how hell worked by gordon a
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How Hell Worked
Gordon A. Craig APRIL 18, 1996 ISSUE
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Knopf, 622 pp., $30.00
Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire: Why So Many German Jews Made the Tragic Decision to Remain in Nazi
Germany
by John VH DippelBasicBooks, 384 pp., $26.00
In 1743, when Moses Mendelssohn, the son of a Torah scribe in Dessau, came
to Berlin, penniless and unable to speak German properly, there were 333
Jewish families resident in the city numbering in all fewer than two thousand
persons. The Jews were an underprivileged minority tolerated only because of
their economic usefulness. Their rights of residence and movement wererestricted, and they were subject to expulsion at the caprice of local authorities.
They were excluded from public service; they could not belong to guilds; they
were forbidden to engage in certain trades; and they were taxed mercilessly and
on every possible occasion—when traveling, when marrying, when buying a
house; they were taxed for the right to remain in the city, taxed whenever they
lef t it, taxed for the privilege of being excluded from the armed services, and
for much else. And always they were suspected of nefarious practices and
secret crimes against the German majority.
Mendelssohn, who overcame formidable difficulties in order to learn the
language and other skills he needed to pursue a career of scholarship, and who
became a friend of Lessing and Nicolai and a philosopher whose stature was
widely recognized in Europe, was inclined to believe that the Jews were in part
responsible for their own isolation and that they should try to escape from it by
accepting German culture as their own and by freeing their religion from
outworn rituals and working for its acceptance as a denomination similar to
others. He himself made his home a meeting place for intellectuals,
distinguished foreign visitors, and the Berlin upper class in the hope that he
could demonstrate that the Jews were not an exotic people but Germans who
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had the same interests as other enlightened members of German society. And
he was a friend and associate of Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, whose widely
read treatise On the Civic Improvement of the Jews (1781) called upon German
governments to give the Jews the same rights that they guaranteed to other
subgroups in society.
Thanks to the energy of these pioneers, the idea of assimilation proved persuasive to leaders of the growing Jewish community, who were inspired
also, as Mendelssohn and Dohm had been, by the Enlightenment’s optimistic
belief in the capacity of reason to solve all of society’s problems and by
Wilhelm von Humboldt’s idea of Bildung (self-improvement) as the key to
social acceptance. In the two centuries that followed, the average Jew, baptized
or unbaptized, became German in his dress and manners, his virtues and vices,
and his patriotic pride in his country. But this availed him nothing, merely
adding new fuel to the country’s deep-smoldering anti-Semitism. The ultimateresponse to the Jewish hope of assimilation was the Holocaust.
1.
In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen takes a fresh look at the
nature of German anti-Semitism. He examines the way in which its nineteenth-
century development provided the Nazis with a society so imbued with hateful
notions of the Jews that it was ready and willing to be mobilized for the mostextreme measures against them, and to support the agencies and the
perpetrators of the killing that followed. His work is animated by his belief
that, in our judgment of the Nazi period, we have been misled by the
assumption that the average Germans of that time disapproved of the actions
taken in their name and, insofar as they participated in them, did so because
they were terrorized by the Nazis or out of an exaggerated sense of obedience
or because of social pressure. On the contrary, he insists, the vast majority of
Germans shared Hitler’s anti-Semitism and willingly participated in its brutalimplementation.
The first section of the book—which deals with pre-Nazi anti-Semitism—
suffers from the fact that the author’s intent, as he explains late in the volume,
“is primarily explanatory and theoretical. Narrative and description…are here
subordinate to the explanatory goals.” It consists of two chapters, the first of
which is a rather heavy-handed and repetitive “framework for analysis.” Here
the important, if not entirely original, points are made that opinions held of Jews do not necessarily bear any relationship to their actual behavior; that in a
society in which anti-Semitism has long been endemic, it will have latent and
manifest phases, depending on circumstances, but will not disappear; and that
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the degree to which a people is obsessed with the Jewish presence is a reliable
indication of the social danger of anti-Semitism. These conditions clearly
obtained in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany.
