Not all of Berlin’s remaining Jews chose to wait dutifully for the authorities to come and cart them away. Some abandoned the Judenhäuser, threw away their identification papers marked with a “J,” and went underground. When these so-called U-Boote (submarines) resurfaced, they had to be equipped with forged identification papers and ration cards, or forged Bombensheine (bomb certificates) stating that they had lost their papers in a raid. Obviously this made them all the more dependent on assistance and protection from sympathetic gentiles. Although helping Jews was a risky business—if caught, offenders faced imprisonment—enough Berliners took the risk that some 1,321 Jews managed to stay safely submerged in the city until the Nazi collapse.
The number of survivors might have been somewhat higher had not a few Berlin Jews, desperate to save themselves and their relatives, lent their services to the Gestapo in its efforts to bring “submarines” to the surface. Called Greifer (grabbers) by their Jewish prey, these figures did not have to wear the yellow star or abide by the various restrictions on movement. As long as they continued to bring in their quota of fellow Jews, they were kept off the deportation lists.
One of the most intrepid of the grabbers was a woman named Stella Kübler (neé Goldschlag), the subject of a searing portrait by journalist/historian Peter Wyden, who interviewed her after the war. A beautiful blond who did not “look Jewish,” or, for that matter, feel Jewish, Stella deeply resented being subjected to the restrictions imposed on the Jewish community. Like Inge Deutschkron, but much more brazenly, she flaunted the Nazis’ regulations, virtually never wearing her yellow star and regularly frequenting popular bars and cafés until the wee hours of the morning. She could not, however, evade being put to work in a Siemens arms factory, which she hated. In spring 1943 she decided to become a “submarine,” albeit hardly a deep-diver. Unable to stay away from her beloved Nachtlokale, she was spotted by an old friend from her Jewish school, who turned out to be a grabber on the prowl. Stella was arrested and taken to Burgstrasse 26, the Gestapo headquarters for Berlin’s central district. According to her later testimony, the authorities tortured her, then offered her the choice between deportation to the East and becoming a grabber herself. The Nazis were especially keen to enlist her because she seemed perfect for the role—a “blond, blue-eyed Jewess who could wiggle her way into any male confidence, who knew the habits, contacts, hiding places, and psychology of the U-boats, who could spot these tenacious resisters on the streets and in the cafés, and who was herself so desperate, so greedy to survive, and tough enough to recover from torture with no visible damage.”
So Stella went to work trolling for U-boats, focusing on places like the Swiss embassy and a string of West End cafés where she knew her prey liked to submerge themselves in the crowds. She stayed on the hunt even after her parents were sent to Theresienstadt. Her only drawback as a grabber was that she was well known among the U-boats, who called her “Lorelei,” after the legendary Rhine siren who lured river sailors to their deaths on the rocks where she perched. Despite her notoriety, she managed to bag her share of victims and stay in the good graces of her keepers. She pursued this work until the autumn of 1944, when, guessing that the Nazis were likely to lose the war, she began to pull back, pleading that there were no more Jews left to grab. She managed to hold out for the remainder of the war, only to be grabbed herself by Berlin’s new rulers after the city fell to the Russians. She was tried and sentenced to ten years in Soviet prisons, which led her to see herself as a “victim of the Jews,” on whom she blamed her fate.
Inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 1943
Fortunately, types like Stella were an exception in Berlin’s Jewish community, and there was always the counterexample of those who sought actively to sabotage the Nazi system. In Berlin a small coterie of Jewish resisters clustered around a charismatic communist named Herbert Baum. All were working-class and passionately leftist in orientation. Intriguingly, a number of them worked at the same Siemens plant that employed Stella Kübler. At first the members of the Baum Group restricted themselves to distributing anti-Nazi propaganda and helping other Jews and leftists escape from the Reich. On May 18, 1942, however, they took the bold step of bombing an anti-Soviet exhibition in the Lustgarten, which resulted in the capture of some members of the organization. Baum himself was arrested and subjected to severe torture, to which he eventually succumbed. Other members of the group were sentenced to death by the People’s Court and executed at Plötzensee Prison on the west side of Berlin. As added retribution, the Gestapo shot 250 Jews at the Lichtenfeld Cadet School and dispatched another 250 to Sachsenhausen and other camps.
A rather different instance of resistance involved a protest by the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men and Mischlinge (partial Jews) who were being held at a detention center in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse. In their determination to make Berlin “Jew-free,” the capital’s Nazi functionaries had begun to deport a few Mischlinge and intermarried Jews at the beginning of 1943. They were also deporting leaders of the Jewish Gemeinde, including Leo Baeck, who was sent to Theresienstadt. In February 1943 they planned a “Final Roundup” that would cleanse the city of remaining Jews. The Fabrikaktion of February 27, 1943, constituted the first stage of the planned multiday sweep; it included Mischlinge and intermarried Jews, as did roundups on subsequent days. On Eichmann’s orders, most of these Jews were interned at Rosenstrasse 2-4, a youth and welfare office of the Jewish Gemeinde. This measure was designed to make the internees and their relatives think that they would not suffer the same fate as the other Jews caught up in the sweep. Siegbert Kleeman, a functionary of the Gemeinde, knew better: “These Jews at Rosenstrasse were supposed to be put on a train, and then no one would have heard from them again,” he said.
As word spread via “mouth radio” that intermarried Jews were being detained at the Rosenstrasse center, relatives of the internees began rushing to the scene. Soon a crowd of women gathered across the street from the building. Such public gatherings were strictly illegal, but the authorities hesitated to intervene, preferring to search for the organizers. There were none. This was an entirely spontaneous action—an outburst of love suddenly become desperate. “We want our husbands back!” shouted the women as they walked up and down in the street. The women continued their protest even as an Allied air raid brought buildings crashing down all over the area. Guards at the detention center fled the building after sealing the prisoners inside. Much to the relief of the women, not to mention their interned husbands, Rosenstrasse 2-4 emerged unscathed from the raid.
By early March the regime had decided to wait the women out, expecting that they would soon tire of their protest and go home. But they did not; on the contrary, the crowd grew as more relatives, emboldened by the Nazis’ inaction, joined the protest. Threats from the police to shoot into the crowd managed to disperse it momentarily, but within minutes the protesters were back, shouting for their husbands.
With the protest dragging on, Goebbels became convinced that it would be safer for the regime to relent in this case rather than to crack down. He could see that the protesters wanted only to keep their families together, not to challenge the system as such. Moreover, the women involved were non-Jews, and their plight might easily illicit the sympathy of all married women, regardless of their husband’s race. Even the Nazis were intelligent enough to understand that stirring up the nation’s women was a bad idea. As Hitler himself was to say later: “Women’s political hatred is extremely dangerous.”