Postwar Decisions: Returning, Staying, or Leaving?

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the decision to remain within or return to Germany was by no means easy for Jews. For example, the German Jewish journalist Karl Marx, who was one of the first civilian German Jews to return from exile in 1946 (his goal was to support Jewish survivors) said a question that instantly came into his mind when entering the British occupation zone was: “How can you possibly, after all that has happened, live there [in Germany] as a Jew?”Footnote ¹¹ After he decided to remain permanently, both his friends and many strangers fired exactly the same question at him. These people, and among them especially Jews, were either unwilling or unable to understand his motivation for attempting to rebuild a sustainable Jewish community in Germany. Despite this lack of comprehension and the German-Jewish communities’ overall political isolation, about 9,000 to 12,000, or roughly 4 percent of the estimated 280,000 Jewish emigrants from German-speaking countries who had escaped the concentration and extermination camps by taking refuge in neighboring European countries or overseas, remigrated to the country of their expulsion before 1960. The small number of returnees suggests a strong determination of those few who committed themselves to the project of reestablishing an integrated and unified German Jewish community.Footnote ¹²

Moreover, the option to return was dependent on more than merely the declared intention of each individual. At the beginning of the occupation of Germany in 1945, the borders of the Allied zones were at first closed; crossing the frontier was possible only with the protection of the occupying powers on both sides of a border. This might explain why many of the first returnees were people who had served in the occupying armies, sometimes in the Jewish Brigade, an independent, national Jewish military formation of the British Army during World War II.Footnote ¹³ A few months after the liberation, the occupying forces also started to encourage German-Jewish translators, lawyers, and journalists to return to Germany. There was a desperate need for professionally trained, language-skilled personnel who had not collaborated with the Nazis, to be employed for example in the war-crimes trials and in reeducation programs. Some emigrant Jews qualified for these jobs. A great number of Jewish emigrants also reentered postwar Germany as aid workers for American and British relief organizations. These organizations operated for varying periods of time, but fairly early on sent rescue teams to support the survivors of the Holocaust.Footnote ¹⁴

After returning German-Jewish emigrants successfully coped with the occupying forces, the next obstacles they faced were German civilians and the German political leadership. Though domestic and foreign observers reported that violent acts and vocalized antisemitism were almost nonexistent in German public life immediately after the end of the war, they never disappeared completely. One indicator is Report No. 49 on antisemitism published by the US Military Forces (OMGUS) in the year 1947. It revealed that 18 percent of the Germans were still “radical antisemites,” 21 percent “antisemites,” and 22 percent more moderate “racists”; only 20 percent did not show any racist resentments.Footnote ¹⁵ Other indicators were the increasing number of violent actions in public spaces committed against Jews, the administrative obstructions of supplies destined for Jews in German territories, threats and anonymous antisemitic letters sent to individuals or published in newspapers, and acts of desecration in Jewish cemeteries.Footnote ¹⁶ Between 1945 and 1950 alone, no fewer than 200 of the 500 Jewish cemeteries in all occupation zones had been desecrated according to the records of the Allied authorities.Footnote ¹⁷ The small number of German Jews who decided to return to their former home often faced difficulties readjusting within this context. Still, they suffered less than non-German, mainly East-European Jewish DPs, who were the main targets of antisemitic offenses. Germans typically distinguished the non-native, less-integrated Jewish DPs from the “good German Jews”Footnote ¹⁸ and blamed the former for major black market activities. This aggravated the already tense situation between the East-European Jewish DPs on the one side and German Jews on the other side, as well as between all Jews and the surrounding non-Jewish German majority.Footnote ¹⁹

