History of the Shoah | The last shtetls

After National Socialism was finally defeated and the Shoah ended, many survivors left Germany for a new life. In the US occupation zone alone, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people lived in camps and confiscated houses between 1945 and 1949. They organized themselves into committees, established kindergartens, schools, orphanages, libraries, hospitals, theater groups, sports clubs, and around 150 newspapers. A minority was religious and established synagogues, Torah schools, ritual bathhouses, and kosher kitchens. Their common language was Yiddish. The Föhrenwald camp near Wolfratshausen, which lasted the longest, was considered "the last shtetl," an expression of the Jewish culture in Eastern Europe that the Germans had destroyed.

These survivors called themselves Scheerit Haplejta, which means the rest of the rescued who had escaped annihilation and were able to shape their future. For them, it was a time in the "waiting room," as Zalman Grinberg, chairman of the Central Committee of the liberated Jews in the US zone, put it. They all had "only one goal: to get out of Europe," said a resident of the Feldafing camp in 1946.

Catastrophic conditions

At the end of the war, West Germany was home to several million so-called displaced persons (DPs), concentration camp inmates, forced laborers, and prisoners of war, as well as foreign fascists. With the exception of the latter, most returned to their countries of origin in the following months. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was responsible for their care. The majority found themselves in barracks, airfields, and prisoner of war and forced labor camps. They were allocated according to nationality, which meant that Jewish survivors had to live alongside Ukrainian, Latvian, or Lithuanian Nazi collaborators. They therefore demanded to be treated as a separate nation and housed separately, a request the occupying authorities refused.

Just a few weeks after the liberation of the Jews, the American press reported on catastrophic conditions in the DP camps: indescribable filth, cramped conditions, hunger, soldiers and officers mistreating traumatized people, and even anti-Semitic incidents. US President Harry Truman responded by sending Earl G. Harrison, a former immigration commissioner, to the American occupation zone.

The lawyer visited approximately 30 camps and published a report in August 1945 in which he emphasized that the Jews, due to their persecution, were a "special group with greater needs." Harrison condemned the military administration in drastic terms: "We seem to be treating the Jews like the Nazis, except that we are not exterminating them." His report led to a shift in US policy. Jewish DPs were housed in their own camps, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower doubled their daily rations to 2,500 calories. Aid organizations such as the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Joint) in the USA sent food and aid workers.

A dedicated camp police force protected the camp from attacks by Germans who pitied themselves as the true victims of the war, denied any responsibility for Nazi crimes, and denounced Jews as parasites and black market traders. In Landsberg, a rumor arose that a Jew had distributed poisoned candy to children. In 1947/48, the Memmingen District Court heard a case brought by a woman who claimed that Jews had drained her four-year-old child's blood before Easter.

Escape from Eastern Europe

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of Jews fled Eastern Europe. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Lithuanian nationalists had massacred their Jewish neighbors; many Poles had condoned the German crimes or even participated in them themselves. When survivors returned in the summer of 1945, they discovered that the anti-Semitism remained. Between 1945 and 1947, approximately 1,500 Jews were murdered in Poland. The Kielce pogrom in July 1946 led to an exodus of both survivors from German concentration camps and those who had fled the Wehrmacht to the Soviet Union and survived in hiding or as partisans, like the Bielski brothers.

In 1947, approximately 250,000 to 300,000 Jews lived in West Germany, 90 percent of them in the American zone. Of 28 large camps with more than 500 residents, 13 were in Bavaria, seven in Hesse, including Zeilsheim near Frankfurt with about 4,000 people, and five in the American-administered part of Württemberg. The Dueppel Center in the US sector of Berlin served as a transit station for Jews from the East. In the British zone, the Belsen DP camp near the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was the only major facility, temporarily housing 11,000 people; in the French zone, the Biberach camp housed 1,000 inmates. There were no such camps in the Soviet zone because hardly anyone wanted to go there.

The first and largest camps were established at the end of the war in southern Bavaria, where several thousand Jews had survived the concentration camps and death marches. These included Feldafing, Föhrenwald, Landsberg, and Munich-Freimann, as well as the hospitals in Bad Wörishofen, Gauting, and Sankt Ottilien. A quarter of the Jews lived in houses and apartments in towns and villages, organized into communities, such as those in Augsburg or Dachau.

The religious survivors called themselves Scheerit Haplejta, which means “the rest of the saved.”

The St. Ottilien Monastery southwest of Munich had been a veritable Jewish refuge since the end of April 1945. Grinberg, a Lithuanian doctor who had survived the Kaunas ghetto, led concentration camp inmates there who had escaped on the death march from the concentration camp subcamps near Kaufering, many of them seriously injured. Eight of the 45 survivors of the Kaunas ghetto orchestra performed the "Liberation Concert" there on May 27, 1945. This evolved into an ensemble that toured the camps. The artistic highlight was two performances in the Feldafing and Landsberg camps, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

The US Army established another camp on May 1, 1945, in Feldafing on Lake Starnberg, in Hitler Youth buildings and private homes. Delegates there founded the Central Committee of Liberated Jews on July 1, 1945. Grinberg was elected chairman and declared: "In the light of the fire of the crematoria and gas chambers, and in view of the shed Jewish blood, we, the former prisoners in Bavaria, call upon the entire Jewish people to unite... so that they may join forces to build a Jewish state."

Changed attitude towards Israel

Before the Shoah, a majority of Jews in Western and Eastern Europe rejected Zionism. Afterward, however, most of those rescued saw no other prospect than their own state as a protecting power. Soldiers of the Jewish Brigade, who came to the camps and provided assistance, contributed to the popularity of Zionism. This unit of the British Army consisted of volunteers from Palestine. After the war, they hunted down and executed approximately 1,500 fascists and smuggled tens of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe into the US zone and then to Italy.

The Haganah, the forerunner of the Israeli army, trained future officers and recruited men and women in the Königsdorf and Wildbad camps. Others organized themselves as kibbutzim on approximately 40 farms that had once belonged to the Nazis to prepare for a life as farmers. The most famous case was the Pleikershof farm of Julius Streicher, publisher of the hate-filled newspaper "Stürmer," in the Fürth district.

Despite all the enthusiasm, by no means all Jews wanted to emigrate to Palestine. Around the same time as the founding of the State of Israel in May 1948, the United States facilitated immigration. The number of Jewish DPs fell from 165,000 in April to about 30,000 in September. One-fifth to one-third emigrated to the United States, while others went to Australia, Canada, and Latin America. However, approximately 2,500 to 3,000 Jews returned from Israel to West Germany shortly thereafter because they could not cope with the society or climate of their host country, or because they feared further armed conflict.

In 1951, West German authorities finally took over the administration of the DP camps, which were closed one after the other. Only Föhrenwald remained until 1957 as a camp for people who were too weak, too sick, or too poor to emigrate—or who, for various reasons, did not want to leave, such as hoping to better pursue compensation proceedings or because they had found new partners. Those who remained were often met with hostility by those who left because they remained in the country of the perpetrators. Most of them integrated into the newly formed Jewish communities, where they constituted more than half the members.