The Third Reich at War (14 page)

The war at first had little impact on Klemperer. His house was raided by the Gestapo, looking for radios and for forbidden literature, but the officers were polite enough, and the main problem he faced was the exorbitant burden of special taxes which the government levied on him as a Jew. On 9 December 1939, however, he was informed that he and his wife would have to rent out their house to a local greengrocer, who would open a shop in it, and move to two rooms in a special house in the city reserved for Jews, which they would share with other families. Under the terms of the rental agreement, which took effect on 26 May 1940, the Klemperers were not allowed to go near their old house, and the greengrocer had first right of refusal on its sale, which was fixed at 16,600 Reichsmarks, a sum Klemperer considered ridiculously low. It was not to be long before the new occupier began to search for a pretext to put the sale into effect. Meanwhile, in the Jews’ House, at 15B Caspar David Friedrich Strasse, a detached villa ‘stuffed full of people, who all share the same fate’, Klemperer was irritated ‘by the constant fussing interference of strangers’ and the absence of his books, most of which he had been obliged to put into storage. Nerves and tempers became frayed, and he became embroiled in a ‘terrible argument’ with another inhabitant of the house, who accused him of using too much water.
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The Klemperers went out for long walks as much as they could, though shopping was a continual humiliation (‘it is always horrible for me to show the J card’). Deliveries from non-Jewish firms were stopped, however, so he now had to go to shops to buy everything, including milk. The Klemperers’ life continued in this way for the best part of a year, until, in June 1941, disaster struck. Pedantic, with an attention to detail that was one of the qualities that make his diaries so valuable, Klemperer had survived to this point not least because of his extreme punctiliousness in observing all the rules and regulations to which Jews in the Third Reich were subjected. ‘Throughout 17 months of war,’ he noted, ‘we had always blacked out with the greatest care.’ But one evening in February he had come back from a walk after dark and realized he had forgotten to put up the blackout shutters; neighbours had complained to the police about the light coming from his room, the police had reported the incident, and Klemperer was sentenced to eight days in prison. He had never heard of anyone being imprisoned for a first-time offence against the blackout regulations. ‘I undoubtedly owed it solely to the J on my identity card.’ On 23 June 1940, after his plea for leniency had been rejected, he reported to the police station to begin his sentence. Down in the subterranean world of the cells, the books he had brought with him to while away the time were confiscated, along with his reading glasses, and the warders, shouting at him roughly to hurry up, ushered him into Cell 89, furnished with a fold-up bed and table, some cutlery and crockery, a washbasin, towel and soap, and a WC (flushed twice a day from the outside). The time weighed endlessly upon him, ‘the awful emptiness and immobility of the 192 hours’. Conscious of the fact that he was there not least because he was a Jew, he began to wonder if he would ever get out alive.
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V

