Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis
352
Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis
352eBook
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Overview
“One of the most incredible stories of World War II.” —Dallas Morning News
How did Berlin’s Jewish Hospital, in the middle of the Nazi capital, survive as an institution where Jewish doctors and nurses cared for Jewish patients throughout World War II? How could it happen that when Soviet troops liberated the hospital in April 1945, they found some eight hundred Jews still on the premises? Daniel Silver carefully uncovers the often surprising answers to these questions and, through the skillful use of primary source materials and the vivid voices of survivors, reveals the underlying complexities of human conscience.
The story centers on the intricate machinations of the hospital’s director, Herr Dr. Lustig, a German-born Jew whose life-and-death power over medical staff and patients and finely honed relationship with his own boss, the infamous Adolf Eichmann, provide vital pieces to the puzzle—some have said the miracle—of the hospital’s survival. Silver illuminates how the tortured shifts in Nazi policy toward intermarriage and so-called racial segregation provided a further, if hugely counterintuitive, shelter from the storm for the hospital’s resident Jews. Scenes of daily life in the hospital paint an often heroic and always provocative picture of triage at its most chillingly existential. Not since Schindler’s List have we had such a haunting story of the costs and mysteries of individual survival in the midst of a human-created hell.
“Gripping . . . one physician’s actions are depicted in all their fascinating complexity.” —The Washington Post Book World
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547975054 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 03/19/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 28,300 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Preface The Story Behind the Story
In August 1945, Ernie Mayerfeld, a nineteen-year-old GI stationed in Berlin, received a letter from his father in New York asking him to undertake a mission for a family friend.
Until 1938 the elder Mayerfeld had been a prosperous leather distributor in Frankfurt. Even as the Nazi persecution mounted in Germany, it had seemed inconceivable to Herr Mayerfeld that the family’s comfortable life would be disrupted permanently. After all, the family’s roots in Germany and Austria went back hundreds of years. (The residence of one ancestor, the Baron Eskeles, whose wife was a patroness of Mozart, today serves as the home of Vienna’s Jewish Museum.) And after the Nazis took power in 1933, he still could not foresee the worst. Had he not received a medal for his service at the front in World War I, accompanied by a letter of thanks signed by Der Führer himself ? Not even the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, in which Herr Mayerfeld narrowly escaped arrest, had convinced him to emigrate. Only in the ensuing months when his suppliers would no longer sell him the merchandise needed for his business was he finally persuaded to flee.
And so, virtually at the last possible moment and aided by a large dose of good luck, the Mayerfelds escaped and eventually made their way to New York, where fourteen-year-old Ernst turned himself into Ernie, an American teenager. Five years later, after fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, he returned to the country of his birth as one of the occupying U.S. troops.
His father’s request was one of many that Ernie had received asking him to look for surviving relatives of German Jewish émigrés in the United States. Frequently, the searches were unavailing. But in this case, Herr Mayerfeld’s friend was certain that his sister, Johanna Frank, had survived the war as a nurse in the Berlin Jewish Hospital. He sent a package of foodstuffs to be delivered to her.
And so one day Ernie made his way through the rubble and devastation of occupied Berlin to 2 Iranischestrasse in the Wedding district. There he found a spacious compound of seven buildings set in a large garden. Carved in stone over the main entrance on Iranischestrasse, in the pediment of the administration building, was the name Krankenhaus der Jüdischen Gemeinde, or Hospital of the Jewish Community. Johanna Frank was indeed there, attending to her nursing duties.
“The buildings were all still standing,” Ernie remembered, “although some of them had taken hits in the bombing. Inside, though, it was unbelievable. Doctors in white coats and nurses in clean, starched uniforms bustled through spotless corridors and rooms, attending to their patients.” It was as if the twelve years of Nazi horror had never happened. Astounded by what he found, Ernie asked Schwester Johanna and her coworkers how it was possible that this hospital, full of Jews, had made it through the Nazi period. All agreed that it was a miracle, but no one had a coherent explanation to offer.
