The German War (41 page)

The first and most dramatic of these central measures was the decree of 1 September 1941, which ordained that all Jews over the age of 5 had to wear a yellow star on the left breast of all outer garments. Even though the outbreak of the war had produced a fresh deluge of anti-Jewish ordinances, from highly restricted shopping hours to the ban on possessing radios, the yellow star was the most visible nationwide measure taken since the November 1938 pogrom and it came into effect across the whole Reich on the same day, 19 September 1941. Its mandatory character could not be in doubt and it was immediately recognised as an important escalation, conditioning how the burghers of Minden digested the news a few weeks later of the deportation and first mass shootings of Jews from their town:

There is much talk in the population about all Germans in America having to wear a swastika on their left breast in order to make them recognisable, along the lines of the way the Jews have been identified here in Germany. Germans in America are said to be having to pay a heavy price because the Jews have been treated so badly in Germany.

This rumour that Germans were being made to wear swastika badges in the United States in retaliation for the Jewish Star arose even before the two countries were at war, and it continued to surface sporadically afterwards. One American who was still in Frankfurt that autumn found that whenever he expressed his repugnance that Jews had to wear a yellow star, his German acquaintances ‘invariably replied in self-justification that the measure was not at all unusual. It was merely in keeping with the way the American authorities treated German nationals in the United States, compelling them to wear a large swastika sewn on to their coats’. Here, as Germans spoke about a world beyond their own experience, it was much easier for Nazi propaganda to shape their image of the ‘Jewish’ character of American politics and, with it, the notion of a ‘world Jewish conspiracy’.
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The tenor of German anti-Americanism had become ever shriller during the summer of 1941, as the Nazi leadership watched the United States and Britain draw closer. After Congress had passed the Lend-Lease Act to supply Britain with war materiel on 11 March and American troops had occupied Iceland on 7 July, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland on board the USS
Augusta
and HMS
Prince of Wales
between 9 and 12 August. At the end of the meeting they announced the Atlantic Charter, which affirmed that peace would be made on liberal principles of national self-determination and equal access to international trade. Without addressing the war directly, the Charter’s very existence confirmed that the USA had publicly allied itself with Britain against the Axis powers, and so it was not surprising that Berlin and Tokyo interpreted it as such, especially when Roosevelt followed it up on 11 September with orders to the US Navy to attack any German submarines sighted in the Western Atlantic. With its explicit repudiation of the harsh economic terms imposed on Germany in 1919, the language of the Atlantic Charter was not in itself threatening – indeed, the RAF dropped thousands of leaflets over Germany confirming that Great Britain and the United States would ‘not admit any economical discrimination against the defeated’ and promised that ‘Germany and the other states can again achieve enduring peace and prosperity’.
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Goebbels turned to his deputy in charge of radio, Wolfgang Diewerge, in order to unmask the real plan behind these anodyne assurances. Diewerge got hold of a little-known, self-published American tract,
Germany Must Perish!,
and translated key passages such as its inflammatory call for 20,000 doctors to carry out mass sterilisation of the German population, leading to ‘the elimination of Germanism and its carriers’ within two generations. Its author was renamed from Theodore Newman Kaufman to the unmistakably Jewish-sounding Theodore Nathan Kaufman. With a frontispiece of Churchill and Roosevelt photographed at Newfoundland, Kaufman was turned from a seller of theatre tickets who had declared himself President of the American Federation of Peace, an organisation he had also founded, into one of the American President’s key advisors and Diewerge also dated the tract to August 1941 so that it appeared to be part of the Atlantic Charter.
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On 7 September, the Nazi Party issued as its ‘weekly slogan’ Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939: ‘Should the international Jewish financiers succeed once again in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the victory of Jewry but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.’
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Printed up in poster format, the Führer’s ‘prophecy’ hung in the glass display cabinets outside Party offices throughout the Reich. As in 1939, so now it seemed to warn the Americans that Germany would hold Europe’s Jews hostage. Almost certainly this escalating conflict played a part both in Hitler’s decision at the end of August to authorise marking Germany’s Jews and in his subsequent decision in mid-September to have them deported before the Soviet war was finished.
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Picturing Germans wearing swastika badges on their clothes in the USA helped to make what was being done to Jews in Germany seem less singular as people drew on their past experience of tit-for-tat retaliation. There had been a boycott campaign against German exports in the USA after the Nazis boycotted Jewish shops on 1 April 1933 and the November 1938 pogrom had led to hostile coverage in the international media. As the people of Minden considered the latest escalation, they worried that its effects would be just as they had been in 1938, ‘which did us far more harm abroad than it benefited us at home’.
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Already during this first phase, when most of the mass shooting of Jews was still confined to the eastern front, the fate of the Jews had acquired a global significance in German discussions which was not accorded to the mass execution of other Soviet civilians. As important power-holders in Washington and London, helping to orchestrate the Allied coalition, the Jews were seen as a unified, international enemy, a way of thinking encapsulated by the use of the collective singular, ‘Jewry’, or, more simply, ‘the Jew’. By autumn 1941, people were imagining how the Jews would orchestrate retaliation against Germany – despite the fact that it had not happened. Within three months of introducing the yellow star, Germany was at war with America.

