Russian soldiers fighting their way through the rubble of Berlin in the
last
days of the war turned the corner of Iranische Strasse, in the district of
Wedding, and came across an elegant building almost intact. Fanning out to
search the structure, the Russians ransacked the place, room by room.
Medical equipment and rows of beds showed that it had once been a
hospital.
Searching deep into the bowels of the building, the Russian liberators
burst
open cellar doors, and in the darkness made out hundreds of cowering
figures - more than 800 people in all.
The soldiers swept through in an orgy of rape. Only when the Red Army
commanders arrived was the question asked: "But who are you?"
"We are Jews."
"You are Jews?" exclaimed the astonished Russians, whose path to Berlin
had
taken them through the smouldering remains of Nazi death camps. "Why
aren't
you dead yet?"
The discovery that 800 Jews had survived Hitler's Final Solution in the
middle of Berlin staggered the city's liberators. That they had survived
in
the full knowledge of the Nazi high command beggared all belief. The
Russians had stumbled upon the last Jewish sanctuary in Germany - and upon
an extraordinary story of survival. And yet over the years it has been a
story that few have been able or willing to tell. Because how could this
have happened? Who were these survivors? And what was Hitler's sinister
purpose in permitting them to live?
Among those 800 men and women were personal dramas of every kind. They
were
the bravest of the brave, the lucky and the cunning. They were
collaborators
and spies. There were also many "privileged" Jews - spouses of non-Jewish
Germans. But most mysteriously, they were Jews whose lives had been
protected by the highest-ranking Nazis. Little is known about them because
their files were burnt by the Gestapo just days before the Russians
arrived.
The new Wedding site of the Jewish Hospital was opened in 1914 by the
prosperous Berlin Jewish community. But with Hitler's rise to power in
1933,
the hospital - along with every other Jewish institution in Germany -
seemed
destined for destruction.
As the Nuremberg race laws were imposed, Jewish doctors lost their
licences
to practise, and thousands joined the rush to leave the country. In 1933
there were 667,000 Jews living in Germany but, from the outbreak of war in
1939, more than two-thirds had emigrated and thousands more were
desperately
trying to flee.
The hospital was nevertheless permitted to remain open, and was even
spared
the rampages of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom of 1938. As war
broke
out, it was still run by a senior Jewish doctor, Walter Lustig, whose
staff
were given special permits to care for patients, and it became a haven for
Berlin's remaining Jews.
But Lustig was already working under direct Nazi control. An ambitious,
brilliant administrator, he had spent much of his prewar career as a
doctor
with the Berlin police, forging close ties with now-powerful figures in
the
Gestapo. From these men he now took his orders. His immediate boss was a
senior Gestapo figure called Fritz Wöhrn, who had been appointed as the
hospital's overseer by Adolf Eichmann, head of department 1V B4 of the
Reich
Security Head Office (RSHA). Eichmann's department was responsible for
planning the extermination of Europe's Jews.
So although at the start of the war the hospital appeared to function
normally, it was already just another of Eichmann's tools. Its continued
operation helped deceive Berliners about what was planned for Jews. The
Nazi
high command, particularly Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister,
feared
the possibility of social unrest in Germany once the reality of mass
Jewish
de****tation became clear. Nowhere was that concern more intense than in
Berlin, where Jews were deeply integrated in the social strata of the
city.
With a Jewish hospital still functioning, and Jewish doctors and nurses
still caring for the sick, it was possible to spread the lie that Hitler
could not possibly intend to exterminate the German Jews. Among the
hospital
workers themselves, however, few failed to foresee the threat.
Ernst Boch, a pharmacist at the hospital, and his wife, Ruth, had been
desperately trying to escape Germany with their baby girl. In 1939 the
couple wrote to Ruth's cousin, already living in England, asking if she
would take their daughter. They enclosed a photograph of curly-haired,
three-year-old Nina, and the cousin readily agreed to take her. Nina was
then put on the very last Kindertrans****t out of Berlin. "I remember
visiting the Jewish Hospital before I left ," says Nina, now living in
East
Anglia, "and seeing my father behind a counter, in a white coat. And I
remember my mother when I left. She was so brave, on the station platform,
smiling at me and telling me what fun I would have in England."
