German 'Workforce Turnover', 1942

 From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 155-57, 181, 191:

If things were bad in Berlin, they were far worse on the eastern front, where many soldiers were freezing to death. The people back home caught glimpses of the Russian campaign on the Wochenschau [weekly newsreels]: horse-drawn carriages and tanks bogged down in knee-high snow; soldiers in white camouflage outfits, rather like hooded bathrobes, skiing or plowing their way through the ruins of Russian villages that were “utterly destroyed by the mighty arms of our heroic shock troops”; German planes dropping food parcels for the soldiers marching in the glacial steppes. Letters home spoke of frostbite and amputated limbs. There were images of “Bolshevik corpses” littered around the icy Russian plains, but never of German soldiers, for that would be too upsetting.

One of the main items on the Wochenschau in January celebrated a domestic campaign that had been ordered by the Führer in December 1941: to donate socks, pullovers, scarves, ski boots, furs, fleeces, blankets, or anything else to keep the troops warm on the front lines....

What was not reported on the Wochenschau, or anywhere else, was an event that occurred at much the same time, on the western shore of the Wannsee, in a grand Italianate villa that once belonged to a rich industrialist and now served as a guesthouse and conference center for SS officers. Houses around the lovely Wannsee were sought after by the wealthiest Berliners. Before 1933, Jews lived in some of the finest homes. After the Nazis came to power, these were confiscated by senior figures in the regime. Goebbels owned a house on the lake, at Schwanenwerder. Walther Funk, the minister of economics, resided in a grand house that had once belonged to a Jewish family, now decorated with swastika tiles. Albert Speer lived nearby, as did Heinz Rühmann, the movie star. 

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Reinhard Heydrich, director of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), invited fourteen senior figures in the Nazi regime to a secret meeting followed by breakfast on January 20 at the SS guest house on the Wannsee. They included top bureaucrats from various ministries, as well as Roland Freisler, the notorious judge on the People’s Court who sentenced more than five thousand people to death between 1942 and 1945. Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for managing Jewish deportations, was asked to take the minutes. What needed to be discussed on that chilly morning, alleviated by a steady supply of fine brandy, were some practical aspects of the extermination of the Jews.

That the Jews were to be eradicated was no longer a matter of dispute. Just one week before the Wannsee Conference, Goebbels wrote in his diary, “The Führer once more expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no sentimental squeamishness about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them.” Mass killings had already been taking place in Poland since 1939. Jews who were not murdered on the spot were to be worked to death. But two questions still needed to be cleared up. How to administer the genocide in an orderly and efficient manner? And how to define who was Jewish? Should Mischlinge be included in the killing program? Heydrich believed that they should. Others wanted to postpone the decision until after the war. After some to-ing and fro-ing, Heydrich settled for that. The logistical issues were cleared up pretty quickly to everyone’s satisfaction, so the gentlemen could enjoy a leisurely glass of cognac in front of the fireplace.

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The first sign that deportations were imminent was a questionnaire sent through the mail to be filled out meticulously: financial assets, family history, personal details, and so forth. After some days, or sometimes weeks, the Gestapo would come beating on the door. There was no way back after that. In 1942, sixteen transports, each with loads of roughly one thousand people, left the Berlin railway stations. The trains carrying their human freight were mostly bound for the ghettos of Warsaw or Riga, or the death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor, where those not deemed fit to be worked to death were immediately gassed. In the summer of 1942, the killing of Jews had reached a bloody peak. Millions had already been shot or murdered by other means before the gas chambers of Auschwitz were employed day and night. The General Gouvernment had become a giant killing field, presided over by Governor General Hans Frank.

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There were now more than three million foreign workers in Germany. Many were French POWs. A number of men from occupied countries in Western Europe, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Scandinavian countries, had volunteered for work. Then there were male and female workers from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other parts of the Soviet Union. Some had come willingly, many had not. The Russians and Eastern Europeans, called Ostarbeiter, often mere teenagers, were treated appallingly. Cooped up in dismal work camps, they were so underfed that many died, or had to be shipped home in horrible conditions. One description of these transports: “There were dead passengers on the returning train. Women on that train gave birth to children that were tossed from the open window during the journey, while people sick from tuberculosis and venereal disease rode in the same coach. The dying lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown onto the embankment.” Treatment of Jewish slave workers in concentration camps, such as Sachsenhausen, was of course even worse.

