The star on the doors of Jewish homes

From 26 March 1942 every flat in Berlin in which even one Jew lived had to be marked with a Star of David. This was no longer the yellow star bearing the word “Jude” that Jews in the Reich had worn on their clothing for half a year, but a star of white paper printed in black ink and stuck on the front door next to the name plate, so that anyone who came up the stairs could see it. From then on the postman, the caretaker, the neighbour, the official and the Gestapo officer could tell, without consulting any card index, behind which doors Jews lived.

A paper star beside the name

The order was not a Berlin regulation but one for the whole of Germany. It was issued by the security police under Reinhard Heydrich: the Reich Security Main Office and the Gestapo offices subordinate to it. Most studies, including Joseph Walk’s collection of anti-Jewish regulations and the German Historical Museum in Berlin, date the decree on the marking of flats to 13 March 1942. Some authors, following Hans Günther Adler, cite a circular from Heydrich of 13 February 1942, and the deadlines for compliance given in the literature range from 15 March to 15 April. The discrepancy most probably arises because the central decree was implemented in turn by the individual police offices, each in its own area. In Berlin, according to the findings of the Berlin research project “Zwangsräume”, which studies the Jewish compulsory houses, the obligation to mark flats applied from 26 March 1942. Popular chronologies also record the event under that date, broadly correctly, with one qualification: the order did not apply only to Berlin’s Jews but to Jews throughout the Reich, and it was not whole buildings that were marked but individual flats.

The regulation described the sign precisely. The star was to have the shape and size of the one worn on the breast, but to be white, so that it would stand out clearly against the usually dark doors. It was to be stuck directly beside the name plate or, if there was none, elsewhere by the entrance to the flat, “on the outside and visible to everyone”. The justification, quoted by Adler, was equally plain: since Jews used every opportunity to continue “camouflaging” themselves, their homes had to be marked. A Jew was anyone covered by the Star of David decree of September 1941, that is, a person classed as a Jew under the definitions of the Nuremberg Laws, regardless of religion.

So the same sign that had marked out Jews in the street six months earlier now appeared on their doors. The difference was that a star on clothing could still, at the risk of one’s life, be covered with a briefcase or taken off in an attempt to escape. A star on the door marked the place where a person could be found at any hour.

Jewish houses

For several years Berlin’s Jews had no longer been living where they chose. The Law on Tenancies with Jews of 30 April 1939 removed their protection as tenants and allowed municipalities and the Gestapo to move them into so-called Jewish houses (Judenhäuser) and Jewish flats, where several families shared accommodation meant for one. According to the “Zwangsräume” project, at least 791 buildings in Berlin were used as compulsory housing for Jews. At the same time the office of the General Building Inspector for the Reich capital, headed by Albert Speer, carried out four eviction drives between January 1941 and January 1943, in which some 5,000 Berlin flats were taken from Jews. They were to go to Germans whose homes had been demolished for the gigantic rebuilding of the city, and later to victims of air raids.

The marking of flats completed this system. The Gestapo and the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, which it supervised – a compulsory organisation through which the authorities passed their orders on to Jews – already kept detailed lists of tenants. The star on the door turned those lists into a map visible to the naked eye, and placed the inhabitants of the Jewish houses, who until then could count on the anonymity of a big city, under the constant watch of their neighbours. Every visit to a Jew, every food parcel left outside a door, every contact between a non-Jewish acquaintance and a marked flat became visible, and since October 1941 Germans who showed friendly feelings towards Jews in public had faced detention in a concentration camp.

A tightening ring of prohibitions

The star on the door was one of several dozen regulations that within a few months at the turn of 1941 and 1942 stripped German Jews of what remained of normal life. In November 1941 they had to hand in typewriters, bicycles, cameras and binoculars, and in the autumn they also lost the right to use public telephone boxes. In January 1942, like the Jews of the General Government during the fur action, they had to surrender furs and warm woollen clothing for the soldiers on the Eastern Front without compensation. In February they were forbidden to buy or subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Two days before the Berlin deadline for marking flats, on 24 March 1942, the Reich Ministry of the Interior banned Jews in principle from using public transport: only those whose forced labour was more than seven kilometres from home could travel by tram, bus or suburban railway, and only with a special permit. In May 1942 came a ban on keeping pets, and in the following months an order to hand in electrical appliances and the closure of the last Jewish schools.

Many of these regulations were never published in the official gazette. They were passed to the Reich Association of Jews, which announced them in its bulletin and notified its members, who were responsible for obeying them. German public opinion therefore did not have to learn of them. The star on the door was an exception: every neighbour could see it.

