Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination
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Sometimes, however, German Catholics took daring initiatives, albeit in a paradoxical way. Throughout the 1930s and up to 1942, radical Nazi enemies of the Catholic Church (of the Rosenberg ilk) abundantly used a well-known nineteenth-century anti-Catholic pamphlet, Otto von Corvin’s Der Pfaffenspiegel. To counter this anticlerical propaganda a host of Catholic writers, theologians, priests, and even bishops argued strenuously over the years that Corvin was Jewish, or part Jewish, or a friend of Jews. As one of these Catholic writers put it, Corvin could well have been of Jewish descent, even if he was not. For the Nazis of course, Corvin was a Protestant Aryan of unimpeachable lineage.223
The election of Pius XII on March 2, 1939, inaugurated a new phase of Catholic appeasement of Hitler’s regime. Thus, although in the Reich and in occupied Europe, the Catholic hierarchy attempted to offer assistance to converted Jews, it did not venture beyond this strict limit.224 A Catholic organization established to help emigrants, Sankt Raphaelsverein, took care of the departures of some “Catholic non-aryans,” while the Paulus Bund, created in the 1930s, catered to their needs in the Reich.225
Old cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau, who throughout the war stood at the helm of German Catholicism, displayed unwavering loyalty toward both Führer and fatherland and, as we shall see, kept cordial personal relations with Hitler to the very end. His political stand was that of the majority of the German hierarchy, and, in general terms, it received Pius XII’s approval. Facing Bertram, in increasingly starker opposition, stood Bishop Konrad Count Preysing and, depending on the issues, a small group of bishops and other influential members of the clergy. An internal confrontation about the Jewish question would come, very late; it did not change the passive attitude of the majority or lead to any public stand.226
XII
The leadership chosen by the Jewish community in Germany in the fall of 1933 remained in place as the war started. The Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany), which in early 1939 came to replace the loosely federated Reichsvertretung, was a centralized body established on the initiative of the Jewish leadership itself for the sake of greater efficiency.227 From the outset, though, the activities of the association were entirely controlled by the Gestapo, particularly by Eichmann’s Jewish section. For all intents and purposes it was a Jewish Council on a national scale. It was the Reichsvereinigung that had to inform Jewish communities of all Gestapo instructions, usually by way of the only authorized Jewish newspaper, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt.228
In most parts of the Reich, except for Berlin, as the local Jewish community offices and services lost growing numbers of members, they were integrated into the local Reichsvereinigung branches; these branches followed instructions from the main office in Berlin, which in turn had to report every step to the RSHA. In the capital the “Jewish community” was allowed to keep its independent offices and activities, a situation that often created tense relations between the two Jewish organizations.229
Until October 1941 the prime function of the association was to foster and organize the emigration of Jews from Germany. But from the outset it was no less involved in welfare and education. Its Berlin offices in Oranienburgstrasse and the board of the association, presided over (as he had the previous Reichsvertretung since 1933) by the elderly rabbi Leo Baeck, as well as the local offices in all major German cities, were the main lifeline for the remaining Jewish population.
