The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (96 page)

VIII

To the very end, research about “the Jew” went on. Notwithstanding the course of the war and the rapid disappearance of their “objects,” German “specialists” did not give up; moreover, some local Nazi officials, apparently acting on their own, launched projects meant to document what had been the world of an extinct race. And throughout all these years, Heinrich Himmler himself, whose thirst for knowledge on the Jewish issue was hard to match, often personally encouraged the most promising avenues of investigation.

Thus on May 15, 1942, Himmler’s personal assistant, Obersturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Brandt informed Standartenführer Max Stollmann, head of Lebensborn [the SS institution taking care of racially valuable single mothers and children born out of wedlock, among others], that the Reichsführer demanded the setting up of “a special card index for all mothers and parents [
alle die Mütter und Kindeseltern
] who had a Greek nose, or at least the indication of one.”
¹⁵¹
But Greek noses weighed less on Himmler’s mind than the indentification of Jewish traits or hidden ancestry, although these matters were indirectly related. A year after his foray into the domain of nasal shapes, on May 22, 1943, the SS chief wrote to Bormann about the need for researching the racial evolution of mixed breeds, not only those of the second degree but even of a higher degree [one-eighth or one-twelfth Jewish, for example]. “In this matter—strictly between us [
das aber nur unter uns gesprochen
]—we have to proceed like in the breeding of higher races [
Hochzucht
] of animals or the cultivation of better plants. At least during several generations (3 or 4 generations), the descendants of such mixed-breed families will have to be racially tested by independent institutions; in case of racial inferiority, they have to be sterilized and thus excluded from hereditary transmission.”
¹⁵²

At times the Reichsführer gave vent to justified anger against some incompetent scientist. Thus in the matter of three SS men of part-Jewish ancestry, Himmler agreed to keep them temporarily in the SS, but their children were excluded from joining the order or marrying into it. This unpleasant confusion was the result of a scientific evaluation by Prof. Dr. B. K. Schultz, who had pointed out that in the third generation, it could happen that not even one Jewish chromosome would any longer be present. “Thus,” Himmler wrote to SS Obergruppenführer Richard Hildebrandt, on December 17, 1943, “one could argue that the chromosomes of all other ancestors also disappear. Then one should ask: from where does a person get its heredity if after the third generation the ancestors’ chromosomes have all disappeared? For me, one thing is certain: Herr Professor Dr. Schultz is not suitable to head the Race office.”
¹⁵³

Sometimes the Reichsführer ventured into somewhat dangerous territory. In April 1942 Winifred Wagner, the widow of Richard and Cosima Wagner’s son Siegfried and herself a much-loving and beloved friend of the Führer, had complained about a lecture allegedly held in Würzburg in an SS institution about “the Jewish ancestry [
Versippung
] of the Wagner family.” On December 30, 1942, Himmler assured the “lady of Bayreuth” that no such lecture had taken place, but that the rumor stemmed from a conversation between SS officers. To put all such insinuations to rest the Reichsführer asked Winifred Wagner to send him her family’s genealogical chart.
¹⁵⁴
It is unknown if this was ever done.

Throughout, collective racial identification remained of the essence, and in this domain some issues stayed unsolved for years, that of the Karaites, for example. On June 13, 1943, Dr. Georg Leibbrandt, head of the political division of Rosenberg’s Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories, issued the following statement: “The Karaites are religiously and nationally different from the Jews. They are not of Jewish origin, rather they are viewed as being people of Turkic-Tatar origin closely related to the Crimean Tatars. They are essentially a Near Asian–Oriental race possessing Mongolian features, thus they are aliens. The mixing of Karaites and Germans is prohibited. The Karaites should not be treated as Jews, but should be treated in the same fashion as the Turkic-Tatar peoples. Harsh treatment should be avoided in accordance with the goals of our Oriental policies.”
¹⁵⁵

At first glance it may seem unusual that, as late as June 1943 (and later), the Germans had to restate a decision that the head of the
Reich-stelle für Sippenforschung
(the “Reich Agency for Ancestry Research”) had already officially conveyed, in a letter of January 5, 1939, to the representative of the eighteen-member Karaite community in Germany, Serge von Douvan. “The Karaite sect should not be considered a Jewish religious community within the meaning of paragraph 2 point 2 of the First Regulation to the Reich’s Citizenship Law,” the letter stated. “However, it cannot be established that Karaites in their entirety are of blood-related stock, for the racial categorization of an individual cannot be determined without further ado by his belonging to a particular people, but by his personal ancestry and racial biological characteristics.”
¹⁵⁶

