Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
Page 18
‘those who, although not professional and habitual criminals, endanger
the generality by their antisocial behaviour’. Preventive custody, fundamentally
unlimited, was to be served in ‘closed rehabilitation and labour camps . . . or in
some other way’; in fact it was to be served in concentration camps. 4
In the implementation guidelines for this decree of early April 1938, the Kripo
defined ‘asocials’ (Asoziale) on the one hand as ‘individuals who through minor
but repeated transgressions of the law refuse to fit in with the order taken for
granted in a National Socialist state (for example beggars, tramps (Gypsies)),
prostitutes, alcoholics, individuals carrying infectious diseases, particularly ven-
ereal diseases, who escape the measures of the public health department’; but
according to this ‘asocial’ could also refer to individuals without a previous
conviction if they ‘evade the duty of work and leave concern for their keep to
the generality (e.g. the work-shy, those who refuse to work, alcoholics)’. 5
Since ‘preventive crime-fighting’ (as expressly stressed in the fundamental
decree of 14 December 1937) was to take its bearings from the findings of
‘Criminal Biology’, for the use of ‘preventive’ measures the assessment of the
potential perpetrator’s family history in terms of ‘hereditary biology’ was crucial. 6
This form of assessment was of particular importance in the case of ‘asocials’,
since this group could not be defined by any unambiguous criterion (such as
previous convictions, for example), but chiefly on the basis of its ‘hidden’ inferior
inherited predispositions: for example, someone not in gainful employment
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would only become ‘work-shy’ if other conspicuous ‘asocial’ qualities could be
established. The concept of the ‘asocial’ was, in its very vagueness, unambiguously
racist by nature, since it acted as a negative counter-selection to the striven-for
Aryan racial ideal (which also eluded any precise definition).
In January 1938, while the Kripo, who were actually responsible, were still
preparing their own measures against the ‘work-shy’, Himmler ordered an inde-
pendent Gestapo action against this group. The group in question—individuals
capable of gainful employment who had refused jobs offered to them twice
without justification, or had taken on the work but then abandoned it without
any sound reasons—were to report via the labour offices to the Gestapo stations
and be transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp. The operation began on 21
April 1938 and ended officially on 30 April, although it may possibly have
extended beyond that date. As a result of the arrests in the context of this
operation, by the beginning of June 1938 there were almost 2,000 prisoners in
Buchenwald. 7
The Reich-wide Kripo operation against ‘asocials’ (operation ‘Reich Work-
Shy’) began in the same month. The fact that this operation was to include all
Jews with previous convictions (however minor) clearly reveals the complemen-
tary function of racial hygiene and racist anti-Semitism within the National
Socialist project of a racially homogeneous social order. (The operation will be
examined more closely within the context of the depiction of the third wave of
anti-Semitism.)8
While the persecution of the Gypsies had proceeded along more or less
conventional lines in the first years of the NS dictatorship, between 1936 and
1938 the essential foundations were laid for a systematic persecution of this
population group on a racist basis.
After the Reich Ministry of the Interior standardized the stipulations of the laws
regarding Gypsies in the Länder, in autumn 1936 the Prussian State Criminal
Police Office began to centralize the persecution of the Gypsies. In 1937 the office,
by now transformed into a Reich Criminal Police Office, took over the ‘Gypsy
Central Office’ that had existed within Munich Police Headquarters since 1899,
which now acted as ‘Reich Office to Combat the Gypsy Plague’. 9 From the end of 1938 until the middle of 1939, a criminal police apparatus extending all the way
down to local police authorities was set up to combat Gypsies.
