In the final words of his interview, William Benson, who left his home in Leipzig in 1937 and fought during the last years of the war with the partisans in Italy, states, “They should make a big park out of all of Germany, a beautiful park—the location is perfect—and use all the Germans as fertilizer. That is what I felt and what I still feel.” In a similar vein, Ruth Mendel, who was raised in Frankfurt and survived Auschwitz concentration camp, laments near the end of her interview, “There were two Germanys, and too bad there weren’t a hundred of them, broken up into little pieces.” Such sentiments, though not held by all Holocaust survivors, reflect what many survivors continue to feel today about the Germany that uprooted their lives, murdered their families and friends, and left them with tortured memories that have lasted a lifetime.1. These expressions of anger and bitterness not only arise from experiences of hardship and loss but also stem from a deep sense of betrayal by a country and a people most German Jews once proudly claimed as their own.
Time and again in interviews we conducted, German Jewish Holocaust survivors told us about how very German and deeply integrated into German society they and their families had once felt and how difficult it had been to come to terms with becoming outcasts in the new German society after Hitler’s takeover in January 1933. Although they were not asked explicitly about this, about one-third of the survivors described the pride their fathers and uncles took in having been decorated or wounded frontline soldiers in World War I.
Henry Singer, formerly of Berlin, explains that many Jews “were fanatical patriots for Germany . . . so patriotic they would give their life for Germany.” Another third of the interviewees volunteered that they had blond hair and blue eyes or “didn’t look Jewish.” Some even referred to themselves as “very Aryan looking” (as did Ernst Levin, who was raised in Breslau) or “looking like any other Aryan” (as did Thomas Green from Mannheim). Werner Holz, who was brought up in Krefeld, took it a step further and criticized Hitler and many other top Nazis for themselves not measuring up to the Nazi racial stereotype, whereas he himself “was blond” and “had more of a German face than they did.”
Near the beginning of his interview, William Benson explains, “Some of those German Jews were more German than Jews. They had medals and were really gung-ho—real, real Germans, especially the rich ones—because Hitler was against communism.” Later in his interview, he recalls his confusion when youths from Leipzig first called him a Jewish pig: “I was only a kid. I didn’t know what I was, Jew or not Jew. . . . We were very integrated. Especially in the business where my father was, they were always very integrated. My father had German friends and they even came to our house—businesspeople, customers. My father always entertained. And that is why my father perished—because he believed in his Germans. . . . Even in 1942, when he gave himself up, he still believed in them.”
Perhaps Thomas Green summarizes best the views of the majority of the survivor population about the situation they faced and the shock and bewilderment they felt when Nazism took over the German nation they loved so much: “The German Jews before 1933 were totally assimilated. There were instances of anti-Semitism even under the kaiser. But, in general, it was a blooming time for German Jewry. The assimilation went so far as to present a danger of Jews disappearing eventually as a religion. It took Hitler to awaken the German Jews to the fact that they are really Jewish. . . . It came to us German Jews as a tremendous shock that this anti-Semitic policy was introduced. It took us such a long time to grasp this new direction. It was unthinkable. Because we were so utterly German—more German than some of the Germans themselves—we couldn’t understand that there should be a difference among people because of religion or race. . . . There is no Jewish race. You were a German citizen of Jewish belief. It took us by surprise. And because of that so many people perished.”2.
Whereas Green expressed views that represent the majority of survivors we interviewed for this book, others were far less positive in their assessment of the historical situation of German Jewry prior to the Nazi takeover. For example, Josef Stone, the son of a Jewish salesman from Frankfurt, asserts, “A Jew was always a Jew in Germany.” And Hermann Gottfried, whose father was a professor of law in Berlin, reckons, “Ninety-nine percent of Germans either were anti-Jewish or were Mitläufer [fellow travelers] and continued going along with it.” Henry Singer, whose father was a master tailor in Berlin, tempered his remarks by saying, “They were not all bad. The majority, yes, but you cannot condemn all of them because the majority was bad.” Yet he concludes, “The anti-Semitism in Germany was there before Hitler came to power. He just openly sanctioned it, and he also asked to kill.”
These examples show that while all Jewish survivors of Nazi Germany were plagued with the same anti-Semitic governmental policies, their assessments of the plight of German Jews in the Third Reich vary widely. This divergence of opinion is due in part to the markedly different personal experiences individual Jews had in contending with official anti-Semitic policy, and to the different treatment they received from their German neighbors. While some Jews experienced relatively little anti-Semitic bigotry before or after Hitler and even received considerable help and support from their fellow German townspeople at crucial moments,3. others encountered constant persecution from German neighbors, classmates, teachers, and work colleagues throughout and sometimes before the Third Reich.
This division of experience and opinion reflects a raging debate among Holocaust scholars over the prevalence and virulence of popular anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany.4. Whereas some scholars insist that German society and nearly all Germans had long been imbued with a pathological hatred of Jews that Hitler did not create but only unleashed, others maintain that the history of popular anti-Semitism in Germany was similar to that of other European countries. Even under Nazism, they argue, Germans were divided in their attitudes toward Jews, giving the Jewish population “mixed signals” that complicated the painful decisions on which their survival often depended.5.
Although there is no evidence that resolves this debate conclusively, the data presented in this chapter sheds considerable light on the questions that lie at the heart of this debate: How much and what specific forms of popular anti-Semitic discrimination and persecution did Jews experience in the Third Reich? Did the size and nature of the communities in which they lived account for any significant differences in the popular anti-Semitism they encountered? How can Jews’ relations with their German fellow citizens before 1933 best be characterized, and how did these relations change over the years of the Third Reich? And, finally, how much sympathy, help, and support did Jews receive from the non-Jewish population, and who were those who offered such sympathy, help, and support?