The
Reichsstelle
’s decision was dictated by political considerations such as the thoroughly anti-Soviet attitude of the Karaites, many of whom had fought in the White armies during the Russian civil war, and by the racial-cultural research of a well-known German Orientalist, Paul E. Kahle, in the Leningrad archives during the 1930s; it confirmed the position taken by the former czarist regime defining the Karaites as a religious group unrelated to Judaism.
¹⁵⁷
Yet, as the war began, and mainly after the attack on the Soviet Union, some hesitation remained.

In Lithuania, Gebietskommissar Adrian von Renteln sent researchers to the heads of the local Karaite community, and in the course of 1942 several Jewish specialists were ordered to participate in the investigation: Kalmanovitch in Vilna, Meir Balaban and Yitzhak Schipper in Warsaw; Philip Friedman in Lwov.
¹⁵⁸
In a diary entry of November 15, 1942, Kalmanovitch noted: “I continue to translate the book of the Karaite
hakham
[“sage,” in Hebrew]. (How limited is his horizon! He is proud of his Turkish-Tatar descent. He has a better understanding of horses and arms than of religion, although he is religious in the Christian sense.)”
¹⁵⁹

Friedman was loath to participate in the Nazi-directed project: “At the beginning of 1942,” he recollected after the war, “when I was in Lwov, I was asked by Dr. Leib Landau, a well-known lawyer and director of the Jewish Social Self-Help in the Galicia district, to prepare a study of the origins of the Karaites in Poland. The study had been ordered by Colonel Bisanz, a high official of the German administration in Lwov. Both Landau and I saw clearly that a completely objective and scholarly study, indicating the probablility of the Karaites’ Jewish origin, might endanger their lives. Besides, everything in me revolted against writing a memorandum for the use of the Nazis and I asked Landau to give the assignment to another historian of Polish Jewry, Jacob Schall. He agreed, and Dr. Schall prepared a memorandum which I went over carefully, together with Landau. The memorandum was so drafted as to indicate that the origin of the Karaites was the object of heated controversy, and great emphasis was laid on those scholars who adhered to the theory of the Karaites’ Turko-Mongol extraction.”
¹⁶⁰

Additional German research in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the East, objections to the non-Jewish identification of the Karaites that came from the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives in France, as well as some opposition within Germany itself delayed Leibrandt’s decision until June 1943. The decision, however, was final. The Karaites escaped the fate of the Jews, and also that of 8,000 Krymchaks murdered by Ohlendorf ’s
Einsatzgruppe D
in the Crimea, although in many ways Karaites and Krymchaks were linguistically related and both groups displayed identical Turkic-Mongolian features.
¹⁶¹

Rosenberg’s ministry, his Frankfurt Institute, and the ERR never established exclusive control over research on Jewish matters, as we saw. Thus RSHA Office VII, dealing with “Research about Enemies” (
Gegnerforschung
), under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Franz Alfred Six, displayed an impressive level of activity, even after Six moved to the Wilhelmstrasse in September 1942.
¹⁶²
He was soon replaced by the no-less-dedicated Prof. Dr. Günther Franz, who, in June 1942, had had the brilliant idea of organizing a conference on the “Jewish question” in which appropriate themes were distributed among talented doctoral students (to prepare the next generation of researchers in this domain). When Franz took over the leadership of Office VII, further series of volumes on Jews in various countries were published by the SS Nordland Verlag in runs of one hundred thousand copies in several cases. The volumes came out through 1943 and 1944.
¹⁶³
Research on Jews and Jewry was only one aspect of the office’s activities (along with the study of Freemasonry, Bolshevism, “Political Churches”—and on Himmler’s specific order—“Witches and Witchcraft”).

