Housing,Hiding and the Holocaust. Introduction

Abstract

The introduction outlines content and scope of this special issue on "Housing, Hiding and the Holocaust". It points out that during World War II-ccupation accommodation became a scarce commodity, with collapsing housing markets. As a consequence, in those places where the German army (and navy) was stationed, direct contact between the occupiers and the occupied couldn't be avoided. Worst hit by housing restrictions was the Jewish population, even prior to ghettoization. The introduction ends with a short outline of the following chapters, discussing France, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland. They all show profound ruptures in patterns of everyday normality while highlighting that the Jewish populations were doubly threatened: As members of occupied societies and as victims of the Nazi policy of genocide.

When the Nazi regime was at the height of its power, around 230 million people lived under German occupation between Tromsø and Heraklion and Smolensk and Bordeaux. When the German Reich capitulated on 8 May 1945, Europe literally lay in ruins and ashes. An estimated 36.5 million people had lost their lives as a direct result of the war, and more than half of the dead, at least 19 million people, were civilians, including the six million victims of the Shoah. Civilian victims outnumbered military losses in the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Hungary, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. The years leading up to this point had been marked by an ever-worsening supply situation, by deportations and transports for forced labour, and by violent collective punishments. Everyday life during these years was consequently characterised by persecution, humiliation, fear and loss. Tony Judt's appraisal of World War II as ‘primarily a civilian experience’ was informed not least by the fact that ‘This was a war of occupation’. ¹

While experiences of hunger, enslavement and reprisals may not have been without historical precedent, their co-occurrence and the resultant cumulative effects were unprecedented, as Olivier Wieviorka has rightly emphasised. ² As many of those who were affected experienced these persistent existential threats to their familiar living conditions as a crisis, ³ the German occupation created a deep caesura in the lives of millions of people. It is all the more startling that scholars have treated the everyday coping and survival strategies used by people in the occupied areas as marginal in their research as has, for example, been observed in Poland. ⁴ This appears all the more striking in light of the availability of extensive research on the history of the perpetrators (including the new and expanded ‘perpetrator history’ field) and the history of occupation structures and of direct acts of repression have generally been quite comprehensively researched. ⁵ A similar situation exists with regard to research on exploitation, especially from a macroeconomic perspective. ⁶ Given this context, it is astounding that so little attention has been devoted to questions of everyday life during this period, especially from a comparative European perspective.

With its focus on the topic of housing, this thematic special issue addresses precisely one such aspect of everyday life – under the anything but everyday circumstances of occupation – that prior scholarship has tended to neglect. It proceeds from the finding that occupation can always be understood as a form of war-induced foreign domination that it inherently strips the occupied of their sovereignty. Occupation is further characterised by a physical and/or regulative presence of the occupiers, so that a asymmetrical relationship emerges between the occupiers and (representatives of) the occupied societies. ⁷ Dimensions of everyday life are foregrounded that were not primarily characterised by the open use of violence but nevertheless reflect that assumptions about what constituted normality were crumbling as behavioural expectations and routines became insecure, familiar certainties eroded and a sense of being bereft of rights and protections became pervasive. This environment compelled Jewish and non-Jewish members of occupied societies alike to develop strategies for adapting to chaotic and perplexing circumstances. ⁸

One of the varied interaction contexts in which the ‘occupiers’ and the ‘occupied’ were frequently dependent on one another was the issue of accommodation. Due to war damage – at the hands, it is worth noting, not only of German forces but also of the Allies – housing quickly became a scarce commodity. Military strategists pointed out from quite early on that even large-scale attacks led to more people becoming homeless than were killed. This is reflected in the figures: estimates suggest that 25 million people became homeless in the Soviet Union alone due to war damage. According to UNESCO figures, these included 6.5 million children. Another 1.3 million children became homeless in France. Other countries and regions such as Greece and northern Norway were also affected severely. ⁹ The situation was compounded by the Wehrmacht's accommodation requirements as well as those of a myriad of other German governmental authorities and institutions. In many occupied areas, the housing market all but collapsed.

The impact this had on the parameters of normality in the lives of members of occupied societies was severe: war damage and building requisitions led to major housing shortages and this in turn led in many cases to people living in severely cramped conditions. In Belarusian cities like Minsk, Baranavichy or Brest, the population was theoretically entitled to six square metres of dwelling space per person. This figure, low though it already was, was reduced to four square metres in Baranovichi in 1944 because of billeting – and often even less space per person was available in reality. A similar situation existed in the western Polish territories that had been incorporated into the Reich; rooms there were shared by four people on average. The situation in the General Government was only marginally better. ¹⁰

The concrete realities of everyday life under these circumstances have been described more often in literary sources than in historical scholarship. The novella Le silence de la mer by Vercors, the nom de plume of Résistance member Jean Marcel Bruller, has become famous. Its behavioural recommendations for the French population are exemplified clearly by the main characters, a master carpenter and his niece, who meet all attempts at conversation by the German officer billeted in their household with silence. ¹¹ In contrast, in the collages of childhood memories compiled by the Belarusian literature Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, German soldiers billeted with the household show little interest in conversation: The Germans ‘took everything from us, we were starving. They wouldn't let us into the kitchen, and they cooked only for themselves. My little brothers smelled the food and crawled to the kitchen to this smell. They cooked pea soup every day, and it had a very strong smell. Five minutes later we heard my brother's cry, a terrible shriek. They splashed boiling water on him in the kitchen because he asked to eat.’ ¹²

Recent research has been able to show how strongly everyday experiences of occupation were experiences of being pressed into hierarchies. This applied to biopolitical measures, but also to the rationing of necessities. ¹³ A similar logic has to be applied to the housing situation, although in-depth research is still lacking: not only were prestigious buildings especially likely to be requisitioned as workplaces for German soldiers and officials, but the residents of the ‘better’ neighbourhoods in occupied cities were also the first who had to move out to make room for Germans. ¹⁴ This was especially true at the main Wehrmacht or Kriegsmarine troop bases; locals not infrequently became a minority outnumbered by the Germans concentrated at such locations. This is known to have happened not only in the Soviet Union, but also on the French coast, in the Danish provinces of Jutland and Funen and in parts of Norway.

