The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (85 page)

The opening paragraph represented a courageous statement regarding
all
Jews: “With deepest sorrow—yes, even with holy indignation—have we German bishops learned of the deportation of non-Aryans in a manner that is scornful of all human rights. It is our holy duty to defend the unalienable rights of all men guaranteed by natural law…. The world would not understand if we failed to raise our voice loudly against the deprivation of rights of these innocent people. We would stand guilty before God and man because of our silence. The burden of our responsibility grows correspondingly more pressing as…shocking reports reach us regarding the awful, gruesome fate of the deported who have already been subjected in frightfully high numbers to really inhumane conditions of existence.” A series of demands that would have alleviated the fate of the deportees followed, but throughout the petition avoided any direct reference to extermination.
¹⁵⁸
The bishops’ conference rejected the idea of submitting the petition and merely issued a pastoral letter admonishing German Catholics to respect the right of others to life, also that of “human beings of alien races and origin.”
¹⁵⁹

Preysing still hoped to sway his fellow bishops by trying to muster encouragement and guidance from the Vatican. No encouragement was provided by Orsenigo: “Charity is well and good,” the nuncio told the bishop, “but the greatest charity is not to make problems for the Church.”
¹⁶⁰
Preysing’s repeated pleas to Pius XII himself elicited no guidance from the pontiff except, as we shall see in the next chapter, for the statement that bishops throughout the Continent were free to respond to the situation according to their own best judgment, an implicit support for Bertram’s passivity. The pope knew of the attitude prevalent among the German bishops and almost certainly understood that Preysing hoped for clear support from Rome, precisely in order to overcome their faintheartedness.
¹⁶¹
In fact Pius XII further bolstered the abstentionist course of the majority by praising the choice made in 1942—and restated in the pastoral letter of 1943—the choice of private help instead of public protest.
¹⁶²

The only
private
letter of protest addressed to Hitler by a church dignitary was sent on July 16, 1943, once again by Bishop Theophil Wurm, the leading figure of the Confessing Church. The bishop first mentioned the absence of any response to letters already addressed to various state and party dignitaries about matters of concern to all Christians. After affirming his own love of the fatherland and alluding to the heavy sacrifices that had become his own lot (he had lost his son and his son-in-law on the Eastern Front) and that of countless Evangelical Christians, Wurm, writing as “the most senior Evangelical bishop,” declared himself to be “assured of the understanding and support of wide circles within the Evangelical Church.” At this point he turned to the core issue of the letter:

“In the name of God and for the sake of the German people we give expression to the urgent request that the responsible leadership of the Reich will check the persecution and annihilation to which many men and women under German domination are being subjected, and without judicial trial. Now that the non-Aryans who have been the victims of the German onslaught have been largely eliminated, it is to be feared…that the so-called ‘privileged’ non-Aryans who have so far been spared are in renewed danger of being subjected to the same treatment.” Wurm then protested against the threat that mixed marriages would be dissolved. Indirectly he returned to the measures that had been taken against the Jews as such: “Such intentions like the measures taken against the other non-Aryans are in the sharpest contrast to Divine Law and an outrage against the very foundation of Western thought and life and against the very God-given right of human existence and human dignity.”
¹⁶³

Wurm’s letter received no response, and although it was not a declaration
ex cathedra
, as Galen’s sermon against euthanasia had been, it was widely circulated. A few months later, on December 20, 1943, Wurm sent a letter to Lammers, pleading again for the safety of
Mischlinge
. This time he received a handwritten warning from the head of Hitler’s chancellery: “I hereby warn you emphatically,” Lammers wrote, “and request that in the future you scrupulously stay within the boundaries established by your profession and abstain from statements on general political matters. I urgently advise you further to show the greatest restraint in your personal and professional conduct. I ask you to refrain from replying to this letter.”
¹⁶⁴
This warning of dire retribution silenced Wurm and the Confessing Church.

VII

In October 1942 Dr. Ernst Jahn, the general practitioner from Immenhausen, divorced his Jewish wife, Lilli, notwithstanding the fact that four of their five children were adolescents and one even younger. As we saw, Ernst had been involved with one Rita Schmidt, a colleague who had borne him a child. He may have believed (as he declared after the war) that the very existence of the five mixed-breed children would protect Lilli from any serious danger, even if she was separated from her Aryan husband. He could not ignore, however, that Lilli’s situation would in any case become more precarious than beforehand. The slightest infringement of any of the regulations and decrees impinging on every move of the last Jews living in the Reich could be fatal.