While Rosenberg’s men were looting in the Baltic countries, for example, Six’s and Franz’s envoys were simultaneously emptying Jewish archives and libraries in the very same areas. In Riga, it will be remembered, they got hold of Dubnow’s library. In the same operation “80 boxes containing Jewish literature were taken from the community in Dorpat, as well as various materials from the ‘Jewish Club’ in Reval.”
¹⁶⁴
Incidentally, until the end of 1941 at least, Jewish “assistants” were working for the various projects of “Amt VII.”
¹⁶⁵

Rosenberg’s “commando” started operating systematically in Vilna from February 1942 on, following a brief survey of the Jewish libraries in the early summer of 1941. As main delegate of the ERR in the Lithuanian capital, Rosenberg appointed one Dr. Johannes Pohl, a Judaica specialist who had spent two years (1934–36) at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, had written a book on the Talmud, and contributed articles to
Der Stürmer
.
¹⁶⁶
Kruk, put in charge of the team of Jewish scholars and workers employed by the
Einsatzstab
, kept regular contacts with Pohl, whom he called the “Hebraist”: “Accidentally I learn from the German
Illustrierter Beobachter
, Munich, April 30, 1942, that Dr. Pohl is one of those doing
Judenforschung ohne Juden
[“the study of Jews without Jews”]. Among other things, he is the director of the Hebrew Department of the library for Research of the Jewish Question” [the library of the Frankfurt institute].
¹⁶⁷

The main targets of the
Einstazstab
were the Strashun Library (Vilna’s Jewish communal library), the religious book collections of the city’s main synagogues and the YIVO library.
¹⁶⁸
The Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever (who, together with Kalmanovitch and another Yiddish poet, Shmerke Kaczerginski, were Kruk’s colleagues in this enterprise) “noted the parallels between the operations of the Gestapo and the Rosenberg squad. Just as the former raided houses in search of Jews in hiding, the latter conducted aggressive searches for collections of Jewish books.”
¹⁶⁹

“In the Rosenberg Task Force in the Yivo building, books rain down again,” Kruk noted on November 19, 1942. “This time, Yiddish ones. In the cellars, where the Yivo library once was, on one side they load…potatoes, on the other, the books of Kletzkin and Tomor publishers. The whole cellar and several side rooms of the ground floor are crammed with packs of those book treasures. Whole sacks of Peretz and Sholem Aleichem are there, bags of Zinberg’s
History of Jewish Literature,
sets of Kropotkin’s
Great French Revolution
, Ber Mark’s
History of Social Movements of Jews in Poland
, etc., etc. Your heart bursts with pain at the sight. No matter how much we have become used to it, we still don’t have enough nerves to look at the destruction calmly. By the way, at my request, they have nevertheless promised to let us take some books for the ghetto library. Meanwhile, we take them on our own. We will, naturally, use the promise.”
¹⁷⁰
And, indeed, the Jewish team (the “paper brigade”) secretly smuggled as many books as they could into the ghetto.
¹⁷¹

At times the ERR “scholars” came up with truly arcane questions: “Today the head of the Rosenberg task force got a new problem,” Kruk noted on June 29, 1943. “He is interested in knowing if there is a connection between the Star of David and the Soviet five-pointed star.”
¹⁷²

Collecting the skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik commissars to identify the racial-anthropological characteristics of this vilest species of Jewish political criminality was naturally the preserve of Himmler’s
Ahnenerbe
. Yet, despite the scientific importance of such a project, it remains unclear who authored the first memorandum addressed to Himmler on February 9, 1942, under the signature of the anatomist Prof. Dr. August Hirt of the Reich University in Strasbourg. On the face of it Hirt must have initiated the project and made the technical suggestions about the safest way of killing the subjects, severing the head from the spine, as well as packing and transporting the precious skulls
without damaging them in the process
.
¹⁷³
There are indications, however, that, although Hirt was ultimately to be the recipient of the material and the project director, the original idea came from
Ahnenerbe
anthropologist Bruno Beger, a member of the Anthropology Institute of Munich University, led by the world-famous Tibet expert, Ernst Schäfer.
¹⁷⁴
Whatever the case may be, during the following months and years, Beger and Hirt cooperated closely. Ultimately the anatomical institute in Strasbourg did not receive the skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik commissars as, by 1942, the Wehrmacht had second thoughts about executing commissars and frightening away those among them who eventually were ready to cross over to the Germans. This difficulty did not derail Hirt’s and Beger’s project; it merely redirected it.