Dresden (21 page)

Some 293 of the surviving Jews in Dresden were moved into the camp on the Hellerberg on November 23–24, 1942. The film, shot by an employee of Zeiss-Ikon for unknown reasons and discovered after his death in the early 1990s, provides a record of how one group were “processed.”

The Jews concerned were still alive, for the moment, because they already had jobs in the armaments industry. At that stage this still pro
tected them from following the other Dresden Jews to the east, to where “transports” had been dispatched since January of that year. The Hellerberg Jews did not know that Gauleiter Mutschmann, ever keen to preempt Berlin in the pursuit of an anti-Semitic plus-point, had vainly tried to have even the so-called
Rüstungsjuden
—armaments Jews—from Dresden sent to the concentration camps with the others. But Mutschmann had suffered a temporary defeat in this particular bureaucratic battle.

Victor Klemperer, saved by his marriage to an Aryan, wrote in his diary about the fate of his friends and neighbors:

The “lucky” Hellerberg Jews would stay that way for less than four months. On March 3, 1943, all the Jews from the Hellerberg were marched to the goods station in Dresden-Neustadt and loaded into goods trucks. Their destination was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most were murdered soon after their arrival.

But in the meantime, they were to continue to work for Zeiss-Ikon AG, whose cigar-smoking representative, Dr. Hasdenteufel, had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Gestapo and watched the entire procedure, from the disinfecting institution to their secure arrival in the
Judenlager
.

The Jews lived in six out of seven huts, the seventh a communal building with a dining hall and washrooms, the others consisting of three rooms, each containing sixteen people. Couples were together, singles divided according to sex. Children from the age of four lived separately, again according to sex.

There was no wire around the camp, though a guard watched over the camp entrance. These guards were supplied by one of the local private security companies, the cost being charged along with the inmates' rent. Relations with the guards were described as quite friendly. The inmates would leave at regular shift times without formal inspection, though to leave the camp at other times they needed special papers. “We could have put up quite well with life in the camp,”
wrote one of the few inmates who survived the war. “I wish they would have left us there…Everyone would still be alive.”

The Hellerberg camp also had the advantage of being just outside the city limits, thus satisfying the objectives of the Nazi authorities (and Goebbels particularly) of making Germany's cities “Jew-free.” The camp inmates were spared the five-mile march from the “Jew houses” in the center of the city, for their place of employment, the Goehle-Works, now lay less than a quarter of that distance away:

What the inmates did not know was that in Berlin, others were already considering whether even this limited, institutionalized existence would be allowed to continue. Should Jews be permitted to survive because of their use to the war effort? The Jews from the Hellerberg camp had been saved from Mutschmann's private vendetta the previous year, but now Berlin was catching up with the Saxon Gauleiter's prescient malice. Goebbels, also a violent anti-Semite, knew that the balance was swinging against the
Rüstungsjuden
(armaments Jews). He insisted that the Jews were not “indispensable”—adding that the Führer was also adamant on this point. Even before the Dresden Jews were transferred to the Hellerberg camp, a lethal struggle was being carried on within the Nazi military-industrial complex between those who wished to continue to use the Jews for slave labor and those who espoused simple extermination.

The debate continued through the winter and into the New Year. As Goebbels had predicted, with the Führer's support, the ideologists were winning their struggle against the pragmatists. Finally, on February 20, 1943, the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) issued new guidelines for the “technical accomplishment of the evacuation of Jews to the East (Concentration Camp Auschwitz).” The guidelines were the same as before, except for one small change. Jews involved in war industry were no longer exempt.

A “factory action” was planned for a week later. In the early hours of February 27, 1943, before they were due to go to work, all inmates of the Hellerberg camp were placed under arrest. The camp was declared a “police detention camp,” surrounded with barbed wire, and police guards placed on the perimeter. The remaining leaders of the Jewish community, who had been permitted to remain living in the city, were arrested and brought to the Hellerberg, to be followed in the next few days by Jews from Erfurt, Halle, Leipzig, Plauen, and Chemnitz. This was now a general holding camp for Saxon Jews, and for those few last days, filled to bursting.

On March 3 the “deportation” began.

Nearly three hundred Dresden Jews were loaded into boxcars in Dresden-Neustadt that day. The destination was Auschwitz. Eight survived the war. The great majority of the rest are marked as “disappeared” (their names were never entered in the camp register, which usually indicates they were gassed immediately after arrival.) A few are traceable as “died” or “murdered” in the camp itself.

Zeiss-Ikon continued to produce for the war effort, using “eastern workers” or foreign labor from elsewhere in the Nazi empire to fill the gaps that could not be plugged with that precious, ever-dwindling commodity: Aryan German employees.

 

AFTER MARCH
1943
the only full Jews left in Dresden were those married to Aryans, like Victor Klemperer, or the children of mixed marriages, like Henny Wolf. They knew each other slightly—though they were very different in personality and background. Henny Wolf had been working at Zeiss-Ikon's Goehle-Works since July 1941, when, at sixteen, she was barred from further education and contracted to forced labor.

While for the Hellerberg Jews, during their brief stay at the camp, it was a twenty-minute walk, for Fräulein Wolf it was still four miles on foot from the family's flat in the southeast of the city, near the Grosser Garten. She did twelve-hour shifts, working on the same timed fuses and clocks for U-boats that many of the Hellerberg Jews were assembling. They had one small stroke of good luck: the Aryan foreman was a “fine human being, who took no notice of the fact that we were Jews.” All the same, this was strict piece-work with a magnifying glass and tweezers, hour after hour under artificial light, which in turn was limited because of wartime power-saving regulations. It caused a deterioration in Henny Wolf's eyesight from which she never fully recovered.