Lilli herself did not seem aware of what her new status implied. Hadn’t her eldest child, her son Gerhardt, become an enthusiastic auxiliary in an antiaircraft unit based near Kassel? Of course she could not know what had happened to other Jewish women in her situation—to a Hertha Feiner for example. Was Lilli trying to taunt fate? The business card she put on the door of the Kassel apartment merely indicated: “Dr. Med. Lilli Jahn.” She had forgotten—or maybe not?—that Jewish physicians were forbidden to use their professional title, that she had to add “Sara” to her name, and, in any case, was not allowed to cater to Aryan patients. Somebody denounced her; she was summoned to the Gestapo and, on August 30, 1943, she was arrested.
¹⁶⁵

By mid-1943 the remnants of German Jewry, bereft of any institutional framework, had become a scattering of individuals, defined on Gestapo lists as so many specific “cases”; in the logic of the system, they would have to disappear. The Klemperers, although they were a childless mixed marriage, had not yet received a summons. But how long could they hope to remain in limbo? Their daily existence was becoming harder. At the end of 1943 they were ordered to move again, to yet another “Jews’ house,” even more overcrowded than the previous one. “The worst thing here,” Victor Klemperer noted on December 14, “is the
promiscuity.
The doors of three households open into a single hallway [on the third floor]: the Cohns, the Stühlers, and ourselves. Shared bathroom and lavatory. Kitchen shared with the Stühlers, only partly separated—
one
source of water for all three—a small adjoining kitchen space for the Cohns.”
¹⁶⁶
The fear of informers had grown with time, even in conversations with Jews whom one did not know well; Klemperer heard rumors about one of the inhabitants in his own house, and he noted a telling joke: “A star-wearing Jew is abused on the street, a small crowd gathers, some people take the Jew’s side. After a while, the Jew shows the Gestapo badge on the reverse of his jacket lapel, and the names of his supporters are noted.”
¹⁶⁷
In one form or another, this was part of everyday reality in the Reich, in the remaining ghettos, in every occupied country.

To Klemperer the attitudes of the population appeared as contradictory as ever, even in this last phase of the war. Frequently he encountered expressions of sympathy and encouragement (“it can’t last much longer”) or just unremarked acts of kindness; nonetheless anti-Semitism was never far away. “On my way to Katz,” he noted on February 7, 1944, “an elderly man in passing: ‘Judas!’ In the corridor of the health insurance office. The only wearer of the star, I walk back and forth in front of an occupied bench. I hear a worker talking: ‘They should give them an injection. Then that would be the end of them!’ Does he mean me? Wearers of the star? The man is called a few minutes later. I sit down in his place. An elderly woman beside me, whispering: “That was nasty! Perhaps one day what he wished upon you will happen to him. One can never know. God judges!”
¹⁶⁸

The reader may remember young Cordelia, the Jewish girl who grew up as a Catholic and, in September 1941, was expelled from the Berlin Catholic Girls Association by her headmistress who didn’t want to keep “girls carrying a Jewish star.” Cordelia’s mother, Elisabeth Langgässer, a convert herself and already a well-known writer, was half Jewish, but the girl’s father, who did not live with Langgässer anymore, was a full Jew. Thus, Cordelia, who turned fourteen in 1943, was a “three-quarter Jewess.”

Sometime in late 1942 or early 1943, Langgässer succeeded in getting a Spanish passport for her daughter and even an entry visa to Spain. Cordelia Langgässer became Cordelia Garcia-Scouvart and stopped wearing the star. Before long both daughter and mother were summoned to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. In the presence of her mother, who remained silent throughout, Cordelia was given the choice of signing a declaration that she agreed to keep her German citizenship and was ready to submit to all laws and decrees applying to her status as a Jew, or to have her mother prosecuted for getting the Spanish passport under false pretenses and thus committing a treasonable act. Cordelia signed. “And now,” the Gestapo official volunteered, “you may go to the office across the hall and purchase a new Jewish star; it costs 50 Pfennig.”
¹⁶⁹

