Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
Page 23
regulating the Party’s involvement in the context of the disposal of Jewish property. 113
A vivid picture of the practice of Aryanization after the pogrom is contained in
the special report from the mayor of Berlin on the Entjudung of the retail trade
in the Reich capital, published in January 1939. 114 According to this, after the Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9
119
pogrom there were 3,700 retailers; of these businesses about two-thirds had been
‘eliminated’, which had brought considerable relief to the retail trade. In the course of the liquidation procedure, goods ‘from Jewish sources’ were on offer from Economic
Group Retail worth a total of 6 million marks, which typically, after examination by
the responsible expert, were assigned an estimated value of only 4.5 million. Where
the takeover of Jewish business was concerned, ‘immediately after the events of the
night of 10 November such a crush began in the various districts that officials, for
example from the Mitte district, were kept busy all day doing nothing but providing
information to applicants and distributing forms. The first request from applicants
normally involved an application for credit for the takeover of a Jewish retail
business . . . For the bulk of applicants, who were entirely uninformed not only
about the financial side, but also about the retail sector, this prompted the second
question, namely where could they be “sure of finding” a good Jewish business. This
too is proof of the fact that elements who have no business experience are interested
in acquiring Jewish businesses.’ The report went on:
For each individual Jewish retail business there were usually at least 3–4 applicants. Among the retinues [i.e. staffs] various factions then formed, declaring themselves in favour of the various applicants, seeking to support them with numerous visits to more or less responsible officials, while accusing one another of friendship towards the Jews. . . . The retinues of a medium-sized department store near Görlitzer railway station appeared several times in
large numbers at my office even supporting an applicant whom I had already rejected . . . To introduce a certain order among the countless applicants, with the consent of the Reich
Economics Ministry, it was agreed between the Party’s Berlin offices and my department to involve the Berlin district leaders heavily in the selection of applicants . . .
At the front of the queue should be old and outstanding Party members who were injured
during the Kampfzeit. Next come Party members who want to make themselves independ-
ent, but who must have business experience, then those who have suffered loss through
demolition work (in the context of the reconstruction of Berlin), and finally long-term
employees of Jewish firms, as long as they are not Judenknechte [‘servants of the Jews’].
In view of the rush of frequently unqualified applicants for Jewish shops, the
mayor observed that the ‘overall impression’ left by ‘Aryanization’ was ‘not
pleasant’. He himself had not thought it possible that ‘the opportunity as a
German to take over Jewish businesses would prompt such an extraordinary
rush of applications’, or ‘that circles of whom it would not have been expected
often asked the person reporting whether he didn’t have “a good Jewish
property available”, could provide information about the whereabouts of Jewish
furniture etc.’.
To the taxes that had already been introduced, which were specially designed
for the economic looting of Jews, further financial burdens were added after the
pogrom. The contribution imposed on the German Jews raised a total of 1,127
billion RM. 115 The Jewish Assets Tax, imposed from December 1938, further 120
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
empowered the authorities to raise taxes for the benefit of the Reich through
‘Aryanization’. According to an order of 8 February 1939 issued by the Reich
Economics Minister the tax was to constitute 70 per cent of the difference
between the official estimated value and the price actually paid. 116 On 10 June 1940, Goering passed an ‘Order concerning the Verification of Entjudung
deals’, 117 which was intended as a compensation tax on all those Aryanization sales undertaken since 30 January 1933 in which the buyer had realized a
‘disproportionate benefit’.
There was also a special emigration tax, which had been levied since the end of
1938 by police stations or Gestapo offices in various places, and which—to some
extent at least—was used for the financing of emigration. One such tax had been
levied by the Gestapo in Hamburg since December 1938, 118 while the Chief of Police in Berlin, according to Heydrich, introduced a ‘special tax on wealthy Jews’,
which by February 1939 had already brought in three million RM, which were paid
to the Reich Economics Ministry. 119
These regulations were made standard for the whole Reich area from March
1939. With a decree of 25 February, issued to all Gestapo headquarters, 120 the Chief of the Security Police determined that ‘a special tax as a single extraordinary
contribution’ should be levied on all Jews upon emigration. The tax was to be
graded according to the assets of the emigrating individuals, and used to promote
the emigration of Jews without assets. 121 By virtue of the fact that the Jews now had to finance their own expulsion, a highly efficient connection between economic
robbery and forced ‘emigration’—on the model created by Eichmann in Vienna—
had been put in place. Altogether the various taxes and levies resulted in the
comprehensive financial theft of Jewish property.
