This post concerns a remarkable 8,000-word, 11-page typed report made by Dela Blakmar, my grandfather Hans’ secretary (and, it now appears, lover). I am publishing it a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), 27 January 2023 for a very specific reason, that the national theme for HMD this year is Ordinary People. People who were victims as well as perpetrators, and people who stood by as well as those who helped those in danger. I’ve only just discovered and translated the report and it illuminates ordinary lives – of Dela, as a Jew in Munich and Berlin, and what she saw around her during the first ten years of the Third Reich.
I have just pulled out a few extracts for this post, observations that particularly struck me. Dela describes all sorts of aspects: the anti-Jewish laws, the rise of anti-Semitism, the reaction and aftermath of the pogroms of November 1938, deportation (including, seemingly, that of my grandmother Vera), the expropriation of Jewish property, the effect of the persecutions on ordinary German citizens, the ordinary people who helped Jews and those who stood by, the desolation of ordinary lives in war-torn Berlin… and so on.
What this document was meant for is not clear, but it would have been written in Sweden during the last years of the war or soon after. Dela would have been writing from Sweden, where she escaped to from Denmark at the end of 1943, and which became her permanent home. It is striking that Dela does not give any names and makes locations unspecific, as if such information is sensitive, which makes me think she may be writing before the war had ended.
The report was among the papers relating to my family found in the basement of a house in Sweden a year ago. A pdf of the original report in German can be downloaded here.
What makes this report particularly interesting is that Dela was Jewish but had a privileged position in Germany of having the protection of Danish nationality, following her marriage of convenience in summer 1933 to Helge Blakmar, a Danish resistance leader who was Aryan by Nazi law. They divorced in 1939.
Dela was born on 3 May 1897 in Berlin to fully Jewish parents, and studied music. She was employed as a violin teacher at the adult education centre in Hamburg. Additionally she gave private lessons, and concerts together with the harpsichordist Ilse Thate. In 1931 she founded a viola quartet, and around that time broadcast on radio. She left Germany in 1933 to marry Helge Blakmar, but returned to Germany in early 1938 to be with her mother, whose life was nearing its end.
She was not allowed to practise her profession in Munich, and when the war broke out she was not allowed to leave Munich. However she did eventually get permission to leave for Berlin and then to Denmark in March 1943, and “was allowed to take DM200 as a special privilege”. Later that year she escaped on a boat to Sweden, settling in the town of Norberg.
In 1959 she filed a claim for compensation for the suffering she had incurred under the Nazis.
Arrival in Germany, 1938
Dela had left Germany for Denmark a few years earlier, but returned to Berlin. She was obviously aware of the anti-Semitic sentiment that the Nazis promoted, but she needed to be with her mother, whose life was drawing to a close.
Being married to a Dane meant she wasn’t subject to the full thrust of the anti-Jewish laws and she clearly wanted to be with Hans. They were together in Berlin and even planned to emigrate to New York that summer. They wouldn’t however have guessed how bad things were to become later on.
In the spring of 1938 I came to Berlin. At many cafés and restaurants you saw signs saying “Jews not wanted”. In some cases, the owners of these restaurants had been threatened that their licence would be withdrawn if they persisted in putting up such posters. Suddenly, yellow benches with the inscription “only for Jews” appeared in squares and green areas, and signs at the same time drew attention to the fact that Jews were forbidden to use other benches under penalty of punishment. People accepted that, looked away in embarrassment use of certain benches was forbidden and subject to a penalty.
On April 27, 1938, a decree was issued that all Jews should immediately list their names, cash assets, bank papers, valuables (works of art, real carpets, jewellery, silverware, etc.) and submit them, stating the value of each item. The purpose for which this was to be served was not initially disclosed.