In a subsequent chapter, “The Evolution of Eliminationist Antisemitism in
Modern Germany,” Goldhagen discusses in very general terms the content of
medieval Christian anti-Semitism, which was the source of so many of the wildfancies that Germans, and other Europeans, entertained about Jewish
machinations against Christians and their church; he goes on to show how
these evolved in a more secular age into images of the Jews as parasites in a
society to which they contributed nothing except corruption and decay. The
Jews were seen to be adverse to any productive work but skilled in financial
manipulation and intrigue, malevolent and powerful, and organized as a secret
force within society, all of whose ills they fomented. These imputed
characteristics became all the more accepted with the new emphasis, at the endof the nineteenth century, on the concept of race and its application to the Jews,
which came as a crushing blow to the cause of assimilation. Goldhagen writes:
So a contemporaneous, interrelated fusion of Judaism with a newly
conceived belief in Jews as a nation on the one hand, and Christianity
with Germanness on the other, bespoke the creation of a virtually
insuperable cognitive and consequent social barrier for Jews to overcome
were they ever to be accepted as Germans.
here is a lack of specificity about Goldhagen’s description of this process. It
might have been useful to point out that it was the very exclusion of the Jews
from so many productive trades that gave a spurious validity to the charge that
they preferred occupations in which there was a premium set on sharp practice;
and some mention might have been made of the financial crash of 1873, which,
because of the real though exaggerated culpability of some Jewish banking
firms, created the atmosphere in which the new racial anti-Semitism flourished.Goldhagen is less interested in describing the historical evolution of anti-
Semitism (he has, for instance, little to say about the first three quarters of the
nineteenth century or about regional differences) than he is in arguing that the
post-1875 image of the Jew logically called for his elimination from society,
although, as he writes,
What “elimination”—in the sense of successfully ridding Germany of
Jewishness—meant, and the manner in which it was to be done, was
unclear or hazy to many, and found no consensus during the period of
modern German anti-semitism. But the necessity of the elimination of
Jewishness was clear to all. It followed from the conception of the Jews as
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alien invaders of the German body social.
Goldhagen believes that the prevailing tendency in what he calls eliminationist
anti-Semitism was toward extermination, that it was “pregnant with murder,”
although he adds that “the only matter that cannot be ascertained is, broadly
held though this view of Jews was, how many Germans subscribed to it in
1900, 1920, 1933, or 1941.”
Nor, of course, can it be said with any assurance how firmly those who spoke
violently about Jews believed in their own rhetoric. How many of those who
fretted over the numbers of Jews they encountered at fashionable social
gatherings were, in fact, as ambivalent as the novelist Theodor Fontane? In
1881, after an evening at the theater in which two thirds of the audience was
Jewish, he wrote worriedly, “…in time the state and the legislative process will
have to help, or things will come to a sorry pass,” only to admit, in a letter to
his daughter in June 1890, that whenever he compared a social evening in a
cultivated circle that was predominantly Christian to one in a similar group that
was predominantly Jewish, he could not help but note how superior the latter
was in cultivation, animation, and interest, adding, “With sorrow I grow
increasingly out of my antisemitism, not because I want to, but because I
must.” Again, how many members of the Conservative Party who voted for
the Tivoli Program of December 1892—“We combat the widely obtruding and
decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life”—were thinking of anythingremotely resembling the extermination of the Jews?
Perhaps such considerations miss the point, and the important thing is that, in
the last years of the nineteenth century and even more so during the turbulent
years of the Weimar Republic, the Jewish question was under such intense
discussion that it had become a national obsession, and that Goldhagen is not
exaggerating when he writes that a racial anti-Semitism, unusually violent in its
imagery and tending toward violence, was
extremely widespread in all social classes and sectors of German society,
for it was deeply embedded in German cultural and political life and
conversation, as well as integrated into the moral structure of society.
And that being so, after he assumed power in January 1933, Adolf Hitler could
count on widespread sympathy and support when he began to implement his
anti-Jewish program.
itler had, of course, never disguised his intention of cleansing Germany of
the Jews and eliminating the threat of Jewry wherever it was to be found. This
could not be accomplished until the beginning of the Russian campaign created
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the conditions and space, particularly in Poland, that would facilitate wholesale
liquidation. Meanwhile, he followed a program of increasingly radical
measures, which included verbal and physical attacks on the Jews and
progressively severe legal restrictions designed to deprive them of their
livelihood and civil rights and to transform them into what Goldhagen calls
“socially dead” beings. The striking thing about the elaboration of this program
is that it elicited no significant protests from the German universities or churches, from the civil service or the courts, or from the general public. Even
critics of other aspects of Nazi policy were strangely quiescent before outrages
like Reichskristallnacht in November 1938. The Nazis were able, therefore, in
the years before the outbreak of the war, to draw up their plans for the
extermination of the Jews without any fear of the kind of popular opposition
that disrupted the euthanasia program of 1939, and to organize the system of
camps that would be the central feature of the program of genocide.
Indeed, if the Holocaust was the defining action of the Nazi regime, Goldhagen
regards the camp—a generic term for concentration camps, extermination
camps, detention facilities, work camps, transit camps, and ghettos—as its
largest institutional creation,
not just because of the enormous number of installations, not just because
of the millions of people who suffered within its confines, not just
because of the vast numbers of Germans and German minions who
worked for and in these camps, but also because it constituted an entirely
new subsystem of society.
Unique in the history of Western Europe, the camp was distinct from other
parts of society in having its own institutions, organization, rules, and
distinctive practices. It was a world of violence and freedom, in which,
liberated from law and ethical restraint, Germans transformed their victims into
their own images of them. It was a world of torture and barbarism designed to
free society from the false morality and bourgeois inhibitions of the past. It
was, Goldhagen writes, the apotheosis of the Nazi revolution.
When we consider that, before they were finished, the Nazis had more than ten
thousand camps in operation, Goldhagen’s remarks are persuasive. This is also
true of what must be described as the most substantial chapters of Goldhagen’s
book, in which he discusses the implementation of the genocidal program and
deals with the question of who actually killed the Jews. Some writers about
Nazi Germany have assumed all too easily that the killing took placeconveniently out of sight and was performed for the most part by gas ovens and
SS men. Goldhagen, by describing three particular instruments of death, police
battalions, work camps, and death marches, shows that this is far from being
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the case.
he so-called police battalions were formations of the Ordnungspolizei, or
Order Police, which had special responsibility for policing occupied territories
during the war. Because of their mobile character, the police battalions carried
out a number of genocidal activities, which included rounding up Jews and
transporting them to work or concentration camps, and often involved shooting
and torturing them in their homes, in their beds, or in the streets or the open
fields. Goldhagen places some emphasis on the fact that the battalions were not
elite organizations; on the contrary, their members were chosen for service
haphazardly, received minimal military and ideological training, and were not
particularly zealous Nazis. By and large, they were ordinary people, a good
average sample of the German lower middle class, with no outstanding
characteristics to distinguish them. But they carried out the duties assigned
them without complaint and on occasion with enthusiasm, and certainly
showed no signs of remorse afterward. Goldhagen quotes a former member of
a police battalion who testified in 1960:
I believed the propaganda that all Jews were criminals and subhumans
and that they were the cause of Germany’s decline after the First World
War. The thought that one should disobey or evade the order to participate
in the extermination of the Jews did not therefore enter my mind at all.
It is important to note, Goldhagen argues, that the members of these units were
not compelled to take part in the killings. In all of the nine battalions that he
studied, commanders had let it be known that anyone who felt that he could not
do so would be given other duties, and in each of them there was evidence to
indicate that this choice had been exercised without penalty. Yet not very often.
Of the 4500 men in the nine battalions, virtually all of them chose to kill and
continue to kill, and many went beyond the call of duty by volunteering for
improvised search-and-destroy missions. Photographs taken by battalionmembers during these operations, at Lomazy in Poland, for example, where
they herded 1700 Jews together and shot them in August 1942, show them in
proud poses and with expressions of satisfaction and accomplishment; and in
their off-duty moments, they appear relaxed and happy. Goldhagen mentions a
photograph taken at Radzyn in the fall of 1942, a period when Police Battalion
101 was thoroughly engaged in mass killings and deportations. He writes:
It memorializes a group of officers from the battalion staff and First
Company sitting outdoors around a long table with the wives of two of the
officers, Frau Brand and Frau Wohlauf. They are drinking in what appears
to be a convivial atmosphere. Frau Wohlauf, who can be seen displaying a
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big smile, is evidently having a good time.
Indeed, life in Poland was not unpleasant for the police battalions, with clubs,
pubs, and recreation centers, and sporting events as well as movies and
concerts and religious services, and, doubtless, love affairs to occupy their time
when they were not killing Jews. Perhaps the latter weighed less heavily on
their minds than the former. It was simply a job that had to be done, and, after all, as a member of a mobile unit in Lublin said laconically, “The Jew was not
acknowledged by us to be a human being.”
he second of the killing agencies discussed here, the work camp, provides an
intriguing demonstration of how Nazi ideological obsessions got in the way of
logical thinking. As the war proceeded, Germany needed all the productive
labor it could find. It was effectively barred from mobilizing female labor, as
Albert Speer desired, by the opposition of the Gauleiter , the localadministrators who took the line that for the Deutsche Frau und Mutter to be
submitted to the rigors of factory work would be demeaning for her and
contrary to her proper role in the Volksgemeinschaft . The anti-Jewish policy
made available an enormous supply of skilled labor. Far from exploiting this,
however, the Nazis operated officially designated work camps as if economic
considerations were irrelevant, forcing their Jewish inmates to work at
unproductive, repetitive, and demeaning tasks with inadequate food and rest
and under constant torture by brutal guards until they collapsed and died.
