Refuge in Hell: How Berlin's Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis

Double-dealing Dr Dr

Among the many tourists visiting Berlin these days few, if any, include the Iranische Strasse, in the working-class Wedding district, in their itinerary. Nor is it part of the route of the tourist buses exploring Berlin; it is in no way a distinctive street, neither aesthetically distinguished nor historically memorable. Even detailed guidebooks do not mention that for about 250 years there has been a Jewish hospital in this neighbourhood; since 1914 it has been in the same building. At that time it was the most modern hospital in town. Nor is there now anything specifically Jewish about this hospital; the director is still Jewish, but the majority of patients seem to be Muslim, the signs inside (no smoking, no mobile phones) are in German and Turkish, reflecting the composition of the local population.

But history did not bypass this small collection of buildings; it was the last surviving Jewish institution in Germany when Berlin was liberated in April 1945. True, at that time it also served as prison, ghetto, deportation centre, branch of the Gestapo, a small army camp, and in several other capacities. It was home to about 800 doctors, nurses, patients and others, most of them half Jewish or Jewish, living in so-called privileged mixed marriages. These were the only legal Jewish survivors in the capital of Germany. (A few thousand survived underground with forged identity papers; their collective history remains to be written.)

The amazing story of this mini-Gulag Archipelago puzzled Daniel B. Silver for years, and, after retiring from a career as an attorney in the legal department of the CIA, having examined thousands of papers and interviewed the survivors of the institution, he has in Refuge in Hell given an account that is troubling and fascinating in about equal measure. Silver was not the first to be intrigued by this story; much spade-work had already been done by German and Israeli researchers. His intention is not to present a full-fledged history of the hospital, but rather to answer two central questions — what were the reasons for the survival of the institution and what was the real role of Dr Lustig, the director of the hospital and the confidant of the Gestapo? Lustig was also the nominal head of what remained of German Jewry after 1943 and he has entered history as a despicable traitor and arch-villain. Silver is not a professional writer, but the story he tells is of such absorbing interest that weaknesses of presentation and style are of little significance.

In early 1943, the Nazis decided to deport to extermination camps the very last Jews living in Germany, their head organization (Reichsvereinigung) was dissolved, its officials arrested and sent to the camps. Why was an exception made for the Berlin Jewish hospital? A variety of reasons has been adduced, most of them quite obviously wrong, such as the theory that leading Nazis still wanted to avail themselves of very skilled Jewish doctors.

But the physicians who had survived were by no means the best and the brightest: Lustig, for instance, was not a practising doctor but specialized in the administration of medical services. (He was the author of a leading textbook in the field known as "der kleine Lustig".) While Silver does not claim to have found the final answer, it seems most likely that the hospital owed its survival to a turf war between rival Nazi security services. The Berlin Gestapo wanted to close down the hospital in 1943, whereas the superior authority, the Main Security office (RSHA), coveted the buildings and insisted on postponing a decision. Another consideration might have played a certain role — the not unreasonable fear on the part of Nazi political police officials that if they were too eager to liquidate the remnants of German Jewry, they would find themselves in fighting units on the Eastern Front, a prospect that cannot have been attractive in 1943-4.

Who were the residents of the complex of seven buildings during the last year of the war? Doctors, nurses and patients were a minority; in addition there was a motley crowd of strange cases. There were, for instance, some fifty orphans of uncertain parentage — the Gestapo seems not to have known whether they were Jews, or Aryan, or from mixed marriages. They could not be sent to Auschwitz but nor could they be released. There was a handful of Jewish collaborators with the Gestapo, above all the notorious "Stella" who has since become the subject of biographies and documentaries. These were a few young people who tried to save their skins by helping the Gestapo to apprehend "submarines" — Jews living underground. They were arrested after the war; some were apparently lynched, others given long prison terms. A few of the survivors had been on a special list enjoying for some unfathomable reason the protection of someone high up in the Nazi hierarchy; among them was a prominent politician, Eugen Schiffer, who had been a minister in a Weimar-era government. A few others with foreign nationality (often disputed) enjoyed the protection of the embassy of a neutral country. Another group was kept in reserve for hostage-exchange purposes: throughout the war, exchanges (by way of Turkey or Spain) took place with the Allies, since Germany was interested in repatriating some fellow countrymen stuck behind enemy lines. And lastly there were some lone individuals, but no one knew who they were and how they had managed to be included among these lucky few. Among these mysterious men and women, medical miracles occurred; there was, for instance, the case of a Mr Ehrenhaft who had been confined for two years to a wheelchair, but started walking the moment the Soviet troops arrived in April 1945.

