Ep. 45- Jewish Resistance in Germany with Wolf Gruner

How did Jews in Germany resist the Nazis? What were the choices that they made to stand up against the regime where its authoritarian power was greatest?  

In this episode, I talk with Wolf Gruner about his research on this topic and his surprising discovery of the extent of resistance by Jewish Germans in the heart of the Nazi state.

Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History and director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California.

Gruner, Wolf.  Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany (2023)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.115)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we're talking about a concept that we've also talked about on the podcast before, but the idea of resistance, and what resistance means and what it looks like. And in this particular context, we have a really fascinating conversation coming up about German Jewish resistance. So people literally in the heart of the Third Reich, Jews and how they were able, how they chose to

take action in a variety of different forms against the Nazi state. And I can't think of a better person to talk to us about this than Wolf Gruener, who has written a book on this, really fantastic book full of amazing examples and a great Holocaust historian in his own right. So Wolf, thanks so much for coming on.

Wolf Gruner (00:50.754)
Yeah, thanks, Waitman, for having me.

Waitman Beorn (00:53.302)
Can you tell me a little bit sort of how you got involved in this or interested in this particular topic?

Wolf Gruner (00:59.086)
So this is actually by coincidence, because after doing several different studies on different aspects of the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, I got the call to kind of get the chair in Jewish studies at USC. And I was still in Berlin. And I had a project where I wanted to look into one Holocaust kind of source, which I came across earlier.

but had never really the time to look into. And these were police diaries, police logbooks of Berlin police precincts. And I thought before I go to the US, I need to kind of look into the source because I probably won't have much time in the future to do this. So I took three months before I moved and went every day to the archive in Berlin and looked in these kind of notes of policemen.

from 1933 till 1943. And I hoped to find traces of the persecution of the Jews. This was my aim. And I found all these handwritten notes about like exhibitionists, stolen bicycles, arrests for drunkenness in public. And suddenly there was this one note where a Jewish man was arrested for protesting against the persecution of the Jews.

This was a very short note, just half a page, just the name of the person. But it struck me for two reasons. First, at this point, I had published several books on the persecution, and I never really came across any kind of resistance except two cases of organized resistance, the Herbert Baum group and another group, late into the war.

So this was in the mid-30s, and I thought I never heard about this. I never came across it. So that's very interesting. Maybe this is an isolated case. But then it also resonated with me because I grew up in East Germany and under a dictatorship. So I knew that sometimes very small things could lead to persecution by a regime. So in a way, this resonated differently for me than it might have been when I would be

Wolf Gruner (03:22.904)
born in the United States. And so I decided this is so intriguing, I need to kind of go deeper into this. And when I read more of the source of these log books, I found more cases. And this is the beginning of this like 12 years of research, which followed. And in total, think 14 years until the book was published.

Waitman Beorn (03:47.291)
And have to say just from one historian to another, I'm amazed that you got 12 years of research into such a nicely compact book. That's amazing. mean, I would have expected it to be like a massive tome, but it's incredibly to the point. So congratulations on that because yeah, I mean, it's it's nicely sort of packaged in a way that sort of tells the story that we're going talk about in a minute.

Can we talk a little bit before though, before we step into the book and into your research, a little bit about the background, right? About the place of resistance in historiography. So in other words, in how historians have thought about the past, right? In this case, about this topic of resistance, what it is, what constitutes it, and sort of the debates over this for

For our listeners, you may not be sort of as up to all the sort of things we are.

Wolf Gruner (04:50.99)
Yeah, so it's a very complex story, actually. It starts very early during the war. There was already discussion about Jewish resistance. And the first publications, for example, in English in 1942 and then also in 1946, like the Black Book, they had already chapters on resistance. which is interesting, at this very early stage, they focused mainly on

this traditional understanding of resistance as a group effort, an organized effort, and mostly looking into armed resistance. And they highlighted examples like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, uprising in extermination, on extermination sites, the partisans in the Eastern European forests.

Most of what they thought or kind of discussed earlier on or early on in 1940s and also 50s were examples from Eastern Europe, like Eastern Poland, occupied Soviet Union and so on. This kind of focus on armed resistance had one kind of, or kind of created one problem. At the time, not many of these examples were available. So there was this kind of

result that people thought while there was resistance it was a rare occurrence and it was only happening in Eastern Europe. So that's kind of a little bit of a misleading start of this discussion and there were challenges to this starting in the 1950s and 60s in Israel.

survivor historians kind of challenged us and said there was much more than organized. There was also like day-to-day resistance as Meir Yadvajeski called it. There was a whole conference in Israel in Yad Vashem in the end of the 1960s where this was prominently discussed and there was this concept of Amidah to stand up which was

Wolf Gruner (07:04.734)
in a way discussing efforts in the ghettos beyond like armed resistance, but preserving religion, clandestine education and so on against Nazi efforts. But in general, let's say I would say there was this notion there was not much resistance. That's what most historians said. And this was also driven by some very prominent Holocaust historians like Raoul Hilberg.

who thought there was not much resistance occurring during the Holocaust. And this influenced many other historians. So in the end, think, during the later decades, many historians settled on resistance as something rare and mostly happening in Eastern Europe.

There were always exceptions to this. There were some people, as I said, in Israel, but also, for example, Konrad Kuit in Australia, or there was an East German survivor historian Helmut Eschweger. They already started in the 1980s to rethink what is resistance. they made a kind of...

clear that one cannot just focus on group resistance. One need to include also individual acts. And they tried to open this up, but still they didn't get much traction. So this is where I'm coming from. in my work, I try to revive these early kind of challenges to that resistance was rare and that it was usually group resistance.

So I think that's, and this is, I think I'm part of also a larger trend because there are more historians now, they think more about beyond, let's say group efforts. They also think more about women as let's say resistors. So there's a new trend during the last 10, 15 years thinking more about resistance because there was this unfortunate kind of result that

Wolf Gruner (09:16.942)
People talk more about rescuers than about Jewish resistors.

