German Jews and paid off, like the Haavara Agreement, through additional
German exports. Jewish assets not transferred in this way were to be used for the
maintenance of Jews unfit for emigration, and would pass to the Reich after their
death. In this way Schacht hoped within three to five years to make emigration
possible for around 400,000 emigrants who were fit for gainful employment and
their families. 7
After Hitler had agreed to these propositions in principle, at the end of
December 1938 Schacht began making the relevant soundings in London. 8 In January he began negotiations with the chairman of the International Committee
for Political Refugees, George Rublee. 9 When Schacht was after a short time relieved of his office as President of the Reichs bank, the negotiations were to be
concluded by Ministerial Director Wohlthat of the Reich Economics Ministry,
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
by the end of February. However, the plan was not realized as it was only
half-heartedly pursued both on the German side (refusal of initialling by the
Foreign Ministry) and on the part of the Committee, and rejected both by foreign
governments and by Jewish circles. 10
In the light of these events the question—unanswerable for the time being—
arises whether the negotiations with Rublee were really seriously pursued by the
regime, or whether they were carried out predominantly for reasons of propa-
ganda. For, however they ended, the German side had grist for its propaganda
mill: if agreement was reached, the power of ‘international financial Jewry’, not
leaving its ‘racial comrades’ in the lurch, was proven; if no solution was reached,
this could be seen as proof of a lack of solidarity and ‘typical Jewish’ egoism and
the great influence of the Jews upon governments abroad.
Central Office for Jewish Emigration
In line with the proposals which Heydrich had already made on 12 November, and
which had subsequently been given concrete form by the SD, to ensure both the
‘final emigration of all Jews’ and the ‘care of less well-off Jews and those unfit for
gainful employment’, 11 on 24 January Goering set up a ‘Central Office for Jewish Emigration’ and parallel with this got under way the subsumption of all Jewish
organizations into a single compulsory organization. 12
The decision to set up the Central Office was made in a series of meetings of
government representatives on 18 and 19 January 1939, after the conviction had
been reached that the negotiations between Schacht and Rublee would lead to
concrete results in terms of emigration. 13
The Central Office, which was to operate according to the model of the Vienna
‘Reichszentrale’, employed representatives of the Foreign Office, the Economics
and Finance Ministries, and the Ministry of the Interior. 14 The direction of the Reich Central Office was formally undertaken by Heydrich, the manager was the
Head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller. With the assumption of responsibilities for
the emigration of the German Jews which, in the opinion of all the offices
involved, was the paramount goal of further persecutory measures, the SS/SD
had finally managed to assume a key role in future Judenpolitik.
Parallel with this the regime initiated the establishment of a unified organization
that would independently secure the minimum level of maintenance and care
required for the remaining Jews, and thus make a considerable contribution to the
complete isolation of the German Jews from the rest of the population. By February
1939 the structure of this new organization was already in place; called ‘the Reich
Association of the Jews in Germany’, it was subject to the supervision of the Reich
Ministry of the Interior, and represented the successor to the ‘Reich Board of
Deputies of the Jews in Germany’, formed in 1933. Compulsory subsumption into
The Politics of Organized Expulsion
127
this organization was only put into force, however, on 4 July 1939, by the Tenth
Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law. 15 The Reich Association was not only to encourage emigration, but also to be responsible for the Jewish school system and
Jewish welfare. 16
Even though no agreement had been reached between the Reich government
and the Intergovernmental Committee, after the November pogrom there was
once again increased emigration of Jews from the territory of the ‘Great German
Reich’. Particularly decisive in this was the fact, among other things, that various
states, including in particular Great Britain and the United States, took in a larger
number of refugees. 17
Another stream of refugees was destined for the international zone of Shanghai,
where there were no restrictions on immigration. In August 1939 there were 14,000
Jewish refugees in Shanghai. 18 By the end of 1939 around 250,000 Jews had emigrated from the Old Reich Territory. 19
Summary: The State of Judenpolitik before the
Beginning of the War
Once the third anti-Semitic wave had reached its peak, the National Socialist
policy of total segregation of the German Jews had now been realized by extensive
measures in all spheres of life. The Jews, excluded from economic life, led a
wretched existence in complete social isolation: they lived on savings deposited
in blocked accounts, from which sums for their immediate needs could be
withdrawn only with permission from the Gestapo, Jewish welfare aid, or the
minimal wages from Jewish work deployment. Jews could only be economically
active for other Jews, for example as Rechtskonsulenten (legal advisers), Kranken-
behandler (treaters of the sick), or as hairdressers, lodgers etc. 20
