[4], risking his position and even property. He lamented the moral degradation
of the Volksdeutsche, not only as a human being, but also as a German.
Examples of such degradation were, alas, widespread. A wave of blackmail
swept the city. A German manufacturer, who as a result of a court judgement
had to pay our company a certain sum the previous year, had the gall
to demand that we immediately return the money to him. Another German
woman, a former tenant who had not paid the rent for a long time, fabricated
some claims to extort money by blackmail. Another young German, whom we
had to dismiss from his job at one time (the head director, a Jew, had repeatedly
provided support for this young man), came one day demanding furniture,
which he needed to furnish a flat, because he had supposedly returned
from some mission in Germany. Since I was assigned this case, and I was
previously the one responsible for making sure that the young man received
support from the head director, I told him that we had no furniture to distribute
and I sent him away empty-handed. Finally, one of our German officials
approached the head of personnel requesting a one hundred per cent pay
rise (and he had two incomes), not even bothering [5] to justify his request.
Unfortunately, the head of personnel — a Jew of little courage — authorised
the rise, regarding the official as an opportunistic shabes goy.
Lists and rankings that we were told to draw up had two distinct objectives:
on the one hand, the purpose was to collect all kinds of stocktaking
reports and identify opportunities for production, on the other hand — to
determine the scope of the Jewish property, and no excuses were of any use
here, such as attempts to describe the capital as Christian-owned, as the forms
provided by the occupying authorities were constructed from a clearly racist
point of view, thus including converts in the Jewish race.
Walking to the office very soon proved to be a very difficult endeavour,
and this was due to the constant threat of being captured for labour, roundups
on all street corners from dawn till dusk. People were seized not only on the
streets, but also pulled out of their homes, shops, and even offices. The captors
were not only the military and ‘hakenkreuzlers,’⁹⁴ but also the civilians
who wore Nazi badges under their lapels. People were held for short periods of
time as well as for longer; the Jews were sometimes taken from the street in
94 Members of German paramilitary organisations who wore the swastika (Hakenkreuz) on their sleeve.