More than half a century passed, filled with marriage, family, and a successful career as a CIA officer and later as a lawyer in the CIA’s Office of General Counsel. From time to time Ernie thought about his strange experience at the Berlin Jewish Hospital and wondered about the story that lay behind it, but he had no time to make inquiries.
At a dinner party in the late 1970s or early 1980s, about the same time that Ernie and I became legal colleagues at the CIA and grew to be close friends, I met Klaus Zwilsky, a charming and ebullient man, then in his fifties, who spoke with a slight German accent. Over the years we continued to see each other. One night over dinner, the talk turned to how it must feel to live under the constant threat of bombing. I don’t remember how the topic arose; probably we were talking about Beirut or one of the world’s other perennial hot spots.
Klaus listened for a while and then volunteered a comment, describing his own emotions as a child in Berlin in 1944 and 1945, cowering fearfully in the cellar while Allied bombers attacked the city.
“But, Klaus,” someone said. “I don’t understand. You’re Jewish; your parents were both 100 percent Jewish. How could you have been living in Berlin during the last years of the war?” “My father worked at the Jewish hospital,” Klaus explained, “and we all lived there.” He said a few more words about his experience of the Allied air raids, and the conversation moved on to other things.
In this way I too learned that a Jewish hospital in Berlin had remained open throughout the entire Nazi era and that Jewish doctors, nurses, administrators, and patients had survived there. The fact astonished me. I thought I knew a goood deal about the Nazi persecution of German Jews. I had read widely on the subject of the Holocaust. I was aware that a handful of Jews haddddd survived in Germany, some in hiding, some “protected” by marriage to non-Jews. But I also knew — or thought I knew — that the Nazis had ruthlessly extirpated every trace of Jewish life in Germany. They had destroyed the synagogues, desecrated the cemeteries, dissolved the Jewish organizations, prohibited Jewish worship, driven two-thirds of Germany’s Jews into exile, and then deported all but a handful of those who remained — the “lucky” ones to the ghetto established in Theresienstadt in what had once been Czechoslovakia, and the rest to the death camps of Eastern Europe. How, then, was it possible that a Jewish hospital operating openly under the name Krankenhaus der Jüdischen Gemeinde had continued to exist in Berlin throughout the war? How was it that Klaus and his parents, full Jews with no apparent form of “protection,” could have survived the war living in that hospital?
The question kept recurring through the next two decades of a life that, like Ernie’s, was too busy to permit further investigation. Klaus, who had been only a child during the war years, was reticent about his experiences and volunteered no further explanation. I could find nothing written on the subject in English-language sources. Years went by, years during which from time to time I would say to myself, “Someday I need to find out about the Jewish hospital,” and then move on to whatever preoccupation was more pressing.
Finally, the day came when circumstances made it possible for me to begin serious research on the Berlin Jewish Hospital during the wartime years. My immediate thought was to ask Ernie Mayerfeld if he would be interested in joining me.
“Did you know that there was a Jewish hospital in Berlin that operated all the way through World War II?” I asked.
His response took me by surprise. Everyone else to whom I mentioned this fact reacted with astonishment. Ernie looked sheepish.
“Not only do I know that,” he said haltingly. “I was there.” He proceeded to tell me the story of his 1945 visit.
We agreed that we would set out together to find out how and why this hospital, alone among all of Germany’s Jewish institutions, had survived when everything else associated with German Jewry was being destroyed. Our initial objective was to satisfy our own curiosity. As we found out more, however, we agreed that we should write something that would bring this astonishing story to the public’s attention. Our determination to do so was strengthened when we discovered that the only Internet reference we could find was on a scurrilous neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denial Web site where the fact that the Berlin Jewish Hospital operated throughout the war was adduced as “proof” that the Nazi atrocities had never occurred.
Our research quickly revealed that the essential facts relating to the Berlin Jewish Hospital were not unknown in the small circle of scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of the German Jewish experience during the Nazi era. Indeed, many facts pertaining to the hospital’s survival from 1938 through 1945 have been recorded in two German-language publications — in a small monograph devoted to the 1938–45 period and in portions of a larger history of the hospital. Both were the products of extensive archival research and of interviews with war survivors. The findings of the monograph were summarized in English in an article in a scholarly journal, the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book. Passing references to the hospital also could be found in other scholarly books on German Jewry during the Nazi era. Thus we found that the task of preserving the record for the scholarly community had largely been completed.
