Nazi crimes against humanity ultimately claimed the lives of millions of people from many national, social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds all across Europe, but the Jews were the foremost targets. From the beginning of the Third Reich in January 1933 to its end in May 1945, Hitler and his Nazi regime plied a policy of terror and discrimination that led to the economic and social death of German Jewry in the peacetime years of the 1930s and then culminated in the attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Nazi-controlled Europe during World War II. This chapter examines the experiences German Jews had with the Nazi terror apparatus, and the following chapter details what they knew and experienced during the Holocaust.
In the questionnaires and face-to-face interviews we conducted with both Jews and non-Jews who lived in Germany during the Nazi years, our questions concentrated on three major areas: everyday life under National Socialism, the nature and application of terror at the local level, and the extent of knowledge that people had about the mass murder of the Jewish population while it was taking place. With non-Jews, the first set of questions we asked about everyday life focused on whether they supported Hitler and National Socialism and why. With Jews, on the other hand, it would have made no sense to ask such questions, since Hitler and National Socialism were obviously abhorrent to them. Therefore, the questions we asked of Jews about their everyday lives in Nazi Germany concentrated more on how they got along with and were treated by the non-Jewish population in their communities and on their loss of identity as former patriotic Germans in a society that no longer considered them worthy of citizenship and eventually of life itself.
If the questions we asked of Jews and non-Jews were different in regard to their everyday lives under National Socialism, this was not true of the other two major areas of interest in our surveys and interviews: terror and mass murder. Thus the questions we asked of Jews and non-Jews about their experiences with and understanding of the Nazi program of terror and mass murder were largely identical, which permits an important comparison of the answers these two groups gave that will be found in the conclusion of this book.
Among the most significant types of questions we asked about terror and mass murder are the following: How widespread was the climate of fear in Nazi Germany? Were there great numbers of spies and civilian denouncers providing the Gestapo and other Nazi authorities with damning information about the activities of the citizenry? How often did common citizens break the Nazi laws? How often did these illegal activities rise to the level of true resistance activity? What ultimately happened to the people who had cases started against them? Were the Nazis successful in keeping their program of mass murder a secret from the Jewish and non-Jewish populations? How much information did the civilian population have about the Nazi mass murder policies, and how and when did they get this information?
Although recent research has shown that the Gestapo and other official organs of terror in Nazi Germany had more limited manpower and resources than once believed, the Nazi terror apparatus certainly had the means to inspire fear and dread in the hearts and minds of Jews and other selected targets.1.Considering the fact that Jews in Nazi Germany were plagued by an ever growing number of laws, ordinances, and decrees that proscribed their activities more than any other group in the German population, it is remarkable that the fear of arrest alone did not eventually overwhelm nearly all Jews to the point that they could no longer function as human beings.2. By the middle of the war years, the fear of the Gestapo “had become a general Jewish psychosis,” according to Victor Klemperer’s diary entry for August 29, 1942. Klemperer was a Jewish professor of romance languages from Dresden.3. Nevertheless, as Marion Kaplan elegantly shows in a recent book and as the interview narratives in this book attest to, most Jews continued to carry out their lives throughout the Nazi period with dignity and often with courage as well.4.
Despite the decorous manner in which most German Jews conducted themselves, fear was an ever present feature of life for them in the Third Reich. Over time the amount of fear that most Jews perceived grew in a nearly linear fashion. Clear evidence of this is presented in the table on page 288, which summarizes the answers we received to the following question we asked in the Jewish Holocaust survivor questionnaire: “In the period before you had to leave Germany, or in the city in which you lived in Germany, did you personally have fear of being arrested by the Gestapo, or did you have no fear of this happening to you?”
The percentages found in the table relate to a number of separate analyses we made to determine the level of fear of arrest that different types of survivors had during the Third Reich. Thus, although a strong majority of all survivors had a great deal of fear, some survivors experienced the fear of arrest more powerfully and more constantly than others, and there were even some survivors who said that they did not personally fear arrest at all. Among the total survivor population who took the survey, over three quarters indicated that they had feared arrest, and usually the fear that they had held was a constant fear (47 percent) as opposed to an occasional fear (30 percent). The percentages for both male and female survivors are strikingly similar to these figures. Although Jewish women might have been expected to have a lower fear of arrest than Jewish men because in most societies of the past and the present women have far lower arrest rates than men, this did not turn out to be the case; 76 percent of the women and 77 percent of the men reported fearing arrest by the Gestapo, and, once again, the fear that plagued their lives was something they typically experienced more on a constant than on an occasional basis.
