As he wrote to Preysing in April 1943, the Pope feared that public protests would lead to renewed persecution of the Church in Germany. He was not willing to intervene to help the Jews. A public stance against the killings would not stop them, he thought, and indeed might simply speed them up. With the Germans in Rome, too, open criticism might bring German troops into the Vatican. The most he could do, he told Preysing, was to pray for the ‘non-Aryan or half-Aryan Catholics . . . in the collapse of their external existence and in their spiritual need’. Contrary to what some of his critics have claimed, there is no convincing evidence that Pius XII was an antisemite, or that he had concluded from his experience in Munich in 1919 that Communism was part of a world Jewish conspiracy.42 But on the other hand, he was fully aware by April 1943 that the Jews, including Catholics of Jewish origin, were not just suffering in spiritual and material terms, but were being murdered in vast numbers by the Germans. Pius XII knew, of course, that many Catholic priests in Italy, including some in the Vatican City, were giving refuge to Jews as the Germans began to threaten their existence from the autumn of 1943 onwards. He did nothing to stop such actions, but he took no part in them himself, nor did he utter a single word that might have encouraged priests to undertake them. Ever the cautious career diplomat, Pius XII did what he thought best in the interests of the Catholic Church both in Italy and elsewhere.43
Things were only a little different among German Protestants. On 4 April 1939 the German Christians issued a declaration in Bad Godesberg that affirmed the Church’s ‘responsibility for keeping our people racially pure’ and insisted that there was ‘no sharper contradiction’ than that between Judaism and Christianity. The following month, the Confessing Church replied with a similar document agreeing that ‘the preservation of the purity of our people demands an earnest and responsible racial policy’. Few will have noticed much difference between the two.44 On occasion the Confessing Church did raise its voice in protest. When the Church Chancellery, formally the leading body of the Evangelical Church, together with three bishops, issued an open letter demanding ‘that baptized Non-Aryans stay away from the Church activities of the German congregation’, the leadership of the Confessing Church asked pointedly whether in that case Christ and the Apostles would have been ejected from the Church on racial grounds had they lived in the Third Reich. And as persecution turned to mass murder, one leading Protestant tried to stop the persecution of the Jews. Bishop Theophil Wurm wrote to Goebbels in November 1941, warning him that the campaign against the Jews was helping enemy propaganda. Goebbels threw the letter into his wastepaper basket. Another letter, which Wurm attempted to have passed to Hitler by a senior civil servant, made a similar point in respect of what he called ‘the growing harshness of the treatment of Non-Aryans’.45 On 16 July 1943 Wurm tried again. By this time, as he noted, he had lost both his son and his son-in-law on the Eastern Front. Writing personally to Hitler, he declared that the ‘measures of annihilation’ directed against ‘Non-Aryans’ stood ‘in the sharpest contradiction to God’s Commandment and violate the basis of all Western life and thought: people’s God-given, fundamental right to life and human dignity in general’. Although it was ostensibly a private letter, Wurm had it copied and distributed within the Church. On 20 December 1943 Wurm repeated its main points in a letter to Hans-Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery. ‘I hereby caution you emphatically,’ Lammers replied, ‘and request you in future to be most punctilious in remaining within the bounds of your profession.’ Politics were not the bishop’s business. Nobody apart from Wurm attempted such an intervention, and shortly after his protest, he was banned from writing or speaking in public for the rest of the war, though he contined to preach and take services despite the ban.46
III
