The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 7
There were still Jews, Arnon Tamir’s parents and their friends among them, who clung to the hope that the boycott was directed not against them – loyal German citizens – but against ‘international’ Jewry. Indeed, with the segregation of Jews and the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws in the autumn of 1935, which codified the extent of Jewish exclusion from normal German life (including stripping them of Reich citizenship and banning them from marrying ‘Aryans’), many Jews thought the regime had finally controlled its hatred. A combination of pressure from Hjalmar Schacht, Minister of Economics and President of the Reichsbank, over the economic consequences of persecuting Jews and the necessity of presenting Germany in a good light for the Olympic Games of 1936 meant that 1936 and 1937 were relatively quiet years for German Jews. This is not to say that the persecution disappeared – merely that compared with the harassment meted out in earlier years, life was not quite so bad.
However, there was still great suffering. The ‘Aryanization’ programme – the forced exclusion of Jews from the owning of businesses – meant that many Jews were deprived of a livelihood. Even those in businesses not initially forbidden to Jews could face ruin. Shortly after the boycott of 1 April 1933, Arnon Tamir’s father experienced problems in running his small cigarette factory. The town’s cigarette dealers, with whom his father had previously had very good relations, told him one after the other that they were ‘sorry’ but that since he was known to be a Jew they were no longer able to sell his cigarettes. Within one or two months of this unofficial ‘boycott’, he was forced to close down his factory. ‘That came as a heavy blow to him,’ says Arnon Tamir, ‘because after the war and after the inflation, this was the third time that he had lost the basis of his livelihood. After that he lay on the sofa for weeks staring into space.’
Thousands of other Jews lost their livelihood not through an unofficial boycott, like Arnon Tamir’s father, but through the raft of legislation in the 1930s that prohibited Jews from certain professions, like the Civil Service. Thousands more were so desperate that they fled the country.
Karl Boehm-Tettelbach accepts that it was wrong that many Jews felt forced to leave Germany, but says he ‘understood’ why the Nazis felt as they did, given their claim that ‘90 per cent’ of lawyers in Berlin were Jews. Former banker Johannes Zahn puts it this way: ‘The general opinion was that the Jews had gone too far in Germany,’ and he too mentions the perceived problem that certain professions (such as the law) were dominated by Jews. These are significant remarks since it is easy to assume, given where this anti-Semitism was to lead, that Nazi anti-Semitic policy was pushed through against the wishes of the majority. From the variety of different witnesses we talked to it is clear that many Germans at the time supported the restrictions the Nazis placed on Jews.
Of course, the reason why Jews were concentrated in certain professions was the legacy of hundreds of years of exclusion from other areas of employment. ‘The Jews were actually pushed into a particular sector,’ says Arnon Tamir. ‘Until 200 years ago they were not allowed to be farmers or craftsmen.’ But logical explanation does not prevail over prejudice.
For non-Jews it was easy to look the other way. I asked Karl Boehm-Tettelbach how it was possible in the 1930s that someone could respect Hitler and what he was doing for Germany when Jews were forced to lose their jobs and leave the country. In his reply he spoke, I believe, for millions of other Germans: ‘That never came up. Everybody thought the same, that you were in a big team and you didn’t separate from the group. You were infected. That explains it a little bit.’ Thinking back to his own enjoyable experiences in the Luftwaffe in the 1930s, he says: ‘A young pilot flying all day long, he didn’t want to discuss these problems and they never came up in the officer’s mess. We came home, had a nice dinner and then went to bed or went out dancing.’
Arnon Tamir suffered as he grew to adulthood in this atmosphere of ‘infectious’ anti-Semitism. He would look into the mirror and stare at his nose – was it too big? And his lower lip – did it protrude too much? As for his attitude to non-Jewish German girls, ‘The mere idea of becoming friendly, or more, with a German girl was poisoned right from the start by those horrible cartoons and headlines which claimed that the Jews were contaminating them.’ Arnon Tamir discovered that, to the committed Nazi, the Jews weren’t just different, they were diabolical. When he was at work on a construction site he listened in horror as a young Storm Trooper told a story, in all seriousness, about a Jewish woman in his village who was a sorceress. He claimed she had been able to turn into a foal and then change back again. One day the blacksmith caught her while she was still a foal and shod her with horseshoes so that she stayed a foal. ‘I was deeply dismayed,’ says Arnon Tamir, ‘that it was possible he believed something like this.’ The ludicrous prejudice of this Storm Trooper could more easily flourish in a society where there were very few Jews – remember that only 0.76 per cent of the German population was Jewish. It is sometimes easier to be frightened of an unseen, almost supernatural enemy, than the ordinary neighbour who lives next door.
After escalating throughout the summer and autumn of 1938 in a third big wave of anti-Semitic outrages to follow those of spring 1933 and summer 1935, violence against the German Jews exploded in an unprecedented manner on the night of 9 November – Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Two days earlier, Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, had been shot by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew angry at the Nazi treatment of Jews, particularly his own family, who had been among those recently deported with great brutality across the Polish border. Josef Goebbels heard the news of vom Rath’s death and, when the Nazi hierarchy met in Munich to commemorate the anniversary of the Putsch, asked Hitler to let loose the Nazi Storm Troopers. Hitler agreed.