Jewish Forced Labour before the Start of the War
Even before Reichskristallnacht, bureaucratic efforts had got under way to deploy
Jews for forced labour. From the regime’s point of view, the tense situation in the
labour market suggested, on the one hand, that the Jews excluded from economic
life could be used again as a workforce (separated from non-Jewish workers and in
subordinate occupations); on the other hand, the regime certainly also hoped that
through tough working conditions the pressure towards emigration could be
further heightened; an important additional factor for the introduction of forced
labour was also the hope of a reduction in state welfare costs. 122 After the pogrom forced labour, alongside forced expropriation, residence prohibition, and detention in camps, became one of the central elements of the forced regime imposed
upon the Jews.
Concrete plans for the forced labour deployment of Jews had begun in the
summer of 1938. At the meeting held in Goering’s office on 14 October, the
Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9
121
proposal had been made to establish ‘Jewish labour columns’; 123 the President of the Reich Labour Exchange had issued instructions to the labour offices to report
all Jews registered as unemployed. 124 In Vienna several hundred Jews had been deployed since as early as October in closed columns working apart from other
workers; an extension of this ‘labour deployment’ in Austria—mostly in quarrying
and similar heavy labour—was planned. Entirely in the spirit of the forced labour
that was to come, in October the Reich Labour Exchange had rejected the
suggestion of allowing an autonomous Jewish labour exchange to come into
being. 125
After Goerin
g had stated that he was fundamentally in favour of the establish-
ment of Jewish ‘labour formations’, at the meeting on 16 December Frick an-
nounced that in future all Jews without work and assets were to be deployed in
closed labour columns; those who still lived on their remaining assets, on the other
hand, represented a ‘valuable pawn’ and were not to be subjected to the new
compulsory measures. 126
Through a fundamental order of 20 December by the President of the Reich
Labour Exchange it was finally determined that ‘all unemployed Jews who were fit
for work should be employed at a faster rate’, and that to this end they should be
deployed ‘separately’ in public and private enterprises. 127
The German historian Gruner estimates128 that in May 1939 between 13,500 and 15,000 Jews were employed in the closed labour deployment, primarily for building work and communal work such as garbage removal, street cleaning, and so on.
In practice, however, it became apparent that the deployment possibilities for
Jewish workers in local government work were limited. 129
Given these limited possibilities, national deployment in the construction of
Autobahns and dams assumed growing importance; in the summer of 1939 more
than 20,000 Jews were deployed in such work. 130
In the face of this tendency to ‘erect camps for forced labour’ (Verlagerung), the
obvious idea was to put Jewish workers in barracks in the event of war. On
28 February 1939, under the chairmanship of the Interior Ministry’s ‘Jewish
expert’, Bernhard Lösener, representatives of the OKW, the Security Police, and
the Order Police, as well as the concentration camp inspectorate, met in the Reich
Ministry of the Interior to discuss the question of the ‘services to be performed by
Jews in the event of war’. 131
The immediate reason for this discussion was the planned exclusion of the Jews
from any form of military service. During the meeting it was agreed in principle
that in the event of war the German Jews aged between 18 and 55 should be
‘recorded’, which would involve the introduction of compulsory registration with
the police.
Lösener stated that the Jews should be employed ‘in columns, separate from the
“German-blooded” workers, primarily in road-building and the supply of the
requisite material (quarry work)’. Since ‘the work-related deployment’ of the Jews
122
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
was to be seen as ‘a substitute for military service’, their ‘employment and
accommodation must also be tackled in a military form’. This was because ‘The
population would doubtless fail to understand if the Jews were able to pursue
their civilian jobs in war without any significant change in their living conditions,
while the German-blooded compatriots performed their military duties at the
front and at home.’
chapter 6
THE POLITICS OF ORGANIZED EXPULSION
The Extermination Announcements at the Turn
of the Year 1938–1939
Still under the immediate effect of the eruption of violence of the November
pogrom, towards the end of 1938/beginning of 1939, the declarations of leading
National Socialists and the commentaries of the Nazi press began to resonate with
threats of the ‘extermination’ of the Jews.
