On 27 February 1943 in Nazi Germany the Gestapo brutally arrested more than ten thousand Jewish men and women. Martin Riesenburger, later the Chief Rabbi of the German Democratic Republic, recalled that day as “the great inferno.” This large-scale raid marked the beginning of the final phase of the mass deportations, which had been under way since October 1941. Also interned in Berlin were people who, according to NS terminology, lived in so-called mixed marriages. But new documents show that no deportation of this special group was planned by the Gestapo. In the past decade, in both the German as well as the American public, quite a bit of attention has been paid to the fact that non-Jewish relatives publicly demonstrated against the feared deportation of their Jewish partners. The scholarly literature as well has pictured this protest as a unique act of resistance that prevented the deportation of these Jews living in mixed marriages. The fact that during this raid an untold number of Jews, both women and men, fled and went underground has so far been ignored. Since we still know much too little, the following article will discuss all the events of the spring of 1943 and their background.

In the year 1724, fifteen-year-old Hark Olufs sailed on the ship the Hoffnung (Hope), half of which was owned by his father and the other half by Ricklef Flor, the captain. The ship was sailing under the flag of Hamburg although the entire crew consisted of Danish subjects: three came from Amrum, as did Hark, one from the neighboring island of Föhr, three from the Elbe. The ship was sailing from Nantes to Hamburg to unload its cargo. Although these waters were considered to be safe, the Hoffnung was seized by a “Turkish” privateer near the Scilly Isles and towed to Algiers.

In his collection of essays, The Path to Genocide (1992), Christopher Browning contends that when Hitler ordered his subordinates to pursue the wholesale destruction of European Jews in the mid-summer of 1941, what they were being asked to accomplish was at the time totally unprecedented. At this stage every step was uncharted, every policy an experiment, every action a trial run … Murder was in the air; many avenues were being explored, but little was settled other than at least Himmler and Heydrich now knew what they were looking for — a way to kill all the Jews of Europe.