Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  come into being, one which was barely capable of emigration and needed some-

  how to be supported, and yet which was to be expelled as a matter of priority

  according to the note sent by the Jewish Department in March. In the light of this,

  a willingness grew within the Party not only to use economic measures, but

  immediately to heighten ‘the pressure to emigrate’ through mass anti-Jewish

  rioting.

  The Riots of Spring 1938: Dry Run for the Pogrom

  This new wave of riots began in Berlin in May 1938. The Berlin events deserve

  particular attention, since it was here that the dialectic of agitation and subsequent

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  large-scale state intervention typical of Nazi Jewish persecution occurred in

  exemplary fashion, and it is possible to observe patterns of action that are already

  very close to those of the November pogrom.

  In May 1938 the Berlin Commissioner of Police, Count Helldorf, in response to

  a request from Goebbels, presented a ‘Memorandum on the treatment of the

  Jews in the Reich capital in all areas of public life’24 that contained suggestions for a programme of the almost complete segregation of the Berlin Jews. These

  were predominantly suggestions that were to be realized over the coming years,

  including labelling (by special ID cards), exclusion from public schools and cultural

  and leisure institutions, the marking of Jewish businesses, the concentration of

  Jews in particular areas of the city, and so on.

  When the Jewish Department of the SD was briefly given access to the memo-

  randum, it responded with alarm. 25 It raised the criticism that the memorandum did not embed the planned measures in a Reich-wide concept, and that it contained no references to emigration. Goebbels reacted to these objections, which

  had been presented to him along with the memorandum, 26 by recommending that the points particularly characteristic of Berlin be turned into general Reich-wide

  statutory regulations. 27 But he had by no means abandoned the idea of developing, in Berlin, a model for a future ‘Jewish policy’ throughout the Reich.

  During the discussions about the memorandum, early in May 1938 individual

  local groups of Gau Berlin had begun daubing Jewish shops at night and sticking

  posters on them. 28 On 31 May, when the Gestapo arrested more than 300 Jews in a major raid on a café on the Kurfürstendamm, presumably in response to the

  growing ‘popular anger’, Goebbels criticized this action as ‘a complete waste of an

  opportunity’ and demanded more radical measures from the Police Commis-

  sioner. 29 On 10 June, a day before he was presented with the memorandum, Goebbels invited the heads of the Berlin police to the Ministry of Propaganda,

  where he took the opportunity to call for a more radical approach in the ‘Jewish

  question’:30 ‘I am really going all the way. Without any sentimentality. The watchword is not law, but harassment. The Jews must leave Berlin. The police

  will help me to achieve it.’

  Over the next few days Goebbels ensured that the anti-Jewish atmosphere that

  he had systematically stirred up in Berlin was combined with the Reich-wide

  major action by the criminal police against ‘social misfits’ to form a campaign

  against ‘Jewish criminals’.

  The ‘Asocial Operation’31 was intended to send thousands of tramps, beggars, pimps, and others to concentration camps for the purposes of the ‘labour mobilization programme’. In addition, all Jews who had been sentenced to previous

  convictions of at least one month were to be drawn into this operation. This

  extension of the operation, as a private remark of Heydrich reveals, goes back to a

  direct decision by Hitler, to arrest ‘anti-social’ and criminal Jews across the Reich

  to carry out important earth-moving works. 32

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  Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

  In Berlin alone, within the context of the ‘Asocial Operation’ the police arrested

  between 1,000 and 2,000 Jews for minor misdemeanours, traffic offences, ‘pro-

  vocative behaviour’, and the like. In Buchenwald concentration camp alone there

  were already more than 1,200 Jewish prisoners in the summer of 1938.33

  In parallel with this, the anti-Jewish riots that had continued since May in

  various districts of Berlin were now systematically extended by the Berlin NSDAP

  to the whole of the city. Not only were Jewish shops and Jewish legal practices

  ‘labelled’ with daubings, but many windows were smashed and in the night of

  18 June three synagogues and two prayer houses were demolished. 34

  The fierce riots and the mass arrests happening at the same time systematically

  created a bloodthirsty atmosphere throughout the capital, which Goebbels now

  plainly wanted to use to enforce the special measures he had demanded against

  the Jews. On 21 June, however, it was decided at a meeting of the Party and police

  leadership that the operation should be terminated. 35

  Goebbels noted in his diary entry for 22 June concerning the previous day’s

  events:

  Helldorf got my orders completely the wrong way round: I had said, the police acts with a legal face, the Party looks on. The reverse is now the case. I get all the Party agencies together and issue new orders. All illegal actions have to stop. The Jews are to clean their shops up themselves. Funk must get a move on with his measures. And incidentally there is something good about this kind of popular justice. The Jews have been given a shock, and

  will know better than to see Berlin as their Eldorado. 36

  In fact, however, the operation, as an internal note from the SD reveals, had

  been terminated after a personal intervention on Hitler’s part. 37 In the case of the Berlin June Operation—unlike all other anti-Jewish actions in which the role of

  the ‘Führer’ was carefully concealed by the Party—it is possible to reconstruct in

  detail the central role played by Hitler: not only had the ‘Führer’ personally

  authorized the inclusion of Jews in the ‘Asocial Operation’, and involved himself

  in details of the propaganda justification of the deployment of police against the

  Berlin Jews, 38 but now he had personally also declared the end of the operation.

