between Jews and non-Jews; the introduction of a separate citizenship law for
Jews; and massive restrictions to the rights of Jews in the areas of finance and the
economy. The regime consistently saw segregation as a prerequisite for the
ultimate goal of Judenpolitik, already in view at this point, namely the complete
expulsion of the Jewish minority from Germany.
Realizing these aims meant more to the National Socialists than the intensifi-
cation of Jewish persecution. They had an important general domestic policy
function since they offered significant starting points for improving the Nazi
movement’s penetration of German society. Demands for a ban on ‘racial misce-
genation’, subjecting people’s choice of partner to the control of the National
Socialist state, represented a radical break with the concept of the ‘private sphere’
that had hitherto been a central constitutive element of bourgeois society. Attempts
Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7
53
to put these aims into practice questioned the notion that there existed behind a
public sphere controlled by the National Socialists an inviolable space into which
the individual might withdraw. The regime pursued the same goal of controlling
the private sphere whilst simultaneously attempting to prevent eugenically
undesirable marriages, and a Marriage Health Law was to follow on immediately
after the Nuremberg Laws. Yet again, there are close parallels between anti-Semitic
and other racist policies. With the introduction of elite Reich Citizenship Rights
(Reichsbürgerrecht), not only were Jews given their own special class of limited
rights but the very principle of equality of citizenship was abandoned. The Reich
Citizen’s enjoyment of full legal rights had to be earned—according to plans drawn
up and announced publicly—by demonstrating that he fulfilled criteria as yet
undefined but which were to be prescribed by the National Socialist state. The
measures against Jews planned in the economic sphere (exclusion from certain
trades, marking out Jewish businesses, complete expulsion from public office, etc.)
not only heralded direct economic advantages for owners of small businesses
under the aegis of the NSDAP; they also offered the Nazi movement as a whole
the potential to use increased intervention as a means of politicizing the entirety of
economic life in a manner that was essentially racially inspired.
The radicalization of the persecution of the Jews in 1935 was closely linked to an
intensified attack on the Catholic Church and on conservative circles labelled
reactionary by the regime. The main target was the German-nationalist veterans’
organization ‘Stahlhelm’ (Steel Helmet), which was eventually dissolved
altogether. After the SA was ‘decapitated’ in June 1934, the regime began to
consolidate its domestic political position on a broad front by eliminating all its
opponents. The intensification of anti-Jewish policy was thus only one aspect—if
clearly a central one—of the regime's increasing repressiveness.
Preparations for the National Socialists’ increasing penetration of the depths of
German society were made at the end of 1934 with a comprehensive restructuring
of the public sphere. The campaign against ‘the Jews’, which was conducted
alongside attacks against ‘the Priests’2 and ‘reactionary forces’, was intended to divert Nazi-controlled ‘public opinion’ from the obvious inadequacies of the ‘Third
Reich’ and focus it instead on new topics, values, and models explaining reality.
This restructuring of the public sphere was no mere propaganda campaign; it was a
mixture of targeted media deployment, Party-instigated terror and state coercion.
Under the dictatorship, restructuring the public sphere did not just mean using
propaganda to lead public opinion in one direction or another, or influencing the
public ‘mood’ in a particular manner. The regime was not primarily concerned
with genuinely winning the hearts and minds of the German people. Instead the
restructuring of the public sphere was achieved first and foremost as the everyday
life of the population began to conform overtly to NS norms and thus give
external expression to their acceptance of the regime’s politics. The segregation of
the Jewish minority, for example, was not only achieved by a series of administrative
54
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
measures, but above all because the majority of the population demonstrated their
distance from the Jews in the conduct of their everyday lives and were thus seen to
be bowing to the instructions of the Party. Such behaviour had to occur in full public
view, so that the general population’s deliberate distancing from the Jewish minority
could be presented in the state propaganda as the popular confirmation of the
regime’s policies. In this way, the ‘boycott’ of Jewish businesses and the prevention
of contact between Jews and non-Jews (which was ensured in a variety of ways, from
the numerous residence bans to accusations of ‘racial defilement’) took on a
particular symbolic significance—not only encouraging further discrimination
against Jews but demonstrating the apparent endorsement of the regime’s racial
policies by the people at large.
The innumerable illegal operations undertaken by Party activists against the
Jews—boycotts, demonstrations, daubing buildings with paint, smashing win-
dows, and so forth—also played an important role in the process of restructuring
the public sphere. These were not merely instances of excessive activism on the
part of radical Party supporters but part of a targeted attempt to impose segrega-
tion by means of many small-scale trials of strength both against the police,
judiciary, and state administration and in the face of an indifferent majority
amongst the population. It was a trial run for what was eventually to be the legally
sanctioned isolation of the Jews, which would later be adopted by broader sections
of the population, with even a degree of relief. The function of the so-called
‘individual operations’ was as stages in the step-by-step imposition of racial
views onto society at large.