While gender made essentially no difference in survivors’ level of fear, factors such as the age the survivors reached while they were still living in Germany, the size and predominant religious background of the communities in which they lived, and especially their length of residence in Nazi Germany did account for some significant differences among them. Since the median birth year of the survivors was 1922 and over three-quarters of them had emigrated before the outbreak of World War II (typically in either 1938 or 1939, when over 50 percent left the country), this means that the majority of the survivors were in their early to middle teenage years when they lived in the Third Reich. But, even among these relatively young people, the fear of being arrested by the Gestapo was something that most felt, though somewhat less constantly than survivors who were eighteen or older and thus bore full criminal liability.
Most survivors in both groups not only feared their own arrest but also experienced a great deal of fear that members of their immediate family would be arrested even if they were not. Thus in addition to the question we asked the survivors about their own level of fear, we also asked them to indicate if they feared that someone in their family would be arrested. When these percentages were tabulated, the results for the two groups were almost identical. Among the survivors who were under eighteen when they lived in Germany, 88 percent feared that the Gestapo would take members of their family under arrest, and 91 percent of those in the eighteen and older group of survivors feared it.
Table 9.1 Fear of Arrest among Jewish Survivors (By Gender, Age of Leaving Germany, Religion and Size of Community, and Year of Leaving Germany)
| Constant Fear (%) | Occasional Fear (%) | No Fear (%) | N of cases | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All survivors | 47 | 30 | 23 | 461 |
| Gender | ||||
| Men | 44 | 33 | 23 | 229 |
| Women | 45 | 31 | 24 | 167 |
| Age | ||||
| Eighteen or older when left Germany | 53 | 31 | 16 | 161 |
| Seventeen or younger when left Germany | 40 | 33 | 28 | 243 |
| Kind of City | ||||
| Catholic cities | 34 | 42 | 24 | 71 |
| Large cities | 44 | 33 | 23 | 178 |
| Medium-size cities | 43 | 30 | 27 | 86 |
| Small towns | 52 | 35 | 13 | 31 |
| Left Germany | ||||
| Before 1939 | 33 | 35 | 32 | 175 |
| Between 1939 and 1941 | 51 | 32 | 17 | 180 |
| Still in Germany after 1941 | 71 | 18 | 11 | 55 |
Note: Large cities include Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Munich; medium-size cities include 33 cities with populations of between circa 50,000 and 200,000 inhabitants; small towns include 39 small towns with 10,000 or fewer inhabitants; Catholic cities include Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Mainz, Munich, and Würzburg.
Fear of arrest was a regular feature of Jews’ lives, whether they lived in communities inhabited by majority Catholic or Protestant populations and whether they lived in large cities with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants or in cities and towns with smaller populations. Still, the religious makeup and size of the communities in which the survivors lived did account for some modest differences in how much and how frequently they feared arrest. While there was very little difference in the overall level of fear between survivors from predominantly Catholic communities in Germany and survivors generally (76 percent versus 77 percent), survivors from Catholic communities appear to have feared arrest less constantly than was typical of the overall survivor population (34 percent versus 47 percent). This may be attributable in part to the somewhat more positive climate of relationships between Jews and Gentiles in Catholic communities that was noted in the previous chapter. But it also stems from the very high percentage of former Krefeld residents among the survivors from Catholic communities.5. If the Krefeld survivors are taken out of the mix, the overall level of fear among those from Catholic communities becomes slightly higher than that of the general survivor population (80 percent versus 77 percent).
The size of the communities in which the survivors lived in Nazi Germany accounted for a more significant difference in their fears. Most survivors lived in relatively large urban areas, and the level of fear among those who lived in either large or medium-size cities was almost identical to that of the entire survivor population. But survivors who had resided in small towns indicated on the survey that they had experienced considerably higher levels of fear. The percentage of survivors who feared arrest on a constant basis was nearly 20 percent higher among those from small towns than those from larger communities; in addition, the percentage of survivors from small towns who feared arrest not at all was only about half that of survivors from medium-size and large cities.
Why did Jews from smaller towns have higher levels of fear? One reason may be the heightened level of popular anti-Semitism there, as mentioned in the previous chapter. Perhaps Jews from small villages and towns worried that they stuck out more than Jews from more anonymous urban settings did. Since their comings and goings and their habits and opinions were more noticeable to their predominantly non-Jewish neighbors and other townsfolk, they may have been easier targets for civilian denunciations that could get them in trouble with the Nazi authorities. But, it should also be mentioned, there was not a greater police presence in their communities. Previous research has demonstrated that most small towns in Germany had no Gestapo officers present and consequently the political police work in these communities had to be performed by modestly staffed regular police forces.6. Thus the greater fear of arrest that small-town Jews experienced must have resulted more from their heightened fear of being reported to the authorities by their anti-Semitic neighbors, classmates, and work colleagues than from their fear of being persecuted by the interventionist efforts of the Nazi police.
