The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (50 page)

The killers themselves were not shy about describing their deeds, even regarding mass executions in the supposedly secret operation 14f13. During the last months of 1941, Dr. Friedrich Mennecke, one of the SS physicians directly involved in the operation, left a few notorious letters to his wife—and to posterity. On November 19, 1941, he reported to his “dearest Mummy” from the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp that on that day he had filled out ninety-five forms [of inmates to be murdered], that after completing the task he had supper (“3 sorts of sausages, butter, bread, beer”), that he slept “marvelously” in his bed and felt “perfect.”
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Seven days later he wrote from Buchenwald: The first “portion” of victims was Aryan. “A second portion of some 1200 Jews followed, who need not be ‘examined,’ but for whom it suffices to take the incarceration reasons (often considerable!) from the file and transfer them to the form. Thus it is a purely theoretical task.”
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A few days later the Jews were transported to Bernburg and gassed.

The German population’s reactions to the deportations and the fate of the Jews sent from the Reich to the East, remained diverse as already mentioned. While some of the inhabitants of Minden, for example, welcomed the deportations,
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others expressed their compassion (“the Jews are also God’s creatures”).
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Yet others simply remained hostile to the Jews, whatever may have been happening to them. Thus, in the same area, many housewives were infuriated by a change in the hours allocated to Jews for their food purchase. The change either compelled German housewives to shop at an inconvenient time or to do so together with Jews.
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Knowledge about the exterminations also spread to German academics in the East and created panic among some “field researchers.” Take the dire straits in which the Viennese Dr. Elfriede Fliethmann from the Race and Folklore (
Volkstumskunde
) section of the Krakow Institute for Research on the East found herself in October 1941: “We do not know what measures are being planned for the evacuation of the Jewish population in the next few months,” Fliethmann wrote on October 22 to her close friend and colleague in the Anthropology Department of the University of Vienna, Dr. Dora Maria Kahlich. “It could possibly happen that if we wait too long, valuable material could escape us; mainly our material could be torn out of its family background and of its habitual environment, whereby the shots would have to be taken under difficult conditions and the very possibilities for photographing would have considerably changed.”
¹⁴³

Fliethmann and Kahlich were soon on their way to Tarnów in Galicia to take pictures and measurements of various Jewish family members, “so that we could save at least something of the material, in case measures were to be taken.”
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As the “objects” resisted, the snapshots and measurements had to be taken with the “kind” help of the Security Police. Tarnów Orthodox families with many children were the main material; they were considered as “typical representatives of the original Galician Jewry.”
¹⁴⁵
Both researchers forged energetically ahead as their correspondence of the following weeks showed: They did not hide their enthusiasm about the racial-anthropological “wonders” which they were discovering. Thus Kahlich, who, back in Vienna, was interpreting the material informed Fliethmann of the first results but with all the scientific caution necessary: “I must immediately set something right. I only established that the Jews of Tarnów can be included in the Near eastern-oriental racial mixture, which does not mean that they will not also show some other racial trace.”
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The importance of Fliethmann’s and Kahlich’s research led to further inquiries at the SD in Lemberg: Couldn’t the Tarnów Jewish community be left in place somewhat longer?
¹⁴⁷
We can only surmise what the answer from Lemberg may have been. Nonetheless the preliminary results of Fliethmann’s endeavor were not lost. They can still be found in the “Preliminary Report about the Anthropological Photographs of Jewish Families in Tarnów” published in volume 2 of
Deutsche Forschung im Osten
in 1942.
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And, at the very time when the Kahlichs and the Fliethmanns of German academe were increasingly worried about the disappearance of their “material,” at the end of 1941 and in January 1942, historian Schieder—whose advice on the handling of Poland’s Jews we already encountered in October 1939—was writing a “confidential” survey about ethnic relations in the newly annexed Bial
^/
ystok region. Contrary to the two female anthropologists, the eager historian from Königsberg prided himself on an “extraordinarily good” collaboration with the authorities. Schieder strongly encouraged the same authorities to pursue their policies in regard to the Jewish inhabitants of Bial
^/
ystok; the ghettoization had put an end to the economic primacy acquired by the Jews under the czars and reestablished by other means during the 1939–41 Soviet occupation period when “the Bolshevik organization of the Jewish-Russian bureaucracy soon controlled the entire economic life of the Bialystok district.” Schieder uncovered the roots of this Jewish ability to dominate its economic environment in pre-1917 Russian history: Jewish assimilation to Russian society was sheer “whitewash” (
Tünche
) that, in his eyes, “did not deter these Jews from tenaciously keeping the racial characteristics which had allowed them in the past to occupy all key economic positions.” Now, however, “Anti-Semitism was becoming understandable to the Belorussians from their everyday experience.”
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VII

The two most extreme measures taken against the Jews of the Reich from mid-September 1941 on, the introduction of the star and the beginning of the deportations, confronted the German churches with challenges they could no longer disregard. Even more immediately than other segments of German society, the Christian churches had to take a stand, as at least some of the victims were converted Jews.

On September 17, two days before the enforcement of the star decree, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna sent out a pastoral letter commending respect and love toward the Catholic Jews; on September 18, the cardinal’s message was withdrawn and replaced by a short text from which any mention of love and respect had disappeared; it merely allowed non-Aryan Christians to continue to participate in church life as previously.
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Also on September 17, Breslau’s Cardinal Bertram set the guidelines for the Church in the Reich. He reminded the Bishops of the equal standing of all Catholics, Aryans or non-Aryans, and demanded that discriminatory measures in church services be avoided “as long as possible.” But, if asked by (non-Aryan) Catholics, priests should recommend “attendance of early morning services.” If disturbances were to occur, then—and only then—a statement reminding the faithful that the church did not recognize any differences among its members, whatever their background, should be read, but separate church attendance should also be considered.
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A month later, however, Bertram wrote to Munich’s Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber that the church had more urgent issues to deal with than the problem of the converted Jews.
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As for the Jews as such, they were not even mentioned.

