The German War (45 page)

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As knowledge spread, it did not automatically raise the question of moral responsibility. For that it would have needed the oxygen of public discussion. Having started in the autumn of 1941 by demanding that ‘national comrades’ actively support the branding and deportation of the Jews, Goebbels had realised that by turning the topic into a public issue the media was creating a space for discussion and dissent. His response had been to tone the entire anti-Semitic campaign down. In a similar fashion, he had backed away from confronting Germans directly with the ‘euthanasia action’ and shelved all hard-hitting attempts to do so, opting instead for a ‘soft sell’ approach based on the issue of voluntary assisted suicide for a terminally ill patient in the film
I Accuse.
The principal difference was that Liebeneiner’s film was designed to steer a national discussion, acclimatising public opinion to the clearing of Germany’s psychiatric wards. The new propaganda approach to the ‘Jewish question’ was more low key, leaving it to hints and rumour to work on the popular mind, promoting quiescence rather than debate. There, thanks to the silence of the churches, things remained, stalling any explicit and public moral reckoning either for or against the ‘final solution’.

In some respects, Goebbels’s approach seems to have worked. Both the public branding and the deportations of the Jews were irreversible, symbolic acts and they changed public attitudes slowly but fundamentally. In the autumn of 1941 there had been numerous cases of Germans getting up to give elderly Jews their seats in crowded trams and trains. A year later, such acts had become both rare and scandalous. When in October 1942 a young German woman stood up on a tram in Stuttgart for an old Jewish lady whose feet were visibly swollen, she found herself the object of a public outcry. ‘Out!’ shouted an angry choir of passengers. ‘Servant of the Jews!’ ‘Have you no dignity!’ The driver stopped the tram and ordered both women to get out. In Münster, the journalist Paulheinz Wantzen dated the hardening of attitudes towards the Jews to the crisis which engulfed the eastern front in the winter of 1941–42.
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There is another aspect to public silence: it made it harder for people to voice their moral disquiet even to themselves. The Solingen teacher August Töpperwien first heard reports about the mass shooting of Jews in Poland in December 1939, noting them again in May 1940. In May 1942, he was sent to help run a camp for prisoners of war in Belorussia and within six weeks he was reporting on the mass shooting of Jews: ‘In our village 300 Jews were shot. Both sexes, every age group. The people had to take off their outer clothing (clearly so that they could be distributed amongst the remaining inhabitants of the village) and they were being killed with pistol shots. Mass graves at the local Jewish cemetery.’ Later, Töpperwien was sent to Ukraine where again his way was marked by killing sites, and yet it took this reflective high-school teacher a further seventeen months before he admitted to himself what all this information meant. Only in November 1943 did he write in his diary, ‘We are not just destroying the Jews fighting against us, we literally want to exterminate this people as such!’ The trigger for this reflection was a conversation with a soldier from whom Töpperwien ‘heard
dreadful,
apparently accurate details about how we have exterminated the Jews (from infants to the aged) in Lithuania!’ August Töpperwien seems to have needed the stimulus of discussion – albeit a private conversation – to put what he had already witnessed into a general context. It was a train of thought he failed to pursue further at this point; it seems that this Protestant diarist, many of whose entries reflect extensively on the metaphysical meaning of the war, could not bear to consider what this admission meant.
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For non-Jewish Germans and most Europeans living under German occupation, the deportation and murder of the Jews was neither very secret nor very significant. To Jews trapped within occupied Europe – registered and labelled in the west, ghettoised in the east – their own victimisation became the central focus. On Yom Kippur 1942, as Victor Klemperer and his wife said their farewells to the last twenty-six ‘old people’ sitting in the Jewish community house in Dresden on the eve of their deportation, he was in no doubt about the prevailing sense common to them all: ‘The mood of all Jewry here is without exception the same: The terrible end is imminent.
They
[the Nazis] will perish, but perhaps, probably, they will have time to annihilate us first.’ This sense of impending doom, both collective and personal, remained fundamental to Klemperer’s response to all news until the end of the war.
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The key asymmetry between Jewish and German responses is to be found here: for the Jews, their impending destruction shaped their understanding of all other aspects of the war; for Germans, the war framed their understanding and response to the murder of the Jews. It was not knowledge of the events which separated them, but their viewpoints, which were marked by huge asymmetries of power – and also of empathy.
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With the German media hinting at what people already knew, the rumours became more bizarre. In November 1942, Himmler was appalled to read a serious claim advanced by Rabbi Stephen Wise in America that the corpses of the Jews were being turned into fertiliser and soap. The SS leader immediately instructed the head of the Gestapo to investigate, asking him to guarantee that no further use was being made of corpses, beyond burning or burial. By that time, the rumour, which had reached Wise via his Swiss rabbinical informants, was already well established. In Berlin it circulated as a joke: ‘Who are the three greatest chemists of world history? Answer: Jesus, because he turned water into wine; Göring because he turned butter into cannons; and Himmler because he turned Jews into soap.’ Fifteen-year-olds laughed at each other under the shower after their football games, joking about how many Jews they had scrubbed in the suds of green soap. Others deciphered the initials RIF embossed in wartime bars of soap as RJF, transforming the innocuous-sounding Reichsstelle für industrielle Fette (Reich Office for Industrial Fats) into ‘Rein jüdisches Fett’ (Pure Jewish Fat).
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The soap rumour may have harked back to the First World War, when British propaganda had claimed that in German ‘corpse factories’ the military dead were processed into glycerine and other products. Like the rumours of mass electrocution in the special camps from which the trains returned empty, false and real details combined to convey a widespread sense that an unparalleled, industrial-scale operation was taking place. Ghoulish humour in particular provided ways of starting to assimilate the enormity of what was happening without fully accepting it as fact. With flippant remarks, people could try to displace fact into the realm of the absurd, without quite dispelling their own profound unease.