Whatever differences among the survivors are attributable to their ages and communities, they pale in comparison with the most significant determinant of the survivors’ level of fear—the length of time they lived in Nazi Germany. In the peacetime years of Hitler’s reign in the 1930s, the survivors’ fear of arrest was more typically intermittent than constant. But after the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, when thousands of Jewish men in communities across Germany were carted off to concentration camps for the first time, the fear of arrest among Jews grew dramatically. As the figures in the table demonstrate, only one-third of the survivors who left Germany before 1939 felt constant fear of arrest before leaving the country, while the other two-thirds were divided almost equally between those who had occasional fear and those who had no fear. But after the war broke out, the survivors’ fear of arrest escalated rapidly. Nearly three-quarters of the survivors who were still in Germany in 1941 when the doors to emigration slammed shut and the Holocaust began in earnest say they lived in constant fear of arrest.
It is nevertheless astonishing that 29 percent of the survivors residing in Germany at the beginning of 1942 maintain that they did not fear arrest at all or did not fear it on a constant basis. Perhaps some of these people interpreted the question too literally. Whereas they might have feared being arrested by some Nazi policing body, they might not have feared being arrested directly by the Gestapo. Still, most of these people were eventually deported and sent to concentration camps, and thus it is hard to fathom how any Jew would not have lived in constant fear of arrest.
Nevertheless, several interviewees said they felt no fear of arrest even though family members had been arrested, sent to concentration camps, and put to death. One such person is Margarete Leib. In the spring of 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, Margarete Leib was a university student in Berlin in her early twenties who had returned to her parental home in Karlsruhe after hearing that her father, an attorney and former SPD Reichstag deputy, had been arrested and placed in investigative detention. In the weeks that followed, she and her mother were allowed to visit her father daily and bring him food while he was in a local jail. But then on May 16, she personally observed how he and six other SPD politicians were forced into an open truck and paraded through the streets of Karlsruhe past screaming crowds of onlookers en route to a small concentration camp in the surrounding countryside. He was murdered ten months later, hanged with packaging cord attached to a window frame. While this experience might have made her deeply fearful for her own life, she says that she was not afraid. Rather, she went back to Berlin, joined an underground resistance group, and helped produce and distribute anti-Nazi literature before emigrating to France in 1936 and later to the United States in 1941.
Lore Schwartz provides an even more extreme example. Raised the daughter of a shoe store owner in Gera, she was only seventeen when her father died on December 7, 1938, five days after returning from Buchenwald concentration camp. During the war she made her way to Berlin and found work at the Jewish Hospital. Although this temporarily spared her from the deportations, in early 1943 she too was about to be deported when she chose to go underground. At about the same time, both her mother and her fiancé were deported to concentration camps in Poland. After learning that her fiancé had been taken to Auschwitz, she actually went there herself and for two days tried to get the guards to allow her to visit him under the pretext that she had promised to help a lady in Berlin locate her son. After this highly unusual visit to Auschwitz, she returned to Berlin, where she worked in a massage parlor and was hidden by a woman whose husband was both a pimp and a member of the SS. In June 1944 the Nazis finally arrested her and sent her first to Theresienstadt and later to a number of other concentration camps before she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. Obviously, given the harrowing saga she related in her interview, she had great reason to live in constant fear of arrest. Near the end of her interview, however, when she was asked if she had lived in fear all the time, she responded, “No, not at all. Nothing would have happened really, except that they sent you away. I knew that I couldn’t live through the war through what I did. I had the feeling . . . I had nothing to lose but myself. I was all alone. My mother was away; my father was dead; my brother was in England. What else could have happened?”
If these two women’s narratives provide extreme examples of fearlessness, several other interviewees also said they had not been afraid even though they too had strong objective reasons to fear arrest. Karl Meyer, for example, who was born in 1915 and raised in Cologne, was also a member of a resistance organization. But he also said that he had no fear of arrest, at least until he was arrested in August 1938 by the Cologne Gestapo on suspicion of high treason. Even though he had worked for a few years for the Rote Hilfe resistance organization, which provided aid to German socialists and communists in exile, he says that he ended up being “lucky.” He was let out of jail and allowed to emigrate to Shanghai on November 6, 1938, just three days before Kristallnacht. Had he not left at this opportune moment, a Jewish man with his background would probably not have survived. But at that time “nobody knew about the impending doom,” he said.
Several other Jews we interviewed also said they did not fear arrest, even though some of them knew about the impending doom. Helmut Grunewald of Cologne, for example, intrepidly played illegal jazz in bars in Cologne and Mönchengladbach before he was arrested in December 1942 and sent to Auschwitz. But most of the interviewees, just like most survivors in the larger survey population, had indeed spent much of their time in Nazi Germany living in fear of arrest. And, for almost all of the interviewees who were still in Germany after 1941, the fear was constant.
