A History of Jews in Germany since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society
528
A History of Jews in Germany since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society
528Hardcover
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| ISBN-13: | 9780253025678 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press (Ips) |
| Publication date: | 02/26/2018 |
| Pages: | 528 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
DISPLACED PERSONS
AGAINST ALL EXPECTATIONS, defeated and occupied Germany became the unlikely and unloved, to many abhorrent, safe haven for about a quarter of a million Holocaust survivors, of whom the majority moved on after 1948–1949. During this time, they created a remarkable transitional society, especially around the larger DP camps located in and around Munich, Frankfurt, and West Berlin. These camps provided a space for a last revival of an Eastern European culture that had been forever destroyed while at the same time preparing its inhabitants for a future in a new homeland far from Europe, especially in Palestine. In effect, in this waiting room Jewish survivors created new, though transient, social arrangements. They came into contact with Germans, among whom they lived, and with the Americans and British who policed, protected, and supported them.
The great majority of the Jews stranded in Germany were of Eastern European, mainly Polish, origin, stateless "displaced persons," or DPs, as they were referred to by the Allies. They named themselves the She'erit Hapletah (the Surviving Remnant). Concentration camp and death march survivors who had been liberated in the territory controlled by the Nazis were joined by Jews who had survived as partisans or in hiding. Many had hoped to find family members and reclaim property "at home," in villages and towns throughout Eastern Europe. Mostly, they found a "vast graveyard"; they were the sole survivors and were not welcomed by non-Jewish neighbors who had appropriated their possessions.
The bitter truth was that almost all Jews who had been unable to evade capture during the German occupation had been murdered. The largest — and least researched — group of survivors living in the DP camps in Germany after 1945 were Jews who had found refuge in the Soviet Union under difficult, though often life-saving, circumstances and who had then been repatriated to Poland. But starting in late 1945, especially after the pogrom in the Polish city of Kielce on July 4, 1946, where at least forty-two Jews were murdered, and after about twice as many had been killed on trains and in neighboring towns, most of the surviving Polish Jews fled westward, as so-called infiltrees, to the American zone of occupation.
"MIR ZENEN DO"
Far from creating a purely "Aryanized" Reich, the genocidal war conducted by the Nazis, based on the enslavement and destruction of "racial inferiors," had left behind a remarkably multiethnic territory in postwar Germany. World War II had brought about historically unprecedented levels of expulsion and migration. The available statistical data on migration and displacement during the years between 1945 and 1949 vary considerably, regardless of whether they were gathered at the time or are the result of later historical research. The sheer numbers — and their unreliability — are clear signs of the chaos that accompanied the cessation of war, of the rapidly changing circumstances in which people found themselves, and of the urgent need on the part of the victors and aid organizations to control and direct the ensuing flood of DPs. Estimates immediately after the war speak of fifty-five million Europeans who were forced to leave their homes against their will between 1939 and 1945. As the Allies advanced into German territory, they found more than eight million people who qualified as displaced persons according to the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). Most of the approximately six million forced laborers, two million prisoners of war, and seven hundred thousand former concentration camp inmates were repatriated astonishingly quickly. At the end of September 1945, only about 1.2 million DPs remained, especially in the American and British zones. These UN DPs had been placed under the "care and control" of the American and British military government and of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which had been founded in 1943 primarily for the purpose of repatriating persons uprooted by Nazi violence and occupation. The Soviets, however, were not willing either to cooperate with UNRRA or to recognize the existence of DPs; the later French occupation established only a few receiving centers.
Nevertheless, the repatriation programs of the Western Allies and UNRRA proceeded with exceptional efficiency. The majority of Soviet citizens, a third of all DPs, were repatriated in accordance with the provisions adopted at Yalta by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. By the end of 1945, approximately three million Soviet citizens, including prisoners of war, had returned home, some of them against their will. Those who remained sometimes tried to pass as citizens of other countries in order to evade forced repatriation. About a fifth of the DPs in the Western occupation zones were children, many of them "unaccompanied," in the euphemistic language of the aid organizations; that is, they were orphaned or alone. Almost half (400,000–500,000) were non-Jewish Poles, and about a quarter (175,000–200,000) were Balts who did not want to return to their homelands, which had been swallowed by the Soviet Union. There were also Hungarians and Yugoslavs, as well as smaller groups of Greeks, Bulgarians, Czechs, Slovaks, and even Iranians and Turks.