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During 1942 and 1943, the few Jews left in the Reich were more isolated than ever. Segregated at work from their ‘Aryan’ colleagues, confined to unsocial hours of shopping and forced to move into ‘Jewish’ houses, there were few spaces left where Jews and non-Jews could meet. The Catholic convert Erna Becker Kohen found she had to quit the church choir because other members did not want to sing with her. Even communion became difficult because fellow parishioners refused to kneel beside a Jew, and some of the priests also avoided contact. After the introduction of the yellow star, Cardinal Bertram had written to Cardinal Faulhaber to say that the Church had more urgent issues to deal with than the Jewish converts; it was left to individual dioceses to work out how to handle the problem.
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Among the Protestant churches, only small sections of the Confessing Church affirmed the right of its Jewish converts to worship with other Christians, and Theophil Wurm, the Bishop of Württemberg, addressed several private letters to the Nazi leadership in defence of the 1,100 Jewish Christians in his see. In November 1941, Goebbels read a letter from him complaining that the measures against ‘non-Aryans’ played into the hands of ‘Roosevelt and his accomplices’: perhaps recalling Wurm’s faint-hearted protest against medical killing, Goebbels saw him as a Protestant Galen: ‘His letter goes into the wastepaper bin.’ Further private letters by Wurm fared no better. Eventually Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, sent a handwritten note warning the bishop to ‘stay within the boundaries established by your profession and abstain from statements on general political matters’. Wurm fell back into line. There were two other Protestant bishops, Meiser of Bavaria and Marahrens of Hanover, who maintained their independence from the avowedly Nazi and reforming German Christians. But neither man followed Wurm’s example. Even if they eschewed the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis, all three bishops remained, like most Protestant pastors, deeply conservative and nationalist, sharing in an anti-Semitism which still identified Jews with the ‘godless’ Weimar Republic and saw Nazi measures to curtail their influence and ‘Aryanise’ their property as legitimate: there was no opposition to the deportations themselves from the Confessing Church.
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At the other end of the Protestant spectrum, the German Christians rushed to avow that they had ‘discontinued every kind of communion with Jewish Christians’, and strongly supported the persecution of the Jews. On 17 December 1941 the German Christian Church leaders of Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck, Saxony, Hesse-Nassau and Thuringia demanded that the Jews ‘be expelled from German territories’ and affirmed again that ‘racially Jewish Christians have no place and no right to be in the Church’. Franz Tügel, the Bishop of Hamburg, had joined the Party in 1931 and become a leading speaker at provincial rallies. Although he started to distance himself from the German Christians by 1935, he responded to the deportation of the Jews in November by reminding his readers that