Direct material assistance became a major concern. After the beginning of the war, state welfare allocations for needy Jews dropped sharply, and most of the assistance had to be raised by the Reichsvereinigung.230 The pitiful “wages” paid to the tens of thousands of Jewish forced laborers could not alleviate the growing material distress. At times even the RSHA had to intervene in favor of the Reichsvereinigung against the ruthless exploitation of the laboring Jews by local authorities.231 Furthermore, because Jewish students had been definitively excluded from all German schools since November 1938, the Reichsvereinigung was solely in charge of the education of some 9,500 children and teenagers in the Old Reich.232
While it was facing growing daily burdens, the Reichsvereinigung did not remain immune to bitter internal confrontations with Jewish individuals or groups, sometimes with potentially grievous consequences. In the fall of 1939, approximately 11,500 Polish Jews still lived in the Reich. Some of them had escaped the deportations of October 1938, others had been allowed to return temporarily to wrap up their businesses. On September 8, 1939, the Gestapo ordered their arrest as enemy aliens and their internment in Buchenwald, Oranienburg, and later Sachsenhausen. The Sachsenhausen inmates were soon dying at an alarming rate. It is in this context that an official of the Jewish Agency [the representation of the Jewish community in Palestine] in Berlin, Recha Freier, a woman in charge of youth emigration, tried to save some of the threatened Polish Jews by putting them on priority lists for transports to Palestine. The Reichsvereinigung officials—in particular Otto Hirsch, its administrative director—were determined to keep all emigration slots for German Jews only and insisted that the Polish Jews be sent to the General Government.233 Apparently Hirsch even threatened Freier with the Gestapo. She escaped and managed to send one transport on its way to Palestine (using forged documents in the process) but never forgave the Berlin Jewish establishment. Leo Baeck was not spared Freier’s wrath: she longed for the day, she wrote after the war, “when this man celebrated as a hero has his halo removed.”234
On December 9, 1939, Klemperer recorded: “I was in the Jewish Community House [the Dresden office of the Reichsvereinigung], 3 Zeughausstrasse, beside the burned down and leveled synagogue, to pay my tax and Winter Aid. Considerable activity: the coupons for gingerbread and chocolate were being cut from the food ration cards…. The clothing cards had to be surrendered as well: Jews receive clothing only on special application to the community. Those were the kind of small unpleasantnesses that no longer count. Then the Party official present wanted to talk to me:…You must leave your house by April 1; you can sell it, rent it out, leave it empty: that’s your business, only you have to be out; you are entitled to a room. Since your wife is Aryan, you will be allocated two rooms if possible. The man was not at all uncivil, he also completely appreciated the difficulties we shall face, without anyone at all benefiting as a result—the sadistic machine simply rolls over us.”235
While in Germany there was a continuity of Jewish leadership, in former Poland much of the prewar leadership was replaced, as we saw, when the Germans occupied the country and many Jewish community leaders fled. Both Adam Czerniaków in Warsaw and Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz were new to top leadership positions, and both were now appointed chairmen of the councils of their cities.
On the face of it Czerniaków’s ordinariness was his most notable characteristic. Yet his diary shows him to have been anything but an ordinary person. Czerniaków’s basic decency is striking in a time of unbridled ruthlessness. Not only did he devote every single day to his community, but he particularly cared for the humblest and the weakest among his four hundred thousand wards: the children, the beggars, the insane.
An engineer by training (he had studied in Warsaw and in Dresden), Czerniaków filled a variety of rather obscure positions and, over the years, also dabbled in city politics and in the Jewish politics of Warsaw. He was a member of the Warsaw city council and of the Jewish community city council, and when Maurycy Mayzel, the chairman of the community, fled at the outbreak of the war, Mayor Stefan Starzynski nominated Czerniaków in his stead. On October 4, 1939, Einsatzgruppe IV appointed the fifty-nine-year-old Czerniaków head of Warsaw Jewish Council.236
It seems that Czerniaków did some maneuvering to secure this latest appointment.237 Was it sheer ambition? If so, he soon understood the nature of his role and the overwhelming challenge that confronted him. He knew the Germans; soon he also lost many illusions about the Poles: “In the cemetery, not one tree,” he noted on April 28, 1940. “All uprooted. The
tombstones shattered. A fence together with its oak posts pillaged. Nearby at Powaski [Christian cemetery] the trees are intact.”238 He reserved some of his harshest comments for his fellow Jews, though never forgetting the growing horror of their common situation.
Czerniaków could have left, but he stayed. In October 1939 he obviously could not foresee what was about to happen less than three years later, yet some of his witticisms have a premonitory tone: “Expulsions from Krakow,” he writes on May 22, 1940. “The optimists, the pessimists and the sophists.”239 In Hebrew soph means “end.” A witness, Apolinary Hartglas, relates that when the council convened for the first time, Czerniaków showed several members a drawer in his desk where he had put “a small bottle with 24 cyanide tablets, one for each of us, and he showed us where the key to the drawer could be found, should the need arise.”240
Czerniaków had his foibles of course, as we shall see, but foibles that bring a smile, nothing more. And yet, during his tenure as enslaved mayor of the largest Jewish urban concentration in the world after New York, this mild administrator was mostly reviled and hated for evil measures that were none of his doing and that he had no way of mitigating.
