Entangled Histories and Close Encounters

AS WE REWRITE the history of the post-1945 years in the aftermath of the political upheavals of 1989, we are only now rediscovering what was amply obvious to contemporaries: that occupied Germany in the immedi­ ate postwar period was the unlikely, unloved, and reluctant host to hun­ dreds of thousands of its former victims, housed both inside and outside refugee camps mainly in the American zone and in the American sector of Berlin. A significant number of the millions of people uprooted by war and persecution who remained on western Allied territory as “unrepatria­ ble” displaced persons (DPs) were Jewish survivors of Nazi genocide and involuntary migration—precisely the people both the Allies and the Ger­ mans had least expected to have to deal with in the wake of National Socialism’s exterminatory war. In 1933, at the beginning of the National Socialist regime, Germany counted approximately 500,000 Jews. In 1946/47, some quarter of a mil­ lion Jews were gathered in Germany, most of them in the American zone. Only about 15,000 of them were German Jews, of whom almost half were in Berlin. Some had endured in hiding or disguised as “Aryans.” Others had survived forced labor as well as death and concentration camps (often elderly survivors from Theresienstadt). Most had managed a precarious aboveground existence in “privileged” mixed marriages or as Mischlinge (“partial” Jews). Still others were returned émigrés, many of them now in occupier uniform and serving as translators, interrogators, or civil affairs and cultural officers in all four Allied, and especially the American, armed forces. The majority, however, were Eastern European Jews, now classified by the victors as “displaced persons.” Approximately 90,000 Jews had been liberated by the Allies on German soil, but many died within weeks, leaving about 60,000 or 70,000 survivors. As the months passed, this remnant was augmented by tens of thou­ sands of Jewish “infiltrees” who poured into the American zone from Eastern Europe. These predominantly Polish Jews constituted three dis­ tinct but sometimes overlapping groups. First were the survivors of con­ centration and labor camps and death marches, who had been freed in Germany but initially returned to their hometowns hoping, generally in vain, to find lost family members or repossess property. The second group encompassed Jews who had survived among the partisans, in hiding, or © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.