Immediately after the Red Army’s sacking of Berlin in April 1945, Jews began to reappear in the ruined city. Some had been liberated from concentration camps, but many others had been there all along, quietly waiting for Hitler’s defeat. Their very presence, boldly announced in Yiddish as Mir Zaynen Do—”We are here”—epitomized to the defeated populace their government’s failure to protect them from pollution. Not only had hundreds of thousands of Berlin’s women been violated by the Soviets, but, as was now clear, Berlin had all along been something other than Judenrein (“purified of Jews”).
Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany
Princeton University Press
416 pages
$42.00
Atina Grossmann’s great insight is that the postwar reappearance of a traumatized Jewish population—and the survivors’ high rates of marriage, pregnancy and childbearing—cannot be understood apart from the parallel victimhood of the “German” population. Throughout the spring of 1945, the advancing Soviet army had been described by Nazi propagandists as a second Mongol Horde, with all that implied: in Nazi logic, it was an unsubtle hint at miscegenation. The pathetic remains of the German army (old men and teenagers, mostly) mounted a desperate and ridiculous block-by-block defense of the city, in which desperation Grossman identifies clues that more was at stake than military defeat: a Soviet victory meant racial violation—and accordingly the very end of the Aryan race.
In Berlin, the aftermath was horrific. Grossmann’s creativity as a researcher emerges here: an examination of requests for abortions filed with transitional authorities—at least 90 percent of ensuing pregnancies—sheds light on the specific and varied meanings the suffering women of Berlin attached to the German defeat. Women were not only victims of sexual violence or war booty, though certainly they were both of these: many of them also experienced the rapes as racial warfare.
Grossmann began her book trying to understand the German perception of victimhood, that is, “why Germans were so convinced after the war that they were the primary victims.” That wide swaths of the German population did see their situation in just this way will come as news to many readers. But more surprising still is another story that emerges in Grossman’s account, a story inextricable from that of German victimhood: Jewish survival and thriving. At a moment when transitional authorities were being overwhelmed with a demand for abortions and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases, Jewish survivors started marrying and making babies. The baby carriage, Grossmann writes, became “central to the iconography of victimization and survival in postwar Germany: those proudly pushed by Jewish survivor parents through the streets of German towns and displaced persons camps … and the buggies pushed by Germans, loaded to the brim, often, with everything except their intended contents.”
Jewish success at filling their carriages with real, living babies—which is to say, Jewish refusal to be mere victims—marked their strongest break in postwar Germany. As horrible as the Nazi period had been, Grossmann argues, it was these minor encounters in the streets that finally convinced many Jews to emigrate: Zionist recruiters found willing settlers in the DP camps; others left for America. In no way minimizing the Holocaust—some of Grossmann’s relatives were survivors whose stories are included here—Grossmann insists that postwar emigration was motivated in part by German refusal to see in Jewish recovery their own healing.
Paul Grant is pursuing a PhD in history at the University of Wisconsin.
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