Submerged on the Surface

The Not-So-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941–1945

Richard N. Lutjens, Jr.

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785334566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that "hidden" Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.

Chapter 1

SUBMERGING

The Prelude: Berlin, 1938–1941

On 10 June 1938, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister for propaganda, addressed over three hundred Berlin police officers: “The rallying cry is not law, but rather harassment. The Jews must get out of Berlin. The police will help me with that.”¹ The first five years of Nazi rule witnessed the gradual, yet steady, tightening of restrictions against Germany’s Jewish population and its increasing exclusion from the country’s political, cultural, social, and economic life.² Berlin was not immune to these developments. However, 1938 witnessed the start of ever more violent and radical policies designed to force the Jews from German soil. Although approximately 30 percent of Berlin Jews had emigrated by the end of 1937, over 110,000 still remained in the city.³ Moreover, despite the continual attacks on Jewish commercial activity that had been occurring since the early 1930s, Berlin’s Jewish businesses (or those designated by the Nazis as Jewish businesses) had managed to persevere to a surprising degree. Although the size of Jewish-owned businesses had shrunk dramatically over the preceding five years (with a vast majority too small to be listed in the city’s commercial register), Christoph Kreutzmüller argues that over 42,750 Jewish businesses continued to exist as late as the summer of 1938 (down from around 50,000 in 1933), with some 6,500 still large enough to be listed on the commercial register.⁴ Yet Nazi determination to rid the country of Jews increased exponentially during the year, as reflectedin a “surge of decrees” designed to destroy all Jewish commercial activity, fully isolate Jews from non-Jews, and bring the still nominally autonomous Jewish communities firmly under Nazi bureaucratic control.⁵ The final break with the regime’s more gradual policies of economic and social isolation came on the night of November 9–10, 1938, when the Nazi authorities unleashed a wave of terror and violence against Jews not seen since the middle ages: Kristallnacht.⁶

The events of Kristallnacht marked a turning point for the Jews of Germany. Any remaining illusions of safety vanished, as did the idea of a Jewish future in Germany. In Berlin, Nazi hordes led by the SA ransacked and destroyed hundreds of Jewish businesses (exact figures are unknown), set ablaze nine of the city’s twelve synagogues, and, amid the beatings and killings, arrested or attempted to arrest some twelve thousand Berlin Jews, sending approximately three thousand individuals to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the Berlin suburb of Oranienburg.⁷ The financial consequences also were devastating. In the immediate wake of the pogrom, the Nazis imposed a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks on the country’s Jews.⁸ One month later, the Nazis ordered the nationwide Aryanization or liquidation of all remaining Jewish-owned businesses; the process took time, but between 1938 and 1941, 5,577 Jewish-owned business closed.⁹ Observing the turmoil around her, the non-Jewish diarist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich wrote, “Now I know it. The Jewish war has begun . . . with an attack across the board.”¹⁰ Indeed, in historical hindsight, the events of Kristallnacht presaged the imminent war against Europe’s Jews.¹¹

Berlin Jews were caught in a snare of degrading national and city laws designed to complete the isolation measures taken against them during the first five years of Nazi rule. In December 1938, the German labor office created a separate Central Administrative Office for Jews to coordinate all issues relating to Jewish housing, food, insurance, and labor.¹² Segregated forced labor, introduced at the end of 1938 for all unemployed Jews, became official policy by 1940.¹³ Social ordinances banning Jews from most public spaces and Jewish children from attending school with non-Jews were followed by dozens of humiliating ordinances pertaining to ration cards, pets, bicycles, shopping times, curfews, housing restrictions, and the confiscation of all valuables.¹⁴ In January 1939, the Nazis required all Jews not in a privileged mixed marriage to add either Sara or Israel to their names.¹⁵ The outbreak of war in 1939 only intensified Nazi efforts to exclude and degrade. The steady eviction of Jews from their homes and government attempts to relocate them to so-called Jewish houses (Judenhäuser) served to further isolate Jews from non-Jews.¹⁶ On 1 September 1941, the introduction of the Judenstern (Jewish Star) allowedthe authorities to monitor the movements of Berlin Jews and better prevent their interaction with non-Jews.¹⁷ Daily life continued in the Jewish community but in an increasingly proscribed and unstable form. Those who tried to circumvent the myriad restrictions—and many of the future U-boats did—risked arrest, imprisonment, and early deportation.

