Red Army Soldiers Stunned to Find Jews Alive in Berlin's Jewish Hospital, 1945
When Red Army forces entered Berlin's Jewish Hospital in 1945, they were amazed to come across hundreds of Jews residing just a short distance from Hitler's bunker.
Envision the scene on April 24, 1945, amid the intense Battle of Berlin between Soviet and Nazi forces: A squad of Red Army soldiers arrives at Berlin's Jewish Hospital and discovers hundreds of individuals living and working in the war-damaged facility. "You are Jews? Impossible. You cannot be Jews, all the Jews are dead," a Russian soldier is said to have exclaimed.
Berlin's Jewish Hospital, along with the Jewish Cemetery Weissensee, stands as the sole Jewish institution that continued functioning and endured the Nazi period. It remains operational today. How could an establishment meant to sustain Jewish life survive at the core of the Nazi extermination apparatus—and outlast it?
Established in 1756, the Jewish Hospital relocated to its present site in the northwestern Wedding district shortly before World War I broke out in 1914. From its inception, the hospital welcomed patients of all faiths and served as a prominent emblem of Jewish integration. However, after the National Socialists seized power in 1933, the hospital was prohibited from treating "Aryan" patients, and non-Jewish staff were compelled to resign.
A contentious figure: Walter Lustig
In December 1941, the Nazis set up the so-called "Screening Unit for Transport Complaints" at the Jewish Hospital to evaluate the "fitness" of Jews for deportation, and Walter Lustig was assigned to lead it.
Lustig, a divisive individual depicted as both a hero and a villain in the hospital's wartime narrative, was born into a Jewish family in Ratibor (now Racibórz in Poland) in 1891. He relocated to Berlin in 1927 and initially worked for the police before being dismissed—due to his Jewish identity—in 1933. After his medical license was revoked in 1938, Lustig assumed leadership of the healthcare division at the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, an organization the Nazis created in 1939.
The Reich Association was a deeply contentious entity. It initially assisted Jews in emigrating from Germany. Membership was mandatory for anyone classified as a Jew under the Nuremberg Laws, requiring them to disclose detailed personal information, including asset inventories, to the organization. In 1941, emigration was banned, and the Reich Association was compelled to undertake preparatory tasks for the forced deportation of Jews to ghettos, forced labor camps, concentration camps, and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.
A deadly balancing act amid mass murder
Jewish institutions—perhaps none more than the Reich Association—were compelled to perform a precarious balancing act in Nazi Germany. This included Walter Lustig in his capacity as hospital director and later head of the Reich Association. Some witnesses claimed he made a point of protecting many children housed at the hospital due to their "indeterminate racial status."
Others recall how Lustig did nothing when Gestapo officers toured the hospital and selected individuals for deportation. There is also evidence that he sexually abused women in exchange for keeping them or their relatives off deportation lists.
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For some, Lustig represented the "utmost negative example" of collaboration with the Nazis, according to Gideon Botsch, director of the Emil Julius Gumbel Research Center on Antisemitism and Right-Wing Extremism at the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam. "But the problematic system of this relationship between the Jewish community and the Nazi terror apparatus is of course inherent in the systematic abuse of Jewish institutions with the aim to destroy Jewish communities in Germany," Botsch told DW.
Mass deportations of Jews from Berlin occurred between October 1941 and April 1943, during which Lustig became the hospital's director in 1942. Jews too ill to be transported out of Germany were granted a delay of up to three months in the hospital. Pregnant women were not exempt unless they were about to give birth, after which they received six weeks before deportation along with their newborn babies.
Berlin in 1943: 'Cleansed of Jews'
At the end of February 1943, the so-called "Factory Roundup" ("Fabrikaktion") involved the sudden arrest of over 10,000 Jews in Berlin and the surrounding area, followed by their deportation to either Theresienstadt Ghetto in German-occupied Czechoslovakia or the Birkenau death camp at Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland. During this roundup, nearly the entire staff of the Reich Association of Jews was deported to Theresienstadt.