In Berlin in 1943 the Gestapo used
Mischlinge
to arrest any remaining Jews slated for deportation. Two such half-Jewish auxiliaries took Cordelia to the Jewish hospital that had become an assembly and administrative center for all Jews, after the disbanding of the Reichsvereinigung. The hospital (first using its buildings on Iranischestrasse, then on Schulstrasse), was of course under complete Gestapo control; Eichmann had dispatched SS Hauptsturmführer Fritz Woehrn to supervise it, while an obscure Jewish physician, albeit a very able and energetic one, Dr. Walter Lustig, a “one-man Reichsvereinigung,” was in charge of everyday matters. A number of Jewish patients continued to stay on the premises, mostly protected by some special status; Jews rounded up in other German cities temporarily landed there, as did Jews caught in hiding. At the end of the war some 370 patients and around one thousand inmates in all still lived at the hospital; this number included ninety-three children and seventy-six Gestapo prisoners.
¹⁷⁰

At the hospital any male with some power could share any woman’s bed; Lustig had an array of eager nurses at his disposal, as he promised to one or another an exemption from deportation. Cordelia, the young newcomer, was shared by two
Mischling
twins from Cologne, Hans and Heinz, although, at fourteen, she had not even menstruated.
¹⁷¹
But Hans and Heinz could not protect her in any way: Toward the end of 1943, she was transferred from the children’s section to that of the mentally ill, all gathered for deportation. Before the end of the year she boarded the train for Theresienstadt.
¹⁷²

Cordelia’s mother had come to visit once, just before her daughter’s departure. She conveyed her impressions in a letter to a friend: “We [Elisabeth Langgässer and her Aryan husband] found her entirely calm, even cheerful and confident, as first, it was really only Theresienstadt and not Poland and, second, because she traveled as accompanying nursing personnel. She had to take care of two children and of an infant and wore a nurse’s uniform; she even had a small bonnet and that, I think, filled her with pride.”
¹⁷³

After a brief stay in Theresienstadt, Cordelia Maria Sara was shipped to Auschwitz.

VIII

Following the failed attempts to establish a unified resistance group in the spring of 1942, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacia Bojowa, or ZOB) was created in Warsaw on July 28, 1942, a few days after the beginning of the
Aktion.
The initial group of some two hundred members mostly succeeded in dodging the deportations, but beyond that there was little the ZOB could do. In August some pistols and hand grenades were purchased from the Polish communist underground. A first and minor operation—an attempt to kill the chief of the Jewish police, Józef Szerynski—failed. Much worse occurred a few days later: The Germans arrested a group of ZOB members on their way from Warsaw to Hrubieszow and tortured and killed them; soon afterward, on September 3, the Gestapo caught some leading members of the organization in Warsaw and murdered them as well: The weapons were discovered and seized. This catastrophic series of events seemed, at first, to put an end to a courageous venture that had hardly begun.
¹⁷⁴

An eerie period of apparent respite and complete uncertainty descended on the surviving inhabitants of the ghetto after mid-September. The approximately 40,000 Jews left in an area of drastically reduced size either worked in the remaining workshops or in sorting the mounds of belongings abandoned by the victims. The German administrators had been replaced by Gestapo officials, mainly of low rank.
¹⁷⁵

None of the remaining Jews knew when the next German move would take place. By then much had transpired about Treblinka: “The women go naked into the bath house to their death,” Abraham Lewin quoted the report of an escapee on September 27: “The condition of the dead bodies. What are they killing them with? With simple vapour (steam). Death comes after seven or eight minutes. On their arrival they take away the shoes of the unfortunates. The proclamation in the square: ‘Emigrants from Warsaw.’”
¹⁷⁶
On October 5 he noted: “No one knows what tomorrow will bring and we live in perpetual fear and terror.”
¹⁷⁷
News seeped in from the outside world. On November 10 the diarist recorded news of the Anglo-American landings in North Africa and the British offensive in Egypt; he also reported about Hitler’s speech to the “Old Fighters” on the previous day: “As yet we have not received a copy of this speech in print, but the Jews already
know
that it is steeped in venomous hatred and full of terrible threats against the Jews, that he talked of the total annihilation of the Jews of Europe, from the youngest to the very old.”
¹⁷⁸
On November 17 Lewin mentioned the final liquidation of all the Jews of Lublin.
¹⁷⁹
News reports about mass exterminations in the Polish provinces soon replaced a spate of reports about protests in England and in the United States regarding the murder of the Jews: “Departing this life is a matter of 10 or 15 minutes in Treblinka or in Oswiecim (Auschwitz).”
¹⁸⁰
On January 15, 1943, Lewin wrote of renewed anxiety as the ghetto expected a forthcoming
Aktion.
¹⁸¹
The following day he recorded his last entry.
¹⁸²