The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Jewish self-help played a role in other areas too. Jewish sportsmen and women set up their own organization after Jews were expelled from mainstream sports clubs in 1933; in 1934 its members numbered no fewer than 35,000. An even more notable achievement was the Jewish Culture League, set up by the Jewish ex-deputy director of the Berlin City Opera, Kurt Singer. Eight thousand Jewish artists, musicians, performers and writers belonged to the Jewish Culture League, which catered exclusively for the Jewish community; 180,000 Jews eventually joined to take advantage of its offerings. Its foundation was officially approved by Hermann Goring. From the Nazi point of view, it was welcome because it marked the complete separation of Jewish cultural life from that of the nation as a whole, and at the same time reassured other Germans that Jews were not banned from writing, painting or performing. Singer was quickly elbowed aside, however, and the Culture League was run by a Nazi, Hans Hinkel, for most of its existence. Hinkel, working under the aegis of Goring, was responsible for the elimination of Jews from cultural institutions in Prussia, so it seemed to Goring obvious that he should run the Culture League as well. Hinkel soon began to ban the Culture League and its members from performing German works, starting with medieval and romantic German plays and moving on to Schiller (1934) and Goethe (1936). Jewish musicians were not allowed to perform music by Richard Wagner or Richard Strauss; Beethoven was added to the list in 1937 and Mozart in 1938.108

  In 1933-4 alone, however, the League put on sixty-nine opera performances and 117 concerts. But although some leading members saw such activities as an opportunity to show the contribution that Jewish artists and performers could make to German cultural life, many more must have been aware that they were evidence of a creeping ghettoization of Jewish culture in Germany. By gradually restricting what the Culture League could do, the Nazis were pushing it inexorably towards a situation where it provided nothing but ‘Jewish’ culture to audiences consisting of Jews alone. The cultural ghettoization of Germany’s Jews was completed after 10 November 1938, when Jews were banned from attending German theatres, cinemas, concerts, lectures, circuses, cabarets, dances, shows, exhibitions and all other cultural events. Following this, all Jewish cultural institutions of whatever kind were merged into the centralized Jewish Culture League on 1 January 1939, including the remaining Jewish publishing houses. There were plenty of works to perform for Jewish audiences, including those of Jewish writers and composers banned by the Nazis on racial grounds. There were exhibitions of Jewish painters and readings from Jewish writers. Non-Jewish Germans, of course, were not allowed to go to these functions. Whether there really was a Jewish-German culture independent and separate from non-Jewish-German culture many, if not most, doubted; most Jewish writers, artists and composers had not really considered the possibility, but had regarded themselves simply as Germans.109

  Paradoxically, perhaps, many Jews found the process of cultural ghettoization rather reassuring as they came to terms with the new restrictions on their life. As one of them remarked critically later: ‘The Jews were left more or less undisturbed within the bounds that had been drawn for them. In the Jewish Culture League, in the Jewish school, in the synagogues, they could live as they pleased. It was only interference in the Aryans’ sphere that was a taboo and a danger.’110 This attitude was in many cases a psychological necessity for those who remained. Increasingly, these were the old and the poor. In 1933, 20 per cent of German citizens of the Jewish faith who had been born in Germany were aged 50 or over; by 1938, the proportion of the Jewish community in Germany aged 50 and above had risen to over 48 per cent; a year later, it was over half.111 Many Jews were German patriots, their families deeply linked to their home towns and communities by decades, indeed centuries, of residence, work, culture and tradition. Breaking with all this was too hard for some to bear. Many left Germany in tears, vowing to come back when things got better. It was not surprising that many German Jews refused to emigrate, or indeed saw no need to do so. ‘Why should I emigrate?’ one middle-aged German Jew answered the entreaties of his anxious son in 1937. ‘Not everything will be eaten as hot as it’s cooked. After all, we live under the rule of law. What can happen to me? - I’m an old soldier, I fought for four years for my Fatherland on the Western Front, I was an NCO and was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class.’112

