The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  It took some time for the effects of the law of 7 April 1933 to work their way through the institutions, but by the end of 1933 the purge was for the moment more or less complete. The cooling-down of the leadership’s ardour was not welcome to many Party activists, least of all within the paramilitary Storm Divisions, who organized repeated local boycotts of Jewish businesses during this period, reaching renewed and often violent heights in the spring of 1934. The stormtroopers’ activism was muted for a while following the purge of 30 June 1934, but by the Christmas period at the end of the year, boycott actions were in full swing again. Moreover, local Party organizations also pushed forward the economic marginalization of Jewish businesses in other ways too, as we have seen, and in this area they were encouraged by the Party leadership as well. 65 In the spring and summer of 1935, however, antisemitic violence broke out afresh in many parts of the country. Antisemitic propaganda became more widespread than ever. The circulation of the sensationalist antisemitic paper The Stormer soared in 1935 when its editor, Julius Streicher, the Party Regional Leader of Franconia, secured a contract with the Labour Front for copies to be placed in every factory and workplace in the land. From now on, the paper was omnipresent and inescapable. The deal made Streicher into a millionaire: the paper had always been his personal property rather than the organ of the Nazi-owned Eher Publishing House.66 More immediately, its new-found wealth and power enabled it to advertise more widely than before, with posters seemingly on every street corner. Other Regional Leaders besides Streicher held public meetings and gave speeches to harangue people, and especially Party members, about the evils of the Jew. Behind all this were more general ideological influences, ranging from increased sales of Hitler’s My Struggle to frequent attacks on the Jews in the Party press. Many local groups took all this as giving the green light to go on the offensive once more.67

  The reasons for this recrudescence of attacks on Germany’s Jews by Party groups and stormtroopers in 1935 lay above all in the growing unpopularity of the regime. As we have seen, whatever public euphoria had accompanied the Nazis’ establishment of the Third Reich in 1933 wore off in the course of 1934, and the brief fillip given the regime by Hitler’s decisive action in crushing Röhm’s supposed putsch attempt at the end of June 1934 had dissipated by the end of the year. During the first months of 1935, Gestapo, Security Service and other agents reported a sharp increase in popular discontent, as material conditions remained miserable, real levels of unemployment stayed high, prices of food and other basic necessities rose sharply, and people became wearied of the regime’s constant demands for acclamation, support and money. Rumours and jokes about the corruption of local and regional Nazi bosses multiplied, and all the efforts of the Propaganda Ministry to generate positive popular enthusiasm for the Third Reich seemed to have failed.68 Within the Nazi movement itself, too, the crushing of any remaining hopes for a ‘second revolution’ in June-July 1934 had created a good deal of bitterness. The desire for violent action, ingrained in many parts of the SA, needed a fresh outlet. How could the brownshirts justify their existence, either to themselves or to the Party, except by violent action? That after all was what they had been created for. But the desire to resume a policy of struggle was not confined to disgruntled stormtroopers. The Nazi Party more generally was well aware of the fact that it had not only failed to sustain the enthusiasm of the broader public but was actually losing what support it had ever enjoyed amongst it. Action was needed.

  Not only the Nazi Party but also significant parts of the state and civil service had wanted since the middle of 1933 to introduce measures banning marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, creating a special category of citizenship for Jews, and accelerating the removal of the Jews from economic life. Point 4 of the Nazi Party programme stated unequivocally that in the Third Reich, Jews were not to be citizens, and a number of Hitler’s early meetings, not to mention My Struggle, had made it clear that he was viscerally intolerant of sexual relations between Aryans and Jews. Acting on this principle, the Party’s Reichstag delegation had already unsuccessfully tried to pass a bill to outlaw racial miscegenation in March 1930, with sanctions up to and including the death penalty. Such provisions would also have the effect of extending the Party’s sphere of influence still further, into the most intimate areas of private life. A new citizenship law would, moreover, not just give rights as an automatic consequence of racial identity, but would also apply political criteria, with refractory elements denied civil rights too. Driving the Jews out of economic life would placate the Party’s many lower-middle-class supporters and give them much-desired opportunities to improve their own situation. A fresh campaign of antisemitic propaganda, terror and legislation would divert popular hostility to the regime, it was thought, by putting the blame for the people’s miserable situation firmly onto the Jews.69

  The antisemitic actions carried out in the spring and summer of 1935 took many forms. In May there were, as we have seen, numerous boycotts of Jewish shops organized by stormtroopers and SS men, often accompanied by violence. It was also at about this time that antisemitic street signs were put up by the roadside on the boundaries of many towns and villages. These were not new in principle, for many had already been erected in Julius Streicher’s fiefdom of Franconia, but they were erected in many more places in the spring and summer of 1935, including in southern Bavaria. The commonest slogan painted on them was ‘Jews are not wanted here’, but some essayed ironic understatement (‘Our demand for Jews has been sufficiently supplied’), uttered threats (‘Jews enter this locality at their own peril!’) or tried an appeal to religious sentiment (‘The Jew’s Father is the Devil’).70 In a number of municipalities, including Weimar, local authorities banned Jews from going to the cinema; in Magdeburg all the trams acquired signs placed over the entry doors bearing the words ‘Jews not wanted!’ The same town also stopped Jews from using the city library. Inns and restaurants in Stralsund and other places closed their doors to Jewish customers. Swimming pools and public baths, reported a Social Democratic agent in August, were barred to Jews ‘in innumerable communities’. Jewish cemeteries and synagogues were desecrated. Non-Jews who had relationships with Jews were publicly paraded as ‘race defilers’ and frequently had to be taken into custody by the Gestapo, for once in truth for their own protection. The atmosphere on the streets of many towns in the Rhineland, Westphalia, Hesse, Pomerania and East Prussia was so threatening that many Jewish inhabitants scarcely dared leave their houses any more.71