According to the results of the May 1939 census, there were still 213,930 ‘faith
Jews’ (i.e. members of synagogues) living in the Old Reich Territory. The concen-
tration of Jews in cities had intensified. There was a disproportionately high level
of old people among the Jews living in Germany: 53.6 per cent were over 50, 21.6
per cent over 65. Only 12.7 per cent were children and young people under 20. As a
result of emigration there was a considerable surplus of women (57.5 per cent). 21
Only 15.6 per cent of the Jews counted in May were in work, almost 71 per cent of
all Jews over 14 came under the category of the ‘unemployed self-employed’. There
were also 19,716 people who did not belong to the Jewish religious community
(more than half were Protestants), but who were graded as ‘racial Jews’, as well as
52,005 ‘half-breeds grade I’ and 32,669 ‘half-breeds grade II’. 22
At the instigation of the NS state the compulsory ‘self-administration’ of the
Jewish minority had been rendered uniform: the religious associations became
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
branches of the Reich Association, the compulsory organization set up in July
1939, which also took over the whole of Jewish care, health, and schooling, as well
as all still existing Jewish organizations. The Reich Association with its local and
branch offices throughout the country thus became the organization that con-
trolled the isolated Jewish sector. Apart from this, the only remaining autonomous
Jewish organization was the Jewish Cultu
ral Association. 23
If the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany, now dissolved, had been a
holding organization of independent Jewish organizations and communities, in
the new, hierarchical organization autonomy was as good as excluded. The
character of the Reich Association as a compulsory organization was also
expressed in the fact that it was also responsible for those people who did not
belong to the Jewish religious community, but were graded as Jews for ‘racial’
reasons. On the social level their task now no longer consisted of supporting needy
Jews alongside state care; falling back entirely on their own resources, they now
also had to undertake the care of the Jews who were completely excluded from the
state social system. In this way the regime had not only discharged responsibility
and expenses; it had also ensured that the Jewish minority was almost completely
isolated from the rest of the population and it had at its disposal a compulsory
organization that it made responsible for the execution of official orders. 24
This set-up, using a Jewish organization to control an isolated Jewish sector and
making it responsible for the implementation of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies,
marked the birth of a new and perfidious form of organization of Judenpolitik: the
Judenrat or Jewish council. After the beginning of the Second World War, the
regime was to create institutions with this title in the occupied territories, which
were to become the executive organs of German policy. This was despite the vain
and desperate hope of their members that they would receive a certain level of
autonomy.
At the same time the consequence of the total segregation of the Jewish minority
and the total withdrawal of their rights, which the Nazi state had carried out in
stages between 1933 and 1939, was that the individual spheres of life affected by
Entjudung, far beyond the exclusion of the Jews, were subjected to a new system of
norms dictated by the National Socialists, the hegemony of racism. As a result of
this complex process the engine of this policy, the NSDAP, was able to extend its
influence into the most diverse spheres and consolidate its pre-eminent position.
Thus the exclusion of Jews, but also of Gypsies, ‘social misfits’, and other groups
from the circle of those receiving state social services, went hand in hand with a
new definition of social policy in terms of Volksplege (care for the Volk), which
would only be available to gemeinschaftsfähige (those capable of being part of the
community), meaning racially ‘valuable’ compatriots, while health care was sub-
jected to the criteria of ‘racial hygiene’.
In parallel with the exclusion of Jews from the education system, racist para-
digms found their way into school education as well as into university teaching
The Politics of Organized Expulsion
129
and research. The extensive Entjudung of the whole of cultural life and journalism
was the starting point for the implementation of an aesthetic defined by the
National Socialists, which presented itself as uncompromisingly ‘German’, a
dictatorship of taste which also affected such important areas of everyday life as
advertising, fashion, and architecture. Anti-Semitic stereotypes were now part of
the basic stock of journalism.
The whole process of the exclusion of the Jews from the economy, which—
guided by the Four-Year Plan Office—served, on the one hand, to finance rearma-
ment, and, on the other, served the needs of a National Socialist clientele, proved
to be a wide gateway for state interventions in the economic sphere, the starting
point for the National Socialist command economy established during the war. By
excluding the Jews from qualified professions and using the same circle of people
for unskilled work in labour columns (like, for example, the detention of the
‘work-shy’ in concentration camps), the labour market was transformed into
‘labour deployment’ (Arbeitseinsatz), organized not least along racist lines; here
important foundations were laid for the slave labour of ‘those of alien race’ during
the war.
