The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (94 page)

• The distinction thus applied to the two categories of Jews derived of course from a fundamental tenet of religious doctrine in both Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism (with the exception of the “German Christians”) regarding the radical difference existing between Christians (including converts) on the one hand and Jews on the other, not only in terms of ultimate salvation but also in terms of their status within Christian societies. Thus, as we saw, Catholic and Protestant church leaders generally took no exception to legislation that excluded Jews from positions in public life and from significant economic activities in most continental European states; in several countries (apart from Nazi Germany) they supported it.

• The be-all and end-all of this doctrine of fundamental inequality between Christians and Jews (both in this world and in the next) naturally created a “gray zone” in terms of individual Christian conscience and in regard to moral obligations; it allowed for a mix of traditional religious mistrust and contempt toward Jews that could easily—and frequently did—offset any urges of compassion and charity, or even fueled aggressive anti-Semitism.

The stigmatizing of Jews intrinsic to Christian dogma or tradition found a vast array of expressions in accepted theological thinking and mainstream public utterances among all the Christian churches of Europe. Some of it was formulated as generously and carefully as possible, some—although avoiding extreme vituperation—could be downright aggressive, even violently so. In Germany all forms and nuances found their way into the minds and hearts of tens of millions of believers, Protestant or Catholic.

Even an outstanding religious personality such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the moral beacon of the Confessing Church, could not escape the traditional dogmatic position. Bonhoeffer denounced the persecution and deportation of the Jews and in his
Ethics,
he tried to establish a theological underpinning for his defense of the Jewish people: “Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah of the Israelite-Jewish people, and for that reason the line of our forefathers goes back beyond the appearance of Jesus Christ to the people of Israel. Western history is, by God’s will, indissolubly linked with the people of Israel, not only genetically but also in genuine uninterrupted encounter. The Jew keeps open the question of Christ. He is the sign of the free mercy choice and of the repudiating wrath of God. ‘Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God.’ (Rom.11:22). An expulsion of the Jews from the West must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.”
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As one of the commentators on this “intriguing passage” indicated, “It contains the characteristic ambivalence of Bonhoeffer’s work. The ultimate importance of Jews for Bonhoeffer’s Christianity lay in their rejection of Christ, their role as a sign both that belief is a choice and that God punishes unbelievers.”
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Archbishop Gröber of Freiburg used a different tone altogether. In a long report on the situation of the church in Germany sent to the pope on February 2, 1944, he took an unambiguous stand against Nazi ideology and against the Nazi cult of the
Volk.
In that sense, the prelate who had once been called “the brown bishop” had decidedly turned against any ideological accommodation with the regime. And yet, a quite unexpected transformation occurred when Gröber came to mention Judaism and repeated for the benefit of the pope the content of his own New Year’s message to his archdiocese. “I declared further [after having discussed other themes regarding the
Volk
] that the new concept of Volk entirely misunderstands the essence of Christianity. It [Christianity] is not some Judaism even if it considers the Israelite people [
Volk
] as the carrier and mediator of divine ideas and promises. But how Christ himself stood in regard to contemporary Judaism is shown in his struggle against the Pharisees and the doctors [
Schriftgelehrten
] and it is shown by the cross on Golgotha. The story of the apostles proves that the hatred of the Jews pursued Christians often during early Christianity, that in fact it went on fanatically throughout the history of Christendom.”
¹¹⁷
And on May 8, 1945, as Germany surrendered, Gröber again attacked Nazi ideology and again offered the same interpretation of the relation of Judaism to Christianity.
¹¹⁸
In both cases Pius XII avoided comment on Gröber’s stand regarding the Jews.

Sermons such as Gröber’s, and tens of thousands of more extreme ones, were but a fraction of a religious-cultural domain including teaching, catechism, and, more generally, a complex web of cultural expressions carrying all forms and degrees of everyday anti-Semitism. None of this, of course, was new either in Europe or in other parts of the Christian world, but the question that surfaced and surfaces repeatedly in our context is stark: What was the contribution of such a religious anti-Jewish culture to the passive acceptance, sometimes to the occasional support, of the most extreme policies of persecution, deportation, and mass murder unfolding in the midst of Europe’s Christian populations?