And yet, a semblance of normalcy for most Berliners continued despite the griping, the bad news from different battlefronts, the horrors endemic in a murderous police state, and “Berlin pessimism.” The soccer competition carried on as always. BSB from Berlin Mitte beat Minerva from Schmargendorf. Tasmania was too strong for Tennis Borussia. And FC Wacker from Reinickendorf lost to Blau-Weiss 90.

Mischlings and the Dreaded Star

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 138-139:

The introduction of the star brought back the life-and-death question of who counted as a Jew. Some mixed families, temporarily protected by a “privileged” status, lived peculiar double lives. Marlene Herzfeld was five when the war began. I spoke to her in her house in Steglitz where she was bedridden. She was still living at home but was facing an operation—“my last chance, perhaps.” Hers was a story of great bitterness. “It would have been better for my mother if I hadn’t been born,” she said, in the firm tone of one who had learned to live with pain. Her mother had converted to her husband’s Jewish faith, and Marlene was classified as Jewish. But after divorcing her husband in 1937, her mother rejoined the Evangelical Christian church, and Marlene was baptized. She had to learn how to behave like a Christian: “I looked at a picture of Jesus, and I said, ‘That is our Führer.’ The pastor said, ‘Yes, indeed he is.’ ” It didn’t help. Marlene was still compelled to go to a Jewish kindergarten. Her mother’s family wanted nothing to do with them. They were spat at in the streets, kicked out of their apartment by the Nazi owner, and Marlene survived the war in an orphanage. Whenever there was a raid by Gestapo officers looking for Jews, she and a little boy with water on the brain had to hide until night in the woods. Marlene had a mournful look in her light blue eyes, as she spoke. “I was lucky that I was blonde,” she added.

The Mischling children of Erich and Sabine Alenfeld were treated as Aryans. Young Justus, ten years old in 1941, was a member of the Nazi youth organization the Jungvolk before he could join the Hitler Youth. The slang name for these boys was Pimpf, meaning “little rascal.” Justus was delighted to be a Pimpf. Sabine wrote to her husband, “Today [Justus] is doing his duty on the Reich Sporting Field…. He was head of his squad three times. Such pride!…Yesterday I handed him his official Hitler Youth dagger. God, was he proud, the little fellow.”

Soldiers on Leave in Berlin, 1941

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), p. 133:

Perhaps Moltke was not just thinking of German victims, but it was difficult to disguise the toll the war was taking on German soldiers. Death notices of men who had “fallen for the Volk and Führer” increased in the newspapers. And bitter strains began to be felt between the men who had to do the fighting and the people at home. The Wunschkonzert for the Wehrmacht had been stopped already in May, for reasons that are not quite clear. By midsummer, German soldiers on the eastern front might no longer have had time for such distractions.

In December, a curious letter of complaint was sent by a soldier to officers in the high command, who forwarded it to the Nazi Party authorities. On leave in the capital of the Reich, this soldier had been shocked by the behavior of Berliners. While men on the front were dying for their country, or losing their limbs, or freezing to death, he remarked, Berliners, many of them men under thirty-five years old, who had managed to be excused from military duty, were carousing in the packed bars and restaurants. Women, often without male company, used ration coupons belonging to soldiers on leave to gorge themselves. He was deeply offended by the cynicism he encountered. “The morals of Berlin are beneath contempt,” he wrote. “When it comes to eating, pushing black market goods, and fraudulence, 80 percent of the population has no conscience. And what about those Judeo-Bolshevik jokes that endanger state security in the worst way? If Berlin were Germany, we would have lost this war long ago.”

Berlin Bombing Neologisms, 1940

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 102-103, 108:

Berliners, like all denizens of big cities, often pride themselves on their urban wit, the humor of which is not always apparent to people from the outside—which is part of the fun, of course. The new reality of nightly bombing raids inspired some examples of the famous Berlin wit. A printed invitation did the rounds to a basement party put on by a Berlin cabaret, promising an all-night program with a musical overture of sirens, a fireworks display, and a lecture by Professor Fragmentation-Bomb entitled “All Good Things Come from Above.”

A contemporary joke: An airplane carrying Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels crashes. All three are killed. Who is saved? Answer: The German people. When Berliners said goodbye, they often wished each other a “bo-lo-na,” short for Bombenlose Nacht (night without bombs).

