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The number swept up in the Fabrikaktion would have been even higher had not some employers, anxious to preserve valued employees, warned their Jewish workers of the impending action. This infuriated Goebbels. “Our plans were tipped off prematurely, so that a lot of Jews slipped through our hands,” he wrote. “But we will catch them yet. I certainly won’t rest until the capital of the Reich, at least, has become free of Jews.” A few weeks later, on June 19, 1943, the Gauleiter claimed that the Nazi purge was indeed complete, and that Berlin was Judenfrei. In fact, this was still not the case, and Goebbels knew it, but Berlin’s large Jewish community had been reduced to a few thousand souls living in Judenäuser (Jewish-only residences), mixed marriages, and underground.

The transports continued to roll east almost to the end of the war, though with smaller and smaller cargoes. The ones in late 1944 averaged one hundred persons. The last shipment from Berlin, which contained 117 people bound for Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, departed on March 27, 1945, only about a month before the Russians overran the German capital. That the Nazis continued to employ scarce resources to transport fewer and fewer people was a testament to their fanaticism. In total, 50,535 Berliners were deported from the capital, 35,738 of them to Auschwitz.

The deportations, of course, added a new dimension of horror to the lives of those Jews who remained in Berlin. Everyone in the Jewish community was understandably terrified by this development, though in the first phase of the operation most were apparently unaware of what was happening to the deportees in the East. As Inge Deutschkron observed: “Of course I was afraid of what lay in store for me. We didn’t yet know precisely what fate awaited the deportees, but instinct told us that it was sure to be worse than what had gone before. I was also curious. What had happened to those who had already left? What could I expect?” It was not long before she had a clearer idea: “In November 1942 we learned about the gassings and executions for the first time via the BBC. We could not and did not want to believe it. And our ranks were thinning.”

Deutschkron watched as her aunt and uncle were taken away in late 1942. She saw what thousands of others were seeing (or choosing not to see):

Two Jewish orderlies wearing the yellow star went into the house. They reappeared minutes later behind my aunt, who was lugging the heavy backpacks. She walked quickly, as though eager to get it over with. My uncle followed haltingly. They didn’t look back as they stepped into the car, not a single backward look at the city that had been their home for almost thirty years. . . . [My mother and I] were the only ones on the street. Strange how the Berliners knew when to make themselves scarce so as not to have to see what was happening in their streets.

Not all of Berlin’s remaining Jews chose to wait dutifully for the authorities to come and cart them away. Some abandoned the Judenhäuser, threw away their identification papers marked with a “J,” and went underground. When these so-called U-Boote (submarines) resurfaced, they had to be equipped with forged identification papers and ration cards, or forged Bombensheine (bomb certificates) stating that they had lost their papers in a raid. Obviously this made them all the more dependent on assistance and protection from sympathetic gentiles. Although helping Jews was a risky business—if caught, offenders faced imprisonment—enough Berliners took the risk that some 1,321 Jews managed to stay safely submerged in the city until the Nazi collapse.

The number of survivors might have been somewhat higher had not a few Berlin Jews, desperate to save themselves and their relatives, lent their services to the Gestapo in its efforts to bring “submarines” to the surface. Called Greifer (grabbers) by their Jewish prey, these figures did not have to wear the yellow star or abide by the various restrictions on movement. As long as they continued to bring in their quota of fellow Jews, they were kept off the deportation lists.