Her new English family wrote to Nina's parents to say she had arrived
safely, and in a letter back the Bochs were still talking about fleeing.
But
by 1941 it was too late. With America about to enter the war, Germany
banned
all emigration. De****tations began, and a new wave of terror gripped the
capital's Jews. Among those to be spared, at least for now, were Jews
working at the hospital, where their services were still needed.
Another im****tant "privileged" group were Jews in mixed marriages. Nazi
hardliners argued that Jews married to non-Jews had "infected" the "Aryan"
line and should be exterminated first, but Goebbels was still concerned
about protests. These Jews were prosperous, and many had friends or
relatives who were now senior Nazi figures. As Goebbels put it, the
position
of intermarried Jews was "sensitive" and their de****tation was deferred -
unless their spouses divorced them. So intimidation of the German spouses
was stepped up to encourage divorce.
Manfred Pahl, a prominent artist who refused to divorce his Jewish wife,
Aenne, was thrown out of the Berlin Art Institute in 1941 and into forced
labour. Aenne, one of three sisters, had grown up in Hannover, in a highly
integrated German-Jewish family. By 1939, both her sisters, Trude and
Hilde,
had fled from Germany, but Aenne and her husband stayed. They still hoped
to
be spared. They hoped the fact that Beate, their 18-year-old daughter, had
been baptised a Christian, meant they would not be de****ted. "For a long
time they believed, like many Jewish intellectuals in mixed marriages, the
worst would not happen to them," says Iris Hilke, Beate's daughter. "They
were in denial."
As the trans****ts east increased, however, shock waves began to spread
through every Jewish household, "privileged" or not. Hilde Kahan, a
resourceful Prussian Jew, took the op****tunity to optimise her own
survival - and that of her elderly widowed mother - by taking one of the
safest jobs in Berlin, as secretary to the director of the Jewish
Hospital,
Walter Lustig.
Lustig was already the most powerful Jewish figure left in Berlin. By now
the hospital was playing an even more central role in the deception worked
on departing victims. Lustig and his staff were ordered to "calm their
people" by providing first-aid stations at a Berlin Sammellager, or
holding
centre, where terrified men, women and children awaited departure
for the death camps. The doctors and nurses also helped to spread a new
lie:
that the de****tees were being sent east to work. In fact they were heading
straight for the death camps near Riga and for the Lodz ghetto. "We were
told to reassure our community, who were in such fear," wrote Kahan.
Staff also took part in an elaborate charade. The sick and disabled among
the first selected victims were offered a medical examination so that they
could prove they were unfit for "work" in the east, thereby avoiding
trans****t.
With perfect bureaucratic order, Lustig was appointed by Eichmann's men to
head a special "medical commission" to choose who should get exemption
certificates. The commission consisted of six Jewish doctors, six nurses
and
six secretaries. Kahan wrote: "Ambulances waited outside the hospital,
bringing the crippled and sick to try their luck before Lustig's
commission.
Now all the elderly and ill pinned hope on these examinations - but only a
few had any success, and as we know only for a short period of time."
This selection work was "the most horrible memory I have", Kahan wrote.
"During medical examinations we had to write down the results in the
presence of the Gestapo after the doctor told us in a low voice all the
details. There came blind people, handicapped people, people with TB and
epilepsy, and they all had to wait hours and hours. The worst moments came
when we staff walked through the waiting halls and friends or well-known
people caught our eyes and then came running and pleading for us to help
them."
By October 1942 staff working for Berlin's other Jewish organisations were
being rounded up. As senior doctors were now selected, all hospital
workers
feared for their families and, using her influence with Lustig, Kahan
secured "safe" work for her mother in a Gestapo kitchen.
