Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
Page 6
theologian Paul Althaus on ‘Church and Nation’. Decisively, his lecture paved the
way for recognizing the völkisch community as part of the divine order; with this
‘theological qualification of the people the principle of the völkisch movement
received Christian legitimacy’. 80
Such theological receptiveness for points of view that took account of the people,
‘das Volk’, meant that whilst in the Weimar Republic anti-Semitism within the
Protestant Church was condemned in its overtly violent form, its underlying racist
premises were not only not rejected but accepted and even to some extent welcomed.
The purely biological concept of race was rejected as irreconcilable with the Christian
image of humanity, but the Protestant mainstream’s views on race and the racial
Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic
23
basis of nationhood (seen as a muddy synthesis of ‘blood’ and ‘spirit’) had already
been influenced to a high degree by biologistic racial dogma.
After the end of the First World War Catholicism also increasingly came to see
‘Volk’ and ‘nationhood’ as components of the divine order of creation. The
Catholic concept of nationhood was not for the most part based on ideas of
race, however, and it did stress its distance from the völkisch camp. Catholic
authors did not rely on a material or biological concept of nationhood based one-
sidedly on ‘blood and soil’ ideas but strove to emphasize the ‘spiritual’ element
within their conception of nation. However, they were prepared at the same time
to acknowledge biological ‘facts’ and the Catholic conception of nation thus drew
nearer to the related concepts of race used within völkisch discourse. 81 The religious anti-Semitism that featured in Catholic circles could therefore be
stretched far enough to permit calls for refusing equality of citizenship to Jews
from this quarter, too. 82
The exclusion of Jews from German citizenship was publicly called for at the
end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s by a whole series of prominent right-wing
intellectuals. What is most remarkable is that a series of leading supporters of the
‘conservative revolution’—the intellectual scene that became part of the ‘new
right’ in the early 1930s—had intensified their anti-Jewish attitudes. Whilst they
had made unambiguously anti-Semitic comments in the 1920s but had not
supported the removal of citizenship from the Jews (indeed had sometimes
vociferously opposed it), now they formed part of the growing chorus of propon-
ents of this measure. This group included Wilhelm Stapel, Editor in Chief of
the newspaper German Nation and organizer of the educational sections of the
German National Association of Commercial Employees. Stapel was one of
the most influential original thinkers in the völkisch camp and represented a
‘cultural’ concept of nationhood rather than one based one-sidedly on racism.
Stapel’s close colleague Albrecht Günther similarly joined the group of those
proposing that Jews be deprived of citizenship. 83
Ernst Jünger, the successful author of popular war literature and one of the
leading figures in the intellectual right, wrote programmatically in 1930 that a Jew
living in Germany would soon ‘be faced with his final choice: being a Jew in
Germany or not being a Jew’, implying that he also believed in the need for a
special status for Jews. 84
The views quoted here were expressed in a series of anthologies or special
numbers of periodicals dedicated to the ‘Jewish question’ and published in the
early 1930s. For example, the September 1930 edition of the Süddeutsche Monat-
shefte was devoted to the ‘Jewish question’. They were the vehicles for anti-Semites
of various hues to give voice to their views, but they also published opponents of
anti-Semitism and leading Jewish commentators. These discussions show very
clearly how the radical anti-Semites had succeeded in putting the solution to the
‘Jewish question’ onto the political agenda, in one form or another.