Before attempting to answer these questions, we need to examine the evidence we will be using, for it is unusual and in some ways unique. Most studies dealing with the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany have relied primarily on either archival documents originally generated by the perpetrators (e.g., police and judicial investigations and case files, court records, newspaper accounts, mood and morale reports compiled by the Gestapo and SD, Hitler’s and other Nazis’ speeches and pronouncements, etc.)6. or biographical accounts from the victims in the form of memoirs, diaries, and sometimes oral history interviews.7. In contrast to these efforts, our study is based exclusively on an unprecedented and systematic social-scientific survey that we administered to a large number of Jews who lived in the Third Reich and on in-depth interviews that we conducted with a large and representative sample of the survey participants. A brief discussion of the design and administration of our study and of the backgrounds of the people who participated in it follows.
We began our study in the fall of 1994 by constructing a written twelve-page questionnaire with fifty-four separate questions pertaining to survivors’ demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds and their experiences with and knowledge of anti-Semitism, terror, and mass murder in Nazi Germany. Since most survivors do not live in Germany and most understand English, the questionnaire was written in the English language.
We sent the questionnaire to two separate groups of survivors in 1995 and 1996. Aiding us in the administration of the larger survey was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which, in the early months of 1995, endorsed our study in a cover letter and mailed our written questionnaires to a thousand German Jewish survivors whose names, addresses, and identities the museum held in confidence.8. Whereas the survivors in this larger group lived in cities and towns spread across Nazi Germany, the survivors in the smaller survey conducted a year later lived in Krefeld, a modest-size community on the Rhine River not far from the Dutch border. The names and addresses of these people were provided by a Krefeld survivor and they included all ninety-four Krefeld Jews who were presumed to be alive when we mailed out the questionnaires in the early winter of 1996.
A total of 507 survivors filled out and returned the questionnaires, 463 from the larger group and 44 from the smaller one. Although the nearly identical response rate we received—slightly over 46 percent—for both surveys compares favorably with the response rates of other types of surveys, it would be even higher had we not sent the questionnaires to an unknown number of people who were either deceased or too infirm to respond. Nevertheless, we were pleased with the response and thankful that roughly 81 percent of those who responded indicated willingness to talk with us personally and provided contact information. Eventually we conducted lengthy interviews with fifty survivors and selected twenty for publication. Finally, we were pleased to receive such a favorable response from both groups of survivors since it would be useful to compare the two groups.9.
Broadly speaking, the survivors who took part in the survey are representative of the Jewish population in the Third Reich except that, by necessity, they are somewhat younger than most Jews were at the time and a slightly higher percentage of them had emigrated to other countries before World War II. Otherwise, in terms of gender, socioeconomic and political backgrounds, experiences with discrimination and terror, and places of origin, they mirror the Jewish population living in Germany during the Nazi period.
Like most Jews living in the Third Reich, most of the participants in our survey were relatively well educated, came from middle- to upper-middle-class business and professional families that typically supported liberal political parties in the Weimar Republic, and lived in either Berlin, where over one-quarter of them resided, or in another large city like Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich, Dresden, or Düsseldorf. Fewer than 10 percent lived in small towns.10. In terms of their gender and age, 56 percent are male, 44 percent female, and their median year of birth is 1922.
Similar to most Jews in Nazi Germany, approximately two-thirds of the survivors we surveyed left Germany before World War II began in September 1939.11. Emigration, however, did not necessarily guarantee the Jews’ security. Although nearly half of the survivors who left before the war made emigration difficult managed to make their way to safe havens like Great Britain (26 percent), the United States (17 percent), or Palestine (4 percent), one-third initially went to neighboring countries on the Continent, for example, the Netherlands (11 percent), Belgium (9 percent), France (7 percent), and Poland (6 percent). Many were swept up later in the Holocaust. Of those who emigrated before the war to France, Holland, Belgium, or Poland, 29 percent were deported during the Holocaust and 40 percent became concentration camp inmates in places like Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Westerbork, and Gurs. Nevertheless, the situation was considerably worse for those who remained in Germany. Over two-thirds were eventually deported to ghettos or concentration camps; of those who had not left before September 1941 when emigration became impossible, only one-quarter were not deported and many only managed to survive by going into hiding (see, for example, the interviews of Rosa Hirsch, Ilse Landau, and Lore Schwartz).
Although the economic boycotts, Nuremberg Laws, and other discriminatory measures caused many Jews to flee the country in the first several years of Hitler’s rule, most held on to hopes that the situation would improve and chose to remain in Germany. But this changed dramatically during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, when across the country Jewish synagogues were set ablaze, Jewish homes and businesses were vandalized, and between 20,000 and 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and carted off to concentration camps where they were informed that their release depended on leaving the country with their families forthwith.12. Whereas Jewish emigration before November 1938 had been a relatively small but steady stream, after Kristallnacht it became a tidal wave. In 1939 alone, 154 of the survivors in our study left Germany, representing nearly half of all survivors who left the country in the 1930s and nearly one-third of the entire survivor population.
Several of the survivor interviews in this book demonstrate in graphic detail how the anti-Jewish pogrom was perhaps the defining moment when German Jews finally realized that any hopes they entertained about Germany returning to its senses were illusory. Of the twenty survivor interviews we decided to publish, five involve Jews who left the country within a year after November 1938, but nearly all survivors who were still in Germany at the time remember the “night of broken glass” with intense pain, bitterness, and sorrow.
Certainly Kristallnacht served as a wake-up call for the Jews of Germany. Many ordinary Germans either participated in it or accepted it. Some added insult to injury by scoffing and jeering at the bewildered Jews, like Josef Stone in Frankfurt, as they were rounded up and marched through the streets on the following morning. Nevertheless, questions remain about the broad popularity of the pogrom and about the extent of popular anti-Semitism that infected the German population.
