The Third Reich at War (42 page)

II

During this period, conditions of life deteriorated rapidly for those Jews who remained in Germany. One of them was Victor Klemperer, whose position was still to some extent protected by his marriage to a non-Jew, his wife Eva, and his record as a war veteran. Imprisoned in a police cell in Dresden on 23 June 1941 for violating blackout regulations, Klemperer found the time in jail weighed heavily on his mind. But he was not badly treated, and, despite his obsessive worry that he had been forgotten, he was released on 1 July 1941. He settled back into life in the overcrowded Jews’ House he was forced to share with his wife and other, similar, couples in Dresden.
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Soon his diary was filled with the growing difficulties he and his non-Jewish wife experienced in what he called ‘the hunt for food’. In April 1942 he recorded despairingly that ‘we are now facing complete starvation. Today even turnips were only “for registered customers”. Our potatoes are finished, our bread coupons will last for perhaps two weeks, not four.’
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They began to beg and barter.
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By the middle of 1942 Klemperer was feeling constantly hungry and had been reduced to stealing food from another inhabitant of the house (‘with a good conscience’, he confessed, ‘because she needs little, allows much to go to waste, is given many things by her aged mother - but I feel so demeaned’).
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From 18 September 1941, following a decree issued by the Reich Ministry of Transport, German Jews were no longer allowed to use dining cars on trains, to go on excursion coaches, or to travel by public transport in the rush hour.
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As his wife sewed the Jewish star on to the left breast of his coat on 19 September 1941, Klemperer had ‘a raving fit of despair’. Like many other Jews, he felt ashamed to go out (ashamed ‘of what?’, he asked himself rhetorically). His wife began to take over the shopping.
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Klemperer’s typewriter was confiscated and from 28 October 1941 onwards he had to write his diary and the remainder of his autobiography by hand.
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More petty privations followed. Jews were denied coupons for shaving-soap (‘do they want to reintroduce the medieval Jew’s beard by force?’ Klemperer asked ironically).
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A list he compiled of all the restrictions to which they were subjected ran by this time to over thirty items, including bans on using buses, going to museums, buying flowers, owning fur coats and woollen blankets, entering railway stations, eating in restaurants, and sitting in deck chairs.
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A law issued on 4 December 1941 laid down the death penalty for virtually any offence committed by a Jew.
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On 13 March 1942 the Reich Security Head Office ordered a white paper star to be pasted on the entrance to every dwelling inhabited by Jews.
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A further blow came in May 1942 when the authorities announced that Jews would no longer be allowed to keep pets, or to give them away; with a heavy heart, Klemperer and his wife took their cat Muschel to a friendly vet and had it put to sleep illegally, to spare it the suffering they thought it would be subjected to if they handed it over in the general round-up.
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All of these measures, as their timing makes clear, were intended to prepare for the mass deportation of Germany’s Jews to the east.
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To underline the firmness of the deportation decision, Himmler ordered on 23 October 1941 that Jews were no longer to be allowed to emigrate from the German Reich or any country occupied by it.
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The end of the Jewish community in Germany was also signalled by the Gestapo’s dissolution of the Jewish Culture League on 11 September 1941; its assets, musical instruments, possessions and property were distributed to a variety of institutions including the SS and the army.
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All remaining Jewish schools in the Reich had already been closed down.
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The round-ups and deportations got under way on 15 October 1941; according to decrees issued on 29 May and 25 November 1941 and personally approved by Hitler, the deported were deprived of their German nationality and their property was confiscated by the state. By 5 November 1941, twenty-four long trainloads of Jews - some 10,000 from the Old Reich, 5,000 from Vienna and 5,000 from the Protectorate - had been transported to L’d’, along with 5,000 Gypsies from the rural Austrian territory of the Burgenland. By 6 February 1942, a further thirty-four trainloads had taken 33,000 Jews to Riga, Kovno and Minsk.
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This still left a substantial number who were performing forced-labour tasks thought important to the war economy. Goebbels was disappointed and pressed for the deportations to be speeded up. On 22 November 1941 he was able to note in his diary that Hitler had agreed to further deportations on a city-by-city basis.
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To prepare the deportations, the Gestapo would obtain lists of local Jews from the Reich Association of the Jews in Germany, pick out the names of those to be deported, give each of them a sequenced number, and inform them of the date on which they were to depart and the arrangements to be taken for the journey. Each deportee was allowed to take 50 kilos of luggage, and provisions for three to five days. They were taken by the local police to a collection centre, from where, after waiting often for many hours, they were transported to an ordinary passenger train for the journey. These measures were intended to prevent the Jews becoming alarmed about their fate. Yet the trains began their journey at night, in shunting yards instead of passenger stations, and not infrequently the deportees were roughly pushed on to the train by the police, with curses and blows. A police guard accompanied each transport on the journey. When the deportees reached their destination, their situation deteriorated radically. The first trainload to leave Munich, for instance, set out on 20 November 1941, and after being diverted from its original destination of Riga, where the ghetto was full, it arrived in Kovno three days later. Informed that the ghetto there was full too, the police took the deportees to the nearby Fort IX, where they were made to wait in the dry moat surrounding the building for two days until they were all shot.
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In January 1942 the order came for the Jews of Dresden to be deported to the east. Victor Klemperer’s relief was palpable, therefore, when he learned that holders of the Iron Cross, First Class, who lived in ‘mixed marriages’, such as himself, were exempt.
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For those who remained, life became still harder. On 14 February 1942 Klemperer, aged sixty and in less than perfect health, was ordered to report for work clearing snow off the streets. Arriving at the venue, he discovered that he was the youngest of the twelve Jewish men on the site. Fortunately, he reported, the overseers from the municipal cleansing department were decent and polite, allowed the men to stand around chatting, and told Klemperer: ‘You must not over-exert yourself, the state does not require it.’
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They were paid the meagre sum of just over 70 Reichsmarks a week after tax.
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When this service was no longer required, Klemperer was sent to work in a packing factory.
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The Gestapo became ever more brutal and abusive, and Jews came to dread house-searches by the authorities. When Klemperer’s own Jews’ House was searched, he was fortuitously out visiting a friend. He returned to find the house had been turned over. All the food and wine had been stolen, along with some money and some medication. The contents of cupboards, drawers and shelves had been emptied on to the floor and stamped on. Anything they wanted to steal, including bed-linen, the Gestapo men had stowed into four suitcases and a large trunk, which they ordered the inhabitants to take to the police station the following day. Eva Klemperer had been insulted (‘You Jew’s whore, why did you marry the Jew?’) and repeatedly spat at in the face. ‘What an unthinkable disgrace for Germany,’ was Victor Klemperer’s reaction.
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‘
These
are no longer house searches,’ his wife commented, ‘they’re
pogroms
.’
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Desperately worried that the Gestapo would find his diaries (‘one is murdered for lesser misdemeanours’), Klemperer started to get his wife to take them at more frequent intervals to his non-Jewish friend, the doctor Annemarie Köhler, for safe keeping. ‘But I shall go on writing,’ he declared in May 1942. ‘This is
my
heroism. I intend to bear witness, precise witness!’
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In Hamburg, thankful that his privileged status as the war-decorated husband of a non-Jew and bringing up a daughter as a Christian meant that her Jewish husband Friedrich did not have to wear the yellow star, Luise Solmitz recorded bitterly on 13 September 1941: ‘Our luck is now negative - everything that doesn’t affect us.’ The Solmitzes secured a ruling from the Gestapo that people in privileged mixed marriages such as theirs were not obliged to accommodate Jews in their houses. Cuts in pensions, benefits and rations they shared with other Germans. Otherwise they lived much as they had done before, though necessarily more privately, since Friedrich was effectively barred from taking part in the social life of the non-Jewish circles in which they had previously moved. Luise Solmitz and her husband steadily lost weight as food supplies became shorter in the course of 1941. By 21 December 1942 she weighed 96 pounds. Yet her principal worry about changes in rationing arrangements was not so much that their diet would become even more restricted, but that she would be banned from collecting the family’s ration cards, and Friedrich would have to go to the ration office himself as a Jew, with his ‘evil, impossible epithet’ imposed by the government (‘Israel’) and queue ‘amidst all the people who one has never had anything to do with’, or in other words Hamburg’s remaining population of Jews. Her concern for the safety of her half-Jewish daughter Gisela grew as rumours circulated that people classified as mixed-race were to be deported. ‘We are already the playthings of dark and malicious powers,’ she recorded gloomily in her diary on 24 November 1942.
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III