  Major riots and broken windows, damage to synagogues, a close collaboration

  between vandals and police, and finally the attempt to mobilize a supposed

  popular movement for the enforcement of drastic state measures aimed at the

  expulsion of the Jews—the essential elements of the Berlin June Operation

  suggested that this was the dry run, staged to a large extent by Goebbels, for the

  pogrom that was organized in November. The cause for the termination of the

  Operation may have been that, in the spring of 1938, the ‘Third Reich’, in view of

  the unfolding Sudeten crisis, wanted to avoid anything that might intensify anti-

  German feeling in the West, and which might increase the chances of a military

  intervention against the ‘Third Reich’—unlike the situation in November, when

  such foreign policy considerations were no longer relevant.

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  105

  The SD saw the Berlin Operation as the confirmation of its attitude that the

  primary goal, the emigration of the Jews, could only be achieved by a systematic

  policy of expulsion that excluded uncontrolled acts of violence. According t
o the

  leader of Division II of the SD, Professor Franz Six, in his message to Higher

  Command South (Oberabschnitt Süd), the operation in Berlin had shown that in

  future ‘no Party operation’ might occur ‘without previous authorization from the

  local police authority’, and such operations had to be most keenly overseen by the

  SD, to channel violent measures against the German Jews. 39 On 5 July SD

  Headquarters informed the Higher Commands (Oberabschnitte) that the head

  of the Security Police, Heydrich, had ‘because of the events in Berlin, reserved to

  himself the granting of permission for individual actions against the Jewish

  population in the Reich’. 40

  The Berlin Operation was followed in June/July by further riots against Jewish

  businesses, particularly in Frankfurt, Magdeburg, and Hanover, but also in Stutt-

  gart. But by the end of July these attacks, expressed in daubings, boycotts, and so

  on, had subsided once more. 41

  Forced Expulsion

  With the International Conference on Refugees held in July 1938 in Evian on the

  initiative of President Roosevelt in July 1938, and the formation of the Intergov-

  ernmental Committee on Political Refugees, the German side gained the prospect

  of the expulsion of the Jews from the Reich area being made an internationally

  soluble ‘problem’. 42 First of all, however, according to a report on the conference produced for Heydrich by the Jewish department of the SD, it was ‘the most

  urgent task for the immediate future to cause as many Jews as possible to emigrate

  under the existing conditions while no decisions have been made by the new

  Committee’. But foreign currency would have to be raised for the purpose. 43

  With the dissolution on 30 August of the state Zionist organization, already

  demanded by the Jewish department in February 1938 because of diminishing

  chances of emigration, the regime finally abandoned the option of encouraging it

  through apparent support of Zionist efforts to emigrate to Palestine. 44

  Meanwhile in Austria, Eichmann was developing a model that might speed up

  the expulsion of the Jews, without eating into the Reich’s foreign-exchange

  reserves. Since April Eichmann had been acting as the official responsible for

  Jewish affairs in the local SD regional headquarters (Oberabschnitt), where he was

  initially responsible for the control of Jewish organizations. To accelerate the

  emigration, Eichmann took the initiative and saw to it that Reichskommmissar

  Bürckel set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration, formally under the control

  of SD Oberabschnittsleiter Walther Stahlecker, but actually run by Eichmann

  himself. 45 In fact, with this office, established by a state official, the Reichskommissar, the SD had for the first time succeeded in exercising executive functions in

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  its own right. 46 Eichmann and the SD’s young ‘Jewish experts’ saw this decision as the opportunity to involve themselves energetically in the persecution of the Jews.

  The expulsion of the Viennese Jews was to provide the model case.

  The Central Office, based in the Palais Rothschild, contained branches of all

  authorities required to be involved in applications to emigrate. Eichmann was to

  describe the basic concept of the Central Office in his police interrogation in

  Jerusalem as ‘a conveyor belt. The initial application and all the rest of the

  required papers are put on at one end and the passport falls off the other end.’47

  By means of this conveyor-belt-like process the applicants could be herded

  through the building and be stripped almost seamlessly of their remaining assets.

