Berlin at War (35 page)

were a great source of excitement to Berlin’s children. As many

commentators record, already the morning after a raid few of these

metal fragments would be found as they had all been collected up by

eager schoolchildren. In general, the larger, more jagged or more twisted

the fragment was, the better; others preferred those fragments that

had a threaded section of the screw-in fuse still visible, or those that

were still warm from being fired. Such splinters – often up to 10 centi -

metres in length – would then be taken into school to be shown off

or exchanged in the playground.74

a taste of things to come

157

The pretence of invulnerability in Berlin was enhanced by the speed

with which the authorities set about repairing what little damage had

been done. Very soon after a raid, ‘roof and window gangs’ began

making good all the damage in the capital. Groups of workmen began

to clear the more serious bombsites, boarding them off to escape the

gaze of the inquisitive. Harry Flannery particularly admired the

extraordinary effort that was made after bombs were dropped on the

Tauentzienstrasse, one of the main shopping streets in the fashion-

able west end of Berlin:

Early the next day a monster crew was on the job, working in an

amazing fashion. There were men down in the stricken subway between

the important stations of Wittenbergplatz and the Zoo, others busy

fixing water mains, gas lines, and other public utilities in the street,

and gangs of men up and down the street restoring store fronts and

installing new shop-window glass. In a few days, no one could tell that

any bombs had fallen on the Tauentzienstrasse.75

Perhaps because it was tidied away and repaired so swiftly, bomb

damage became a real novelty in the autumn of 1940 and countless

Berliners flocked to view the aftermath of each British raid. Though

this was, in part at least, a result of a ghoulish fascination with death

and destruction, it is also tempting to see it as a symptom of a more

serious malaise – namely the dawning sense that the Nazi authorities

were not telling the truth about the scale or seriousness of the attacks.

Kurt Radener witnessed the extraordinary popular response after

the house opposite his in Tempelhof was destroyed by a bomb in one

of the earliest raids on Berlin in August 1940. He recalled that it was

‘a sensation’ and that a ‘mass migration began with all of Berlin

coming to Tempelhof to see a bombed-out house’.76

Young Dieter Zimmer recalled that the excitement was also tinged

with the chilling realisation of the fragility of life:

That afternoon, my parents and I went to the affected streets to have

a look at the damage . . . Two houses had been wrecked by high explo-

sives. On one, the whole front had been torn away and lay as a pile

of rubble in the front garden. The furnished rooms were laid bare,

like the rooms in a doll’s house. The middle-class living room, now

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berlin at war

inaccessible and exposed to prying eyes, gave me a profound shock. I

couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights afterwards. Everything could now

be turned inside-out and collapse in on itself. The world had lost its

former solidity.77

As the attacks multiplied, the destruction wrought increasingly

became a part of Berliners’ everyday lives, but this curiosity took rather

longer to fade. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in October 1940: ‘After

each raid, the populace turns out, curious and sensation hungry, to

view the so-called “damage”. They gape at a burned attic here, a few

paving stones dug up there, a half-collapsed house over yonder.’78

The phenomenon was even worse when the city centre was hit.

On the morning of 11 September, for instance, one American

newspaper correspondent reported: ‘The downtown district of Berlin,

especially near the Brandenburg Gate, was jammed today with pedes-

trians who had come to view the damage inflicted in last night’s raid.

Unter den Linden and the other streets . . . were a mass of curious

Berliners.’79 In reality, there was precious little to see, but that did not

serve to keep the crowds away. Instead, they milled around the govern-

ment district, congregating many deep at each of the locations where

a bomb had hit. At one site – an eight-foot crater in the East-West Axis

– a constant stream of Berliners peered solemnly into the hole in the

roadway, as if seeking revelation.

Yet, whatever the material damage inflicted in that early phase of

the bombing, the effect on the civilian population – both in terms of

sleep deprivation and the wider impact on morale – was substantial.

Goebbels summed up the problem in his diary when he complained

that: ‘Late in the night comes the usual air-raid warning. Two aircraft

scuttle over Berlin. And for that, a city of 4½ million people must

take to the shelters.’ ‘Berlin’, he complained, ‘is a tired town.’80

Later that autumn, the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo

Ciano noted the ‘depressed spirit’ in the German capital, which he

attributed to the constant air raids. ‘Every night citizens spend from

four to five hours in the cellar. They lack sleep, there is promiscuity

between men and women, cold, and these things do not create a good

mood. The number of people with colds is incredible. Bomb damage

is slight; nervousness is very high.’81

William Shirer suggested that the effect the bombing was having

a taste of things to come

159

on morale in the German capital, far more than the damage inflicted,

should be the primary rationale for the British. He explained his

reasoning in a diary entry on 26 September: ‘We had the longest air-

raid of the war last night, from eleven p.m. to four o’clock this

morning. If you had a job to get to at seven or eight a.m., as hundreds

of thousands of people had, you got very little sleep. The British

ought to do this every night. No matter if not much is destroyed . . .

the psychological effect is tremendous.’82

By the winter of 1940–41, the air raids – which had been unthink-

able only a few months before – had already become a part of everyday

life in the German capital. As in Britain, ‘business as usual’ was the

order of the day; Berlin society endured the hardships and privations

and got on with life. Yet, for all the pride and stoicism on display, there

was, for many, a profound underlying disquiet; an unspoken fear of

what horrors the coming years might bring. As Ruth Andreas-Friedrich

noted on 16 December:

Now, we are all emerging together from the basement after the fifty-

second alarm. The firing was heavier than usual tonight. ‘They’re getting

in practice’ says Frank pointing to the red glow that stains the western

sky. We join him at the window. The siren of the fire brigade is screeching

in the distance . . . ‘They’re getting in practice’ says Frank again. His

words bring a cold shiver to our hearts.83

8

Into Oblivion

On 1 October 1941, Berlin’s Jews gathered to celebrate the holiday of

Yom Kippur. One of the holiest festivals of the Jewish calendar, it was

a time for reflection, prayer and fasting; a time when man repented

of his sins and asked for God’s forgiveness.

