That turned out to be a cunningly conceived strategy to divide people and create chaos so that the Jews would focus their attention on the desperate hustle for exemptions. An eyewitness related that on the day the first Sperres were issued, people broke down the doors of the Jewish Council office and attacked staff.3 In fact, the Sperres were a delusion; they only delayed the inevitable. In the end, the Germans simply deleted the words “until further notice” and deported people anyway. “Further notice” had arrived.
Sperres were personal. Each Sperre had an individual number and fell into a specific range, from 10,000 to 120,000, that corresponded to the type of exemption that was granted. （The goal was to get as close to 120,000 as possible.） The bureaucratic complexity was astonishing. The Nazis considered various permutations, giving different levels of Sperres to “foreign” Jews; to Christian Jews—those born Jewish but baptized before January 1, 1941 （only 1,575 Catholic and Protestant Jews were protected that way）; and to Jews in mixed marriages, who were invited to choose between deportation and sterilization. （That didn’t work; many doctors provided a phony certificate of the operation or refused to do it; an estimated eight thousand to nine thousand Jews in mixed marriages survived the war.）4 There were also “exchange Jews,” who’d been able to buy citizenship in a South American country and were considered candidates for exchange with German prisoners of war. The parents of Anne Frank’s schoolmate and close friend Hanneli Goslar, who was also interned in Bergen-Belsen, were able to buy Paraguayan passports through an uncle in neutral Switzerland. Though Hanneli and her younger sister were never exchanged, they were allowed to keep their own clothing in the bitter north German winter and received the occasional Red Cross package of food. Probably because of those “privileges,” Hanneli and her sister survived.5
Also up for exchange were so-called Palestine Jews, who had relatives in the British Protectorate of Palestine. At the end of 1943, 1,297 Jews held Palestine certificates and were marked for exchange. In January 1944, they were sent to Bergen-Belsen.6 About 221 people made it to Palestine via Turkey that July. Most of the rest did not survive the camp.
The categories went on and on and were based on a diabolical and ultimately meaningless series of distinctions. Most Sperres, including those held by members of the Jewish Council, did provide some protection but only for a limited period of time.
Still, far and away the most desirable and useful exemption was known as Calmeyer status; the J was permanently removed from the identity cards of those who were approved for Calmeyer status, and they were no longer considered Jewish, which meant that they could avoid deportation indefinitely.
The Germans defined a Jew as anyone who had one Jewish grandparent by race or belonged to a Jewish religious community （see the table here）。 Doubtful cases in which the definition was challenged were referred to the Reich Commission in The Hague, which passed them on to the General Committee for Administration and Justice （sic）， and ultimately to the Nazi-controlled Internal Administration Department, whose chief adjudicator was a German named Dr. Hans Georg Calmeyer.
The Calmeyer list included people who claimed not to be Jewish or to be only partially Jewish. They based their requests for a revision of their status on anthropological and ancestral documents or on evidence that they had never held membership in a Jewish religious community. The process necessitated the assistance of a lawyer, the creation of a genealogical record, a notary statement, and, where necessary, the forging of documents, since most applications were from people who were, in fact, Jewish by birth. All of that required substantial money. During the research phase of the investigation of heritage, applicants were exempt from deportation.
Calmeyer’s office was a department of the German authority, but it seems that he and his staff were not overly scrupulous in determining the provenance or validity of documents and accepted dubious birth and baptismal certificates, divorce papers, and letters claiming that children had been born out of wedlock and therefore were not Jewish. Calmeyer was regarded as “totally incorruptible,” “neither a Nazi, nor an avowed anti-Nazi,” yet he often went to extreme lengths in order to make a case for an applicant, and some members of his office staff were secretly sympathetic to the Jews.7 It is estimated that Calmeyer saved at least 2,899 people, or three-quarters of the cases sent to him.
That was the bureaucracy of the absurd. The Nazi sense of order imposed a level of complexity and pseudolegality on something very simple: how and when to send hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths.