Obermayer German Jewish History Award

Ina Lorenz and Jörg Berkemann

Hamburg & Berlin

Last February, after more than 20 years of research and writing, professors Ina Lorenz and Jörg Berkemann published their lives’ crowning achievement: more than 5,000 pages long, the seven-volume Die Hamburger Juden im NS-Staat 1933 bis 1938/39 (Hamburg´s Jews in the NS State, 1933 to 1938/39) is a milestone in the history and understanding of Jewish life in Hamburg during the Nazi years.

“I had a very important question in my life: how this so-called civilized country, Germany, in 12 years committed such crimes and became one of the most criminal countries in history—and how it is possible that the majority of Germans followed and accepted the Nazi ideology,” says Berkemann, a retired federal judge who formerly served in Berlin and Leipzig. “Because it’s an international town, a lot of Hamburgers are convinced that Hamburg was less Nazi than other towns, but that’s not true. Hamburg was a Nazi town like Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and others. As a jurist I wanted to know, from the moral and legal aspects, how the Nazis changed the laws, implemented new laws, how judges falsified laws and misinterpreted laws, and how it was possible to change the German legal system between 1933 and 1945.”

For Lorenz, a retired historian who specializes in German-Jewish history in the 19th and 20th centuries, the pair’s painstaking efforts have produced a work that, above all, makes Hamburg’s history and identity and Hamburg´s Jewish history more understandable to its own citizens. “Not only are the books published, but the interest in Jewish history in Hamburg has greatly changed our knowledge and our attitude,” she says. In 1933, Hamburg had a Jewish population of around 24,000, and more than one-third of them, over 9,000, perished in the Holocaust. Now, “a lot of Hamburgers have a better understanding about how Nazi ideology worked.”

Born in Hamburg in 1940, Lorenz’s Jewish roots in the city date back 200 years. Her grandfather was ordered to the concentration camp Theresienstadt in February 1945, but amid the chaos of the war’s final months he managed to avoid being sent there. Other members of her family weren’t so lucky and perished. Her family never spoke about Jewish history or the family’s persecution, and it wasn’t until Lorenz attended university in the 1960s, as more information about the Nazi years started to become available, that she discovered her passion for the subject. Lorenz studied history, art history and philosophy in Vienna, Berlin, and later in Karlsruhe where she met Berkemann, with whom she shared the same “Doktorvater” (thesis advisor). Lorenz became an historian and in 1981 began working as a lecturer and later deputy director at the Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (Institute for the History of the German Jews), the country’s first institute for Jewish studies founded after WWII with the aim of preserving the city’s Jewish history.

The author of numerous books and scholarly articles credits the institute for making Hamburg “the city with great research in German Jewish history,” due to the fact that its Jewish archives were saved during the war and not handed over to the Gestapo. Among Lorenz’s books are Leo Lippmann (1881-1943): A German Jew, about the leader of Hamburg’s Jewish community in the 1930s, who committed suicide when the Nazis ordered him deported to Theresienstadt and the two-volume study Hamburg’s Jews in the Weimar Republic.

Also born in Hamburg, in 1937, Berkemann studied law at the University of Hamburg and philosophy, modern history and sociology at universties in Berlin and Karlsruhe. He held numerous judicial posts—at the Regional Court of Hamburg, Higher Administrative Court of Hamburg and Federal Administrative Court —and has specialized in constitutional law and constitutional history as a university lecturers, publishing hundreds of articles analyzing the inner structure and state administration of the Nazi regime. As professors in their respective fields, Lorenz and Berkemann collaborated to publish several books focusing on Jewish Hamburg. Their first, a nearly 900-page tome printed in two volumes in 1995 Streitfall jüdischer Friedhof Ottensen (1663–1993) (The Ottensen Jewish Cemetery Dispute), focused on the city’s ancient Jewish cemetery, founded in 1665, which the Nazis vandalized and destroyed to the point that only 600 to 800 gravestones remained from the original 7,000 to 8,000. The cemetery was later sold and a warehouse was erected on the site, sparking enormous controversy—and widespread interest in Lorenz and Berkemann’s work.

“The position of the Hamburg government wasn’t clear, and at the time we had a lot of anti-Semitism,” recalls Berkemann. “It was very important to publish the book because the general public in Hamburg didn’t know about the history of Jewish cemeteries either before or after 1945. We studied the case from both historical and juridical perspectives, and it had a positive effect: this pioneer project started other books on Hamburg cemeteries.”

Then, in the 1990s, Lorenz and Berkemann decided to join their specialized skills—hers in history, his in law—to research and write Hamburg´s Jews in the NS State, an epic work based on more than 200,000 documents, and divided into 58 chapters, which took more than two decades to complete. The book contains a monographic study in two volumes, describing the history of discrimination and persecution of the city’s Jews and analyzing the precise ways in which Nazi policies were enacted. The following four volumes provide detailed, highly annotated documentation that describes life for Hamburg’s Jews under Nazi rule, painting an accurate, vivid portrait of the era. The final volume is an index. Relying heavily on the Hamburg State Archives, the book is considered the most conclusive work to date covering the conditions and fates of Hamburg’s Jews during the Third Reich.

“This very impressive survey and documentation may serve research, curricula planers and schoolbook authors not only in Hamburg but all over Germany, and may act as an incentive for historians to publish similar works about other cities or provinces in Germany during the Third Reich,” says professor Moshe Zimmermann, of Kiriat Ono, Israel. Meanwhile, Stefan Rohrbacher, a professor at the Institut für Jüdische Studien (Institute for Jewish Studies) at Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, praises the work as “groundbreaking” and “a truly astounding effort.” The first two volumes, in particular, “are without parallel,” he says. “There is presently no other monograph study on the Jews in a major city of Nazi Germany that would compare with this one. [The work] is a most impressive, exemplary piece of scholarly research, and an outstanding example of a lifetime devotion to the subject of German-Jewish history. This seminal work speaks of the dignity of the persecuted and tormented Jews, and of their continued efforts to maintain a self-determined life in decency and solidarity."

For Berkemann, understanding the way laws were changed under Nazi rule—especially the moral aspect of those changes—drove him in his research. “All the crimes were committed by Germans, so it’s very important to know why, and who was responsible for those crimes. As a jurist it is important to know that the Nazis justified the crimes with so-called German racial laws,” he says. Looking at the immigration tensions now roiling Germany, Berkemann asserts there are real and dangerous comparisons to be made between the 1930s and today.

“The new right’s attacks against Islam use the same argument as the Nazis used against the Jews. They say we have to close all mosques, the same as saying we have to close all synagogues; they say a Muslim can never be a German, the same as saying a Jew can never be a German. We can learn a lot from Germany’s Nazi history to avoid a new anti-Islamic, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant time,” he says.