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READING SIGNS


In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Calvinist region around the city of Lemgo, between the Teutoburg Forest and the Weser River, in what is today the state of North Rhine–Westphalia, was a hotbed of witch persecution. During four successive waves between 1561 and 1681, more than two hundred Lemgoers were executed as witches.1 Most were women, many of them elderly.2 By cleansing their communities of witches, people believed, they were subverting the Devil’s intentions, exposing his clandestine conspirators, and eradicating evil. To unmask witches was to do God’s will.

Over subsequent centuries, this aspect of the city’s past became an increasingly uncomfortable memory for locals. Marianne Weber, feminist author and spouse of the sociologist Max Weber, went to school in Lemgo as a girl in the 1880s. The city’s reputation as a “witches nest,” she recalled, was “a disgrace!”3

Half a century later, with the Nazis in power, Lemgo’s recently refurbished hometown museum opened, and with it a new exhibit on the witch-hunting era. Displaying interrogators’ torture instruments, like thumb screws and “Spanish boots” used to crush the calves of suspects, the museum portrayed the persecutions as “the unfortunate consequences of the dark ages.” In a speech he gave to commemorate the 1937 opening, Mayor Wilhelm Gräfer addressed the era of the witch hunt as a “somber chapter in the history of our city,” one that represented “an entirely inexplicable distortion of the German mentality, spirit, and essence.”4

Many citizens shared the confidence Gräfer expressed. With the coming of the Third Reich, they felt, a new era had dawned. The unenlightened bad old days were gone. A journalist who saw the Lemgo museum exhibit felt his heart fill with a “deep gratitude … that fate has bestowed upon us happier times—times which not only pass sentence upon the tortures of the witch persecutions, but which guarantee and secure all German racial comrades’ right to live.” The witch-hunting era seemed so remote, so safely tucked away behind museum glass, that in June 1939, when a festive regional parade was organized, members of Lemgo’s local chapter of the National Socialist League of German Girls dressed up as witches to lead guests to their seats.5

Only seven months earlier, in November 1938, the pogroms of Kristallnacht had taken place all across the country. In large cities and small towns, Germans had torched synagogues, smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops, and physically attacked and murdered Jews. Residents of Lemgo, too, destroyed the local synagogue, breaking its windows and setting fire to the ruins in broad daylight. The photography studio of Erich Katzenstein, a Jewish Lemgoer, was likewise smashed, and two Jewish cemeteries were vandalized.6

Just as fantasies about witches had gained such cultural authority in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lemgo that they led to waves of executions, fantasies about an all-powerful Jewish enemy bent on destroying Germany steadily accrued validity among Germans over the course of the 1930s. When war came, these fictions became the explanation for why fighting was an existential necessity. After 1943, as the war turned increasingly deadly inside Germany itself, all kinds of chimeras became steadily more compelling. Premonitions, rumors, and legends gained tremendous, predictive power. Word of mouth, speculation, and whispers achieved epistemological sovereignty. People read signs to comprehend what was to them incomprehensible, even unthinkable: that they were losing the war.

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In Lemgo, as across Germany, Jewish life had become ever more precarious in the years after Kristallnacht. Jews had lived in Lemgo since the fourteenth century. In 1900, at the community’s peak, 111 of 8,184 Lemgoers were Jews.7 By 1942, only 22 remained, many of them elderly.8 Then, in late July that year, a large number of townspeople gathered in the market square to watch the last of their Jewish neighbors assemble for deportation.

What went through the minds of those who gathered to witness this expulsion? At least some, we know, found the proceedings disturbing and worse—dangerous. They warned that the “German nation should expect God’s punishment” for treating old people that way, people who “could not hurt a fly.”9 It was not a popular point of view, but once voiced, it could not be unheard. It was there, it had been said. Later on, when everyone knew exactly what fate met Lemgo’s Jews, surely someone remembered having heard it. Or having said it.

Most Germans remained largely indifferent to their Jewish neighbors’ persecution. But there were those for whom the way the war was being carried out—a merciless, apocalyptic campaign that swept even the elderly into its vortex—presented dangers associated not just with violence and guns and falling bombs but spiritual dangers. During the catastrophic later stages of World War II, some wondered whether they were seeing divine punishment. “Germans mixed anxieties about their culpability with a sense of their own victimhood,” writes the historian Nicholas Stargardt.10 People found themselves listening to all available hypotheses, sorting through a variety of possible outcomes. Nearly everyone got into the business of predicting the future and became adept in reading signs.

A pattern of engaging in interpretive speculation, driven by fear and self-pity, emerged with particular force after what Stargardt sees as the turning point of Germany’s war: the firebombing of Hamburg. Over a week’s time in late summer 1943, British and American bombers assaulted the city from the air. Thirty-four thousand people were killed and much of Germany’s second-largest city burned to the ground. The Allies called the campaign Operation Gomorrah, after the impenitent city razed by God in Genesis. The name was surely intended to telegraph something more than just a message about destructive capacity alone. “Gomorrah” was a claim about whose side God was on. It was prophecy. On some level, the Allies understood how to weaponize spiritual anxiety, understood that the war they were fighting was capable of provoking ancient fears of vengeful gods. “Our home town is dying,” a pastor told his congregation after Hamburg’s bombing. “Should we accuse the Royal Air Force?” No, he concluded; it was not just the enemy’s hand at work here, it was “His hand!”11

Signs, the pastor clearly understood, have to be read. They are oblique; they require deciphering. As the war dragged on, auguries of every kind began to mount up. Some Germans drew explicit connections between Hamburg’s bombing and the persecution of the Jews. The Nazi state actually encouraged this interpretation—a version of it, anyway. To stiffen the country’s resolve, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels floated the idea that Allied bombs were “Jewish retribution”: that Jewish influence had been brought to bear in Washington and London to destroy Germany. But after Hamburg, this idea took on a life of its own. All over the country, Germans whispered that it was revenge for Kristallnacht. Mammoth concrete bunkers had been built in many cities, including Hamburg, on top of sites where synagogues once stood. This made the bombs look, to growing numbers of people, like God’s vengeance.12


Copyright © 2020 by Monica Black