Nor had the existence of the hospital in the war period completely escaped the attention even of authors who wrote for a more popular audience. Fleeting references to it gave evidence that they knew it was there. For example, in a fascinating book, The Last Jews in Berlin, Leonard Gross tells the stories of several Jews who survived the final years of the Nazi period in hiding in Berlin. A passing reference makes clear that he knew that the hospital was in operation throughout this period, but nothing more is said about the institution and the large number of Jews who were living there openly.
None of the scholarly or passing accounts, we felt, satisfactorily addressed two important questions. Again and again we asked ourselves, “How could this have happened?” So, too, has almost everyone who has encountered the simple fact of the hospital’s survival. Another question that the barest outline of the facts about the hospital urgently raises is: “What was it like to live and work in such circumstances?” And so we set out to do two things. First, we wanted to supplement the existing historical record as much as possible, knowing that the number of living witnesses already had been greatly diminished by the passage of so many years. Second, we decided to write this book, and in so doing, to attempt to answer our two questions.
Sources
In pursuit of the first objective we turned to something new, the Internet, and something traditional, a newspaper. We posted an appeal for information on the Internet Web site of the German Special Interest Group of the Jewish Genealogy Net, and we published an advertisement in the newspaper Aufbau, the German- language periodical of the German Jewish émigré community. It was Ernie who remembered that his parents had read Aufbau avidly in his youth. It was a surprise to us both to find that it still was being published. It was an even greater surprise, in the weeks and months that ensued, to receive e-mail messages, letters, and telephone calls in response both to the Internet posting and to the Aufbau advertisement, although primarily the latter. The communications came from all over — mostly from the United States, but also from Germany, Israel, Brazil, Australia, Canada, and France. In some instances, we were contacted directly by people who had been in the hospital, either as patients or as members of the staff. In other cases, friends and relatives gave us information on how we might be able to find former hospital patients or employees whom they knew. The total number of people still alive who once had worked or lived at the hospital was not huge — fewer than twenty — but, in light of the passage of more than half a century since the end of the war, it was more than we had dared hope for.
We called and wrote to the people who seemed most likely to have useful information and began to conduct interviews. One of these never took place; the subject died before the date of our appointment. Another was canceled when the subject, a former hospital prison patient from 1944 to the end of the war who initially had been enthusiastic about telling his story, called in a state of agitation and said that he was afraid that our visit would awaken unpleasant memories. We desisted, but Ernie gently managed to gather the essential information over the telephone.
Not long after we returned from a trip to New Jersey and New York to speak with the first three wartime survivors, my beloved friend Ernie Mayerfeld died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving an enormous void in many lives, including mine. He also left me with the determination to complete the research and write this book as a tribute to him. I continued interviewing as many surviving individuals as I could find.
All of the survivors I was able to locate and interview were women. Every interview followed the same pattern. I tried to schedule my visit for a time when no one would feel obligated to provide a meal. Nonetheless, regardless of the time of day, on arrival I would find the table set and a bountiful display of food laid out. The first order of business always was to eat. Only then, with the imperatives of German Jewish hospitality fulfilled, were my hostesses ready to talk about their experiences. Without exception, the people I met were delightful, charming, vivacious, and intelligent. One could easily discern, more than half a century later, the qualities of strength and spirit that had kept them alive and sane through years of persecution, loss, and terror.