Meanwhile, a young nurse called Dora Brüg was threatened by Lustig with
trans****t east just because she was late for work. "So she escaped by
hiding
in an ambulance," says her daughter, Deborah Silverberg. Dora then hid out
in Berlin for two years, living underground and providing ***ual services
in
a massage parlour. "She had to do this to survive," says Deborah.
Gestapo officers, and even Eichmann himself, often visited the hospital,
randomly picking out victims for trans****t. No records have survived to
indicate why some were selected and some spared, but no doubt winning
Lustig's
favour was a protection.
Those leaving in 1943 were sent first to Theresienstadt concentration
camp,
declared by the Nazis to be a "model" camp. Such was the success of the
deception that when news arrived at the hospital that this was the new
destination, a party was held among staff to celebrate. Lilli Ernsthaft, a
filing clerk, described in her memoir how she watched her own sick mother
being driven away smiling on a lorry. "I sent her a cake for her birthday
to
Theresienstadt."
Yet word later reached the hospital that those on the Theresienstadt
trans****ts had swiftly been taken to Auschwitz, among them the pharmacist
Ernst Boch and his wife, Ruth. After the war, Nina learnt that her parents
had been gassed, and that two new baby sisters, born after she was sent to
England, also died at Auschwitz.
In the spring of 1943 the screws on Berlin's Jews tightened still further
as
Goebbels declared that the city was to be made judenrein (cleansed of
Jews)
and the final roundup began. Nazi leaders abandoned all pretence regarding
their plans for total extermination. The sick and disabled were taken
straight from hospital beds to waiting lorries, and "privileged" Jews -
even
those whose spouses had refused divorce - were rounded up.
The artist Manfred Pahl's refusal to divorce his wife offered her scant
protection by 1943, and Aenne had gone into hiding somewhere in Berlin.
Their daughter, Beate, was also in hiding outside the capital. To her
dying
day, Aenne never divulged where she had hidden or who it was who helped
her
and Beate. But evidence pieced together by Beate's daughter, Iris,
suggests
that influential non-Jewish German friends had helped both women. Another
Berlin artist, Karl Orasch, a protégé of Manfred's before the war, had
formed a strong romantic attachment to Beate, whom he hoped one day to
marry. Orasch now pulled whatever strings he could to keep Beate and her
mother safe.
The roundup of "privileged" Jewish spouses, beginning with men, started on
February 27, 1943, creating terror in middle-class households across the
city and sparking protests from non-Jewish wives. As Goebbels' fears were
realised and the protests grew, he advised that these Jewish captives,
held
in a building on Rosenstrasse, be released to avert wider public tension.
In
a rare example of capitulation, the Nazis bowed to the protesters and
released some spouses. Aenne and Beate were tem****arily reprieved as
further
roundups of intermarried Jews were once again deferred.
In the hospital, few staff or patients except for the intermarried Jews
escaped. Selections became a "horrible" weekly routine, according to Lilli
Ernsthaft, the clerk. "Numerous patients had to line up, and the
hospital's
director, Dr Lustig, together with the Gestapo officer, stood in front of
them and indicated the ones to be de****ted." Several female survivors
explained how some staff kept off Lustig's lists. "Dr Lustig had a series
of
affairs with Jewish nurses at the hospital, and only if you surrendered to
him were you a favourite," wrote a British survivor who testified
anonymously to investigators after the war.
By mid-1943 everyone at the hospital expected it to be closed down. Staff
had been told that the building was to be given to a Reich medical project
for the young. Yet the transfer of the property to its new owners never
happened. Evidence shows that the sale was blocked by Eichmann's
department,
1V B4.
According to the Israeli scholar Rivka Elkin, it is highly likely that
Eichmann himself blocked the sale. Even when Allied bombing intensified,
leaving every department of the Reich crying out for space, the Jewish
Hospital remained in place, and Eichmann argued it was "necessary for
Jews".
