The Jews of Berlin

Berlin in 1933 was home to the largest Jewish community in Germany. The official census of June 1933 recorded 160,564 Jews living in the city, around a third of all German Jews and roughly 4 per cent of the city’s population. By the time of the deportations of 1941 and 1942 the community had been broken by emigration, dispossession and forced relocation; by May 1945 fewer than 7,000 Jews remained in Berlin, most of them in hiding or in mixed marriages that had given them limited protection.

The community before 1933

Berlin’s Jewish community was the most thoroughly integrated and most thoroughly bourgeois in central Europe. Emancipation under the Prussian edict of 1812 had given Berlin Jews civil rights well before most of their European counterparts. By the late nineteenth century the community had produced a layer of professional, commercial and cultural figures whose contribution to German life was central rather than peripheral: the publishing houses of Mosse, Ullstein and Cassirer; the department stores of Wertheim, Tietz and Israel; the banking houses of Mendelssohn, Bleichröder and Warburg; the salons of Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, and later Elsa Bernstein.

The community was visibly religiously divided. The Reform synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, opened in 1866 with seating for 3,000 worshippers, was at the time the largest synagogue in Germany; its Moorish-revival exterior with the gilded dome was one of the architectural landmarks of the city. The Orthodox community had its own institutions, including the Adass Jisroel congregation founded in 1869 by Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer. Between them stood the much larger liberal-conservative middle, served by the Neue Synagoge and many smaller houses of worship.

Educational institutions were extensive. The Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, founded in 1872, trained generations of liberal rabbis and scholars including Leo Baeck. The Orthodox Rabbinerseminar zu Berlin, founded by Hildesheimer in 1873, did the same for the Orthodox tradition. The Jüdische Volkshochschule and a network of communal libraries, welfare societies, hospitals and burial associations served the community’s daily life.

Cultural and intellectual life

Berlin’s Jewish cultural contribution in the Weimar period was disproportionate to the community’s size. The Mosse and Ullstein publishing houses produced much of the German daily press, including the Berliner Tageblatt and the Vossische Zeitung. Jewish-owned theatres and cinemas dominated entertainment in the city. The art dealers Paul Cassirer, Alfred Flechtheim and Justi Thannhauser brought modernist art to the German public. Albert Einstein held the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics from 1917, the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin, and a place at the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Walther Rathenau served as foreign minister of the Weimar Republic until his assassination by right-wing extremists in June 1922. The composer Arnold Schoenberg taught at the Prussian Academy of Arts; Kurt Weill wrote the music for The Threepenny Opera, first performed in Berlin in 1928.

1933 to 1939: dispossession and emigration

The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 began the systematic destruction of Berlin’s Jewish life. The boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 was followed within a week by the Civil Service Law that removed Jews from the public service. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped them of citizenship. The systematic process of Aryanisation transferred Jewish-owned businesses to non-Jewish owners, often at a fraction of their value. By 1938 most of the great Jewish department stores, banks and publishing houses were in non-Jewish hands.

The pogrom of 9 to 10 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht, was particularly destructive in Berlin. Twelve of the city’s main synagogues were burned or seriously damaged, including the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse (the structure was preserved by a local police officer who refused to allow the SA to enter; it was later destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943 and partially restored in the 1990s). Around 1,200 Jewish-owned businesses in the city were vandalised or destroyed. Approximately 30,000 Jewish men were arrested across Germany and sent to concentration camps; many of them passed through Berlin’s Levetzowstrasse synagogue, requisitioned as a holding centre.

The community’s response was emigration where possible. Around 90,000 Berlin Jews left between 1933 and the closing of the borders in October 1941. They went to Palestine under the Haavara Agreement, to Britain on the Kindertransport, to the United States, to Latin America, to Shanghai which required no entry visa. Those who left took with them a fraction of their wealth, much of it surrendered to the regime as a precondition of departure.

1941 to 1945: deportation and destruction

The first deportation transport from Berlin left the Grunewald freight station on 18 October 1941, carrying 1,089 Jews to the Łódź ghetto. Between October 1941 and the end of the war some 50,000 Berlin Jews were deported, most to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Riga, Minsk and Sobibor. The deportations were carried out by the Berlin Gestapo, with the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, the umbrella Jewish organisation, forced into the role of compiling lists and summoning deportees.

The largest single operation was the Fabrikaktion of 27 February to 6 March 1943, during which 11,000 Jews still working as forced labour in Berlin armaments factories were rounded up and deported. The action included the arrest of around 2,000 Jewish men in mixed marriages, who were held at the Rosenstrasse facility. The protest of their non-Jewish wives outside the building over the following days, the only sustained public protest by German civilians against a Nazi deportation, led to the men’s release.

By the end of the war approximately 55,000 Berlin Jews had been murdered. Around 7,000 survived in Berlin itself, in hiding or in mixed marriages; another small number returned from the camps and from exile. The community has never recovered its pre-war size; the Jewish community of Berlin today numbers roughly 10,000 and is largely the product of post-Soviet immigration after 1990.

What survives

The Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Strasse stands again, its dome rebuilt in the 1990s and the Centrum Judaicum housed within it. The Jewish Museum Berlin in the Daniel Libeskind building, opened in 2001, is the largest Jewish museum in Europe. The memorial at Grunewald station includes the Track 17 monument with the dates and destinations of every deportation transport that left from there. The Stolpersteine, the brass cobblestones laid at the last freely-chosen address of murdered Jews, are most numerous in Berlin: there are over 9,000 of them in the city.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, HarperCollins, 1997
  • Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945, HarperCollins, 2007
  • Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 1998
  • Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon and Chana Schütz (eds), Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation, University of Chicago Press, 2009
  • Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany, W. W. Norton, 1996
  • Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis, Cambridge University Press, 2006
  • Centrum Judaicum Foundation, Die Neue Synagoge Berlin: Geschichte und Gegenwart, exhibition catalogue, 2007
  • Yad Vashem, Berlin community pages, https://www.yadvashem.org
  • Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, Berlin, https://www.topographie.de