Among the Allies, only the Soviets pursued a deliberate repatriation policy. But they typically focused their efforts on communists, former social democrats, or other people whom they hoped to recruit for the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) founded in April 1946. Two of them were Alfred Norden and Jürgen Kuczynski. Norden, who was the editor of the communist newspaper Rote Fahne before 1933, went into exile during Nazi rule, and ultimately found safety in the United States. He returned to Berlin after the war and was appointed head of the press section of the Information Department of the Ministerial Council of the GDR in 1949—a position he held only until 1952. The communist Jürgen Kuczynski had emigrated from Berlin to England in 1936, where he was interned as an enemy alien in 1939, but he was released after American intervention and was recruited by the US Office of Strategic Services as a statistician. He returned to Germany after the war (initially with the US Army) and decided to settle in East Germany, where he became one of the leading intellectuals of the SED. In 1946, he was appointed to the chair for economic history at Humboldt University in Berlin.Footnote ²⁰ Though a high number of Jewish returnees to the GDR did not build careers as party dignitaries, they still can be characterized as left-wing intellectuals. Among this group were the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who returned from his American exile to the GDR in 1948; the University of Leipzig had offered him the position of professor of philosophy. It also included the communist jurist and writer Alfred Kantorowicz, who returned to East Berlin from his American exile in 1946 and became professor of German literature at Berlin's Humboldt University in 1950. One of the most important German female writers of the twentieth century, Anna Seghers, returned from her Mexican exile to West Berlin in 1947, moved to East Berlin in 1950, and shortly thereafter became the president of the GDR's Writers’ Union (DDR-Schriftstellerverband). These three had already been close to or were members of the Communist Party (KPD) before 1933 and had escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to locations other than the Soviet Union. Their experiences qualified them in the eyes of the SED for high-profile positions in the emerging “socialist state of the German nation.”Footnote ²¹

Contrary to the Soviet approach, West German official policy only occasionally addressed the theme of return after 1945. Aside from some individual calls that were directed especially toward politicians, academics, and writers—but not explicitly to Jewish returnees—a statement that the heads of the governments of the federal states (Länder) in the three western occupation zones issued in June 1947 remained the only official West German appeal to all refugees from the Third Reich, including Jews. Yet early on, leading West German politicians from across the political spectrum—including the Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, Liberal Democrat Theodor Heuss, and the Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher—recognized that the promotion of Jews and Jewish culture could serve as an effective method for Germany to reintegrate into the community of Western countries. Later developments, especially the passage of two reparation lawsFootnote ²² and one regulating restitutionFootnote ²³ by the West German Parliament, the Bundestag, during the 1950s, clearly encouraged German-Jewish return and reconciliation.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, this process of German-Jewish reconciliation was also expected and supported by the Western Allies. At the second conference on the future of the Jews in Germany that the adviser on Jewish affairs in the American zone of occupation, Harry Greenstein, held in Heidelberg in July and August 1949 to discuss the question of Jewish interest representation in the emerging German states, keynote speaker and later US High Commissioner John J. McCloy called German attitudes about the Jews a “barometer of democratization.” The development of the Jewish community could be understood as “the test of Germany's progress toward the light,” McCloy stated, and he further asked the Jews to contribute to the transformation of German attitudes by acting with honesty and courage.Footnote ²⁴ Despite these attempts by leading West German politicians and the Western Allied authorities to reestablish Jewish life in the first years after the war, a majority of the German population did not welcome returning Jews, who oftentimes lived in an anti-Jewish if not outright antisemitic environment.

For returning Jews, beginning anew in the old homeland was further complicated by the circumstance that their continued presence in the “land of the perpetrators” was condemned by international Jewish organizations. Jewish leaders and global Jewish institutions (particularly the World Jewish Congress) decided that Germany could not be a safe haven for the Jews. Among these influential figures was the German rabbi and leader of Progressive Judaism in Germany, Leo Baeck, who had survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he had been the spokesman for the Council of Elders (Judenrat) and settled after the war in London. This stance was mainly because of continued negative opinions of Jews held by the majority of Germans.Footnote ²⁵ Consequently, those who remained in Germany found themselves, especially during the early postwar years, disliked by the Germans and ostracized by world Jewry.

In the face of this isolation, struggling for recognition, and finding themselves confronted with the question of German reparations to Jews at the end of the 1940s, the representatives of both Jewish DPs and German-Jewish communities from East and West Germany agreed to come together on July 19, 1950, in Frankfurt am Main to establish a consolidated political representative body, the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, which still is the most influential Jewish institution created in post-Holocaust Germany. Henceforward, the Zentralrat claimed to voice the interests of all Jews living in both parts of Germany and identified the needs for compensation and restitution as among the most pressing issues.Footnote ²⁶ Yet, given the differences between the political systems established in the two German states, the developments of the Jewish communities in the West and the East followed very different paths.