When, in 1988, Ian Kershaw published a well-received study of German popular opinion in Bavaria, he pointed out that reactions to the Kristallnacht pogrom were mixed, but he stressed evidence indicating that a great number of Germans disapproved of it: “A broad swell of disapproval, unmistakable despite the intimidation, found muted expression in the comments of reporters. Most people were too afraid to speak openly, but muttered invectives and words of disgust at the barbarity of the action and shame and horror at what had taken place could be observed in Munich as in other German cities. . . . Goebbels’s claim that the pogrom had been the ‘spontaneous answer’ of the German people to the murder of vom Rath was universally recognized as ludicrous.”13. Twelve years later, however, when he published the second volume of his acclaimed Hitler biography Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, his assessment of the popular German reaction to Kristallnacht had become more negative in tone. Although he continued to argue that the pogrom was “organized and carried out by the Party” and that “many ordinary people were appalled” by it, he now placed greater stress on popular approval: “Ordinary citizens, affected by the climate of hatred and propaganda appealing to base instincts, motivated too by sheer material envy and greed, nevertheless followed the Party’s lead in many places and joined in the destruction and looting of Jewish property. Sometimes individuals regarded as the pillars of their communities were involved. . . . Schoolchildren and adolescents were frequently ready next day to add their taunts, jibes, and insults to Jews being rounded up by the police, who were often subjected to baying, howling mobs hurling stones at them as they were taken into custody.”14.
If Kershaw’s assessment of Kristallnacht changed modestly in tone and emphasis between 1988 and 2000, it probably stems from his conscientious weighing of the mountain of new scholarship and historical evidence on the Third Reich and the Holocaust that appeared in the interim.15. Still, despite all that has been learned over the years, many questions remain that a systematic survey of the experiences and opinions of the people who lived through the Nazi period can help clarify.
How then, on balance, did the Jewish survivors we surveyed assess their relations with and treatment by the German population? What do they tell us about how virulent, widespread, and popular anti-Semitism really was among the German population? We might begin with an analysis of the survivors’ appraisal of the pre–1933 situation.
As explained at the beginning of this chapter, most of the people we interviewed stated that they and their families had felt well accepted and integrated in German society. Only a few believed that anti-Semitism was especially prevalent in Germany before the Nazi takeover in January 1933. This, if confirmed by the more systematic survey data, would help explain why so many Jews decided to remain in the country for so many years in hopes that normalcy and decency would return. It would also indicate that a “unique eliminationist antisemitism” did not prevail among the German populace and German society prior to 1933, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen boldly insists.16.
Whereas most of the questions in the survey deal with survivors’ experiences during the Nazi period, two questions relate to the pre–1933 situation—one involving relations with their non-Jewish school classmates and the other with their families’ treatment by non-Jews in their communities; the answers to these questions do not point toward a German society full of anti-Semitic prejudice before Hitler came to power. First we asked the following question: “During your school years in Germany, how would you describe the manner in which you were treated by non-Jewish pupils in your class?” A list of possible responses was provided ranging from “mostly friendly” to “mostly unfriendly.” Of those who finished their schooling before 1933, one can conclude that most Jews appear to have gotten along well with their non-Jewish classmates before Hitler came to power. Thus, of the sixty-seven survivors born before 1916 and who had therefore completed their primary and secondary schooling before the Nazi period began, 55 percent characterized the treatment they received from their non-Jewish fellow pupils as being either “friendly” or “mostly friendly,” and only 16 percent rated the treatment they received as being either “unfriendly” or “mostly unfriendly.” The rest of the survivors in this age cohort had either no relations with non-Jewish pupils or described their relations with them as a “mixture of friendly and unfriendly.” The situation worsened considerably for those who went to school during the Nazi period itself. For example, only 32 percent of those born between 1920 and 1924 rated their relations with non-Jewish pupils as either friendly or mostly friendly, and this declined to 17
Table 8.1 Family’s Treatment by Non-Jews Before and After 1933 (By Type of Community)
| All of Germany % | Berlin % | Medium-Size Cities % | Small Towns % | Catholic Cities % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before 1933 | |||||
| Friendly or mostly friendly | 69 | 59 | 71 | 68 | 76 |
| Mixture of friendly and unfriendly | 14 | 22 | 16 | 5 | 14 |
| Unfriendly or mostly unfriendly | 3 | 3 | 2 | 10 | 3 |
| Other (too young, etc.) | 14 | 16 | 11 | 17 | 8 |
| After 1933 | |||||
| Friendly/ no change | 10 | 9 | 8 | 8 | 14 |
| Mixture of friendly and unfriendly | 11 | 14 | 7 | 14 | 10 |
| Worse/ hostile | 58 | 52 | 61 | 70 | 55 |
| Other (too young, etc.) | 21 | 24 | 24 | 8 | 22 |
| N of cases | 471 | 122 | 99 | 40 | 78 |
NOTE: Medium-size cities include 33 cities with populations of between 50,000 and 200,000 inhabitants; small towns include 39 small towns with circa 10,000 or fewer inhabitants; Catholic cities include Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Mainz, Munich, and Würzburg.
Unless specified the figures in this and the other tables add up columnwise to 100% (deviations in case of roundings). Whenever the N of cases is listed at the bottom of the table, the calculation of percentage is by column. When N of cases is listed at the right hand of the table (e.g. in Table9.1), the calculation is by row.
