Sippenhaft

Sippenhaft, the Nazi doctrine of kin liability, is the brutal legal principle that structures the Holocaust narrative at the heart of City of God. The rule, which held that the family of anyone who committed a crime or was designated for execution would be killed along with the offender, transforms the ghetto's every act of resistance into a potential death sentence for an entire household. It is the mechanism that orphans the young Yehoshua, drives the ghetto's desperate calculus of survival, and ultimately shapes the novel's central quest to bring the ghetto commandant to justice.

The Doctrine and Its Immediate Terror

The rule is first articulated in the novel through the voice of a neighbor who pulls a stunned child to his feet after the child's father has committed a crime. "Don't you know any better? He's finished, your old man. Move, run, get out of here!" the neighbor shouts, before running back to his own house and slamming the door. The explanation that follows is chilling in its simplicity: when a head of family committed a crime or was otherwise designated for execution, it was the Germans' policy to kill his dependents as well. This is the doctrine of Sippenhaft in its rawest form, a policy that made every family a hostage to the actions of its patriarch. The child, Yehoshua, understands instantly that his parents' failure to come home means they have been taken, and that he himself is now a target. The speed with which the ghetto's institutions respond reveals how deeply this rule was understood and feared: Yehoshua is quickly taken to the council office and given another name, a desperate attempt to erase his identity and shield him from the reach of kin liability.

The Ghetto's Response and the Calculus of Survival

Yehoshua's arrival at the council office stills the busy place, his pale, terrified face a warning signal the staff knows all too well. What he has to say puts them on alert, and several boys are summoned and dispatched to spread the word among the houses and shops for people not known to the Germans to go into hiding. In a matter of minutes, everyone in the ghetto knows what the tailor has done. The question now is how the Germans will adjudicate his crime, and rumors are rife that the price for the act will be thirty, fifty, a hundred Jewish dead. The council staff, in clear distinction to the increasingly agitated public, remains calm, and the calmest of everyone is the council president, Dr. Sigmund Koenig, a handsome man in his sixties, a man of great dignity, a good six feet tall. He goes outside and his mere appearance stills the small crowd, telling them he is awaiting a call from the ghetto commandant as to exactly what is to be done but that he doubts there is any immediate danger of a major action. He speaks almost in a whisper, wearing no coat or hat, the cold not seeming to bother him, neatly dressed in a gray double-breasted suit with a clean shirt and tie. The scene captures the impossible arithmetic of the ghetto: every act of defiance, however small, could trigger a mass killing, and the council's job was to manage the terror, to calculate the odds, and to keep the community from panicking into a catastrophe of its own making.

The Rule's Long Shadow: Yehoshua's Orphanhood and Survival

The doctrine of Sippenhaft is what makes Yehoshua an orphan, and it is also, paradoxically, what saves his life. Sarah Blumenthal, the daughter of the ghetto's chief assistant, later reflects on this irony when discussing her own father's past. She notes that her father was not appointed a runner, like "your little Yehoshua," but that it was more happenstance than that, because even before he was orphaned, he made himself useful. He was a little fellow and he could dart about, and they came to depend on him. And then, when he was given his official runner's cap, that was toward the end. "And it did save his life. In more ways than one," she says. The runner's cap, a military-style garrison cap with a star sewn on the jacket, gave the orphaned boy a role, a purpose, and a measure of protection within the ghetto's desperate hierarchy. Yehoshua himself, in his testimony, describes the perverse pride he felt in his uniform, the star on his tunic not like all the other stars but some indication of rank, the military-style hat, and knowing what was going on almost before anyone else. He was the star runner, the best runner of Mr. Barbanel, the chief assistant to the community leader, Dr. Koenig. Yet even as he lived in this illusion, sometimes secretly admiring the uniforms of his enemies, he knew full well what was happening. The doctrine that killed his family also, through the ghetto's institutional response, gave him a new identity and a new life.

The Archive and the Pursuit of Justice

The legacy of Sippenhaft extends far beyond the ghetto's walls, shaping the novel's central legal and moral quest. The archive chest that Pem and Sarah recover from Moscow contains reams of documentation, rules and regulations issued by the Germans, innumerable orders, with the signature of Commandant Schmitz, confiscating all domestic animals, then all wagons. The chest itself, impounded at JFK until Pem can get in touch with the Justice Department and have one of their attorneys present when it is cracked open, is treated with the reverence of a sacred object. Sarah watches as the customs man pries off the hasps, the sound of the splitting wood making her wince, as if her father's history is seeping into the room. The inspectors carefully lift out packages of various sizes wrapped in oilskin, finding sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, envelopes of various sizes, each labeled in a small, neat Yiddish script. Among these materials is a diary in one increasingly familiar hand covering a period of three years, 1941 to the date in 1944 when the ghetto is dismantled and the survivors are marched to the railroad station. The archive is meant to provide documentary proof of the identity of the ghetto commander, S.S. Major Schmitz, and to resist a challenge in court. The hope is that the evidence will finally hold the man who enforced Sippenhaft accountable for his crimes.

The Unfinished Reckoning

The pursuit of justice under the shadow of Sippenhaft ultimately ends in frustration. The ex-Times man who flies to Cincinnati with an open-ended return ticket reflects on the difficulty of identification, remembering from accounts of the Eichmann kidnapping that the major problem was identification, that they would have the right guy. He thinks about the suspected Eichmann, who worked under an assumed name, wore heavy black-rimmed glasses, looked unprepossessing, and came home to a not very nice neighborhood. The ex-Times man realizes he comes from the other culture, the culture of reporting the fact, getting the story, getting the spelling right. "It is like a ball and chain, it drags on him," the novel observes. "A heavy weight to pull, it is one thing to have the resolve to end a story, another to make the muscles actually do it." The legal case against Schmitz, built on the testimony of elderly witnesses and the documentary evidence of the archive, collapses when the defendant's lawyer shoots down their testimony, and the judge finds in his favor. The man testifies that he is Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who only did guard duty in the ghetto for three months before being shipped to fight on the Russian front. The Simon Wiesenthal Center agrees with Sarah's father that Preissen is almost certainly Schmitz, but short of convincing documentation, the ID cannot be made that will justify reopening the case. The final blow comes when Pem learns that the man died two months ago, in his sleep, in a home in Yonkers. "We had him good and nailed, too. Damn!" Pem exclaims. The man who enforced Sippenhaft, who ordered the killing of families, never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The doctrine that destroyed so many lives ultimately escaped its own reckoning, leaving the survivors and their descendants to carry the weight of an unfinished justice.