Yet how, by mid-1943, could a Jewish institution in Germany be sanctioned
in
any form? In the previous year alone, 2.7m Jews had been killed in the
Holocaust. By 1943 the machinery of the Final Solution was operating
at full capacity. The remaining 7,978 German Jews arrested in the final
roundup of early 1943 had been, or would soon be, de****ted. So why exactly
were the Jews held here after 1943? By this time the building was
certainly
no longer functioning as a hospital. It had become a prison.
A significant pro****tion of the occupants of the hospital ghetto were the
"privileged" spouses of non-Jews. Though a decision to de****t them had
still
not been taken, they faced random arrest and imprisonment, usually in the
former hospital. Among those captured in the new roundups was Aenne Pahl.
Venturing out on the streets of Berlin one day, she was arrested for not
wearing a Star of David, and found herself in what she would later
describe
as "a prison for Jews".
Alongside her were countless other Jews. Some were hospital staff who had
so
far dodged the trans****ts. Others were patients who inexplicably had not
yet
been sent to their deaths in the east. There were also large numbers of
Jewish children - often orphans - whose Jewish parentage could not be
established.
The names of many such prisoners were recorded on lists found later at the
hospital. But another group of prisoners were those on a so-called
"B-list",
which was burnt in the Gestapo bonfire. They were admitted as
"administrative detainees". All had friends in high places.
It is only thanks to Hilde Kahan, who had access to Lustig's secret files,
that anything is known of them. She wrote in her diary that these people
were "not de****ted but arrested there". Their details were kept
separately.
"Their files were simply stamped B-list," she says. "The B stood for
Behörden, or 'administrative order'. So they were obviously held under a
special decree."
Kahan is guarded about what she recorded of the B-list prisoners, but she
reveals that they had not only to be "privileged" in some way but also
well
connected. "In most cases these were friends of very im****tant
personalities
of the Third Reich," she writes. She gives just one example, "an
80-year-old
former minister and his daughter. They could both stay in Berlin. He was
called 'Exzellenz Sch' ". This person is believed to be Eugen Schiffer,
briefly a minister of justice in the pre-Nazi German government. Why
Schiffer should have secured the right to sit out the war in the Jewish
Hospital is not known. But there were clearly many more like him. Another
leading Nazi, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, fearing serious international protest
if
news got out that well-known Jews were disappearing, issued a directive
saying that special care should be taken not to de****t Jews "with special
connections and acquaintances in the outside world". And Heinrich Himmler,
the Reichsführer SS, was not averse to holding "valued" Jews as bargaining
chips with the Allies, hoping perhaps to exchange im****tant personalities
for Germans or money.
In 1944 a valuable prize fell into Himmler's hands when Gemma La Guardia
Gluck was captured in the roundup of Hungarian Jews. The sister of the New
York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, she was held in a privileged cell at
Ravensbrück and released unharmed at the end of the war.
But how many more such "prizes" were held at the hospital? Perhaps it was
simply bribery that protected some of these Jewish "detainees".
"Bribery of Jews with contacts with the Nazis was definitely part of the
story of the Jewish Hospital. It is a very, very strange story and nobody
knows all of it," says Aubrey Pomerance, head of archives at the Jewish
Museum in Berlin.
Aenne Pahl's name does not appear on hospital- or police-ward lists,
suggesting she was almost certainly on the B-list. Her imprisonment
provides
a rare insight into how such cases came about. Aenne later described
conditions in the "prison" as horrifying, talking of backbreaking slave
labour sewing soldiers' uniforms, yet she had some privileges and
protection.
For one thing, she was allowed visits. On several occasions, she was
visited
by her daughter and her husband's artist friend Karl Orasch. Beate and
Karl
would come disguised as Mr and Mrs Schmidt. "My mother had no idea how
this
was arranged," said Iris Hilke, Beate's daughter. "When I asked her first,
she didn't seem to know what this strange 'prison' was where she had
visited
Aenne. Then I showed her a photograph of the Jewish Hospital and she said
at
once, 'Yes, that's it! That's where we went to see mother.'"