Table 8.2 Family’s Treatment by Non-Jews Before and After 1933 (By Gender, Year of Birth, Year of Leaving Germany)
| Gender | Year of Birth | Year of Leaving Germany | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male % | Female % | 1895– 1919 % | 1920– 1925 % | 1926– 1932 % | Before 1938 % | 1938– 1939 % | After 1939 % | |
| Before 1933 | ||||||||
| Friendly/ mostly friendly | 68 | 71 | 74 | 71 | 63 | 71 | 71 | 66 |
| Mixture of friendly and unfriendly | 16 | 12 | 16 | 16 | 10 | 15 | 15 | 11 |
| Unfriendly/ mostly unfriendly | 3 | 3 | 6 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 5 |
| Other | 13 | 14 | 4 | 11 | 24 | 10 | 13 | 18 |
| After 1933 | ||||||||
| Friendly/ no change | 10 | 10 | 15 | 10 | 5 | 14 | 9 | 6 |
| Mixture of friendly and unfriendly | 9 | 13 | 8 | 11 | 12 | 8 | 7 | 23 |
| Worse/ hostile | 61 | 53 | 59 | 61 | 49 | 48 | 67 | 39 |
| Other | 20 | 24 | 17 | 18 | 35 | 29 | 18 | 32 |
| N of cases | 262 | 194 | 95 | 251 | 112 | 96 | 227 | 86 |
percent among those born after 1924. The picture these figures paint of a mostly positive relationship between Jews and non-Jews that only soured after Hitler came to power is confirmed by answers to questions about how the survivors’ families were treated by non-Jewish citizens in their communities both before and after 1933.
The two tables (shown on pp. 270 and 271) provide strong evidence that it was not only Jewish schoolchildren who experienced positive relations with non-Jews in the pre-Hitler years. These tables summarize the responses that different types of survivors gave to questions we asked about their families’ treatment by non-Jews. As the figures at the top of the first table indicate, more than two-thirds of all survivors say that their families had either friendly or mostly friendly relations with their non-Jewish fellow citizens before 1933; only 3 percent had unfriendly or mostly unfriendly relations. Moreover, as the evidence in the two tables shows, this overwhelmingly positive assessment was shared by Jews who lived in communities of different sizes and religious backgrounds, by both male and female Jews, by younger and older Jews, by Jews who left Germany in the 1930s, and by Jews who lived in Germany throughout the entire Nazi period. Although some might think that these Jews were viewing their families’ past lives in Weimar Germany through rose-colored lenses, the consistency of this pattern of responses among different subgroups of the survey population is striking.
The only significant percentage (10 percent) of survivors to say that their families were treated in an unfriendly or mostly unfriendly manner by non-Jews before 1933 had lived in small German towns, but survivors from small towns represent only a small minority of the survivors in general. Even though this percentage is higher than it is for Jews who lived in other types of communities, the percentage of small-town Jews who rate their families’ treatment as primarily positive is somewhat higher than it is for Jews who lived in Berlin, and about equal to that of Jews in general before 1933.
If, as the data show, most Jews cherish positive memories about their relations with Germans before Hitler assumed power, few hold romantic thoughts about what they experienced in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Although many Jews received help and support at critical moments from German friends and acquaintances during the Nazi years (as will be discussed more fully later in this chapter), it did not prevent the lives of all Jews in Germany from becoming more and more of a nightmare as time went on. But was this nightmare primarily brought on by the ever intensifying anti-Semitic policies of the National Socialist government and inflicted on the Jews mostly by the Gestapo, police, and other Nazi officials? Or were German civilians crucial agents in adding to the misery of their Jewish neighbors, classmates, and colleagues? In the opinion of the Jews who lived in Germany during the Nazi years, how popular and widespread was anti-Semitism among the German population, what forms did it take, and how quickly did it take hold?
The short answer to these questions is that in the experience of most Jews, popular anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany was powerful and strengthened with continuing Nazi anti-Jewish policy and legislation. But this general sentiment was not shared by all Jews, and some had far better experiences than others with the non-Jewish population. Even Jews from the same city often had quite different views and experiences. Thus, while Helmut Grunewald of Cologne says that, with the exception of his own personal friends, “otherwise, anti-Semitism was everywhere,” Karl Meyer states that “in Cologne, they never had this anti-Semitism.” Part of the difference between their viewpoints probably stems from the fact that Meyer managed to emigrate to safety in Shanghai in early November 1938 and was spared the tragic experiences of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, while Grunewald remained in Germany until early 1943, when he was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp.
The length of time Jews remained in Germany is, however, not the only determinant of the severity of the anti-Semitism they experienced. Indeed, some Jews who left Germany in the 1930s view the popular anti-Semitism they encountered as more intense than Jews who remained in Germany during the war years. Recall the views of Hermann Gottfried, who left Berlin for Great Britain in April 1939 on a children’s transport, and compare them with those of Ilse Landau, who originally came from the small city of Düren outside of Cologne and remained in Germany during the war and went into hiding with her husband in Berlin in January 1943. While Gottfried bitterly remarked in his interview that “99 percent of the German population were either anti-Jewish or were Mitläufer,” Landau began her interview by saying, “We were very much loved. We didn’t have any enemies in Düren at all.” She later followed this up with similarly positive comments about her experiences with Germans during the war years. About her time working as a forced laborer at Siemens in Berlin, for example, she said, “The foremen and foreladies were German people. They were marvelous to me.”
The varied opinions of the four people above reflect the broad spread of opinion among survivors in general. But the fact that Grunewald and Gottfried better represent the majority opinion than Meyer and Landau is made clear in the figures presented in the bottom half of Tables 8.1 and 8.2. After we asked the survivors how their families were treated by non-Jewish citizens before 1933, we then asked them the following question: “After the Nazis came to power in 1933, was there a change in the treatment your family received by most non-Jewish citizens in your town? How would you describe this change?” Table8.1 provides figures for how survivors from different types of German communities answered this question, and Table8.2 does this for survivors of different individual backgrounds.