In researching and writing this book, I have relied heavily on the work of scholars who have investigated the history of the Berlin Jewish Hospital during the 1938–45 period. Rivka Elkin, the Israeli historian, deserves great credit for having written the definitive monograph on the hospital during that period, Das Jüdische Krankenhaus in Berlin zwischen 1938 und 1945, the contents of which were ably summarized in her article in English in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book. Equal recognition is due to Dagmar Hartung-von Doetinchem and Rolf Winau, editors of Zerstörte Fortschritte, a 1989 history of the hospital from 1756 to modern times that includes a lengthy and excellent chapter by Ms. Hartung-von Doetinchem on the wartime period, and to Daniel Nadav and Manfred Stürzbecher, the authors of that book’s chapter on the hospital’s director, Dr. Walter Lustig. (Full references to all of these books and to Ms. Elkin’s article can be found in the Bibliography.) I have gone back to original sources whenever it seemed appropriate. Some of the most important were personal histories of people who were at the hospital during the relevant period. Of particular interest are the written memoirs in German of Hilde Kahan, Dr. Lustig’s secretary, and a videotaped interview of Ms. Kahan in English, both found in the archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Similar memoirs exist (in some cases published in whole or in part in German or English, or both) that were written by others who lived or worked at the hospital. I have paid particular attention to all of these personal histories because I wanted to describe the texture of daily life in the hospital and to reconstruct the drama of living under an intense and continual pressure that differed from what other European Jews experienced in the ghettos, labor camps, and death camps.
I have also had recourse to a variety of other archival materials — in particular, to war crimes trial transcripts and to the records of the wartime central organization of German Jews, the Reichsvereinigung. With the assistance of historical research consultants, I searched the captured German government records housed in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. This search failed to turn up any new material relevant to the hospital. Finally, I examined and used certain materials that were not used by earlier researchers, largely personal papers of people who were at the hospital. It has been particularly gratifying that two holders of important personal papers asked me to help them find a suitable repository where these materials would be preserved and made available to researchers. (One collection ultimately was entrusted to the Leo Baeck Institute Archives located in the new Jewish Museum in Berlin. The ultimate home of the other is still under consideration.)
Relying on Memories
The body of archival material relating to the hospital — records of the hospital and of the Reichsvereinigung and the Jewish community, war crimes trial pleadings and judgments, a few records of the Gestapo and of Adolf Eichmann’s department in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), or Reich Security Main Office, which had formal jurisdiction over the hospital — reveal amazingly little, at least in any transparent way, about what is really interesting. One cannot determine from official, bureaucratic documents how and why the hospital managed to stay open when, by all the logic of the Nazi racial policy, it should have been eliminated. Nor does the formal record preserve the infighting, conniving, ambitions, deals, backbiting, double- dealing, skullduggery, and luck that must have contributed to that outcome.
So, too, it is surprising how little information the archival record truly provides about day-to-day conditions in the hospital, particularly in the chaotic circumstances that prevailed during the final months of the war. The principal source of information on daily life is witnesses’ recollections — those of the former inhabitants of the hospital who were interviewed by Elkin or Hartung-von Doetinchem or more recently in the course of conducting research for this book, witnesses who testified at war crimes trials, and hospital survivors who wrote memoirs or letters describing their experiences. These accounts provide invaluable documentation of the hospital’s story, but, to the same degree, they are subject to the inherent uncertainties and limitations of human memory. Several points should be kept in mind.
First, although some of the firsthand accounts were written or collected shortly after the end of the war, many of the memories reflected in this book were already old at the time they were recorded. That is especially the case, obviously, of those that were collected specifically for this book in interviews held during the past several years. It would be oversimplifying to assume that time has caused these recollections to dim. For many of the people who lived or worked in the hospital, the last years of the war were the most unforgettable of their lives. Yet, time and postwar life have a way of transforming even the most vivid of memories and blurring the details. Even Hilde Kahan, who as secretary to the hospital’s director had an intimate view of what transpired, gives slightly different accounts of the same events in her written memoir and in her videotaped interview, which occurred years after the memoir was written.
Second, for every person in the hospital, the horrifying things that were witnessed and experienced must have had a powerful psychological effect. Everyone in the hospital underwent years of constantly intensifying Nazi persecution. For each, it was a time of loss, as relatives and friends disappeared in the deportations, and a time of fear. The haven the hospital provided was at best fragile and ephemeral. Again and again, those who survived saw others around them seized and taken away. No one ever knew who would be next. Not a single person at the hospital could have felt truly safe. Thus, for many, life at the hospital was perceived, and has been remembered, through a filter of strong emotion. In some cases a survivor’s account is so divergent from other reports that it is clear that powerful emotions essentially reshaped the way events were remembered.