Originally, the Jews were a tiny minority in this sea of humanity forced from their homelands by the war and the population displacements triggered by the Nazi regime. Only about seventy thousand to ninety thousand Jews were liberated on German soil. Liberation came too late for many, and they died within a few weeks, leaving only between fifty thousand and seventy thousand Jewish survivors. The estimates of the proportion of Jews in the total number of DPs vary depending upon when the counts were done. Initially, people spoke of only about 2 percent. But as the repatriations progressed, the percentage of Jews soon reached between 10 and 20 percent, and after late 1945 — intensifying after the Kielce pogrom — the flood of Jews from Poland changed the national and ethnic profile of the DPs considerably. Immediately after the war, many of the Jewish survivors were gathered in the British zone; however, the willingness of the Americans to take in Eastern European "infiltrees" led to a reversal, making the U.S. zone the most important destination for Jewish survivors.
Given the situation that Jewish survivors found in Eastern Europe, their "return to the home country had been a pseudo-repatriation. It had lacked the necessary ingredients of a bona-fide homecoming. It was rather the final visit of a mourner to his family burial plot — the refugee's last look at his native land to which his forefathers had been attached for generations, but which he had to leave forever. His homage paid to dear ones, his last glimpse taken, he then set out on a new exodus in the hope of eventually reaching more hospitable soil." As a result of this migratory wave, by the fall of 1947 about 91 percent of all Jewish DPs were in the American zone, and they comprised at least a quarter of all DPs registered by UNRRA. The precise figures are unknown and will probably remain so, but in any case, current estimates exceed the official figures at the time. Malcolm Proudfoot, one of the many officials in UNRRA and other aid organizations who wrote about Allied efforts to manage this mass of the "uprooted," counted 157,000 for the summer of 1947 alone, and current historical research suggests a total of about 250,000 Jewish DPs. These survivors of the Final Solution and forced Soviet exile unexpectedly became an irritating presence both for the Allies and for the Germans. It was no accident that the Jewish survivors, no matter how varied their origins and wartime experience, defiantly adopted as their motto the refrain from Hirsch Glick's partisan song "Mir zenen do" (We are here), as if to demonstrate to all their collective presence in the territory of the Reich that had attempted to destroy them.
UNDER BRITISH CONTROL
Immediately after the end of the war, a large majority of the She'erit Hapletah in Germany was located in the British zone of occupation. Bergen-Belsen in particular had during the last year of the war become the final destination of numerous death marches: as the Eastern front moved inexorably westward, tens of thousands of inmates were evacuated from the concentration and death camps in the East. During the winter of 1944–1945, other transports from all over Germany began to reach the catastrophically overcrowded camp. The final weeks before the liberation was announced (in five languages) were especially dramatic. As many as five hundred inmates died each day. More than forty-three thousand people were wedged into a space that a year earlier had accommodated no more than two thousand.
The horror that confronted the British soldiers was indescribable. Epidemics had spread, and the stench of rotting corpses and fecal matter took the soldiers' breath away. It is estimated that sixty thousand persons, of whom half were Jews, were still alive — precisely how many will never be known, because the camp commanders had long since stopped keeping records. People continued to die as a consequence of the inhuman conditions that had prevailed at Bergen-Belsen, even after the British liberated the camp on April 15, partly as a result of rapid but misguided attempts to feed the survivors. By the beginning of the summer, the situation had slowly begun to stabilize, and it is estimated that perhaps twenty thousand Jews were still in the camp, among them an unusually large number of women and almost five hundred children. Many of the liberated had only recently arrived at Bergen-Belsen with transports and death marches from Buchenwald and Theresienstadt.
