On Christmas Eve 1942, Lothar Orbach, a Jewish teenager, was with his mother in their one-room Berlin apartment when the doorbell sounded. They knew immediately it was the Gestapo, come to take them away. They managed to slip out in order to escape via the tenement’s rear door, which the superintendent had agreed to keep open for just such an occasion. It was locked. They knocked on the door of an old man who had known Lothar since he was small. He slammed the door in their face, then turned up the record player. It was playing Handel’s Messiah.
Other neighbours reacted similarly, until an old lady let them in and they hid under the bed while she hurriedly put on a Nazi badge, leaned out of the window and shouted: “Did you catch those damned Jews?” When the Gestapo knocked on her door, they saw her badge, gave the Hitler salute and left.
This story aptly summarises the situation in Berlin in the middle of the war: a few thousand Jews left, known as U-Boats as they hid beneath the surface, desperate to avoid the dreaded knock on the door and removal to almost certain death. Most Berliners knew this awful reality only too well and were either openly hostile or feigned ignorance while a few brave Germans risked their lives to protect them. (Before the war, young Lothar had considered himself more German than Jewish and wanted to join the Hitler Youth.)
The Orbachs’ story is one of the many such tales recounted by Ian Buruma in his meticulously documented history of Berlin during the war years. His interest stems from his own father’s history. As a young law student in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, he was forced in 1943 to join the 400,000 foreign workers sent to Berlin from all over Europe as forced labourers to keep the wartime economy running. He survived but, says Buruma, the experience scarred him for life, and right at the end of the war he narrowly escaped being shot by suspicious Soviet soldiers as they overran the city. There were 90,000 Jews in Berlin in 1939, half the number when the Nazis took power in 1933. As was the case everywhere in Germany, they endured humiliation and hostility amid frequent deportations, which reached a peak in early 1943, with the “Great Factory Action” when the Nazis switched tactics to arrest Jews at work instead of at home. Goebbels had set a target of a “Jew-free” city by Hitler’s birthday on April 20. Some 7,000 Jews were deported, mainly to Auschwitz, in a couple of weeks but a few thousand somehow hung on.
In his understated, matter-of-fact style Buruma spares no detail of the hideous persecution of Berlin’s Jews, with many committing suicide rather than allow the Nazis to take them away. By interviewing survivors and combing through contemporary records, he has unearthed some extraordinary stories of the lengths to which some Jews went to survive. Some German women would demand sexual favours of good-looking Jewish men, or else.
Buruma makes some interesting comparisons between Berlin and London under constant bombing raids. There were many similarities, including the evacuation of children, the construction of massive bomb shelters, sheer terror, and a sort of stoic resignation, although the Berliners do not seem to have come with an equivalent phrase for “the Blitz spirit”. Strange, that.
What did increase as the Allied bombing raids grew in scale and devastating power in the latter years of the war was a feeling among some Berliners that their suffering was a just reward for the atrocities their own forces had committed, particularly against the Jews.
Buruma vividly describes the last months of the war in the almost destroyed capital with the population living largely underground, and the few remaining Jews forced to do the worst jobs, such as looking for bodies in the ruins. And even then, on March 27, 1945, 45 Jews were rounded up and deported by train to Theresienstadt.
As for young Lothar Orbach, he somehow survived, after hiding in a pool hall and a brothel before being caught and sent to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. Back in Berlin, he managed to locate his mother and in September 1946 they boarded a ship for the United States.
Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma, is published by Atlantic Books
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