  III

  One particular group of Jews who stayed were those who were married to partners classified by the regime as Aryan. There were 35,000 couples living in mixed marriages in 1933 - that is, in marriages where the partners had come respectively from the Jewish and Christian faiths. Most such marriages were between Jewish men and Christian women. The Nuremberg Laws, of course, redefined the mixed marriage in racial terms. Mostly, by this time, both partners were Christian in religion. Non-Jewish spouses came under increasing pressure from the Gestapo to bring divorce proceedings. The courts had quickly begun to allow divorce petitions brought by non-Jewish spouses on the grounds, for instance, that only since National Socialism had come to power had they realized the dangers of race defilement. Because of the removal of Jews from virtually every area of public and social life by this time, Jewish husbands in mixed marriages had been forced to cede power over their children, their financial affairs, their assets, their businesses, their property and almost everything else to their non-Jewish wives. Increasingly, as economic opportunities were closed off to the husband, the wife became the principal breadwinner in the family. On 28 December 1938, acting on orders from Hitler, Goring issued new regulations governing the status of mixed marriages. In order to assuage the potential wrath of Aryan relatives, he declared that mixed marriages where the husband was Jewish and the children had been brought up as Christians, or where the wife was Jewish but there were no children, should be classified as ‘privileged’ and exempted, in a piecemeal way, from some of the discriminatory acts of the regime in the following years.113

  In mixed marriages where the husband was Jewish and there were no children, or where the wife had converted to Judaism or the children had been brought up in the Jewish faith, then, there were no privileges. The pressure on non-Jewish wives caught in this situation to bring divorce proceedings was considerable and mounted steadily. Nazi marriage laws, enshrined above all in the Marriage Law of 6 July 1938, defined marriage as a union between two people of healthy blood, the same race and opposite sexes, concluded for the common good and the purpose of procreating children of healthy blood and raising them to be good German racial comrades. Mixed marriages clearly did not fall under this definition, and indeed new ones had been banned since September 1935. The new Law codified recent court decisions on existing mixed marriages and pushed them further. German-blooded people, as the Law put it, who were married to a Jewish spouse could now apply to have the marriage annulled purely on racial grounds. In addition, a Jewish man who had lost his livelihood could be sued for divorce by a non-Jewish wife on the grounds that he was failing in his duty to support his family. Separation for three years was now also a ground for divorce, so that if a Jewish husband had been in a concentration camp, or in exile abroad, for this period, his non-Jewish wife could divorce him without any problem. Increasing economic and other difficulties inevitably placed a huge strain on such marriages, and even without direct pressure being brought to bear by the Gestapo or various Party agencies, as it often was, breakdown was frequently the result. It took a good deal of courage, loyalty and love to maintain a mixed marriage in such circumstances.114

  By 1938, however, people were becoming aware of the fact that divorce would mean not just additional hardship for a Jewish spouse, but also quite possibly violence, imprisonment, and death. When a non-Jewish spouse died, the Gestapo now customarily appeared within a day of the death being reported to the authorities and arrested the surviving Jewish husband or wife. The Gestapo, indeed, began a regular campaign of inviting Aryan women married to Jewish men into police headquarters for a friendly chat. Why would a good-looking blonde German woman want to carry o
n being married to a Jew in present circumstances? Surely life would be better divorced? She only had to say that National Socialism had dispelled her previous ignorance about the Jewish threat for the divorce to go through. Promises were mingled with threats. Divorce would bring glittering careers for her children, who would be reclassified as German, and economic improvement for her family, which would now be rid of the dependent spouse. Refusal would condemn the children to a shadowy existence, deprived because of their mixed race of many of the benefits and privileges that went with being purely German. If she did not divorce, the state would confiscate her property. Driven to desperation, a few German women in mixed marriages without children divorced in order to cling to their material assets and continued seeing their husbands in secret even after they had moved out of the family home. Many, however, resisted such pressure and reacted with outrage at the suggestion that they should divorce out of base pecuniary motives: what, they asked, did that imply about the reasons they had got married for in the first place? 115

