Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  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,

  126

  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

  128

  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.

  130

  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