Jews and Poles were not the only objects of the radicalization of Nazi racial policy and practice in the first two years of the war. Germany’s 26,000 or so Gypsies were also included in the plans developed by the Nazis for the racial reordering of Central and East-Central Europe in the course of the invasion of Poland. By September 1939, Himmler, persuaded by the criminologist Robert Ritter that mixed-race Gypsies in particular were a threat to society, had instructed every regional criminal police office to set up a special desk dealing with the ‘Gypsy problem’. He issued an order banning Gypsies from marrying ‘Aryans’, and placed some 2,000 Gypsies in special camps
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On the outbreak of war, Heydrich banned Gypsies from plying their itinerant trades near Germany’s western borders. Even before this, some local authorities in these areas had taken the initiative and expelled Gypsies from their districts, expressing a traditional wartime fear of Gypsies as spies; Gypsies who had been conscripted into the army were also now cashiered because of the same fears.
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In November 1939 Gypsy women were legally prevented from fortune-telling, on the grounds that they were spreading false predictions about the end of the war (the date of which was obviously a matter of intense interest to many of Germans who consulted them). A number were incarcerated in the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbr̈ck in consequence. Already in December 1938 Himmler had spoken of ‘the final solution of the Gypsy question’, and in pursuit of this aim Heydrich informed his senior underlings on 21 September 1939 that as well as the Jews, the Gypsies would also be deported from Germany to the east of Poland. Germany’s Gypsies were ordered to remain where they were on pain of being taken off to a concentration camp while a census was taken; subsequently some limited mobility was permitted, essential if Gypsies were to continue to make a living, but it was not much of a concession.
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Meanwhile, in January 1940, Himmler began detailed planning for the expulsion of the Gypsies, who were rounded up and placed in collection camps. In May 1940 some 2,500 of them were put on trains and taken to the General Government from a total of seven embarkation centres in the Rhineland, Hamburg, Bremen and Hanover. They were allowed to take a limited amount of luggage, and they were supplied with food and medical care, but the property and possessions they left behind were eventually seized and confiscated. On arrival in the General Government, they were dispersed to towns, villages and work camps; one train even stopped in the middle of the countryside, where the guards threw the Gypsies out and left them to fend for themselves. Many Gypsies died of malnutrition or disease, particularly in the harsh conditions of the camps, and some perished in a massacre near Radom. However, in most cases they were able to move about freely, and a large number found work of one kind or another. Many used the opportunity to return to Germany, where they were generally arrested but not sent back to Poland. Like the planned deportations of the Jews, however, the expulsion of the Gypsies was soon halted; Frank had objected to yet further mass deportations into the General Government, and the supposed military necessity for removing them from the western borders of the Reich disappeared after the conquest of France. For the time being, the Gypsies who remained in Germany were left where they were. Increasing numbers of the fit and able were drafted into forced-labour schemes.
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Like the Jews, Germany’s Gypsies had experienced a drastic deterioration in their situation since the beginning of the war. It had been made plain to them that their long-term future did not lie in Germany, and that when their deportation en masse finally happened it would be achieved through violence, brutality and murder. Conflicting interests in Poland, coupled with the rapidly changing war situation, had put a temporary halt to the expulsions and given them a respite. Yet Hitler’s declared intention of ridding the Reich of all its Jews and Gypsies was in no sense abandoned. Its full realization could only be a matter of time.

‘LIFE UNWORTHY OF
LIFE’

I

On 22 September 1939, in occupied Poland an SS unit from a paramilitary SS and police group, some 500 to 600 strong, founded in Danzig by Kurt Eimann, a local SS leader, loaded a group of mental patients from the asylum at Conradstein (Kocborowo) into a lorry and drove them to a nearby wood, a killing field where many thousands of Poles had already been shot by the Germans. The SS made them line up, still dressed in their asylum clothing, some of them even wearing straitjackets, on the edge of a ditch, where Gestapo officers from the Old Reich shot them, one by one, in the back of the neck. The mental patients fell into the ditch as they were executed, and the paramilitaries covered their bodies with a thin layer of soil. Over the next few weeks, more lorry-loads from the asylum arrived, to suffer the same fate, until around 2,000 mental patients had been killed. Relatives were told that the victims had been transferred to other asylums, but the reverse was the case, as mentally and physically handicapped children from institutions in Silberhammer (Srebrzysk), Mewe (Gniew) and Riesenburg (Probuty) were taken to Conradstein for execution. The same thing was happening elsewhere too. In Schwetz (Swiece) and Konitz (Chojnice), German police units and ethnic German ‘Self-Protection’ squads carried out the killings, while in November 1939 patients from Stralsund, Treptow an der Rege, Lauenburg and ̈ckermünde were taken to Neustadt in West Prussia (Wejherowo) and shot.
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In the Wartheland, Regional Leader Greiser emptied three major psychiatric hospitals of their inmates and had all the Poles and Jews among them killed. Most of them were shot by members of the SS Task Force VI. A special fate, however, was reserved for the patients of the hospital at Treskau (Owi’ska). They were taken to Posen and crammed into a sealed room in the fort that served as the local headquarters of the Gestapo. Here they were poisoned with carbon monoxide gas, released from canisters. This was the first time in history that a gas chamber had been used for mass killing. Further murders took place in the fort; on one occasion in December 1939, Himmler himself came along to observe. Early in 1940 this murder campaign finished with the transportation of more asylum inmates to Kosten (Ko’cian) in the Wartheland, where they were loaded into gas chambers mounted on the back of lorries, taken out into the countryside and asphyxiated. All in all, by the time the initial action was over, in January 1940, some 7,700 inmates of psychiatric hospitals and institutions for the mentally and physically handicapped had been killed, along with a number of prostitutes from Gdingen (Gdynia) and Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), and Gypsies from Preussisch-Stargard (Starograd).
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Such events could hardly be kept secret. Dr Klukowski heard of the killings in February 1940. ‘It is hard to believe anything as terrible as this,’ he wrote.
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The murders continued during the following months. In May and June 1940, 1,558 Germans and 300 or so Poles were taken from an East Prussian mental institution at Soldau and killed by mobile gas wagons in an action organized by a special unit under the command of Herbert Lange, which went on to murder many hundreds more patients in the incorporated territories in the same way. Lange’s men received a special bonus of ten Reichsmarks for every patient they killed. The killings even extended to mental patients in the L’d’ ghetto, where a German medical commission took away forty to be shot in a nearby wood in March 1940 and another batch on 29 July 1941. So terrible were the conditions in the ghetto by this time that Jewish families still begged the hospital to admit their mentally ill relatives even though they were fully aware of the risks this involved. Altogether well over 12,000 patients were killed in these various actions by Eimann, Lange and their men.
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Although these murders took place in the context of a war in which many thousands more Poles and Jews were being shot by German army units, SS Security Task Forces and local ethnic German militias, they none the less stand out in some ways as qualitatively different. In Posen the need to free up space to quarter Military SS units may have played a role, and in some cases the accommodation released by the murders was made available to Baltic German settlers. But for the most part, such practical considerations were only of secondary importance or indeed merely served as a way of justifying these actions in seemingly rational terms. The space made available by the killings stood in no relation at all to the numbers of settlers arriving from the east. The real reasons for the killings were not practical or instrumental, but ideological.
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There was no convincing justification for the murders in security terms either. Unlike Polish intellectuals, the victims could not be regarded as posing a threat to the German occupation or the long-term Germanization of the region. Significantly, those few inmates of asylums deemed capable of work were spared and taken off to Germany. The rest were ‘social ballast’, ‘life unworthy of life’, to be killed as quickly as possible.
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II