  Actions such as these were encouraged not only by the general atmosphere of antisemitism but also explicitly by leading figures in the Party. ‘Some people think’, Goebbels told a rally of the Berlin Region of the Nazi Party on 30 June 1935, ‘that we haven’t noticed how the Jews are trying once again to spread themselves over all our streets. The Jews ought please to observe the laws of hospitality and not behave as if they were the same as us.’ Reporting on 15 July that an antisemitic film had been jeered at by ‘troops of Jewish trouble-makers’ on its first performance three days previously, Goebbels’s Berlin Party paper The Attack urged Party members to take violent action: the Jews, it declared, must ‘ever and again feel the flat of our hand’. In fact, the Jewish ‘demonstration’, whether real or invented, was the excuse by which Goebbels sought to justify the antisemitic violence that now inevitably followed, with Party activists beating up Jews on the main shopping street, the Kurfürstendamm, or pursuing them into nearby pubs and bars and physically attacking them. This incident in turn sparked a fresh wave of violent boycott actions in other parts of the country.

  Goebbels was not the only Nazi leader who whipped up his followers in this way. On 30 August 1935, Julius Streicher held a rally in Hamburg. The day before, two lorryloads of stormtroopers drove through streets known to be inhabited by Jews, throwing blazing torches onto the road with chants of ‘Let the Jews perish!’ Party comrades were told that attendance at the rally was compulsory; a massive adver
tising campaign offered tickets at 10 Reichsmarks apiece to the unemployed. Twenty thousand people attended, many of them in SA, SS, Hitler Youth, Labour Service or other uniforms, strategically placed in the audience to lead the applause at preordained points in Streicher’s speech. Working his voice up to a deafening bellow, Streicher inveighed against foreign correspondents who criticized Nazi antisemitism. ‘I say here’, he shouted, ‘that we do what we want with the Jews in Germany!’ As his speech went on, so a listener reporting secretly to the exiled Social Democrats in Prague observed, he became more and more obscene, not only declaring that hundreds of German women had been raped by Jews, but also giving graphic details of these supposed crimes. When one girl gave birth to a baby nine months after marrying a Jew, he went on, ‘what lay there in the crib, comrades?! A little ape!’ Some of the listeners walked out at this; others, drafted in from the Labour Service, had apparently long since fallen asleep. Nevertheless, although ordinary people in the audience seem to have been either indifferent or repelled, such rantings must have had an effect on the committed Nazis amongst them; and they were repeated, if in less extreme form, by other Nazi leaders across the country. Most local and regional Party leaders took Streicher’s insistence that antisemitic actions should be legal and non-violent as nothing more than an attempt to assuage public opinion at home and abroad.72

  II

  Neither this wave of terroristic actions nor the accompanying campaign against the Catholic Church had the desired revitalizing effect on public support for the regime. Indeed, the coincidence of these campaigns caused many Catholics to sympathize with the Jews and to feel, as the Gestapo in Münster reported, ‘that the measures taken against the Jews are going too far’. They were in any case hostile to the idea that race rather than religion should be the guiding principle of social action. Boycotts and, still more, violence, inspired ‘rejection rather than approval’ in the wider population, as another Gestapo agency reported. In Mannheim-Neckarau shoppers even engaged in fisticuffs with stormtroopers who tried to stop them from patronizing Jewish retailers. The middle classes were particularly upset at such open disorder on the streets and feared its impact on foreign opinion. Some took the cynical view that petty-bourgeois Nazi activists were just trying to drive out competition.73

  A Social Democratic agent in Bavaria reported, however, in more nuanced terms:The persecution of the Jews is not meeting with any active support from the population. But on the other hand it is not completely failing to make an impression. Unnoticed, racial propaganda is leaving its traces. People are losing their impartiality towards the Jews, and many are saying to themselves that the Nazis are actually right to fight them; people are only against this fight being exaggerated. And when people shop in Jewish department stores they do so in the first place not to help the Jews but to cock a snook at the Nazis.74

  The Nazi leadership had no objection to the violence in principle, but there was a growing feeling that, whatever Streicher might say, it was having a damaging effect on foreign opinion when the regime still needed sympathy abroad. In the last week of August 1935 it was reported that brownshirts had staged a violent demonstration against the Jews in Breslau and beaten up the Swedish consul in the city in the process. Göring, Bormann and Hess, speaking for Hitler himself, all put the police on notice in late July and early August that uncoordinated terror actions against Jews had to be stopped. As Goring told the Gestapo, general regulations for dealing with the Jews would soon be issued. These were indeed already in the air. Debate had been conducted in a desultory fashion within the Interior and Justice Ministries since July 1934 without getting beyond what were seen as formidable legal obstacles to a new law governing citizenship and interracial sexual relations. On 21 May 1935, however, a new Defence Law included in its provisions the banning of ‘mixed marriages’ between German soldiers and non-Aryan women.