The first Rudi Bamber and his family knew about Kristallnacht was when their front door crashed open: ‘In the early hours of the morning they sort of broke the front door down and started to smash the place up – the Storm Troopers. We had two lots: one lot just concentrated on smashing things up and left, but then the second lot arrived.’ He tried to ring the police but saw that the people perpetrating the violence were in uniform themselves. ‘We had three elderly ladies who were living on the first floor with us. One was dragged out and beaten up, for no reason except she probably got in the way or something. And I was knocked about and finally ended up in the cellar which was where the kitchens were . . . Then I was arrested and put under a guard outside the front door while they finished off what they were doing inside.’ In a typical example of their arbitrary behaviour, the Storm Troopers suddenly changed their mind and decided not to detain Rudi Bamber: ‘A great many people were arrested that night and it was obviously their intention to arrest me as well. But after a while they found that the leader of the group had gone home. He had obviously had enough and they were very irritated by this. They weren’t going to waste any more time, so they gave me a swift kick and said ‘Push off,’ or words to that effect, and they walked out and left me to it.’ But a terrible sight awaited Rudi Bamber when he re-entered the house: ‘I went upstairs and found my father dying, dead. I tried as far as I could to give artificial respiration but I don’t think I was very good at it and in any case I think it was too late for that . . . I was absolutely in shock. I couldn’t understand how this situation had arisen . . . uncalled-for violence against a people they didn’t know.’
For Germans like Erna Kranz, Kristallnacht ‘was a shock because from that moment on you thought about things more. You see, at first you let yourself be carried along by a wave of hope; we had it better then, we had order and security in the country. Then you really started to think.’ We asked her if she therefore became an opponent of the regime. ‘No, no,’ she replied hastily, ‘that, no. When the masses were shouting “Heil”, what could the individual person do? You went along. We went along. We were the followers. That’s how it was. We were the followers.’
The reaction of ordinary Germans to Kri
stallnacht varied. Many were shocked, disgusted or stunned by the violence and destruction. Often the extent of the material damage was criticized. Sometimes people felt ashamed that a cultured nation could stoop to this. Sometimes expressions of human sympathy, albeit muted, could be heard. Most people, however, appear to have approved of ridding Germany of Jews. The Jews were friendless.
The morning after Kristallnacht, in Nuremberg, local Germans demonstrated what they felt about the suffering Rudi Bamber and his family had experienced: they threw stones at the windows of their house.
There is no reliable record of how many Jews were murdered as a result of Kristallnacht, nor how much property was destroyed. Recent research by Professor Meier Schwarz (a biologist from Tel Aviv, whose own father was killed by the Nazis) suggests that more than a thousand synagogues were destroyed and at least four hundred German Jews died.
The circumstances of Kristallnacht demonstrate once again how momentous events could occur within Nazi Germany with little advanced planning, and how violence, always near the surface, could explode once Hitler gave the nod. Hitler’s own reputation suffered little as a result of Kristallnacht. He never spoke openly about the affair and, for those Germans who wanted to, it remained possible to believe that such violence could once again be laid at the door of Goebbels and the party’s rabble.
In 1938, the same year as Kristallnacht, a grand new Chancellery was built (to a design by Albert Speer) to symbolize the power and authority of Nazi rule. But within its walls Hitler’s style of government could still only lead to chaos. According to Dr Günter Lohse, of the German Foreign Office, the basic problem was that Hitler would appoint two people in two separate departments to do relatively similar tasks without making it clear who was working for whom. Then they would fight between themselves. Alternatively, Hitler would issue an instruction and then ‘everyone made an institution out of the instruction’. When it came to resolving the inevitable disputes, Hitler rarely made a decision as to the merits of a case or said who was right. He would say to his ministers, ‘Now you should sit down together and when you’ve made up, you can come and see me.’
In this spirit of competition Hitler’s working life within the Chancellery was organized not by one private office but by five. There was the office of the Reich Chancellery under Hans-Heinrich Lammers; the office of the Chancellery of the Führer under Philipp Bouhler; the office of the Presidential Chancellery under Otto Meissner; the office of Hitler’s personal adjutant under Wilhelm Brückner; and the office of the Führer’s deputy under Martin Bormann. Since all these people claimed to represent Hitler, much of their time was spent fighting with each other over jurisdiction. All of them looked for ways of pleasing their Führer as a means of increasing their influence. The result was a system in which chance events could provoke radical policies. The most chilling example of how this could happen within the Chancellery is the origin of one of the most repugnant policies of the Third Reich – the Children’s ‘Euthanasia’ Programme.9
Sometime in late 1938 or early 1939 the father of a deformed child wrote a petition to Hitler, one of hundreds received by the Chancellery of the Führer every week. (In a system that lacked democratic representation, writing to the Führer, like offering a petition to the King in medieval times, became one of the few ways individuals could try to influence their fate.) This father wrote that his child had been born blind, appeared to be an idiot and was also lacking a leg and part of an arm. He wanted the child to be ‘put down’. Officials in the Chancellery of the Führer, under the ambitious Philipp Bouhler, now decided that this should be one of the few petitions that they actually put in front of Hitler rather than responded to themselves or passed to other government departments. (The process of selecting letters always involved ‘working towards the Führer’, namely deciding in advance which of the petitions would be most likely to please Hitler.) Knowing Hitler’s obsessive pseudo-Darwinian views, it must have been obvious that this particular petition would feed his prejudice (laws had already been passed by the Nazis which ordered the compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill). Hitler read the petition and then asked his own physician Dr Karl Brandt to go and examine the child and, if the father’s statement proved to be correct, to kill the child. According to the post-war testimony of Dr Hans Hefelmann, a leading functionary in the Chancellery of the Führer, the Knauer case, as it became known, prompted Hitler to authorize Brandt and Bouhler to deal with similar cases in the same way.