Table 9.2 Involvement in Illegal Activities among Jewish Survivors (Multiple Responses by Age, Gender, and Year of Leaving Germany)
| Left Germany between 1933 and 1939 | Still in Germany After 1939 | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Ages | Over Seventeen When Left | All Ages | Over Seventeen When Left | |||||||||
| Men | Women | All | Men | Women | All | Men | Women | All | Men | Women | All | |
| Member of illegal youth group | 19% | 14% | 17% | 29% | 21% | 26% | 18% | 16% | 17% | 27% | 21% | 24% |
| Listened to illegal radio broadcasts | 31 | 19 | 26 | 46 | 30 | 39 | 37 | 40 | 38 | 46 | 61 | 52 |
| Told anti-Nazi jokes | 15 | 11 | 13 | 19 | 13 | 17 | 27 | 13 | 20 | 30 | 21 | 26 |
| Criticized Hitler | 16 | 20 | 18 | 23 | 25 | 25 | 27 | 22 | 24 | 30 | 29 | 29 |
| Criticized Nazis | 21 | 21 | 21 | 35 | 30 | 33 | 35 | 22 | 28 | 42 | 29 | 36 |
| Spread anti-Nazi flyers | 2 | 1 | 1 | 6 | 2 | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 4 | 5 |
| Helped people threatened by Nazis | 5 | 6 | 5 | 14 | 8 | 10 | 18 | 13 | 16 | 21 | 18 | 19 |
| Active Resistance Activity | 3 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 3 |
| None of the above | 34 | 43 | 37 | 21 | 28 | 26 | 39 | 31 | 35 | 24 | 21 | 24 |
| N of cases | 201 | 141 | 351 | 52 | 53 | 106 | 49 | 45 | 96 | 33 | 28 | 62 |
More typical of the Jewish survivors in regard to the fear they felt were people like Ilse Landau and Rosa Hirsch of Berlin. Even though Ilse Landau actually jumped off the train deporting her to Auschwitz, she says that she “always, always, had fear. There was never a moment when we saw that we were secure, never.” And even though Rosa Hirsch also displayed great courage while going into hiding during the Holocaust, she states in her interview, “You always were afraid. You didn’t talk to other people. Even among yourselves, you only whispered because they say walls have ears.”
As a final example, Ruth Mendel was barely a teenager when she was deported to Auschwitz from her home in Frankfurt in April 1943. Expressing the numbing fear that most Jewish youth must have felt when they realized their parents could no longer protect them, she explains, “I always had this feeling that my father would be able to protect me, protect us. When you’re a child, you feel your parents are almighty. But I realized then that your parents cannot. . . .Of course we were afraid. We always wanted to be inconspicuous. We didn’t want to awaken anything or anyone.”
If most Jews, for good reason, did indeed fear being arrested, this obviously did not stop great numbers of them from taking considerable risks. Most did not jump from a deportation train like Ilse Landau, voluntarily take a trip to Auschwitz to try to get information about a loved one like Lore Schwartz, or play illegal jazz in bars during the war years like Helmut Grunewald; most probably preferred to remain as inconspicuous as possible, as did Ruth Mendel and her family. Still, as our evidence will demonstrate, most Jews who lived in Nazi Germany found it impossible not to break one or another of the multitude of Nazi laws that enmeshed them. Some even broke the law on a daily basis. Evidence for this is found in Table9.2 about the survivors’ involvement in illegal activities during the Third Reich.
In one question we asked in our survey, we provided a list of activities that were illegal in Nazi Germany and asked the survivors to indicate which of those activities applied to them. Although the list contains a variety of forbidden activities ranging from listening to foreign radio broadcasts and telling anti-Nazi jokes to taking an active role in resistance activity, it does not attempt to cover all possible outlawed behavior. In particular, it does not contain offenses that applied only to Jews and not to non-Jews, for we eventually wanted to compare the amount of involvement in illegal activities of these two different groups. Thus, for example, it does not include offenses that large numbers of Jews committed such as refusing to wear the Jewish star when they went out in public after September 19, 1941.7.
Clearly most Jews did not simply buckle under to Nazi authority, and many displayed considerable courage and took direct action against their oppressors.
In fact, the table demonstrates that a clear majority of Jews of various backgrounds took part in forbidden activities during the Third Reich. Usually their transgressions were relatively minor. Only relatively small numbers, as the table shows, disseminated anti-Nazi literature or actively worked against the Nazi regime in other ways as members of underground resistance organizations. Still, given the risks involved, the number of survivors who did take part in such extremely dangerous activity is noteworthy and there are at least four examples of survivors who were involved in underground resistance among the interview narratives featured in this book.8. Furthermore, female survivors were equally as likely to take part in resistance efforts as male survivors, and the percentage of both female and male survivors who were involved in these activities rose among those who were still in Germany during the war years, when they could expect to be put to death if caught.