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A new verb entered the already rich lexicon of violent Nazi vocabulary: Coventrisieren, to “Coventry” a city. On November 14, the Luftwaffe bashed the city of Coventry with more than five hundred tons of incendiary and explosive bombs, as well as air mines that exploded upon impact. The cathedral went up in flames, more than five hundred people died, and two thirds of the city’s buildings were badly damaged.

Newspaper headlines in the rest of November gave Berliners a taste of what it meant to be Coventried: “Eyewitness Account of the Devastation of London: London Is on Its Way to Being Totally Destroyed” (Völkischer Beobachter, November 20). “Birmingham in Flames: The Blaze Can Be Seen from as Far as the English Channel” (VB, November 21). “Coventry, a Dead City” (VB, November 21).

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Since the bunkers that went up in 1940 by no means offered enough protection against bombs for most Berliners, it was decided that children should be evacuated to the countryside. The word “evacuated” was never mentioned in public, however, since that would suggest a sense of panic. The official term was Kinderlandverschickung, KLV, or “children’s relocation.” In the bracing rural air of Brandenburg, Silesia, or Bavaria, the children would be taught discipline, obedience, and loyalty to the Volksgemeinschaft, by senior members of the Hitler Youth. The state would pay for the KLV of poorer children. Wealthier families would have to pay for it themselves. Off they went, waving swastika flags from packed railway carriages, the youngest ones with tags around their necks bearing their names. Parents were not allowed to visit their children in their new billets, for that would interfere with their education.

From Sitzkrieg to Blitzkrieg in the West

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 92-93:

When German troops invaded Denmark and Norway in April [1940], “to save Scandinavia from British influence,” according to the Nazi press, victory came so quickly that the public was not especially alarmed. On the contrary. The SD reported, “The occupation of Denmark and Norway has made a huge impression on the entire German people, which rejoiced almost without exception.” It helped that Denmark was a major producer of ham, butter, and eggs, supplies the occupation army was not slow to plunder to feed the Volk back home. Moltke wrote to his wife on April 13, “The process by which Denmark is gradually to be made like Poland begins today. I did what I could to prevent it; but when I first heard about it the people who should have done something had already given their consent.” Denmark would never be like Poland, but the occupation was bad enough.

Meanwhile, Goebbels’s Promi [Propaganda Ministry], echoed by the obedient press, made sure that once an attack on Britain and France was launched, the blame would fall squarely on the belligerents in Paris and London. On May 8, the Berliner Volks-Zeitung reported that France and Britain were preparing aggressive war plans. Chamberlain, of all people, was depicted as a warmonger: “Never before has a responsible statesman played with the fate of nations in a more villainous and shameless fashion.” An article on the same page exulted in the extraordinary change in Norwegian public opinion. Somehow, all the old sympathies for Britain had vanished:

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On the evening of May 9, Major Sas, the Dutch military attaché, anxious to get information on the latest German war plans, visited the home of Hans Oster, his friend in the Abwehr. Oster told him that the Germans would invade the Netherlands the next morning, unless Hitler gave a counterorder later that night. The Dutch ambassador, meanwhile, was dancing with his wife, Nini, at the home of a friendly German aristocrat. Sas and Oster waited fearfully for more news. Perhaps things might still turn around at the last minute. When the counterorder didn’t come, Oster said, “My dear friend, it’s all over. I hope we’ll see each other again after the war.” The Dutch capitulated four days later, after German Luftwaffe bombers did to Rotterdam what they had previously done to Warsaw: The center of the city was obliterated. This marked the end of the Sitzkrieg, the Phony War.

Berlin's Busybodies, 1939-45

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), pp. 23-24:

Kennan, as an American diplomat, was vastly more comfortable than most Berliners, especially when winter set in. In Kennan’s description: “Canals were frozen. Fuel was short. Whole blocks of huge apartment houses could not be heated at all and had to be evacuated in zero weather.” (Jews were deprived of coal, and left to freeze in their “Jew houses.”) People also lived in constant fear of busybodies who could have a person arrested for breaking any petty regulation. The lowest-level busybody was the block warden (Blockwart), usually a little local fanatic, who would make sure that any untoward remarks or behavior observed on his street would be instantly reported to the relevant Nazi authorities. One such man is described by the German British Christabel Bielenberg. Herr Neisse was perhaps no better or worse than most minor Nazi officials. In daily life, he was a friendly gardener, who greeted Christabel politely as Frau Doctor Bielenberg whenever they crossed paths, and was a handy man with the pruning shears when her vine leaves needed pruning. A war veteran, he had come to Berlin from a small village in Saxony, and had had his fair share of problems. Like millions of other working men, Herr Neisse had suffered from inflation, unemployment, and poverty in the big city. And like millions of others, he had come to understand whom to blame for his own and his country’s misfortunes. His Führer had made that very clear. “ ‘Oh, no, Frau Dr., you must not get me wrong,’ ” he hastened to say, “ ‘not one particular Jew…. No, no, International Jewry…. You understand, Frau Dr., International Jewry.’ ”