  With this money, extorted from Jews who were forced into emigration, Eich-

  mann set up an ‘emigration fund’. The Central Office also sent officials from

  Jewish organizations abroad to negotiate emigration places and obtain foreign

  currency. 48 By placing the burden of finance for emigration on the expelled individuals themselves, or on foreign-aid organizations, Eichmann had shown

  in exemplary fashion that one of the chief obstacles to larger-scale emigration, the

  question of cost, could be solved.

  In the balance sheet drawn up by the Central Office for 1938, however, it was

  apparent that the number of emigrating Austrian Jews had not increased in spite

  of the introduction of the ‘conveyor belt’. Whereas 46,000 Austrian Jews had

  emigrated in the five months from March to August 1938, the figure for the period

  between 26 August—the day the Central Office opened—and the end of the year

  was 34,467—a development that, given the diminishing opportunities for emigra-

  tion overall, the Jewish department neverthless considered a success. 49

  But the ruthless expulsion of the Jews from Austria was only able to work

  because of the considerably more radical line taken in that country, particularly

  through the combination of riots, expulsions, and complete expropriation, and

  even then only for a limited period of time.

  The Sudeten crisis made it very clear to those responsible for Germany’s

  Judenpolitik that they constantly had to reckon with the possibility of entering a

  war before the emigration of the German and Austrian Jews was complete. The

  previous general plans, on the other hand, had always been based around a longer-

  term preparation for war, in which the Entjudung of Germany was considered an

  important precondition for the achievement of readiness for war in terms of the

  economy and morale. Now, though, there was suddenly a real prospect of having

  in the country, during a war, several hundred thousand people who were seen as

  enemies of the state.

  One initial suggestion as to how this situation might be overcome was made by

  the head of the SD Jewish Department, Herbert Hagen, early in September under

  the title ‘Activity of the Department in the Event of Mobilization’. 50 Apart from the ‘arrest of all Jews of foreign nationality to prevent their making contact with

  other countries’, Hagen suggested (as their deployment in Ersatzreserve II51 would Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

  107

  contradict the ‘military ethos of the German army’) the ‘accommodation of all Jews

  in special camps and their deployment in munitions production and other work on

  the home front’; Jewish women who were unfit for war work could ‘look after those

  in need of help’. If mobilization were to occur after the planned census (which was to

  make the complete record of all Jews possible for the first time, Hagen went on to say,

  ‘the definition of a person’s Jewish character should be undertaken according to the

  stipulations of the Reich Citizenship Law, unless particular reasons relating to the

  intelligence service or the security police require special treatment’. The document

  does not reveal whether the term ‘special treatment’ merely refers euphemistically to

  an exemption from the stipulations of the Reich Citizenship Law or—which in my

  view seems more likely—is supposed to refer, according to the usual terminology of

  the SS, to the liquidation of this group.

  Between Sudetenland Crisis and Pogrom: Increasing

  Attacks on the German Jews

  A further brutalization of ‘Jewish policy’ began in September with the e
nd of the

  Sudetenland crisis, when Party activists resumed their anti-Jewish operations. As

  in the summer riots, these activists were still determined to intensify the pressure

  to emigrate still further. The tension that had built up during September in the

  face of the expectation of the immediately impending military conflict was now

  discharged in direct acts of violence by Party activists against Jewish property and

  Jewish life, which put the activities of the summer in the shade.

  This connection between a foreign-policy crisis and increased outbreaks of

  anti-Semitic hatred was established, for example, in a report by the SD for the

  month of October, 52 according to which ‘the increasing anti-Jewish attitude of the population, which was chiefly caused by the provocative and impertinent behaviour of individual Jews during the period of the foreign policy crisis’, found ‘its

  most powerful expression in actions against the Jewish population, which in the

  south and south-west of the Reich partly assumed the character of a pogrom’.

  According to an SD report that would not be dispatched because of the events

  of 9 November, the operations in late September/October were at first largely

  concentrated upon the area of the SD regional headquarters South, South-West,

  West, and Danube, before moving in isolated instances to Danzig and central

  Germany. The focus of the riots lay without question in Middle Franconia. 53

  In many places synagogues were damaged or destroyed beginning in late

  September:

  ^ in Beveringen and Neuenkirchen (Kreis Wiedenbrück) in September;

  ^ in Neuwedel (Neumark) on the night of 28/9 Sept. 1938;

  ^ in Mellrichtstadt (Lower Franconia) on the night of 30 Sept./1 Oct.

  1938; 54

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  ^ in a small village near Euskirchen on the night of 1/2 Oct. 1938; 55

  ^ in Leutershausen on the night of 16/17 Oct.;

  ^ in Dortmund-Hörde on 27/8 Oct.; 56

  ^ in October, in the district of Alzenau (Lower Franconia) two syn-

  agogues were damaged by stones; 57

  ^ at the end of October a tear-gas grenade was thrown into the synagogue

  in Ansbach; 58

  ^ in October the interior of the synagogue in Langen (Hesse) was