The Villa Wannsee, site of the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942
The bureaucrats at Wannsee may have employed veiled language—perhaps the cruelest euphemisms in history—but the deportation process was open and visible enough to make it improbable that significant numbers of ordinary Berliners were unaware of the action, as many later claimed. Jewish citizens recalled their gentile neighbors observing the loading process from their houses and stores, and crowding around the stations to watch the transports depart. How then did the Berliners react to the horror that was transpiring under their noses? This of course is an integral part of the broader question of how “ordinary Germans” responded to the various stages of the Holocaust. The short answer is that in Berlin, as in other German cities, the majority of the people seem to have accepted this extraordinary development as if it were part of the natural order of events. Some actively welcomed the forced expulsion of a vilified minority, “gloating over the misery that had befallen their fellow citizens,” in the words of one witness. Others were ashamed of the deportations; and still others—perhaps as many as 30,000—tried to sabotage the process by hiding or otherwise helping their Jewish neighbors. (There is, alas, no monument in Berlin to this last group.) It is impossible to say exactly how many Berliners had clear knowledge of what was happening to the deportees once they arrived in the East, but by late 1942 accounts of mass killings, sent back by perpetrators and bystanders, were widely circulating in the city. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich wrote in her diary on December 2, 1942: “The Jews are disappearing in throngs. Ghastly rumors are current about the fate of the evacuees—mass shooting and death by starvation, tortures, and gassings.” Whatever their knowledge of the situation in the East, those Berliners who were disgusted by the sight of innocent people being dragged from their homes often felt powerless to help the afflicted, much less to thwart the process. At the very outset of the deportations, Ursula von Kardorff, a journalist at the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote in a letter to a friend: “The most depressing things are happening here. All Jews under eighty years of age are being transported to Poland. One sees only tearful wretches in the streets. It is horrible and cuts at one’s heart. The worst is that one watches it all so helplessly and can do so terribly little to help.”
Shameful as the deportations may have seemed to some Berliners, the SS concluded by late 1942 that the Berlin Gestapo was not acting ruthlessly enough in the removal process. Thus the local officials in charge of the operation were replaced by a team from Vienna (recently declared “Jew-free”) under the leadership of Alois Brunner, a gnomish Austrian who was quite un-Austrian in his mania for efficiency. Brunner saw his job as showing “those damn Prussian pigs how to handle filthy Jews.” Soon capacious moving vans driven by members of Brunner’s Judenpolizei (Jewish orderlies forced to work with the Nazis on pain of deportation themselves) ranged through the Jewish districts, transporting hundreds of Jews at a time to the collection centers for deportation. The Austrian saw to it that tighter controls were imposed at the predeportation center in Grosse Hamburger Strasse, a former Jewish old folks’ home that now replaced the smaller Levetzowstrasse site as Berlin’s main collection camp. When, in December 1942, the number of Jews designated for a transport did not materialize at Grosse Hamburger Strasse, Brunner “filled” the quota by shooting officials from the Jewish Gemeinde.
In autumn 1942 Jews working in Berlin’s vital war industries—some 20,000 of them as of November—were still kept off the deportation lists, but in December Brunner persuaded the Wehrmacht to allow the removal of these individuals if they could be replaced by Poles. On February 27, 1943, Brunner’s team and the Gestapo staged a Fabrikaktion (factory purge), in which some 5,000 Berlin Jews were pulled from their workplaces and homes for deportation to Auschwitz. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich described the scene on that day:
Since six o’clock this morning trucks have been driving through Berlin, escorted by armed SS men. They stop at factory gates, in front of private houses; they load in human cargo—men, women, children. Distracted faces are crowded together under the gray canvas covers. Figures of misery, penned in and jostled about like cattle going to the stockyards. More and more new ones arrive, and are thrust into the overcrowded trucks, with blows of gun butts. In six weeks Germany is to be ‘Jew-free.’
The number swept up in the Fabrikaktion would have been even higher had not some employers, anxious to preserve valued employees, warned their Jewish workers of the impending action. This infuriated Goebbels. “Our plans were tipped off prematurely, so that a lot of Jews slipped through our hands,” he wrote. “But we will catch them yet. I certainly won’t rest until the capital of the Reich, at least, has become free of Jews.” A few weeks later, on June 19, 1943, the Gauleiter claimed that the Nazi purge was indeed complete, and that Berlin was Judenfrei. In fact, this was still not the case, and Goebbels knew it, but Berlin’s large Jewish community had been reduced to a few thousand souls living in Judenäuser (Jewish-only residences), mixed marriages, and underground.
The transports continued to roll east almost to the end of the war, though with smaller and smaller cargoes. The ones in late 1944 averaged one hundred persons. The last shipment from Berlin, which contained 117 people bound for Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, departed on March 27, 1945, only about a month before the Russians overran the German capital. That the Nazis continued to employ scarce resources to transport fewer and fewer people was a testament to their fanaticism. In total, 50,535 Berliners were deported from the capital, 35,738 of them to Auschwitz.
The deportations, of course, added a new dimension of horror to the lives of those Jews who remained in Berlin. Everyone in the Jewish community was understandably terrified by this development, though in the first phase of the operation most were apparently unaware of what was happening to the deportees in the East. As Inge Deutschkron observed: “Of course I was afraid of what lay in store for me. We didn’t yet know precisely what fate awaited the deportees, but instinct told us that it was sure to be worse than what had gone before. I was also curious. What had happened to those who had already left? What could I expect?” It was not long before she had a clearer idea: “In November 1942 we learned about the gassings and executions for the first time via the BBC. We could not and did not want to believe it. And our ranks were thinning.”
Deutschkron watched as her aunt and uncle were taken away in late 1942. She saw what thousands of others were seeing (or choosing not to see):
Two Jewish orderlies wearing the yellow star went into the house. They reappeared minutes later behind my aunt, who was lugging the heavy backpacks. She walked quickly, as though eager to get it over with. My uncle followed haltingly. They didn’t look back as they stepped into the car, not a single backward look at the city that had been their home for almost thirty years. . . . [My mother and I] were the only ones on the street. Strange how the Berliners knew when to make themselves scarce so as not to have to see what was happening in their streets.