Difficult Beginnings: Restoring/Consolidating Jewish Life in Postwar Germany

By the end of the 1940s, no more than approximately 25,000 Jews lived in the recently founded FRG. By the end of 1951, a good three years after the founding of the State of Israel and the change of US immigration policies, which both created better opportunities for Holocaust survivors to immigrate to these countries, the official figure in West Germany was down to about 21,500.Footnote ²⁷ New arrivals to the West came only, and sporadically, from the Eastern bloc. At the same time a much smaller number of approximately 4,000 Jews had decided to settle in the East. At the time of the foundation of the GDR in 1949, the East German–Jewish communities included 1,250 members. Jewish communities existed in Brandenburg/Havel (68 members), Chemnitz (49), Dresden (188), Halle (95), Leipzig (338), Magdeburg (167), Schwerin (81), and Thüringen (264).Footnote ²⁸ An additional 2,500 Jews who lived in East Berlin were registered members of the joint Jewish community, the Gesamtgemeinde, in the former capital city.Footnote ²⁹ In view of the Cold War, it is not surprising that at the beginning of the 1950s neither the existence of the Zentralrat, based in Düsseldorf, nor the presence of a national German-Jewish newspaper known today as the Jüdische Allgemeine,Footnote ³⁰ founded in 1946 in the same city, attracted much attention abroad. Nevertheless, it was during this time that leading representatives of the Zentralrat and the independent newspaper against all odds successfully reclaimed the right to represent the concerns and complaints of all Jews living in the two German states. Especially influential were the lawyer Hendrik George van Dam, the first general secretary of the Zentralrat, and the journalist Karl Marx, the longtime editor of the Jüdische Allgemeine, which was the most important postwar German-Jewish newspaper. Despite initial problems—Marx was suspected by the British occupation administration of having served as a spy for the Germans during the first years of the war, and both Marx and van Dam had been interned for significant amounts of time in England like many other German-Jewish refugees during World War II—both men soon earned the trust of the American, French, and British occupying powers because of their professional educations and their status as German-Jewish emigrants. The latter factors had convinced the British to allow their return to postwar Germany by crossing into the British zone as early as 1945 and 1946, respectively. Their personal backgrounds, professional qualifications, and the networks they were able to establish for the British and American authorities and the German political leadership in the early postwar years helped both to take on the responsibilities of high-profile representatives of the Jewish community in Germany.Footnote ³¹

A close analysis of the beginning of Jewish representation in Germany leaves no doubt that van Dam's and Marx's main strategy to consolidate and vindicate the return of Jews focused on two core issues. On the one hand, their inward-looking policy was geared toward the “principle of unity”; and on the other, their call for acceptance of the Jewish communities (and their various regional and national associations) served as a “leitmotif” of the institutions’ “foreign policy.”Footnote ³² Together they worked to strengthen solidarity among the members of the Jewish community in the East and West and sounded warnings when the community's coherence was threatened. For almost two decades, they cooperated very closely, and they continually considered these central precepts to be essential for the achievement of their political aims. They agreed that in the wake of the Nazis’ and their collaborators’ systematic, state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of the Jews, restitution and compensation were the primary challenges. These issues were unavoidable, and they were of fundamental moral and financial importance for the Jewish communities while they were struggling to redefine “home” and reestablish a Jewish culture in Germany.Footnote ³³ In line with this policy, van Dam and Marx initially also utilized the aforementioned argument made by US High Commissioner John J. McCloy in 1949 that the success of Jewish integration is a sign of “Germany's progress toward the light,” to make their case for why Jewish life had to continue in the “land of the perpetrators.”Footnote ³⁴

However, neither the formative act of establishing one national umbrella organization of Jews for the two Germanys nor the emerging consultations concerning the question of German compensation with the West German government constituted guaranteed security for the permanent return of Jews. At this juncture in the early 1950s, the outcomes of the Zentralrat's policies were uncertain, and thus failed to quiet justified worry about the future of Jews in Germany. One great concern was the fact that the Zentralrat's members lived not in one, but in two diverging German states. This naturally led to questions concerning the inclusion and continued involvement of the Jewish communities located in the newly established GDR.Footnote ³⁵