In the next few weeks, all objects made of precious metals and jewellery specified on the lists submitted had to be handed in – a receipt was issued for each delivery in accordance with the number of pieces. Over the next two years, Jews who had delivered such loads received a request from the official authority to collect the money for the delivered goods, whereby the value was of course ridiculously low, 3 pfennigs per large silver regardless. whether it was a matter of simple everyday objects or for antique works of art
In the summer of 1938, house searches began in Jewish households, which led to secret abuse by the officials. Works of art, carpets, furniture that someone might want to have were simply taken away. Suddenly overnight one saw the names in big white letters on the shop windows of all the shops that were assumed to be in Jewish.
Dela, in the 1930s
Observations on anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism had been brewing in Germany for many years – it wasn’t a Nazi invention by any means, but Dela remarked that it had been confined to the official circles of the upper bourgeoisie, the arts and science, not the German working class. But with the arrival of Hitler a blood-tainting element came into being, prompted by accounts of the German “noble breed”.
When the “Nuremberg laws” were issued on September 15, 1935, anti-Semitic actions were expressly considered undesirable or to a certain extent safe, albeit the restrictions were felt bitterly. However, there was no reason to fear that the situation would worsen, and for a long time no threatening action was taken by the authorities. Jews were given their own Jewish cultural association, which had its sections in all larger cities. There was a Jewish publishing house, theatre and concert performances with Jewish literature and Jewish music. Jews were still allowed to practise their professions as long as they could take place within the defined framework of Jewishness.
Jews were now expelled from public life in Germany, they lived in invisible ghettos, the walls of which, however, had not yet completely sealed them off from the German environment.
The November pogrom (“Kristallnacht”): referring to the Neumeyers?
It is very likely Dela was still with Hans when the mass attacks against Jews and their properties occurred throughout Germany around 9 November 1938 in what the Nazis euphemistically termed “Kristallnacht”. My mother Ruth and uncle Raymond Neumeyer and their mother Vera were in Dachau the night before, when they were ordered by town officials to leave town by dawn or else go to prison. Ruth described the incident in an interview recorded by the Imperial War Museum, adding “my father was away in Berlin learning how to make flutes”, but without mentioning that he had been with Dela in summer in Berlin, and presumably was still with her.
Fortuitously, when Ruth, Raymond and Vera arrived at Munich station on the morning of 9 November, they seem to have avoided the worst of it.
Then came November 9, 1938, when synagogues throughout the Reich were set on fire and all Jewish shops were systematically demolished. I was staying with Jewish friends at the time. On the morning of November 10, two ladies who were friends of mine were able to ask me, both “pure Aryan” folk comrades, whether their landlords wanted to entrust them with important papers or valuables for safekeeping, which no longer were secure in Jewish households. So these two women went from one Jewish family to another to offer their help; they were not the only ones. Suddenly all classes of people wanted to help, in contrast to the officially attested spontaneity of the uprising against the Jews, throughout the Reich at exactly the same time of night.
I am virtually certain that the passage below refers to my mother’s family – the Neumeyers – and that the location is Dachau, as it was indeed there that all non-Aryan residents were told to leave the house and district by 6 o’clock the next morning, although this was actually on 8 November rather than the following day, arriving at Munich railway station on the morning of 9 November. Assuming it is the Neumeyers, it mentions the requirement for them to pay for repairs to their house, and that any money received was paid into a blocked account – both of which did indeed happen.
Jews had to be removed from rural communities and suburbs. For example, on 9 November at 10 o’clock in the evening, all non-Aryan residents of a residential suburb were informed that they had to leave the house, the town and district by 6 o’clock in the morning. The men were immediately transferred to the concentration camp, women and children were allowed to take as many handpicks as they could carry themselves. On 10 November many camped in Munich Central Station with nowhere to go.
Before leaving their house, the owners were forced to hand over their entire possessions to a law firm with a Power of Attorney to entrust their entire property to a law firm “in trust”. Thousands of such powers of attorney were issued these days, but cancelled again a few weeks later by the government because they were trying to enrich Jewish property. Gradually one piece of land was sold after the other, mostly for only a fraction of the actual value. The purchase price had to be paid immediately in cash into a blocked account with the foreign exchange office, from which the Jewish account holder was allowed to withdraw a small monthly amount to cover his living expenses upon request.