If the Churches did not openly condemn the Nazi genocide of the Jews, or undertake anything to try to stop it, then what was the attitude of the mass of ordinary Germans in this respect? Finding out about the killings was not difficult. Obviously, news travelled fast to the few Jews who remained in Germany.47 In January 1942 Victor Klemperer was reporting rumours that ‘evacuated Jews were shot in Riga, in groups, as they left the train’.48 On 16 March 1942 his diary mentioned for the first time ‘Auschwitz (or something like it), near Königshütte in Upper Silesia, mentioned as the most dreadful concentration camp’.49 By October 1942 he was referring to it as a ‘swift-working slaughterhouse’. 50 ‘The will to extermination is growing all the time,’ he noted at the end of August 1942.51 The mass murders in Auschwitz and elsewhere had, he noted, ‘now been reported too frequently, and by too many consistent Aryan sources, for it to be a legend’.52 As this suggests, knowledge of the mass killings of Jews, Poles and others in the east was not hard to come by. It could be obtained from a variety of sources. The Security Service of the SS reported in March 1942 that soldiers returning from Poland were talking openly about how the Jews were being killed there in large numbers.53 The Nazi Party Chancellery complained on 9 October 1942 that ‘discussions’ about ‘ “very harsh measures” against the Jews, particularly in the Eastern Territories’ were ‘being spread by men on leave from the various units deployed in the east, who have themselves had the opportunity to observe such measures’.54 Civil servants at many levels of the central Reich administration read the Task Force reports or were in contact with administrators in the east.55 Railway timetable clerks, engine drivers and train drivers and other staff on stations and in goods yards could all identify the trains and knew where they were going. Policemen rounding up the Jews or dealing with their files or their property knew as well. Housing officials who reassigned the Jews’ dwellings to Germans, administrators who dealt with the Jews’ property - the list was almost endless.
Some Germans reacted with open enthusiasm to discrimination against the Jews. After putting on his yellow star, Victor Klemperer experienced for the first time being shouted at in the streets by young members of the Hitler Youth.56 In his minutely detailed account of everyday life as a Jew in Nazi Germany during the war, Klemperer recorded a wide variety of reactions by ordinary Germans on the street as they encountered him wearing the star. While one asked him brusquely ‘why are you still alive, you rogue?’, others, complete strangers, would come up to him and shake him by the hand, whispering ‘you know why!’, before passing quickly on.57 Such encounters became more dangerous after late October 1941, when the Reich Security Head Office ordered the arrest of any German who demonstrated any kind of friendliness towards a Jew in public, along with the arrest and incarceration in a concentration camp of the Jew in question.58 Some persisted, however. Sometimes Klemperer was able to identify friendly workers as ‘old SPD men at least, probably old KPD men’, but he received abuse from other workers too.59 On a visit to the Health Insurance Office Klemperer noticed a worker catching sight of his Jewish star and saying, ‘They should give them an injection. Then that would be the end of them!’60 By contrast, in April 1943 a worker removing the effects of an ‘evacuee’ from the Jews’ House in Dresden where Victor Klemperer lived murmured to him, ‘These damned swine - the things they’re doing - in Poland - they drive me into a rage too.’61 Jewish rations were worse than inadequate, but, while some shopkeepers stuck stony-faced to the rules, others showed some willingness to bend them.62
When they forced Jews to wear the yellow star on their clothing, the better for people to identify them, many non-Jewish Germans did not react in the way that Goebbels wanted them to. Jews reported being greeted on the street with unusual politeness, people coming up to them and apologizing, or offering them a seat on the tram. Foreign diplomats, among them the Swedish Ambassador and the US Consul-General in Berlin, noted similarly sympathetic reactions on the part of the majority population, particularly from older people. The public advertisement of the Jews’ persecuted status produced feelings of shame and guilt when it was attached to visible, living human beings.63 Popular reactions to the introduction of the Jewish star were overwhelmingl
