Testimony Analysis of Ruth Winterfield's Story
The Pressure from a Powerful Nazi Party and the Struggles of a Holocaust Survivor from Berlin
In trying to solidify their power leading up to World War II, the Nazi regime’s leaders attempted to create a movement against “outsiders,” like Jews, homosexuals, the disabled, turning Germany into a “Them versus Us” society. Through Ruth Winterfield’s personal testimony, one can see the evolving persecution of Jews and the impact that experience had on them as well as the second-hand portrayal of the racially “Aryan” Germans and their hesitation to truly hate the Jews despite attempts from the Nazi leaders to incite hatred for Jews in the German people.
In the years leading up to the war, “Aryan” Germans turned away from the Jews for fear of being outed by the Nazi regime, and this caused the Jews to distance themselves from the “Aryan” Germans later on, as highlighted by Winterfield. Growing up as a kid, Ruth Winterfield had dreams of becoming a lawyer like her father. However, as Germany neared closer to war, Winterfield was denied education and schooling. While taking away this dream from her was cruel, Winterfield felt the loss of friendship much stronger (USC Shoah Foundation). Like Marion Kaplan, Winterfield highlights this, reminiscing on how her closest friends just stopped talking to her; there was no explanation, no “I’m sorry,” it was simply a cold break (Kaplan 2) . Winterfield, though, says she understood why they needed to do it, but she still says when they tried to reach out to her after the war, she did not reply (USC Shoah Foundation). So while the Jews may have understood the need of the racially “Aryan” Germans to avoid contact with the Jews, they still felt hurt because of this coldness. This development of absolute ignorance of the Jews by the “Aryan” Germans led to the Jews to turn away from the “Aryan” Germans, even after the war, it seems.
Another way of looking at Ruth’s story is through the lens of Christopher R. Browning’s idea in his book “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.” Within this book, a central thesis is that the Germans men were not killers, they were just taking orders in the awful deeds they carried out. A good time to examine this point is Kristallnacht. Ruth Winterfield’s face is in great distress as she recalls getting off the train one day to see a Jewish business with a policeman in front of the store, nothing broken and then coming back the next day to see “the glass was broken...all the Jewish stores, the glass was broken.” (USC Shoah Foundation) She goes onto describe the subsequent measures the Nazi Party took against the Jews, such as requiring one to be a part of the Nazi Labor Union to find many jobs, not allowing Jews to have pets, not allowing them to have a radio, etc; she was shocked her community was allowing this to happen, because before she did not see them as cruel. Throughout this sequence, Winterfield continues to acknowledge that she knows the “Aryan” Germans had to do it, but it didn’t change how it felt (USC Shoah Foundation). In his text, Browning does not seem to suggest we should feel sorry for the “Aryan” Germans, although he does build this claim that ordinary people were forced into these acts of hate against the Jewish people (Browning xvii-xviii). Ruth’s account of the evolution seems to mirror closely, all the way from stores refusing her to a close family friend never speaking to her family again (USC Shoah Foundation).
Though the correlation of Ruth Winterfield’s account with Browning’s argument does perhaps show that the “Aryan” Germans followed this natural evolvement under the strain of the looming Nazi Party, other parts of Ruth’s account show a split in the evolution of the “Aryan” Germans’ hostility towards Jews and other outed groups leading to World War II. Winterfield had non-Jewish neighbors, who, while reserved, never harmed Winterfield and her family. In fact, one of them allowed them to get hot water to take a bath later on when Winterfield’s family didn’t have any and when her family was “dirty and filthy.” (USC Shoah Foundation). So, obviously, the “Aryan” Germans did not have to be mean necessarily to the Jews and, from Winterfield’s account, it does not sound like a great majority were despite pressure from the Nazi party. This is not to say that the Jewish people did not face persecution from the Nazis or “Aryan” German people, but it seems there were many who were more reserved and just allowed the authoritarian policies of the Nazi party to be enacted in order to avoid persecution themselves.
In contrast, there was the Milgram Shock experiment, in which they found many participants were fine with delivering shocks to a “fellow participant” even until the “fellow participant” died, this scenario should not be used to say all “Aryan” Germans were innocent of their actions just because they were obeying orders. For some, yes, this may make sense, but for the “Aryan” Germans that took advantage of the situation to harm Jews and uplift themselves are never in the setting in which this experiment places them. In other words, these “Aryan” Germans were not forced to harm Jews necessarily; it sounds like, according to Winterfield, they could have avoided it, like Winterfield’s neighbors avoided harming Winterfield and her family, for example. From the readings in class, though, it seems that many “Aryan” Germans chose to be harmful to the Jews; For example, in Marion Kaplan’s book “Women in the Holocaust,” she described the Germans of having a “bad temper and ill will, where ‘Germans’ accused ‘Jews’ of smelling of garlic or simply of smelling ‘like Jews.’” (Kaplan 40) One note to make here is that perhaps later on (during World War II), the “Aryan” Germans Ruth Winterfield knew became more hostile, but I want to focus on the pre-war era of hatred instead. Additionally, Kaplan describes the pre-war “Aryan” Germans as a reliable grassroots movement, which conflicts with the aforementioned view of Winterfield (Kaplan 40).
Before the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, Ruth Winterfield and her family enjoyed a normal life as middle-class citizens in Berlin, Germany. Winterfield had many friends, both “Aryan” Germans and Jewish friends. The changes in her life started to happen very gradually and through what she viewed as a top-down approach to antisemitism, that is Germans following orders from the higher commanders or attempting to protect themselves in a time of radical authoritarianism. Winterfield would eventually suffer many losses in her life, such as her job, items she enjoyed, the safety of her community, and her friends as the time neared closer to World War II (USC Shoah Foundation). In Ruth Winterfield’s account, there seem to be two forces she observed in her life. First, she realizes that the “Aryan” Germans need to go along with the Nazi party in order to protect themselves, and, in this way, Winterfield appeal to the idea of Browning in which she feels the “Aryan” Germans are simply taking orders from a higher Nazi party power. Second, she recounts that her neighbors, while reserved, did not harm her, which plays against the thoughts of Marion Kaplan who creates this picture of a bottom-up approach to the rise of Nazi Germany, i.e., the antisemitism was not built by the high powers of the Nazi parties; it was already there within the “Aryan” German people. With these perspectives together, it seems, according to Ruth Winterfield’s account, that those “Aryan” Germans who were forced into committing hate crimes against the Jews did so as a result of the Nazi party’s high powers whereas those “Aryan” Germans who were not forced into that, for the most part, tried to simply stay away from the Jews to protect themselves and did not actively make an effort to harm the Jews. As a result of this, and understanding why the “Aryan” Germans were forced to do what they did, Ruth Winterfield resents those “Aryan” Germans who abandoned her.
Works Cited
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland. 2017
Encina, Gregorio. Milgram's Experiment on Obedience to Authority,
nature.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35.htm
Kaplan, Marion. Women in the Holocaust. Yale University Press, 1998
“USC Shoah Foundation.” USC Shoah Foundation, USC, 2 Nov. 2017,
https://vhaonline.usc.edu/viewingPage?testimonyID=43034&returnIndex=2#. Accessed
22 Mar. 2019