A villa owner I know received, 6 months after the sale of his house, a claim for a larger fine for repair costs, which a new tenant of the former house had justified as necessary. The claim was issued by the local burgomaster; in the event of refusal to pay, there would be an immediate transfer to the concentration camp.
Meanwhile a new office had been set up in Munich, the Treuhänder des Gauleiters, Stelle für Arisierung (“Trustee des Gauleiters, Office for Aryanisation”). The name explains only partially the function of this office, whose directors, including a former carousel employee from the funfair, who had the power to decide about expropriation, evictions, forced labour – i.e. about the life and death of several thousand once respected German citizens. Two years after the sale of the same house, that official demanded several percent of sales price at the time, on the basis that the sum was needed to cover the fee and administrative costs of the law firm, to which that general power of attorney was compulsorily transferred two years before.
Reaction to the Pogroms
The run on foreign consulates was desperate – who had relatives abroad who wanted and were able to guarantee that they would rescue completely destitute and almost unknown relatives? And did people in other countries know that this was literally about saving the lives of these hundreds of thousands? When, filled with this horror, I travelled to Paris at the end of 1938, I found no one there who had the slightest interest in the fate of German Jews, whether the French or German migrants. I met many people of different nationalities there — no one asked me what was actually happening with the persecution of the Jews in Germany; the only exception was an Indian! Also in Switzerland, in Denmark, during 1938-39 where I tried something for German-Danish friends, I found for the same indifference everywhere.
From the beginning of 1939 I had been able to experience living in Munich, the “capital of the movement”, and so I was able to witness the development of the “solution to the Jewish question” from there. This problem was dealt with differently in every city from that time onwards and above all from the outbreak of war until 1942. On 9 November Jews in a well-known Upper Bavarian health resort were forced to buy tickets to foreign countries, although they knew that border tickets to places abroad had to be purchased and that crossing the border without a valid passport was impossible – and Jews did not get a passport.
In Berlin, the chief of the police, von Helldorf, said that all emigrating Jews had to make an extra payment in addition to the statutory Reich flight tax, the so-called Helldorf donation, which – as previously stated – was to go to the “Reich Association of Jews in Germany” to finance the emigration of destitute Jews.
A member of the Reichsvereinigung told me that this money was actually deposited into an account in the name of the Reichsvereinigung, over which the Reichsvereinigung had no right of disposal.
Expropriation of Jewish property
From now on, the systematic expropriation of all Jewish property began, primarily property and all Jewish businesses. Personal wishes of more prominent party members played a role in carrying out this “Aryanisation”. On November 9, 1938, at around 11:00 a.m., a troop of uniformed Nazis appeared at the country estate of Herr von X, a member of a respected Catholic family of Jewish descent, and ordered all guests and domestic staff present to leave the house immediately. As a result, some of the access doors were locked from the outside and torches were thrown into the house. The villagers, who, woken up by the noise, came to help to put out the fire, were prevented at gun point and Herr von X was transferred to the concentration camp the next day, where he was held for several months.
Barely a week passed without new summonses, demands, restraints, insults. The Jewish food supply (special ration cards marked with J, on which the allocation was limited to textile goods, meat, eggs, milk, tobacco cards; other allotments were greatly reduced), the ban on entering other specially designated food shops and outside of prescribed times, a ban on entering certain streets and facilities, a ban on leaving home after 8pm, a ban on using public transport, a ban on leaving one’s place of residence, a ban on teaching Jewish children, registration of all Jews in evangelical work and finally the yellow Jewish star, without which no Jew was allowed to show himself on the street, and which had to be attached to the outside of every apartment inhabited by Jews.
A secret decree within the air protection organisation stated that in the event of fire damage from air raids, Jewish houses were not to be protected, it was forbidden to provide help to Jews unless a Jewish house was destroyed by fire. At that time there were still many Jews in other cities who lived in their apartments among the “Aryan people”; there were special Jewish air-raid shelters there, separate from the other air-raid shelters; and the inscriptions Juden verboten (“Jews forbidden”) in shops, guesthouses, in the middle of the stations, public telephones.