y negative, and those who took it as the opportunity to abuse and attack Jews were in a small minority.64 When, not long afterwards, the police began rounding up Jews in German cities and taking them to the local railway station for deportation to the east, negative public reactions outweighed the positive ones again. Older Germans in particular found the deportations shocking. The Security Service of the SS reported in December 1941 that people in Minden were saying that it was ‘incomprehensible how human beings could be treated so brutally; whether they were Jews or Aryans, all of them in the end were people created by God.’65 The religiously inclined were particularly critical of the deportations.66 In Lemgo a crowd gathered to see the last transport of Jews off at the end of July 1942. Many citizens, particularly in the older generations, were critical, and even Nazi Party members said it was too hard on the Jews, who had been living in the town for many decades, even centuries. 67 ‘On the train,’ noted Luise Solmitz in Hamburg on 7 November 1941, ‘people are craning their necks; apparently a fresh trainload of Non-Aryans to be sent away is being put together at Logenähs.’68 Not long afterwards, she heard a passer-by comment as an elderly Jewish woman was taken away from a Jewish old people’s home, ‘driven together in such a little pile of misery’: ‘Good, that the rabble is being cleaned out!’ But another witness to the action took exception to this comment: ‘Are you talking to me?’ he asked. ‘Please shut up.’69 All through the summer of 1942 Luise Solmitz witnessed the repeated deportations of elderly Jews to Theresienstadt. ‘The whole of Hamburg is filled with the deportation even of the oldest people,’ she noted. An acquaintance reported that ‘whooping children had accompanied the removal’, although Solmitz herself had never seen such behaviour. ‘Once more, Jews have gone to Warsaw,’ she reported on 14 July 1942. ‘I found confirmation of this in the rubbish-bins outside their home, which were full to the brim with the miserable remains of their few possessions, with coloured tin cans, old bedside lamps, torn handbags. Children were rummaging about in them, cheering, making an indescribable mess.’70
An unexpected new challenge was posed to the Solmitz family when Friedrich and Luise’s daughter Gisela fell in love with a Belgian man working in a Hamburg factory and they decided to marry. At the Registry Office, an official told Luise that the Reich Ministry of Justice had turned down the couple’s application to marry, adding:
‘Do the young man’s parents know that your daughter is a half-breed of the first grade? I’m sure they’ve given their consent, but do they know that?’ - ‘Belgium doesn’t recognize such laws or such views.’ - ‘What do you mean, “Belgium”? Today we don’t even use the term “Germany”. We think: “Europe”. No Jew is to remain in Europe. This is my personal view - not the official one, but I notice it from signs that the Jews will be dealt with even more severely than before.’ He said that to me twice. And there I sat, defenceless. ‘Look,’ he continued to lecture me, ‘at what the Jews have done in Russia, in America. Now we’re noticing it for the first time.’
When Luise Solmitz made so bold as to mention her Jewish husband, the official was thoroughly taken aback. ‘Your husband is still here?!’ he exclaimed in disbelief.71
IV
A few people tried to rescue such Jews as they could. The story of the businessman Oskar Schindler is well known: a Czech German and member of the Nazi Party, he obtained an enamel factory in Cracow when its Jewish owner was dispossessed, and employed 1,100 Jewish forced labourers there while also engaging in widespread black market activities, trading in looted art and pursuing other forms of corruption. As time went on, however, Schindler began to be outraged at the treatment meted out to Polish Jews, and managed to use his money and connections to protect those who were working for him. As the Red Army approached, he obtained permission to evacuate his workers to an arms factory in the Sudetenland, although it never produced any arms. The Jews survived the war, but Schindler had lost most of his fortune in protecting them, and he did not prosper in the more orderly business world of the postwar years. He moved to Argentina in 1948, but was forced into bankruptcy a decade later, and returned to Germany, living first in Frankfurt then in Hildesheim, and dying a relatively poor man in 1974, aged sixty-six.72
Another rescuer, the Catholic German army officer and former schoolteacher Wilm Hosenfeld, also began employing Poles and Jews in his army sports administration in Warsaw, to protect them from arrest. ‘How many have I already helped!’ he wrote to his wife on 31 March 1943, adding a few months later: ‘I don’t have such a bad conscience that I must be afraid of any retribution.’73 On 17 November 1944 Hosenfeld stumbled upon a starving Jewish survivor of the ghetto, living in an abandoned house that Hosenfeld was prospecting for use as the new army command headquarters.74 The man turned out to be a well-known professional pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose radio recitals had made him a household name in Poland before the war. Hosenfeld hid him in the attic while the German army command moved in downstairs, and kept him supplied with food and winter clothing until the Germans left the city. He never told Szpilman his name, nor did he, for obvious reasons of security, make any mention in his diary of what he had done. It was not until the 1950s that the pianist, who by this time had revived his career in Poland, discovered his rescuer’s identity.75