Although the GDR was hardly a top destination for Jewish refugees and survivors after the Second World War, some German Jews were attracted by the opportunity to build a different kind of Germany under Soviet protection. The leader of the Jewish community in East Berlin and later president of the State Association of Jewish Communities in the GDR (Landesverband der Jüdischen Gemeinden in der DDR, Landesverband), Julius Meyer, was keen to realize his dream of a socialist society in East Germany. As a member of the German Communist Party since 1930, he had been imprisoned in two Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, and decided to resettle in East Berlin after the war, where he joined first the KPD and in 1946 the SED.Footnote ³⁶ Meyer defended the politics of the nascent GDR, which presented itself as an “antifascist” state and claimed to be the successor of the communist and socialist resistance against National Socialism.Footnote ³⁷ He became a member of the board of the Jewish communities of Greater Berlin in 1946 and represented the Jewish communities of the Soviet occupation zone in the Directorate of the Working Group of Jewish Communities in Germany (Direktorium der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Jüdischer Gemeinden in Deutschland). Together with others he founded the Landesverband in 1950 and became its president from 1952 to 1953.Footnote ³⁸

His opponent on the board of the Jewish Communities of Greater Berlin was Auschwitz survivor Heinz Galinski, who emerged as the leader of the Jewish community in West Berlin. Unlike many other Holocaust survivors, Galinski, like Meyer, had remained in Germany after the end of the Second World War. He functioned both as chairman of the Jewish community in West Berlin and since 1950 also as an elected representative of the East Berlin Jews to the newly founded Zentralrat. These roles strengthened Galinski's position in the Zentralrat, especially because representatives of the Jewish communities in the GDR who lived in East Germany, such as Meyer, were oftentimes hindered by the Soviets when they attempted to participate in the common meetings of the Zentralrat, which for the most part took place in the West.Footnote ³⁹ In fact, no representative of the Jewish communities in East Germany was invited to the inaugural meeting of the Zentralrat in July 1950. For this reason, Galinski brought up the importance of reserving one seat in the new directorate of the Zentralrat for a representative of the Jewish communities in the GDR.Footnote ⁴⁰ His suggestion sparked a fierce debate. One of the leading players in the State Association of Jewish Communities in Hesse, for example, spoke out against the participation of representatives from the GDR, mainly for two reasons. First, he argued that difficulties could arise if East German representatives were to contact German government representatives in Bonn on behalf of the Jewish communities in the East or West. Second, he was convinced that any interaction with or representation of the Zentralrat, an organization headquartered in the democratic West German state, would cause major problems with these spokespeople's East German government, which strictly opposed any Western interference in the GDR's domestic affairs.Footnote ⁴¹ Another point of discussion was focused on whether a representative from the Berlin community could effectively represent the interests of all the Jews living in East Germany.

In the end, Galinski's idea attracted enough support. The general secretary of the Zentralrat, Hendrik George van Dam, threw his weight behind the proposition by making his acceptance of this new position dependent on the presence of GDR representatives in the directorate (in addition to the presence of Galinski, who represented the Jews in Berlin). The deputies in attendance at the very first meeting of the Zentralrat agreed on a directorate of five delegates and five alternates, supported by a governing council of fifteen representatives. The governing council met once a year to elect the directorate, and they entrusted the general secretary with all active business. One seat in each of these newly established organizations was reserved for a representative of the Jewish communities in East Germany, despite the problems that might arise from their participation.Footnote ⁴²

During the next months, many issues filled the Zentralrat's agenda. One of the priorities was to advocate for the right of Jews to live in Germany. Another important subject, mentioned before, was to establish the necessary economic and legal conditions to allow the rebuilding of a sustained Jewish community. That process was generally summarized by the term reparation negotiations (Wiedergutmachungsverhandlungen). The work in this area focused on moral and material compensations for both Jewish victims of Nazi persecution as well as Jewish communities.Footnote ⁴³ A third priority was the restoration of the principles of law. Among other things, this included voicing a unified stance on antisemitism and promoting a consistent approach to all neo-Nazi manifestations, as well as opposing any attempt to rehabilitate individuals convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity.Footnote ⁴⁴