Waitman Beorn (09:22.767)
Yeah. And that's a great point. Hadn't really been thought about that the way that, yeah, that sort of overshadows and then particularly sort of in the, in the Western European context, it's, it's rescuers dominate that, that discussion, I think. Right. I yeah. I mean, that's what was really fascinating about the examples and we'll talk about them in a minute is just, there are so many of them and I'll be honest, you know, I, I,

Wolf Gruner (09:34.978)
Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (09:53.101)
even as a Holocaust historian, I kind of thought, gosh, I can't believe people are doing this in Nazi Germany. mean, like, because even my sort of, you know, impression of the Nazi state was just this sort of crushing fear, you know, and crushing autocratic state that you would not choose to do anything that might. But yet people were just, you know, very blatantly out in public.

resisting and saying, you know, this is messed up or Hitler's horrible or whatever. And that to me was, was shocking as well. So I guess I, I had even had some of the misconceptions about sort of how severe, least on its face, I mean, the dictatorship was in terms of repressing expression.

Wolf Gruner (10:37.206)
Yeah, but I agree. mean, I had the same kind of pressure because I thought along the lines, as many historians thought, Jews kind of adapted step by step to the ever more radicalizing policies. But one sees now with this new evidence that this was very different and that they kind of reacted very specifically to certain measures, sometimes to the persecution in general.

but very different from adapting and getting used to the oppression.

Waitman Beorn (11:13.115)
Yeah, and can we, before we get into some of the examples, can you talk a little bit about the sources for this? You kind of mentioned in the beginning these police files, but what kind of sources do we have and what kind of insights do they give you as sort of a source base for this work?

Wolf Gruner (11:31.715)
Yeah, since I had this illuminating encounter with this police book, this made me rethink really to what kind of sources did we use before this to kind of understand how Jews.

behaved under oppression in Nazi Germany. Mostly there were two sets of sources which Stoen used to understand Jewish attitudes. These were Nazi reports on the one hand, like Gestapo, SS, but also administrative reports. And they don't speak much about resistance because they want to also kind of highlight the weak, so to speak. They don't want to emphasize that there was resistance.

The second set of sources was like ego documents, like diaries and letters from Jews. But because of fear of censorship, many Jews never wrote something about what they did for obvious reasons. So these two sets of sources which were used never really allowed historians actually to find something about this. So what I started to do was looking into

the perpetrator sources. And this is kind of against the challenging previous understandings or ideas that one can only find really something out about Jewish attitudes when you use Jewish sources. So I did actually the opposite. I used perpetrator sources like police records, log books, but also records. And then I extensively used court records.

This is interesting, most of the court records I used in the beginning, which were about public protests where Jews were punished for speaking up against the oppression, they were coming from special courts. And special courts were established in 1933 to quell any kind of potential resistance. But we thought always they were mainly created to fight communists and social democrats.

Wolf Gruner (13:42.755)
We never thought that they would actually also were used to punish Jews. But I found tons of cases in every special court in the big cities in Germany, which kind of challenges this previous understanding there. And then from there, I extended this and found that even regular courts also punish Jews for so-called crimes, as the Nazis perceived this.

or threats against the regime. And then I thought, but I can't just use perpetrator source. That's just kind of, in a way, this seems to be strange. And so I then added interviews of survivors from the Visual History Archive of the Shor Foundation, in total over 170 interviews, where I found a lot of mentioning of these small acts of resistance.

Without that, actually, this is interesting that the survivors describe them as resistance, because they have the same traditional understanding of resistance as many historians still have, that resistance is only something which is kind of armed, violent, and kind of organized.

Waitman Beorn (14:50.971)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (15:02.361)
Yeah. I mean, we'll get to this, but there was a, there was one specific example in the last chapter that I was just like jaw hitting the floor of this woman who was like, as a little girl had basically been like taking on these Nazi thugs, but it sounded like, mean, I haven't heard her testimony, but it sounded again, like one of these testimonies that you listen to. And as an historian, you're just kind of like aghast, but the person is sort of very matter of fact, and like not making a big deal of this thing that they did that was actually a massive big deal. Right.

Wolf Gruner (15:30.68)
Yeah, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (15:31.515)
And it's interesting that you point out that this is because they've been sort of conditioned as well that resistance is like the Bielski brothers or it's Sobibor and otherwise, and anything else is just is not, you know, it is not worthy of note, I suppose.

Wolf Gruner (15:49.581)
Yeah, and somehow also the archives is created in a way to actually eclipse certain things like this type of resistance which I investigated is not, let's say, in the index terms of the Shaw Foundation. So the index term resistance only highlights this traditional understanding. So when you put in resistance and are looking for survivor interviews, then

Waitman Beorn (16:05.979)
Hmm.

Wolf Gruner (16:15.374)
the Warsaw uprising is coming up, the ghetto uprising, or the partisans are coming up, but not these small deeds. So this is interesting. It shows also how archives have to be understood as historical artifacts, right? Because this archive was created in the 1990s, where this, let's say, understanding of resistance was dominant.

Waitman Beorn (16:39.707)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want get back to the testimonies in a minute, but I'm somebody that I love. I love me a judicial source. I love I love court records. Can you talk a little bit about because it was going to be important, but just for my instance, because I don't know the difference. So what is the role of the special courts versus regular courts? Because what happens in a lot of these examples we're to talk about, you know, is is somebody report somebody to the police and then

Maybe the Gestapo gets involved, which is a special kind of police, or maybe it's just the regular police, and then it goes to a court. Can you talk a little about, just so we have an understanding, a general understanding of sort of what the court system is like in Nazi Germany, and then what role these special courts do, and what crimes people are going to be accused of?

Wolf Gruner (17:29.996)
So in the beginning of my investigation, it was mainly a public protest, which I found in these special court records. And this is for a reason, because these special courts were supposed to quell any kind of public kind of critique or any insults of Hitler.

They used one law which was introduced in 1934 against so-called treacherous attacks against the Nazi state and the Nazi party. So this was a special law. There was a decree before in 1933, but then in 1934, this law. And this allowed practically to punish anybody with prison sentences who spoke up against the regime. And this is not just true for Jews, but also non-Jews, obviously.

But interestingly, many Jews were kind of punished under this law. And then later I found that many other so-called crimes, that means any law which was either interpreted against Jews or created against Jews was then also in a way persecuted via regular courts. So for example, during the war, were all these kinds of economic crimes, black market and

They were usually tried at regular courts. So you have a whole variety of different acts which were punished or tried at regular courts in addition to the special courts, which were more kind of against political incidents, so to speak. And the first incident I found was actually labeled in this police logbook, political incident. And the follow-up is...