Jews commonly took part in other types of illegal behavior such as belonging to illegal youth groups, listening to forbidden foreign radio broadcasts, telling anti-Nazi jokes, providing aid and support to Nazi victims, and criticizing Hitler and the Nazis in discussions with acquaintances. Even before the war, offenses such as these could lead to lengthy confinement in jails and prisons for non-Jews as well as Jews. But being arrested for such offenses during the war years was, especially for Jews, often tantamount to a death sentence, as the Nazis considered such behavior injurious to the success of the German war effort and punished it severely. Nonetheless, roughly two-thirds of the male and female survivors took part in one or more of the types of illegal activities enumerated on the table; this was equally true among those who remained in Germany during the war years and those who left the country sometime during the 1930s.
Listening to forbidden foreign-radio broadcasts was the most common offense committed by the survivors. During the war years, this most often involved tuning in to the German-language broadcasts of the BBC, which previous research has demonstrated could be received all across Germany and even in places as far away as Pinsk on the eastern front.9. Although the Nazis threatened all German citizens with the death penalty for this behavior, and even though it was especially difficult for Jews to gain access to the BBC broadcasts as their radio sets were taken away from them during the war, more than half of the survivors (52 percent) who were over seventeen years old and still living in Nazi Germany during the war years say that they tuned in to these broadcasts. This, as it turns out, was almost the same percentage as that of the non-Jewish German population that listened to the BBC during the war, as demonstrated by our survey evidence relating to the German populations from the cities of Cologne, Krefeld, Berlin, and Dresden.
The number of survivors who took part in the other types of illegal behavior listed on the table was also quite large. For instance, among those who were over seventeen and still living in Germany during the war years, about one-quarter joined illegal youth groups, over one-third criticized Nazis in discussions with acquaintances, and more than one-quarter criticized Hitler and had related anti-Nazi jokes to others. These figures are similar to and sometimes higher than the percentages of the regular German population from the cities we surveyed who took part in such activities. Finally, considering that the percentage of survivors who had involved themselves in the most serious illegal activity listed on the table—taking part in active resistance and belonging to an illegal organization—was also somewhat higher than that of the non-Jewish population from the cities of Cologne, Krefeld, Dresden, and Berlin, the conclusion follows that Jews were every bit (and often more) likely to stand up against the Nazi regime than were others among the German population.10.
As prime targets for discrimination and persecution, Jews had special motivation to oppose as well as to fear Nazi authority. That many Jews courageously took grave risks in opposing Nazi authority does not mean, however, as anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda alleged, that they were in the habit of acting illegally or that they simply threw all caution to the wind. Not only were Jews one of the most traditionally law-abiding groups in the German population, with historical crime rates that were well below most other groups of German citizens, they were especially cautious with whom they spoke.11. As several of the interviewees related to us, “We kept to ourselves.”
The caution Jews usually exercised in speaking with others is also borne out in the survey. When we asked the survivors to compare how openly they believed they could discuss political topics with Jewish and non-Jewish friends and neighbors, upwards of two-thirds answered that they had felt it was advisable not to speak about political topics even with Jewish friends and neighbors they knew well. This applied equally to survivors who had left Germany in the 1930s and to survivors who had remained in Germany during the war years. With non-Jews, even those considered friends, the survivors displayed great caution. Only 7 percent of those who remained in Germany during the war indicated that they felt they could speak openly with non-Jewish friends, and only 1 percent felt that they could do this with non-Jewish neighbors.
Cautious as most Jews were, the Nazi authorities waged a campaign of terror and persecution against them that had no comparison with that carried out against any other group in the German population except perhaps the communists. But, whereas the pressure against the communists subsided and many former communists were supposedly “healed” and reintegrated into German society after the mid 1930s, when the communist threat had been eliminated, it only increased over time against the Jews, reaching a crescendo after the war broke out when the Nazis tried their utmost to eliminate the entire Jewish population. Well before the war started, however, Jews were commonly spied on, arrested, charged with offenses real and imaginary, and punished with a severity that few “ordinary Germans” ever experienced.
One of the issues touched on briefly in the previous chapter is spying. As we saw earlier, a relatively large percentage of the survivors indicated that they were spied on by neighbors (19 percent), fellow pupils (15 percent), coworkers (5 percent), or police (8 percent). Furthermore, the percentage of survivors who were spied on increased in a linear fashion with the passage of time. For example, only 7 percent of the survivors who left Germany before 1938 believe that they were spied on by their neighbors, but the percentage rises to 19 among those who left the country between 1938 and 1939, and to 31 among those who were still in Germany after the war began. Similarly, the percentage of survivors who say they were spied on by the police rises from 4 percent among those who left in the earliest period to 21 percent among those who were still in Germany after 1939.
The finding that Jews were regularly spied on in Nazi Germany would surprise few people. Still it runs counter to a popular current in recent scholarship which maintains that spying in Nazi Germany was far less common than has commonly been assumed. The Canadian historian Robert Gellately, for example, who made a detailed study of Gestapo case files in Würzburg dealing with the issue of race defilement and friendship displayed toward Jews in an influential book on the Gestapo he published in 1990, reports that he found only one case that began with a report of a Gestapo spy and concludes that “paid informants or agents are conspicuous by their absence.”12. Although other recent work on Gestapo case files in other cities uncovers a greater incidence of spying when other kinds of cases are considered, the dispute over the prevalence of spying warrants more detailed consideration.13.