Regarding efforts to rebuild cultural and religious life, the members of the Zentralrat's directorate were confronted with many pressing day-to-day questions. At their first meeting in 1951, for example, the participants identified a set of new fields of action after they agreed that religious education was inadequate; rabbis were in scarce supply; reliable membership statistics did not (yet) exist; the youth was in desperate need of attention; emigration continued to be an ongoing process; and there was no consensus regarding whom to admit as new members into the newly founded Jewish communities. In this context, the representative of the Jewish communities in the GDR and member of the Jewish community in Erfurt, Günter Singer, felt compelled to correct the false impression that the Jewish communities in the East were shifting away from Judaism. Using the example of the Jewish community in Erfurt, he emphasized that since 1945 a rich religious cultural life existed—as two examples for this he presented continual lectures about different topics and quality childcare.Footnote ⁴⁵

Unquestionably, these were important steps toward rebuilding Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany. Yet, as the general secretary of the Zentralrat, Hendrik G. van Dam, remarked in his first annual report from August 1951, “in the background of all of these events, including the work of the Zentralrat, stands the world political situation, which is reflected in Germany.”Footnote ⁴⁶ With this statement, van Dam reminded everyone of the increasing tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War, which had resulted in both the division of the city of Berlin into East and West and the founding of the two German states. Those political developments significantly complicated the work of the Zentralrat. Van Dam also claimed that, in its short history, the organization had “fully maintained their position as a nonpartisan, Jewish organization.”Footnote ⁴⁷ An important element of this approach was the Zentralrat's decision to give the responsibility for negotiations concerning the relationship between the Jewish communities and the state authorities in East Germany to the Landesverband and to the Jewish community in Berlin.Footnote ⁴⁸ In spite of this policy, Cold War realities continued to pose major challenges for the Zentralrat. The political division resulted in ongoing discussions on the situation for Jews in East Germany, the implications of the GDR's positioning toward the Jews, and how both issues had affected the work of the Zentralrat since its foundation.

Political Reorientation: The Persecution of Leading Members of the Jewish Communities

At the beginning of the 1950s, despite the growing antagonism of the Cold War and the rejection of developments in the GDR by individual members of the Zentralrat’s directorate, the Zentralrat was determined to maintain a joint representation and felt responsible for the well-being of all of its members. Consequently, one major point of discussion in the directorate of the Zentralrat was the beginning of persecution of leading members of Jewish communities in the GDR. To give the SED authorities no grounds for a persecution, they debated for example, whether it was necessary to censor information that the Zentralrat (and others) published, especially in the Jüdische Allgemeine, which was distributed both in East and West Germany. The Zentralrat wished to avoid “putting the Jewish community” in East Germany “at risk.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The presumption that informed this debate was that politically charged statements voiced by Jews in West Germany held the risk of escalating the already difficult situation for the Jewish communities in the East and might even, this was the Zentralrat's worst fear, result in an externally enforced ending of the existing cooperation between the Jewish communities in East and West Germany.

A closer analysis of changes in the treatment of Jews in the GDR in the early 1950s provides important context for this discussion in the Zentralrat. Since the founding of the GDR, the new SED party elite increasingly used the small East German–Jewish community as an instrument in the Cold War against West Germany. Members of the Jewish communities were forced to sign declarations that distinguished the antifascist East German state from West Germany, where many prominent Nazis were entrenched in government and the private sector. At the same time, the SED leadership adopted an increasingly critical attitude toward any contacts between Jewish functionaries and Israeli or American-Jewish organizations. In this atmosphere, a growing number of practicing members in the Jewish community in Berlin found themselves at odds with the newly established political leadership in the GDR. Statements like the ones the editor of the Jüdische Allgemeine had published concerning the importance of Israel for post-Holocaust Jewish identity, restitution negotiations (that were initiated in the West, but denied in East Germany),Footnote ⁵⁰ and discussions of the political outlook of the Association of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes, VVN)Footnote ⁵¹ were all perceived with great concern.Footnote ⁵² The evolution of the latter organization that had been founded from local committees as an all-German organization in Berlin in 1947 is a good example of how the evident Cold War tensions began to impact and change organizational structures that (initially) connected people from both sides of the German border. By the early 1950s, the VVN came under the influence of the KPD in West Germany, while the SED accused leading members of the VVN in the East of spying for the West. Members of the Zentralrat monitored this development very closely because many of the Jewish communities’ spokespeople in both German states, among them Julius Meyer (who was an elected representative of the East German Jews to the Zentralrat) and Hans Freund (a Member of the Board of Jewish Communities in Greater Berlin), were members of the VVN. The latter was even the deputy chairman of the VVN in Berlin from 1949 to 1951. When it became known in West Germany that—especially after the political reorientation of the VVN in the Federal Republic—membership in this organization could have negative effects, since it was interpreted as identification with communist ideas, representatives of the Jewish community living in the Federal Republic quickly began to terminate their membership in this association.Footnote ⁵³ In addition, Jewish organizations, including the Zentralrat, began from then on to discourage membership in this organization in order to prevent their members from becoming trapped in the growing antagonism of the Cold War. When in 1953 the VVN was abolished in the GDR and the Committee of the Anti-fascist Resistance Fighters (Komitee der Antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer, KdAW) was founded in its place, further efforts of the persecutees of the Nazi Regime living in East and West to cooperate on this front were dropped.Footnote ⁵⁴ This was not the case with the Zentralrat.