Paradoxically, evaluating and interpreting the assistance given by Christian organizations, institutions, and religiously motivated individuals to Jews in need of a hiding place or other forms of help is no less difficult. Such assistance, let us remember, entailed risk, extreme risk in Eastern Europe, various degrees of risk in the West. On the other hand, proselytism and conversion were major, albeit most elusive elements in granting such help, particularly in the hiding of children. In some places conversion may have been considered essential for better camouflage, but generally it was an aim in itself. This of course changes the historical assessment of Christian assistance, notwithstanding risk, compassion, or charity. It would be pointless to try and disentangle the components of such situations, the more so since, to a degree, all these motivations probably played some role, wherever mere greed was not the sole overriding factor. Actually, from the point of view of the devout Christian, bringing about the conversion of a Jew (or any other nonbeliever), even as a result of dire circumstances, may have been considered a religious obligation and an act of ultimate charity.

It is probably from that strictly religious point of view that one should interpret the pope’s decision, at the end of the war, to allow the Holy Office to instruct bishops throughout Europe not to return baptized Jewish children hidden in Catholic institutions to the Jewish fold. The pope also allowed the keeping of such children who had not (yet) been baptized but had no family members who could claim their return.
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VI

Cordelia Maria Sara was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in early 1944, more or less at the time Primo Levi arrived from Fossoli, a few months before the arrival of Ruth Kluger. Levi was dispatched to Auschwitz III Monowitz where he slaved as a laborer first, then as a chemist in the Buna laboratories. Young Cordelia, first mustered by Maria Mandel, the female commandant of the women’s camp in Birkenau, then by Mengele himself (or was it possibly another SS officer?), was found fit for work and, temporarily at least, dispatched to the camp’s offices.
¹²⁰

Ruth Kluger and her mother arrived at Auschwitz from Theresienstadt in May 1944, and for a short while they were shoved into the “family camp” (to which we shall return). Then both were transferred to the women’s camp, where the decisive selection took place: Healthy women aged fifteen to forty five would be sent to a labor camp; the others would be gassed. Ruth was twelve. When her turn arrived, she declared her age. Her fate would have been sealed had her mother not taken a daring initiative: In a moment of inattention among the guards, she rushed her daughter to another line. Ruth promised her to say that she was thirteen. “The line moved,” Kluger recalled, “towards an SS man who, unlike the first one, was in a good mood…. His clerk was perhaps nineteen or twenty. When she saw me, she left her post, and almost within the hearing of her boss, she asked me quickly and quietly and with an unforgettable smile of her irregular teeth: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Thirteen,’ I said as planned. Fixing me intently, she whispered, ‘Tell him you are fifteen.’ Two minutes later it was my turn…. When asked for my age I gave the decisive answer…‘I am fifteen.’ ‘She seems small,’ the master over life and death remarked. He sounded almost friendly, as if he [were] evaluating cows and calves. ‘But she is strong,’ the woman said, ‘look at the muscles in her legs. She can work.’ He agreed—why not? She made a note of my number, and I had won an extension on life.”
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“Neither psychology nor biology explains it,” Kluger later wrote about the young German woman’s initiative. “Only free will does…. The good is incomparable and inexplicable, because it doesn’t have a proper cause outside itself, and because it doesn’t reach for anything beyond itself.”
¹²²