In the survey questionnaire, therefore, we not only asked people to indicate if they believed that they had been spied on, we also posed several other questions that aimed to uncover how much depth of knowledge they had about Gestapo spies. Therefore, in addition to asking them to cross off if they had been spied on from a list of possible experiences with discrimination, we also asked them directly in a separate question if they had either known or assumed that people in their neighborhoods or places of work had been involved in spying. And, if they had, we asked them to provide specific information about the backgrounds of the spies they knew the most about.
The answers the survivors provided strengthen the conclusion that spying was often employed against Jews in the Third Reich; moreover, it became more prevalent over time. Among the survivors who left Germany in the 1930s, even though many of them were young at the time, 13 percent say that they had direct knowledge of Gestapo spies in their neighborhoods and workplaces; an additional 28 percent relate that they had reason to assume that there were spies working for the Gestapo in these places. These figures rise to 20 percent and 32 percent, respectively, among those who were still in the country after 1939. As one would expect, though, younger survivors had less knowledge about spies than older survivors. Among survivors who were younger than twenty when they left the country, only 12 percent knew of spies in their neighborhoods or workplaces and an additional 27 percent assumed that people were spying on them.
Further evidence that the survivors’ knowledge of Gestapo spies is based on more than conjecture is that most can provide a number of details about the backgrounds of the people they either knew or assumed to be involved in spying. Broadly speaking, the typical profile of a person survivors identified as a Gestapo spy is a middle-class, adult male between the ages of twenty and fifty who was directly affiliated with the Nazi movement either as a party member or as a member of the SA or SS and who was also either a neighbor or a work colleague of the survivors. Thus among those whom survivors identified as known Gestapo spies, 85 percent were male and 15 percent were female. Only 10 percent were younger than twenty years of age and only 6 percent were older than fifty. The youngest person identified as a spy was thirteen and the oldest was seventy-five. The median age of spies was just over thirty, but there was an almost equal distribution among spies between the ages of twenty and fifty. Although the spies came from a wide range of occupational backgrounds, relatively few were common workers (only about one-third); most held middle-class positions in business, government, or the professions. Only 16 percent of the spies were thought to have no affiliation with the Nazi movement; slightly more than one-third were identified as regular Nazi Party members (34 percent); another slightly more than one-third were thought to be members of either the SA or SS (38 percent); 6 percent were members of either the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls; and another 6 percent were identified simply as Gestapo. Finally, only 7 percent of spies were people who had no relationship with the survivors. Nearly 50 percent were neighbors and 25 percent were work colleagues. Ten percent were either domestic servants or employees, and the remaining few were either teachers or building superintendents (Hausmeister). Only one spy was identified as a friend, and one was said to be of Jewish background.
Even if many of the survivors believe that they were spied on and can furnish a number of details about the people they believe acted as Gestapo spies, this does not necessarily prove that the individuals they identify were in fact spies. But even if the survey evidence in itself cannot prove definitively that spying against Jews was indeed a common practice in Nazi Germany, one cannot challenge the firmness of the survivors’ convictions. Thus, in the in-depth interviews we conducted with the survivors, we heard time and again how they had to be especially cautious during the years they lived in the Third Reich because they knew at the time that they were being spied on. The phrase “all the walls had ears” became a common refrain in these interviews. One example of this comes from a Jewish woman born in Hamburg in 1914, who relates the following about the Jewish men she knew who returned from concentration camps after being rounded up during the Kristallnacht pogrom: “They were not allowed to speak about what they went through. They had to sign a paper when they were released from the camps—either Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen or Dachau—that they were not allowed to speak about it. But some of them did. They couldn’t speak loudly [though], because all the walls had ears. If they still had maids, they all had ears. They were paid by the party to talk about what was happening in these families.”14.
