most frequent issues relating to mixed breeds of the first degree were petitions for admission to universities, usually after army service followed by discharge (as mixed breeds). Those decorated for bravery were mostly accepted—in line with a Hitler decree of October 1940—the others mostly rejected—even if they boasted of particularly famous ancestry. On February 1, 1941, the Office of the Führer’s Deputy had to decide on the petition of one Jürgen von Schwerin, whose ancestors on his father’s side belonged to the foremost Prussian aristocracy. The trouble came from the mother’s side: Schwerin’s maternal grandfather was a Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a banker who had worked closely with Bismarck. Of course the name also indicated some relation to the famous Jewish composer, and although his grandparents had converted, Schwerin carried the burden of the name Mendelssohn. He was accepted only after lengthy efforts.
⁴⁸

Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s descendant was a relatively easy case compared with that of a professor at the University of Munich, Dr. Karl Ritter von Frisch, a
Mischling
of the second degree (his maternal grandmother was “fully Jewish”). According to paragraph 72 of the Civil Service Law, Frisch had to retire and on March 8, 1941; the Minister of Education informed his colleague Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and the ubiquitous Martin Bormann of his decision to implement the law. Frisch, it should be added, was the head of the zoological institute of the university and a world-renowned bee specialist. Not only were bees essential for food production, but according to a newspaper article included in the file, in the spring of 1941 a disease decimated hundreds of thousands of bees in the Reich and the specialist who was supposed to devise the appropriate countermeasure was none other than Frisch.

For Bormann there was no problem. On July 11, 1941, he informed the education minister that Frisch was to retire, according to paragraph 72, the more imperatively so because even after 1933 he was known to have maintained many contacts with Jews, to have declared that German science was harmed by the departure of Jews, and to have attempted to remove from his institute scientists who were known for their anti-Semitic views. In a further letter, on January 31, 1942, Bormann added that Frisch could continue his research even in retirement.
⁴⁹
It remains unclear what compelled the all-powerful chief of the party chancellery to change his mind. On April 27, 1942, however, after lamely referring to new information indicating that retirement would harm Frisch’s research, Bormann instructed the minister of education to postpone it until after the end of the war.
⁵⁰

No matter of any importance in the ongoing anti-Jewish harassment could be settled without Hitler’s consent. In August 1940, as we saw, it was Hitler who gave the green light for implementing the anti-Jewish measures in occupied France. During the same month the Nazi leader authorized
Gauleiter
Gustav Simon to introduce anti-Jewish legislation in occupied Luxembourg.
⁵¹
In October he ordered the deportation of the Jews of Baden and the Saar-Palatinate into the Vichy zone, and in January 1941, he agreed to the deportations from Vienna. At approximately the same time Hitler authorized the beginning of the “Aryanizations” in Holland: “Following a presentation by the Reich Commissar” (Seyss-Inquart), the head of the Economic Department of the Wilhelmstrasse wrote on March 1, “the Führer had in principle decided three months ago that the Aryanization plan could be carried out. Reichsleiter Bormann is aware of the current status of the matter.”
⁵²
Even more telling in this respect was an issue discussed at lower levels since 1938 and brought up again in 1940: the marking of the Jews living in the Reich with a special sign.

In April and May 1941 the matter resurfaced (probably in view of the forthcoming campaign in the East) on Heydrich and Goebbels’s initiative. Both turned to Göring for an answer, to no avail.
⁵³
A few days after the onset of the attack, the Reichsmarschall informed the minister and the chief of the RSHA that the matter had to be submitted to Hitler, whereupon Heydrich asked Bormann for a meeting with the Nazi leader to present the case. Goebbels, on his part, sent a message to the
Reichsleiter
, emphasizing that he considered the matter “exceptionally urgent and necessary [
ausserordentlich dringlich und notwendig
].” After expostulating on the manifold difficulties in implementing the anti-Jewish measures as long as the Jews were not outwardly identified, the memorandum, which sums up Goebbels’s view, continued: “As a departure of the Jews [from the Reich] is not to be expected in the near future [
da eine baldige Abwanderung der Juden nicht zu erwarten ist
] it is essential to mark the Jews…in order to avoid their attempts to influence the morale of the Volksgenossen.”
⁵⁴
As we shall see, in August Hitler agreed to Goebbels’s entreaty—and soon thereafter ordered the “departure” of the Jews.

Throughout the Reich the Jews cowered under the increasing incitement surrounding them and the relentless drive of the authorities to harm and humiliate them by an endless accumulation of new measures. “We live here in such troubled times,” Hertha Feiner wrote to her daughters on March 11, 1941, “that notwithstanding all my longing, I am glad that you have escaped this and can quietly work…. Many teachers have been dismissed: of the 230 teachers, only 100 remain and as many of these have a permanent position [they had worked for the community before 1928]; you can imagine how limited my prospects are [to continue teaching]. It will be decided by April 1. These worries and many more don’t leave me the peace of mind to read.”
⁵⁵

For the time being she was allowed to stay. “Work at the school is very tiring,” she reported on June 1, 1941, “as, due to the dismissal of teachers, the number of our students increases while our salaries decrease. But, the community is in bad shape and nothing can be done about it.”
⁵⁶
A week later Feiner continued to describe the everyday life unfolding around her: “I am glad when nothing special happens, because it’s rarely something good. Aunt Irma works in a factory. She likes it, even if she earns little, because she and her mother have to live somehow…. They have received an affidavit from ‘Amerika’ and hope to emigrate, possibly in half a year. I spoke with the Goldsteins…their daughter is in Palestine but they hear nothing from her.”
⁵⁷

In December 1940 Jochen Klepper had been drafted into the Wehrmacht; his diary was interrupted for the next ten months.

