Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution

by Saul Friedlander

  The Jews finally, like a considerable part of German society as a whole, were not sure—particularly before the March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections—whether the Nazis were in power to stay or whether a conservative military coup against them was still possible. Some Jewish intellectuals came up with rather unusual forecasts. “The prognosis,” Martin Buber wrote to philosopher and educator Ernst Simon on February 14, “depends on the outcome of the imminent fight between the groups in the government. We must assume that no shift in the balance of power in favor of the National Socialists will be permitted, even if their parliamentary base vis à-vis the German nationalists is proportionally strengthened. In that case, one of two things will happen: either the Hitlerites will remain in the government anyway; then they will be sent to fight the proletariat, which will split their party and render it harmless for the time being…. Or they will leave the government…. As long as the present condition holds, there can be no thought of Jew-baiting or anti-Jewish laws, only of administrative oppression. Anti-Semitic legislation would be possible only if the balance of power shifted in favor of the National Socialists, but as I have said above, this is hardly to be expected. Jew-baiting is only possible during the interval between the National Socialists’ leaving the government and the proclamation of a state of emergency.”35

  III

  The primary political targets of the new regime and of its terror system, at least during the first months after the Nazi accession to power, were not Jews but Communists. After the Reichstag fire of February 27, the anti-Communist hunt led to the arrest of almost ten thousand party members and sympathizers and to their imprisonment in newly created concentration camps. Dachau had been established on March 20 and was officially inaugurated by SS chief Heinrich Himmler on April 1.36 In June, SS Group Leader Theodor Eicke became the camp’s commander, and a year later he was appointed “inspector of concentration camps”: Under Himmler’s aegis he had become the architect of the life-and-death routine of the camp inmates in Hitler’s new Germany.

  After the mass arrests that followed the Reichstag fire, it was clear that the “Communist threat” no longer existed. But the new regime’s frenzy of repression—and innovation—did not slacken; quite the contrary. A presidential decree of February 28 had already given Hitler emergency powers. Although the Nazis failed to gain an absolute majority in the March 5 elections, their coalition with the ultraconservative German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP) obtained it. A few days later, on March 23, the Reichstag divested itself of its functions by passing the Enabling Act, which gave full legislative and executive powers to the chancellor (at the outset new legislation was discussed with the cabinet ministers, but the final decision was Hitler’s). The rapidity of changes that followed was stunning: The states were brought into line; in May the trade unions were abolished and replaced by the German Labor Front; in July all political parties formally ceased to exist with the sole exception of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP). Popular support for this torrential activity and constant demonstration of power snowballed. In the eyes of a rapidly growing number of Germans, a “national revival” was under way.37

  It has often been asked whether the Nazis had concrete goals and precise plans. In spite of internal tensions and changing circumstances, short-term goals in most areas were systematically pursued and rapidly achieved. But the final objectives of the regime, the guidelines for long-term policies, were defined in general terms only, and concrete steps for their implementation were not spelled out. Yet these vaguely formulated long-term goals were essential not only as guidelines of sorts but also as indicators of boundless ambitions and expectations: They were objects of true belief for Hitler and his coterie; they mobilized the energies of the party and of various sectors of the population; and they were expressions of faith in the correctness of the way.

  Anti-Jewish violence spread after the March elections. On the ninth, Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA) seized dozens of East European Jews in the Scheunenviertel, one of Berlin’s Jewish quarters. Traditionally the first targets of German Jew-hatred, these Ostjuden were also the first Jews as Jews to be sent off to concentration camps. On March 13 forcible closing of Jewish shops was imposed by the local SA in Mannheim; in Breslau, Jewish lawyers and judges were assaulted in the court building; and in Gedern, in Hesse, the SA broke into Jewish homes and beat up the inhabitants “with the acclamation of a rapidly growing crowd.” The list of similar incidents is a long one.38 There were also killings. According to the late March (bimonthly) report of the governing president of Bavaria, “On the 15th of this month, around 6 in the morning, several men in dark uniforms arrived by truck at the home of the Israelite businessman Otto Selz in Straubing. Selz was dragged from his house in his nightclothes and taken away. Around 9:30 Selz was shot to death in a forest near Wang, in the Landshut district. The truck is said to have arrived on the Munich-Landshut road and to have departed the same way. It carried six uniformed men and bore the insignia II.A. Several people claim to have noticed that the truck’s occupants wore red armbands with a swastika.”39 On March 31 Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick wired all local police stations to warn them that Communist agitators disguised in SA uniforms and using SA license plates would smash Jewish shop windows and exploit the occasion to create disturbances.40 This could have been standard Nazi disinformation or some remaining belief in possible Communist subversion. On April 1, the Göttingen police station investigating the damage to Jewish stores and the local synagogue on March 28, reported having caught two members of the Communist Party and one Social Democrat in possession of parts of Nazi uniforms; headquarters in Hildesheim was informed that the men arrested were the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish action.41

