Yet the majority of the Jews remaining in Berlin still failed to get the message— or, more accurately, continued to refuse to act on a message that was becoming clearer by the day. In the spring of 1941 the Jewish presence in the city had not diminished significantly despite all the intimidation and threats. Surveying the situation on March 20, 1941, Leopold Gutterer, Goebbels’s deputy, fumed that it was not right “that the capital of the National Socialist Reich should still harbor such a large number of Jews.” Goebbels himself, still pressing for a mass deportation to Poland, believed that Hitler would soon endorse such a “solution.” After all, he noted, Hitler’s master builder for Berlin, Speer, could certainly use the twenty thousand or so dwellings still occupied by Jews “as a reserve for those rendered homeless by greater bombing damage and later by demolition connected with the revamping of Berlin.”
In August 1941 Goebbels received a promise from Hitler that the deportation of Berlin’s Jews would begin as soon as the means of transportation became available and arrangements for their expulsion could be worked out. He ordered a survey to determine which Jews might be employed in work crucial to the war effort and which where “ripe” for deportation. In the meantime, in September 1941, the Gauleiter was authorized to make life even more miserable for the capital’s remaining Jews by forcing them to wear a yellow Star of David patch on their clothing. Beginning in October 1941, Jews could use Berlin’s public transportation system (but not the seats) only with special permission, and in April 1942 they were banned from it entirely. During air raids they were obliged to go to their own shelters, separate from those of the Aryans. They were also barred from shopping in “German” stores or employing the services of “German tradesmen.” They could not walk in the public parks or appear in the streets after 8:00 P.M. A decree of December 21, 1941, prohibited Jews from using public telephones. As of early 1942, Jews were required to turn over to the state such “luxury” items as radios, bicycles, typewriters, gramophones, electric stoves, and hand mirrors. To ensure that all Jews would live in the “harsh climate” that the Nazis said they deserved, monthly support payments for the sick and elderly were drastically reduced.
Many Jews evaded the regulations as best they could. Young Inge Deutschkron had no intention of abiding by the restrictions concerning freedom of movement and association. “I wasn’t ready to spend my life without occasionally going to a play or concert or for a walk in the park. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending all my time in the company of Jews exclusively. All they ever talked of was Nazi persecutions and their own anxieties—a litany of fear, apprehension, and self-torture.” Nor did she always wear her stigmata—the Star of David—when out in public. She carried a second jacket without the star and furtively changed into it before riding the subway or entering stores where Jews were not allowed. As she recalled, “I went through my coat-changing routine often, not only because Jews were barred from using public transportation except when going to and from work, but also because our grocer would not have been able to wait on us if I had come in wearing the star; nor would Mrs. Gumz have been allowed to do our laundry or give me the meat she got for us at the butcher’s.” As Deutschkron’s account makes clear, she and other Berlin Jews relied on the help of non-Jewish friends and neighbors to get around some of the Nazi rules. They obtained food beyond their official rations from grocers who slipped them “a little something extra” under the counter. They stored their valuables in the basements or attics of gentile acquaintances.
The number of people affected by the anti-Jewish regulations was finally shrinking significantly, however, for an order to begin the deportation of Berlin’s Jews was signed by Kurt Daluege, chief of the city’s Order Police, on October 14, 1941. Having waited impatiently for this moment, Goebbels was jubilant. By way of justifying this measure to the public, he recalled Hitler’s prophecy, delivered in a speech to the Reichstag in January 1939, that “if the Jews involved in international high finance were to succeed in dragging the peoples of the world into another war, the result would be not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but rather the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.” The world would now witness the fulfillment of this prophecy, the Gauleiter wrote. He added that if the Jews were in for a “harsh” time, this was simply what they deserved. “Pity or regret is completely out of place here.”
Out of place indeed. The ensuing roundup and deportation of Berlin’s Jews set a new standard for brutality in a city that had seen its full share of inhumanity. On October 15, 1941, Gestapo men appeared at the homes of the families earmarked for the first “evacuation” and ordered each family to pack one suitcase. The families were held for three days in the partially ruined synagogue in the Levetzow-strasse, where they were cared for by members of the Jewish Gemeinde (community). (The Gestapo forced the cooperation of Jewish leaders in the deportation process by threatening even harsher measures in the event of noncompliance.) On October 18 the group set out in heavy rain for the freight railway station at Grunewald— able-bodied men and women marched the entire distance, children and the infirm were transported in open trucks. At Grunewald they were loaded into third-class passenger cars supplied by the Reichsbahn, which charged the SS four pfennigs per adult per kilometer, with kids riding free. Here, too, officials from the Jewish Gemeinde proved of assistance, issuing instructions to the deportees “to keep in mind that your demeanor and your orderly compliance with the regulations will contribute substantially to the smooth processing of the transport.” According to one witness, the loading proceeded “without crowding or other impositions.”
That first transport, carrying about 1,000 Jews, was bound for the ghetto of Lodz in eastern Poland. In subsequent weeks trains carried thousands more to the ghettos and concentration camps being hastily established in the East. For the vast majority of the deportees, work ghettos like Lodz were simply way stations to the killing fields of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps. The loading ramp at Grunewald was the last patch of Berlin that these people would ever see.
Well after the first transports of Jews from Berlin and other German cities were underway, and well after the mass murder of Jews in the conquered eastern regions had begun, a group of Nazi officials met in the capital to systematize the killing process. The conference took place on January 20, 1942, in a Wannsee villa then serving as a guest house for the SS. The setting could hardly have been more ironic, for Wannsee was Berlin’s favorite playground, an idyllic stretch of beach and water invariably crowded on summer days with sunbathers, swimmers, and amateur sailors. Host for the meeting was Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst— Security Service) of the SS. Participants included officials from Justice Ministry, Interior Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Ministry for Eastern Regions, and the Reich Chancellery. These men were not known to be fanatical anti-Semites; rather, they were “Technocrats of Death”—bureaucrats dutifully organizing the mechanics of murder as if they were discussing interagency cooperation in the building of a new highway system. The written protocol of the meeting, compiled by Adolf Eich-mann, is all the more chilling for its sober, bureaucratic tone. While avoiding reference to extermination or even to camps, it conveys clearly enough what the regime had in mind. One passage reads:
In the course of the final solution, the Jews will be put to work in appropriate fashion in the East. Large work groups, separated by sex, will be employed in road construction, whereby a significant component will of course fall aside in a natural culling process. Because the surviving elements will doubtless consist of the most resilient types, capable if released of forming the core of a Jewish revival, they will have to be dealt with accordingly. To effect the final solution, Europe will be combed [for Jews] from West to East. . . . The evacuated Jews will be conveyed first to so-called transit ghettos, then transported further into the East.