Berlin at War (37 page)

capital. Despite the pouring rain, only the very young and the infirm

were permitted to use the open trucks supplied by the authorities;

the remainder made the six-kilometre journey through the city on

foot, most of them carrying the 50 kilograms of luggage allotted

to each of them. Upon arrival at Grunewald Station, they were

calmly loaded into passenger carriages, according to a system worked

out by the community elders. ‘Once everyone had taken their place’,

one eyewitness recalled, ‘warm food and hot drinks were distrib-

uted, and the prepared packages of supplies were handed out to

each evacuee.’18 In the early afternoon, their train departed. It would

reach Litzmannstadt, some 250 miles to the east, sometime during

the following day.

More transports quickly followed. On 24 October, a further 1,000

or so Berlin Jews were sent to the same destination, on the 28th

another 1,000 and on 2 November yet another 1,000 were dispatched.

Arriving in the Lódz˙ ghetto, the ‘evacuees’ were descending into a

world they would barely have recognised as human. In the autumn

of 1941, the ghetto was home to approximately 200,000 individuals,

crowded into an area of barely two and a half square kilometres.

The squalor, malnutrition and disease would challenge all but the

most robust. It was a nightmarish world where the emaciated

wandered the streets dressed in rags and the dead lay untended

where they fell. Within just a few weeks, the Berlin Jews who left

Grunewald Station that rainy Saturday in October 1941 would

be dying. Within a year, the majority of them would already be

dead.

This was only the beginning. In the next phase, new destinations

were found for Berlin’s Jews, including the ghettos at Minsk, Kaunas

and Riga. While there was little change in the procedure followed,

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169

there were two minor yet significant differences from the way in which

the early transports had been processed. The first was that the Jewish

deportees were now marched to the Grunewald Station at night,

thereby giving fewer ‘Aryan’ Berliners the opportunity to witness

events. The second change was to the demographic make-up of the

transports. In an effort to speed the removal of those Jews who were

unable to perform manual labour, the authorities now targeted old

people’s homes and hospitals in making up the new transport lists.

The tenth Berlin transport, for instance, which left for Riga on 25

January 1942, had an average age of 58; fully 500 of its complement

of 1,044 were over 61, 103 were over 71.19

On boarding the trains, passengers on these transports would have

noticed other differences too. The veneer of civility – paper-thin at

best – was slipping. Though much of the processing of evacuees was

still done by members of the Berlin Jewish community, the real power

– the Gestapo – was making its malicious presence felt. Casual

brutality increasingly became the order of the day. Moreover, where

the early transports had used the comparative comfort of passenger

carriages, now the deportees – especially those who were disabled or

bed-ridden – tended to be packed into goods wagons, or cattle trucks

covered with a simple tarpaulin. Lacking even the most basic ameni-

ties, such elderly or frail deportees would often not survive the five-

day journey, through the depths of a northern European winter, to

distant Riga.

For those who survived the ordeal, arrival at their destination was

scarcely more comforting. One deportee from Berlin, Heinz

Bernhardt, arrived at the ghetto in Minsk in December 1941. There

he and his fellows were marched to a collection of shabby wooden

huts, all strangely deserted. ‘The wrecked houses looked as if a

pogrom had taken place there’, Bernhardt remembered. ‘Pillow

feathers everywhere. Hanukah lamps and candlesticks laying around

in every corner . . . Later we were informed that this was the Russian

ghetto, whose Jewish residents were shot in early November 1941.’

Those victims were still nearby and were shown to them by an SD

man, who ‘pointed and said: “There, in front of you, a heap of

bodies.” And in fact we saw a hillock with parts of human bodies

sticking out.’20

Those deportees who found their way into the ghetto at all might

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berlin at war

be counted among the lucky ones. All of the 1,006 Jews from the sixth

Berlin transport, for instance, which reached Kaunas in occupied

Lithuania on 21 November 1941, would be murdered four days after

their arrival. The 1,053 Berlin Jews on the very next train, arriving in

Riga on the last day of November, did not even have four days in which

to collect themselves. After their arrival, they were marched straight

off the train and into the nearby forest of Rumbula, where they were

shot en masse in freshly dug pits. Thirty-eight of them were children

under ten years old. They were the first of an estimated 13,000 Jews

murdered at Rumbula that day, the first of 25,000 in total.21

The killing of that Berlin transport at Rumbula was to prove contro-

versial. The officer in charge of the operation, SS-
Obergruppenführer

Friedrich Jeckeln, had initially received instructions to murder the inhab-

itants of the Riga ghetto so as to make room for arriving ‘Reich’ Jews.

While ‘eastern’ Jews were viewed as thoroughly expendable, the attitude

then current in Berlin was that Reich Jews were not to be exterminated

out of hand and were, initially at least, to be housed in the ghetto and

put to work. The reasoning behind this distinction is unclear. It is most

unlikely that Himmler was moved by any residual humanitarian scru-

ples or feelings of sympathy for those people who might have previously

been his neighbours. Rather, it is most plausible that he was concerned

about the effect on public opinion at home, should the true fate of Reich

Jews get out.22

As senior SS officer in the Baltic, Jeckeln would have been well

aware of this policy when he opted to include the Berlin Jews in the

‘liquidation operation’ that was planned for the Riga ghetto. Himmler

was not best pleased, especially after his personal intervention, explic-

itly ordering that the Berlin Jews were not to be liquidated, arrived

too late. He forcefully reminded Jeckeln that Jews were to be dealt

with according to the guidelines given and that ‘unilateral acts and

violations’ would be punished.23 Nonetheless, for all his apparent

displeasure, he promoted Jeckeln to Head of SS Upper Section
Ostland

ten days later.