Since autumn 1937, the Reich Criminal Police Office had worked closely with
the Racial Hygiene Research Centre within the Reich Health Authority which,
under the direction of Robert Ritter, focused upon the ‘Gypsy question’. Since
1937 the Research Centre had undertaken an anthropometrical and genealogical
investigation of all Sinti and Roma in the Reich. On the basis of these investiga-
tions the Research Centre produced racial hygiene reports in which distinctions
were made between ‘genuine’ Gypsies and ‘half-breed Gypsies’. The Criminal
Police were able to use this material as a database for the persecution of the
Persecution of Non-Jewish Groups by the Police, 1936–7
93
Gypsies. Towards the end of the war, with about 25,000 reports, Ritter’s institute
claimed to have recorded almost the whole Gypsy population of the Old Reich
territory. 10
After Himmler had taken over the whole of the police in summer 1936, the
persecution of homosexuals was also intensified. 11 Even before the end of the year a ‘Reich Central Office for Combatting Homosexuality and Abortion’ was set up
within the Prussian State Criminal Office, which centrally recorded particular
categories of male homosexuals. For a time the Gestapo was able to take over
control of the Reich Central Office, although with the start of the war this came
back within the sphere of responsibility of the Kripo. 12 Himmler indicated the priority given to the suppression of homosexuality with reference to the fact that
he had stated in March 1937, at a meeting of Kripo and Gestapo leaders, that he
would henceforth measure the effectiveness of the Kripo according to its successes
within the sphere of the battle against homosexuality and abortion. Accordingly
the number of those sentenced for offences against paragraph 175 of the Reich
Penal Code suddenly rose: from 766 (1934) to over 4,000 (1936) and over 8,000
(1938). After 1937, homosexuals with more than three relevant convictions behind
them, with sentences each of at least six months’ imprisonment, were sent to
concentration camps once they had served their regular sentences. 13
Finally the police apparatus took systematic action against the so-called
‘Rhineland Bastards’, those young people who were the product of relations
between German women and colonial soldiers from the time of the French
occupation of the Rhineland. As early as 1935 the Specialist Advisory Board for
Population and Race Policy agreed to ‘solve’ this ‘bastard question’ by means of
sterilization, although they were initially unable to reach agreement upon the
procedure. 14 Early in 1937 the decision was redrafted so that Afro-Germans were to be compulsorily sterilized outside the existing legal procedure; a relevant
‘special instruction’ from Hitler seems to have been produced. 15 Accordingly, in the spring of 1937 a special commission was set up which, over the coming
months and with the assistance of three sub-commissions, performed the
sterilization of some 600–800 young people. 16
The practice of German Racial Policy also raised the problem of how the
children of German and non-European foreigners, described in Nazi language
as ‘alien half-breeds’ (artfremde Mischlinge), were to be treated. For this group, the
race legislation was similar. In a document dated February 1937 the Foreign Office
indicated that over the previous two years about fifty cases at most had appeared,
in which ‘the German race legislation was to be applied to non-Jewish alien half-
breeds’. It had turned out that the ‘domestic political interest in an enforcement of
racial legislation was in most cases entirely insignificant, while on the other hand
the fear of foreign political disadvantages was always justified and decisive’.
Generally, then, the emergency regulation intended for such cases had been
applied. The number of those cases in which, because of fundamental ‘racial
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
policy’ considerations, foreign policy concerns had been set aside and it had been
impossible to apply the emergency regulation ‘had numbered about 5 over the past
4 years’. In view of this practice, the Foreign Office suggested that the race
legislation be fundamentally restricted to Jews and that those race laws already
passed be altered, replacing terms such as artfremd (alien) or ‘non-Aryan’ with
‘Jewish’.
On 22 April 1937 the Reich Interior Ministry fundamentally adopted a position
on the relationship between ‘racial policy’ and Jewish policy. The Interior Ministry
established that the ‘final goal of the National Socialist movement . . . was to
eliminate all people of alien blood from the German national body’ (Volkskörper).
Besides, a change in the race laws was inopportune because it would be interpreted
abroad as a ‘sign of insecurity or even of weakness’.
First, however, ‘the most urgent racial problem for the nation, the Jewish
question, was to be legally regulated’, while the ‘question of the legal position of
people with other kinds of alien blood must receive consideration only in so far as
was unavoidably necessary to the movement’s fundamental attitude towards the
race question and in view of the basic significance of this question for the
continuing existence of the nation’.
If, as a consequence, ‘a general restriction of race legislation to the Jews proved
impossible in view of both National Socialist principles and general political
considerations, this would not rule out the possibility of individual exceptions
to stipulations of the race laws, if the foreign political interests of the Reich
urgently required it’.
In a response to the Foreign Office’s suggestion on 28 April, the director of the
Office of Racial Policy of the NSDAP, Walter Gross, also declared his opposition
to a change in the race laws ‘for educational reasons’. The dogmatism of ‘racial
policy’, these statements reveal, went far beyond the sphere of anti-Jewish policy. 17
However, there was a significant difference between the persecution of the Jews
and other groups considered racially inferior, because although the racial policy
measures directed against other groups before 1938 were to some extent more
radical than those of anti-Jewish policy (sterilization, compulsory abortion, cas-
tration, imprisonment in concentration camps), they were primarily directed, in a
‘racially hygienic’ sense, towards the elimination of ‘inferior’ individuals from the
‘Aryan race’, whereby this negative selection (with the exception of the small
group of Afro-Germans) was still preceded by a pseudo-scientific, and yet some-
what elaborate, analysis of individual cases. For National Socialist racial policy, on
the other hand, the Jews constituted a minority which, as a closed group, was seen
as the enemy.
chapter 5
COMPREHENSIVE DEPRIVATION OF RIGHTS
AND FORCED EMIGRATION, LATE 1937–1939
The Third Wave of Anti-Semitism: The Radicalization
of Persecution
The Political Context: Entjudung and Preparation for War
During 1938 the regime responded to the crisis in which the NS regime’s Judenpolitik
found itself at the end of 1937, when faced with dwindling opportunities for
emigration, with a series of radical steps which, taken together, can be described
as the third wave of anti-Semitism of the Nazi era.
