How did Berlin's Jewish Hospital and hundreds of its patients survive the Holocaust?
When Red Army troops entered Berlin's Jewish Hospital in 1945, they were astonished to discover hundreds of Jews living just a couple of miles away
When Red Army troops entered Berlin's Jewish Hospital in 1945, they were astonished to discover hundreds of Jews living just a couple of miles away from Hitler's bunker. Picture the scene on April 24, 1945, as the Battle of Berlin between the Soviets and the Nazis raged: A group of Red Army soldiers arrive at Berlin's Jewish Hospital to find hundreds of people living and working in the battle-scarred facility. "You are Jews? Not possible. You can't be Jews, the Jews are all dead," one Russian soldier reportedly exclaims. Berlin's Jewish Hospital, together with the Jewish Cemetery Weissensee, is the only Jewish institution that continued to operate and survive the Nazi era. It still operates to this day. How could an institution designed to preserve Jewish life survive in the heart of the Nazi killing machine — and outlast it? Founded in 1756, the Jewish Hospital moved to its current location in the northwestern district of Wedding just before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. From its founding, the hospital was open to all patients regardless of their faith and was a prominent symbol of Jewish integration. But after the Socialists came to power in 1933, the hospital was barred from treating "Aryan" patients and non-Jewish employees were forced to resign. A controversial figure: Walter Lustig In December 1941, the Nazis established the so-called "Screening Unit for Transport Complaints" at the Jewish Hospital to determine the "fitness" of Jews for deportation and Walter Lustig was sent to head it. Lustig, a controversial figure who has been painted as both a hero and villain in the drama of the hospital's wartime history, was born into a Jewish family in Ratibor (today Racibórz in Poland) in 1891. He moved to Berlin in 1927 and initially worked for the police before his dismissal — because he was Jewish — in 1933. After his medical license was revoked in 1938, Lustig became head of the healthcare division at the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, established by the Nazis in 1939. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, it was forbidden for non-Jewish Germans to be treated at the Jewish Hospital Image: Herbert Sonnenfeld/Jüdisches Museum Berlin The Reich Association was a highly controversial organization. It initially helped Jews to emigrate out of Germany. It was compulsory for anyone identified as a Jew under the Nuremberg Laws to become a member and to share detailed personal information, such as asset inventories, with the organization. In 1941, emigration was forbidden, and the Reich Association was forced to carry out preparatory work for the compulsory deportation of Jews to ghettos, forced labor, concentration- and extermination camps in Germany-occupied Eastern Europe.
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