It is in stark contrast to Czerniaków’s mostly posthumous image of decency and self-sacrifice that any number of diarists, memoirists, and not a few later historians describe the leader of the second largest Jewish community in former Poland: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the “Elder” of Lodz. Rumkowski’s life to age sixty-two was undistinguished: in business he apparently failed several times, in the Zionist politics of Lodz he did not leave much of an impact and even his stewardship of several orphanages was criticized by some contemporaries.
As in Warsaw, the head of the prewar Lodz community, Leon Minzberg, fled; he was replaced by his deputy, and Rumkowski was elevated to the vice-presidency of the community. It was Rumkowski, however, whom the Germans chose to lead the Jews of Lodz. The new “Elder” appointed a council of thirty-one members. Within less than a month these council members were arrested by the Gestapo and shot. The hatred Rumkowski inspired years after his death finds a telling expression in the ambiguous comments of one of the earliest and most distinguished historians of the Holocaust, Philip Friedman, regarding this episode: “What was Rumkowski’s part in the fate of the original council? Had he complained to the Germans about the intransigence of the council members? If so, did he know what was in store for them? These are grave questions, which we cannot answer on the basis of the evidence at our disposal.”241 A second council was put in place in February 1940.
Czerniaków had no great respect for his Lodz counterpart: “It seems that Rumkowski in Lodz issued his own currency ‘Chaimki’; he has been nicknamed ‘Chaim the Terrible,’” the Warsaw chairman noted on August 29, 1940.242 And on September 7 Ringelblum recorded Rumkowski’s visit to Warsaw: “Today there arrived from Lodz, Chaim, or, as he is called, ‘King Chaim,’ Rumkowski, an old man of seventy, extraordinarily ambitious and pretty nutty. He recited the marvels of his ghetto. He has a Jewish kingdom there with 400 policemen, three jails. He has a foreign ministry and all other ministries too. When asked why, if things were so good there, the mortality is so high, he did not answer. He considers himself God anointed.”243
Most contemporaries agree about Rumkowski’s ambition, his despotic behavior toward his fellow Jews, and his weird megalomania. Yet a keen observer who lived in the Lodz ghetto (and died just before the mass deportations of early 1942), Jacob Szulman, while recognizing and listing some glaringly repulsive aspects of the Elder’s personality, in a memoir written sometime in 1941, nonetheless compared his stewardship favorably to that of his opposite number, Czerniaków.244 Actually the comparison between the Jewish leaders in Lodz and Warsaw should be pushed even further. Rumkowski, historian Yisrael Gutman argues, created a situation of social equality in the ghetto “where a rich man was the one who still had a piece of bread…. Czerniaków, who on the other hand was indisputably a decent man, came to terms with scandalous incidents in the Warsaw ghetto.”245
Jewish diarists—their chronicles, their reflections, their witnessing—will take center stage in this volume. These diarists were a very heterogenous lot. Klemperer was the son of a Reform rabbi. His conversion to Protestantism, his marriage to a Christian wife, clearly demonstrated his goal: total assimilation. Entirely different was Kaplan’s relation to his Jewishness: A Talmudic education at the Yeshiva of Mir (and later, specialized training at the Pedagogical Institute in Vilna) prepared him for his lifelong commitment: Hebrew education. For forty years Kaplan was the principal of the Hebrew elementary school he had established in Warsaw in 1902.246 Whereas Klemperer’s prose had the light ironic touch of his revered Voltaire, Kaplan’s diary writing—which had already begun in 1933—carried something of the emphatic style of biblical Hebrew. Kaplan was a Zionist who, like Czerniaków, refused to leave his Warsaw community when offered a visa to Palestine. Klemperer, on the other hand, fervently hated Zionism and in some of his outbursts compared it to Nazism. Yet this self-centered neurotic scholar wrote with total honesty about others and about himself.
Ringelblum was the only professionally trained historian among these Jewish witnesses. The dissertation that earned him a doctorate from Warsaw University dealt with “The History of the Jews in Warsaw up to the Expulsion of 1527.”247 From 1927 to 1939 he taught history in a Warsaw gymnasium, and during the years before the war he helped to set up the Warsaw branch of the Vilna Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) and a circle of young historians. Ringelblum was an active socialist and a committed left-wing Zionist. From the outset, in line with his political leanings, he was hostile to the Jewish Council—the corrupt “establishment” in his eyes—and a devoted spokesman of the “Jewish masses.”
