Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  amenable to their demands. If I were Kaiser was the title of one of the most

  influential publications from the radical anti-Semitic camp, written in 1912 by

  Heinrich Class, the President of the Pan-German League. 8 After 1918, however, confronted with the Republic, radical anti-Semitism was uncompromisingly

  hostile to the new system and linked their demands for amendments to the

  emancipated status of the Jews with a demand for the removal of the Republic

  itself, which they claimed was dominated by Jews. Radical anti-Semitic aims were

  no longer inhibited as they had been before 1914 by such considerations as loyalty

  to the existing order or respect for a state governed by the rule of law. Radical

  anti-Semitism became identical with the campaign against the Weimar Republic.

  Far-reaching völkisch ambitions such as these did seem utopian from the per-

  spective of those emerging from the First World War but their negative corollary, the

  inner ‘cleansing’ of a new nation defined along nationalist lines immediately caught

  on and manifested itself in the form of attacks against a Jewish minority that was

  clearly visible or had been made visible and had no place in the new nation.

  As a direct reaction to the revolution, and then with greater intensity in the

  second half of 1919, small radical anti-Semitic groups and solo activists began to

  emerge right across the country. They exploited the general paralysis that the

  revolution had caused in the larger right-wing organizations, openly indulging in

  Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

  13

  propaganda in favour of the use of force as a means of solving the so-called ‘Jewish

  question’ and using such sloganizing to dominate opinion formation in the radical

  anti-Semitic camp. It was these forces that evidently lay behind the demands for a

  ‘pogrom’; at the same time there was an increase in anti-Semitic acts of violence. 9

  These activities laid the groundwork for the anti-Jewish agitation of the ‘Ger-

  man People’s Defence and Offence League’ (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und

  Trutzbund) that can be regarded as the parent organization of many radical

  anti-Semitic activities in the Weimar Republic. It campaigned for depriving

  German Jews of their citizenship. 10 In 1922 the League had more than 150,000

  members and was developing a raft of anti-Semitic propaganda primarily to

  attract workers from the Socialist parties. 11 Whilst this strategy was largely unsuccessful the organization’s main effect lay in a general radicalization of anti-Semitic

  attitudes in right-wing associations and parties. 12

  The NSDAP—the German Workers’ Party that had been founded in 1919 and

  changed its name to National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1920—also

  profited from anti-Semitic agitation such as this. In a series of anti-Semitic points

  the NSDAP programme for 1920 made provision for the removal of the equal

  citizenship rights that Jews had enjoyed in the German Empire since 1871.13 Even if the NSDAP succeeded in becoming the leading force in the Munich radical right

  wing by 1923, its effectiveness was nonetheless essentially restricted to Bavaria. 14

  Anti-Semitic agitation was also a key element in the activities of the German

  National People’s Party (DNVP) that was formed after the end of the First World

  War as a successor to Imperial Germany’s Conservative Party, and they directed

  their efforts in particular against ‘Eastern Jewish’ immigrants. 15 But like the Conservatives in the pre-war period they resisted the demands of their völkisch

  wing for the exclusion of the Jews from German citizenship. After fierce in-

  fighting its radical völkisch-German wing broke away from the DNVP to form

  the German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP) with similar aims to those of the

  NSDAP. Its stronghold was in North Germany. 16

  There were many other groups that belonged to the troubled and internally

  divided völkisch camp in the post-war years and also argued for an end to equal

  citizenship rights for Jews. In its second issue, in 1921, the German Völkisch

  Yearbook cited nearly seventy ‘German national unions, organizations, leagues,

  and orders’ where the adjectives ‘German national[ist]’, or deutschvölkisch, gave

  an indication of their fundamentally anti-Semitic position. 17

  Amongst these organizations several were fairly substantial. With some

  200,000 members in the early 1920s, the ‘Young German Order’ (Jungdeutscher

  Orden) represented one of the most important nationalist and radical anti-Semitic

  organizations of the Weimar years. 18 It rejected the use of anti-Semitic violence and hate campaigns as being ‘anti-Semitic rowdyism’ but its leadership left no

  room for doubt that the Young German Order—which naturally had no Jewish

  members—desired a form of state, known as the ‘Young German State’, in which

  14

  Historical Background

  ‘the Jewish question would be solved in a völkisch manner’. Given the nature of the

  slogans common in such nationalist circles, this could only be interpreted as a call

  for excluding Jews from German citizenship. 19

  The elitist ‘German League’ (Deutschbund) formed in 1894 was one of the co-

  founders of the ‘German People’s Defence and Offence League’ and was char-

  acterized by hard-line racist anti-Semitism. In its constitution for 1921 it pledged

  to ‘cultivate pure Germanness in all areas of life’ and it saw its principal

  function as exercising a nationalist influence on other right-wing organizations.