The figures show that after Hitler took power in 1933, the once positive relations between Jews and non-Jews deteriorated. Whereas over two-thirds of the survivors’ families before 1933 had friendly relations with non-Jews in their communities, after 1933 nearly two-thirds had relations that the survivors described as clearly worse or even hostile; only about one in ten of the survivors’ families continued to experience good relations with non-Jews in their communities. Not only did relations between Jews and non-Jews become worse in general after 1933, they declined dramatically in all types of communities. Although the decline was somewhat more precipitous in small towns and medium-size cities than in large, Catholic-dominated cities, very few Jewish families in any German communities after 1933 maintained friendly associations with non-Jews.
Jews from all types of communities say that their families’relations with non- Jews deteriorated after 1933, and this was also true of Jews of all types of individual backgrounds, with a few modest exceptions. Thus, as the figures in Table8.2 show, Jewish men and Jewish women held similar views on this issue, as did Jews of different ages. Still, it is not easy to explain why the youngest survivors were the least likely to say that their families continued to enjoy positive relations with non-Jews after 1933. Perhaps they had not lived in Germany long enough to develop the kind of lasting friendships that many older survivors had with non-Jews before Hitler came to power. But this is only conjecture. However, it makes intuitive sense that the assessment of survivors who left Germany in the first years of the Third Reich was somewhat more positive than among those who left later or did not leave the country at all. It also strongly suggests that the relations between Jews and non-Jews not only became worse almost immediately after 1933, but they continued to worsen over time. The fact that only 6 percent of the survivors who remained in Germany after 1939 continued to be treated in a friendly manner by non-Jews in their communities after 1933 clearly points to a sour relationship that developed over the years between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors and former friends and colleagues in the Third Reich.
Although the large majority of survivors say the treatment they and their families received from non-Jews became ever worse after 1933, this does not necessarily imply that they believed all Germans around them were ardent Nazi supporters. In fact, in a subsequent question in which we asked the survivors to rate how their German neighbors “were disposed toward National Socialism after 1933,” only one-third answered that “most were for it,” and roughly another one-third described the support for National Socialism among their neighbors as “mixed.”
But, if most survivors did not think their German neighbors were particularly attracted to National Socialism, they also did not think that many of them opposed Nazism either. As Table8.3 shows, only 3 percent of the survivors say that most of their German neighbors were against National Socialism, and survivors from different types of communities and different types of personal backgrounds were again largely unified in this viewpoint.
Table 8.3 Disposition of Non-Jewish Neighbors Toward National Socialism (By Type of Community)
| All of Germany % | Berlin % | Medium-Sized Citites % | Small Towns % | Catholic Cities % | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Most for | 33 | 37 | 30 | 33 | 29 | ||||||||
| Some for, some against | 35 | 31 | 36 | 53 | 37 | ||||||||
| Most against | 3 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 4 | ||||||||
| Donߣt know | 29 | 29 | 32 | 14 | 30 | ||||||||
| N of cases | 471 | 122 | 96 | 38 | 99 | ||||||||
| (By Gender, Year of Birth, Year of Leaving Germany) | |||||||||||||
| Gender | Year of Birth | Year of Leaving Germany | |||||||||||
| Male % | Female % | 1895– 1919 % | 1920– 1925 % | 1926– 1932 % | Before 1938 % | 1938– 1939 % | After 1939 % | ||||||
| Most for | 39 | 26 | 32 | 34 | 34 | 29 | 32 | 39 | |||||
| Some for, some against | 34 | 36 | 33 | 40 | 22 | 23 | 37 | 42 | |||||
| Most against | 3 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 7 | 2 | 3 | |||||
| Donߣt know | 24 | 35 | 30 | 23 | 42 | 42 | 29 | 17 | |||||
| N of cases | 240 | 178 | 87 | 230 | 103 | 84 | 211 | 78 | |||||
There is, however, one significant caveat in regard to how the survivors assess the extent of National Socialist support among their German neighbors, and this points once again toward the conclusion that Jews believe that anti-Semitism became increasingly popular and widespread among the German population over time. Survivors who had lived longer in Nazi Germany were considerably more likely to view National Socialism as having gained a large degree of support among their German neighbors than survivors who had only experienced a few years of Nazi rule; in fact, among survivors who were still in the country after 1939, over 80 percent believe that their German neighbors were either fully in support of the Nazi movement (39 percent) or at least mixed in their support (42 percent), and this compares with a total of only 52 percent among those who left the country before 1938. Thus, since anti-Semitism was a major component of the Nazi movement, and since the longer Jews lived in Germany the more Nazi support they detected among their German neighbors, the conclusion follows that most Jews who were there to witness and experience it believe that anti-Semitism became ever more palatable and popular among their German neighbors over the years.
The evidence pointing toward a rapid deterioration in Jews’ relations with non-Jews and toward a growing support for the National Socialist movement among the Jews’ German neighbors provides largely subjective indications of growing anti-Semitic popular sentiment in the Third Reich. To provide more objective information about the explicit types of anti-Semitism that Jews suffered and to help assess the involvement of the German civilian population in anti-Semitic behavior, we posed the following question near the middle of the questionnaire: “What kind of harassment or discrimination did you personally experience during the Third Reich?” We then provided a list of twelve types of anti-Semitic discrimination and harassment and asked the survivors to indicate which they had personally experienced. Among these were several that applied to the German civilian population (verbal taunts and threats; physical beatings; spying by neighbors, coworkers, and fellow pupils; home vandalized; and family’s business vandalized) and several others that applied to Nazi officials (verbal taunts and threats, physical beatings, spying by the police, being sent to jail, being sent to a concentration camp). Tables 8.4 and 8.5 summarize the responses.
Even though the specific types of discrimination and harassment on our list constitute only some of the myriad types of persecution Jews experienced in Nazi Germany, it was the unusual Jew who did not suffer any persecution. Only 11 percent of the survivors experienced “none of the above,” but more than half experienced three or more types of persecution. More often than not these involved discriminatory acts committed by German civilians. Nazi leaders and officials may have set the Third Reich’s campaign against the Jews in motion,
Table 8.4 Types of Persecution Experienced (Multiple Responses by Type of Community)
| All of Germany % | Berlin % | Medium-Size Cities % | Small Towns % | Catholic Citites % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| From civilians | |||||
| Verbal taunts or threats | 63 | 63 | 65 | 70 | 44 |
| Physical beatings | 22 | 22 | 24 | 22 | 18 |
| Spied on by neighbors | 19 | 20 | 26 | 22 | 16 |
| Spied on by coworkers | 5 | 3 | 5 | 3 | 7 |
| Spied on by fellow pupils | 15 | 10 | 18 | 22 | 10 |
| Home vandalized | 25 | 15 | 41 | 46 | 34 |
| Familyߣs business vandalized | 24 | 26 | 36 | 30 | 23 |
| From Nazi officials | |||||
| Verbal taunts or threats | 27 | 19 | 24 | 43 | 23 |
| Physical beatings | 10 | 8 | 11 | 8 | 16 |
| Spied upon by police | 8 | 6 | 13 | 8 | 10 |
| Put in jail | 11 | 10 | 15 | 11 | 15 |
| Put in concentration camp | 27 | 26 | 33 | 35 | 23 |
| None of the above | 11 | 15 | 8 | 0 | 18 |
| N of cases | 406 | 106 | 85 | 37 | 61 |
Table 8.5 Types of Persecution Experienced (Multiple Responses by Gender, Year of Birth, Year of Leaving Germany)
| Gender | Year of Birth | Year of Leaving Germany | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male % | Female % | 1895– 1919 % | 1920– 1925 % | 1926– 1932 % | Before 1938 % | 1938– 1939 % | After 1939 % | |
| From civilians | ||||||||
| Verbal taunts or threats | 68 | 56 | 43 | 67 | 69 | 49 | 67 | 69 |
| Physical beatings | 30 | 11 | 21 | 19 | 27 | 20 | 21 | 19 |
| Spied on by neighbors | 18 | 21 | 8 | 21 | 23 | 7 | 19 | 31 |
| Spied on by coworkers | 4 | 5 | 11 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 4 | 11 |
| Spied on by fellow pupils | 17 | 12 | 13 | 17 | 14 | 11 | 15 | 16 |
| Home vandalized | 24 | 26 | 24 | 25 | 25 | 14 | 25 | 30 |
| Family’s business vandalized | 26 | 23 | 19 | 30 | 17 | 14 | 25 | 30 |
| From Nazi officials | ||||||||
| Verbal taunts or threats | 30 | 22 | 25 | 28 | 25 | 16 | 27 | 40 |
| Physical beatings | 13 | 6 | 17 | 8 | 11 | 11 | 4 | 19 |
| Spied on by police | 8 | 9 | 6 | 7 | 13 | 4 | 5 | 21 |
| Put in jail | 12 | 9 | 17 | 12 | 5 | 10 | 7 | 19 |
| Put in concentration camp | 27 | 28 | 29 | 25 | 31 | 19 | 12 | 66 |
| None of the above | 10 | 12 | 17 | 9 | 11 | 22 | 12 | 1 |
| N of cases | 236 | 169 | 72 | 223 | 111 | 74 | 203 | 83 |
but for many Jews the faces of persecution they most commonly saw were not those of people dressed in Nazi uniforms. They were those of their neighbors, classmates, teachers, coworkers, and townspeople wearing civilian clothing. The interviews provide numerous examples of this, Jews being isolated by their teachers in the front or back rows of classrooms, being called names like “dirty Jew” and “Jewish pig” by neighboring children and adults, being jeered by crowds of onlookers as they were marched or carted off to deportation trains, having their homes and shops destroyed by greedy civilians as well as Nazi storm troopers during the Kristallnacht pogrom, and being accosted and beaten up in the streets by the local population.
Table8.4 shows that nearly two-thirds of survivors endured “verbal taunts or threats from German civilians” during the Nazi years, which was more than twice as common as “verbal taunts and threats from Nazi officials.” While verbal abuse might be a relatively mild form of anti-Semitic behavior in comparison with other forms of anti-Semitic persecution, the ratio of civilian to official acts of persecution was more or less the same for more severe forms of discrimination like spying and physical beatings. The issue of spying will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter on state-sponsored terror and mass murder, but for present purposes it is significant to observe that more than twice as many survivors believe they were spied on by civilian neighbors (19 percent) than by Nazi police authorities (8 percent), and neighbors were only some of the civilians who spied on them. Even more disturbing, 22 percent of the survivors (30 percent of males and 11 percent of females) suffered physical beatings from German civilians, and this was nearly three times the percentage of those who suffered beatings from Nazi policemen or other officials (8 percent of the total, 13 percent of males, 6 percent of females) even though 11 percent of the survivors spent periods of time in Nazi jails and 27 percent in concentration camps.