III

Although the creation of ghettos was an uneven process in the General Government, the concentration of Jews in separate town areas progressed apace throughout early 1941. “At ten o’clock a Jew dropped in from Kielce,” Dawid Rubinowicz noted on April 1. “The same day Jews who have relatives outside the Jewish quarter already left Kielce to go to their families…. Uncle came from Kielce to consider what he should do. Papa told him he should join us for the time being; he’ll do as we do. So he went to order a cart for tomorrow.”
⁵⁸
The first uncle arrived at the Rubinowiczes’ in the early hours of April 3; then, during the day, another uncle arrived: “I wondered where on earth they could find room to stay in our house,” Dawid noted on the third.
⁵⁹
But, to everbody’s surprise the second uncle “thought things over and drove back to the Jewish quarter. We were worried because we know very well he would get nothing to eat there.”
⁶⁰

Indeed, during these same months, hundreds of thousands of Jews lived on the edge of starvation, mainly in the largest ghettos of the Warthegau and the General Government. Among German officials two contrary approaches to the crisis were envisioned. On the one hand the new chief administrator of the Lodz ghetto, Hans Biebow, favored a level of economic activity that would grant at least minimum subsistence to its population; on the other Biebow’s own deputy did not mind letting the Jews starve to death. Greiser opted for Biebow’s policy; Biebow’s deputy, Alexander Palfinger, was transferred to Warsaw.
⁶¹

The path of reorganization was not clear, however, even after the
Gauleiter
’s decision to support a “productionist” policy, in Christopher Browning’s terms. Greiser himself displayed an unusual talent for extortion: He levied a 65 percent tax on all Jewish wages. Moreover, local German agencies and businesses withheld raw materials or food from the ghetto (or delivered substandard products and pocketed the difference). It was only in the late spring of 1941 that Biebow was able to impose the regulations he had been demanding: “For working Jews, ‘Polish rations’ were to be a minimum; non-working Jews were to receive the long-promised ‘prison fare.’”
⁶²

Rumkowski’s mistakes sometimes added to the chronic starvation. According to a ghetto survivor interviewed immediately after the war, the population was particularly incensed by the potato affair. “A lot of potatoes were brought into the ghetto,” Israel U. told the American psychologist David Boder in a 1946 interview. “When Rumkowski was asked why he didn’t distribute them, he answered: ‘you have no business to meddle in my affairs. I will distribute the potatoes when I want.’ Frosts came and the potatoes became rotten and they had to be thrown away. They were buried. And afterwards for three years people still searched for potatoes at this spot where they lay buried. Moreover, the people talked themselves into believing that they tasted better that way, because the water had evaporated from the potatoes.”
⁶³

Yet the witness also recognized that over time some order was introduced into the food distribution system by the same dictatorial chairman: “In the beginning a committee was organized in every [apartment] house; it received the allotment for the entire house, and distributed it to all the people. This was very bad. They stole. But Rumkowski remedied this. There were forty-three district warehouses arranged according to streets. And everybody had a card for bread, a card for vegetables, and so forth. Today, for instance, bread comes out for such and such numbers. One went to the warehouse, the card was clipped, [and the transaction was] entered in the book.”
⁶⁴

Rumkowski’s “rationalization” of the ghetto food distribution system was effective only insofar as supply from the outside was authorized by the Germans; yet, despite a wave of strikes and protests by ghetto workers in the spring of 1941, the chairman did impose a measure of equality among the inhabitants that, as already mentioned, contrasted with the situation in Warsaw. Even the “Elder’s” most adamant ideological opponents noted his initiatives with a derision tempered by acquiescence: “Rumkowski is leaving for Warsaw to bring doctors, and is reorganizing the food-distribution system in the ghetto,” Sierakowiak wrote down on May 13. “The number of food cooperatives is increasing; separate vegetable units are being created, while the bread and other food units are being combined. Creation of new squares, lawns, and even cobblestone and construction works completes the “Spring Program” in the ghetto, marching in ‘glory on the road of ascent and highest achievement.’”
⁶⁵

Even with all the “productivization” efforts—which in Lodz reached a significant scale—the food supply situation never improved beyond chronic starvation for much of the population. We have some knowledge of everyday life from individual records but mainly from the detailed “Chronicle” in which, from January 1941 to July 1944, a group of “official” diarists (in other works, diarists appointed by Rumkowski) regularly wrote down what they considered of significance for “future historians.” At first the writers were Lodz Jews; then, after the deportation from the Reich and the Protectorate in late 1941, Jews from Vienna and Prague were added to the initial group. The chroniclers reported the events of everyday life and used documents assembled in the ghetto archives, a vast and ongoing collection of all available information pertinent to the ghetto, and to the life and work of the megalomaniac Rumkowski. Although they avoided comments on the material they thus kept for history, the chroniclers—by their very presentation of the evidence—told a story whose implications the reader could not miss.
⁶⁶

In the first entry of the “Chronicle,” on January 12, 1941, the authors noted two minor but telling incidents: “Appearing at one of the precincts of the Order Service, an eight-year-old boy filed a report against his own parents, whom he charged with not giving him the bread ration due to him. The boy demanded that an investigation be conducted and that the guilty parties be punished.” And immediately following this entry, the chroniclers recorded another strange occurrence: “The residents of a building found themselves in a very disconcerting situation when, after waking up, they discovered that in the course of the night unknown culprits had stolen…their stairs as well as their handrail and banister.”
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