An interesting example of how easily memories can be distorted is given by Holocaust scholar Beate Meyer in a November 2000 paper describing her research on the Reichsvereinigung, the central organization of Jews in Germany that functioned from 1939 until 1943 and then, in a “rump” form, to the end of the war headquartered in the hospital. She recounts the experience of interviewing a Jewish woman, a survivor from Hamburg, about Max Plaut, who directed the Reichsvereinigung district office in northwest Germany. The interviewee spoke with great certainty about two Plauts, the father, Raphael, whom she described as a man of integrity, and the son, Max, whom she described as dishonest.
In reality, this woman had never known Max Plaut’s father. Her memory of Max Plaut in his earlier years as an upright community leader was inconsistent with her recollections of him from 1938 on, when she perceived that he exercised his official role in a corrupt manner. Faced with this cognitive dissonance, her memory had played a trick on her and divided the single individual into a “good” father and a “bad” son.
A prime example of the same kind of phenomenon is the journalist Cordelia Edvardson’s account of her brief stay as a teenager in the orphanage section of the hospital, where, for some reason, the Gestapo placed her before later deporting her to Auschwitz. In her memoir, Burned Child Seeks the Fire, she depicts the hospital as a lawless hellhole where promiscuous sex abounded and a black market flourished in drugs and cigarettes. In the context of a memoir that is written in a poetic and highly impressionistic style, it makes sense for the hospital environment to serve as a metaphor for the horror and confusion that beset a traumatized adolescent. Yet, although others’ accounts confirm that sexual liaisons occurred in the hospital, no one else substantiates Edvardson’s orgiastic description to the same degree, and virtually all other sources gainsay what she says about drugs and cigarettes.
Hartung-von Doetinchem records a similar discrepancy. One of the survivors she interviewed provided a vivid description of how, when the war with Poland broke out, the Nazis began to loot the hospital every few weeks, taking away its medical supplies and equipment and leaving it almost completely devoid of what it needed to continue functioning. The informant goes so far as to say that the Gestapo even emptied the kitchens and loaded their contents onto trucks. Yet numerous other witnesses describe the hospital in 1939 as well organized and functioning normally. Hartung-von Doetinchem notes that the story of looting cannot be reconciled with the information provided by other informants. Nor can it be squared with the accounts I collected. Except for the one woman interviewed by Hartung-von Doetinchem, everyone described the hospital, right through to the end of the war, as a functional medical institution, short of some items as the war neared its end — as no doubt every hospital in Germany was — but by no means stripped of medical equipment or supplies.
It is hardly surprising that someone whose life suddenly descended into hell should remember the hospital in terms as hellish as the death camp to which she was sent. It is equally comprehensible that another woman who may well have gone through her post-Holocaust life burning with anger at the Gestapo for the uncounted acts of looting it committed elsewhere should “remember” one that, however plausible, did not occur. No overarching point needs to be made with respect to these discrepant memories. Where they arise, I have chosen to accept as most probable the story that emerges from the greatest number of accounts, while noting that divergent recollections exist. With respect to the entire account of life in the hospital that is based in survivors’ memories, it is sufficient to note that, although perceptions undoubtedly were colored, and in some details perhaps even distorted, by emotions and personal reactions, what the survivors have to tell us is largely accurate and is as close to reality as we ever will get.
Jews and Aryans: A Note on Terminology
Anyone who writes about the Nazi period faces at least two issues of terminology: who is encompassed in the term Jew, and what word should be used to describe non-Jewish Germans? In both cases, with reluctance and with apologies to anyone who may find this usage offensive, I have adopted the terms the Nazis used — clearly not out of any sympathy with that usage but because, in writing about the perverted world of Nazi racial ideology, those terms most accurately and succinctly express the relevant ideas.
For the Nazis, a “Jew” was anyone they decided was Jewish, based on a notion of racial Judaism that had nothing to do with either anthropology or the Jewish religion. An elaborate calculus was developed, under the Nuremberg Laws in particular, for the “racial” classification of the population. It categorized as Jews thousands of people who did not consider themselves to be Jewish and would not have been considered Jewish under Jewish law.