The Nazis also consolidated the country’s remaining Jewish communities firmly under a newly created umbrella organization: Die Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (The National Association of Jews in Germany).¹⁸ Under the nominal cover of “Jewish self-administration,” the Reichsvereinigung was responsible for coordinating all facets of Jewish life: welfare services for the now-impoverished Jewish community; facilitating Jewish emigration; ration card distribution; and, as of October 1941, the organization of deportation lists. In reality, the Reichsvereinigung was under the direct control of the Gestapo and was responsible for enacting its antisemitic policies. Although the Reichsvereinigung attempted to care for the Jewish community, its primary function by the closing months of 1941 was the coordination of the Jewish community in Germany in preparation for the Final Solution.¹⁹

In response to increasing and unrelenting persecution, Jews throughout Germany scrambled to procure the affidavits and visas necessary for emigration. Many succeeded. In Berlin alone, between 1933 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, some eighty thousand Jews emigrated.²⁰ These numbers declined, however, as a number of potential places of refuge either were at war with Germany or already conquered. Moreover, the restrictive quotas set by many countries and the fantastic sums of money required to procure visas hindered mass emigration. Although Kristallnacht had awoken most Jews to the dangers facing them, the ensuing three years did not give most of them enough time to escape. In her memoirs, Inge Deutschkron, a future U-boat, remarked, “For the German Jews, even the most German among them, the events of November 9 were an alarm signal. Some believed that it was now five minutes before twelve. Actually, for most of them it was already five minutes past twelve—too late.”²¹ Indeed, when Heinrich Himmler ordered the halt to most emigration in October 1941 (emigration still being an option for a very small number), 73,842 Jews remained trapped in the capital of a country soon bent on their extermination.²²

On 18 October 1941, a train carrying 1,013 individuals left Berlin for Litzmannstadt in the Reichsgau Wartheland of what had, until September 1939, been Poland.²³ This transport was the first of almost two hundred that departed from Berlin during the next three and a half years for various ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps in Eastern Europe. After eight years of various approaches to solving the“Jewish Question,” in the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Nazi antisemitic policy quickly began to coalesce around the decision to exterminate Europe’s entire Jewish population. Even still, the process was uneven and piecemeal, and it was largely initiated away from the Berlin metropole. While the process of systematic extermination of Soviet Jews had begun in September and October 1941, Polish Jews had already been dying in great numbers since 1939 through ghettoization and the ensuing disease, starvation, and sporadic killings. Yet when the first deportation train left Berlin in October 1941, the fate of Jewish Germans was still somewhat unclear, as they were not initially marked for inclusion in the extermination measures already sweeping Eastern Europe. Indeed, the chief purpose of the Wannsee Conference (initially scheduled for 9 December 1941) was to clarify the position of Jewish Germans and who should be included in the deportation measures. This changed, however, with the declaration of war against the United States, which ultimately pushed the meeting of the conference back to 20 January 1942. Critically, on 12 December 1941, Hitler gave a speech to his Reichsleiter and Gauleiter, indicting Jews as responsible for what was now a world war; it was only at this point, as Christian Gerlach argues, that the inclusion of Jewish Germans in the extermination of European Jewry became an official reality.²⁴ Thus, de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Names and Terms
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Submerging
• Chapter 2. Surviving
• Chapter 3. Living
• Chapter 4. Surfacing
• Epilogue
• Appendix. The Demographics of Submerging in Nazi Berlin
• Bibliography
• Index