Jochen Klepper’s diary is different: Suffused with intense Christian religiosity, it should not be read in the same way as the Jewish chroniclers’ recordings. Because of his Jewish wife, Klepper had been dismissed from his job at German radio, then from the Ullstein publishing house. However, the bureaucracy did hesitate for a time about the category to which he belonged, the more so because he was the author of successful novels, even of a nationalist bestseller, Der Vater (The Father), a biography of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia. Thus Klepper’s tortured life turned him into a witness of an unusual kind, one who shared the fate of the victims yet perceived them from outside the pale in a way, as a German and a Christian.
Many more Jewish diarists will add their voices to those encountered so far, from West and East, from diverse walks of life, of different ages. Dawid Sierakowiak, the high school diarist from Lodz, will soon be joined by the youngest chronicler of all, twelve-year-old Dawid Rubinowicz from the neighborhood of Kielce in the General Government; by the high school chronicler Itzhok Rudashevski in Vilna; the adolescent Moshe Flinker in Brussels, and the thirteen-year-old Anne Frank, in Amsterdam. Other adolescents will be heard, more briefly. None of them survived; very few of the adult chroniclers survived either, but hundreds of hidden diaries were found. Tragically the chroniclers had achieved their aim.
CHAPTER II
May 1940–December 1940
On October 22, 1940, the 6,500 Jews of the German provinces of Baden and the Saar-Palatinate were suddenly deported into nonoccupied France. According to a report from the prosecutor’s office in Mannheim, on the morning of that day, eight local Jews committed suicide: Gustav Israel Lefo (age seventy-four) and his wife Sara Lefo (sixty-five), gas; Klara Sara Schorff (sixty-four) and her brother Otto Israel Strauss (fifty-four), gas; Olga Sara Strauss (sixty-one), sleeping pills; Jenny Sara Dreyfuss (forty-seven), sleeping pills; Nanette Sara Feitler (seventy-three), by hanging herself on the door of her bathroom; Alfred Israel Bodenheimer (sixty-nine), sleeping pills.1
Registration of the property left behind by the deportees was thorough. Thus the gendarmerie station of Walldorf, in the district of Heidelberg, reported on October 23 that nine hens, four roosters, and one goose were foun
d at Blanca Salomon’s; Sara Mayer owned ten hens and three roosters; Albert Israel Vogel was the possessor of four hens and Sara Weil, of three hens and one rooster. As for Moritz Mayer, he owned a German shepherd who responded to the name “Baldo.”2 On December 7, 1940, the gendarmerie of Graben opened and searched the apartment previously shared by four deportees: two Jewish widows, Sophie Herz and Caroline Ott, and a couple named Prager. The officials registered a golden medal—Paris Eiffel Tower—1889, a golden medal—Paris—1878, a gilded wristwatch bracelet, a gilded brooch, three golden rings, seven foreign copper coins, six silver kitchen knives, seven silver coffee spoons in their étuis, and so on.3
I
No major military operations had taken place from the end of the Polish campaign to early April 1940. The “winter war,” which started with the Soviet attack against Finland in December 1939, ended in March 1940 after the Finns gave in to Soviet territorial demands in the province of Karelia. This conflict in northern Europe had no direct impact on the major confrontation except, possibly, by strengthening Hitler’s low opinion of the Red Army. During these same months of military inaction on the Western Front (the “phony war”) optimism was rife in London and in Paris, and consequently among Jewish officials who kept in touch with Western governments. On November 4, 1939, Nahum Goldmann, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, reported to Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress in New York, that both in London and Paris people in the know had the highest expectations. Goldmann himself was slightly more prudent: “I would not go as far as some do to say that the breakdown of Hitler is already sealed, but it seems indeed that the Reich is in a terrible position. Italy is definitely no more on the Axis’ side…. Next spring the Allies will have twice or three times as many aeroplanes as Germany, whose aeroplanes, by the way, seem to be inferior to those of the Allies…. Most of those who still a month ago in France and Britain believed in a very long war, do not believe in it anymore and very important people hold the view that by next spring or summer the war may be over. The internal situation of Germany seems to be very bad. It is Germany at the end of 1917.”4