  In 1925 its membership was greater than 3,000, but in 1930 the entire leadership

  of the ‘German League’ joined the NSDAP. 20

  The ‘Pan-German League’ (Alldeutscher Verband or AdV) had some 50,000

  members at its high point in 1922 and its constitution from the same year declared

  its aims as ‘combating all forces that inhibit or harm the völkisch development of

  the German people, in particular the Jewish domination of almost all public,

  economic, and cultural fields’. In 1924 the AdV excluded Jews from membership. 21

  Further such organizations included the ‘Tannenberg League’, founded in 1925 by

  General Ludendorff—an umbrella organization for radical right-wing youth and

  defence associations which together claimed some 30,000–40,000 members22—

  and the 10,000-strong ‘Viking League’ founded in 1923 by the militia leader

  Hermann Ehrhardt. 23

  At the beginning of the 1920s a Central Office for Patriotic Associations was

  founded in order to coordinate the diverse activities of these nationalistic bodies.

  In 1922 its Secretary, Wilhelm Schultz-Oldendorf, identified ‘dealing with the

  Jewish question’ as one of its main tasks, 24 but in 1928 its functions were taken over by the Central German National Office (Deutschvölkische Hauptstelle)

  which operated as an umbrella organization for a total of twenty-five nationalist

  groups. 25 Less central, but still associated with the völkisch movement, were elements of the Gymnasts’ Movement, the Movement for Life Reform, and

  various occult and theosophical groups. They were all united by the firm convic-

  tion that the Jews represented a ‘foreign body’ within the German people and had

  to be excluded at all costs—indeed that the nationalist regeneration for which they

  all strove
could only be achieved by ‘cleansing’ Germany of everything Jewish.

  Seen as a whole, these various organizations from different areas of public life

  constituted a substantial socio-cultural movement. 26

  The wave of anti-Semitism that began after the First World War and which was

  propelled by agitators from these various groups reached its high point in the

  assassination of the Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, in June 1922 and the

  numerous attacks and violent assaults on Jews that took place in connection with

  the Hitler Putsch of November 1923. However, both events make it plain that anti-

  Semitic violence could be restrained using state-sponsored counter-measures: the

  Rathenau assassination led to the disbandment of the ‘German People’s Defence

  and Offence League’, and after the forced end of the Hitler Putsch and the

  Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

  15

  dissolution of the NSDAP the overall level of anti-Semitic violence diminished

  noticeably.

  When the NSDAP was refounded in 1925 it maintained its staunchly anti-

  Semitic stance. The ‘Fundamental Guidelines for the Re-establishment of the

  National Socialist Workers’ Party’ published in February of that year contain

  the following statement: ‘The energy of the whole movement is to be directed

  against the worst enemy of the German people: Judaism and Marxism. ’27 By 1928

  and the appearance of his ‘Second Book’, Hitler himself had succeeded in devel-

  oping out of the vague conglomeration of racial right-wing ideas that most

  strongly influenced his thinking a more fully developed world-view in which

  anti-Semitism held a central position: it was the linchpin for all the various

  ideological clichés that made up his so-called Weltanschauung. 28

  A list of such announcements could easily be compiled. The NSDAP group in

  the Thuringian regional parliament put together a package of seven draft laws in

  1926 that to some extent moved beyond the anti-Semitic demands of the NSDAP

  Party Programme. They included demands for the dismissal of Jewish teachers,

  the expulsion of Jewish schoolchildren and students from their educational

  institutions, and the imposition of bans to prevent Jewish doctors, judges, lawyers,

  and cattle-traders exercising their trades and professions. 29 During the debate on the referendum on the expropriation of former royal houses in April 1926 the

  NSDAP presented a draft for a law on the ‘Expropriation of Banking and Stock-

  Market Royalty and other Parasites on the People’, which included provision for

  seizing the assets of ‘Eastern Jews and other Alien Races who have joined the

  Reich since 1 August 1914’ in their entirety. 30 Two months later the NSDAP group introduced a resolution demanding in addition that the regional government

  seize, without compensation, the assets of ‘those large-scale Jewish concerns

  (such as Mosse and Ullstein) that have significant public influence’. 31

  In 1928 deputies from the National German Freedom Movement in the

  Prussian parliament and NSDAP members of the Reichstag submitted requests

  aiming at the introduction of Alien Law for Jews. 32 In January 1928 the National Socialist member of parliament Wilhelm Frick called for the ‘exclusion of Jews

  from the administration of justice in Germany’. 33 During budget discussions in March 1928 the National Socialist member Count Reventlow invoked the whole