The impending radicalization of persecution had already been indicated when,
after the end of the protection of minorities in the former Upper Silesian voting
area, the Reich’s anti-Semitic laws were ruthlessly introduced in the summer of
1937. They were accompanied by riots, boycotts, robberies, broken windows, and
the like. 1 The more radical course was introduced by Hitler’s strongly anti-Semitic speech at the Party rally in 1937, and by the anti-Semitic riots in Danzig (where,
because of its status as a ‘free city’, the German Jewish legislation did not yet
apply) in the second half of October 1937. 2 From the end of the year, anti-Semitic propaganda was massively intensified once again.
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
The clearly more radical course is directly connected with the regime’s expansion
policy, introduced late in 1937, which Hitler announced to the military leadership
and the Foreign Minister on 5 November, and which was then prepared by the
comprehensive reshuffle of staff in the armed forces (the dismissal of the War
Minister, Werner von Blomberg, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army,
Werner von Fritsch, in February 1938) and in the Reich government (the resignation
of Hjalmar Schacht as Reich Minister of Economics in November 1937 and of the
Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, in February 1938). Now all key positions
necessary for the waging of war were in the hands of reliable National Socialists.
With the transition to a policy of expansion, in the mid-term foreign-policy
considerations that had applied until then, and which had hitherto argued against
a further intensification of the persecution of the Jews, were dropped.
There was also no longer the fear that the definitive elimination of the Jews
from commerce would cause major negative economic repercussions. On the one
hand, the general economic situation of the ‘Third Reich’ had been consolidated,
and its dependency on exports had declined. On the other, the economic position
of the Jews had already been so undermined by the ‘boycott’ by Party activists, by
the numerous obstacles raised by state authorities, and the more or less compul-
sory ‘Aryanization’ or liquidation of businesses, that they no longer represented a
major factor in economic life. Finally, by now the network of controlling organ-
izations, taxes, and so on had been perfected to such an extent that the profits
achieved by the sale of Jewish businesses went to the state, the Party, and
individuals (often linked to the NSDAP) with an interest in Aryanization.
From the regime’s perspective there was a further reason to increase pressure on
the Jewish minority once again. Following the gradual general propaganda prepar-
ation of the population for a major
state of emergency in Germany’s dealings with
foreign powers, the Jewish minority was to be assigned the function of an internal
enemy which formed the appropriate object for hatred and aggression.
The transition to the third phase of National Socialist Judenpolitik, which had
been introduced late in 1937, more intensely since spring 1938, and definitively
implemented with the November pogrom, the complete isolation, deprivation of
rights, and expulsion of those Jews still living in Germany became the goal.
For a third time after 1933 and 1935 the mood of the population was to be
remoulded through a large-scale campaign, a new wave of anti-Semitism; after the
exclusion of the Jews from public offices and the separation of the Jewish minority
from the non-Jewish population, the final Entjudung of German society was
placed at the centre of propaganda and of the policy of the regime. Anxieties
aroused by the regime’s risky foreign policy and its repressive domestic political
course were to be deliberately projected upon the image created by the National
Socialists of the Jew as enemy.
The renewed radicalization of ‘Jewish policy’ once again followed the familiar
dialectic of ‘actions’ and administrative or legislative measures, a process lasting
Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9
97
about a year, which was to reach its climax in the November pogrom and the
subsequent anti-Jewish laws. This third phase of National Socialist ‘Jewish policy’
also signified a further extension of power in favour of National Socialism: the
concluding ‘legal’ Aryanization gave the NSDAP and its clientele numerous
opportunities to extend their influence in the economic sphere: with the passing
of diverse special regulations, the Jewish minority was turned into an enforced
community that had to lead a life in the shadows and (along with its remaining
possessions and its labour potential) was exposed to the arbitrary actions of local
potentates. What was crucial, however, was that by virtue of the fact that the open
terror of the Party activists, hitherto unknown to such an extent, which culmin-
ated on 9 November in lootings, arson, abuse, mass transports, and numerous