Approximately one-quarter of the survivors’ homes and businesses were vandalized in anti-Semitic acts that German civilians commonly participated in, suggesting that official Nazi anti-Semitic policies found a strong popular base among the German citizenry. Although anti-Semitism was unquestionably widespread, it was more prevalent in some kinds of communities than others and Jews of some backgrounds fared somewhat better than Jews of other backgrounds. As the figures in Table8.4 show, Jews who lived in communities with a majority Catholic population reported lower percentages of several types of civilian-based discrimination (in particular verbal taunts and threats) than Jews who lived elsewhere. Also Jews who lived in large cities received better treatment in several ways than Jews who lived in small communities, and this is probably one of the main reasons why many Jews moved from small cities and towns to larger cities like Berlin during the Third Reich. Small-town Jews, as the evidence shows, were more often verbally insulted or threatened by both German civilians and Nazi officials, more of their homes were vandalized, and they appear to have been spied on more often by their neighbors and schoolmates than Jews in big cities like Berlin, or in Germany in general. Perhaps the most important indicator that small-town Jews received worse treatment than Jews in larger communities is that every single survivor from a small German town experienced at least one type of discrimination and harassment listed in Tables 8.4 and 8.5. But many survivors from larger communities answered that they had not experienced any of the types of persecution listed (15 percent of survivors from Berlin, 8 percent from medium-size cities, and 11 percent from all types of communities).
Several of the survivor interviews provide additional evidence that small towns were especially inhospitable for Jews. For example, Rebecca Weisner of Berlin describes being sent in 1938 at the age of twelve to stay with her aunt in Stralsund, a small city on the Baltic Sea, where, she says, about twenty Jewish families lived. When she got off the train, she says, “All [the Jews] were beaten up. They were already beaten up on the streets by the Germans. I don’t know how they knew they were Jewish, but being that it wasn’t such a big place, maybe they knew that. They didn’t arrest them, but they were beaten up. This happened in every small town in Germany.”
If the size and religious makeup of German communities were significant factors in determining the relative prevalence of anti-Semitic activity, what can be said about the gender and age backgrounds of the Jews, and to what extent did popular anti-Semitism gain intensity over time? The evidence provided in Table8.5 helps answer these questions.
As the percentages reported in the first five columns of the table show, the gender and age backgrounds of the Jewish survivors accounted for modest differences among them in the relative amount of anti-Semitism they experienced, but Jews from both genders and all age-groups suffered heavily from anti-Semitic activity perpetrated against them by both German civilians and Nazi officials. For example, even though more Jewish men than Jewish women suffered verbal and physical abuse from both German civilians and Nazi authorities, a strong majority of both Jewish men and women suffered verbal abuse of some kind and a considerable minority of both Jewish men and women endured physical beatings. Although younger Jews were more likely to experience civilian taunts and threats and physical beatings, they were less likely to be beaten by police authorities, spied on by coworkers, or put in jail. Finally, whether they were male or female or older or younger Jews, there was essentially no difference among them in their likelihood of having their homes or family businesses vandalized or being sent to concentration camps.
Far more significant than considerations of gender and age in determining the amount of anti-Semitism that Jewish survivors experienced, however, was the length of time that the survivors remained in Germany. The evidence presented in the last three columns of Table8.5 provides yet another indication that popular anti-Semitism grew more intense and virulent over the years of Nazi Germany. By almost every measure of discrimination and harassment listed on the table, the longer Jews remained in the country, the more overt anti-Semitic persecution they experienced. Although fewer than half of the survivors who left Germany before 1938 endured verbal taunts or threats from German civilians, over two-thirds of those who left after this time experienced such abuse; while only 7 percent of those who left the country in the early years of National Socialism believe they were spied on by their German neighbors, 4 percent by the police, and none by coworkers, these percentages rise to 31 percent, 21 percent, and 11 percent respectively among those who remained in Germany after 1939. Similar to these figures are the increased percentages of those who suffered verbal abuse from police authorities among those who left the country after 1939, and the increased percentages of those whose families’ homes and businesses were vandalized. A kind of bottom line is provided in the final cell of the last row of the table, which shows that nearly every Jew who remained in Germany after 1939 suffered at least one kind of anti-Semitic persecution listed on the table.
The only survivor who was in Germany after 1939 who experienced none of the forms of persecution listed was a man born in Breslau in 1912. With only an elementary school education, he rose to become a midlevel manager by the early 1930s. During the Nazi years he married and moved to Berlin, where he remained until early 1945, when he was deported to Theresienstadt. Although some might consider Theresienstadt a kind of concentration camp, he apparently did not. Hence he probably answered “none of the above” because he believed that none of the forms of persecution applied to him. From his answers to other questions on the survey, we find he believed that most of his neighbors were against National Socialism and that he enjoyed friendly relations with them both before and after 1933, relations that he described as “friendly support.” Moreover, during the Third Reich he went into hiding in Berlin and received help and support from several people, most importantly from a forty-year-old policeman whom he considered a “friend.”
This man may have been unusual; nevertheless he was only one of many survivors who received help and support from German civilians during the Third Reich. Indeed, if many German civilians participated in anti-Semitic acts that worsened the plight of the Jews, a considerable minority of other German civilians did what they could to help Jews endure the hardships they faced. In the interviews we conducted, we encountered several examples of this. Some German civilians supported Jews in minor ways, such as an older Quaker man who showed his sympathy for the Jews’ plight by putting a yellow handkerchief in his coat pocket and attending Jewish services on Friday evenings in Nuremberg during the middle of the war years. As Herbert Klein explains at the end of his interview, “This was somebody who helped. He didn’t help you by trying to hide you or something like that. He just wanted to show his cooperation, his sympathy.” Others helped Jews in major ways, sometimes involving huge personal risks, by tipping them off about impending police raids or providing them with food, shelter, and money, or helping them hide and avoid being sent to a concentration camp. Whatever kind of help or support was offered, it was greatly appreciated. Often it made the difference between survival and death.