However much spying was conducted against the Jewish population, there can be no disputing the fact that the Nazi police authorities were far more likely to start cases against them for alleged criminal activity than they were to start cases against most other people in the German population. This has been established elsewhere by detailed investigations of Gestapo case files, and it is supported further by the survey and interview evidence in this study. Whereas, for example, only 2 percent (30 out of 1,342) of the respondents in the surveys we conducted of the ordinary German population of Cologne and Krefeld indicate that they had been interrogated either by the Gestapo or another policing body during the years of Nazi Germany on the charge that they had committed an illegal act, this happened to more than 13 percent of the people who took part in the Jewish survivor survey. Although this suggests that Jews were more than six times more likely to have cases started against them than non-Jews, it considerably underestimates the real difference between Jews and the rest of the German population in this regard. To begin with, while nearly all of the people who participated in the Cologne and Krefeld surveys had lived in Nazi Germany for its duration, most of those who were involved in the survivor survey had only lived in the country for a few years before emigrating abroad. Thus, if one considers only those survivors who were still in Germany after the war began, the percentage of Jews who had been interrogated by the Gestapo on the charge that they had committed an illegal offense rises to 19 percent. This would mean that Jews were nearly ten times more likely than non-Jews to have cases started against them. But even this figure underestimates the true difference between Jews and non-Jews. Many of the survivors who remained in Germany after 1940 were either too young to have criminal charges brought against them or had been deported to concentration camps before the end of the Third Reich. Had they remained in Germany throughout the war or had they been older when they were deported, their chances of having a criminal case brought against them would have been considerably greater. If we, therefore, only consider those survivors residing in Germany after the war broke out and reaching the age of seventeen before they left the country, the percentage of survivors who had cases started against them rises to 27 percent (24 percent for male survivors and 30 percent for female survivors). In sum, this means that our survey data indicate that Jews may have been at least thirteen times more likely than non-Jews to have cases started against them for alleged illegal activity.
Beyond demonstrating that Jews were frequently spied on and charged with illegal activity in Nazi Germany, what else does the survey evidence tell us about the Jews’ brush with the Nazi legal authorities? What kinds of offenses, for example, were Jews charged with committing? What sources of information, in addition to spying, did the Gestapo and the police use to start cases against the Jews? And what was the final result of the cases brought against the Jews?
The survey evidence shows that most criminal cases initiated against Jews involved relatively minor infractions. This, however, was more typical in the prewar period than in the war years. In the 1930s, only one-third of the cases started against the survivors involved offenses that the Nazis considered especially serious, most commonly including race defilement (Rassenschande), spreading anti-Nazi propaganda, and illegal attempts to flee or hide from the authorities. The remaining two-thirds of the cases against survivors at this time constituted a hodgepodge of illegal behaviors that were severely punished only on occasion, such as minor violations of the pervasive legislation discriminating against Jewish business and economic practices, and of the laws and decrees that limited Jews’ contact with non-Jews or restricted their freedom to travel or their rights to speak their mind about Nazi policies and leaders.
During the war years, however, the cases initiated against the survivors typically involved far more serious allegations and cases involving minor infractions slowed to a trickle. Seemingly by this time survivors had learned to do their utmost to avoid being implicated in any kind of unlawful activity. But this was not always possible. Thus the cases started against them often involved attempts to flee the country or go underground, illegal relations with non-Jews, illegal resistance activity, libel or slander of Nazi authorities, and failure to wear the Jewish star (which became mandatory for German Jews in the fall of 1941).
Given that Nazi policy toward the Jews escalated from destroying their livelihoods to destroying their lives and that the crimes the Jews were accused of in the war years were more serious than in the 1930s, it comes as no surprise that the punishments handed out to alleged Jewish offenders followed the same trajectory. Nevertheless, some people would not expect to learn that the Nazis did not always throw the book at Jews who were accused of violating the law. In the 1930s, in fact, nearly two-thirds of the Jews in our survey (64 percent) who had cases started against them soon had the charges dropped. They were let go immediately after being interrogated by the Gestapo or other police authorities, with no further action taken against them. This probably suggests that the evidence against them was weak. But it also implies that the Nazis were not at that time keenly interested in punishing the Jews with utmost severity. Further evidence of this is that an additional 8 percent of the Jewish survivors in our survey who had cases started against them in the 1930s were tried and subsequently acquitted by Nazi judges. Only 16 percent were sent to a concentration camp or placed in so-called protective custody.
This comparatively lenient treatment contrasts sharply, however, with the treatment they received in the war years. After the war broke out, the Gestapo usually acted as the final arbiter and judge in cases involving Jews and the result was often life-threatening for the accused. Among the survivors who had cases that took place in the 1940s, none were passed on from the Gestapo or the police to the courts and the percentage of cases in which charges were dropped against them fell by nearly half to just over one-third (36 percent). What most typically transpired, therefore, was that the Gestapo simply bypassed the court authorities in cases involving Jews during the war years and placed the Jews directly in protective custody and sent them on to concentration camps. Clear evidence of this is that at least one-half of the wartime cases involving survivors who took part in our survey ended in this fashion.
While the severity of the punishment alleged Jewish lawbreakers received depended largely on the time period when the cases took place, the manner in which the cases started against them also played a role in determining their fate. In the questionnaire, survivors who indicated that they had been interrogated by either the Gestapo or the police on the charge that they had committed an illegal act during the Third Reich were subsequently asked to specify how the cases had originated against them. Next to this question, we provided a list with eight possible answers they could chose from. Three of the possible answers involved what might be construed as denunciations from civilians (“accusation/ report from a neighbor, coworker, or relative”); three other possible answers involved information coming from official sources (“accusation/report from a Gestapo spy, a member or official of the Nazi Party, or a police roundup”); and the remaining two possible answers were “other” or “I don’t know.” Table9.3 summarizes the answers the survivors gave.