During further arrests, several Jewish doctors, including some from the hospital, were taken from their homes to a transit camp in the city center. After the war, Hilde Kahan, Lustig's Jewish secretary, described how SS functionaries visited the hospital to discuss deporting 50% of its staff. "A week later, the affected employees were arrested in their homes along with their family members, and we never heard from them again [...]," she told the Berlin public prosecutor's office in the 1960s.
The Reich Association was officially dissolved in June 1943 after Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared Berlin "cleansed of Jews" ("Judenfrei"). In its place, the Nazis created a successor organization, the Residual Reich Association, headquartered at the Jewish Hospital, and appointed Lustig as its head, though under direct Gestapo control.
Additional functions were then established at the hospital: The central shelter for Jewish orphans was moved there in June 1943; Berlin's last remaining transit camp for Jews destined for deportation was transferred to the hospital in March 1944. Nearly 50 Jewish men and women were also forced to work at the camp. Some were tasked with running it, while others—so-called "grabbers" ("Greifer")—were ordered to track down Jews in hiding and were allowed to leave the grounds without wearing the Star of David.
The lie that saved hundreds of lives
In the final days of the war, an extraordinary incident saved the hospital's transit camp from liquidation. As the Third Reich collapsed around them, the Gestapo issued a last-ditch order to shoot all Jews in the camps. Curt Naumann was a Jewish former bank clerk conscripted to work at the hospital's camp. He was soon entrusted with "official" bank errands and then with running private errands for the camp commander and other Gestapo leaders, primarily by procuring items on the black market.
On April 19, 1945, Naumann entered the office of Erich Möller, head of the Jewish Affairs Department of the Gestapo, where he overheard Möller discussing the order. Naumann went directly to the Berlin Post Office, called the hospital, and managed to convince the SS officer that the order to execute the Jewish captives was instead an order to release them. Naumann's quick thinking saved the lives of roughly 180 camp inmates.
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Despite the release orders, many people remained in the hospital because the surrounding area was the scene of heavy fighting. When Soviet troops and Red Cross workers entered the hospital on April 24, 1945, they found 370 patients, 1,000 residents, 93 children, and 76 prisoners. By this time, the hospital's staff were almost entirely people in "mixed marriages" ("Mischehen") between Jews and non-Jews—part of Nazi attempts to break up these marriages—and so-called "Geltungsjuden" of mixed Jewish and non-Jewish descent (for example, children of "mixed marriages"). Some were Jews who had been brought there for treatment after falling ill while in Gestapo, SS, or police custody.
One of those patients was Bruno Blau, a Jewish lawyer. He had been transferred to the Jewish Hospital by the Gestapo in 1942 while serving a three-year prison sentence in Tegel. He was diagnosed with cancer and kept for treatment. In his 2003 book "Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis," Daniel B. Silver speculates that this was perhaps due to "a virtually instinctive German sense of bureaucratic order [...] applied unthinkingly, even in the midst of mass murder."
Neither a story of resistance nor of rescue
The survival of the hospital and the many people within it is not as unusual as it might initially seem, says Beate Meyer, a former historian at the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg. "It was in the interests of those in power to keep the hospital open," she explains. "It was not an act of resistance in that sense. For the Jews, it was a workplace, and as long as the people there could be put to work, they were to some extent protected from deportation, even though being under constant surveillance by the Gestapo was, of course, dangerous."
For Botsch, the story of the hospital's endurance is neither one of resistance nor rescue. "By 1943, most members of the Jewish community had been deported to Theresienstadt or assassinated, and who was left were the most useful instruments, from the perspective of the Gestapo, with which to fulfill the job of destroying German Jewry," he says.
So what happened to Walter Lustig? In the immediate aftermath of the war, Lustig had hoped to rebuild the Jewish community and serve as its leader in Allied-occupied Berlin. However, a Jewish boxer who had survived the war identified Lustig as the man who had had his parents deported and knocked him to the ground. Lustig was last seen getting into an official Soviet limousine, accompanied by two uniformed officers in June 1945. Deemed a Nazi collaborator, it is assumed he was shot in the woods a short time later.
Edited by: Sarah Hofmann and Felix Tamsut
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