Determined to find out more about her father - later, Karl did marry Beate
-
Iris discovered that early in the war he had worked in the propaganda
section of the foreign ministry as a graphic artist. He evidently had
strings to pull. Certainly, his visits with Beate to Aenne must have been
sanctioned by Walter Lustig and therefore by Lustig's overseers in
Eichmann's
office.
"When I asked my mother what my father's role had been in it all, she said
she didn't know," says Iris. "She got quite angry. She said, 'Are you
saying
he was a Nazi? Your father wasn't a Nazi. He saved our lives.' But I'm
sure
that it was my father who arranged this. And I think my mother married him
because she was grateful."
Of other B-list prisoners' cases we know even less, as none of them ever
spoke. Glimpses of these individuals do appear, however, in the memoirs of
Lilli Ernsthaft. Describing how the prisoners had to hide during Allied
bombings, she says: "They had to stay in the basement day and night. Among
them were a few celebrities."
She names one of the celebrities as Ludwig Katzenellenbogen, known in
prewar
Germany as the third husband of the world-renowned actress Tilla Durieux.
Durieux fled Germany with Katzenellenbogen before the war, settling in
Switzerland, then Yugoslavia. He was de****ted back to Germany and sent to
the Jewish Hospital. Ernsthaft writes that during the bombing she
"comforted" him with her "love services" while they sheltered from the
bombs.
The second celebrity she names is Theodor Wolff, a once-famous Jewish
editor. Before 1933 his anti-Nazi writings made him a special object of
hate
for Goebbels, yet when arrested he mysteriously found himself in the
hospital and not on a trans****t to a death camp.
The final terror of hiding in the hospital basement and the rampage of
Russian liberators left some of the worst scars of all. Hilde Kahan says
that everyone expected to die in the final confrontation. German radio was
still insisting that the Germans would defeat the Red Army, and she, for
one, believed it. "Our doctors, who had been fighting at the front during
the first world war, laughed at me for losing my nerve in the very last
moment," she writes.
But one doctor had already made his own escape. When the Russian
liberators
came, Lustig was nowhere to be found. Some re****ts suggest that amid the
mayhem he tried to go into hiding, though others say he found work as a
doctor in one of the many Berlin hospitals now under the control of the
Allies. Countless re****ts claim, however, that Lustig was soon tracked
down
by Russian war-crime hunters. Though no proof exists, it seems most likely
that he was denounced, charged with collaboration and shot.
He could certainly have revealed the full story of the Jewish Hospital's
survival, and details of his own deal with Eichmann would have surely
horrified his victims. For some B-list prisoners his early death came as a
relief. He took their identities with him to the grave.
Adolf Eichmann, the other man who could have revealed the truth about the
hospital, was never pressed for answers on a matter considered peripheral
to
the prime charge against him at his Jerusalem trial: enforcement of the
Final Solution. As for the survivors, few knew anything of how the
hospital
became Eichmann's tool. And many were determined that the next generation
should never learn how they themselves survived.
Reunited, Aenne and Manfred Pahl found consolation in their lifelong
affection and continuing artistic work. Manfred's own diary reveals
nothing
about the war years, saying simply of Aenne: "Nobody was her enemy, except
for the Nazis, who declared her their enemy, not personally, but much
worse,
as descendant of another race - sheer illusion."
The survival of the Jewish Hospital and its 800 Jewish prisoners remains,
therefore, a mystery. But there is no doubt that their murder had been
deliberately delayed by Nazi order.
Had the Russian liberators not reached Berlin when they did, each one of
those Jewish men and women would have eventually been sent to the gas
chambers. Hitler's solution was always to be "Final". The only compromise
was over when exactly that finality would come
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