Oppenheimer and his wife, Lisa, live in a Jewish House whose inhabitants are intermarried couples with one spouse Jewish and the other non-Jewish. I knew being in an intermarried or mixed marriage provided a level of protection from deportation to the death camps for the Jewish spouse but I had never heard of Jewish Houses where such couples were grouped together.
Judenhäuser were not ghettos so much as designated housing for the mixed marriage couples. Doing a little research some couples survived the war living in such housing.
The Museum Blindenwerskatt said about 8,000 Jews survived the war in Berlin with most of them in mixed marriages.
The investigation takes Oppenheimer into a home for the Lensborn. While he had thought it a form of brothel to create babies to maintain the German population he finds the actual circumstances more complex.
He finds that the organizers are not seeking to undermine marriage. For women unable to find a partner they are “considering offering help” in the form of “procreation helpers” but trials were unsuccessful because of the low quality of men who volunteered.
The doctor in charge of the home then recounts a bizarre idea of Heinrich Himmler:
“Did you know, the Reich Leader SS advocates a fascinating theory. He has found proof that procreation helpers existed in Teuton and Dorian times …. The chosen man had to mate with her on the ancestral grave at night and remained anonymous in the sexual act.”
Returning to reality, what caught me off guard was how ordinary life continued in Berlin a year before the end of the war. Electricity, telephones, gas, water, trains all continued to be available. People went to work each day. They drank with friends, went to the cinema and enjoyed time in the parks of the city. Bombs would cause damage. Repairs would be made to infrastructure and bombed out Berliners would seek refuge with family and neighbours. I realized life had to continue but had not considered how much of life remained routine.
However, the bombing is growing more intense. After attacking London with V-1’s the retaliatory attacks on Berlin are larger and more often especially in Central Berlin. Oppenheimer walks through the devastation of a bombing as he goes to the Reich Chancellery. Bodies, rubble, the occasional time fused bomb going off create a form of hell on earth.
Gilbers writes:
It might be a controversial question whether all humans were equal before God, but there was no doubt in regard to the bombs; they claimed any life.
In real life I knew a woman who had been an air raid warden during the bombing Blitz of London. Forty years later she could not be in a room with popping balloons.
Life’s little pleasures are rationed to the point of rarity. Oppenheimer’s new status as an investigator for the Nazis lets him enjoy a cup of real coffee or a cigarette. As well, he gains easy access to the methamphetamines that many people, not just the military, use to keep going.
There is a mix of historical figures amidst the fictional characters.
Oppenheimer meets up with ctual Berlin police officer Arthur Nebe. He was a rival with Oppenheimer in the Berlin police force. While neither as skilled nor as successful on examinations as Oppenheimer, Nebe achieved his ambitions by becoming an early Nazi party member, moving up in the ranks, and avidly pursuing anti-Jewish policies.
Later Oppenheimer meets a fictional police colleague who spent time in Poland where he participated in the murder of thousands, mostly Jews. He reflected the ordinary Germans who carried out the Holacaust. Every German had choices during the war. He tells Oppenheimer the few who refused to murder were berated but had no futher punishment. Oppenheimer wonders if his regret is over committing murder or self-pity at being ordered to kill men, women and children.
Hilde introduces him to members of the traditional German intelligence service under Admiral Canaris who are working for Germany and against Hitler. They have insights into the investigation not revealed by Vogler.
In one of the most surreal scenes I have read in a historical novel the German Nazi leader Goebbels, wanting Oppenheimer to have freedom to investigate, orderss:
“For my part, you are suspended from affiliation to the Jewish people until the end of the investigation. Until then, you are to be treated as an Aryan.”
When convenient for the Nazis, a Jew becomes an Aryan.
****
Germania by Harald Gilbers
It sounds as though the book really does an excellent job of depicting life at that time and in that place, Bill. And your insights give an even better portrait of what it must have been like. What I find interesting is the way that, war or not, people lived their lives. That seems to be a theme in wartime-era books that I've read, and perhaps it's part of being human - wanting life to go on.
ReplyDeleteMargot: Thanks for the comment. For those on the Home Front, rapidly becoming the actual Front in wartime Berlin of 1944, people endured. Catastrophes come to every generation in some form.
DeleteI'm always thrilled by what truths can be learned by digging behind good fiction.
ReplyDeleteAnthony: Thanks for the comment. I agree. I have learned a lot about life in many places through crime fiction.
DeleteThere is a movie called "Rosenstrasse," a deportation holding building for Jewish men on that German street. Their non-Jewish wives were not being detained, and they held demonstrations continually to get their husbands released. They succeeded.
ReplyDeleteBut I have read that non-Jewish men mostly abandoned their Jewish wives. I hope that isn't true.
Ordinary German soldiers had choices. Not so for Jewish people in Germany or throughout Europe.
I learned two years ago of a sister of my grandfather's who was killed in Poland during the Holocaust. I didn't know of her existence, and at the same time I learned of her, I had to grieve.
I have no tolerance for Germans who went along with the genocide, especially if there were no reprisals against them. Where is morality? Humanity? A code of ethics? Gone.
Kathy D.: Thanks for the comment. I remember you mentioning those brave women in earlier comments on other posts.
DeleteI am not sure how many many men v. women divorced Jewish spouses. Whoever divorced their spouse was a cowardly soul.
I am sorry that after more than 70 years you learned of the death of a great-aunt. I am glad there remained yourself to grieve and remember her.
On choices when facing evil Louise Penny's new book addresses that theme in a powerful mystery.
After learning of the existence of several siblings of my grandfathers, I found out several had gotten out of Poland. Only one that I know of died in Poland.
ReplyDeleteI wish I knew more about what became of his other siblings.
I spent a long time reading online about Polish Jews, and found an eyewitness account of when the Germans came to my grandoarebts; city. I read it once and will never read it again.
Kathy D.: Thanks for the comment. Some stories need but a single reading to be seared into the mind. You continue to honour their memory.
DeleteI do honor their memory, even those whose names I don't know. I had learned that my grandfather had more siblings, but I don't know their names nor their fates.
ReplyDeleteKathy D.: Thanks for the comment. Maybe some day those missing names will come to you and you can add them to your remembrances.
DeleteI hope so. I have inquired to agencies that deal with Holocaust history and Polish history.
ReplyDeleteKathy D.: Thanks for the comment. Information turns up from likely and unlikely sources.
Delete