‘Life in Illegality Cost an Extortionate Amount of Money.’ Ordinary Germans and German Jews Hiding from Deportation

Abstract

The woman who hid Marie Jalowicz Simon, a young Jewess from Berlin, for over a year in her apartment did not like Jews. Luise Blase, as she was called, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party, and on the first day of each month she expected the rent to be paid for the insect-ridden chamber that Jalowicz Simon shared with a foreign worker. Once the landlady had received the rent in cash, she would often gleefully remark how she had squeezed some money out of the rich Jewess. Nevertheless, Marie Jalowicz Simon owed her life to Luise Blase – a woman who had been motivated largely by greed. In German academic literature, assistance to Jews attempting to escape deportation has widely been treated as a form of resistance, as Rettungswiderstand (rescue as resistance). This term, coined by the Holocaust survivor and historian Arno Lustiger, has become well established in the field. By comparison, cases like the one described above have undergone little academic scrutiny. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by situating the multifaceted social interactions between ordinary Germans and Jews who had gone into hiding within the wider history of German popular responses to the Holocaust.