In order to contain the raging epidemics, the liberated inmates were evacuated from the infected barracks and taken to nearby Wehrmacht quarters. In fact, the British set Camp I of the Bergen-Belsen camp complex on fire. They had given the former Wehrmacht facility, consisting of barracks and officers' housing, the neutral-sounding name DP Hohne Camp, but in memory of the suffering endured in the concentration camp, the survivors insisted on renaming it DP Camp Bergen-Belsen.
Despite efforts at repatriation, the new housing was totally unable to accommodate all of the concentration camp survivors, and so an attempt was made to find a solution in the nearby town of Celle, located north of Bergen-Belsen. In 1933 only seventy Jews had lived there; former barracks were repurposed, and a total of ten thousand DPs of various nationalities were distributed among four sites around the city. It is unclear exactly how many Jews were among them, but in all probability they constituted 25 percent.
On May 6, 1,135 Polish Jews, along with non-Jewish Poles, were assigned to the Heidekaserne DP camp in Celle. The conditions there were catastrophic, and the food was completely inadequate. The majority of the DPs still had to wear their shabby, filthy inmates' garb, but the fact that their barracks were protected by British soldiers, that no barbed wire hindered their movements, and that the streets of the city were populated by a mix of refugees from multiple countries gave them at least a sense that freedom was at hand.
The number of Jews in Celle fluctuated widely. While some of the DPs returned to Belsen, others settled in private accommodations in the British occupation zone. As the situation in Celle slowly stabilized during the summer of 1945, Jewish survivors built a new community that was closely connected with the Bergen-Belsen DP camp but completely different from the small prewar German-Jewish community.
In the immediate postwar period, both the Americans and the British adhered strictly to the assembly and repatriation plans along national lines that had been hammered out at Yalta and Potsdam. This segregation of refugees by national origin or citizenship meant that Jews and non-Jews from Eastern Europe were housed according to their countries of origin — which in turn meant that Jews from Poland, Russia, or the Ukraine might live in close quarters with former Nazi collaborators. Moreover, they were often subjected to virulent antisemitism by non-Jewish DPs.
While the Americans recognized the Jewish DPs as a separate national group in the fall of 1945 and settled them in special DP camps, the British government resisted such distinctions until the end of the occupation. The British, whose intensive efforts to save the survivors of Bergen-Belsen had garnered international attention, were, for multiple reasons, nonetheless unwilling to recognize the Jews as a separate group. Great Britain was preoccupied with its own postwar reconstruction, and the costs of occupying the most industrialized (and therefore least agrarian) part of Germany were a great burden. Ideologically, the British insisted that recognizing the identity of a certain ethnic or religious group would revive and give credence to precisely those racial categories that they had entered the war to oppose. But above all, they feared that recognizing Jewish DPs as a national group would facilitate immigration to Palestine and exacerbate the conflict between Arabs and Jews in the territory under British mandate.
Despite British occupation policies, the Committee of Liberated Jews in the British zone, encouraged by decisions made in the American zone, succeeded in establishing separate Jewish housing units, at least in Bergen-Belsen. After a number of incidents and violent protests, the British finally decreed in May 1946 that non-Jewish DPs had to leave the camp, assuring that Bergen-Belsen developed into a de facto all Jewish DP camp. In fact, with a population of nine thousand it was until its dissolution in 1951 the heart of the She'erit Hapletah in the British zone and, indeed, the largest Jewish DP camp in occupied Germany.
In addition to Bergen-Belsen, Jewish DPs in the British zone were housed in a total of forty-five DP camps, many of them very small. A few DPs settled in the cities. In other regions in the British zone, by contrast, Jewish refugees continued to be housed together with Polish forced laborers and prisoners of war, and sometimes even with Lithuanian collaborators.
In early 1946, after border controls were tightened, the Jewish population in the British zone stabilized at approximately sixteen thousand persons. The vast majority were of Polish origin; Hungarian Jews comprised about a quarter, along with a fairly sizable group of Romanian Jews.