Interactions between the occupiers and the occupied were therefore virtually unavoidable, in these places and encompassed a broad spectrum of encounters in public spaces and working contexts. Furthermore, German security forces could also demand access to homes at any time. While this theoretically applied to all members of occupied societies, it particularly affected Jewish people. They faced the threat of losing their homes entirely because the occupying Germans forced their relocation to ghettos or ‘Jews’ houses’ or as a consequence of planning decisions made by local agencies. Examining urban spaces with the kind of integrated and integrative history envisaged by Saul Friedländer in mind consequently also highlights a dynamisation of the relationships between native Jews and non-Jews. The designation of special areas within which Jews were to reside, the deportations of Jews and the clearing of the ghettos were linked with the hopes of non-Jews that they would be able to take possession of furniture left behind, move into vacant flats or simply profit from a general relaxation of the housing market. ¹⁵ The enormously cramped nature of the residential quarters that remained after others had been destroyed, requisitioned or used for billeting troops also contributed – along with the reporting requirements imposed by the occupiers, who pressed caretakers and concierges into service to keep track of registered residents – to making hiding places very difficult to set up. Going into hiding as a ‘distant cousin’ or with similar cover stories required at least tacit tolerance (and was not infrequently ended by denunciation). ¹⁶

This thematic issue brings together four case studies on France, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland. It has its origins in a conference – organised by the Imre Kertész Kolleg, the University of Wuppertal and the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden and conducted in Jena in October 2019 – with the title ‘Societies under German Occupation during the Second World War: Housing, Leisure and Everyday Life’. Shannon Fogg's contribution draws on the example of the 17th arrondissement in Paris to show practices of exclusion that were based on administrative ordinances but went far beyond them. While the German occupiers took up quarters in the city and refugees sought a roof over their heads, the Jewish population that had fled from the invading troops was denied the opportunity to return. Vacant apartments kindled covetousness. Abandoned ‘Jewish’ flats were often identified by direct neighbours who requested housing allocations accordingly and participated in their looting. A considerable proportion of the denunciations that have been recorded relate to supposedly abandoned and ownerless Jewish properties. Housing and property ownership appear to be significant factors for explaining the participation of the French population in the Holocaust.

Similar dynamics can also be observed in the occupied Netherlands. While Shannon Fogg touches on later restitution processes only briefly, Hinke Piersma and Jeroen Kemperman focus on their emotional dimension. ‘Hausraterfassung’, the Household Inventory Agency that handled the property of Jews deprived of their rights, encroached drastically on the personal lives of its victims and gave a bureaucratic veneer to the process of looting their property. Later attempts – by no means always successful – to recover valuables that had been hidden or entrusted to neighbours for safe-keeping often triggered profound emotional ruptures. The beneficiaries, for their part, defensively trotted out patriotic formulas justifying their actions. Many of these ‘bewariërs’ (translated here as guardaryans) by no means understood themselves merely as custodians and tenaciously retained goods thus acquired. A complex web of emotions linked with specific household objects thus comes into view.

The German occupiers of Norway also sought to foment antisemitic animosity to assuage resentment triggered by the Wehrmacht's vast requirements for space for dwelling quarters, offices and storage. The efficacy of this strategy was, however, naturally limited by the comparatively small proportion of Jews in the Norwegian population. Maria Fritsche's contribution focuses on everyday interactions between the Norwegian population and billeted German soldiers. She describes an ambivalent tension between rejection and inner distancing towards the occupiers at one pole and everyday cooperative arrangements at the other. This ambivalence persisted in the narrative patterns of autobiographical testimony from the post-war period.

Finally, Agnieszka Wierzcholska reaches slightly further back in time in her contribution on the Polish city of Tarnów. She shows how ethnic markers already became more potent in the city in the interwar period and nourished considerable animosities held by the non-Jewish Polish population towards Jews. The vision of a city with no Jews suddenly became a real possibility once the town came under German occupation. Poles and the local German population made extensive use of the options that presented themselves for dispossessing their Jewish neighbours and competitors. These practices took on a new qualitative dimension with the establishment of a ghetto in the city and the first deportations in 1942. Both the Polish and the German authorities turned two blind eyes to thefts and looting from confiscated and sealed Jewish apartments. In a city where Jews had made up almost half the local population before the war, the self-authorisation of the non-Jewish population to appropriate Jewish property would have been virtually impossible to regulate in any case.

All four case studies thus show the German occupation as a profound rupture in patterns of everyday normality at each location. In addition, occupation established hierarchisations and forced people living under occupation to improvise strategies and their own moral economies for getting by in perplexing circumstances. Having established this general trend, the four case studies each tease out the extent to which the pressures exerted by the occupiers on housing conditions accelerated the marginalisation and exclusion of local Jewish populations and drove practices of interaction between the occupiers and the occupied that operated to their detriment. Jewish people proved to be doubly threatened by these developments: as members of occupied societies and as victims of a murderous Nazi policy of genocide.

The editors extend thanks to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for its generous financial support of the conference, Jaime Hyatt for her meticulous language-editing of the contributions and Sarah Swift and Ellen Yutzy Glebe for translating this introduction.