  NSDAP group in calling for a law that ‘would prohibit all further Jewish

  immigration, expel all Jews who had entered Germany since 1914, and place

  those remaining under Alien Law, whilst reserving the right to expel them

  subsequently, and exclude them from all the rights associated with German

  citizenship’. 34

  In March 1930 the NSDAP group in the Reichstag submitted a draft law

  according to which anyone ‘who contributes towards, or threatens to contribute

  towards the racial degradation and subversion of the German people by misce-

  genation with members of the Jewish “blood community” . . . should be punished

  16

  Historical Background

  with imprisonment on the grounds of racial treason’. In particularly serious cases

  the death penalty was proposed. 35

  In the course of budget negotiations Reventlow made two demands in June

  1930 that exceeded the provisions already envisaged in the NSDAP Party Pro-

  gramme: he asked for ‘all Jews in Germany to be labelled visibly as such’ and for

  ‘the names of all Jews to be prefaced by the term “Jew” ’. These proposals were to

  be put into practice by the Nazi regime in 1941 and 1938 respectively, but in 1930

  they seemed so absurd that the members of the Reichstag actually laughed at

  them. 36

  In the summer of 1930 the Ostdeutscher Beobachter, the official organ of the

  National Socialists in East Prussia, demanded that ‘children whose racial charac-

  teristics suggest a father who was racially negro, oriental, near-Eastern, or Hamitic

  be killed. National Socialists cannot conceivably permit racially inferior blood and

  thus poor spiritual conditions to infiltrate the body of the nation once again. The

  mothers of these bastards must be made infertile.’37

  The anti-Semitic demands of the NSDAP were thus consistently repeated in

  public after the refoundation of the Party and were even made more severe.

  Corresponding activity in parliament shows that the Party would aim single-

  mindedly at a series of special anti-Semitic laws after seizing power. What we do

  not know, however, is to what extent anti-Semitic activity characterized the life of

  the Party before 1933. The subject of anti-Semitism is neglected or even omitted in

  most regional studies on the rise of the NSDAP. 38 Most historians agree that the Party markedly reduced its anti-Semitic propaganda after the election of 1930, but

  this thesis is only partially defensible. 39

  It is certainly true to say that by this point the ‘Jewish question’ was no longer

  seen as an independent, free-standing issue. A glance at the Party’s election

  posters—one of the National Socialists’ most important propaganda vehicles—

  makes this clear. In 1924 these posters still portrayed the ‘puppeteer’, the stereo-

  typical caricature of a Jewish capitalist and thus incarnating the very image of the

  Party’s main enemy. But from 1930 anti-Jewish propaganda was linked with other

  topics, with campaigns against the ‘Young Parties’ (the forces that were in favour

  of accepting the Young Plan for reorganizing reparations) in which the relevant

  posters showed the representatives of these views caricatured as Jews. One of the

  main posters for the 1930 campaign had the heading ‘Battle against Corruption’: it

  not only showed the National Socialist fist smashing a table at which were sitting

  functionaries caricatured as Jews but also gave the name Sklarek to one of these

  figures, a man who had been the principal defendant in a major corruption

  scandal and who featured in right-wing propaganda as the very personification

  of a fraudulent mentality portrayed as originating with the Eastern Jews. 40

  The NSDAP was adept at deploying anti-Jewish stereotypes in its propaganda

  with the minimum of overt effort and without always using the word ‘Jew’. The

  most important methods that for
med part of this propaganda technique were

  Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

  17

  abbreviation, allusion, symbolism, and personalization. National Socialist propa-

  ganda made use of a semantic and visual code that was very easily recognizable to

  an anti-Semite: it was enough merely to give a Jewish name, to hint at physical

  characteristics or external traits that were generally associated with Jews, or to

  use certain words to trigger prejudices about supposedly high levels of wealth

  controlled by the Jewish population or the omnipresent Jewish conspiracy. 41

  The CV-Zeitung, which had seen through this technique, commented in the

  issue published on 21 September 1928 that Hitler knew very well that he no longer

  needed to talk about ‘Jewish capital’ or ‘Jewish crimes’ and that it was enough to

  refer to ‘international capital’ or ‘international crime’ since years of agitation and

  propaganda had meant that everyone knew what he wanted to be understood by

  his words. Hitler deployed this technique after the National Socialists’ electoral

  success in September 1930 with renewed vigour. He was obviously perfectly well

  aware that the number of those voting for him was greater than the total number

  of radical anti-Semites in the German population, 42 and a few weeks after the election he gave an interview to The Times in which he spoke out against violent

  anti-Semitism and pogroms, thereby establishing respectable credentials as one of

  the leading German politicians. 43 ‘The movement discountenanced violent antiSemitism’, he was reported as saying. ‘Herr Hitler would have nothing to do with

  pogroms, and that was the first word that had always gone forth from him in

  turbulent times. Their doctrine was “Germany for the Germans” and their attitude

  towards Jews was governed by the attitude of Jews towards this doctrine. They had

  nothing against decent Jews, but if Jews associated themselves with Bolshevism, as

  many unfortunately did, they must be regarded as enemies. The Party was against

  all violence, but if attacked was ready to defend itself.’ But a more precise analysis

  of Hitler’s speeches shows that he had not altered his basic position. As the