What, in Nazi eyes, justified this squandering of a potentially valuable
resource? Certainly it was the assumption that since the Jews did not deserve to
live and, after the outset of the genocidal program, were condemned to die, any
work to which they were assigned was merely an interruption in the process of
eliminating them. It should, moreover, be made as unpleasant as possible, since
the Jews deserved to be punished for their past crimes in any case. Goldhagen
writes:
Getting a young, healthy, skilled worker to weave the rope and build the
gallows (with bloodied, swollen, stiffened hands and substandard tools)
from which he will hang can be seen as an economically rational use of
his labor power only by those who want to hang him and who do not care
about the loss of his valuable productivity.
Because Nazi minds were incapable of sensing the contradiction in such
thinking, work camps like Majdanek had mortality rates that were not
significantly lower than those of Auschwitz and the other extermination camps.
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he third killing agency was the forced marching of Jews and other victims
over long distances, with death in constant attendance on the way or waiting at
the end of the road. Goldhagen, who calls the death march “the ambulatory
analogue to the cattle car,” has concentrated on the marches that took place in
the last phase of the war, when the German cause was hopelessly lost and
Allied armies were closing in from every direction. In the winter of 1944, as
the Nazis closed their camps and sent their prisoners off through thecountryside, in long columns under the guard of Germans and German
auxiliaries, these marches were characterized by the same irrationality and
cruelty that marked the operation of the work camps. Although logic might
have counseled a cessation of brutality against the Jews and either their
liberation or their expeditious delivery into Allied hands (and although
Heinrich Himmler, seeking to negotiate with the Americans, actually ordered a
cessation of the killing), the German guards remained true to their genocidal
hatred of the Jews, driving them senselessly through winter landscapes towardgoals unknown even to themselves, depriving them of food and water, beating
them furiously as they walked and fell, and shooting them when they could no
longer stumble on.
They thus demonstrated by their actions that the purpose of the operation was
not to arrive anywhere but to kill the marchers. Goldhagen describes the march
of a mixed column of Jewish and non-Jewish Polish and Russian women from
Helmbrechts in Upper Franconia to Prachatitz on the Czech border, in whichthe non-Jewish women were treated with some solicitude but the Jews
brutalized so horrendously that at least 178 (and perhaps 275) of the 580 who
began the fearful trek died before it was over, from either starvation,
exhaustion, disease, or beatings and shootings. Although this march was
through German territory, no one in the villages they passed sought to
intervene on behalf of the Jews.
itler’s Willing Executioners comes to us with the publisher’s promise that itwill transform our view of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. This seems
unlikely, at least for readers who have followed the literature on these subjects.
Its principal general conclusions—that a great many Germans wanted to be rid
of the Jews long before Hitler came to power, that when the extermination
began no one stood up in their defense, and that the number of participants in
the killing was much greater than originally supposed—have been reasonably
well known for a long time. But some of the specific stories Goldhagen has
reconstructed to support these conclusions are particularly telling andhorrifying, concentrating as they do on aspects of persecution, such as the
forced marches, that seldom have been singled out for attention. Moreover, his
reflections on the camp system as a central element of the Nazi revolution are
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incisive, and his extensive research on the various genocidal agencies should
be a model for future scholars working on the Holocaust. It is a pity that the
author’s habit of stopping periodically and repeating much that he has said
before gives the book a disjointed feel that might easily have been corrected by
a good editor.
2.
Anti-Semites fed their hatred of the Jews by thinking of them as an evil sub-
community within society, constantly plotting against their Christian
neighbors. This was a fantasy, and John V. H. Dippel writes in Bound Upon a
Wheel of Fire:
The overriding fact about “Jewish life” during the Weimar era was that
there was no such thing. Rather there were half a million individual Jewswho were busily building their own lives and pursuing points of view
along many different and independent lines. This, after all, was the import
of assimilation—not to be defined and restricted by Jewishness, but to be
as free as other Germans to find their own values, political affiliations,
careers, and stations in life.
If there were as many German anti-Semites committed to eliminating the Jews
on the eve of Hitler’s coming to power as Daniel Goldhagen thinks there were,this does not seem to have dawned upon the consciousness of Germany’s Jews.
