Wilhelmshaven

To understand the Jewish community of Wilhelmshaven, one must first grasp the exceptional nature of the city that housed it. Unlike Rhineland or Franconian cities where Jews settled from the Middle Ages onward, often at the price of precarious status and recurring persecutions encountered in fifteenth-century Germany [Bell, 2001], Wilhelmshaven is a creation of the industrial and imperial era. Prussia, seeking access to the North Sea for its fleet, had purchased in 1853 from the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg a strip of coast on the Jadebusen. The work of the military port, colossal in scale, transformed in a few decades a deserted shore into a permanent construction site, then into an agglomeration of civil servants, workers, naval officers and merchants.

This genesis determined the demographic and professional composition of the Jewish population. Attracted by the commercial opportunities offered by a rapidly growing city — supplying the garrison, textiles, clothing, retail commerce, liberal professions —, Jewish families came to settle, often from neighboring regions of Oldenburg, East Frisia and Hanover, lands of old rural Israelite settlement. The proximity of the administrative boundary between Prussia (Wilhelmshaven proper) and Oldenburg (the neighboring territory that would become Rüstingen in 1911) created a lasting singularity: two contiguous urban entities, subject to distinct legislation, where Jewish life long distributed itself across either side of an invisible border in the urban fabric.

The movement of settlement fits into the great current of urbanization and internal migration of German Jews in the nineteenth century, described by Ruth Gay as one of the major traits of communal modernization, through which a once dispersed population in towns and villages came to the thriving cities [Gay, 1992]. Legal emancipation, gradually acquired in the German States and completed by the Constitution of the Empire of 1871, now guaranteed freedom of settlement, freedom of profession and civil equality; the gains of the generation of 1848, whose decisive importance for the entry of Jews into German public life Werner Mosse and his collaborators have shown, made such settlement in a new city conceivable, without ghetto or status of exception [Mosse, Paucker, Rurup, 1981].

The Jewish community of Wilhelmshaven was structured during the last third of the nineteenth century, as the population reached a threshold permitting the organization of regular worship. As in all emerging German communities, the earliest concerns were the establishment of a place of prayer, the acquisition of a cemetery, and the organization of religious instruction for children. One may reasonably infer, based on the pattern common to communities in the German northwest, that the faithful first gathered in rented halls or private homes, before an oratory and then a synagogue were established when means permitted.

The coexistence of two municipalities — Prussian Wilhelmshaven and Oldenbourg Rüstringen — was reflected in the organization of worship. The community remained modest in size, numbering at most a few hundred souls at its height, placing it among the small communities of the Empire, far removed from great centers such as Berlin, Frankfurt, or Hamburg. Such a community lived to the rhythm of Sabbath services and festivals, of associational life — mutual aid societies, burial confraternities (Chevra Kadisha), ladies' associations — and of instruction provided by a religious teacher who frequently combined the functions of chazan (officiant) and shochet (ritual slaughterer), for lack of means to maintain a resident rabbi.

The functioning of these small communities, with their registers, their internal courts, and their relative autonomy in matters of personal status, inscribed itself within a long tradition of communal self-governance of which Edward Fram offered a remarkable illustration through the judicial diaries of Rabbi Hayyim Gundersheim of Frankfurt in the eighteenth century, where one sees a community settling disputes, marriages, and matters of conduct among itself [Fram, 2012]. In Wilhelmshaven, a young city without rabbinical traditions of its own, this autonomy was doubtless more tenuous and more oriented toward integration; the community fell under regional rabbinical jurisdictions, that of Oldenbourg for the Rüstringen part and Prussian authorities for Wilhelmshaven itself.

The city's distinctive character — its military vocation — impressed itself upon local Jewish life. Jews served in the imperial navy and in the army, participating in the same German patriotism that seized all of Jewry throughout the Reich, notably during the First World War. This attachment to the German fatherland, this desire for full and complete belonging, constitute one of the main threads of German Jewish history that Amos Elon masterfully traced from the eighteenth century until the collapse of 1933 [Elon, 2002].