Usually then that the regular police, the order police, hands over the arrested man or woman to the Gestapo and they then interrogate them and then usually they hand them over to the special courts. Perceived political incidents, critique against the regime or if it's kind of a more economic crime or breaking of other anti-Jewish legislations, then they hand them over to regular courts.

Waitman Beorn (19:47.343)
And this is, I think it's a really interesting distinction because I think here you have another layer. It's kind of, maybe I'm off base, but it's almost like you have the Nazis defining resistance too. like what, cause I think we would say perhaps that all of the resistance is political resistance, right? Because it's all against, it's all against the Nazis. Jews, when somebody, when a German Jew wants to, you know, go to the theater or the swimming pool and they take off their star to do it.

You they are in a sense protesting the Nazi state, but it sounds like what you're saying is that the Nazis themselves might say, well, you, you've broken the law, but that's not actually political, a political statement resistance in the same way that, you know, defacing a Hitler poster or sending something bad about Hitler is, is that true?

Wolf Gruner (20:36.942)
So I think this is a really important result of my research is I started out to think about what is resistance and what can be labeled as resistance. And I was trying to challenge this old understanding. And then I realized what I just mentioned that survivors also have their own opinions about what resistance is. But the result of this research is really that we need to rethink and that

the perpetrators usually define what resistance, what they perceive as a threat to their regime. And it can be as minimal as taking off the stars. And we sometimes overlook the repercussions what people actually faced for sometimes not doing anything. So for example, not wearing the star. We thought, I thought also, have to include myself here for a long time, some stuff was like cavalier, right?

going into a cinema which is forbidden for Jews or not putting on the star. But then when you see that they actually face prison sentences for these small deeds, then you see how the regime sees this as a danger. And I think what they perceive as a threat, that's what we can kind of understand as resistance.

And to give you a new example, which is not about the Jews, I don't know if you remember when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was this woman sitting on the Red Square with a blank sheet of paper, and she was arrested for anti-war protest in Russia. And there was nothing on the paper. So the regime was perceiving this as a threat, a blank sheet of paper held by a woman on the Red Square.

Waitman Beorn (22:18.233)
Mm, yeah.

Wolf Gruner (22:30.54)
So that's how we have to rethink actually resistance, I think.

Waitman Beorn (22:34.361)
No, I think, I think that's really important. I mean, it's just interesting to me, the different layers in this story of who's defining resistance as what, you know, that, that to me is really fascinating. But I mean, I think we've, we've probably teased the audience too much already, but can you, can you talk about some of the examples, right? Because you've divided the book into sort of thematic chapters, which each of them deals with sort of a, certain kind of resistance. So can you walk us through.

Wolf Gruner (22:49.006)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (23:03.479)
sort of the different ways in which people chose or in the heat of the moment. You know, I think it's also fair to say that sometimes people, know, resistance wasn't a sort of white rose. Everyone getting together and thinking about I'm going to go and I resist. was just someone who was fed up and just like lashed out in the moment as well. You know, that's also resistance. If you just can't take it and you you say something that you maybe later on, like, wish I hadn't said that because I'm going to get in trouble. But like I meant that.

Wolf Gruner (23:33.143)
Yeah, and I think this is also, I mean, these kind of snap reactions you have a lot. And you are right that people kind of in a way took along, let's say, took in a lot of, let's say, experiences of oppression and persecution and discrimination up to a certain point, then they could never, then they kind of reacted. But I think the interesting thing here is

There are different, there is a huge variety and you mentioned earlier that you applauded me that I got in 12 years in a small book, but this was actually what I had to do because I found so many different ways of how Jews responded to the regime and were punished for it, that I had to find some way to actually, first of all, to get some order into things, right?

This is why I came up with these five different rubrics, which are umbrella terms for understanding individual acts of resistance. I have to emphasize because we didn't talk so much about this. What I focus on in the book is really individual acts of resistance. That means not of people together. This is really about a woman or a man, young or old, who

did something against the regime. often without that their relatives knew this or their friends knew this. So really often in an isolated way, I have to emphasize they are all conscious about, in my understanding, what they do. They know what kind of repercussions they might face.

And sometimes, as you said, there are these fed-up reactions where they just block this out. But there is always this consciousness that this might have repercussions not only for themselves, but also for other people in their surroundings. So that's, I think, important to know. So then I try to come up with these five categories. One, which I defined as.

Wolf Gruner (25:49.615)
So the challenges of Nazi propaganda, anti-Jewish propaganda, then the most, the biggest bucket, so to speak, is public protest. We talked already and mentioned this. This was oral protest. So speaking up in restaurants, on the streets, in your neighborhood, criticizing the regime or measures of the regime against the Jews. Then critique in written form.

and then disobedience of laws and regulations on the local level. And the last one was physical self-defense. So there are five different categories which allowed me to subsume very diverse cases under these five different categories.

Waitman Beorn (26:36.891)
Yeah. And can you talk before we get into some of the examples? Because one of the things you talk about in the book that I think is important, because we had a sort of conversation before about before we started recording about kind of comparisons to other regimes that oppressed people and these kinds of things. And you have this concept of the impotent Jew, which which reminds me as an American of the history of Jim Crow and the uppity N word writer, the uppity black person as a as a same kind of.

you are acting in a way that is not acceptable because of your degraded status in the eyes of the oppressor, right? I wonder when you talk a little about sort of this idea of the impudent Jew and how that comes through in the sources as part of these, it's almost part of the crime. It's like part of the crime is how dare you even speak up. You're not allowed to address this.

Wolf Gruner (27:31.501)
Yeah, I think there are two important factors here. One is I came to this because in a lot of Nazi reports, you have this trope of the impudent Jew. And I thought, as many historians thought, the Nazis put this in there, in these reports, just to justify new, harsher measures. They just kind of are.

thought, kind of proclaimed Jews are kind of a threat to state authority, they challenge this, and that's why we need to kind of introduce more radical measures against them. But then I realized that actually, this is somehow there is a truth to this, and that sometimes in these reports, you can actually have a correlation to actual events.