These included converts to Christianity and the children of converts, as well as children born to mixed marriages in which the mother was not Jewish and had not converted to Judaism. The same categorization excluded people whom Jews would consider Jewish, such as children born to a mixed marriage in which the mother was Jewish and had not converted to Christianity but whose names had been left off the register of an official Jewish community (Gemeinde) because of parental decision or mistake or clerical error.
In this book I use the term Jew to refer to those who were so categorized by the Nazis and suffered accordingly, without distinguishing between those who were legally Jews under Jewish law and those who were not. I do so because I am writing about a population that was subjected to persecution and threatened with annihilation because they were Jews in Nazi eyes, and about the way in which hundreds of people among that population found an improbable refuge in the hospital. In this context it seems irrelevant to worry about how their religious affiliation might have been judged in other circumstances.
In referring to Germans who were not Jewish in Nazi eyes, I have decided similarly to remain within the frame of reference provided by Nazi doctrine, without thereby intending, in any way, to give credence to a totally abhorrent ideology. The fact is that there is no good way to describe non- Jewish Germans during the Nazi era. The survivors whom I interviewed generally used the term Christian, but that strikes me as unsatisfactory and misleading.
First, it glosses over the fact that the Nazis made a distinction based on the fiction that Jews were racially different from the rest of the population. Although in practice the Nazis found themselves compelled, for want of an alternative, to refer to the religious registration of an individual’s grandparents in categorizing people of mixed ancestry, in theory they never deviated from their racial ideology. To use a religious term to refer to the Nazis’ imagined racial construct thus seems inappropriate.
Second, to use the term Christian in this context seems an insult to Christianity. Although there is no doubt that fifteen hundred years of anti- Semitic teachings by the Christian churches set the stage for the Holocaust and that both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany by and large betrayed the central moral principles of their faith in the face of Nazism, it goes too far to equate Christian, a term properly applied to a believer in the Christian religion, with the Nazis’ odious concept of a master race, especially in light of the Nazis’ own hostility to the Christian religion.
The term non-Jew, in addition to being awkward, is imprecise. Not everyone in Germany who was non-Jewish shared in the privileged status accorded to what the Nazis called the German “racial people.” Gypsies and Eastern Europeans of non-German stock were also deemed inferior, and the Gypsies were subjected to persecution similar to that visited on the Jews. To apply the term Germans to the so-called racial people is also distasteful, since it implicitly accepts the Nazi assumption that no Jew could ever be truly German, no matter how fully that Jew participated in or contributed to German culture. The same issue is alive in Germany today with regard to the status of Turks and other immigrants, as well as Jews. I cannot bring myself to join modern-day German racists in using the term German to denote what the Nazis would have called “Aryan.” In Nazi ideology and the earliest anti-Jewish legislation, Aryan applied to those deemed to belong to the master race. In later Nazi legislation, the term Jewish blood was also used, but to refer to non-Jews as “those not of Jewish blood” is not only awkward but, in my eyes, no less offensively redolent of the Nazi racial ideology than the term Aryan. So, in the end, I have chosen to use the term Aryan to mean what the Nazis intended it to mean, just as I have used the term Jew in the same sense the Nazis gave it.
Copyright © 2003 by Daniel B. Silver. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Table of Contents
Contents Preface ix 1. Nichts Juden. Juden Kaputt 1 2. The Hospital and the Berlin Jews 14 3. The Beginning of the End, 1938–41 31 4. The Nazis’ Intermarriage Quandary 46 5. The Deportations 59 6. The Assault on the Gemeinde and the Hospital, 1942–43 77 7. Making a Life for Oneself in the Hospital 93 8. The Factory Raid and the Frauenprotest 119 9. The Continued Assault on the Hospital 140 10. Prisoners and Survivors 159 11. TheWork of the Reichsvereinigung and the Hospital, 1942–45 177 12. The Twilight of the Nazis 190 13. The Trial of Dr. Dr. Lustig and Other Questions 209 Afterword 242 Notes 253 Bibliography 279 Glossary 284 Acknowledgments 290 Index 296Related Subjects
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