The hospital was called a vestibule to hell by its survivors, with its director, Walter Lustig, as the villain of the piece. He was, according to all the evidence, an unpleasant man. Born in 1894 in Upper Silesia, he had served in the First World War — in a hospital in the rear. Later he joined the medical department of the Berlin central police office, of which section he eventually became head. Thus he came to know more than a few of the officials who served as Adolf Eichmann's assistants. (The Gestapo was largely recruited from among the Weimar Republic police.) This, in all probability, helped his career in later years -he was a man they knew and trusted. When, like all other Jews, he was dismissed, he worked for the health department of the Jewish community, even though he had converted to Protestantism as a young man. Being married to a non-Jew, he was exempt from deportation but not from most other restrictions imposed on Jews, such as owning a car or a radio or using public transport. Small in stature, with the bearing of a Prussian officer, he was quite undistinguished and, in fact, elusive; he is about the only person in the hospital of whom no photograph exists. His influence was quite limited: he could not save his own father from being sent to a camp.

Lustig was overbearing and pompous: people had to address him as "Dr Dr" since he had degrees in both medicine and philosophy. He had a foul temper and people were afraid of him; some said they feared him more than the Gestapo; some called him totally unscrupulous and a Jewish anti-Semite. In the words of one of his subordinates, he had cold, stabbing eyes and certainly showed little sympathy for those serving under him. He seems to have exploited his position for, among other things, getting sexual favours from the young nurses. Lustig (nomen est omen) seems to have shared one of them with Dobberke, the local Gestapo chief. Silver calls Lustig a lecher by way of polite understatement. But not every lecher is a traitor and vice versa. It seems to be true that, in times of great tension and danger, sexual permissiveness increases, and this was the case with regard to some residents, voluntary and involuntary, of the hospital during the last two years of the war.

Whenever the Nazis demanded a reduction of the staff, which happened quite often, Lustig willingly took the selection on himself; this meant certain death, and he must have known it. Personal preferences seem to have influenced his choice of deportees. No order of the Gestapo was to be violated, and doctors making unjustified exemptions from deportation were to be punished. Lustig certainly enjoyed what power he had and the Gestapo trusted him as a person who slavishly carried out their orders. In the end he served not only as head of the hospital but as "top Jew" of whatever remained of German Jewry.

All this would seem to be true, but Silver, guardian of justice, believes that it was not the whole truth. He argues that there appears to be no evidence that Lustig was a traitor in the sense that he did things over and above what was expected of him — and what was necessary for the survival of the institution he headed. On the contrary, he played one Nazi institution against another to safeguard the existence of the hospital, and if he sent hundreds to their death, he eventually also saved hundreds, even if the motivation had been mainly to save his own skin. He was aware that he could only do any good if he persuaded the Gestapo that he was their obedient servant and that the survival of the institution served their purposes.

In brief, he should have been given a fair trial. As it happened he was given no trial at all. Lustig seems to have been quite oblivious that a price would now have to be paid for his collaboration. After the arrival of the Russians he had been made director of medical services of the Wedding district and had petitioned the Soviet command that a new Jewish community be established with himself as its head. In June 1945, a large official limousine arrived with Soviet officers at the gate of the hospital to take Lustig for a conference from which he never returned. He was either shot or beaten to death at local headquarters or in Buchenwald, the former Nazi camp which had been taken over by the Soviets. All attempts by Silver and earlier researchers to find out details about his fate were unsuccessful; there were no records, and there certainly had been no trial.

In fact, there is little doubt that Lustig was guilty of collaboration over and above what was needed for survival. He should have been punished. Ambition, not a feeling of duty, drove him to make his pact with the devil; no one forced him to become "top Jew". Living in a "privileged mixed marriage" he would, in all probability, have survived in any case. But there still is the feeling that justice was not done; of the Gestapo officials who gave him his murderous orders, only Eichmann was executed (and this in another country) and some were not punished at all.

After the war, those who had survived the ordeal in Iranische Strasse dispersed all over the world. Most left Germany; a few are still alive. Visiting the site on a recent rainy morning, I discovered a rectangular plaque near the entrance summarizing the history of the hospital in a few sentences. But I was the only passer-by who stopped to read it; it is not the kind of story anyone working or living there wants to be reminded of.

Walter Laqueur's most recent book is No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, published earlier in 2003. He is a Professor at the Center for Strategic and International Studeis in Washington, DC.

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