Second letter to Kari at Farm Hill School , part 1
Walter Felscher (walter.felscher@UNI-TUEBINGEN.DE)
Sun, 8 Feb 1998 14:44:07 +0100
Dear Kari,
thank you for your reply. I shall try to answer your new
questions. To avoid that your electronic mailbox overflows,
I shall separate this letter into three successive parts.
Also, following the last part I shall add a footnote for
grownups.
1. What did ghettoes look like ?
I don't know from own experience. You see: ghettoes were set up
in towns in occupied Poland - Warsaw, Cracow, Lwow [Lviv], ... ;
none were set up in towns in Germany proper. The average
person had no reason to travel to those Eastern areas and,
therefore, would never come to know about them.
2. Did non-Jews have knowledge of what concentration
camps and death camps were actually like ?
Your question, which I would call that about the knowing
observers, requires again a long answer and, as usual, careful
distinctions. I shall begin with two stories. The first has
really nothing to do with our topic, but it will explain
something which I shall tell in the second story.
Young children sometimes say stupid things. I was maybe six
when, one saturday morning, my father took me along to visit
an older business acquaintance for his sixtieth birthday.
Mr. Behrens ran a tiny inn across the street from a large
factory; quite a number of well-wishers were crowded in his
living room, and there my father took out his birthday
present: a bottle of brandy which, on its label, said "very
aged". Seeing this, I said loudly "oh yes - that bottle:
it's very aged indeed - it has been standing around in our
cupboard for more than a year ! " There followed a minute
of uneasy silence - after all, my remark had made it obvious
that this present not only had not been bought for the
occasion, but also had stood around for a long time, not
particularly appreciated for my father's own consumption.
Uneasy silence - until somebody made a good humoured joke,
which resolved the tension. I felt very ashamed for the
next few days, sufficiently ashamed to remember it still
today after 60 years.
My father had a business: he sold cigars, cigarettes and
other things made from tobacco. He sold them to smaller
outlets, cafeterias and inns, and he also sold them in his
store, fairly spacious at a busy intersection in town. Most
customers, of course, were in a hurry, but every morning at
about ten, the time of their first break, some regulars
gathered for five minutes, or even ten, in front of the
store's long counter, standing around, smoking a small
cigar, talking among each other, and then leaving again for
their work. I remember "Schorsch" Lemm who made things from
wood: doors, window frames and sometimes a cabinet; I
remember a painter by the name of Sauter, always in his
white outfit and sprinkled with a coloured stains. When he
was not present, he was jokingly referred to as "the German
painter" - apparently because he once had expressed his
opinion that Germans painted walls better than foreigners.
Sometimes there also was Kurt Kohl, ex-husband of one of my
father's sisters, who, as I learned later, had been active
in the trade union movement before Hitler. In so far, the
room in front of the tobacconist's counter was, during this
morning hour, a place to meet and to talk for a while -
preferable over an inn which one would not have left without
the smell of beer on one's breath: not a smell to have while
at work.
In the far corner of the store, there stood a small desk at
which my father did his occasional paperwork. And on the
desk stood a typewriter, an old-fashioned mechanical device,
which, already at age three or four, I found fascinating to
toy around with. Of course, I could neither read nor write
then, still I often sat there, pressing the keys and
covering a sheet with black symbols. And of course, I
overheard the grownups talk without understanding what they
meant. But one day, at the age of four, so maybe in 1935, I
had repeated some of the phrases I had heard, possibly
connected them and added some silly thought of my own - and
then my father came over, took me aside, and told me very
gravely that I never must say such words again if didn't
want to be sent to a "Konzertlager". Of course, I did not really
know what that was [it was the colloquial euphemism for
Konzentrationslager, concentration camp], but that much was
clear that it would be extremely undesirable to be there -
so undesirable that it could not even be spoken of within
other people's earshot.
This was the second story. So it happened that I knew about
concentration camps when I was very little: through my own
sillyness, so to speak. And for about ten years did not
really hear about them again, until the autumn of 1944. I
had almost forgotten about them, except that somehow I knew
that a reference to "Oranienburg" meant the concentration
camp nearest to our town. Probably from something I had
overheard my father speak about with someone else. The
camps were not mentioned in the press either when, later
during the war, it reported every few weeks that somebody
somewhere had been sentenced to death and been executed for
"spreading enemy propaganda" or otherwise undermining the
war effort.
No doubt, my father and those regulars at his store 1935
knew more, but I can only implicitly conclude what it may
have been. Already during the first weeks after Hitler's
appointment as chancellor, almost all known communists were
arrested (including their members of parliaments), further a
number of leading members of the SPD [social-democrats] -
e.g. the chairmen of towns' party organizations - and higher
administrators (e.g. mayors) if they had been members of
that party; finally a small number of leading journalists
who had been critical of the NS-party before. In other
words: all possible and vocal opposition from the Left. They
all were sent into hastily established concentration camps,
kept there as prisoners, beaten up indiscriminately (and
sometimes beaten to death), and subjected to a discipline
and to emasciating hard labour often amounting to torture.