24
Historical Background
An important stage in the onward march of radical anti-Semitism was the
spread of the anti-Jewish boycott movement from the mid-1920s onwards in a
variety of different fields of life. There were traces of a systematic boycott of
Jewish businesses organized by anti-Semitic circles evident even in Imperial
times, especially at Christmas, but it was very substantially intensified during
the Weimar Republic, not least in the ‘stable’ period. Although the Centralverein
succeeded in obtaining court judgements against the boycott in a large number
of cases, reports in its newspapers show that the boycott movement was
growing. 85
Local National Socialist papers had begun openly encouraging the boycott of
Jewish businesses since the end of the 1920s. 86 The boycott became a regular part of National Socialists’ local strategies for gaining power in many areas, 87 and from 1931–2 took on a violent form: customers were prevented from entering shops,
windows were smashed, and the owners of shops threatened. 88
The organized boycott of Jewish businesses reached a high point at Christmas
1932. In September of that year the Centralverein identified an office within the
National Socialist leadership that was centrally organizing the boycott. 89 The fact that it was already taking on the form of a violent blockade became very clear
when the Minister of the Interior from Hesse answered a parliamentary question
at the beginning of December by saying that ‘the current large-scale campaigns
against Jewish business people . . . had already led to serious disruptions to public
order’. The national government supported this view and in the same month
recommended that regional governments deploy the police to restore order ‘if for
example pickets are set up in front of a shop and grossly offend those attempting
to gain entry by making threats, insulting them or in any other way’. The method
the National Socialists used to organize the boycott of Jewish businesses in April
1933 thus corresponded to a model that had been tried and tested even before their
‘seizure of power’. 90
From the mid-1920s on, the Centralverein received more and more complaints
about discrimination against Jews applying for jobs in large firms. Such discrim-
ination, which the CV mainly attributed to the activities of former army officers
working in the personnel departments of these firms, was justified as an attempt to
avoid friction with völkisch-minded employees. It too grew to the extent of
becoming a boycott. According to the CV, the firms principally affected were
large banks, the domestic departments of large insurance firms, the chemical
industry, heavy industry, mining, shipbuilding, and the firm of Siemens. 91
As had happened in Imperial times, in the Weimar Republic a large number of
hotels, guesthouses, tourist, and spa resorts refused to accommodate Jewish guests
and exclusively targeted a völkisch-minded public. The most famous example of
this form of boycott is the holiday island of Borkum, which was positively proud
of banning Jewish visitors. The number of anti-Semitic restaurants and cafés also
increased during
the 1920s. The CV published blacklists and in 1932 eventually
Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic
25
established a tourist office to advise Jewish travellers about the current status of
local anti-Semitic activity. 92
The Director of the CV made the following summary at the end of 1925: it was
depressing to note ‘that a form of social anti-Semitism that far exceeds what had
been the case before the war is now a dominant feature of the reactionary political
and social climate; that with many, too many fellow citizens, whilst the atmosphere
fostering aggressive anti-Semitic activity has waned, a “passive” anti-Semitism is
still present, a tendency to avoid all contact with Jews’. 93
The boycott movement that originated with the National Socialists and other
radical völkisch forces was only supported by a minority of the population at large;
it was not a truly popular movement, but the openness with which the boycott was
propagated proved to be decisive, as did the fact that the boycott, although it
was in many instances against current law, was generally tolerated and did not
produce a counter-movement to offer resistance. Those who encouraged others to
boycott Jewish businesses, heads of personnel who refused to employ Jewish
applicants, guesthouse owners who did not accommodate Jews risked no general
social disapproval or fatal economic consequences.
It became clear, therefore, that radical anti-Semitism and its central demand for
the exclusion of Jews from the rights of citizenship was not limited to the agitation
of the NSDAP but gradually took root in the political and social life of the Weimar
Republic. The radical anti-Semitic forces had succeeded in forcing the Republic to
enter into a debate on the ‘Jewish question’.
It was against this backdrop that an informal compromise was worked out in
the early 1930s between the National Socialists and their political partners on the
right. Whilst the National Socialists indicated that they would give up the overly
violent forms of anti-Semitism if they were to take power, their partners in the
leadership of the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, and other right-wing organizations were
obviously more and more willing to accept the old demand that the Jews be legally
driven out of certain areas of public life. This increasing willingness was not
evident from public decrees but it was clearly detectable in the public statements
of leading right-wing intellectuals and it manifested itself in the policies of
organizations discussed above that were prepared to exclude Jews definitively
from their membership for fear of criticism from the National Socialist camp. 94
In 1933 the radical anti-Semites had triumphed in the matter of exclusion after a
struggle that had lasted more than fifty years. With the imposition of their radical
viewpoint towards the ‘Jewish question’ they had won a significant symbolic
victory that in turn emphasized their leading role amongst the political right.
However, it is not the gradual erosion of conservative reservations about taking
on radical anti-Semitic positions that explains how the National Socialists were so
easily able to introduce their anti-Semitic policies immediately upon taking
power. There is an additional important factor: in the last years of the Weimar
Republic there were no significant political or social groupings that might have
26
Historical Background
prevented the success of the radical anti-Semitic movement. The Liberals who had
inscribed the emancipation of the Jews on their banners in the nineteenth century
(even though they were mainly concerned with founding a German nation state in
which non-Christians could also thrive as citizens with equal rights) no longer
existed as a political force by the early 1930s. 95 Anti-Semitism was also rife amongst Catholics. For religious reasons, because of the Catholic view of mankind, Catholicism was in essence incompatible with radical racist anti-Semitism.