After the Hellerberg's inmates were deported, the camp was closed¸ and with it the “Jewish department” at Zeiss-Ikon. Henny Wolf, many years later, can still recall the anxiety of those left alive—all married to “Aryans” or
Mischlinge
—until they were assigned to other, smaller companies in Dresden, apparently not associated with the armament industry. She thought that the “Jewish department” had been shut down because it wasn't worth the effort with most of the Jews gone, but the real reason was more sinister. The authorities planned for the moment to stick to the letter of the law and allow married Jews and the
Mischling
children of such liaisons to live. However, should it also be decided to “deport” such people at a future date, the action would be easier and attract less attention if the victims were dispersed and working in selected low-profile concerns not associated with the war effort.

The spring of 1943 saw Henny Wolf begin work at the Adolf Bauer cardboard packaging company, which lay just east of the Altstadt. It was a middling-sized enterprise, owned and managed by Herr Bauer, a man rumored to be a Nazi Party member, but who nonetheless behaved decently to his Jewish employees.

Henny Wolf stayed at Bauer's for most of the rest of the war. Not that Jews were completely safe there. On several occasions the Gestapo snatched colleagues, who were never seen again, or sent friends of hers to punishment assignments at factories known to be much harder than the box factory. The few remaining Jews in Dresden were subject to the whims of Henry Schmidt and his henchmen at the Judenreferat, and they knew it. “The fear was worse than anything,” wrote Henny Wolf, “worse than the hunger or even having to wear the star…”

There were occasional kindnesses. The young woman who slipped her some ration coupons, the occasional passerby who would whisper, “Chin up!” or the butcher who would hide some extra meat in with the meager allowance permitted on a Jewish “J” ration card. Then again, there were the youngsters who taunted her as a Jew, the men who followed her home on the long trek back from the factory after the nightshift, the young fanatic who picked her up when she fell off her bicycle, then saw her yellow star and let her drop bruisingly to the cobbled ground once more.

Most Dresdeners, though, just looked away or through her, like the nervous passersby on the Sporergasse, caught on film watching the young Jews loading the furniture onto the trucks headed for the Hellerberg camp.

 

BETWEEN
1940
AND
1945
more than thirteen hundred human beings were killed within the confines of a building in Dresden's comfortable southern suburbs (known as the Südvorstadt). The building, the Justizgebäude, housed the central courts and central remand prison for the whole of Saxony. At the time it was built, in 1907, it was considered an advanced, model institution—with the offices of the clerks and prosecutors, the courtrooms, even the cells where the accused were held awaiting trial, seen as spacious, light, and airy. The facilities, even down to a prison library and the visiting rooms, which separated prisoners from visitors by a wide table rather than a set of bars, were absolutely modern.

Despite its potentially solemn, even grim purpose, the Justice Building, which vaguely resembled the tastefully fortified residence of a middling-ranked princely family, was reckoned by a contemporary critic to be “not wholly foreign to a sense of benevolent humanity.” The prison part of the complex was hidden away around the back behind a fifteen-foot wall. This was not just because its originators and architects intended the appearance of the Justice Building to represent the new, modern reforming ideals of that still-hopeful time, though it was a factor. The complex also needed to fit in with the surrounding suburbs, which were inhabited by the kind of educated, respectable middle-class folk who frankly would be reluctant to live next door to a prison—especially if it looked like the traditional idea of one. Under
Hitler, however, the prison wing became a place where draconian punishments were meted out.

There was a “death row” in the prison. These were the small cells where condemned prisoners spent their final days, each with a little bench and desk. There was the nearby guardroom to which they would be led and kept while the guillotine was prepared, and then the courtyard where the advanced instrument of death was set up. The rate of executions reached its apogee after the annexation of Bohemia and Moravia, the so-called protectorate that Hitler hacked out of the rump of Czechoslovakia. Eight hundred Czech dissidents and resistance workers were executed here with the aid of the new electrically operated guillotine. Some Poles, mainly from the Posen (Poznan) province, which had been annexed in 1940, were also brought here to be killed. German victims included members of resistance groups, Social Democrats, and Communists, among them former members of the Reichstag, and individuals such as the idealistic doctor Margarete Blank, denounced in 1944 by a patient for making “demoralizing” remarks.

Dr. Blank died under the blade early on the morning of February 8, 1945, a few days before bombs brought salvation to some of her fellow prisoners.

 

AT THE END OF
1940
Dr. Walter Schmidt, president of the Directorate of the German State Railways in Dresden, described the rail industry as “at the core of its being, so closely connected to the Wehrmacht.” The railway's slogan was “Wheels Must Roll for Victory” (
Räder Müssen Rollen für den Sieg
). The entire development of the German railways in the middle of the nineteenth century had been designed to facilitate military mobilization and to move troops and equipment rapidly to meet the enemy threat at whichever front, wherever it might arise.

In this system, Dresden was not only one of the largest regional directorates but a key junction, through which ran both the north-south and east-west axes of the German railways.

After the German-speaking Sudetenland was ceded to Germany by Czechoslovakia in October 1938, its railways were absorbed into the Reich's railway system. In the summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Dresden directorate had a payroll of eighty-eight thousand employees and controlled movements of
rolling stock over more than three thousand miles of track. By the end of 1943 the Dresden directorate employed a total of 128,000 workers of all kinds.