Before Hitler came to power, Herr Neisse had already attended party meetings, where the men wearing brown storm trooper uniforms under their raincoats arrived in halls that reeked of sweat and beer. There they could freely fling up their arms and sing their favorite songs: “Clear the streets for the brown battalion / clear the streets for the storm division man!” In 1933, the humble, polite, diffident gardener became a somebody, a figure of authority, someone to be feared, “resplendent,” in Christabel’s words, “in brown uniform with shining boots and pill box hat, his mustache trimmed to a neat rectangle, his left thumb hitched into his Sam Browne belt and his right arm raised rigid in salute.” He was “resurgent Germany.” On a visit to Berlin in 1946, after she had moved back to England, Christabel was curious to know what had happened to Herr Neisse. She was told that he had been hanged from a lamppost after the Russian troops fought their way into the city in May 1945. Perhaps the Russians did it. Perhaps someone took revenge on a minor Nazi. Or, most plausibly, Herr Neisse had lost his faith in the Führer as the Reich collapsed around him and he had voiced doubts about Germany’s final victory. That was all it took in those last days of the war to be hanged by a mob of zealous SS men, roaming the streets in search of “defeatists.”

From Christabel’s description of Herr Neisse, he was not a particularly bad man, not motivated by malice, but he and people like him could get anyone into serious trouble if they caught them insufficiently blacking out their windows, or God forbid, listening to the BBC on their radio. After passing through the Alex, such offenses could result in forced labor, time in a concentration camp, or even death. Imposing petty rules was also another way to bully Jews in Berlin. A non-Jew caught jaywalking or cutting diagonally across a street would be let off with a warning. Jews would be taken to police stations, where they were often abused by bored cops just for sport.

Berlin's "Golden October" of 1939

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), p. 53:

Thinking back to the first year of the war, Hilde became almost wistful: “We had a lot of fun, and danced in bars like the Eden and the Roxy. Hans played jazz music when he was in a good mood. It was a wonderful time, especially at night when we danced with small groups of friends. But then we had to walk through the dark streets to the S-Bahn…. That was not such fun.”

The poet Jochen Klepper, who would later commit suicide with his Jewish wife, wrote about the “Golden October” of 1939, when the weather was still fine before the cold winter months set in. He took a walk along the Wannsee on October 15: “The lakes never looked so beautiful. A marvelous afternoon after the morning rain…. We are so happy about the lovely walks we can enjoy here. All day, until sundown at five o’clock, the terrace doors are open, and the summer furniture is brought out once more. Everything is redolent of the tentative sense of peace.”

As long as one wasn’t Jewish, or involved in active resistance, it was almost possible to imagine that life in Berlin was normal. “Normal” is the word I heard most often from men and women I interviewed about their childhood at the beginning of the war in Berlin. I asked a retired engineer named Jörg Sonnabend about his school days. We were having coffee and cakes prepared by his wife, Dorrit, in the small living room of their apartment in Spandau. A teddy bear dressed in a German naval uniform was sitting on a bookshelf next to a model battleship. “Absolutely normal,” remembered Herr Sonnabend about his primary school. “Nothing different from other times.” He couldn’t recall any pictures of Hitler in the classroom. “Well, yes, in the principal’s office, there was a portrait of the Führer.” Songs? “Yes, there were the usual songs. We sang the Horst Wessel song [the Nazi anthem] during flag raising ceremonies, of course. And as a boy I must confess I loved uniforms. But otherwise, things were entirely normal. All the horror people talk about nowadays, none of that bothered us until the Allied bombings.”

Advertisements in the newspapers promoted ways to cope with graying hair, or ears that stick out, or heartburn after having had too much to eat. Goebbels complained in his diary about the upper classes living it up, partying with foreign diplomats. He vowed to put a stop to that.