  Local registry offices had already begun to refuse applications for mixed marriages on a wider basis. On 19 July representatives of the Justice and Interior Ministries and Hess’s office proposed a law to prevent such marriages altogether. The matter had become urgent not least because of the numerous attacks on ‘race traitors’ and a wave of arrests of such people by the Gestapo. In May 1935 a new law governing citizenship applications by foreigners already ruled out Jews and other non-Aryans. A consensus on legislative action thus seemed to have been achieved; and as this became clear to local and regional Party organizations at the beginning of September, the wave of violent antisemitic actions finally began to subside, though it did not stop altogether.75

  Not only the idea of a new citizenship law but also a considerable number of concrete proposals for its formulation were therefore familiar to state and Party officials by the time the annual Party Rally began in Nuremberg on 9 September. At this point dock workers in New York who had torn down a swastika flag from a German ship were released by a magistrate with a lengthy denunciation of Nazism and all its works. This so enraged Hitler that he decided on the spot that the time had come to declare the swastika Germany’s national flag. As he told the Party Rally on 11 September 1935, the recent congress of the Communist International in Moscow, which had declared an international war on fascism, demonstrated that it was time to tackle the Bolshevik menace, which he regarded as the product of an international Jewish conspiracy. Hitler summoned the Reichstag to a session in Nuremberg on 15 September, the final day of the Rally; the fact that he could simply command it to attend in this way showed how insignificant it had now become. The Reichstag session, he now decided, would be the opportune moment to introduce the citizenship, miscegenation and state flag laws all in one go. After some hurried, last-minute drafting of the detailed Laws in collaboration with an Interior Ministry official, Hitler introduced them on 15 September 1935. The Jews in Germany, he said, had been using the tense international situation to stir up trouble. ‘Vehement complaints are coming in from innumerable places about the provocative behaviour of individual members of this people,’ he claimed: indeed, Jewish provocations had been organized and thus had to be answered with decisive action if they were not to lead to ‘individual, uncontrollable defensive actions carried out by the outraged population’. Here was a characteristic mixture of lies and threats, capped by an equally characteristic assurance that the new laws would be ‘a once-and-for all, secular solution’.76

  Hitler left the detailed justification of the Laws to Goring, whose speech to the Reichstag left little doubt that he was no less rabid an antisemite than Goebbels, Streicher or indeed the Leader himself. The swastika, he told the assembled, brown-uniformed Reichstag deputies, was a ‘symbol of our struggle for our own, species-specific race, it was a sign to us of the struggle against the Jews as racial wreckers’. When ‘an impudent Jew, in his bottomless hatred’ for Germany had insulted the flag in New York, he had insulted the whole nation. Thus Jews were not to be allowed to fly the flag. The new Laws, indeed, would go much further, and protect German blood against pollution by Jews and other alien races. They were, he declared,a declaration of faith in the strengths and blessings of the Germanic-Nordic spirit. We know that to sin against the blood is to sin against the inheritance of a people. We ourselves, the German people, have had to suffer greatly because of this hereditary sin. We know that the final root of all Germany’s decomposition came in the last analysis from these sinners against heredity. So we have to try to make a connection again to the chain of heredity that comes to us from the greyness of prehistory . . . And it is the duty of every government, and above all it is the duty of the people themselves, to ensure that this purity of the race can never again be made sick or filled with rottenness.77

  The parliament naturally passed all three laws with acclamation, and they were printed in full in prominent positions in the daily newspapers the following day. But they were not all as simple and straightforward as they might at first sight have seemed.78 The Reich Citizenship Law defined citizens of the Reich exclusively as people of ‘German or kin
dred blood’. Just as crucially, it declared that only someone who, ‘through his conduct, shows that he is both desirous and fit to serve the German people and Reich faithfully’ was entitled to be a citizen of the Reich. Only citizens could enjoy full political rights. All other people, notably the Jews, but also potentially all opponents of the regime, or even those who silently distanced themselves from it by their lack of enthusiasm for its policies, were merely ‘subjects of the state’. They had ‘obligations towards the Reich’ but were given no political rights in return. Details of implementation were left to the Interior Ministry, in conjunction with Hess’s office, to work out, and in due course two officials in the Ministry, Dr Wilhelm Stuckart and Dr Hans Globke, issued a commentary justifying its provisions and outlining its implications. Within a fortnight, Interior Minister Frick had ordered the dismissal of any civil servants of Jewish ancestry who had remained in post as a result of the special provisions of the civil service law of 7 April 1933.