Once the SED regime had begun accusing members of the VVN of espionage for the West, the Zentralrat feared that disadvantages for members of Jewish communities in the GDR resulting from membership in the VVN could be exacerbated if critical views of Jews in West Germany were shared within East Germany. In light of further developments, the Zentralrat’s concern about this issue that they identified as a threat to the interconnections between Jews across the Cold War divide proved justified. In early 1953, the already difficult situation for Jews in the GDR grew even more restrictive, following the virulent anti-Zionist campaign launched by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and throughout eastern Europe. With the aim to prevent any further disobedience within the Soviet bloc, a number of show trials were instigated that initially focused on political opponents of the communists, but at the beginning of the 1950s were extended to prosecute perceived enemies within the communist parties. This action triggered the Slánský Trial in Prague, in which Czechoslovak authorities accused fourteen individuals, eleven of them Jewish, of an alleged Zionist conspiracy in 1952. The secretary-general of the Czech Communist Party, Rudolf Slánský, was the main target. Eleven defendants (including Slánský) were accused of being “counterrevolutionaries” and “Zionist agents”; all eleven were sentenced to death and were executed without delay, whereas the three other defendants received life sentences. Strident anti-Zionism distinguished the Slánský trial from earlier purges in other East European countries and marked all Jews as possible traitors and Western agents.Footnote ⁵⁵

Similar show trials were also launched in the GDR and reached their peak when the leading SED official Paul Merker, who in the 1940s had spoken out in favor of offering support to Israel and Jewish victims of the Nazi era, was detained for alleged activities involving the spread of Zionist corruption and spying in 1950.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the wake of these campaigns, a series of antisemitic measures was initiated against the Jews living in the GDR. Jews were removed from positions of power, the homes of almost all Jews were raided and identity cards seized, and “the leaders of all the GDR Jewish communities were interrogated and asked to sign statements that, among other things, equated Zionism with Fascism and condemned demands for restitution payments to Jews as exploitation of the German people.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This repression caused some 500 Jews to leave the GDR for the FRG, including Julius Meyer and Hans Freud. On January 13, 1953, they fled along with the leaders of the Jewish communities in Leipzig, Dresden, Halle, and Erfurt. Later also prominent left-wing Jewish intellectuals, such as the formerly mentioned returnees from exile, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch and communist jurist and writer Alfred Kantorowicz, distanced themselves from the new course of the GDR's leadership and fled to the West.Footnote ⁵⁸ They were by no means alone in opposing the new policies implemented in the GDR. A dramatic increase in the overall numbers of people defecting to West Germany in response to the growing repression in 1952 and 1953 clearly indicates a large-scale dissatisfaction across various groups of people, among them also several non-Jewish members of and candidates for the SED.Footnote ⁵⁹

These political developments in the GDR rocked the foundations of the Jewish communities in the East. Simultaneously, they also posed a significant challenge for the Jewish communities in West Berlin and the FRG. How should one react? Although some individuals, such as Nathan Peter Levinson, the rabbi in the largest Jewish community at the time in Berlin, encouraged Jews living in the GDR to flee to the West, other Jewish officials, such as Heinz Galinski, refused to take sides because they feared retaliation against Jews still living in the GDR. Whether individuals representing Jewish interests in the FRG considered it appropriate to take a position quickly became of minor importance as the Zentralrat found itself confronted with a huge influx of Jewish refugees from the GDR.Footnote ⁶⁰