Dela’s list of possessions
We know that the Neumeyers had fine furniture and art in their house; it all disappeared, of course, though Dela managed to smuggle out some jewellery, which we still have. Vera’s father, Martin Ephraim, had stupendous wealth at one time, and even though they lost the value of their Görlitz villa in the hyperinflation of the early 1920s their home in Schreiberhau would have been opulently furnished too.
We do, however, have a list of Dela’s possessions – could some of these have belonged to the Neumeyers, and left behind in the apartment Dela lived in after they left?
The inventory of objects owned by Dela Blakmar. (Click on arrow to view slide show)
Also – possibly related to the above list – an application for tax clearance for the purposes of emigration. And the address is Thorwaldstrasse 5, Munich – the apartment belonging to the Köbners, where the Neumeyers lived from 1939 until Hans and Vera were deported in 1942. This is the first evidence I have found that Dela was also living there – whether concurrently with the Neumeyers for a time, or after they had left.
We don’t know the fate of the Köbners. Raymond found their apartment block bombed out when he visited Munich in 1946.
Dela’s application for a tax clearance certificate as a person intending to emigrate: this is the year she moved to Denmark, although the new address here is given as Berlin-Friedenau, Rheinstrasse 54
Reactions to the Jews’ plight
Dela illustrates several examples of the reaction of ordinary German citizens to the Nazis’ persecution of Jews. Sympathy towards Jews was by no means was prevalent across Germany, but Berlin was said to have harboured a considerable amount of opposition to the Nazis.
Of the 9 November 1938 “Kristallnacht” pogroms, she remarked:
Truckloads of valuables were thrown out of windows. I didn’t get the impression that many took the opportunity to enrich themselves, with the exception, of course, of those who had staged this spontaneous popular movement. For days people went through rubble and shards – similar to the scene four years later after English bombing raids. One example of many: a few days after 9 November, a chauffeur in impeccably new gear appeared in a large Berlin car park. When asked by his comrades where he got the fine equipment from, he proudly said that on 9 November he had taken it from one of the leading Jewish shops. The reaction from his comrades was not what he had expected, he was beaten up with the clear indication that if he were ever to be seen among them again, he could expect no different treatment.
In the course of the November pogrom, almost without exception, all Jewish men were arrested [this is an overstatement of what happened; according to the US Holocaust Museum, the total number of Jewish men that were placed in concentration camps after the pogrom was 30,000]. The fact that a few managed to escape the concentration camps is thanks to the willingness to help of “Aryan friends” – often among them caretakers and police officers who warned them in good time; but there were also many, including diplomats, artists, pastors, who offered Jews refuge in their homes.
According to Dela, the requirement introduced in 1941 for German Jews to wear yellow stars backfired to a certain extent:
This star did not have the intended effect – because now, for the first time, the astonished comrades of the people who are actually Jews realised that Jews were not the human scum as shown in “Der Stürmer”, but people, Germans, tall or short, beautiful or ugly, blond or dark, with straight or crooked legs, just like themselves.
Most people knew nothing, or hardly anything, about who was a Jew until the appearance of the yellow Jewish star. Suddenly it became clear and then the open good mood was very noticeable. Friends demonstratively greeted star-bearers, offered seats, although Jews were forbidden to sit in the trams, and protested against the expulsion of Jews from overcrowded trams. Shopkeepers smuggled large parcels of food to Jewish buyers. Often the Jewish guests found the normal meat ration in inns, which Jews were officially allowed to visit, under the mountain of potatoes and cabbage. And often peasant women in the street and in the church (a relatively large number Catholic Jews attended mass with their star) secretly put beer and butter in their pockets.
Those who just stood by
For ten years the German people watched as their Jewish fellow citizens were systematically deprived of their rights, tortured, hounded to death and exterminated. Without defending themselves against it, without intervening, without even protesting, they have accepted this guilt in its entirety. But a large part of the German people is fully aware of this guilt.