  One such woman was Eva, wife of Victor Klemperer, who stood by him through all the vicissitudes of the 1930s. As a war veteran and the husband of an Aryan, he was still entitled to keep his job as a professor of French literature at Dresden’s Technical University, but he was removed from examining, he was unable to find a publisher for his latest book, and his teaching was so severely restricted that attendance at his lectures fell to single figures and he felt in danger of being made redundant. He was dismayed still further by some of his Jewish friends’ continuing illusions about the regime; all around him, Jewish colleagues were being dismissed and young Jewish families he knew were emigrating to Palestine. As a German nationalist, he was shocked by the extent to which other Jewish friends were taking on a more Jewish identity and losing their Germanness. He considered Zionism little better than Nazism. He saw his Jewish friends emigrating to Palestine, but had no thought of going there himself - ‘anyone who goes there is exchanging nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness’ - and in any case he felt that he could not adapt to another life at his age. He was, he wrote, a ‘useless creation of excessive culture’.116

  At the beginning of October 1934, he and his wife moved into the house they had long been having built for themselves at Dölzschen, a quiet suburb of Dresden.117 They had scarcely put the house in order when Klemperer’s situation began seriously to deteriorate further. In March 1935 the non-Nazi Saxon Minister of Education was dismissed and his duties taken over by the Nazi Party Regional Leader Martin Mutschmann. ‘In all aspects of the destruction of culture, Jew-baiting, internal tyranny’, Klemperer confided to his diary, ‘Hitler rules with ever worse creatures.’118 On 30 April 1935 he received his dismissal notice through the post, signed by Mutschmann. None of his colleagues did anything to help him; the only sympathy came from a secretary. Klemperer wrote to a number of colleagues abroad in search of a new job, but nothing materialized, and in any case he did not feel that his wife Eva, who was frequently ill, was strong enough to withstand the rigours of exile. Now in his mid-fifties, he had to live off a pension fixed at just over half his previous salary. He was saved by his older brother Georg, a successful surgeon, aged seventy and now retired, who had left Germany and made Victor a loan of 6,000 Reichsmarks, not the last such help he rendered to his distressed relatives. Meanwhile, however, antisemitic outrages became more frequent and more noticeable. In the middle of Dresden, Klemperer noticed a man shouting repeatedly, ‘Anyone who buys from a Jew is a traitor to the nation!’ On 17 September 1935 he noted the passage of the Nuremberg Laws. ‘Disgust makes one ill.’119 Deprived of his teaching, Klemperer doggedly continued to write his history of French literature in the eighteenth century, though the prospects of publishing it were minimal. In the meantime he spent a good deal of time going on expeditions in his new car and discussing with his friends the possibility - remote, he concluded - of the Third Reich collapsing. Everybody grumbled, he said, but nobody was prepared to do anything, and many saw the Third Reich as a necessary bulwark against Communism. Klemperer began to feel his views changing. ‘No one can take my Germanness away from me,’ he wrote, ‘but my nationalism and patriotism are gone for ever.’120

  Yet some found it easier to separate their enthusiasm for the Third Reich’s nationalistic policies from their dismay at its antisemitism. When retired Major Friedrich Solmitz took on the position of Air Raid Protection League Block Warden soon after the Nazis came to power, he and his wife seemed all set to move comfortably into the Third Reich. Early in 1934, however, he had to write to Peter Schönau, the local Nazi Party Leader, resigning as Block Warden because of the latter’s persistent hostility towards him. In all his dealings, Solmitz protested, he had followed the Party’s orders, including the implementation of the Aryan Paragraph, meaning the exclusion of all Jews from positions of responsibility in preparing for air raids. He could not comprehend why he was being singled out for criticism. Yet, amazingly, the reason why Solmitz was coming under pressure was because he himself was Jewish.121

