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.
Following are book reviews of a number of significant works.
- Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Die “Endlösung” in Riga: Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941-1944 (2007) — Angrick and Klein's work exhibits the dichotomy endemic to current German scholarship on the Holocaust in Latvia, fact based on the one part, but demonstrably eschewing facts for propaganda where the possibility and myth of the Germanless—spontaneous, without Nazi involvement or organization—Holocaust remains.
- Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The “Final Solution in Riga”: Exploitation and Annihilation 1941-1944 (2009) — A brief review of Angrick and Klein's work translated from the German, highlighting a reliance on Nazi German accounts at face value where the Holocaust in Latvia is concerned—over a thousand footnotes does not mean a work cannnot still be lacking in certain aspects.
- Anita Kugler, Scherwitz: Der jüdische SS-Offizier (2004) — Eleke Scherwitz, a Jew, was one of the first indigenous Germans to be tried and convicted for war crimes. Kugler's book attempts to extract the truth about Scherwitz’s life from the incredibly tangled, contradictory record, and ultimately seeks to rehabilitate him.
- Katrin Reichelt, Lettland unter deutscher Besatzung 1941–1944: Der lettische Anteil am Holocaust (2011) — Reichelt's Elephants: In Reichelt's world, collaboration becomes self-occupation, as if rape connotes willful participation. Polarities are reversed, the object becomes the subject, the hunted becomes the hunter. The brutalities of the Nazis become those of the Latvians; the occupier becomes the occupied—prompting a deeper look at representation of the Holocaust.
Following, more on German scholarship and versions of the Holocaust in Latvia.
- A Letter to German Journalists: Between Judgment and Complexity — Ezergailis identifies the “six formidable renderings of the truth of the Holocaust,” Hitler's among them, none the same—a web of complexity which needs to be unraveled to fully understand the Holocaust.