In a city entirely organized around the arsenal and the navy, the Jewish population naturally occupied the sectors of commerce and services. The trades represented — textile and clothing commerce, novelty shops, hardware stores, livestock commerce in the rural surroundings, medical and legal professions — correspond to the classic professional profile of German Jewry at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, as described by Ruth Gay for the country as a whole [Gay, 1992].

This economic integration was accompanied by visible social integration. Jewish merchants of Wilhelmshaven kept shops in the central streets of the city, participated in civic associations, choral societies, and interdenominational charitable circles. Acculturation was profound: German was the language of the home, German culture that of education, and the sense of belonging to the nation left little doubt for most families. This Jewish bourgeoisie, patriotic and cultured, embodied what historiography has long called, not without retrospective melancholy, the "Judeo-German symbiosis" — this tragic illusion of an accomplished fusion whose sincerity and fragility Amos Elon demonstrated [Elon, 2002].

It is nevertheless important not to idealize this integration. Antisemitism, latent and then growing from the 1880s onward in Wilhelmine Germany, did not spare port cities or military circles, often traversed by nationalist and conservative currents. Wilhelmshaven, city of the Kaiserliche Marine, was by nature fertile ground for ideologies of power and national purity. Jews therefore lived there in this characteristic ambivalence: full citizens in law, but objects of diffuse suspicion that only awaited a context of crisis to turn into open hostility. The city's growth nonetheless continued, and the period of the Empire and then of the Weimar Republic represented, despite the turbulence, the height of the local Jewish presence, both demographically and institutionally.

The defeat of 1918, the mutiny of the sailors of the high seas fleet — of which Wilhelmshaven was one of the epicentres in November 1918 —, the collapse of the Empire and the revolutionary upheavals plunged the city into profound crisis. The drastic reduction of the navy imposed by the Treaty of Versailles struck the local economy hard, entirely dependent on the arsenal. Unemployment, inflation, and then the great crisis of 1929 fuelled resentment and political radicalization.

In this climate, National Socialist antisemitism found fertile ground. The Nazi party advanced rapidly in this stricken city where the promise of rearmament — and thus a return of activity and jobs — exercised powerful appeal. Wilhelmshaven, whose very existence depended on the naval fleet, had everything to gain, materially, from the arrival of a regime determined to rebuild the fleet. This convergence of interests between an arsenal city and a rearming power made Nazi implantation particularly solid.

After Hitler's seizure of power on 30 January 1933, persecution of the Jews descended upon the small community according to the systematic process that Saul Friedländer analysed for the entire Reich: boycott of Jewish shops from April 1933, progressive exclusion from the civil service, professions and economic life, then the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 which made Jews second-class citizens, deprived of political rights and soon struck down in their very activity [Friedländer, 1997]. Friedländer called this phase that of "State antisemitism", methodical and legalistic, which prepared the ground for physical violence.

In a small city like Wilhelmshaven, where everyone knew each other, ostracism was all the more painful in that it was personal: yesterday's neighbours, clients, business partners turned away. Many Jewish families, understanding that their future was closed off, then chose emigration — to Mandate Palestine, the United States, the neighbouring Netherlands, England or South America. The community, already modest, shrank year after year. It was in this context of contraction that Wilhelmshaven and Rüstringen were united into a single city in 1937, under the name of Wilhelmshaven, thus unifying what remained of their Jewish communities.

The night of November 9–10, 1938, known as Reichspogromnacht or the "Night of Broken Glass," marked the transition from legal persecution to open mass violence. Throughout the Reich, synagogues were set ablaze, shops ransacked, Jewish men arrested and deported to concentration camps: this coordinated conflagration constituted, according to Friedländer, the decisive threshold beyond which the expulsion of Jews from the German national community was consummated in blood and fire [Friedländer, 1997]. Wilhelmshaven was not spared: the synagogue and Jewish property there suffered the common fate, men were arrested, and what little remained of communal life was shattered.