After about one year, the larger part of the lower,
rank-and-file members of the communists [among them Erich
Honecker] and of the SPD were set free and told not to say a
word about their experiences in the camp. And these
experiences had been so gruesome that most of them did not
even talk to their wifes about the time in the Konzertlager.
All this was not published in the press. But if the town's
mayor or his deputies disappeared, the people who at all
knew about the city's administration did, of course,
notice. And those who had known the men, re-appearing from
the camps after a year's of unexplained absence, did notice
as well, noticed their subdued manner and their bound
tongues. So it became clear to these observers that a
concentration camp was a most undesirable place to be at.
How large the circle of such knowing observers was in
1933/34 , that is difficult to appreciate. Take a high
school teacher or a doctor: he probably knew no communist or
SPD-member in person, and if in his spare time he collected
shells or insects then he probably did not know about town
hall politicians either. Take the owner or manager of a
larger store who would not have occasion to talk with such
regulars as appeared there in my father's store. Would they
know ? And know from examples or only from unreliable rumors ?
Take the sheltered life of the two Misses Erbstoesser who
ran a dressmaker's business in their flat ( my mother
visited them every spring to have her dresses changed - the
length of the hems, the width of the skirts): unless they
happened to have politically engaged relatives, they
might not be aware of anything. And for examples and actual
experience, at this time it were more likely to be people
from the lower strata of the population which knew, than
those leading a life within the circles of their own.
And what was these observers' reaction ? Silence, of course,
silence grown from fear. Within circles of a few trusted friends,
behind closed doors, one might talk to each other, express
one's indignation. But among colleagues in the teacher's
lounge ? Colleagues in the cafetaria ? I have described you
in my last letter how the mechanism works that makes
competitors tell upon each other.
[ Of course, it was said, the communists in a way had
brought it upon themselves: during the years before Hitler's
accession they had armed themselves and had fought as red
street gangs - killing not only men from the brown street
gangs of the SA, but also deliberately shooting police
officers. Much was also made of the few professional
criminals, say the brothers Sass, who with help of their own
cleverness and that of their lawyers had escaped conviction
in the courts before 1933 (just as Al Capone never was
convicted of his real crimes) and who now were simply taken
away to the camps. Taking them out of traffic appeared as
one thing; beating them to pulp was quite another. ]
Silence grown from fear. But there is one devil who loosens
people's tongues, and his name is Booze. There was a
drunken farmer, saying 'this Hitler, he can't even melk my
cows' - and a lenient judge sentenced him to six weeks in
prison for public nuisance. Stronger criticism, and less
lenient judges, would bring much longer terms for defamation
of "Volk und Staat". And when the prison term had been
served, often enough the political police, the GeStaPo,
would find the man to be sufficient of a risk, a nucleus of
possible opposition, to immediately forward him to a
concentration camp. In this way, the camps received a
continuous supply of inmates - not to mention the occasional
pastor or priest who might have been too open hearted on the
pulpit, or even had held conventicles among the young,
contravening the aims of the HJ organization.
This was the situation from 1933 up to the end of 1938 . In
between, a certain change occurred after 1934. Above I
mentioned the streetgangs of the SA - stormtroopers as they
often are translated. Indeed, they were gangs of young men,
fighting their political enemy (mostly the communists) both
with physical violence and, more and more, also with
firearms. Many of them were unemployed in that time of
economical depression. Recall now that the name of Hitler's
party used the abbreviation NS , meaning national-socialist,
and to those SA-men, the word 'socialist' was not an empty
phrase: many of them called the takeover of 1933 a
"revolution" and expected to carry it on with a state
supported (national) socialism, straightening out what they
viewed as economical injustices. With the communists they
shared the enemy-picture of the 'evil capitalist' - only
that in the cartoons of the SA-papers the capitalist always
had the facial features of a Jew. And they were an unruly
bunch, given to a form of anarchical activism not always
controlled by the party's leadership.
On July 1st 1934 , an early sunday morning with a silky blue
sky, when loading the car to leave for a vacation at the
seaside, the radio news informed us that "der Fuehrer",
Hitler, had been threatened by a conspiracy of the SA
leadership; he had surprised them in their sleep, and most
of them had been summarily shot alreay. [Yes, I am amazed
myself that I remember this: the morning, the car in front
of our house, and the obvious consternation of my parents
for which, of course, I did not know the reason then.] For
the next few days, machine guns in a Berlin barrack's yard
continued to mow down Hitler's inner 'enemies' from his
party (and others, thrown in for good measure, as well).
Whatever might have been said about the persecutions of 1933
- that they might partly have been caused by irresponsible,
over-zealous local activists: it could not be said anymore
when the government's leader himself organized summary
executions. The state itself had turned terrorist.
>From that day on, the SA lost any importance. Its r“le was
taken by a much smaller organization, the SS . Anarchic,
decentralized terrorism through the crowds from the SA was
replaced by organized, professionally centralized terrorism.
In particular, the concentration camps now were managed by
the SS .
==> part 2