NSDAP achieved unprecedented successes in elections in the years from 1930 to
1933, the fundamental elements of Hitler’s ideology, ‘space’ and ‘race’, were
consistently at the forefront of his addresses. 44 On many occasions Hitler stressed how he continued to see the ‘Jewish race’ as the principal enemy of the German
people.
On 29 August 1930, for example, shortly before the National Socialists’ huge
success in the Reichstag elections, Hitler referred to the Jews in a speech given in
Munich: ‘The head of another race is on top of the body of our nation, heart and head
are no longer one and the same in our people.’45 In another speech held a few weeks later he depicted the struggle against the Jews—without naming them explicitly—as
a divinely appointed task: ‘if we appear today as Germans and try to resist the
poisonous effect of an alien people, what we are doing is attempting to return into the
hands of the almighty Creator the same creature as He has given us. ’46
There is much here to support the view that the reduction in anti-Jewish attacks
was a temporary tactical concession on the part of the National Socialist leader-
ship which, after its electoral success, was trying to enter into a coalition with the
18
Historical Background
Centre Party. When these plans collapsed, from late 1931 or early 1932 onwards, it
seems that more space was made for anti-Semitic tirades. 47
It is clear from a list of definitive statements compiled and published by the CV
that in 1931 and 1932 National Socialist speakers made demands that included
taking Jews as hostages to ensure that money allegedly taken out of the country be
brought back in or to fend off an attack by France. They demanded also that Jews
be removed from public office, from the field of journalism, or removed
altogether; they insisted that Jews be deprived of citizenship, called for the burning
of synagogues, or promised pogroms in the event of an attack on a member of the
National Socialist leadership. 48 Speakers indulged themselves in ever more extravagant comparisons of Jews with animals and fantasies of annihilation as they
demanded, for example, the ‘extirpation’ of Jews ‘like tapeworm’, or insisted that
they be made ‘harmless . . . like fleas’. 49 The National Socialist Party press seems to have had little occasion to rein in their anti-Semitic propaganda in these years: the
Völkische Beobachter, the Party’s main publication, revelled in violent anti-Semitic
tirades; 50 the same was true of Goebbels’s newspaper, Der Angriff—‘attack’—
which was tailored for the public of Berlin in particular.
Anti-Semitic activities and attacks by Party followers were just as evident in the
years 1930–2 when the Party was officially calling for moderation in the matter of
the ‘Jewish question’ and distanced itself from such actions. After 1930 there was
an increase in the number of attacks on cemeteries and desecrations of syn-
agogues, and in the cases where the perpetrators were identified a significant
proportion of these actions were committed by NSDAP followers. 51
NSDAP members repeatedly attacked Jews or ‘Jewish-looking’ people on the
streets, 52 and such activities reached an initial high in the violence organized by the Berlin SA on the Kurfürstendamm on 12 September 1930, the Jewish new year,
when more than a thousand SA followers, not in uniform, randomly attacked
Jewish passers-by. 53 Immediately after the Reichstag elections of 31 July 1932 NS
followers swamped East Prussia and various other regions of Germany with a
wave of violent attacks, a number including the use of hand grenades and
including the attempted murder of Jewish citizens; the windows of many Jewish
businesses were smashed, too. 54 The boycott of Jewish firms and other Jewish institutions, which we shall return to in more detail later, was driven forwards on
the authority of the NSDAP. National Socialists even went as far as making
accusations of ritual murder in order to fan the flames of anti-Semitism. 55
Women and men received threats because of their alleged ‘racial disgrace’. 56
During the election campaign for the poll on 6 November 1932 the Nazi Party
made use of massive anti-Semitic propaganda, coining the slogan ‘bigwigs and the
Lords’ Club57 with the Jew’, including a correspondingly large range of examples from their repertoire of anti-Jewish caricatures. 58
During the period from 1930 to 1933, however, with an eye to a possible coalition
with other right-wing forces, the NSDAP officially rejected the rowdy anti-Semitic
Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic
19
tendency and stressed its intention of solving the ‘Jewish question’ in a ‘reason-
able’, or in other words legal, manner.