Of course, no protest against the persecution of the Jews reached the public – but what does publicity mean in a country like Nazi Germany? In a country in which every single citizen is hardly guarded, spied on, in which no place may be spoken, printed or read that is not acceptable to the official opinion of the state? In which every careless utterance, every deviation from the commanded the heaviest penalties, of which the deprivation of liberty is the lightest?
I was asked by German friends above, why do the Jews all tolerate this, why didn’t they emigrate long ago? One generally believed in Germany that National Socialism no longer wanted the Jews in certain places, but was only willing to let them out of Germany and did not understand that there were still thousands of Jews who did not want to leave Germany. Whatever one’s general opinion was that Jews were rich, broad circles had not known anything about the Jewish proletariat.
And those who helped
I could list hundreds of cases in which German people campaigned for Jews, not only secretly, but also tried everything with the authorities, with the Gauleitung and Gestapo, to rescue Jews. Generals who tried to free arrested Jews from prison or concentration camps by vouching for their innocence and had very sadly to experience that all the promises the official authorities had made to them remained empty phrases and their protégés were no longer alive. Church authorities, Evangelical and Catholic, who intervened on behalf of Jews of their denomination, artists, scientists, men and women in public life who jeopardised the position and safety of their families in order to help individual Jews. Rarely did they succeed but they it tried again and again.
There were dairymen and butchers, who declared that they would still supply their former Jewish customers, even though they could no longer get ration coupons for their goods. And tobacconists who served their former customers as before, however scarce their supplies were.
I remember the morning after the first severe bombing attack I witnessed when I was standing in front of a heap of rubble and shards, which the day before had been one of the biggest commercial buildings, an old woman walked by and said, shaking her head, “So that’s what they did to the Jews – now it’s your turn!”
And one will not forget her that German girl, member of the “B.d.M.”[Association of German Girls – the equivalent for girls of the Hitler Youth] and who grew up under National Socialism, brought up by Dr Goebbels’ propaganda, who went from one Jewish family to another during the period of deportation. When she made a speech, asked if she had nothing better to do than go to these traitors, she declared firmly that she didn’t know of any more important duty at that moment than to help those of their fellow human beings who were in dire need.
Forced labour (Zwangsarbeit)
Vera was forced to work in gardening in Munich, very possibly when she was forced out of the Döblers’ apartment in Thorwaldsenstrasse and made to live in the Sisters of Mercy Monastery, where Dela visited her.
Jews undertaking forced labour in gardening work (photo: Jüdisches Museum, Berlin)
Younger Jewish women up to 45 years old were used for heavy factory work, gardening and farm work, partly for heavy physical work in a flax roast, older women up to 65 years for factory work, men of all ages and occupations for construction work and heavier, often in the fashion industry factory work. Doctors, freer high heads of state, craftsmen, artists, merchants, scientists were assigned to erect a barracks outside the city.
You only had to pay a little something for the canteen food itself – this could only be regulated in such a way that those who still had a certain amount of capital in their blocked account voluntarily covered the costs for the many comrades who had meanwhile become completely destitute. When the camp barracks were finished months later, hundreds of Jews were driven out of their cramped dwellings and were allowed to survive in the camp barracks against a rent matched to their blocked account, using Catholic nuns for this purpose, some of whose homes were taken away and Jews quartered there. From these two camps, day in and day out, all men and women up to the age of 65 who could were only half able to work had to walk a distance of one and a half to two hours, in the snow and rain, summer and winter, and starting work in the morning at 7am or 8am. In the evening they went back the same way on foot, then had a lousy dinner, slept in overcrowded dormitories, the couples of course separated, and had to do the usual household chores such as cleaning, mending, washing up, etc.