I preached once before during the time of the inflation that, in order to bring the brutal exploitation of millions of thrifty and hard-working Germans to a swift end, the banks should be shut and the Jewish stock-exchange speculators hanged . . . I have no responsibility for the Protestant members of the Jewish race, for the baptised are only in quite rare cases really members of our communion. If they have to leave for the ghettos today, then they should become missionaries there.

Two days before Christmas 1941, the Protestant Church Chancellery issued an open letter to all provincial churches calling on the ‘highest authorities to take suitable measures so that baptised non-Aryans remain separate from the ecclesiastical life of the German congregations’.
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In his own Berlin parish church at Nikolassee on Christmas Day 1941, Jochen Klepper found ‘no Jew with the star present at the service’. Thanks to her ‘Aryan’ marriage, his wife Johanna did not have to wear the star, but her daughter Renate enjoyed no such exemption and she did not dare accompany them. During the service, Jochen and Johanna were consumed by ‘anxiety that we would not be allowed to take communion’. Klepper had returned home to Berlin two months earlier, his service in the Wehrmacht abruptly terminated because he had not broken with his Jewish wife. In September 1939 he had felt certain that Germany was fighting a justified war of national self-defence but had feared for Johanna and Renate. Certain that war would only intensify the persecution of the Jews, he was racked with guilt for having talked them out of emigrating to England while there was still time. Now, as the deportations began, his worst premonitions were being fulfilled.
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Desperate to use his remaining ties to the political elite, Klepper sent the last copy of his edited collection of the letters of the Prussian ‘Soldier King’ Frederick William to the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, in March 1942: it was a fitting birthday present and served as a reminder of the promise Frick had given to help Renate to circumvent the general ban on Jewish emigration which had been introduced in October 1941. It took several months for Klepper to secure an entry visa for Renate to neutral Sweden. Eventually, on 5 December 1942, it came through and Klepper immediately contacted the British mission in Stockholm to find out if the Quakers could sponsor Renate to join her sister, Brigitte, in England. He also approached Frick about the all-important exit visa. The Interior Minister agreed to see him, acknowledged his promise and signalled his readiness to help. In Klepper’s presence, he set the wheels in motion to obtain the permissions from the Reich Security Main Office. Elated and anxious in equal measure, Klepper asked him whether he would also help his wife to emigrate. Visibly agitated, Frick began to pace up and down, explaining to the writer that he no longer had the power to protect a single Jew. ‘Such things by their very nature cannot remain secret. They reach the ears of the Führer and then there’s a furore.’ He told Klepper that, for now, his wife was protected by her marriage to an Aryan, but confided that ‘there are efforts under way to push through forced divorces. And that means after the divorce the immediate deportation of the Jewish partner.’
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All Frick could promise was to bring his own influence to bear on the SD. This bought Klepper an audience with the head of the Jewish section, Adolf Eichmann, the following day. Warning him to speak of it to no one, Eichmann told him, ‘I have not finally said yes. But I think the thing will work out.’ When Klepper asked again about his wife, Eichmann told him categorically that ‘A joint emigration would not be approved.’ He was invited to return the next afternoon to learn the outcome of Renate’s case. At his second meeting with Eichmann on 10 December, he was told that Renate’s visa had been turned down. Jochen, Johanna and Renate now decided to leave on their own terms: ‘Tonight we go together into death.’ They placed their picture of Christ raising his hand in blessing in the kitchen, closed the door, opened the oven, and lay on the floor looking at the picture and one another, as the sleeping pills and gas took effect.
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