However, this did not cause the Catholic Church to stand up to that form of anti-
Semitism; instead it was by no means hostile to a certain weakening of the Jews’
position in society so that in the end both variants, religious and racist, were
mutually supportive. And the workers’ movement, which was relatively clear of
anti-Semitism, saw it principally as a diversion from the realities of the class
struggle and did not take the anti-Semitic demands of the National Socialists
especially seriously. They did not seriously fear their implementation, and in the
view of the Socialists these demands ultimately undermined the interests of
‘capital’ (including the stereotype of the ‘Jewish capitalist’ that was also prevalent
in the workers’ movement). 96 This, then, was the political scenario that faced the National Socialists in 1933 when they began to put their anti-Semitic policies into
practice.
Part I
RACIAL PERSECUTION, 1933–1939
This page intentionally left blank
chapter 1
THE DISPLACEMENT OF THE JEWS FROM
PUBLIC LIFE, 1933–1934
Before the war German Jews were the victims of three waves of Nazi anti-
Semitism, each of which inaugurated a new stage in their persecution. The unrest
of March 1933 was followed by the boycott of 1 April and the first anti-Semitic
laws, which initiated the process of driving Jews out of the public sphere. The
second wave began in spring 1935 with renewed anti-Jewish attacks, which reached
their pinnacle in the summer of the same year. The regime responded by pro-
mulgating the Nuremberg Laws, which discriminated against the Jews by assign-
ing them a special status that was defined in increasingly narrow and restrictive
terms as time went on. Then, in 1938, after a relatively long preparatory phase that
seemed from the outside more like an easing of policy towards the Jews, there
followed the third wave of anti-Semitism. After the violent excesses of summer
and autumn 1938 had culminated in the November pogrom, the regime decreed
the complete disenfranchisement of the German Jews, statutory steps towards
their total economic depredation, and their enforced expulsion.
Each of these three waves is marked by a characteristic dialectic between
‘campaigns’ arising in the ‘grass roots’ of the Party and measures taken by the
Nazi leadership. The anti-Semitic rowdyism of the National Socialist mob was
always followed by decrees from the leadership, which in turn instituted a whole
series of legal and administrative measures aimed at persecuting the Jews and
30
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
thereby initiated a new step in the persecution process. These three anti-Semitic
waves from the pre-war period must be seen in the context of the racism that was
at the heart of National Socialism.
At the heart of National Socialist political thinking was the idea that all the
most pressing problems besetting Germany could be solved with the introduc-
tion of a fully comprehensive ‘new racial order’. What was to be created was a
racially homogeneous ‘national community’ consisting of biologically superior
‘Aryan’ or ‘Germanic’ Übermenschen. But this racial utopia was based on their
absurd and inconsistent concept of race: it was simply not possible to use
inherited biological criteria to reduce the populations of Central Europe to
their ‘racial’ components and at the same time maintain the view that the
majority of these people represented something approximating to a homoge-
neous blood-related community. Tellingly, contemporary ‘experts’ on race
solved this problem by qualifying the majority of the population of Central
Europe as a racial ‘mixture’ or blend. This meant that any policy that attempted
to define members of the ‘Aryan’ race according to clearly distinguishable
criteria, and to make a positive selection of ‘racially valuable’ individuals, was
doomed to failure from the outset. If the Nazis had actually attempted to
implement such policies across the board, either the inhabitants of Central
Europe would have been subjected to a form of racial hierarchy defined by the
proportion of ‘Aryan’ blood in their veins, or the definition of ‘Aryanism’ would
have had to be so broad as to apply to a very large proportion of those living on
the continent of Europe. In either case, a policy of ‘positive’ racial discrimination
such as this was not workable, and would inevitably founder on its own abstruse
premises.
The only practical way to implement racial policy was therefore to use negative
criteria. National Socialist racial policy consisted above all in the exclusion of so-
called ‘alien races’ and in the ‘racially hygienic filtration’ of the weaker members of
the native ‘Germanic’ race. Nazi racial policy thus always consisted of the exclu-
sion or ‘eradication’ of minorities. For historical reasons, Judenpolitik was bound
to play a central role within racial policy that operated along ‘negative’ lines in this
manner. The Jewish minority was only superficially integrated into society. There
was a traditional image of the Jew as ‘enemy’, an age-old prejudice, and existing
anti-Semitic stereotypes assisted in constructing a scenario in which ‘the Jews’
represented a serious threat both as ‘enemies within’ and as the adherents of a
worldwide conspiracy. In addition, Entjudung or the removal of the Jews, offered