Sandwiched between questions on the survey dealing with how their German neighbors had been disposed toward National Socialism and what types of discrimination the survivors personally experienced, we asked the following question: “Did you ever receive significant help or support from non-Jewish Germans in your town or city during the Third Reich?” If the answer was yes, the survivors were asked to indicate the year and month this occurred, the nature of the help or support they received, the gender, age, and occupation of the helper, and the type of relationship they had with the helper.
Most survivors answered these questions (432 out of 507). Of those who answered, 166, or 38 percent, answered in the affirmative that they had received significant help or support from non-Jewish Germans. Typically the help or support had not come during the earlier years of the Third Reich, as fewer than one-third of those who had received it indicated that it took place before November 1938. Thus most of the “significant help or support” that the respondents received came in the later years of Nazi Germany, when, arguably, Jews needed it most to survive. In fact, nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of the survivors who were still in Germany after 1941 answered that they received significant help or support from German civilians.
Typically the help or support the survivors received was truly meaningful: 41 percent of the instances of help or support involved helping them to escape or go into hiding, 29 percent involved providing them with food, and 10 percent involved warnings about roundups, deportations, or other police actions. The remaining instances were more minor in nature, but they were nonetheless significant gestures, for example, safeguarding the survivors’ possessions, providing them with financial support, helping them find work, vouching for them during police and Gestapo investigations, and sometimes merely displaying friendship or compassion toward them.
Just as help came in many forms, so too did the helpers themselves. When the answers the survivors gave concerning the helpers’ gender, age, and occupation are tabulated, no clear prototype emerges. Nevertheless, most helpers appear to have acted alone (73 percent of the cases of help or support involved either an individual man or woman). Individual male helpers outnumbered individual female helpers, by a modest margin. Most helpers were middle-aged and few were very young or very old (only 10 percent were below thirty, 7 percent above fifty-five; the median age was forty). And, finally, the helpers came from all types of occupational backgrounds. Over sixty different occupations were listed for the 146 helpers whom the respondents identified with a specific occupation. Like the Jews they helped, few helpers (26, or 18 percent) came from the ranks of the working classes, whether skilled or unskilled, and only three were farmers. Most held either middle- or upper-middle-class managerial or professional positions, and many were in government service. While eleven were teachers or professors, only two were clergymen (one a Catholic priest and the other a Catholic monk). Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the most frequently named profession of all was policeman, of which there were sixteen.
Helpers, therefore, typically came from the same kinds of social and economic backgrounds as the Jews they helped. This is probably to be expected, since meaningful contacts and bonds are more likely to develop among individuals from similar backgrounds. Furthermore, most of these contacts seem to have been of long duration. When asked about their relationship to their helpers, the most frequent answer given was friend (35 percent), and the next most frequent answers were neighbor (24 percent) and coworker or colleague (10 percent). Like the helpers who were friends, neighbors, coworkers, or colleagues, many of the rest were people the survivors knew well, such as relatives (3 percent), teachers (3 percent), and former fellow soldiers (1 percent). Only 20 percent of the helpers were described as strangers or acquaintances, or others with whom the survivors had an “indirect relationship.”
That a large percentage of Jewish survivors received significant help and support from non-Jewish German civilians during the Third Reich cannot compensate for the fact that a greater percentage of Jews received none. If roughly one-third of the survivors were helped by Germans, about two-thirds could not find a single German willing to help them, and one can only wonder about the Jews who did not survive. The help and support that many Jews received cannot obscure the fact that most Jews suffered systematic and pervasive anti-Semitic treatment from both the German government and its officials and from great numbers of German civilians. It grew worse over time, and most Jews were forced to leave Germany before the Holocaust or perished in it. Nevertheless, the help and support that many German civilians provided should not be overlooked. Had it not been offered, even more Jews would have died in the Holocaust. Sadly, however, many Jews, with fond memories of their once positive relationships with their non-Jewish neighbors and with a strong identification with the German nation and its history and culture, probably perceived a mixed message about what their fate would be if they remained in Germany, and thus the help and support they received sometimes served, if unintentionally, to make this mixed message more perilous.
The evidence, then, points to a mixed conclusion about the extent and degree of popular anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Certainly it does appear to have been widespread and also to have gained acceptance and support over time. While some Catholic communities may have fostered it less and some small towns and cities may have fostered it more, all German communities provided ever more fertile soil for anti-Semitic behavior as the years progressed. In all German communities, the relations between Jews and non-Jews deteriorated rapidly after Hitler came to power and grew ever worse in the Nazi years. In all German communities Jews became ever more vulnerable targets of popular persecution and discrimination. By the war years, there was nary a Jew living in Germany who had not suffered at least one form of discriminatory treatment perpetrated by German civilians, ranging from verbal and physical abuse to spying and the destruction of their property. But even if only the rare Jew did not experience anti-Semitic treatment from German civilians, this does not mean that all Germans had become raving anti-Semites. Since the Jewish population never constituted more than a tiny fraction of the German population, only a minority of Germans probably took a direct part in overt anti-Semitic activity. Furthermore, even if most survivors say that their once cordial relations with their German neighbors turned sour over time, most do not believe this was because their German neighbors had all become ardent Nazi supporters.
Despite some bright spots, the picture of popular anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany painted by the survivor evidence is an unattractive one. Even if some Germans continued to remain friendly toward Jews, and even if some Germans offered them aid and assistance, and even if Germans were mixed in their support for National Socialism, nearly all Germans went along—many actively, most at least passively—with the anti-Semitic policies and measures fostered by their government and offered no meaningful protest against them. As Ian Kershaw once explained, “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.”17.