So that, for example, in 1935 in Berlin, the Gestapo wrote in their report that Jews are born with disrespect to state authority. The same month, the Gestapo arrested more than 100 Jews in Berlin for offenses against the Nazi state and the Nazi party. So we can, when you bring one and one together, it makes actually sense that they talk about the Jews in this way in their report. So this was on the one hand

based on a certain reality of Jewish responses. But then it was also an anti-Jewish trope in a way, exactly as you described it, that they have to obey, that they are only, and this is sometimes you read this in the indictments of these trials, that they are guests in Germany and they should be especially observant to the law. so there is this extra expectation that they have to obey.

Waitman Beorn (29:18.905)
Yeah, mean, I think that again, I think this is really interesting because it also speaks to, think, a larger paradox of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, which is on the one hand, know, Jews are these inferior subservient people that are not anywhere near, you know, Germans in any kind of way. And yet they're also existential threats to the state. Right. So that they

they inhabit these two areas that are fundamentally incompatible because if they're just completely, you know, of no concern, then why are they such a desperate threat? But you see that right almost right here in just what you just described in terms of this impudent piece of like, on the one hand, they're so low that they shouldn't be speaking up the way they are, but also the fact that they are speaking up is threatening enough that we need to actually take serious action against it.

Wolf Gruner (30:11.224)
Yeah. And there's also one historical component which adds to this because at the time in the 1930s and 40s, things were, let's say, not appropriate, which we today wouldn't care about. So for example, when somebody called somebody with names, you could actually sue somebody for this. But today, people would say,

get over it. So there is an extra layer that creates more severity in general to, for example, insults so that they allow defamation suits. But then also, if it's done by a Jew, gets even more pronounced.

Waitman Beorn (31:05.247)
So can we look at some examples now? I think these are really interesting. And one of the things that I think is, and you probably discovered this as well, that's so amazing about court documents and police records and these kinds of examples is that because they're trying to prove something, they have to be incredibly detailed about what happened and who said what.

when and where and what it looked like. And so that actually leaves us with a very rich set of sources, which albeit have a perspective and they have biases and everything else. the first example in the book is a guy who basically defaces a Nazi symbol on a bus. And then this becomes this sort of unravels into this, you know, massive, not massive, but I mean, in the context of the documentation.

an extensive court case where he has, you know, people in his apartment building talking about what he and his wife are saying. Can you talk a little about this example and kind of what it shows?

Wolf Gruner (32:11.852)
Yeah, so first of all, I want to roll this a little bit back. The problem for me was while I found, let's say widespread documentation, often the documentation itself was scarce. So I found, for example, court records, I found, let's say indictments, but the indictments were three pages, five pages. In many cases, I didn't find the whole trial proceedings.

So this was especially difficult for me then to write the book when I decided I need to find a way to convey these stories to make a good read also, because I didn't want to overwhelm the reader with hundreds and hundreds of cases which are often similar. So I wanted to dive deeper and to also come closer to what could.

be the reasons why people acted this way, why did they resist. But it was really hard to actually get me to the bone and find cases where I have rich documentation. So this was an extraordinary find that I have, that they had more documentation in this case. So it's one of the reasons why I pre-did. But it was also an interesting, unusual case because there was this guy.

He was a of a merchant, middle-aged in Hamburg. And in 1936, he accompanies his wife to the bus terminal at the outskirts of Hamburg because she wants to visit her parents. And while waiting for the departure of the bus, talking to her, she is already sitting in the bus, he stands outside. He tries to kind of scratch or destroy the Swastika logo on the public bus with his walking cane.

He is then denounced or denunciated by a bus conductor who waited nearby for the departure of his bus. And then, as you say, this whole trial unravels and in the end he is put on trial. And this is, by the way, maybe we should emphasize this. Many people in the English speaking world have this misconception that the Nazi state was a lawless state.

Wolf Gruner (34:30.898)
Jews where when they did anything, they're immediately put into a concentration camp. And that's just not how it worked, actually. What I learned also, and I had my own misconceptions there, because I thought there's the steady Nazification also of the judicial system, that the reality was much more complex. the Nazi state perceived itself still as a legal system.

and operated in this way. That means it was not possible to just put somebody who actually committed a crime in their understanding to put them in a concentration camp. The logic was if somebody disobeys a law or does something which is perceived as a crime, then there needs to be a trial. And this is what then actually was good for my research so that I could find these traces.

Because if they would have been sent to a concentration camp, I would not even have the limitation of this, or much less. So in this way, he received five weeks in jail for scratching the Swastika logo. And this was because, interestingly also, they need to have a legal foundation for their punishment. And in this case, the only legal framework of kind

law which they could come up with was a paragraph in the criminal code about the destruction of public property, so to speak. so he gets five weeks in jail, is released, but this is not the end of the story because what I also didn't realize is many of these early resistors in the 1930s then had a criminal record.

because of their prison time. And I knew that in 1938, some months before Kristallnacht, there was a huge action against so-called asocials. And part of the action was also that 2,500 Jews were arrested and put in concentration camp because they had criminal records. And I thought always these were minor offenses like...

Wolf Gruner (36:51.138)
They were caught, like they drove, let's say, intoxicated or they smoked a cigarette in the summer in the woods, which was forbidden. But now I realized that actually quite a lot of them had political offenses. had criminal offenses according to this political legislation. So for their resistance, they now ended up in the concentration camp later on.

because of this new action. he survives and then is fortunate to kind of leave Germany before the program of November in 1938.

Waitman Beorn (37:32.251)
I mean, this is something that's really interesting too that happens throughout the cases that you look at. And not just the sort of ones that are highlighted in each chapter, but also the other ones, which is the varying levels of severity with which courts deal with people, which speaks exactly to the point you just made. in this instance, for example, I remember reading, they were preparing to go to Palestine. And basically the court was like, they asked the court, hey, can you not

Can you not put him in jail until we get back from our trip to Palestine? Cause we've already booked it and they were, the court ultimately said, okay, and let them go, let them come back. mean, like, I'm not suggesting that the Nazis are being lenient, but what you do see is again, speaking of sort of complexity versus kind of our simplistic conventional wisdom that, know, these courts are just crushing, crushing any resistance. You know, some of them were, were not, I mean, what, what does that say about the justice system as it's developing?

or degenerating, suppose, in Nazi Germany.