Behind this avalanche of decrees stood, to a large extent, Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and since 1926 Gauleiter of Berlin. It was he who in the summer of 1941 persuaded Hitler to introduce the star on clothing, and he who demanded most loudly that the capital of the Reich should be the first to become “free of Jews”. The obstacle, as he saw it, was that some 20,000 Berlin Jews were working as forced labourers in armaments factories, from which industry and the Wehrmacht did not want to release them. The marking of flats made it easier to control those who still remained in the city and prepared the way for their deportation.

Transports to the east

Berlin’s Jews had been deported since the autumn of 1941. The first transport, with about a thousand people, left Grunewald station on 18 October 1941 for the ghetto in Łódź, where a few months later some of the deportees from the Reich were sent to Chełmno. By the end of November three more transports had left Berlin for Łódź and one each for Minsk, Kaunas and Riga. The people on the transports to Kaunas and Riga were shot within a few days of arrival. In January 1942, in the weeks when officials of the SS, the Party and the ministries were agreeing on the course of the “Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference and Hitler, at the Berlin Sportpalast, was recalling his “prophecy” of the annihilation of the Jews, three more trains left Berlin for Riga, each carrying about a thousand people.

In March 1942 the deportations changed direction, and their purpose became unmistakable. On the night of 16–17 March the first transport left the Lublin ghetto for the new Bełżec extermination camp, where people were murdered with engine exhaust in gas chambers immediately on arrival. So began Operation Reinhard, directed from Lublin by Odilo Globocnik, in which, according to historians’ estimates, some 1.5–1.8 million Jews, most of them from the General Government, were murdered by the autumn of 1943. By 11 April 1942, according to Polish and German literature, about 30,000 Lublin Jews had been deported to Bełżec, and in the same period also between ten and twenty thousand Jews from Lwów (Lviv). The space thus freed in the ghettos of the Lublin District, above all in Izbica and Piaski (PL), was set aside for Jews from the Reich, the Protectorate and Slovakia. On 23 March the Germans drove some 2,500 Polish Jews out of the Piaski ghetto to make room for the newcomers from the West.

Two days after the Berlin order came into force, on 28 March 1942, the eleventh transport left Berlin for Piaski, carrying 973 people according to the surviving lists, and on 2 April the twelfth left for the Warsaw Ghetto. The stars on the doors made the work of Gestapo officials and their helpers from the Reich Association of Jews easier in each successive “action”: it was known where to find the people put on the list.

Place in the war

The order to mark flats killed no one. It was, however, part of a process that in the Reich in the spring of 1942 moved from isolating the Jews to their physical annihilation. On 27 March 1942, the day after the Berlin deadline, Goebbels noted in his diary that the Jews were now being deported to the east from the General Government, “beginning with Lublin”; that a “fairly barbaric” method was being used, which should not be described more closely; and that, broadly speaking, about 60 per cent of them would have to be liquidated, while only 40 per cent could be put to work. The operation, he wrote, was being carried out by “a former Gauleiter of Vienna”, that is, Globocnik. This entry is among the clearest evidence that the leadership of the Third Reich knew what was happening to the deportees.

In the following months the pace of deportations from the Reich increased. From June 1942 trains from Berlin went mainly to Theresienstadt and to execution sites in the east, and from the end of 1942 above all to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In February and March 1943, in a round-up known as the “Factory Action”, the Gestapo and the SS took the last Jewish forced labourers from their workplaces; the protest by non-Jewish wives of men from mixed marriages who had been detained, demonstrating in the Rosenstraße, became one of the few public protests in the history of the Third Reich. Of the more than 160,000 Jews who had lived in Berlin in 1933, over 50,000 were deported during the war. Few survived: some of the Jewish partners in mixed marriages, a handful of those who returned from the camps, and those who managed to survive in hiding. In Berlin such people were called “U-boats” (U-Boote); of the several thousand who went underground, an estimated 1,500–1,700 survived the war.

The paper stars on the doors of Berlin’s apartment houses disappeared together with the people who lived behind them. Today the places are commemorated by the brass “stumbling stones” (Stolpersteine) set into the pavements outside the houses from which Jews were deported, and by research such as the “Zwangsräume” project, which is reconstructing the history of the Jewish compulsory houses address by address. In the history of the Holocaust, 26 March 1942 is a minor date, but a telling one: in the same week in which doors were being marked in Berlin, the machinery that was to consume most of Europe’s Jews began its work at Bełżec.