Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (32 page)

There was little the Reichsvereinigung could do for the Jews of Stettin. It was only granted permission to send a representative there. with funds supplied by the Reichsvereinigung, this emissary bought the deportees’ property back from the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People’s welfare Agency, or NSV), which had misappropriated it. The Reichsvereinigung’s representative also organized aid for a few people who had been left behind because they were infirm or aged.
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And, as a further result of these events, the Reichsvereinigung unseated Paul Hirschfeld, the member of the board of the Jewish community who had failed to inform the central office. As far as the deportations from Schneidemühl were concerned, the Reichsvereinigung at least succeeded in reducing the number of Jews deported to 165, fewer than originally planned.
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But what was to prove of much greater consequence was a fundamental decision reached by the RSHA in this period, namely, that eppstein was forbidden to undertake any action on behalf of the deported Jews once they reached their destination.
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This principle was to remain in effect for subsequent deportations.

The functionaries of the Reichsvereinigung did, however, prevent one mass deportation. There were plans to deport the some 1,000 Jew-ish inhabitants of east Frisia and oldenburg to Lublin as well. The Reichsvereinigung assured the Gestapo that they could relocate these people quickly and inexpensively and, within three weeks, found new

quarters for them in Berlin, Hamburg, and Hannover.
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For the most part, however, even before the mass deportations from Germany be-gan, Jewish leaders were forced to witness the course of events without any opportunity to act. The Reichsvereinigung struggled to keep up with events. An attempt was made at one point to organize a silent protest. In reaction to the deportation of 6,500 Jews from Baden and the Palatinate in october 1940, Julius Seligsohn, a member of the executive board of the Reichsvereingung, called on rabbis to announce a day of fasting throughout the Reich. The day of fasting was banned and Seligsohn paid for this initiative with his life.
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Today, it is common knowledge that the Nazi state sought “territorial solutions” before it conceived of the indiscriminate murder of all Jews, called the “final solution.” Some examples include the short-lived Lublin Reservation of 1939 and the so-called Madagascar Plan of 1940, which had intended to move large numbers of Jews from Greater Germany and from German-occupied territories in eu-rope to eastern Poland and to Madagascar respectively. The Reichsvereinigung was not involved in these utopian plans, but found itself confronted with them at certain points. For example, following the German attack on France in 1940, the RSHA demanded that Jewish leaders produce within twenty-four hours a plan for relocating seven and one-half million european Jews, “an opportunity of a kind that National Socialism has never before given to a Jewish organization.”
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The Jewish leaders assumed that the destination was to be Palestine. After two days, they answered that they would first have to conduct more intensive investigations. The RSHA interpreted this answer as an attempt to buy time. It confronted Paul eppstein and otto Hirsch with its intention, under these circumstances, to ship the Jews off to Madagascar—at the expense of the “Jewish millionaires” in the United States.
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Arrests of Jewish functionaries became increasingly frequent in 1940 and 1941. The case of Julius Seligsohn has already been mentioned. Seligsohn was tormented to death in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp; his colleague otto Hirsch died in the Mauthausen concentration camp, to name only two examples. In this transition phase, Jewish functionaries were regularly permitted to travel abroad to negotiate with aid organizations, but their personal plans to emigrate were thwarted, and they were forced to relinquish their passports after each trip. Paul eppstein’s sister-in-law later aptly described a situation that was characteristic of the plight of eppstein and others: “Paul and

Hedwig never received permission to leave Germany at the same time. one of the passports was always retained. one was always the hostage for the other.”
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why did Jewish functionaries return from their trips abroad? why did they not take the opportunity to flee Germany? of course, they could not have known how the persecution of the Jews was to end, but the situation was threatening enough as it was. In my estimation, a highly developed sense of responsibility, external coercion, and exaggerated self-confidence came together to prevent their leaving. In later accounts, not only Leo Baeck but nearly every Jewish representative was described as having wanted to put his skills to use for the remaining Jews in Germany. one of the few survivors later explained that eppstein, for example, aimed to preserve the independence of the Jewish administration in order to prevent the worst from happening. According to eppstein, that goal could only be realized if the Jews themselves carried out all orders in a manner that did not offer the Gestapo any excuse for taking over the administration of Jewish affairs themselves.
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Moreover, in eppstein’s view, he himself was more or less the only person capable of fulfilling this task.

Nevertheless, many of the functionaries themselves attempted to flee when it was already too late. In February 1941, the Reichsvereinigung had applied to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

f
Igure
6.1.:
Paul eppstein, member of the board of the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, ca. 1935.
Courtesy
: Stadtarchiv Mannheim, Nachlass Paul eppstein.