As early as July 1951, a circular letter written by Berthold Simonsohn—an attorney who had survived the Holocaust, moved to Switzerland from where he returned in 1950 to Germany, and became the first director of the newly reestablished Central Welfare Office of Jews in Germany (Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Juden in Deutschland, ZWST)—mentioned the increasing number of “penniless refugees from the Soviet zone.”Footnote ⁶¹ It was not until 1953, however, that this topic became a central point of discussion in the Zentralrat's directorate. In principle, its members agreed that the Jewish communities in the FRG had to do everything possible to play a full role in resolving the problems that arose from this refugee crisis. In response to the new situation, the ZWST was tasked with coordinating these efforts and with establishing a new emergency fund. The representatives further agreed that although it was necessary to support all Jewish men, women, and children in need, they would continue to keep their published statements intentionally “pale” to avoid additional irritations or difficulties for the Jews still living in the GDR.Footnote ⁶²

Although most Jewish communities in the West were willing to contribute to solving this problem, fighting quickly erupted among the different players over how many refugees would be placed in each community. Both space and financial resources were scarce, which significantly complicated this undertaking. The Jewish community in Frankfurt am Main, in particular, was concerned that it had been burdened by an above-average amount of refugees; it complained bitterly about this perceived injustice. But this allegation proved incorrect, considering that the West Berlin Jewish community agreed to care for 300 of the 570 refugees who had found their way across the border between January 15 and May 3, 1953.Footnote ⁶³ Due to timely and decisive action by both the head of the ZWST, Berthold Simonsohn, and the general secretary of the Zentralrat, Hendrik G. van Dam, a continuing flow of generous donations and financial subsidies (among them funding from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) guaranteed sufficient individual support for the arriving Jewish refugees from the GDR.Footnote ⁶⁴

In the medium and long term, the integration of these Jewish refugees into the Jewish communities in the FRG and the communities’ subsequent stabilization became easier. The self-supporting strategy that the high-profile representatives of the Jews in Germany had developed to counteract the initial stigmatization of Jewish life was starting to bear fruit in the mid-1950s. On the basis of successful negotiations with international Jewish organizations for restitution payments, and also a West German government subsidy, the Zentralrat was able to employ a cultural head of department in 1955, to secure the annual budget of its ZWST (which supported its disproportionally aged and destitute members) and to reclaim Jewish communal property illegally seized during the Nazi dictatorship.

Because German-Jewish representatives were initially excluded from the official negotiations among German, Jewish, and Israeli parties regarding restitution claims,Footnote ⁶⁵ a compromise with the Jewish Successor Organizations—three organizations established by the Western Allies to pursue the restitution claims of the so-called heirless assets of German Jewry that in 1951 merged into the Conference of Jewish Material Claims against Germany—had been their best chance to receive financial support and the assignment of restitution claims necessary to gain full legal estate regarding former Jewish communal properties.Footnote ⁶⁶ At the same time, the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization agreed to the equal inclusion of German-Jewish representative members into their organizations. For the Zentralrat, the disappearance of serious threats to the existence of a Jewish community in Germany marked a milestone and strengthened the communities in the West before once more waves of antisemitism in the FRG at the end of the 1950s presented new challenges for Jewish integration—a situation the GDR used in the heated atmosphere of the Second Berlin Crisis to label the West as a “fascist state.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Already before this juncture, however, the status of the Jewish communities in the GDR became a matter of great concern.