The NS Monatshefte, the Nazi Monthly Journal published an article in its
October 1930 volume that explained, on the basis of the Party Programme, how
plans for anti-Jewish laws would be put into practice in the ‘Third Reich’ that was
to come. There was a plan, for example, to give Jews a special legal status which
would have as a consequence a ‘restriction in their simple rights as citizens’,
including the removal of both active and passive voting rights and of military
service. This general restriction imposed on German Jews would ‘not exclude
further interventions, if they prove necessary’. The author of the article then gave a
series of examples that read like a catalogue for the anti-Semitic laws that would be
introduced a few years later. In a similar vein, Ernst von Heydebrand von der Lasa,
the Deputy Director of the domestic policy office of the NSDAP, published a draft
law in 1931 that made provision for the exclusion of Jews from German citizen-
ship. 59
In contrast to fundamental draft plans such as these, it seems that there were
not so many requests for spectacular anti-Jewish laws made by the NSDAP’s
parliamentary group after 1930 as there had been previously. Nevertheless, in the
Prussian parliament there was a demand made that Jews be excluded from
theatres and the radio and for a numerus clausus to be imposed on Jewish
receivers. 60
Gregor Strasser, who was head of the Nazi Party’s national organization,
announced in October 1931 that a National Socialist government would ensure
that ‘the dominance of Jews in Germany would come to an end’ and that this
meant ‘the exclusion of Jews from all areas in which they are in a position to
hamper the German economy’. 61 In June 1932 Strasser declared in a radio address that the Party ‘did not want to persecute the Jews’, but that they did intend a
‘German leadership with no trace of Jewish or foreign spirit’. 62
Possible concerns were assuaged by an explanation given by Goering in May
1932 to an Italian newspaper. He noted the plans for far-reaching special laws to be
applied to Jews, but stressed ‘that any decent Israelite businessman who wishes to
live in Germany as a foreigner under the protection of the law to which all
foreigners are subject, will be allowed to pursue his business’. 63 Goebbels defended the anti-Semitic policies of his party again a few weeks before taking power, in an
interview with the Daily Express. 64
However, the facts that in Germany in 1933 radical anti-Semitis
m was elevated
to the status of official government policy and that with the help of initial anti-
Semitic laws the equality of citizenship of the Jews was destroyed are not
attributable solely to the rise of the NSDAP. It was above all crucial that the
thought of excluding the Jews from citizenship rights had been becoming an
increasingly popular notion in the socio-cultural milieu of the Conservatives, the
NSDAP’s future partners in government, since the 1920s. This was initially
20
Historical Background
because representatives of a radical anti-Semitic stance within conservative-
leaning organizations had used demands for expelling Jewish members to trigger
a long-lasting debate on the attitude of these organizations to the ‘Jewish
question’. These discussions often ended with the introduction of an ‘Aryan
clause’, which symbolically expressed the readiness of the whole organization
to adopt a radical stance on the ‘Jewish question’, distance themselves from
traditional conservative views, and fall into line behind the National Socialists.
There were two political organizations in particular that paved the way for their
move into the National Socialist camp with an ‘Aryan clause’, the German
National[ist] People’s Party (DNVP) and the ‘Stahlhelm’—the so-called Steel
Helmet Veterans’ Organization, which would join with the NSDAP in 1931 to
form the Harzburg Front and become partners in Hitler’s government in 1933.
The DNVP took the decision to exclude Jewish members in 1924 and (for
formal reasons) again in 1926. 65 This decision was in line with the ideas of the right wing of the Party that used the Party’s cooperation with democratic forces in
parliament and coalition governments (in 1925 and 1927) to accuse the leadership
of abandoning its fundamental opposition to the Weimar Republic and of bring-
ing it too close to the state that it disliked. With the election of Alfred Hugenberg
in 1928 the right wing of the Party prevailed and determined on an alliance with
the NSDAP. 66 Hugenberg was himself relatively restrained about making anti-Semitic statements, probably because of his interests as the head of a group of
press companies, but it is clear that the exclusion of Jewish members was a
precondition for the Nazi-friendly line of development that the Party took. In
the Steel Helmet Veterans’ Organization the völkisch wing under the Deputy
Leader, Theodor Duesterberg, gradually succeeded in taking over and bringing
about a political alliance with the DNVP and the NSDAP. 67 These forces managed to engineer the exclusion of Jewish members in 1924 and ensured that thereafter
the organization routinely took an anti-Semitic stance.