(AJDC) for visas for all of the leading German-Jewish functionaries in Germany, but these visas were no longer of any use to them.
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The Deportation of German Jews (1941–1943)

In october 1941, representatives of the Reichsvereinigung recorded—as a measure of the success of their work—that some 70,000 German Jews had left the country during the two years of the organization’s existence. About 10,000, however, had been deported to the district of Lublin or to Gurs in France during the same period, a sign that the Reichsvereinigung had been unable to prevent the brutal dynamics of Nazi policy against the Jews from taking its course. It had achieved, at best, deferment or mitigation. Although the Nazis continued to deny it, the Reichsvereinigung leaders realized that they themselves were also trapped. when the Jewish functionaries were told in october 1941 that emigration was to be banned for all Jews, the Nazi leaders added a lie to this announcement. They asserted this ban was to hold for all members of the Reichsvereinigung, but not for its functionaries.
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At that time, about 73,000 Jews lived in Berlin, the capital of the Reich. This was more than one-third of Germany’s remaining Jewish population. Some of the Berlin Jewish community’s functionaries were ordered to report to the Gestapo in early october. They were told that a “relocation” of the Berlin Jews was to begin. The community had to cooperate, or else the SA and SS would take over.
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After joint consultations, the executive boards of the Reichsvereinigung and the Jewish community decided—in view of the threats about the SA and the SS and “despite serious reservations”—on a strategy of cooperation. They intended to “prevent anything worse,” and hoped “in this way to be able to do as much good as possible in the interest of those affected.”
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Perhaps they also expected that the chaos of the previous two years would now give way to an orderly process in which they could take part and potentially intervene. In any event, Jewish leaders assumed that only some of the German Jews would be affected by the deportations. After the partial deportation was over, the Jewish representatives could continue administering and caring for the welfare of those that remained in the community. At this point as well as later, they felt forced to accept the obligation of concealing their knowledge about the deportations from their members, especially since this order from

the RSHA had been underlined with the threat of incarceration in a concentration camp.

Thus, the Berlin headquarters of the Reichsvereinigung, its regional offices, and the remaining local Jewish communities took on the tasks assigned them by the RSHA and the Gestapo. The Reichsvereinigung compiled one central file and numerous regional files. These files were used by the Gestapo as the basis for the deportation lists. At times, the Jewish functionaries also drew up lists of specific groups of people who were to be deported. In most cases, the Jews had already been drawn together in certain neighborhoods or in so-called
Judenhäuser
(Jewish houses) in the preceding years. Now the Reichsvereinigung set up
Sammellager
(assembly camps) in exhibition halls, gymnasiums, taverns, or public institutions from which the Jews were picked up for deportation. In these assembly camps, the Reichsvereinigung organized camp leadership, medical services, and food
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The Reichsvereinigung informed people of their impending deportation by mail or messenger, and sent out marshals to collect their luggage. Later, Jewish marshals also had to accompany Gestapo men who picked up the Jewish deportees. Reichsvereinigung staff members assisted the deportees in filling out property lists. These lists made it easier for the German authorities to confiscate property left behind after the transports had departed. The Reichs vereinigung also appointed people to oversee the transports, collected money from the deportees to pay for the transports and transferred it to the Gestapo. Later, the Reichsvereinigung for a time assumed responsibility for postal service in and out of the ghettos and camps. This included, in the earliest phase, delivering urns with the ashes of Jewish
Schutzhäftlinge
(prisoners in protective custody) who had died.
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Hopes of being able to prevent the worst from occurring were fulfilled only in a few cases. In the larger cities, deportation of those who were ill was deferred (until the end of 1942).
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The orders and guidelines for deportations sent to the Gestapo by the RSHA also stipulated that certain groups of people were to be excluded: Jews who worked in the armaments industry, people older than sixty-five, invalids between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five, those with non-Jewish spouses, Jews of foreign citizenship, and those who had been awarded military honors in world war I.
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If the Gestapo did not adhere to its own guidelines, then the Jewish functionaries at times protested successfully. The Theresienstadt ghetto, originally earmarked for Czech Jews, was expanded to serve as a “ghetto for the elderly” and a
Vorzugslager
, a camp for the privileged. Later, Theresienstadt became the destination for Jewish spouses and their children from mixed

marriages, which had since been dissolved. After June 1942, transports with those who had been deferred rolled into the old garrison town, which was considered a “good” deportation destination. Reichsvereinigung staff filled out
Heimeinkaufsverträge
(home purchase contracts) for the elderly, as if they were buying into a nursing home and paying for it with all they owned. The Reichsvereinigung collected these sums in a central account and transferred millions of marks to an account in Prague.
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Limited as they were at the outset, the opportunities for the Reichsvereinigung to intervene had dissolved almost completely by the spring of 1942. This was the same period in which the program for systematically murdering the Jews in the east was being established. Following the assassination of Heydrich in May 1942 and the arsonist attack by a communist-Jewish group, the Baum Group, on an anti-Soviet exhibition in Berlin, Berlin’s NSDAP Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels ordered 250 Jews shot in the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The same num-ber was arrested in Berlin and brought to Sachsenhausen. The executive boards of the Jewish communities in Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, as well as the representatives of the Reichsvereinigung, were ordered to report to the RSHA and to stand there for hours, their faces turned to the wall. They did not receive an explanation until some time later.
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This image of the waiting functionaries is a fitting symbol of their situation in spring 1942. without information, without any opportunities for movement, exchange, or escape, they were condemned to wait. Their own lives were in danger, and they had no choice but to obey orders. The period in which it had been possible to negotiate or to mitigate a specific situation was over, once and for all. They had themselves become hostages.