Although the information provided in the table about the sources of information used to initiate criminal investigations is based on the experiences of only 86 Jewish survivors who themselves were interrogated by the Gestapo or the police on the charge that they had acted unlawfully during the Third Reich, it permits a number of key observations about the manner in which the Nazi terror apparatus operated. Furthermore, this information corresponds closely with a detailed study of the archival records of all existing Gestapo case files involving Jews in a typical German city (Krefeld) that one of the authors of this study conducted in the course of his research on his recent book, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans.15.
The Gestapo had many different sources of information at its disposal for starting cases against Jews, and no single source of information predominated over the entire period of the Third Reich. Among the most significant sources were accusations stemming from German civilians, which in contemporary research on the Third Reich are commonly referred to as “denunciations.”
Table 9.3 Origin of Gestapo and Police Cases Involving Jewish Survivors
| All Cases (%) | Cases in 1930’s (%) | Cases in Wartime (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Civilian Denunciations | |||
| Accusation/report from neighbor | 9 | 17 | — |
| Accusation/report from co—worker | 12 | 21 | 23 |
| Accusation/report from family member or relative | — | — | — |
| Official Sources | |||
| Accusation/report from Gestapo spy | 12 | 8 | 15 |
| Accusation/report from Nazi Party | 6 | — | 8 |
| Gestapo/police roundup | 17 | 21 | 39 |
| Other | 11 | 13 | 15 |
| Don’t Know | 33 | 21 | — |
| N of cases | 86 | 34 | 13 |
They often stemmed from such base motives as a desire to gain the favor of party officials or petty personal quarrels between neighbors and coworkers. But, as the table shows, they seldom arose from family disputes. These denunciations helped the Gestapo and the police begin over 20 percent of the eighty-six cases against the survivors in our survey. That such denunciations were numerous is attested to by several of our interviewees. Herbert Klein of Nuremberg, for example, relates a story in his interview about his sister’s elderly mother-in-law, who was denounced during the war by a neighbor for not observing the blackout restrictions after she had unintentionally turned on the lights in her apartment one evening. “It was always like that,” Klein insists. “These Germans could not wait to get a feather in their cap.”
Common and deplorable as denunciations were in Nazi Germany, their importance should not be overestimated. Their prevalence does not prove, for instance, as several scholars have recently maintained, that the Gestapo was primarily a reactive organ with such limited resources and manpower that it merely sat back and relied almost exclusively on the civilian population for its information.16. Not only does our questionnaire evidence show that the Gestapo utilized many other sources of information to begin its cases throughout the Third Reich, it shows that civilian denunciations were most plentiful during the prewar years, when most cases against Jews did not lead to draconian punishments. They were considerably less common during the war and the Holocaust, when any criminal case initiated against a Jew might result in death.
The evidence in the table, therefore, points to a terror apparatus that combined both reactive and proactive strategies in maintaining law and order and combating the targeted enemies of the National Socialist regime. During the 1930s, when Nazi policy called for putting pressure on Jews to force them to leave the country, the Gestapo may have been content to act mainly in a reactive fashion. Evidence for this is that a higher percentage of the cases started against the survivors in the 1930s began with accusations made by the civilian population (38 percent) than by information the police authorities received from official sources (29 percent). This overlaps neatly with the study mentioned above of Gestapo case files involving Jews in the city of Krefeld, where 41 percent of the Krefeld Gestapo’s cases began with civilian denunciations in the 1930s. But during the war, when Nazi policy toward the Jews turned to mass murder as a “final solution to the Jewish problem,” the Gestapo actively set in motion its own limited but still considerable resources to help decimate Germany’s remaining Jewish population. Correspondingly, the table shows that civilian denunciations became far less important sources of information in starting Jewish cases, as most of the information the Gestapo and the police used to initiate cases against Jews during the war came from spies, Nazi Party members and institutions, and, above all, from Gestapo and police roundups. Taken together, these official sources of information made up 62 percent of the wartime cases in the survivor survey, and this does not exhaust the Gestapo’s official sources of information. Many cases against Jews also began with information the Gestapo gained from forced confessions they beat out of people under interrogation, house searches, or other Nazi control organs that are only partially subsumed under the “other” category in the table.
Spying, denunciations, and Nazi police repression contributed heavily to the persecution and ultimate destruction of Germany’s Jewish population, but it was not necessary for Jews in Nazi Germany to be spied on, denounced, or accused of wrongdoing by the Gestapo or the police to meet a dire fate once the Holocaust began. We now turn to perhaps the most sensitive part of our entire study—the carrying out and supposed secrecy surrounding the so-called Final Solution.