That October day, many hundreds of Berlin Jews squeezed into

the large synagogue on Levetzowstrasse, in the suburb of Moabit.

There they prayed, perhaps with special fervour, for those family and

friends, who had managed to leave Germany – but also for themselves.

There were many reasons for prayer in the autumn of 1941. Life for

most German Jews had deteriorated markedly in the past year. Already

subjected to a programme of persecution, they had been systematic -

ally expropriated, demonised and marginalised. Prohibited from state

employment and removed from most of the professions, the areas of

legitimate activity open to them had dwindled to nothing. And new

legislation now sought to remove what few comforts remained to

them: radios were to be confiscated, and the keeping of pets was to be

forbidden.

Perhaps the most visible sign of this process of ostracism and perse-

cution was the introduction of the
Judenstern
, or ‘Jewish star’. From 18

September that year, all Jews over the age of six were obliged to wear

a yellow cloth star when out in public. According to the legislation

that accompanied the measure, the star, which bore the word
Jude
, or

‘Jew’, in black Hebrew-esque lettering within a yellow Star of David,

was to be worn firmly stitched to the left breast and had to be visible.1

Those who dared to contravene the order, or who covered the star in

any way, would receive a fine or imprisonment.

While most ordinary Berliners reacted with indifference or occa-

sional sympathy,2 the effect of the new measure on the city’s Jews was

into oblivion

161

profound. At a stroke, any anonymity that they could have enjoyed

was taken from them; their public humiliation was complete. As the

philologist Victor Klemperer noted, the day of the
Judenstern
’s intro-

duction was ‘the worst day for the Jews during those 12 years of hell’.3

For all the uncertainty of the times, however, there was much about

Yom Kippur that October that had the comforting ring of familiarity

about it. For one thing, the service was led by the well-known rabbi

Leo Baeck. Born in Posen in 1873, Baeck had studied in Berlin and

Breslau and had emerged as an eminent Jewish intellectual in Germany.

After service as an army chaplain during the First World War, he had

returned to Berlin to serve as a rabbi and had become one of the

pillars of the Jewish community there. As head of the
Reichvereinigung

der Juden
, the ‘Reich Organisation of Jews’, he was a respected authority on Jewish affairs. His white hair and kindly, bespectacled face were

reassuringly familiar to many in the congregation that evening.

The location, too, was held in special regard. Built during the First

World War, the synagogue on Levetzowstrasse was one of the largest

of the thirty-four synagogues in the German capital, capable of accom-

modating over two thousand worshippers. Built in the classical style, it

was an elegant construction, presenting clean lines in sandstone, a high,

saddle roof and little of the architectural complexity and exoticism of

conventional orthodox synagogues. Those entering the building would

pass through a high pillared portico, with a Hebrew inscription from

the Book of Isaiah emblazoned above: ‘O house of Jacob, come ye, and

let us walk in the light of the Lord.’4 Inside, there was a large main hall,

almost square in outline, flanked on three sides by raised galleries, all

of which were laid out with elegant wooden pews. At the eastern end

of the hall, beneath a decorated Risalit, was the ‘Holy of Holies’, where

the Torah scrolls were kept.

Though it had been damaged in the
Kristallnacht
pogrom of November

1938 – in which most of Berlin’s synagogues had been seriously damaged,

desecrated or destroyed – the building in Levetzowstrasse was the only

large synagogue in the German capital to have survived more or less

unscathed. Where many of Berlin’s Jewish community were thus forced

to congregate in the remaining private prayer houses, or in their own

homes, the Levetzowstrasse synagogue offered its congregation a familiar

refuge from an outside world which had turned decidedly hostile.

The services and rituals held for Yom Kippur that day took the

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berlin at war

traditional and familiar form. It had begun with the moving
Kol Nidrei

service, the previous night, in which the Talmudic Scrolls were held

aloft and the congregation had prayed to be released from the vows

that they had made during the previous year. The day of Yom Kippur

itself was taken up almost exclusively with prayer and fasting. One

highlight was the
Minchah
service in the afternoon, which included

the reading, in its entirety, of the Book of Jonah with its well-known

parable of the prophet and the whale. The story’s message was clear:

it is impossible for man to escape God’s will. The day closed with

the evening service of
Ne’ila
, when the final prayers of repentance

were offered. Thereafter, the
shofar
horn was sounded and the faithful

were sent out into the dusk – with joy in their hearts – to end their

fast.

But even as the congregation was leaving the Levetzowstrasse that

evening, events were taking a sinister turn. At that very moment,

Gestapo officials appeared at the synagogue, demanding the keys to

the building. Jewish community elders were then ordered to go to the

Gestapo office on the Burgstrasse, where they were informed that the

‘resettlement’ of the Berlin Jews was soon to begin. They were told

that the Jewish community itself was required to cooperate fully in