Though deportations from the Reich continued into January 1942

– including three transports from Berlin, each of over a thousand

Jews, bound for Riga – thereafter the process slowed. Between then

and June 1942, only two more transports left the capital; one in March

bound for the ghetto at Piaski in south-eastern Poland, and the other

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171

in April bound for Warsaw. One of the factors behind that slow-

down, one must surmise, is that the authorities were struggling to

find suitable locations for the many Reich Jews that were still awaiting

‘evacuation’. It would take until that summer before new destin a-

tions could be found and for the deportations from Berlin and else-

where to begin once again.

One of those new destinations was Theresienstadt in northern

Bohemia. Formerly a Habsburg fortress, Theresienstadt had initially been

established as a camp for Jews from the Czech lands, but was later trans-

formed into a ghetto for elderly Jews from the Reich, as well as those

designated as ‘privileged’, such as veterans who had received a combat

decoration in the First World War. Theresienstadt played primarily a

propaganda role, serving as the quasi-acceptable face of the deportation

of the Jews from the Reich, a place whose comparatively tolerable condi-

tions could be trumpeted so as to assuage the concerns of the inter-

national community and the Red Cross.

The first transport from Berlin to Theresienstadt departed in the

early morning of 2 June 1942. It contained fifty elderly Berlin Jews,

almost all of whom were former inhabitants of the Jewish old people’s

home on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, which – like the Levetzowstrasse

synagogue – had now been transformed into a transit camp. The

deportees were taken by tram to the Anhalter Station – one of Berlin’s

busiest rail termini – where they were loaded into closed passenger

cars, which were coupled to the scheduled service towards Dresden

and Karlsbad. Departing early in the morning, usually around 5.00 a.m.,

the deportees would generally reach Theresienstadt by evening, and,

as one eyewitness recalled, the journey was carried out ‘under quite

tolerable conditions’.24

This process continued into the autumn and winter of 1942. Every

few days another transport was formed taking between 50 or 100 indi-

viduals to Theresienstadt. By the end of that year, 82 such transports

had departed from the capital, carrying over 9,000 elderly, infirm and

juvenile Berlin Jews to the camp.25 Those deportees from the capital

had little inkling of their fate. Even if they had believed the propa-

ganda about Theresienstadt, they had no idea that, for the vast majority

of them, that camp would not be their final destination. Theresienstadt

was not all that it seemed. Though it would be periodically buffed

and polished for the benefit of press photographers or outside

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berlin at war

observers, it was little more than a transit camp, briefly accommo-

dating its inmates prior to a second deportation to other locations

further east.

In June 1942, for instance, as the first transports were arriving from

the capital, another transport with over 1,000 unfortunates on board

was departing from Theresienstadt for the newly built extermination

camp at Sobibór. In July, 1,000 more were sent to the ghetto in Minsk,

and another 1,000 to Baranowitschi, both in former Byelorussia. The

following month, another 1,000 were dispatched to Riga. Clearly, what-

ever scruples had conspired to stay the hands of German executioners

the previous winter had now been overcome. In the majority of such

cases, arriving Jews would be marched by the thousand into the nearby

forest and murdered. Their bodies, limed to speed decomposition,

would be left to rot beneath a thin layer of soil.

In time, new techniques were developed. At Treblinka – a small,

unassuming town on the rail line north-east of Warsaw – gas cham-

bers were installed that autumn, using carbon monoxide from diesel

engines, which could ‘process’ over 300 individuals in one hour. In

September, 10,000 Jews in five transports left Theresienstadt bound

for this then-unknown destination; 8,000 more followed in October.

By the time the camp that has become synonymous with the Holocaust

– Auschwitz-Birkenau – was brought on-stream as an extermination

centre that winter, the vast majority of the 29,000 Jews already deported

from the German capital were dead. In the following months and

years, a similar number would follow them to a similar fate.

In June 1943, Joseph Goebbels declared that the German capital was

now
judenrein
– ‘cleansed of Jews’. It was a rather premature announce-

ment, for many thousands of Jews remained in the city, either in

hiding, or in mixed marriages, or in the remaining Jewish hospital.

Yet, though the factual basis of the announcement was misleading,

its ‘tone’, its sentiment and its fundamental message were absolutely

correct. Berlin’s Jewish community – one of the most numerous and

vibrant of all Germany – had been destroyed.

How much did ordinary Berliners – and, indeed, Berlin Jews – know

about the Holocaust?

There
were
rumours. Despite being top secret, any event of the

scope and emotional magnitude of the destruction of the Jews was

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173

bound to find an echo in the domestic rumour mill. Soldiers in the

east heard rumours of the mass killings and, in some instances, these

would be relayed to friends and family back in Germany. A few of

them might have seen proof – in the form of grainy photographs of

mass shootings and the like – or perhaps even themselves been witness

to ‘actions’, round-ups or massacres. The experience of the later resist-

ance member Philipp von Boeselager was perhaps typical. He heard

news of the Holocaust after a fellow officer shared a train carriage

with some drunken SD men, who had boasted that they had murdered

250,000 Jews in the rear areas of Army Group South on the Eastern

Front in 1941.26

Surprisingly perhaps, some information about what was going on

was transmitted by post. Given that limited communication was

possible between those incarcerated in the ghettos and those back

home in Berlin and elsewhere, news of the awful conditions and hard-

ships experienced by deported Jews was occasionally able to seep back