There then followed a period in which doctors and other medical officials drew up detailed criteria for children who were to be ‘referred for treatment’ under the new policy. Diseases that had to be referred included ‘idiocy and mongolism . . . deformities of every kind, in particular the absence of limbs, spina bifida, etc.’ Forms were returned to a Reich committee, from whence they were sent to three paediatricians who acted as assessors. They marked each form with a plus sign if the child were to die, or a minus sign if the child were to survive. None of the three doctors who made the judgement saw any of the children: they decided on the information of the forms alone.
Gerda Bernhardt’s family was one of the thousands to suffer once the ‘euthanasia’ policy was in full swing in the early years of the war. Her younger brother, Manfred, had always been retarded. When he was ten he was still speaking like a three-year-old. He could say ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ but little else except ‘Heil Hitler’ – something he was pathetically proud of being able to pronounce. Some unpleasant neighbours in their block of flats said that it would be for the best if the boy was ‘put away’, but Manfred’s mother always tried to resist the idea. Eventually, though, her husband convinced her that their son should be sent to a nearby children’s hospital in Dortmund called Aplerbeck. Manfred was twelve years old now and becoming a strain for all the family. There was a farm at Aplerbeck and Herr Bernhardt comforted his wife with the thought that Manfred would be able to spend time around animals.
Manfred was duly admitted to the hospital and his parents went to visit him once a fortnight – all the regulations would allow. Gerda also visited her brother as often as she could, taking him little gifts of food. Then, around Christmas of Manfred’s first year in Aplerbeck, Gerda noticed a change in him. He was brought into the anteroom where they normally met dressed only in his underpants and he seemed apathetic and weak. Gerda hugged him goodbye. That was the last time she saw him alive.
The hospital authorities said that Manfred had died a natural death of measles, but Gerda Bernhardt noticed that a lot of children were dying at Aplerbeck around this time. She asked to see the body of her brother and in one room saw the bodies of fifteen little children all wrapped in white sheets. The nurse asked her as they moved from one body to another, ‘Is this your brother?’ and at each body Gerda said, ‘No.’ Manfred’s body was not one of these fifteen corpses, but lay in another room on a hospital trolley.
After the burial his father said to the family, ‘They killed our son,’ but he had no evidence to prove it. Only in the last few years has it been possible to piece the true story together and to be able to say with certainty that staff at Aplerbeck murdered children who were put into their care.
Paul Eggert was a patient at Aplerbeck around the time Manfred was there. His father was a violent drunkard and he was one of twelve children. With this family history, classed by the Nazis as ‘delinquent’, Paul Eggert was forcibly sterilized at a hospital in Bielefeld when he was 11 years old and then sent to Aplerbeck for ‘assessment’. As he was not mentally disabled, he was given odd jobs to do, such as fetching clean linen or pushing trolleys containing dirty washing. Once he thought the trolley he was pushing felt unusually heavy, so when no one was looking, he pulled back the washing and saw the bodies of two girls and a boy.
The similarity between life at Aplerbeck and a horror story continued in the nightmare world that was the children’s evening meal. Dr Weiner Sengenhof, one of the senior doctors at Aplerbeck, would come into the dining-room
with a nurse. They would then select the children who had to go to the doctor’s consultation room in the morning for ‘immunization’ injections; the children, however, had noticed that those selected for such ‘immunization’ in the past were never seen again. Outside the consultation room, a child hung on to Paul Eggert screaming for help as the nurse tugged him away. Paul Eggert told us, ‘These pictures would swim in front of my eyes when I lay in bed at night and they are still before my eyes today.’
Assembling the historical evidence for what happened at a hospital like Aplerbeck has been extremely difficult. Almost all the papers that could have established clear proof about what went on there were burned in the last months of the war. After 1945 nothing was said by those who had perpetrated or witnessed these terrible acts. Dr Theo Niebel, the doctor who had been in charge of the Special Children’s Unit at Aplerbeck under the Nazi regime, still worked there as a doctor until his retirement in the 1960s. According to local historian Uwe Bitzel, ‘It became possible to uncover something only when the direct participants were no longer at the hospital.’ To Herr Bitzel this compounds the crime: ‘I do find it totally awful that after 1945 none of these people stood up and said: “I have done terrible things. I recognize that we have all done them.” But they all remained silent, denied it and lied – trivialized it in some cases.’