While Cordelia and Ruth were still in Theresienstadt, throughout 1943, some changes took place in the ghetto camp. At the beginning of the year the heads of the Reichsvereinigung arrived from Berlin and so did the remaining leaders of Austrian and Czech communities. For reasons not entirely clear, Eichmann decided on a change in the leadership of the camp: Edelstein remained on the council, but a German and an Austrian Jew were put ahead of him in the new hierarchy. Paul Eppstein, the former de facto leader of the Reichsvereinigung, and Benjamin Murmelstein, the Viennese rabbi whom Edelstein had already met in Nisko, took over the (Jewish) reins of the ghetto. In the meantime a German
Mischling
converted to Protestantism, ex-officer in the Imperial Army and Prussian to the marrow of his bones, Karl Löwenstein, had been transferred from the Minsk ghetto, on Wilhelm Kube’s request, and appointed chief of the Theresienstadt Jewish police. The changes did not stop at that: For no clear reason again the first commandant, Siegfried Seidl, was replaced by the brutal Austrian SS captain Tony Burger (whose main claim to fame—the deportation of the Jews of Athens—was still a year away).

In August 1943 a mysterious transport of more than one thousand children arrived from Bialystok. The rumor had it that they would be exchanged for Germans and possibly sent to Palestine. Two months later, well dressed and without wearing the yellow patch, they were sent on their way, accompanied by a few counselors, including Franz Kafka’s sister Ottla, straight to Auschwitz.
¹²³

Shortly before the departure of the Bialystok children, another transport, an unusually massive one, had also left Theresienstadt. In his diary Redlich did not hide his panic: “What has happened? They incarcerated Fredy [Hirsch] and [Leo] Janowitz and put them on a transport. A transport of five thousand people. They sent five thousand in one day.”
¹²⁴
On September 6 the transport was on its way to Auschwitz.

The prehistory of this particular transport started several months earlier when the International Committee of the Red Cross requested a visit to Theresienstadt and also a “Jewish labor camp.” By late 1942, as we saw, the Geneva organization was aware of the extermination and, according to Favez, throughout early 1943, information about the mass murder of Europe’s Jews kept accumulating at ICRC’s headquarters. On April 15, 1943, the Red Cross chief delegate in Berlin, Roland Marti, reported that the Jewish population of the Reich capital had dwindled to fourteen hundred persons and that they, too, were slated for deportation to camps in the East. He then added: “There is no news or trace of the 10,000 Jews who left Berlin between 28.2.43 and 3.3.43 and who are now presumed dead” (if they were presumed dead less than six weeks after deportation they had obviously been murdered). Favez then adds: “The Geneva Secretariat replied thanking Marti for the information and added that it was anxious to discover the deportees’ new addresses, for all the world as if they had merely moved.”
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Before sending his report to Geneva, Marti had inquired at the German Red Cross whether packages could be sent to the deportees; the answer had been negative (as reported by an official of the German Red Cross to the ICRC delegate).
¹²⁶
Eichmann and his acolytes could have no doubts by then that a request from Geneva to allow ICRC representatives to visit a Jewish camp would be forthcoming. This was precisely the kind of situation Theresienstadt had been established for. But what should be done if the Red Cross delegates insisted on visiting the ultimate reception place for deportees leaving Theresienstadt? As Theresienstadt was meant to be a hoax from the outset, some kind of sham complement had to be set up in Auschwitz, just in case. This was the rationale behind the establishment of a “family camp.”

No selection took place on the arrival of the five thousand deportees’ transport, and the entire group was settled in a special subcamp, BIIb, in which most of the draconian rules of life and death in Birkenau did not apply. The inmates could wear their civilian clothes, families were kept together, and every day some 500 children were sent to a special area, Block 31, where, under the guidance of Fredy Hirsch, they attended some classes, sang in a choir, played games, were told stories—in short were kept as unaware as possible of what Auschwitz-Birkenau was really all about.
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In December 1943 another 5,000 Jews from Theresienstadt joined the first batch.

Exactly six months after their arrival, on March 7, 1944, on the eve of the Jewish festival of Purim, the 3,792 survivors of the September transport (the others had died in the meantime, despite their “favorable” living conditions) were sent to Crematorium III and gassed. Hirsch had been warned of the forthcoming gassing by members of the
Sonderkommando
and encouraged to start a rebellion. Unable to decide between passivity or a course of action that meant death for all his charges, he committed suicide.
¹²⁸
Other transports from Theresienstadt arrived in May 1944.