The strong influence of völkisch forces on attitudes to the ‘Jewish question’ was
also felt in the ‘Reichslandbund’ or National Rural League, the successor to the
strongly anti-Semitic pre-First World War Farmers’ League. The RLB’s propa-
ganda shifted in 1924–5 towards the extensive use of anti-Semitic stereotypes
under pressure from völkisch forces. These were attempting to depict the particu-
lar burdens on agriculture, following currency stabilization in 1924, as a conspir-
acy on the part of international Jewry to force it into subjugation. This way of
seeing things was adopted to a large extent by the RLB. 68
The German National Association of Commercial Employees (DHV) had
more than 300,000 members at the end of the 1920s and it undertook a lively
programme of anti-Semitic propaganda and education. Under the intellectual
leadership of the publicist Wilhelm Stapel, the Association propagated a völk-
isch-cultural brand of anti-Semitism and stressed the essential incompatibility of
being both German and Jewish. 69
Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic
21
Thus the Weimar Republic saw a large number of middle-class associations take
steps to exclude their Jewish members, and it is remarkable that the anti-Semitic
forces managed to implement this process of exclusion precisely during the most
stable period of the Republic, at a time, therefore, when such associations were
recovering from the years of inflation and consolidating themselves. For instance,
the ‘Jewish question’—the demand by völkisch members of the association that an
‘Aryan clause’ be inserted into the constitution—played a major role from the
early 1920s onwards at the annual general meetings of the German-Austrian
Alpine Club, which was probably the most important of all German leisure and
tourist organizations. Important branches such as Berlin and Breslau did in fact
succeed in banning Jewish members. 70
However, discussions about the introduction of an ‘Aryan clause’ were held in
German gymnastic associations (the German League of Gymnasts did not
accept Jewish members), in the German Academy, in the Association for
Germans Abroad, and other organizations where the anti-Semitic forces did
not prevail. 71
Scattered references to the exclusion of Jews from local associations can be
found throughout the literature on regional history, but the question of how far
this represented a consistent pattern is an important area that still requires further
research—and in the light of the importance of such associations in Germany and
their close connections with local politics this omission is all the more scandalous.
Students took a leading role in the spread of radical anti-Semitic ideas in
German society. At the beginning of the 1920s almost all the student bodies had
ceased to accept Jewish members. The Deutscher Hochschulring, an umbrella
organization of student associations (DHR), refounded in 1920, saw itself as
particularly völkisch and anti-Semitic and quickly became a powerful force in
most of the country’s universities, the general student councils, and within the
German National Student Union. This dominant role found expression above all
in the huge influence the DHR had on getting the student body to adopt radical
anti-Semitic positions. 72 This occurred for the first time in 1922 when the DHR
was able to push through a constitutional amendment according to which the
association sanctioned the practice of its members, the German and Austrian
student organizations, of not accepting any students of Jewish origin at all. 73
Five years later the University Circle caused another conflict linked to the
‘Jewish question’. It was sparked by the fact that the majority of state-
recognized and state-supported student associations accepted Jews into their
ranks provided they were German citizens, but did not accept Jews classed as
‘Germans from abroad’, such as those from Danzig or territories ceded to
Poland. When the Prussian Minister of Culture demanded that this practice
be changed, in a vote taken in 1927 the majority of the student representa-
tives voted against, which eventually led to the dissolution of the student
organizations. 74
22
Historical Background
At the end of the 1920s the leading political role amongst student organizations
was taken over by the National Socialist League of German Students. After 1929 it
ensured that the student associations in a
number of universities decided to
demand that the number of Jewish students be limited to the proportion of Jewish
members of the population in the area of the Reich. 75 Violence against Jewish students and professors was a daily occurrence in German universities towards the
end of the Weimar Republic. 76
Radical anti-Semitic positions also spread within the two principal Christian
confessions where they reinforced what were already fairly strong anti-Semitic
prejudices that had been formed on confessional or religious grounds.
Within the Protestant Church a group known as the ‘German Christians’ had
formed from the early 1920s onwards, rejecting the Jewish roots of Christianity—
most notably the Old Testament and the Jewish ancestry of Jesus himself—and
attempting to reconcile Christian theology with Germanic mythology. 77
Whilst these groups only met with very limited success, from the early 1930s
onwards the National Socialists succeeded in mobilizing their supporters on the
occasion of church elections, working in particular with the ‘Faith Movement of
German Christians’ who were opposed to ‘racial miscegenation’ and the ‘Jewish
mission’. In the church elections of November 1932 the German Christians
gathered about a third of all the votes, which roughly corresponded to the
proportion of National Socialist supporters in the population at large. 78
The Church reacted to these forces—which after all challenged the fundamental
premises of Christian belief according to prevailing theology—with sympathy and
a willingness to dialogue rather than by clearly distancing itself from them. Under
the influence of this völkisch provocation the spectrum of opinion within the
Church moved decisively to the right in the direction of völkisch and racist ideas. 79
The indirect influence of the German Christians proved to be much more
important than any direct effects they could have by virtue of their position within
the Church.
The Königsberg Church Congress of 1927 marked a caesura in the attitude of
the Protestant Church to the völkisch movement. It witnessed the presentation of
the outline for a new political theology in the paradigmatic paper given by the
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 5
