Black Earth(95)

For Jews themselves, the existence of a state meant citizenship, even if only in an attenuated and humiliating form. Citizenship meant the legal possibility of emigration. Most German and Austrian Jews exploited this possibility, although they generally lost their possessions and their connections to their previous lives in doing so. Citizenship for Jews meant the existence of a civil code, even if sometimes a very discriminatory one, which allowed them claims to property. These could be traded, in ways that were obviously unjust, for the right to depart. The legal exploitation of Jews is often seen as a step towards their extermination, but this was not exactly the case. Even the most exploitative and painful forms of legal discrimination were much less risky to Jewish life than regime change or removal of state authority. In those situations, Jews were suddenly and totally vulnerable, since they lost their access to the civil code and thus their property rights. Rather than trading their property for their lives, they lost both.

Legal discrimination by antisemitic states did not bring an automatic downward spiral toward death, but state destruction did. Once a Jew lost access to a state he or she lost access to the protection of higher authorities and lower bureaucrats. Jews could live if they restored that access, but this was a difficult feat. Anton Schmid was a German (Austrian) soldier from Vienna who, in Vilnius, was responsible for the office that returned individual German soldiers to their units. He saved a Jewish man by providing him with a Wehrmacht uniform and paybook. He saved a Jewish woman in Vilnius by inventing for her a legal identity. With a bit of charm and bluster he generated a false baptismal certificate and moved her through the five necessary offices until she was fully documented. No Jew alone in the stateless zone could have done that. All in all, Schmid provided at least one hundred Jews with documents that gave them a chance to live.

Citizenship in modern states means access to bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has the reputation of killing Jews; it would be closer to the truth to say that it was the removal of bureaucracy that killed Jews. So long as state sovereignty persisted, so did the limits and possibilities afforded by bureaucracy. In most offices, time is slowed and matters are considered, perhaps with the help of petitions or bribes. When people in sovereign states beyond Germany wished to be noble, bureaucracy provided them with the opportunity to frame their arguments on behalf of individual Jews in the pragmatic or patriotic terms that employees of the state could understand and endorse. The bureaucracies beyond Germany also exhibited the typical tendencies of passing the buck, awaiting clear orders from higher authorities, and insisting on clarity of expression and proper paperwork. Many of the things that make bureaucracies annoying in daily life could and did mean survival for Jews.

Even German bureaucracy did not kill Jews by itself. Even after it was overlaid and penetrated by Nazi structures for six years, German bureaucracy was not capable of murdering the Jews of Germany. German officials were never even instructed, in any final and dispositive way, as to who among German citizens counted as a Jew. At the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the issue seems to have consumed more time than any other; but it was not resolved, either then or later. This was not for lack of desire: The lawyers concerned believed that Jewish “blood” had to be cleansed “from the German and indeed the entire European bloodstream.” Such a thing could be undertaken only when neighboring European countries were invaded and their polities wrecked. German Jews died not because of bureaucratic precision in Germany but because of the destruction of bureaucracies in other countries. German Jews were not killed, with a very few exceptions, on the territory of prewar Germany. Instead they were extracted from Germany and deported to bureaucracy-free zones in the East, places where they would have been entirely safe before the war.

The killing sites of German Jews were places such as ?od?, Riga, and Minsk. If the Holocaust is recalled from the perspective of German Jews, as it usually is, these names evoke nothing but the horror of death amidst the unknown. In the minds of many Germans, and thus in many German sources, these cities are nothing more than improbable assemblages of subhumans in the colonial Lebensraum. The combination of Nazi and German Jewish sources can convey a misleadingly incomplete impression of these places.

Before the war, before the arrival of policies of state destruction, each of these cities was a model of Jewish civil society in Europe. ?od?, for example, was Poland’s second largest city and its second largest Jewish city, with a sizable Jewish middle class. It was the birthplace of one of the most influential poets of the Polish language, Julian Tuwim, who was a Jew. It was annexed to the Reich after the 1939 invasion of Poland. Riga had been the capital of Latvia, where Jews enjoyed equal rights under the civil code, had sat in parliament, and were ministers of government. In the late 1930s, Riga was a site of refuge for a considerable number of Jews from Germany and Austria. It was altered first by Soviet state destruction in 1940 and then by German state destruction in 1941. Minsk, before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, had been the capital of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Rates of intermarriage were high, and Jewish and non-Jewish schoolchildren were often close friends. Jews had been executed in large numbers in the Soviet Great Terror of 1937, but not as Jews; most often they were taken away by the NKVD’s black ravens and shot on false charges of espionage for Poland. Antisemitism was certainly present in Soviet Minsk; but it was a crime. Minsk had to be occupied by Germany, as it was in 1941, before it could become a place where people were murdered as Jews. Jewish urban civilization in eastern Europe had exhibited great variety; only the destruction of the state transformed cities with Jewish particularities into sites for a general policy of killing.