Gradual Divergence: Jewish Communities in the GDR during the 1950s

Following the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, Soviet leadership seemed to become more moderate. More consumerism, less communism was the new motto. On June 11, 1953, and without any elaboration, the East German government announced its “New Course,” which would partially reverse the harsh policies introduced during the previous year; but the earlier unpopular increase in production norms remained. Then, what began on June 16, 1953, as a strike by East Berlin construction workers against these heightened production quotas quickly escalated the next day into a spontaneous and widespread uprising against the GDR government. Historians still debate whether this escalation of events should be attributed to the workers’ discontent (arising from economic concerns) or to a more general dissatisfaction with the SED regime felt by a broader section of the population. Whatever the reason, the East German Uprising was the first serious attempt to challenge Communist authority in Eastern Europe after Stalin's death. The level of public discontent clearly demonstrated that the 1952 SED policy to accelerate the “building of socialism” was unpopular with many people. Yet, despite this demonstration against the government, which ended with Soviet military intervention, the “New Course” also awakened widespread hopes that further reforms were possible.Footnote ⁶⁸

For the Jews living in the GDR, this perceived opportunity for change partially materialized as government-led discrimination against Jews came to an end following Stalin's death. East German–Jewish institutions that had been closed during the time of the show trials were reopened and received government support, which enabled the Jews to rebuild destroyed synagogues and maintain their organizations. Julius Meyer's flight necessitated a reorganization of the Landesverband, however, and from this point onward, their presidents were responsible to the state. The composition of the Jewish communities also had changed dramatically. Only a tiny and increasingly geriatric community that numbered just 1,715 members remained in the GDR in 1955, and this community experienced a substantial decline in religious life.Footnote ⁶⁹ Its continued existence was dependent on Jews accepting specific SED definitions and regulations. As a group, they were defined as having been persecuted by the “fascists,” and they could observe certain religious rituals. Nevertheless, they were not allowed to express any form of “national or ethnic” dimension of Jewish identity, that is, Zionist ideas. This latter rule included a promise of suppression of any contact or identification with the State of Israel.Footnote ⁷⁰

Using the example of the Jewish community in Leipzig, historian Hendrik Niether has convincingly demonstrated that these new policies constrained the Jewish communities in the East considerably, but did not result in their complete isolation from the Jewish communities in the West.Footnote ⁷¹ This argument is reinforced by the fact that the Jewish communities in the East appointed two new representatives to the Zentralrat's directorate after their reorganization: Hermann Baden, chairman of the Jewish community in Halle and successor of Julius Meyer as president of the Landesverband, became a regular member, and Max Cars from Erfurt became his deputy. Though neither were politically active, their nominations confirm that the Jewish communities in the GDR were still members of the Zentralrat at this time. Financial donations, shipments of much needed prayer books, and kosher-food deliveries around the time of the Jewish High Holidays are just three examples of ongoing support provided from the Jewish communities in the West for the communities in the East.Footnote ⁷²

Other steps, however, suggested a growing alienation of the Jewish communities in the East from the Jewish communities in the West, which was a declared goal of the SED regime.Footnote ⁷³ To reflect its new status, the Landesverband der Jüdischen Gemeinden in der DDR changed its name to the Verband der Jüdischen Gemeinden (Association of Jewish Communities). As a second measure, its main office was moved from Berlin to Halle.Footnote ⁷⁴ In spite of all that, the facts that Jews in the SED were encouraged to stay away from Jewish communities and were forced to maintain a low profile illustrate how difficult “being Jewish” still was in the GDR. Even though the Zentralrat continued to restrict its political statements to a minimum to keep open the channels of communication to the Jewish communities in the GDR, the distance between Jews in East and West continued to grow.

The building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 marked the beginning of the end of cooperation between the Jewish communities in the two German states. Up to that moment, contacts between the two Jewish communities within Berlin had been the most important connection between the two broader Jewish communities in East and West Germany. With this line cut, it became impossible for representatives from the GDR to travel and participate in meetings organized by the Zentralrat. The generational leadership transition in many Jewish communities and the appointment of a loyal SED member, Helmut Aris from Dresden, as the representative for the Jewish communities of the GDR, following the death of Hermann Baden in 1962, contributed further to the growing distance between the communities on both sides of the Iron Curtain. At the same time, this development is to be interpreted as a concrete expression of the antagonism of the Cold War, which manifested itself in the rejection of the central representation of the Jews in East and West Germany by the Jews in the GDR that led to its separation.Footnote ⁷⁵ After a period of inactive membership, the Jewish communities in the GDR officially withdrew from the Zentralrat in 1963 and thus ended the Zentralrat's longstanding effort to transcend the fact of division and guarantee joint support for Jewish cultural life in both East and West Germany.Footnote ⁷⁶