  As far as their religion was concerned, the family were Christians and had no contact with the Jewish community, which no doubt explains why his wife, Luise Solmitz, in the privacy of her diary, noted in 1933 that in Hamburg ‘no brownshirt is doing anything to the Jews, no curses fly after them, everyday life in Hamburg is just the same, everyone is going about his own business as always’.122 Luise Solmitz had no Jewish ancestry. Yet even she found the Nazi boycott of Jewish shops carried out on 1 April 1933 a cause for concern, ‘a bitter April Fool’s joke’. ‘Our entire soul’, she complained, ‘was oriented towards the rise of Germany, not towards this.’ Nevertheless, she reflected, at least the Eastern European Jews were no longer in evidence (‘the underworld creatures from East Galicia really do seem to have disappeared for the moment’).123 A year later she was becoming bitter about the discrimination from which her Jewish husband and half-Jewish daughter had to suffer. She was depressed to see how Fr[iedrich] is at the mercy of every dishonourable rogue, how he is excluded from the SA and Steel Helmets, the National Socialist War Officers’ Association, and the Academic Association. To know how every avenue of happiness, whether it is in professional or married life, will also be closed off for Gis[ela]! To tremble at every chance word, at every visit, every letter: what do people want of us?124

  In 1935 Solmitz lost his citizenship rights as a consequence of the Nuremberg Laws, although he and his non-Jewish wife were subsequently classified as living in a privileged mixed marriage because they were bringing up their daughter in the Christian religion. The Nuremberg Laws, she wrote on 15 September 1935, were ‘our civil death sentence’. They meant that as in 1918 the family would now be banned from flying the Imperial flag (now adorned with the swastika), and much more:Our black-white-red flag is lowered for the second time. - Any man who marries my daughter will land up in the penitentiary, and she with him. - The serving-maid has to be sacked . . . Our child is cast out, excluded, despised, worthless. Who is really aware of the isolation from the people, the rootlessness, of the ‘Jewish-related’ woman, insofar as she does not draw on her own resources with a defiant ‘despite everything I’m always with you’, my people, my Fatherland? Most people, or many, will still reject Jewry, like I do; they have no relation to that side, and they don’t want any. Have never had any, don’t know any Jewish people. - And when we’re together with our own racial comrades, every chance word terrifies us, every one shows the gulf.125

  Outraged at their treatment, the Solmitzes wrote a personal letter to Hitler. It was referred to the local police and the Interior Ministry, who informed the couple that they could under no circumstances be exempted from the provisions of the Law.126 Despite this, Luise Solmitz remained optimistic. The growing isolation of her daughter, and her bitterness at not being able to join the League of German Girls, continued to give her concern, but the family was comfortably off, and the family’s national pride in Germany’s achievements under the Third
Reich more than compensated for any minor worries, which she dismissed in 1937 as ‘biting midges on the summer lakes’.127

  IV

  And indeed, beginning late in 1935, the situation of the Jews in Germany eased a little for a while. The reason for this was unexpected, and in one sense at least, beyond the control of the Nazi regime. For in 1936 Germany was scheduled to hold the Olympic Games, a decision that had been taken by the International Olympic Committee well before the Nazis had come to power. The Winter Games were due to be held at the ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the Summer Games in Berlin. Hitler was initially sceptical. Sport for its own sake had no appeal to Nazi ideology, and he found the internationalism of the event highly suspect. But when a boycott campaign was mounted, particularly in the United States, over the Third Reich’s treatment of the Jews, he realized that the transfer of the Games elsewhere would be extremely damaging, and that the staging of the Games in Germany would provide an unmissable opportunity to influence world opinion in favour of the Third Reich. Preparations duly got under way. The German team contained no Jews: under pressure to avoid a US boycott, the German team managers had attempted to recruit Jewish athletes, but the denial of top-class training facilities to Jews in Germany since 1933 meant that none made the grade. Three half-Jews were called into the team, all of them living outside Germany, including the blonde fencer Helene Mayer. This seemed to be enough, along with the Germans’ assurances that they would abide by the Olympic spirit, to ward off the threat of an international boycott.128