Wolf Gruner (38:34.67)
Yeah, so this was very interesting and one of the unexpected results of my research for me was to see the complexity of the system. So the idea of this steady classification actually doesn't really translate into how judges kind of put sentences together.

how prosecutors kind of wrote their indictments. So what I saw, which was interesting, confirmed actually earlier research I had done on the initiative role of city governments. And one of my arguments at the time was that these city governments, the mayors and the head of departments, when they enacted anti-Jewish regulations, which were not requested by law on their own initiatives.

depended very much on their individual responsibilities and initiative. And often these men, not even Nazi party members. So I was at the time discussing, it is really about the individual in certain positions. And it depends on how they act, what interests they have. And this in a way shapes their actions. And what I saw there with the city governments that

Plenty of departments didn't do anything, while others were very kind of forerunners in enacting anti-Jewish regulations. And similarly, we can see this in the courts here that judges had a certain leeway in applying the law. And if they didn't find witnesses reliable, or if they thought there were certain, let's say,

aspects which could kind of minimize the sentence or lower the sentence, then some of them applied it. And even more interesting is this is not because one judge is more liberal than the other. What I found is actually a lot depends on the situation and on the individual case. So there was this one example of a judge in Hamburg who

Wolf Gruner (40:53.678)
sentenced somebody according to the 1934 law to several months because he or she, I don't remember, insulted Hitler and criticized the persecution of the Jews in public. Several months later, a woman rushes, and this is during the war, I have to say in 1941, so very late, a woman rushes into a police station, yells at the policeman down with Hitler and kind of

right in the face of the authority. And she is arrested, she is put on trial, and the same judge gives her two weeks for a similar offense what the first person got several months for. And in his verdict, he writes that she acted out of despair. So he, in a way, used the leave he had towards this woman because

she might have made a repression on him. And then six months later, there's another case with the same judge and he punishes again somebody for a very similar offense with several months in prison. So there was leeway how they could act. moreover, we find even during the war, like in 1941, there are acquittals of Jews.

So they are for the same offenses like insulting Hitler, criticizing Nazi measures, and then they are acquitted, which would be unimaginable if you think about this, right? So late into the war, one could think maybe in 1933, something like this could happen, or 1935, but 1941, 1942, and it's not just one case, it's dozens of cases.

So this shows us that there was kind of individual responsibility involved in, let's say, what they perceived as a threat and how they punished it.

Waitman Beorn (42:54.043)
And one of the things that comes through also is that, um, you know, there's not necessarily looking, looking back on it. There's not necessarily even a logic to what will get you in lots of trouble, you know, and what, I mean, one would think that, that the bad mouthing Hitler would be the worst thing you could do. But sometimes it, it, it's a close by that there's an example you have here, um, which might talk about a little bit of a, he's a young man who.

pulls fire alarms, you know, and, the calling out sort of the fire brigades to sort of non-existent fire. And he gets in big trouble for this. He talked a little about, about sort of about his trajectory, because there's also the really interesting thing that happens in all these cases of what's happening in the background to family and to, friends while somebody is sort of in the, in the system as it were.

Wolf Gruner (43:48.589)
Yeah, so this is the case of Hans Oppenheimer, who was 17 years old, living in Frankfurt. He was a young man, young Jewish man, in kind of well of family. The family lost their income, and he decides to kind of learn a craft and did an apprenticeship.

And after finishing this, he goes to the labor office to find a job to sustain his family. And he is recruited in one of the early forced labor programs. So he spends two years in two different labor camps with really horrible conditions for these Jewish forced laborers. And this is even before the war starts. And when he comes back in 1940, when he is released from these labor camps, this is when with

his personal experience in these camps, but also the increasingly hostile environment of Frankfurt, which had especially fanatic Nazi mayor and was forerunner in lot of anti-Jewish regulations. So all this comes together that he decides to break the curfew every night for Jews, which was introduced in the beginning of the war.

and then to wait for the allied bombers to kind of drop their bombs. And when they drop their bombs, he sets off a wrong fire alarms to divert the firefighters. sometimes he does this twice. So he waits till they come and then they go away. And then he pulls another fire alarm and he gets caught red-handed in front of one fire alarm post.

And then there is a big discussion which goes to the Reich justice ministry, how he can be punished for this. And the first idea is to charge him with treason, which would have been the death penalty. But they can't really establish legal ground for it. So in the end, he actually gets away with a relatively mild sentence in comparison with three years in prison. But three years in prison meant a lot because he is put in solitary confinement.

Wolf Gruner (46:01.87)
He has horrible conditions in prison. He still rebels there. He complains about these conditions and so on. And while his parents are in Frankfurt and often don't know actually anything about him because communication is censored by the prison warden. And so it is a situation where he in the end, because of the conditions, attempts

twice to commit suicide there in prison. And then finally he is transported to Auschwitz when all Jewish prisoners are moved to Auschwitz at the end of 1942, where he then perished after a short while, short weeks.

Waitman Beorn (46:44.687)
And then of course, again, like his parents are also sent away in the meantime. mean, like this is what, you know, it's part of the great way that you write the narrative, but also it's about what's happening to Jews writ large is that, you know, it's like persecutions within persecutions. know, the family ends up at Theresienstadt or from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz or whatever, and that happens more than once.

Wolf Gruner (47:02.274)
Yeah.

Wolf Gruner (47:08.45)
Yeah, I tried in these main stories to always try to find out as much as possible about the individual biography and the family and what happened to them if I was able to do it. And by the way, we talked in the beginning about the 12 years, half of this time actually are the five stories, the main stories. To find biographical details was so difficult. It took a large amount of time.

often more than just to go to the archives and find stuff about the actual acts of resistance. And so for him, I was fortunate to find the prison files where I found Leather. so it was important to show not only the fate of the family, but also how it is connected to the location where they live. Because the situation was very different when we think about different cities in Germany. Berlin was different.

environment for Jews than in Frankfurt or Munich. And I think these local persecutions within the kind of national framework of the anti-Jewish persecution is also important to understand, let's say, the fate of these local populations and then the individual families and the resistance themselves.

