History of the Shoah – the last Schtetl

After National Socialism was finally defeated and the Shoah had been put to an end, many survivors went to a new life from Germany. Between 1945 and 1949, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people lived in camps and confiscated houses in the US crew zone alone. They organized themselves in committees, created kindergartens, schools, orphanages, libraries, hospitals, theater groups, sports clubs and about 150 newspapers. A minority was religious and set up synagogues, thora schools, ritual bathrooms and koscher kitchens. Your colloquial language was Yiddish. The Föhrenwald camp near Wolfratshausen, which lasted the longest, was considered “the last Schetl”, an expression of the Jewish culture in Eastern Europe that the Germans had destroyed.

These survivors described themselves as Scheerit Haplejta, which means the rest of the saved people who had escaped the destruction and could shape the future. For them it was a time in the “waiting room”, as Zalman Grinberg put it, the chairman of the Central Committee of the Freed Jews in the US zone. They all have “just a goal, out of Europe,” said a resident of the Feldafing camp in 1946.

Catastrophic conditions

At the end of the war there were several million so-called display persons (DPS), concentration camp occupants, forced laborers and prisoners of war, but also foreign fascists in West Germany. Except for the latter, most of them returned to their countries of origin in the following months. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (Unrra) was responsible for the supply. The majority found themselves in barracks, airfields, prisoner of war and forced labor. The division took place after nationality, which is why Jewish survivors had to live together with Ukrainian, Latvian or Lithuanian Nazi collaborators. They therefore demanded that they were treated as a separate nation and housed separately, which the occupying authorities rejected.

Just a few weeks after the exemption of the Jews, the American press reported on catastrophic conditions in the DP camps: indescribable dirt, urgent tightness, hunger, plus soldiers and officers, the traumatized people, right up to anti-Semitic incidents. US President Harry Truman then sent Earl G. Harrison, a former commissioner for immigration, to the American occupation zone.

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The lawyer visited around 30 camps and published a report in August 1945, emphasizing that the Jews were a “special group with larger needs” due to their persecution. Harrison condemned the military administration with drastic words: “We seem to treat the Jews like the Nazis, with the exception that we do not destroy them.” His report led to a turn in US politics. Jewish DPS were accommodated in their own camps, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had their daily rations double to 2500 calories. Aid organizations such as the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (joint) from the USA sent food and helpers.

A separate camp police protected against attacks by the Germans, who were captivating as the true victims of the war, rejected any responsibility for the Nazi crimes and mowed Jews as parasites and black market dealers. In Landsberg the rumor arose that a Jew had divided poisoned candies on children. Before the Memmingen district court, a woman’s complaint was negotiated in 1947/48, who claimed that Jews had drawn blood from her four -year -old child before Easter.

Escape from Eastern Europe

Meanwhile, more and more Jewish people fled from Eastern Europe. Already after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Lithuanian nationalists had massacrated their Jewish neighbors, many Poles had given the German crimes or created them themselves. When survivors returned in the summer of 1945, they found that the hatred of Jews had remained. Around 1,500 Jews were murdered in Poland between 1945 and 1947. Kielce’s pogrom in July 1946 led to the Exodus of both survivors who came from German concentration camps, as well as people who had fled to the Soviet Union in front of the Wehrmacht and had survived in hiding or partisans like the Bielski brothers.

In 1947, around 250,000 to 300,000 Jews lived in West Germany, 90 percent of them in the American zone. Of the 28 large camps with more than 500 residents, there were 13 in Bavaria, seven in Hesse, including Zeilsheim near Frankfurt with around 4,000 people, and five part of Württemberg in the American. The Dueppel Center in Berlin’s US sector acted as a passage station for Jewish people from the east. In the British zone, the DP camp of Belsen was the only larger facility with 11,000 people at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and the Biberach camp with 1000 inmates in the French zone. There were no such camps in the Soviet zone because hardly anyone wanted to go there.

The first and largest camps were created at the end of the war in southern Bavaria because a few thousand Jews had survived the concentration camps and death marches, including Feldafing, Föhrenwald, Landsberg and Munich-Freimann as well as the hospitals of Bad Wörishofen, Gauting and Sankt Ottilien. A quarter of the Jews lived in cities and villages in houses and apartments, organized in communities such as in Augsburg or Dachau.

The religious survivors described themselves as Scheerit Haplejta, which means “the rest of the rescued”.

The Sankt Ottilien Monastery southwest of Munich has been a real Jewish refuge since the end of April 1945. Grinberg, a doctor from Lithuania who had survived the ghetto in Kaunas, led a number of of this to a number of concentration camps who were able to flee from the KZ outer farmers at Kaufering on the death march. Eight out of 45 survivors of the Ghetto Orchestra of Kaunas gave the “Liberation Concert” there on May 27, 1945. This resulted in an ensemble that toured through the camp. The artistic highlight were two appearances in the camps in Feldafing and Landsberg, which Leonard Bernstein conducted.

Another camp set up the US Army on May 1, 1945 in Feldafing on Lake Starnberg in buildings of the Hitler Youth and private houses. On July 1, 1945, delegates founded the Central Committee of the freed. Grinberg was elected chairman and explained: “In the glow of the fire of the crematoriums and gas chambers and in view of the shed Jewish blood, we call the whole Jewish people for agreement … so that it builds up a Jewish state with united forces.”

Changed attitude to Israel

Before the Shoah, a majority of Jews had rejected Zionism in Western and Eastern Europe. After that, on the other hand, most saved people saw no other perspective than their own state as a protective power. Soldiers of the Jewish brigade who came and helped contributed to the popularity of Zionism. This unity of the British army consisted of volunteers from Palestine. After the end of the war, they chased and executed around 1,500 fascists and smuggled tens of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe to the US zone and on to Italy.

The Hagana, forerunner of the Israeli army, trained future officers in the Königsdorf and Wildbad camps and recruited men and women. Others organized themselves as Kibbuzim on around 40 farms that had heard Nazis to prepare for a life as farmers. The most famous case was the Pleikershof of Julius Streicher, the editor of the “striker” rush, in the Fürth district.

Despite all the enthusiasm, all Jewish people did not want to emigrate to Palestine. The United States made immigration easier for the founding of the State of Israel in May 1948. The number of Jewish DPS dropped from 165,000 in April to around 30,000 in September. A fifth up to a third emigrated to the USA, others went to Australia, Canada and Latin America. However, around 2500 to 3000 Jews returned from Israel to West Germany a little later because they did not cope with the society or the climate of their immigration state or were afraid of further warlike arguments.

In 1951, German authorities finally took over the administration of the DP camps, which were closed one after the other. Until 1957, only Föhrenwald existed as a warehouse for people who were too weak, too sick or too poor to emigrate – or did not want to go for various reasons, for example because they hoped that they could do compensation procedures better, or because they had found new partners. These remained were often hostile to those who went because they remained in the land of the perpetrators. Most of them integrated into the newly created Jewish communities, in which they provided more than half of the members.