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The deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from the Reich involved many different administrative officials. From the outset, the Gestapo involved the local Jewish community organisations in drawing up lists of those to be deported, giving them the power to decide whom to exclude from transports as well as the responsibility for informing those whom they had included. Once they had received their summons, people selected for ‘resettlement’ were placed under curfew restrictions and could leave their homes only with police permission. They were kept busy settling bills, preparing food for a journey of three to five days and packing their 50 kilos of luggage. They also had to make a full list of their assets, which was cross-checked by the financial authorities. They were instructed to leave all furniture and household goods behind, and to turn their keys over to the caretaker of their block of flats before leaving. They then faced two departure dates. On the first, deportees reported to their local collection point, where they were held for days and where their luggage – and often their persons – were searched for disallowed items. Even permitted goods were frequently confiscated. Jews were charged a fee for their deportation and an additional ‘donation’ set at 25 per cent of the value of property being left behind was also levied by the Reich Security Main Office on the pretext of covering the transport costs of those too poor to pay; it was really just a way for the SS to claim a share before the assets were taken over by the Ministry of Finance.
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On the day of deportation, the Jews were driven or marched in a column to be loaded on to goods wagons. On 27 November 1941, the twelve Jews of Forchheim in Upper Franconia were marched to the local railway station, ‘followed by a great number of inhabitants’ who expressed their ‘interest and great satisfaction’, according to the contemporary police report. In many towns, the deportations were the first collective spectacle of local Jew-baiting since the pogrom of November 1938. In places where the 1938 pogrom had turned into a popular festival with Hitler Youths and BDM girls joining the throngs of ill-wishers, the deportation of the remaining Jews was now accompanied by curses and chants, mixing insults old and new – ‘Just look at those cheeky Jews!’ ‘Now they’re marching into the ghetto!’ ‘Just a bunch of useless eaters!’ In Bad Neustadt, local activists took photographs of the elderly, undernourished Jews as they assembled on the market square. Enlarged to poster size, the photos were later displayed in the centre of town to document the action. When the column of Jews formed up, they were accompanied all the way to the station by a ‘large, hooting throng of schoolchildren, who continued shouting till the train left’.
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The first deportations also pitted Jews against Jews. In November 1941, Marianne Strauss and her parents were waiting to board the tram in Essen taking the Jews from the collection point to the railway station when two Gestapo officials released them, to the surprise of their fellow deportees. As they left, 18-year-old Marianne could not forget ‘this animal howl’ that went up from the other Jews. The Strauss family was ‘privileged’, wealthy enough to have bought protection from a local banker and from military counter-intelligence. Others held back from these first waves of deportation included Jews working in the armaments sector, Jews with foreign, usually Western, passports, those living in ‘mixed’ marriages, those with outstanding records of service in the First World War and – in an attempt to preserve the fiction that the deportees were being ‘resettled’ in labour camps – the old and frail.
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The rhythm of deportation was set by the overriding priorities of military transports and the annual shortages of coal in winter. They restarted in March 1942, when another 45,000–60,000 Jews were deported from Prague, Vienna and areas of the ‘old Reich’ considered at risk of air raids. Many elderly Jews and war veterans were sent to Theresienstadt, a small eighteenth-century garrison town north of Prague, whose location within the Reich and away from the ‘east’ was deliberately used to calm German anxieties and to vitiate the numerous interventions by Nazi officials, pleading on behalf of their own favoured Jews. Far from being an ‘old age ghetto’, let alone the ‘end station’ it was claimed to be, Theresienstadt in fact served principally as a transit camp, with almost as many trains leaving as arrived. At this time, many were sent to ghettos in the Lublin district of Poland.
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On 21 April 1942, another transport left Essen. Among those on it was Marianne Strauss’s fiancé, Ernst Krombach. Marianne tried to wave goodbye to him from the station platform and Ernst managed to post a card to her from their first stop at Duisburg to tell her that he had seen her. The next stop came at Düsseldorf-Derendorf: here the deportees were shepherded by the police into an abattoir, where their luggage was whittled down to one suitcase or rucksack with essential items. The Gestapo gave all the toiletries, medicines and surplus food to the German Red Cross; the bed linen, clothing – including 345 dresses and 192 overcoats – and umbrellas went to the National Socialist People’s Welfare. Ernst managed to protect most of his family’s bundles during this confiscation, at the end of which the deportees were issued with an official notification of the 11th ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law, which informed them that once they crossed the German border, all their property would automatically be assigned to the Reich. On 23 April, the train crossed the border and the next day they arrived at Izbica, one of the ghettos in the Lublin district, from where Ernst managed to go on writing to Marianne, assuring her of his continuing love and warning her that ‘the conditions here are more extreme than anything we imagined; it’s simply impossible to put them into words . . . The Wild West is nothing to this.’