  Much of the foreign press gave wide coverage to the Nazi violence. The Christian Science Monitor, however, expressed doubts about the accuracy of the reports of Nazi atrocities, and later justified retaliation against “those who spread lies against Germany.” And Walter Lippmann, the most prominent American political commentator of the day and himself a Jew, found words of praise for Hitler and could not resist a sideswipe at the Jews. These notable exceptions notwithstanding, most American newspapers did not mince words about the anti-Jewish persecution.42 Jewish and non-Jewish protests grew. These very protests became the Nazis’ pretext for the notorious April 1, 1933, boycott of Jewish businesses. Although the anti-Nazi campaign in the United States was discussed at some length during a cabinet meeting on March 24,43 the final decision in favor of the boycott was probably made during a March 26 meeting of Hitler and Goebbels in Berchtesgaden. But in mid-March, Hitler had already allowed a committee headed by Julius Streicher, party chief of Franconia and editor of the party’s most vicious anti-Jewish newspaper, Der Stürmer, to proceed with preparatory work for it.

  In fact, the boycott had been predictable from the very moment the Nazis acceded to power. The possibility had often been mentioned during the two preceding years,44 when Jewish small businesses had been increasingly harassed and Jewish employees increasingly discriminated against in the job market.45 Among the Nazis much of the agitation for anti-Jewish economic measures was initiated by a motley coalition of “radicals” belonging either to the Nazi Enterprise Cells Organization (Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation, or NSBO) headed by Reinhold Muchow or to Theodor Adrian von Renteln’s League of Middle-Class Employees and Artisans (Kampfbund für den gewerblichen Mittelstand), as well as to various sections of the SA activated for that purpose by Otto Wagener, an economist and the SA’s former acting chief of staff. Their common denominator was what former number two party leader Gregor Strasser once called an “anti-capitalist nostalgia”;46 their easiest way of expressing it: virulent anti-Semitism.

  Such party radicals will be encountered at each major stage of anti-Jewish policy up to and including the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. In April 1933 they can be identif
ied as members of the party’s various economic interest groups, but also among them were jurists like Hans Frank (the future governor-general of occupied Poland) and Roland Freisler (the future president of the People’s Tribunal) and race fanatics like Gerhard Wagner and Walter Gross, not to speak of Streicher, Goebbels, the SA leadership, and, foremost among them, Hitler himself. But specifically as a pressure group, the radicals consisted mainly of “old fighters”—SA members and rank-and-file party activists dissatisfied with the pace of the National Socialist revolution, with the meagerness of the spoils that had accrued to them, and with the often privileged status of comrades occupying key administrative positions in the state bureaucracy. The radicals were a shifting but sizable force of disgruntled party members seething for increased action and for the primacy of the party over the state.47

  The radicals’ influence should not be overrated, however. They never compelled Hitler to take steps he did not want to take. When their demands were deemed excessive, their initiatives were dismissed. The anti-Jewish decisions in the spring of 1933 helped the regime channel SA violence into state-controlled measures;48 to the Nazis, of course, these measures were also welcome for their own sake.