If the anti-Jewish campaign of spring and summer 1935 is seen in this broader
context, therefore, it is clear that from the point of view of the regime it consti-
tuted the key to subordinating the whole of German society to the Nazi regime via
the establishment of racial norms.
Anti-Jewish Violence
The hostility to Jewish businesses that had flared up again in the Christmas boycott
of 1934 was revived with renewed vigour from early February 1935 in various areas
of the Reich, fanned by appeals from regional NS leaders and the Party press.
Immediately after the National Socialist triumph in the Saar Plebiscite of 13
January, when 90 per cent of voters opted for reunion with Germany, the
foreign-policy considerations that had so far militated against the pursuit of radical
anti-Jewish persecution no longer seemed to Party activists to be relevant. As part
of the boycott Party activists organized demonstrations, smashing windows
and assaulting Jews. These operations were focused in Pomerania, Hesse
, the
Rhineland, and Franconia. Alongside attacks on Jewish businesses and their
proprietors the activists also targeted so-called ‘race defilers’. Since the end of
Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7
55
1934 there had been increasing demands from within the Party for legal measures
to prevent marriages or sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews. 3
These unofficial steps were accompanied by measures sponsored by the state.
When the Gestapo banned the raising of the swastika by Jews in February 1935, the
Reich Minister of the Interior felt obliged to sanction this ruling by issuing a
decree, which he did on 27 April. 4 Jews were excluded from the call-up to military service, initiated in May of that year. 5 In addition all émigrés returning to Germany, whether Jews or non-Jews, were sent to internment camps from the
beginning of 1935.6
At the end of April the instances of anti-Semitic violence began to diminish.
There were doubts expressed in various quarters about continuing operations that
had not led to changes in how the general public shopped and which had been met
with widespread criticism and opposition from the populace at large. 7
There were evidently also foreign-policy considerations in play. The government
was anxious to overcome what was by then its almost complete isolation on the
international scene after the formation of the ‘Stresa Front’, the joint diplomatic
reaction of France, Britain, and Italy to the German reintroduction of compulsory
military service. Germany was particularly concerned to improve its relations with
Great Britain. Hitler’s Reichstag speech of 21 May, in which he announced the
Reich’s wish for peaceful coexistence with other nations and its willingness to seal
non-aggression pacts, signalled a phase of détente in questions of foreign affairs. At
the same time, negotiations with the British government were taking place, the
source of much disquiet amongst the British public, which ended on 18 June with
the signing of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. In the period from the middle
of April to the middle of June, therefore, further anti-Jewish violence would have
put the foreign policy of the ‘Third Reich’ at some considerable risk. 8
Whilst the violence continued to recede in the main areas of unrest from the
end of April to the middle of May, by the end of May a second series of anti-Jewish
operations was beginning in other areas, intensifying in June and reaching a high
point in July 1935. The month of May presents a very uneven picture, therefore,
since the first phase of violence was receding in some areas whilst the second was
beginning in others. 9
This unrest came to a climax with serious anti-Semitic violence in Munich at
the end of May. There were open confrontations between members of the SA and
SS on the one side and the police on the other. The reactions of high-ranking
National Socialists demonstrate how inconvenient the government found these
spectacular anti-Jewish incidents at this point. 10 The Reichsführer of the SS
(Himmler), the Führer’s Deputy (Hess), the Gauleiters of Cologne (Grohé) and
Hessen-Nassau (Sprenger) all made public declarations of opposition to these
‘individual operations’. 11
In July the Party organization in Berlin made a renewed attempt to radicalize
anti-Semitic policies by means of a wave of terror ‘from below’. 12 Members of the 56
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
Hitler Youth had been organizing demonstrations outside Jewish businesses and
restaurants since the beginning of June, and they spread rapidly throughout the
city. The anti-Jewish mood had also been stoked up very significantly in a speech
by Goebbels, who was also Gauleiter of Berlin, at the 30 June Party rally.