At the end of August, Marianne received a long and detailed account of conditions in Izbica, smuggled back to Essen by an ‘Aryan’ friend who drove a truck under contract for the SS. Ernst detailed how the village had been cleared of the 3,000 Polish Jews who had originally lived there in order to accommodate the transports from Poland and Slovakia, from Aachen, Nuremberg, Breslau, Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Theresienstadt. He described the ethno-national divides between Polish, Czech and German Jews, and wrote of public hangings in punishment for transgressions. At first Ernst turned down offers of a job in the Jewish police ‘mainly because of the unpleasant work: Jews against Jews’, but then he agreed, probably from a desire to protect his family from deportation. ‘But’, he told his fiancée in Essen,

I was unable to avoid getting involved in the evacuation of Polish Jews. You have to suppress every human feeling and, under supervision of the SS, drive the people out with a whip, just as they are – barefoot, with infants in their arms. There are scenes which I cannot and will not describe but which will take me long to forget . . . I only think of these inhuman experiences in my dreams.

Meanwhile, the three German Jewish families living in their tiny wooden and clay hut on the edge of the village began to eat better and to take care of some of the other families from Essen.
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The households which the deported Jews left behind in Germany became sought-after spoils. From Swabian villages to the once radical city of Hamburg, locals actively lobbied to take over their property and turned up to bid at the public auctions. At least 30,000 Jewish households went under the auctioneer’s hammer in Hamburg between 1941 and 1945, the lots finding approximately ten buyers for each household. Working-class housewives in the Veddel district took up trading in coffee and jewellery, and bought old furniture and carpets from the auctions. By the start of 1943, the takings in the Gestapo account at the Deutsche Bank from this trade had risen to 7.2 million Reichsmarks. As women acquired fur coats which still carried labels with the names of their original owners, they would have had to try hard not to guess what kind of people these owners had been. The press publicity advertising the auctions made no secret of the Jewish origins of the goods on sale. Meanwhile, the sealed flats became a reward to be allocated to local Nazi functionaries or the still small numbers of bombed-out families.
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