Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany
Atina Grossmann
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 069114317X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives.
In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters.
Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.
liberation of, 196–97, 247; life of, 10; living conditions of, 138, 139, 140, 143–44, 145, 146, 147; and local Gemeinden, 256; and Magistrat, 119; and marriage, 184, 186–88, 197–98, 210, 215, 227, 228, 229, 261; as masters, 213; medical treatment for, 150; memorialization by, 196–98; and memory of murdered women, 228, 229; moral rehabilitation of, 158; mortality rates of, 215; Munich housing for, 266; in ostensibly judenrein territory, 184; with partisans, 133; perceptions of, 148–49, 157; and
unpolluted water supply; the limited but reliable five million kilowatts of electricity available daily; gas production at 75 percent capacity; waterproofing and repair on some thirty thousand housing units; the inoculation of the entire population against typhoid and all children against diphtheria; a functioning if not generous rationing system; the reopening of newspapers, magazines, opera, symphony, theaters, and cinemas; the purging of “died in the wool” Nazis from important positions; and,
not central to his account and is revised and then expurgated in later editions.57 Israeli novelist Hanoch Bartov’s autobiographical novel about his service in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade from Palestine contains a riveting description of his unit’s efforts to contain and come to terms with the rapacious actions of some of their comrades while also insisting on understanding and protecting the violators. For him too, “even the “unwritten law of the Red Army,” granting a twenty-four-hour free
return from the camps, or safer havens, met a reception both celebratory and anguished. When 295 Berlin Jews were repatriated from Shanghai in 1947, the media presented an upbeat picture of lost natives coming home. Seventy-one-year-old Martin Hamburg, the former London correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt, brought back the same faithful dog that had accompanied him to exile in 1939. A much reprinted photograph showed the actor Martin Rosen, liberated from Auschwitz, at the Görlitzer train
for further emigration. This stance was stoutly resisted by the British, who, determined to prevent large-scale European Jewish immigration into their Palestinian mandate, rather disingenuously insisted that acceding to Jewish demands for separate treatment would represent a reinstatement of Nazi racial policies. Harrison minced no words in dispatching that argument: “The first and plainest need for these people is a recognition of their actual status, and by this I mean their status as Jews.” He