Such, with small local variations, was the life of all Jews in Germany; the existence of the so-called “privileged” (Jews who had fathered children with Aryan spouses) differed only in that they mostly still lived together with their family members, did not need to wear a Jewish star and also received the normal ration cards but everything else, bans, blocked accounts, forced labour, bullying, denials and insults they shared with their other “racial comrades”.
Deportations and Vera’s final disappearance
Dela reported that she read many letters from the camps de Gurs, the detention camp at the foot of the Pyrenees, where deportations from Baden in Germany were carried out in late 1940, some time before the rest of deportations of Jews began. I don’t know if these were letters from a friend or how she saw events unravelling. They describe the appalling conditions but also the real sense of community, with people helping each other out – a shared life full of goal setting and bonding. Even when the end came “every death and every suicide triggered not sadness but relief and almost joy”.
Vera was at the Barmherzigen Schwestern (Sisters of Mercy Monastery) before being deported to somewhere in Nazi-occupied Poland. She was originally due to be deported to Piaski in April 1942 but somehow managed to appeal and did not leave.
If the “half-Aryan woman” Dela describes is my grandmother Vera Neumeyer, then clearly the Nazis took a last-minute decision to allow her to stay behind. Dela visited her there, and on the day Vera finally was deported , 13 July 1942, Dela went to the station to try to stop the deportation – but in vain. The letter to the family that Vera wrote on that train mentions the furniture van that took them to the station, confirming Dela’s description below.
Barmherzigen Schwestern (Sisters of Mercy Monastery), as it was in 1910. Vera spent her last weeks here before deportation in 1942
The transports of deportees to the train station were carried out in closed furniture vans, as passenger transport had become scarcer, and probably had to be saved for more important purposes than transporting Jews.
The first transport took place in Munich in November 1941. At that time it was still handled in such a “humane” way that those affected received a message a few days beforehand that they had to be ready from a certain day onwards, as they were being sent to “resettlement”. At the same time, all belongings had to be listed, such as cash, furniture, clothing, laundry. Hand luggage up to 30 kg was permitted, everything else went to the state. Large passenger transport cars went from house to house; four people came to each home: Gestapo officer, police officer, foreign exchange agent and a Jew as porter. Before leaving the living quarters, the list was handed in and the reverse signed, stating that the undersigned had lost his German citizenship as an enemy of the state. All those in the transport were sent to Jewish camps where the camp was hermetically sealed; the Gestapo and the SS took control of people and luggage.
It took on average three days for a transport to be dispatched. When the number was full, a train of heavily laden people went at night through a line of SS guards with revolvers to a goods station 2 km away, where they were loaded up and left, destination unknown. I learned these details from a half-Aryan woman who was left behind at the last moment. She even got her suitcase back, which had already gone through the SS control.
Watches were of course taken away, knives and forks, razor blades and utensils were forbidden, smoking materials and alcohol – about three days of travel provisions were taken, and only the most common medicines were allowed through.
The admirable bravery and willingness to help of some Jewish helpers made it possible to get some provisions to those who had already been cut off from the outside world, despite strict controls. The Jewish camp administration also did what it could to make these last days easier. Every deportee got a sleeping place, adequate food, no one left the camp at night without first checking in to get a good hot meal. Here too – willingness to help, mutual support, dignity and respect for fellow human beings. The regulation of the transport, selection of deportees, was now determined from Berlin. The Munich authorities, including the Gestapo and Gauleitung, had no influence on this.
With regard to the position of the compilation of this first transport, two aspects seemed to make the selection best: ability to work and the size of the blocked account. No authentic news ever reached home of this transport, which is said to have gone as far as Riga. This is in contrast to later transports that were directed to the Lublin area, from where shocking letters came: “send bread, send clothes, not a single item of the officially deposited luggage has reached us, send shoes and socks individually, not in pairs, otherwise they won’t arrive!” These things as well as cheap jewellery served there as objects of exchange for food. The diet there was a watery soup in the morning and at noon and 25 grams of bread a day. Those who could find farm jobs were a little better off, and could at least get a little more. On a card I read “morituri te salutant”, then after two or three months nothing else arrived.