Thus an article in the SS journal, Schwarze Korps, of 24 November 1938 stated:
‘Least of all do we want to see these hundreds of thousands of impoverished Jews
as a breeding-ground for Bolshevism and a recruiting base for the political and
criminal subhumanity that, as a result of the selection process, is disintegrating
on the margins of our own nationhood. . . . In the event of such a development,
we would face the harsh necessity of wiping out the Jewish underworld just as we
are used to wiping out criminals in our orderly state: with fire and sword. The
result would be the actual and definitive end of Jewry in Germany, its total
extermination.’
After Goering had, at the meeting of 12 November, described ‘an important
reckoning with the Jews’ as ‘a foregone conclusion’, Hitler was also heard speaking
in similar terms on various occasions. When the South African Defence and
Economics Minister, Oswald Pirow, visited Hitler at the Berghof on 24 November,
124
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
to offer him, amongst other things, his services as mediator in an international
solution of the German ‘Jewish question’, he learned from his host that the
‘problem of the Jews’ would ‘be solved in the near future’; this was his ‘unshake-
able will’. It was not only a ‘German, but a European problem’. 1 During the conversation, Hitler moved on to an open threat: ‘What do you think, Mr
Pirow, if I were to take my protecting hand away from the Jews, what would
happen in Germany? The world could not imagine it.’
The minutes of the reception of the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Chvalk-
ovsky by Hitler on 21 January 1939 recorded the following statement by the
‘Führer’: ‘The Jews would be exterminated here. The Jews did not carry out 9
November 1918 in vain, that day would be avenged.’2
In his speech before the Reichstag on the sixth anniversary of the seizure of
power on 30 January 1939, Hitler finally expressed himself in a central, lengthy
passage on the ‘Jewish question’. 3
And there is one thing that I should like to state on this day, memorable perhaps for others as well as us Germans. In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet and was
generally laughed at for it. During my struggle for power it was in the first instance Jewish people who laughed at my prophecies that I would some day assume the leadership of the
state and thereby of the entire nation and then, among many other things, achieve a
solution of the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious but I think that for some
time now the Jews have been laughing on the other side of their faces. Today I will be a
prophet again: if international Jewish financiers within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the nations into a world war, then the consequence will be not the
Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. 4
These extermination declarations, which strikingly accumulate between November
1938 and January 1939, cannot simply be interpreted as a revelation of the
programmatic intention of leading National Socialists, under the effects of the
intoxication of violence unleashed in November 1939. But one must consider
closely the situation of the regime around the turn of the year 1938/9 to recognize
that these declarations were framed in highly ambiguous terms.
The tactical intention of these declarations, particularly Hitler’s speech on 30
January, is clear: by means of the threat of annihilation the pressure of expulsion
upon the German Jews was to be heightened and the willingness of foreign powers
to receive them extorted through a form of blackmail. In this context the contacts
that began in November 1938, leading to negotiations between the Reich govern-
ment and the Intergovernmental Committee created in Evian, are of the greatest
import
ance; the governments of the potential receiving countries and ‘inter-
national financial Jewry’ were to be forced to agree to an extensive solution
through emigration by threats, with the help of a loan and the facilitation
The Politics of Organized Expulsion
125
of German exports (the final abandonment of the boycott against Germany). 5
Secondly, the declaration of the annihilation of the Jews under German rule in the
event of a world war was intended to prevent the formation of an anti-German
alliance of the Western powers in the event of German military action on the
continent. If a war begun by Germany became a world war through the interven-
tion of the Western powers, the Jews in the German sphere of influence would
automatically assume the role of hostages under the threat of death. But the threat
of extermination contained one further perspective: if it remained ineffective, that
is, if emigration made no significant progress and in the event of war the Western
powers could not be restrained from intervening, the locus of ‘guilt’ for a further
intensification of the German persecution of the Jews was, in the view of leading
National Socialists, already clear.
The Negotiations for an International Solution
through Emigration
The international soundings and negotiations which were to be considerably
influenced by the ‘extermination declarations’ had begun in November 1938.
While the German government had consistently refused over the previous few
months to negotiate with the Intergovernmental Committee formed at the Evian
Conference over a financial agreement concerning the promotion of emigration,
Goering’s instruction of 12 November to encourage emigration ‘with all means’
created a new situation.
Early in December Schacht had proposed that the emigration of German Jews be
financed by an international loan; Schacht was thus picking up the initiative of the
Austrian Economics Minister, Hans Fischböck, who had already proposed and
concretely pursued a similar plan. 6 According to Schacht’s plan, the loan was to be underwritten by foreign Jews and guaranteed by the remaining assets of the