Berlin, Germany

BERLIN, capital of Germany. Jews were probably present in Berlin soon after it was founded in the late 12th century. The medieval Jewish settlements in Berlin-Coelln and in Spandau were exposed to recurring persecutions and expulsions. At least twelve Jewish families were living in Berlin by 1674, their number expanding to 40 by 1688 and to no fewer than 117 in 1700. A plot of land for a cemetery was already acquired in 1672 and in 1714 the first public synagogue was dedicated. In 1724, and again in 1734, poorer Jews were expelled from Berlin, and yet the Jewish population continued to expand, numbering 2,188 persons in 1750. In the same year, King Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great) further restricted their rights. The first decades following the end of the Seven Years War (1763) were a period of economic and cultural growth for the Jewish community of Berlin, which under the leadership of Moses Mendelssohn (1729 - 86) and his disciples became a focal point of the Haskala movement. Beginning in the 1770s, Mendelssohn gathered around him a growing circle of young Jewish scholars, maskilim, who like himself were well versed both in humanistic and Jewish learning. An integral part of the social milieu of the Berlin Haskala was a new Jewish economic elite, who engaged the maskilim as private tutors, supported them financially, and often intermarried with them, and whose Jewish women operated salons where Jews and Christian intellectuals of both sexes could converse on equal terms. Christian Wilhelm Dohm, friend of Moses Mendelssohn, formulated in 1781 for the first time a political theory of the emancipation of the Jews. Dohm's ideas were first implemented in 1812. At the end of 1814, Israel Jacobson instituted a regular modernized service, whose features included an organ and sermons in German delivered by lay preachers. In 1845, the more radical reformers set up their own congregation, which had a nominal membership of only 300 but enjoyed wide support. In 1822, the Association for Culture and the Scientific Study of the Jews (Verein für Cultur [sic] und Wissenschaft der Juden) published the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the first scientific Jewish periodical. Berlin was the birthplace of modern antisemitism. The very word “antisemitism” was coined there in 1879 by the journalist Wilhelm Marr. Adolf Stoecker, the court preacher, organized the first antisemitic political party anywhere. His sensational success prompted the Berlin Jewish lawyers Maximilian Horowitz and Eugen Fuchs to found in 1893 the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (C. V.), founded to combat anti-semitism. In 1852, there were still fewer than 10,000 Jews in Berlin. By 1871 there were already 36,326. In the following decades, the Jewish population of Greater Berlin more than quadrupled, rising from 64,355 in 1885 to 144,043 in 1910 and peaking at 172,672 in 1925. Close to 20,000 Berlin Jews fought for their German fatherland in the war; many paid with their lives. During the Weimar Republic, several Berlin Jews came to occupy high state offices. The Jewish contribution to the cultural life of the capital - what came to be known as “Weimar culture” - was crucial, be it as producers, consumers, or patrons of the arts. In the last free Reichstag elections of November 1932, the Nazis won 26% of the vote in Berlin - below the national average of 33%. After 1933, Berlin became the capital of the Third Reich and the nerve center of Nazi persecution policy. Not only the Reich ministries, but also the Nazi party, the SS and, after 1939, the Reich Security Main Office - had their head offices in Berlin. The future propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who had been appointed by Hitler as Gauleiter (Nazi administrative head) of Berlin in 1926, regarded it as his special mission to rid the capital city of its Jewish population. The first victims were party activists, intellectuals, and artists of Jewish descent who had identified themselves in the past as the political opponents of the Nazis. Many were apprehended, maltreated, and thrown into makeshift concentration camps without trial. At the same time, the police and the SA carried out demonstrative raids in the Scheunenviertel neighborhood. Beginning March 1933, numerous Jewish civil servants, including jurists and physicians, were fired. On April 1st 1933, the authorities instigated a boycott against Jewish businesses. On that day, SA and SS troops stood guard before Jewish shops as well as the work places of Jewish lawyers, estate agents, and medical doctors. In June 1933, there were 16,643 Jews listed as unemployed. The Reichsvertretung, the main umbrella organization, was set up in September 1933 by all the major constitutive forces of German Jewry to coordinate Jewish activity and represent the German Jews before the regime. That year, the community was assisting more than 19,000 needy persons, apart from an additional 21,000 aid recipients in the framework of Jewish Winter Relief. The Jewish Cultural Organization, the Kulturbund, staged concerts, theater productions, and lectures, providing jobs to many unemployed Jewish artists. The Jewish educational system was greatly expanded to accommodate the growing number of Jewish pupils ejected from German public schools. An estimated 28,000 Jews had left Berlin during the first three years of the Nazi regime and a further 20,000 during the years 1936-37. Berlin was especially hard hit by the Kristallnacht pogrom of 9-10 November, 1938. Jewish shops were looted and destroyed and more than 40 synagogues were burned and destroyed. Dozens of Jews were murdered and some 12,000 men were arrested. Many were deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The remaining Jewish associations were closed down. Jewish newspapers had already been banned on the eve of the pogrom. All Jewish property had been forcibly “Aryanized” (that is, confiscated), and in 1941, there were 26,000-28,000 Jews employed as forced laborers in Berlin. The Jews were subjected to an endless series of humiliating prohibitions: they were banned from public places, their telephone connections were cut, their radios confiscated, and their use of public transport restricted. They were limited to specific hours and specific shops when purchasing food. As of July 1939, the Berlin Jewish community was integrated into the Reich Union of the Jews of Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland), the Nazi-imposed organization which succeeded the voluntary Reichsvertretung. On Yom Kippur 1941, several leading officials of the Jewish community were informed by the Gestapo of the impending deportations. The Jewish community was required to assist in the process. The first transport of about 180 left on 18 October 1941 with 1,013 persons in the direction of the Lodz ghetto. The transports of the elderly and “privileged” to the Theresienstadt ghetto began in June 1942. In May 1942, the “Baum group”, a Jewish-Communist resistance organization, carried out an arson attack on the Nazi propaganda exhibition “The Soviet Paradise.” In response, the Gestapo arrested 500 Jewish hostages in Berlin. Half were shot and half were deported to Auschwitz. In December 1942, the last big deportation phase began and by February 1943 there were only 27,000 Jews living in Berlin. In the last big roundup of Jews in Berlin beginning on 27 February 1943, Jews were arrested at their workplaces in the factories. Of the more than 11,000 Jews arrested in the last, final roundup, 8,568 “unprotected” Jews were deported in March 1943. Jews in mixed marriages were separated from the rest, but were released along with the so-called racial half-Jews raised as Jews (Geltungsjuden) in the course of March 1943. After the war, there were about 7,500 Jews in Berlin: 4,200 of a “privileged” mixed marriage status; 1,400 who evaded deportation by going underground; 1,900 returned to Berlin from the concentration camps.