The situation escalated when the Berlin newspaper edited by Goebbels, Der
Angriff, which was as rabidly aggressive as its name suggests, made an open appeal
on 15 July for people to take physical action to prevent disruptions to a Swedish
anti-Semitic film supposedly initiated by Jewish cinema-goers. On that evening
there were riots on the Kurfürstendamm during which NS activists forced their
way into cafés and forcibly drove out Jewish customers, and these ended in
confrontations with the police. The events attracted the attention of the inter-
national press and led to the dismissal of the Chief of the Berlin Police Force, von
Levetzow. Goebbels seized the initiative, issued a ban on the very acts of violence
that he had himself been partly responsible for encouraging, and managed to
restore at least a superficial level of goodwill between the police, the city author-
ities, the Gau leadership, and the SA, with a slogan promising the systematic
cleansing of Berlin of ‘Communists, Reactionaries, and Jews’. 13 The violence in Berlin was the starting gun for a new anti-Semitic propaganda campaign that now
extended across the whole of the Reich.
The reports of the Centralverein, the Gestapo, the SPD in exile, and other
sources show quite clearly that NS activists were once more carrying out large-
scale anti-Jewish operations across the Reich from mid-July onwards. Regional
centres for this violence were the Rhineland, Westphalia, Hesse, Pomerania, and
East Prussia. 14 The list of the techniques typically employed includes blockading and obstructing Jewish businesses, threatening customers who tried to get past
these measures, driving Jews from public swimming pools, smashing windows and
daubing shopfronts with paint, desecrating Jewish cemeteries and synagogues,
putting up anti-Jewish signs, and preventing the sale of goods to Jews. ‘Race
defilers’ often had to be taken into protective custody by the Gestapo after attacks
by Party activists. In many places Jewish economic life was destroyed altogether by
the end of the summer as a result of these large-scale hate campaigns.
Radical forces within the Party made an attempt to make a link between the
wave of anti-Jewish sentiment and a general reckoning with all ‘enemies of the
state’ still present in Germany. Thus in many cities Party activists organized
demonstrations against supposedly anti-social businessmen and senior officials
who refused to bow to the demands of local Party bosses. 15 The newspaper Der Stürmer, edited by the radical Nuremberg Gauleiter, tried in June to summarize
the whole campaign in a nutshell:
Who are the enemies of our state? We group them together under the heading ‘reaction-
aries’. And this reaction is a tangled, many-coloured skein. We can see red flags. We can see coal-black flags. We can see flags of black, red, and gold. We can even see a few black, white, Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7
57
and red flags. The leader of this reactionary rabble is the Jew. The Jew is the general leading the whole reactionary army. 16
At the end of July, before the anti-Jewish wave of terror and the campaigns of
violence had reached their climax, there were already attempts being made by the
NS leadership and the Reich government to stem the tide and to address the main
anti-Semitic demands of the Party activists with the help of legal measures.
It was quite evident that the wave of terror was not achieving the level of public
support that it had intended. It had not succeeded
in its original aim of deploying
the ‘Jewish question’ to improve the popular mood, which was still as low as it had
been before, and was if anything getting worse during the summer. 17 In a circular to the Party of 9 August Martin Bormann (who ran the office of the Führer's
deputy, Hess) informed Party functionaries that Hitler had given the order to all
responsible Party offices to cease ‘individual operations’ against Jews. 18
The Nuremberg Laws
At the same time as the Party leadership was making efforts to stem the tide of
anti-Semitic violence, legal measures were being instituted with the aim of regu-
lating the three key elements behind the campaign of violence: ‘racial defilement’
and ‘mixed marriages’; economic discrimination; and the exclusion of Jews from
German citizenship.
Demands for penalties against ‘racial miscegenation’ were central to the
NSDAP’s racial policies. In March 1930 the NSDAP group in the Reichstag had
introduced a draft bill in this area that made provision for the death penalty in
severe cases. 19 Before 1933 the NSDAP leadership had already worked up several draft bills aimed at the ‘separation of races’. 20 In 1933, after preliminary work conducted by a group of experts selected from amongst Party functionaries and
civil servants, the Prussian Minister of Justice had proposed a draft bill, but it was
not taken up by the commission that had been set up to manage the reform of
criminal law. 21 After a law had banned ‘mixed marriages’ for soldiers and reservists in May 1935,22 and district courts had started to cover for registrars who were refusing to marry Jews and non-Jews, 23 the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, publicly announced on 25 July that a law against ‘mixed marriages’
was in preparation. On the following day he called upon registrars to postpone
issuing notices of marriage between Aryans and Jews until further notice, since
formal legal regulation of this matter was to follow shortly. 24 The Ministry of Justice had already developed a draft law to combat ‘marriages detrimental to the
German people’, which was intended to prevent marriages with both ‘members of
alien races’ and ‘people with hereditary illnesses’. 25 At the Gau Party rally in Essen on 4 August, Frick announced the legal settlement of the ‘Jewish question’; at the
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 11