Waitman Beorn (48:23.525)
I mean, one of the things that I think you do really well in this book and in this project is dealing with the sort of the trade off between the Holocaust as this massive event that kills millions of people and individual lives. You know, the fact that these are individual people, you know, what I always say is that

Wolf Gruner (48:41.26)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (48:44.697)
You know, there's there's no six million killed. There's one person killed six million times. You know, there are six million individual stories and more than that really, because that's the people that are murdered, but there's also survivors, et cetera. And again, the records here, this guy's in prison. He's a young man. He's being mistreated. Prison's awful. And you're telling his story through letters he's sent that never reached his family.

because the prison people didn't even deliver them. And so like there's, there's that additional piece of just a powerful sort of message from history where like you got to see the letters, but his family never got to see them. And he didn't get to see letters coming back from his family. So he doesn't actually know what's happening in his family or ended up suffering and murder, being murdered as well, you know, and he's going down his own path.

Wolf Gruner (49:22.179)
Yeah.

Wolf Gruner (49:33.422)
Can we stop for one second? Yeah, I'll come back in a second.

Waitman Beorn (49:35.598)
Yeah, sure.

Short, Yep.

Wolf Gruner (50:58.926)
Wolf Gruner (51:03.874)
Sorry about this.

Waitman Beorn (51:05.22)
No problem.

Wolf Gruner (51:08.121)
Okay

Waitman Beorn (51:11.403)
forget what saying. What was I saying? Was it anything?

Wolf Gruner (51:13.9)
No, you didn't ask a question, you just finished your thought.

Waitman Beorn (51:18.395)
Oh yeah. mean, what was my thought? forgot what I was mentioning. I mean, I was basically just talking about the fact that I think one of the things you do really well here is these individual stories and the fact that these documents, many of them you got to read, but the families themselves never got to read them, right? Which I think is a really sort of, it's also a...

a commentary on

It's a commentary on also the.

the sort of detailed persecution, the fact that even the Nazis just wouldn't let, just to add insult to injury, they're not gonna let these letters be delivered. They're not really any kind of threat to the regime, but they're just gonna withhold those as well.

Wolf Gruner (52:11.934)
But I think there's this part also that any, let's say, complaint or critique is perceived as, let's say, a crime when it comes from Jews. And I think this shows that then the prison warden is censoring by keeping these letters.

Waitman Beorn (52:30.233)
Yeah, yeah. mean, and there's other examples of like, you know, where the prison, the prison warden is asked to sort of give a commentary on the behavior of the prisoner. And they could have just said nothing or they could have said he was fine. She was okay. But they go out of their way to say, actually, you know, this person didn't work very hard or they're awful. I mean, so, and again, you, you, see those differences even in, like one prison warden might say, you know, the person was all right.

nothing to comment on. Another person goes out of their way to sort of say they were awful. I mean, I think one of the things that's nice about this study is it shows individuals making individual choices and the importance of differences that different individuals have when they're sort of doing this, right? One case that I did want to talk about, because I think was, for me, one of the ones that was the most...

Wolf Gruner (52:59.778)
See ya.

Waitman Beorn (53:25.275)
powerful in a certain sense is the one of Beto Neumberger, who's an older man. And he ends up in some ways being one of the most strident resistors, I think, in the book in a certain sense. the way he just sort of can tell a little bit about it, tell his story a little bit and we can talk about that.

Wolf Gruner (53:46.575)
Yeah, so Benno Neuburger was 17 years old and he was a former real estate broker and he lost his business not because of the Nazis but because of hyperinflation. So he was living selling some of his remaining real estate. And then 1933 comes and his daughter and his son,

both decided in short order to leave the country because they don't see a future anymore. he experienced not only, let's say, the persecution of the Jews in Munich, but also one huge problem for him and his wife is the distancing from their children and their children's future, their children's lives. And what I found so impressive for me to see

If you have children, then this comes really with this crazy big impact when they don't can be a part of the marriages of their kids, that they never see their grandchildren. so that's really hard on them. And they try to get out. They don't make it out. And then I think the last straw which broke the camel's neck was for Benno Neuburger, the introduction of the yellow star.

This was the kind of extra insult to be marked and branded as Jews for everybody to see. And this was extraordinarily humiliating. And we often, I don't think that we really acknowledged this, what kind of impact this had on people that they had to put on this yellow star. We know that this happened, but we never really think about it.

And it's very similar to another aspect I describe in the book that many, we always accepted that Jews had to adopt their middle names, these discriminatory middle names Sarah and Israel. But then I found so many cases where Jews refused to adopt these and they had a kind of a tool because the German name law demands that they have to request the adoption of these middle names. So it was not automatic.

Wolf Gruner (56:09.686)
And many just didn't do it. so, and then they were persecuted for it. But back to Neuburger, I think the introduction of the Yellow Star is the watershed moment for him where everything what he experienced comes to demands this reaction. And I think 10 days after this, he sends out the first postcard where he puts on a Hitler's post stamp and then writes insults and abusive comments on them.

This goes from the eternal mass murderer Hitler, disgusting exclamation mark, to one very prophetic actually postcard where he writes on the murderer of five million. And this is at the end of 1941 where not much information was available that massacres in the East had already started. So he actually took this, and this is interesting, from the

announcement of Hitler when he in January 1939 gave the speech that if there will be a word war, that's his words, then this will mean the end of the Jewish race in Europe. And he took this literally, so as many others maybe didn't do, and saw this as kind of the writing on the wall.

So he writes dozens of these postcards and makes one mistake, which uses an old postcard from his real estate firm. And that's how the Gestapo gets to him. And then they see this as treason because in their understanding, these postcards could have been read by other people, which is then in a way a call to resist the regime. And so he is put on

trial not in Munich but in Berlin at the notorious People's Court, which is a pure propaganda court. even there, as a 70-year-old man, when they ask him why he wrote these postcards, he actually says, because I hate Hitler, because he persecutes the Jews. So even there, he stands up and...

Wolf Gruner (58:32.206)
is not begging down and he received the ultimate punishment, the death penalty, and is then kind of murdered in September 1942.