After November 1938, those who could still escape fled. For the others—often the elderly, the most destitute, those whom no country would any longer agree to accept as the world closed its doors—the trap closed shut. With the outbreak of war in September 1939, emigration became nearly impossible, and the regime shifted toward what Friedländer has termed "the years of extermination" [Friedländer, 2008]. From 1941 onward, Jews still present in Germany were subjected to wearing the yellow star, concentrated, then deported to the ghettos and killing centers of the East.

The last Jews of Wilhelmshaven met this fate. Gathered, stripped of their possessions, they were transported on deportation convoys which, from northwestern Germany, led toward Riga, Minsk, Theresienstadt and, ultimately, toward the extermination camps. The arsenal city, an early and convinced stronghold of National Socialism, thus saw the entirety of its remaining Jewish community disappear. The logic of destruction, in its bureaucratic coldness and in its total scope, corresponds exactly to what Friedländer has described as the culmination of a process whose each stage had been crossed without the surrounding society opposing it with any significant resistance [Friedländer, 2008]. Of the community founded with the city itself, there remained, at the end of the war, only the silence of emptied houses and names erased from municipal registers.

The postwar period of Wilhelmshaven was that of a city doubly devastated: by Allied bombardment, which made this great naval center one of the major targets of aerial warfare, and by the disappearance of part of its soul, that of its Jewish inhabitants murdered. The physical reconstruction of the city, patient and industrious, could not restore what had been annihilated. Unlike other German cities, Wilhelmshaven did not experience the rebirth of an organized Jewish community in the postwar period commensurate with that before 1933; the communal fabric had been too completely destroyed, and survivors were scattered throughout the world.

What remained was the work of memory. From the last decades of the twentieth century onward, as throughout federal Germany, Wilhelmshaven undertook to confront its past. Local historians set about reconstructing, from municipal archives, registers, and testimonies of survivors and their descendants, the history of the city's Jewish families — their names, their addresses, their trades, their fates. Monuments, commemorative plaques, and Stolpersteine — these "stumbling stones" sealed into the sidewalk in front of the victims' last homes — were installed to rescue individuals from oblivion behind the statistics.

It is here that transmitted memory and the archival item meet and respond to each other. Where the family memory of emigrants preserved the name of a shop, the face of an ancestor, the account of a hasty departure, the municipal archive and deportation lists bring cold confirmation of the facts, the date, the convoy, the place of death. This confrontation, inherent to any history of the Shoah in small communities, restores to Wilhelmshaven a human dimension that history alone could not provide. It inscribes the city within this vast effort of memorial restitution which, throughout Germany, attempts to repair the irreparable by naming, one by one, those who were erased — a distant echo, in northern German soil, of the melancholy that runs through the narrative of the end of German Jewry [Elon, 2002].

The Jewish history of Wilhelmshaven fits within a brief interval — scarcely three generations, from the city's founding in 1869 to the annihilation of the community in the early 1940s. It lacks the secular depth of the great Rhineland communities, nor the rabbinical richness of the centers of medieval pietism. Yet its very conciseness makes it an exemplary condensation of modern German Jewish fate: a community born of emancipation and mobility, flourishing in commerce and bourgeois integration, patriotic enough to serve in the Kaiser's navy, then crushed by the regime that made this arsenal city one of its very bastions.

The paradox is striking. Wilhelmshaven's prosperity depended on military power; yet it was this same warlike vocation that made the city so receptive to National Socialism and so fatal to its Jewish inhabitants. What the history of this community teaches, in the wake of the great syntheses by Friedländer, Elon, and Gay, is the radical fragility of a belonging that German Jews believed they had secured and that the State managed to undo in a few years through law, then through fire, then through deportation [Friedländer, 1997] [Elon, 2002]. Today, nothing remains of this presence but names engraved, brass plaques and the persistence of historians in reconstructing a vanished world. It is to this persistence — to this form of fidelity — that this Great Book intends to associate itself.