For some Catholic institutions, keeping converts was too much of a burden. In her memoirs Cordelia Edvardson, at the time a young Jewish convert to whose story we shall return, describes a telling episode. Shortly after the introduction of the star, the headmistress of the Berlin branch of the Catholic Girls Association to which Cordelia belonged informed her that “if it became known that one kept members who wore the Jewish star, the authorities would disband the association; it would be better therefore if the girl did not come to their meetings anymore.” And, unaware of the irony, the director added: “You know our slogan: one for all and all for one.”
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Among Protestants stark differences of course appeared between the Confessing congregations and the “German Christians.” Some members of the Confessing Church demonstrated outright courage. Thus, in September 1941, Katerine Staritz, a church official in Breslau, published a circular letter in support of the star bearers, calling on her congregation to show an especially welcoming attitude toward them.
¹⁵⁴
The SD reported on the circular;
¹⁵⁵
the
Schwarze Korps
commented on it, and officials of the church dismissed Staritz from her position as “city curate.” A few months later she was shipped to Ravensbrück for a year. Upon her return she was not allowed to perform any significant duties in the church and had to report twice a week to the Gestapo.
¹⁵⁶

As could be expected, the German Christians reacted to the new measure with glee. A few weeks beforehand, they had published a manifesto praising the anti-Bolshevik campaign in the East: “We are opposed,” they declared in their message, “to a form of Christianity which allies itself with Bolshevism, which regards the Jews as the Chosen People, and which denies that our Volk and our Race are God-given.”
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For them the introduction of the star allowed barring “Jewish Christians from attending services, entering church buildings, or being buried in Christian cemeteries.”
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When the deportations from the Reich started, the controversies within both the Protestant and the Catholic churches sharpened. In November 1941 the most prominent personality of the Confessing Church, Bishop Theophil Wurm, tried to convince Goebbels that the measures taken against the non-Aryans could only be grist to the mill of Germany’s worst enemies, particularly “Roosevelt and his accomplices.”
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The propaganda minister noted that Wurm probably aspired to play among the Protestants the role held by Galen for the Catholics: “His letter goes to the wastebasket.”
¹⁶⁰
On December 10 Wurm, in the name of the assembly of church leaders [of the Confessing Church], handed a memorandum addressed to Hitler to State Secretary Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger; a short paragraph also alluded to the fate of the Jews: “Much has happened that can help enemy propaganda: we include in this the measures taken to eliminate the mentally ill and the growing hardness in dealing with the non-Aryans, also those who adhere to the Christian faith.”
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There is no known answer.

Thereupon, on December 17, the German Christian church leaders of Saxony, Nassau-Hesse, Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Anhalt, Thuringia, and Lübeck announced their position regarding Jews in general and converted Jews more specifically: “The severest measures were to be taken against the Jews,” who were “to be expelled from German territories…. Racially Jewish Christians have no place and no right in the church.” The undersigned church leaders had “discontinued every kind of communion with Jewish Christians.”
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The German Christian manifesto demanded a response; it came from the highest authority of the Evangelical Church—the Church Chancellery, the mouthpiece of mainstream German Protestantism. An open letter addressed to all provincial churches, published two days before Christmas 1941 and signed by the deputy director, Dr. Günther Fürle, in the name of the chancellery and its spiritual advisory board of three bishops, took an uncompromisingly anti-Semitic stand: “The breakthrough of racial consciousness in our people, intensified by the experience of the war and the corresponding measures taken by the political leadership, has brought about the elimination of Jews from the community of us Germans. This is an incontestable fact, which the German Evangelical Churches, which serve the one eternal Gospel within the German people and live within the legal domain of this people as corporations under public law, cannot heedlessly ignore. Therefore, in agreement with the Spiritual Council of the German Evangelical Church, we request the highest authorities to take suitable measures so that baptized non-Aryans remain separate from the ecclesiastical life of the German congregations. The baptized non-Aryans will have to find the ways and means to create their own facilities to serve their particular worship and pastoral needs. We will make every effort to help obtain permission for such facilities from the responsible authorities.”
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Bishop Wurm responded in the name of the Confessing Church. He remained very prudent in his criticism of the chancellery’s stand, adding a fair amount of anti-Semitism to his reservations about the discrimination between Aryan and non-Aryan Christians.
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The Provisional Church (the Confessing Church) Administration was more forthright: “Together with all the Christians in Germany who stand on the ground of the Scripture and the Confession, we are compelled to declare that this request from the Church Chancellery is incompatible with the confession of the church…. By what right do we desire to exclude, for racial reasons, Christian non-Aryans from our worship services? Do we want to be like the Pharisees, who renounced communion with the “tax collectors and sinners” in the worship service and, because of this, reaped Christ’s judgment?”

To be consistent, the Provisional Church Administration noted, the chancellery would have to “expel…all the Apostles and, not least of all, Jesus Christ himself, the Lord of the church, because of their racial membership in the Jewish people.” The Provisional Church Administration did not contest, however, that the state could take measures against the Jews and, as in Wurm’s case, its statement was not devoid of anti-Jewish comments.
¹⁶⁵
The controversy persisted for several months, while an increasing number of regional churches adopted the chancellery’s attitude.
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