Scherwitz: Der jüdische SS-Offizier

Anita Kugler
Scherwitz: Der jüdische SS-Offizier
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln: 2004, pp.754
ISBN: 9783462033144

This is a Holocaust book to end all Holocaust books. It turns onto itself and then spirals out into a cluster of historical paradoxes and ironies. It is a book not only about a Jews who suffered under the Nazis but also of some who may have been persecuted by a Jew. [This implies equality, which is unfair to Scherwitz.] At the time of the trial in 1948, the tale becomes one of a Jew who was tried by Germans but maligned by Jews. Was Scherwitz a blood-thirsty Nazi who participated in the extermination of his own people or was he a Jew who had figured out a way to survive the Nazi terror and in the process saved the lives of numerous compatriots? Was he a monster or a Jewish Schindler, who as a factory supervisor used his position to help Jews? Eleke Scherwitz (nee Sirewitz) was a Lithuanian Jew who as boy in the aftermath of World War I attached himself to a Freikorps unit. In time he drifted into the Nazi movement and eventually in the Nazi Security Forces. As a member of the SD in 1941 he was posted to Riga where he was put in charge of a detachment of working Jews. Eventually he was made a supervisor of a work site, Lenta, a prewar Latvian factory of textile accessories—which under Scherwitz’s supervision manufactured luxury goods for the Nazi elite. During the German retreat in 1944 he drifted back to Germany and after the end of the war presented himself to Americans as a Jew. In spite of his Jewish credentials, or, as Ms. Kugler thinks, because of it, he was arrested and in 1948 tried for war crimes in Munich. It is noteworthy that one of the first indigenous German war crimes trials was of a Jew. Scherwitz was found guilty on the basis of dubious testimony by Jewish survivors, and sentenced to a six year imprisonment. In 1954 he was freed, married and in 1962 died. He was buried under his Jewish name Elke Sirewitz. In retrospect, with the perspective of years, many of the witnesses, who in 1948 testified to convict him, came to think of Scherwitz as a hero, who within the scope of his powers had saved the lives of some Jews and made life of many much easier. (In fact, Scherwitz was a world-class impostor who used his phenomenal skills for his own benefit—but even more so to help the hundreds of Jews in his charge.) His people at the worksite were always well fed, slept in beds with proper bedding, and were repeatedly protected from persecution by Scherwitz’ ingenious machinations. And there are at least four documented cases in which he supplied Jews with Aryan identity papers. On the day of the major killing in Riga, the Rumbula action in 1941, he told his workers not to return to the ghetto but to spend the night at the work site.

Anita Kugler’s book is a meticulous attempt to extract the truth about Scherwitz’s life, warts and all, from the incredibly tangled, contradictory record; and ultimately, accounting for human vagaries, to rehabilitate him. Kugler’s opus is a labor of love and a high scholarly accomplishment. It is well researched and minutely documented—a great read.

Andrew Ezergailis
Andrew Ezergailis is Professor Emeritus of History at Ithaca College, author of The Holocaust in Latvia (1996), The Stockholm Documents: The German Occupation of Latvia (2002), and Nazi/Soviet Disinformation About the Holocaust in Latvia (2005).
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