Even after the acceleration of street violence and outrages against Jewish
establishments and individuals at the end of 1932 and in the first months of
1933, Jews were reluctant to admit that this would continue or that their lives
would be seriously affected by the Nazi seizure of power.
Dippel investigates the reasons for this apparent impercipience and asks why so
many Jews who might have escaped the Holocaust by leaving Germany after
1933 did not do so. In general, his answer is that, like other Germans, Jews
tended to place the best rather than the worst construction upon Hitler’s
Machtübernahme (takeover of power). Politically conservative Jews thought
that it would mean an end to the political instability of the last days of the
Weimar republic, eliminate the threat of communism, and encourage a return to
economic prosperity. Patriotic Jews welcomed the restoration of Germany’s
international position, which was one of Hitler’s goals. Those who were
troubled by Hitler’s anti-Jewish rhetoric were inclined to believe that the
Führer would become more reasonable with time and amenable to a legal
solution of the “Jewish question,” perhaps at the expense of the Ostjuden, the
more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. In general, Jews found it
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difficult to believe that the Führer’s threats were really directed at themselves,
because they regarded themselves as Germans in every sense and loved their
country. In their gloomiest moments, when they thought of what they could do
if Hitler really meant what he said, they were prone to a feeling of helplessness,
since they could not as Germans imagine starting a new life in a strange land.
Whether optimistic or pessimistic about National Socialism, therefore, Jews
were more inclined to wait and see than to emigrate.
n telling their story, Dippel has concentrated on the experience of six Jews,
all of whom stayed in Germany long after it was safe for them to do so,
although in the end all six escaped the fate of hundreds of thousands of fellow
Jews who followed their example. These were Richard Willstätter, a Nobel
laureate in chemistry; Bella Fromm, the Berlin society columnist; Hans-
Joachim Schoeps, a right-wing Jewish youth leader; Robert Weltsch, the
Zionist editor of the Berlin newspaper the Jüdische Rundschau; Max Warburg,
Germany’s leading Jewish banker; and Leo Baeck, the chief rabbi of Berlin. In
their decision to stay in Germany there was a strong element of illusion, but in
most cases their behavior was determined also by their identification with
German culture and their feeling of responsibility for their fellow Jews.
The most self-defeating form of accommodation sought with the Nazis was that
of Schoeps, and the most pathetic that of Willstätter. A conservative nationalist
of the most extreme stripe, Schoeps formed a group of like minded friendscalled the German Vanguard, which set out on the one hand to free German
Judaism from its bourgeois and international values and on the other to
persuade Germany’s new rulers that they shared their hatred of communism
and even democracy and their desire for national renewal. Schoeps sought to
establish relations with the Stahlhelm and other veterans groups, without
success, and later, in March 1935, when Hitler repudiated the arms clauses of
the Versailles Treaty, supported this step in a statement which read:
In this historic moment, when the German Reich restores its military
sovereignty, we young German Jews feel compelled to express our
satisfaction over this step. Just as our fathers fulfilled their duty to the
Fatherland in 1914–1918, so are we, too, prepared today for military
service, in loyalty to our motto, “Ready for Germany.”
This offer was rejected, and, adding insult to injury, the Nazi government
announced that Jews would be banned from military service. This ended the
pretensions of the German Vanguard, and, although Schoeps continued his
attempts to inspire a conservative renewal among his fellow Jews, he had long
been in the Gestapo’s bad books and was extremely lucky to escape, without
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money, job prospects, or visa, to Sweden in 1938.
he chemist Willstätter hoped to assure his right to remain in his beloved
country, not by calling attention to himself, as Schoeps did, but by cultivating
obscurity. By giving up all of his official positions, he convinced himself that
he had won a kind of immunity, and he wrote Chaim Weizmann that he was
sure, in any case, that anti-Jewish agitation would abate and that he would ride
out the storm in his house in Munich, doing private research and cultivating his
rose garden. It was only after Kristallnacht that he began to see how terribly
mistaken he had been and managed, after one panicky failed attempt to escape
that led to his arrest, to get permission to go to Switzerland.
Bella Fromm and Max Warburg remained in Germany because they felt that
they could help more vulnerable Jewish acquaintances by doing so. Fromm
was a celebrity with many friends in high places, particularly in the diplomaticcorps, and they gave her a certain degree of protection, although this, she knew,
had limits. She had good antennae and usually knew what the Nazis were going
to do before they did it, and what she learned she used to warn potential
victims, often giving them financial aid to help them get out of the country.