As Himmler’s visit to the Posen fort killings suggests, the Nazi leaders in Berlin were well aware of what was going on, and indeed provided the ideological impulse for it to begin. From the mid-twenties at the latest, influenced by the writings of radical eugenicists, Hitler had considered that it was necessary for Germany’s racial health and military effectiveness to eliminate ‘degenerates’ from the chain of heredity. ‘If Germany got a million children every year,’ he had declared at the 1929 Nuremberg Party Rally, ‘and removed 70,000 to 80,000 of the weakest, then the end result would perhaps actually be an increase in its strength.’
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On 14 July 1933 the regime had introduced compulsory sterilization for Germans considered to be suffering from hereditary weaknesses, including ‘moral feeble-mindedness’, a vague criterion that could encompass many different kinds of social deviance. Some 360,000 people had been sterilized by the time the war broke out.
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In 1935, in addition, abortion on eugenic grounds had been legalized.
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Already, however, well before this time, Hitler had begun to plan for even more radical action. According to Hans-Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler had considered putting a provision for the killing of mental patients into the Law of 14 July 1933, but shelved it because it would be too controversial. In 1935, however, as his doctor Karl Brandt recalled, Hitler had told the Reich Doctors’ Leader Gerhard Wagner that he would implement such a measure in wartime, ‘when the whole world is gazing at acts of war and the value of human life in any case weighs less in the balance’. From 1936, SS doctors began to be appointed in growing numbers as directors of psychiatric institutions, while pressure was put on Church-run institutions to transfer their patients to secular ones. At the end of 1936 or the beginning of 1937, a secret Reich Committee for Hereditary Health Matters was established within the Chancellery of the Leader, initially with a view to drawing up legislation for a Reich Hereditary Health Court. By this time, too, the SS journal
The Black Corps
was openly urging the killing of ‘life unworthy of life’, while there is evidence that a number of Regional Leaders began to prepare for the murder of institutionalized patients in their areas. All of this suggests that serious preparations for the killing of the handicapped began around this time. It only needed the imminent prospect of war to put them into effect.
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