THE AMERICAN ZONE AS SAFE HAVEN
The Jewish DPs in the American zone lived primarily in Bavaria, especially in the area controlled by Gen. George S. Patton's Third Army, XX Corps. At the end of 1945, about two-thirds of all Jewish DPs in the American zone lived in this region, located in and around Munich and bordering on Austria and the French occupation zone. Here, not far from the liberated Dachau concentration camp and its numerous subcamps, Jewish DP camps at Feldafing, Landsberg, and Föhrenwald, as well as the Jewish DP hospital in St. Ottilien Monastery, were established. Zalman Grinberg, the later chair of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American zone, managed to commandeer the Benedictine monastery, which had previously served as an SS field hospital, and make it available to Jewish DPs. After the arrival of the Allies, Grinberg, then a young physician, was appointed head of the hospital, which soon cared for four hundred patients, all of them survivors of the death marches.
The first inhabitants of Feldafing DP camp, which was located on the shore of picturesque Lake Starnberg, were also survivors from Dachau and its Kaufering subcamp. In August 1945 more than six thousand persons lived at the former elite Nazi boarding school (Napola), where only a few months earlier a new generation of Nazis had completed their training. Supported by the Jewish Brigade, a unit of the British army recruited in Palestine, and the American Jewish chaplain Abraham Klausner, the Feldafing DPs began to organize themselves. Feldafing therefore became the first purely Jewish DP camp in Germany, even before the Jewish DPs had been recognized as a national group.
In response to reports by ordinary Jewish GIs and Jewish chaplains serving in the American military about the terrible conditions in the camps, as well as pressure exerted by American Jewish organizations, President Truman sent Earl G. Harrison, the newly appointed dean of the Law School at the University of Pennsylvania and a former commissioner for immigration and naturalization under President Roosevelt, to investigate the "conditions and needs" of the displaced persons "particularly those who may be stateless or non-repatriable." The report that Harrison sent to Truman at the end of August 1945 proved to be a political bombshell and had wide-ranging consequences for the immediate and long-term future of the Jewish survivors.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A History Of Jews In Germany Since 1945"
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Table of Contents
Introduction Michael BrennerBanished: Jews in Germany after the Holocaust Dan DinerPart One: Way Station 1945–1949Atina Grossmann and Tamar Lewinsky1. Displaced Persons2. An Autonomous Society3. German Jews4. Dissolution and EstablishmentPart Two: 1950–1967 Michael Brenner and Norbert Frei5. Institutional New Beginning6. Religion and Culture7. German Jews or Jews in Germany?8. After the Deed9. Germans and Jews during the Decade of the "Enlightenment"Part Three: 1968–1989 AlignmentsConstantin Goschler and Anthony Kauders10. The Jewish Community11. The Jews in German SocietyPart Four: 1990–2012New Directions12. The Russian-Jewish ImmigrationYfaat Weiss and Lena Gorelik13. A New German Jewry?Michael BrennerAppendixAcknowledgmentsTimelineChairpersons and Presidents of the Central Council of Jews in GermanyStatisticsAbbreviationsArchivesReferencesWhat People are Saying About This
The recent radical changes in German politics make Michael Brenner’s handbook on the history of post-war Jewry in German the essential text for scholars and students. Written by the preeminent specialists from the USA, Israel, and Germany it presents in clear and accessible language the complex and contradictory trajectory of Jewish life reestablishing itself in the German states and then in a united Germany. The reappearance of radical right-wing xenophobia makes this history of Jews in Germany an even more important addition to our book shelves and classroom reading lists.
In Michael Brenner’s exceptional overview of Jewish history in Germany, some of the most renowned experts in the field tell the compelling tale of what happened after the Holocaust – from the first days of the post-war era, when some Jews remained, apprehensively, on Germany’s "blood stained soil," until today, when they are there to stay. Chapters describe the plight of the survivors and Displaced Persons, the consolidation of a small Jewish community, and the immigration-driven growth of a new, larger, and increasingly diverse one. Never overlooking the abyss of the Holocaust, the authors sensitively analyze how Jews reacted to, acted in, and interacted with an ever-evolving Germany.