The strict prohibitions on everyday contact with Jews could only function with
the help of an extensive system of espionage which, in view of the relatively small
numbers in the Gestapo and the SD, depended upon the support of the population
and in fact functioned so effectively that it inevitably tended towards an abolition
of the private sphere. One other consequence of the gradual implementation of
anti-Jewish policies was that the open terror of the Party activists was finally
acknowledged and legitimized as an appropriate instrument for the implementa-
tion of a policy of exclusion.
In the wake of National Socialist Judenpolitik, between 1933 and 1939 a widely
ramified apparatus of persecution had been constructed. Apart from the special
departments of the Gestapo and the SD and the relevant Party offices (such as the
Office of Racial Policy or Rosenberg’s Institute for Research into the Jewish
Question), within the Reich ministries (as for example the Interior Ministry, the
Foreign Office or the Propaganda Ministry, special Jewish desks, for the purposes
of the ‘de-Judaization’ (Entjudung) of the economy) an extensive apparatus had
been set up, and local government had bureaucratically confirmed discrimination
against the Jews down to the bottom level of the administration.
The implementation of Judenpolitik occurred, as we have seen, in phases, with a
certain tension between the NS government, the state bureaucracy, police appar-
atus, and Party base, and frictions appeared concerning the pace and methods of
anti-Jewish policy: the leadership of the regime allowed a great deal of scope for
initiative on the part of the various institutions involved in Judenpolitik. If these
initiatives proved inadequate or if they went too far, the centre intervened
correctively. But concerning the bottom line of this policy, the gradual exclusion
of the Jews from German society, there was considerable consensus.
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
With the total exclusion of the Jewish minority from German society Juden-
politik had, by the start of the war, reached a certain end point. A further
intensification of discrimination, a continuation of Entjudung was now no longer
possible; after six years of active Judenpolitik it was hardly the time from a
propaganda point of view to treat those Jews who had remained in the country
as dangerous adversaries.
The war, however, was to provide entirely new possibilities for a radicalizing
‘Jewish and racial policy’: in the context of the conquest and penetration of the
European continent, new functions within National Socialist policy fell to the
‘Jewish race in Europe’ and ‘world Jewry’ (so named by Hitler in his Reichstag
speech on 30 January 1939): the National Socialist idea of taking the Jews hostage
was now extended across the whole of the continent: the Jewish minorities in the
conquered countries became important objects of the German policy of occupa-
tion and alliance, and it was at their expense that the ‘new order’ of
the ‘new
Lebensraum’ of the German Volk was primarily to be achieved. Where Juden-
politik had until 1939 been one of the most important instruments of the power-
political penetration of German society, the extension of persecution to the entire
European area and its gradual further radicalization performed in the eyes of the
NS regime a key function for the control of the ‘new Europe’.
PART II
THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS,
1939–1941
The Politics of Annihilation and the War
The beginning of the Second World War saw the inauguration of the National
Socialist regime’s systematic politics of racial annihilation. The start of the war
also marked the start of the physical annihilation of ‘alien races’ and the ‘racially
inferior’ on a vast scale. In 1939 the National Socialist regime set in train two
extensive programmes of mass murder, the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme, or
the systematic murder of sick and disabled inmates of psychiatric institutions, and
the mass murder of members of the Polish elite, including many Jews. The
institution of a terrorist regime in Poland, organized on racist lines, established
a framework for further murder on a huge scale. This is the context, too, for the
extensive deportation programmes that were being developed from the autumn of
1939 onwards and which made provision for the ‘resettlement’ of all Jews under
German rule into a ‘reservation’ in Poland. In the long term, given the inadequate
conditions there, those transported to this ‘reservation’ were intended eventually
to die.
The radicalization of the politics of annihilation at the outset of the war is
linked to the key function that the war had within National Socialism: war was
synonymous with the opportunity to realize the National Socialist utopia of a
comprehensive new social order conceived on racial lines:
Attaining Lebensraum (living space) in the East would create the conditions for
a ‘biological revolution’, which could be achieved via a huge increase in the birth
rate amongst the ‘racially valuable’ sections of the population. It would also
comprise the permanent extirpation of racially undesirable elements within the
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 24