There were others, less well known, who helped keep a total of several thousand Jews in hiding in Berlin, Warsaw, Amsterdam and many other occupied cities. They included clandestine groups stimulated by socialist or religious or sometimes simply humanitarian beliefs, such as scouting troops, charitable organizations, student clubs and a whole variety of pre-existing networks. A number of Jews, especially in France, were able to hide in the countryside with the help of friendly or compassionate farmers and villagers. One of many groups devoted to rescue was the Organization for Rescuing Children and Protecting the Health of Jewish Populations, founded in Russia in 1912. Its French branch hid several hundred Jewish children, many of them refugees from Germany and Austria, provided them with false identity papers, dispersed them to non-Jewish families who were willing to take the risk, or smuggled them into Spain or Switzerland. All in all, underground groups such as this managed to hide many thousands of Jews or send them into safety outside German-occupied Europe.76 But these thousands, of course, have to be set against the millions who did not survive.
A small number of individuals also tried to get news of the extermination to the world outside German-dominated Europe. At the end of July 1942 the German industrialist Eduard Schulte, who enjoyed good relations with leading members of the regime, travelled to Zurich, where he told a Jewish business friend that Hitler had planned the complete annihilation of Europe’s Jews by the end of the year. Up to 4 million would be transported to the east to be killed, possibly by sulphuric acid, he said. The information reached Gerhart Riegner of the Jewish World Congress, who organized the British and US embassies to transmit it via telegram to his headquarters in New York. Such reports frequently encountered scepticism amongst those to whom they were addressed. The enormity of the crime seemed beyond belief. The US government advised the Congress to keep Riegner’s report confidential until it could be independently verified.77 More reliable and precise information could only come from an eyewitness. One of the most extraordinary of these was Kurt Gerstein, a disinfection expert in the Hygiene Institute of the Military SS. Gerstein was sent by the Reich Security Head Office in the summer of 1942 to deliver 100 kilos of Zyklon-B to Lublin for an undisclosed purpose. On 2 August 1942 he arrived in Belzec and was present as a trainload of Jews from Lvov came in, were forced to undress, and were driven by Ukrainian auxiliaries into the gas chambers, where they were told they would be disinfected. There they had to wait for two and a half hours, weeping and crying, while mechanics outside tried to get the diesel motor going. Once it started working, Gerstein noted punctiliously, it took thirty-two minutes to kill the people inside the chamber. A devout Protestant, Gerstein was shocked by what he witnessed. On the journey back from Warsaw to Berlin,
he told it all to Göran von Otter, a Swedish diplomat, who reported the details in a dispatch to the Swedish Foreign Office after discreetly checking Gerstein’s credentials. The dispatch languished there until the end of the war, kept secret by officials who feared it would offend the Germans. Back in Berlin, Gerstein pestered the Papal Nuncio, the leaders of the Confessing Church and the Swiss Embassy with his story, all to no effect. Gerstein did not, however, as one might have expected, resign his post or ask for a transfer. He continued to deliver consignments of Zyklon-B to the camp, while redoubling his futile efforts to spread information about what was going on. Finally he wrote three separate reports on what he had seen, augmented by information gained by talking to others involved. He kept them secret, however, and it was only at the end of the war that he made them public by handing them over to the Americans. Arrested as an alleged war criminal, Gerstein hanged himself in his cell on 25 July 1945, most probably out of remorse at his failure, or guilt at not having done more.78
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