Waitman Beorn (58:44.251)
I mean, and again, you know, one of the things that's so important that you do, think so nicely is the details, right? And, and, and for example, you know, he, one of his last requests is that, I want to have a Jewish burial, please. And et cetera. But of course the Nazis send his body off for medical dissection, you know, and then, and then they build a family, you know, for that, which again, shows the extent to which,

you know, this system is stacked against the people that are involved. And then his wife, believe, ends up in Trajnistan and then later on in, she's murdered, you know, in the Holocaust as well,

Wolf Gruner (59:25.762)
Yeah, and she never really knew about what he did. He kept it from her and she only learns that he is on the people's court very late when everything is already done.

Waitman Beorn (59:40.025)
Yeah. I mean, and again, and also just in this one case, what you've mentioned earlier, which is the whole, the challenge of immigration. And there are just so many really, I think, insightful moments in there where, you know, his children are trying to get him out as well. Right. So they're, they're suffering in a different way in the United States. One of them said, we'll try to get you to Cuba. And he basically says, I'm really like, we're really old and we can't just, we can't just go to Cuba. You know, that's, that's not gonna, it's not gonna work.

for us, you and of course the reason, the reason that they can't go anywhere in the, in the first place really is that they have lost all their money in the great depression because it's really money becomes a limiting factor, but what, what's not going to allow this particular couple to get out. then, you know, all these other things happen and, and they end up, if they're, their friends are leaving, for example, you know, and, they're, they're not, and they're sort of stuck in Germany. again, you know, the, details here, I think are really powerful.

Wolf Gruner (01:00:36.974)
They came to me by coincidence. I have to really thank the grandson of because he read an article of mine where I mentioned the story and I was fascinated by the story, but there was not much detail. I only knew this from the book which was published in Germany. And he said, you mentioned my grandfather. And I said, what? And I thought he would ask me for some like insights. And then he said, no, I actually.

I have 150 letters from my grandparents and do you want to see them? I mean, this enabled me to write this chapter. Otherwise, I could not have written it. Yeah. That's the beauty of the internet.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:16.219)
That's amazing. Wow. Yeah. So everyone out there, you, yeah, everyone out there, if you have stuff about your, uh, people that are historically important in your past, send them to your local historian. Um, can you, can, as we sort of step, take a step back from the details, um, you know, I've, I've had people on talking about rescuers, right? And one of the things, of course, that the historian, the Hama tech dig was tried to.

Wolf Gruner (01:01:28.61)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:47.035)
create sort of an archetypal profile of a rescuer? what kinds of people chose to be rescuers? What was it about their personalities or backgrounds or life experience that led them to be more likely to sort of be a rescuer? Is there something similar that you can do with these people? Is there something that they have in common that distinguishes them from other people? At least based on the

the sample that you have, because one of the things you point out that there were 10,000 of these court cases and only 2,000 of them, 10,000 court cases in the special courts or whatever, and only 2,000 of them are actually surviving. So you only can work with a small sample size. are there things that you noticed that these people have in common, or are they all kind of individuals coming at it from their own different perspectives?

Wolf Gruner (01:02:41.026)
Yeah, so I think I have a pretty good sample because I have hundreds and hundreds of cases, but you're right, the 10,000 cases, this is Berlin, just one court, there were 10,000 cases and 2,000 survived, which is still a lot, which you can go through. Not all of them are about Jews. And I have to say, while I found in dozens of archives in Germany,

Waitman Beorn (01:02:46.394)
Yeah.

Wolf Gruner (01:03:05.314)
hundreds of cases, I only went to dozen of archives. There are so many archives still kind of untouched for the same kind of research. And then many other cases didn't leave traces at all. And this I only know from the testimonies of the Shoah Foundation because they talk about certain things which were never persecuted and punished because they were never denunciated, which also speaks to the role of non-Jewish witnesses, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:03:32.185)
Yeah, I was going to say, I was going to mention that that's another piece that comes out. What does this say about non-Germans? Because so much are non-Jewish Germans because so much of the damning, I'm using air quotes here, the damning evidence comes from people not just testifying, but going out of their way to testify and to give information to the Nazis.

Wolf Gruner (01:03:59.043)
Yeah, on the one hand, this is one result is that it shows a broad involvement of like neighbors, former friends, officials who denunciate Jews. Sometimes they are passersby when they witness somebody speaking up and protesting in public in the streets. But then on the other hand, I want to mention that, which I don't really go into the book, that

in these special courts and also in regular courts, I found also dozens and dozens of cases of non-Jews, and this is really interesting, protesting against the persecution of the Jews and being punished in the same way as the Jews, by the same courts. So when somebody critiques, let's say the Nuremberg race laws as a non-Jew, they're also put on trial and they're also punished with jail time.

So this was a very interesting also side effect of my research to get a different idea that challenges the notion of indifference among the Germans, because on the one hand you have a more broader involvement, but then also you have more solidarity and more actually speaking up for Jews than we ever thought. So that's an interesting aspect. But your question was about can we establish

Waitman Beorn (01:05:18.937)
Yeah, I interrupted my own question.

Wolf Gruner (01:05:20.91)
Can we establish patterns or are there some characteristics which we can identify that enable these individuals to resist? And this is, think, for me, was very eye-opening. In my sample, there are no patterns. we have, as you already saw,

old Jews acting in a resisting or defined way similarly as young Jews. And normally we would expect more younger Jews being resistors, but that's not the case. Also, we always thought more about men when we think about resistance, but here in my sample, we have equally women as men.

equally in all these cases. There are some tendencies like physical self-defense, there are a little bit more men than women, but women are highly also presented, represented there. Or women are more likely to be caught speaking up because they are in the 1930s more in the streets. So there are some tendencies, but in general, there's no gender difference. And then

I also didn't see any kind of differences regarding let's say socialization, education, social status, which led me to the conclusion that practically anybody in the Jewish population was able, depending on circumstances, to act in a resistant way.

And that's, think, very important as a result because it in a way removes the distance that we usually have when we think about these heroes who resisted. They seem so distant because they seem to have special characteristics. And then, for example, young people, when they think about the Holocaust, they think, we could never do this. These are extraordinary people. But no, they are actually ordinary people.

Wolf Gruner (01:07:26.934)
And I think this is also the lesson which we had at the very beginning. think we talked about this for today that if Jews could resist against one of the most oppressive regimes in kind of modern history, then anybody can resist in any way against any authoritarian development.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:52.729)
And I think one of things that I saw that bears, I think bears repeating bears reflecting on, you know, particularly looking back on it, you know, 80 years later from a position of not being in Nazi Germany, not being the Holocaust.