Munich was now cleared of Jews fairly quickly, one transport after the other left, to Poland, to Upper Silesia, the sick, the physically handicapped, the elderly over 65 and all those who were somehow “preferential” (e.g. earlier holders of the Iron Cross, first class), as well as the Jewish widows from privileged mixed marriages, who had previously been spared, would go to Theresienstadt.
My grandmother Vera was deported from Liam Goods station in Munich on an ordinary third-class train with compartments, much like this one.
Berlin 1943: a snapshot
Stolperstein to Dela’s cousin, Franz Kaufmann
Dela certainly knew about Jews living “underground” in Berlin: her cousin Franz Kaufmann, was part of the web of residents helping smuggle out Jews to safety, although the Nazis eventually caught up with him and took him to Sachsenhausen, where he was shot.
In the week of the first heavy bombing on Berlin in March 1943, when one walked for days and weeks among rubble and broken glass, when thousands of Berliners had become homeless, thousands between broken walls, in houses without roofs, in rooms without ceilings and walls, living among charred rubble, that week the last few remaining Jews still working and living in Berlin were taken away from their living quarters without prior notice, picked up on the streets, taken from the factories, children without their parents, spouses individually from their places of work.
In that week, the majority of the so-called “privileged” people were suddenly picked up, but not deported, but collected in the houses of the Jewish administration. They never stayed there without their “Aryan” or “semi-Aryan” relatives being able to find out more about their whereabouts. After a few weeks or up to three weeks, they could suddenly be back home again.
SS formations had to be sent from Vienna to carry these actions out since the Berlin SS was so corrupt that it was no longer considered reliable.) The last remnants of those legally living in Berlin! On the other hand, thousands of Jews who had been reported to the police as dead or missing lived in Berlin were now living an “underground” life in broad daylight.
What it means to live in the Germany of 1943, where everyone was registered tenfold, unregistered with the police, without a work or identity card, is hard to imagine. Every bedroom was registered, not to be given a piece of bread or any other food without a permit. Military and civilian Gestapo checks on all railway lines, even in suburban areas – you had to be prepared for them.
You could expect racism in inns and on the streets every day – and yet there were 3,000 Jews living illegally in Berlin at the time.
Severe penalties threatened every German person who helped a Jew – and yet it happened in a devastating way and to the greatest extent. People from all walks of life took part in this response, and were filled with concern for those “in hiding”. Above all, it was a question of finding accommodation, holding cards, real or forged, foreign papers, real or forged, money (for a long time it had been forbidden for Jews for to sell anything of their possessions, cash was scarce, illegal life was not cheap), work under false names, the possibility of borrowing money, connections in other cities and in the country.
And people helped, people from all walks of life, all previous political leanings, former government clerks who would never have thought of anything illegal, took in strangers, allotment garden owners, bartenders and skippers, nurses and pastors, unemployed old ladies and official of the National Socialist state apparatus, who had to swear by oath that they had no connection with Jews.
Perhaps there was a lot of fatalism in the game – people who spent the nights in the air raid shelter, who didn’t know whether they would still have a roof over their heads the next day, whether they and their families would still be alive at all still lose these people? Was their fate essentially different from the fate of these thousands, who were driven into that homeless anonymity not by bombs but by criminal legislation? During these weeks something arose that no propaganda for a national community could have brought about in ten years—a real solidarity, a bond in the struggle against barbarism, reaching beyond all differences of class and race.
Women in Berlin removing rubble after bombing [US Holocaust Museum]
Conclusion
If I recall my impressions of the behaviour of the German people towards the Jewish question, it is not possible to make a sweeping generalisation. It would be unfair to saddle all Germans with guilt. Especially their experiences in Germany do not give rise to hope. The feeling of solidarity that crystallised more and more strongly between people and their fellow human beings, and the deepening abyss into which National Socialism drove the whole German people, gives me the conviction that people will still find each other again and again in Germany, ready to use their strength to build a new world.
The Ephraims and the Neumeyers 