Warburg believed that his bank and his international connections were
important for the German economy and that, in Hjalmar Greeley Schacht, the
president of the Reichsbank, he had a protector who would not let the Nazis
forget it. He, too, used his position of relative security to help others, providingaid for many Jews who were attempting to find a refuge in Palestine.
In Jewish circles in America, he was accused of collaboration with the Nazis, a
charge that was only formally true and could be made only for a short period.
For Schacht fell out of favor, and Germany moved toward a war economy, and
Warburg was forced to turn control of his bank over to Aryans. No longer in a
position to help others and himself in grave personal danger, he yielded to the
pressure of friends and sailed for America. Fromm’s experience was much thesame. After Joachim von Ribbentrop became foreign minister in February
1938, she could no longer expect friends in the ministry or in foreign embassies
to protect her and followed Warburg’s example.
n April 1, 1933, after the first Nazi anti-Jewish boycott encountered a
lukewarm reception from Berliners, Robert Weltsch was inspired to write an
article in his Jüdische Rundschau that became famous as the “Yellow Badge
Article.” In it he called upon Jews to wear with pride the emblem that the Nazisforced upon them. Since the boycott had stigmatized the Jews as a distinct
group, the Jews should stop camouflaging themselves as Germans and affirm
their Jewishness. Anything else would merely confirm their degradation by the
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Nazis. Until 1938, Weltsch continued to preach in this vein, using his
newspaper (toward which the Nazis showed a remarkable degree of tolerance)
to attack the obsolete ideal of assimilation and to argue in favor of Zionism.
When he finally left Germany in 1938 for Warsaw en route to Palestine, it was
with a sense of disappointment and defeat, caused less by his memory of Nazi
crimes against his people than by Jewish naiveté and passivity. “It is a bitter
recognition that every Zionist brings with him from a European trip,” he wroteafter he had reached Palestine. “Jewry has not fought the Nazis in any
systematic way.”
Indeed, among those Jews who had elected to remain in Germany after Hitler
came to power, the disagreements were greater in 1938 than they had been in
1933, and the animosity between those who clung to the ideal of assimilation
and the Zionists, who rejected it, was much more bitter. To seek to bridge the
differences and to bring some unity to a people increasingly harassed by the Nazis had been the rationale for Leo Baeck’s refusal to leave Germany. As
early as April 1933, this dedicated scholar, whose life, Dippel writes,
“embodied the historical symbiosis of German and Jew,” concluded privately
that the end of German Jewry had arrived. It was not a truth that he could
proclaim, or one that he could allow to deter him from doing everything he
could to comfort and hearten those Jews who were unwilling to leave Germany
or incapable of doing so.
As head of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden, the official organization
of German Jews, as well as chief rabbi of Berlin, Baeck tried in the years that
followed to fulfill his ministry to his people, at the same time staying in contact
with the Nazi government in the hope of maintaining at least a modicum of
Jewish rights, while preparing young Jews for emigration to Palestine. As the
situation worsened, he sought to console those who had no escape by urging
them to accept their historical tradition and to take comfort from the memory of
the recurrent cycles of persecution and renewal that Jews had experienced
through the ages. He was devastated by Kristallnacht , which seemed to mark
the end of all hope, but refused to leave the country, as he might have done,
telling a friend, “I will go when I am the last Jew alive in Germany.”
In January 1943, almost exactly two hundred years after Moses Mendelssohn
had arrived in Berlin from the east and begun to preach the cause of Jewish
assimilation, the Gestapo came for Leo Baeck and shipped him off to
Theresienstadt. He was not the last Jew still alive in Germany, but during the
past twelve months the Nazis had killed 2.7 million European and GermanJews, and the genocidal tide was still at the flood. Dippel writes that late in the
war Adolf Eichmann visited Theresienstadt and, finding to his dismay that
Baeck was still alive, ordered him shot. Through some mix-up, the SS guards
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murdered a Jew named Beck instead, a mistake that was not corrected and one
that enabled the chief rabbi to survive the war.
Theodor Fontane, Tagebücher 1866–1882, 1884–1898, edited by Gottfried Erler (Berlin: Aufbau, 1995), p. 78.↩
Theodor Fontane, Briefe, IV. Band (1890–1898), edited by Otto Drude and Helmuth Nürnberger (Munich: Hanser, 1982), p.
49.↩
See my article “Under an Evil Star,” in The New York Review of Books, October 5, 1995, pp. 27–28.↩
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