You people might say, look, just wear the star. It's not a big deal. You know, like just get along, like change your name to Israel. Your middle name to Israel's head. You know, it's not worth it. but there are people back then for, for whom the principle mattered enough that they would risk serious repercussions to say, look, I'm not going to just, even though, you know, people might say, this is not a big deal. It is a big deal. Like it's the principle, you know, and I'm not going to do this.

with, with a better understanding than any of us about what that might mean for them. Cause they're living in Nazi Germany, but they're willing to take a stand on something. And I'm using air quotes here again, as sort of small as, you know, going to movie theater or not wearing their armband or their, their yellow star. but it's, in some ways it's a very defiant rejection of assaults on their own humanity.

It's like saying, this may be small to you, but it's not small to me, and I'm willing to take what comes as a result.

Wolf Gruner (01:09:11.576)
Yeah.

Wolf Gruner (01:09:15.726)
Yeah, and I think what really is important is that this is also really, in most cases, these individuals react to either events, when there's violence, example, Kristallnacht or the November program, or they act because certain laws are enacted. So in most cases, it's a direct response to something. And this is actually interesting because

By previous assumption, when I started this project, I thought, okay, I will find a lot of people speaking up in the early 30s, and then it will kind of fizzle out and will be much less later on. And that's actually not the case. The interesting thing is it comes in waves, and it really shows the response to certain, like the Nuremberg laws, Kristallnacht, the deportations later in...

1941, 1942. So there are waves of responses. So it's not that the response kind of decreases over time. It actually decreases and then it increases and this decreases and increases. And that's also important to understand that people pick their own fight at a certain moment and they couldn't stand certain things anymore. there is...

Waitman Beorn (01:10:33.849)
And also just that they don't know how the story ends. Right? we can look back and say, at this point in the Holocaust, this happened. But they don't know that. And so for them, as you point out, something happens and that thing is enough at that point. Because they don't know where this is ending up.

Wolf Gruner (01:10:40.194)
Yeah, exactly.

Wolf Gruner (01:10:53.923)
there.

Wolf Gruner (01:10:58.174)
And I think this is, on the one hand, I think what I observed there are two main, let's say, factors who play in these decisions. And one is, you mentioned this earlier, this kind of the people are fed up. So there is an accumulation and at a certain point they can't deal with it anymore and they snap. sometimes these can be minor things, sometimes they are big things.

but it's a certain situation which then creates the reaction and the response. In other cases, it's a deliberate conscious decision not to do anything or to do things while knowing that this is against the regime. For example, to hide their Jewish identity, to, for example, play music and private concerts. They are conscious decisions and they do this on a frequent basis. It's not just one time that they do.

This is often also interesting. While the evidence is, let's say, scattered, in some cases one can see that people do different individual resistance acts over time, as well as the same person.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:13.231)
Yeah. mean, and you have these, you know, like with, with Ben and Neuberger, you sort of have these, these arcs of, like, you know, going from, from one thing to the next thing and then accumulating in this sort of very strong sort of, to the extent of even continuing after he's arrested. Right. I mean, that, our doggy, his resistance continues because he never, he never folds and tries to go back on what he did. He always owns it. And even in court in front of the judge, he's, he's sort of condemning Hitler.

which even if he's not, he's clearly not convincing anybody or, but it's still resistance, you cause he's still not letting the state win.

Wolf Gruner (01:12:53.132)
And not everybody was so strong like him. mean, others tried then on trial to deflect or to make it seems like this was, they did this unconsciously or like Hans Oppenheimer with the wrong fire alarms, he said it was a prank, but they immediately kind of in a way know that this is just an excuse. So others tried to,

bring in mental problems or so. so not everybody is strong there because they're humans and right, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:30.735)
But it's fine. mean, like, you know, I'm not going to judge somebody for trying to, you know, get out of going to a concentration camp, you know, like, mean, like, you know, fair enough, you know, like you, if you deny doing it, that's fine too. mean, you know, and, you know, yeah, I mean, it's, but it's, it's a mosaic. And I think it's one of the, it's really amazing is, the, different kinds of behaviors. And I mean, there's so much each, each story is really rich. And again, behind the scenes is all the like,

Wolf Gruner (01:13:37.387)
Exactly.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:59.011)
interpersonal relationships with non-Jewish Germans and, you know, what's going on in the larger, I mean, it's really important. But we've taken up a ton of your time already. I want to close by asking our sort of question I ask everybody, which is what's one book on the Holocaust that you would recommend to our readers? Again, at this particular moment, because it could change tomorrow, but right now, what would you recommend?

Wolf Gruner (01:14:29.378)
I mean, I'm just going with one of the more impressive book I have read over the last years. And this is The Last Ghetto by Anna Heikova. Because I mean, not only this is a work which was long in the making based on a dissertation, but then really over the years, kind of matured. And the book is really fascinating.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:39.736)
Okay.

Wolf Gruner (01:14:55.982)
for one reason, she shows in a way a prisoner society in this so-called model ghetto in Theresienstadt, the protectorate of Rohingya, in Rohingya, and what I found so intriguing is that Anna Heikova really does an excellent job in challenging kind of our previous understanding.

She leaves certain canons behind that this is a ghetto for the elderly, like elderly German Jews, that she does not shy away from controversies. That means to think about the prisoners also.

the complexity of their behavior and that this is also about power within the prisoner society. She talks about gender, about elderly people, how they often are on the bottom of the hierarchy and that's also why many elderly people died. And she talks about sexual violence. so she is really not shying away from any controversy to uncover in a way really rich.

companion of how, let's say, daily life in a coerced environment.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:16.231)
Thank you so much for coming on Wolf. Again, for everyone else, again, I'm sorry for the short hiatus. We had some scheduling issues with other folks. That's okay. It happens. So we didn't have a couple of episodes for the last couple of weeks, but we're back on target. Again, if you were finding this podcast useful, particularly in these current times, if you can give us a like, subscribe, comment on iTunes and Apple podcasts or

Spotify, that's fantastic, much appreciated. And again, well, thank you so much for coming on and telling us about your work.

Wolf Gruner (01:16:52.801)
Okay, thank you, Redmond, for having me and this was fun. Thank you.