It is clear that by October 1941 the deportation idea encompassed in principle the whole of Europe, and was intended to begin almost immediately.
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On 4 October 1941 Heydrich referred to ‘the plan of a total evacuation of the Jews from the territories occupied by us’.
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In early November 1941, he defended his approval of antisemitic attacks on Parisian synagogues that had taken place four days earlier in view of the fact that ‘Jewry has been identified at the highest level with the greatest clarity as the fire-raiser responsible for what has happened in Europe, and must finally disappear from Europe.’
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Hitler himself sharply increased his rhetorical attacks on the Jews once more, not just in the Soviet Union and the USA but also in Europe as a whole. On 28 November 1941, meeting the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Hitler declared: ‘Germany is determined to press one European nation after the other to solve the Jewish problem.’ In Palestine too, he assured the Mufti, the Jews would be dealt with once Germany gained control of the area.
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By this time, the surviving Jews in the regions conquered by the German forces in Eastern Europe were being rounded up and confined in ghettos in the principal towns. At Vilna (Vilnius), beginning on 6 September 1941, 29,000 Jews were crammed into an area formerly housing only 4,000 people. Visiting the Vilna ghetto at the beginning of November 1941, Goebbels noted that ‘the Jews are squatting amongst one another, horrible forms, not to be seen, let alone to be touched . . . The Jews are the lice of civilized humanity. They have to be exterminated somehow . . . Wherever you spare them, you later become their victim. ’
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Another ghetto was set up at Kovno on 10 July 1941, where a Jewish population of 18,000 was subjected to frequent, violent raids by German and Lithuanian forces searching for valuables.
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Smaller ghettos were established around the same time in other towns in the Baltic states in the wake of major massacres of the local Jewish population. Since these massacres had mainly, at least in the initial phase, been directed against men, these ghettos often had a preponderance of women and children: in Riga, for example, where the ghetto was set up towards the end of October 1941, there were nearly 19,000 women compared to just over 11,000 men when the ghetto was closed just over a month later. 24,000 were taken out and shot on 30 November and 8 December 1941, the remainder, mostly men, being sent off to Germany as industrial labourers. A similar mass killing happened on a larger scale in Kovno on 28 October 1941, when Helmut Rauca, head of the Jewish Department of the Gestapo in the town, ordered its 27,000 Jewish inhabitants to assemble at six in the morning on the main square. All day long, Rauca and his men separated those who could work from those who could not. By dusk, 10,000 Jews had been sorted into the latter category. The rest were sent home. The next morning, the 10,000 were marched out of the city on foot to Fort IX and shot in batches.
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