  Hitler informed the cabinet of the planned boycott of Jewish-owned businesses on March 29, telling the ministers that he himself had called for it. He described the alternative as spontaneous popular violence. An approved boycott, he added, would avoid dangerous unrest.49 The German National ministers objected, and President Hindenburg tried to intervene. Hitler rejected any possible cancellation, but two days later (the day before the scheduled boycott) he suggested the possibility of postponing it until April 4—if the British and American governments were to declare immediately their opposition to the anti-German agitation in their countries; if not, the action would take place on April 1, to be followed by a waiting period until April 4.50

  On the evening of the thirty-first, the British and American governments declared their readiness to make the necessary declaration. Foreign Minister Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath made it known, however, that it was too late to change course; he then mentioned Hitler’s decision of a one-day action followed by a waiting period.51 In fact, the possibility of resuming the boycott on April 4 was no longer being considered.

  In the meantime Jewish leaders, mainly in the United States and Palestine, were in a quandary: Should they support mass protests and a counterboycott of German goods, or should confrontation be avoided for fear of further “reprisals” against the Jews of Germany? Göring had summoned several leaders of German Jewry and sent them to London to intervene against planned anti-German demonstrations and initiatives. Simultaneously, on March 26, Kurt Blumenfeld, president of the Zionist Federation for Germany, and Julius Brodnitz, president of the Central Association, cabled the American Jewish Committee in New York: WE PROTEST CATEGORICALLY AGAINST HOLDING MONDAY MEETING, RADIO AND OTHER DEMONSTRATIONS. WE UNEQUIVOCALLY DEMAND ENERGETIC EFFORTS TO OBTAIN AN END TO DEMONSTRATIONS HOSTILE TO GERMANY.52 By appeasing the Nazis the fearful German-Jewish leaders were hoping to avoid the boycott.

  The leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine also opted for caution, the pressure of public opinion notwithstanding. They sent a telegram to the Reich Chancellery “offering assurances that no authorized body in Palestine had declared or intended to declare a trade boycott of Germany.”53 American Jewish leaders were divided; most of the Jewish organizations in the United States were opposed to mass demonstrations and economic action, mainly for fear of embarrassing the president and the State Department.54 Reluctantly, and under pressure from such groups as the Jewish War Veterans, the American Jewish Congress finally decided otherwise. On March 27 protest meetings took place in several American cities, with the participation of church and labor leaders. As for the boycott of German goods, it spread as an emotional grass-roots movement that, over the months, received an increasing measure of institutional support, at least outside Palestine.55

  Goebbels’s excitement was irrepressible. In his diary entry for March 27, he wrote: “I’ve dictated a sharp article against the Jews’ atrocity propaganda. At its mere announcement the whole mischpoke [sic, Yiddish for “family”] broke down. One must use such methods. Magnanimity doesn’t impress the Jews.” March 28: “Phone conversation with the Führer: the call for the boycott will be published today. Panic among the Jews!” March 29: “I convene my assistants and explain the organization of the boycott to them.” March 30: “The organization of the boycott is complete. Now we merely need to press a button and it starts.”56 March 31: “Many people are going around with their heads hanging and seeing specters. They think the boycott will lead to war. By defending ourselves, we can only win respect. A small group of us hold a last discussion and decide that the boycott should start tomorrow with fullest intensity. It will last one day and then be followed by an interruption until Wednesday. If the incitement in foreign countries stops, then the boycott will stop, otherwise a fight to the end will start.”57 April 1: “The boycott against the international atrocities propaganda broke out in the fullest intensity in Berlin and all over the Reich. The public,” Goebbels added, “has everywhere shown its solidarity.”58

  In principle the boycott could have caused serious economic damage to the Jewish population as, according to Avraham Barkai, “more than sixty percent of all gainfully employed Jews were concentrated in the commercial sector, the overwhelming majority of these in the retail trade…. Similarly, Jews in the industrial and crafts sectors were active largely as proprietors of small businesses and shops or as artisans.”59 In reality, however, the Nazi action ran into immediate problems.60

  The population proved rather indifferent to the boycott and sometimes even intent on buying in “Jewish” stores. According to the Völkischer Beobachter of April 3, some shoppers in Hannover tried to enter a Jewish-owned store by force.61 In Munich repeated announcements concerning the forthcoming boycott resulted in such brisk business in Jewish-owned stores during the last days of March (the public did not yet know how long the boycott would last) that the Völkischer Beobachter bemoaned “the lack of sense among that part of the population which forced its hard-earned money into the hands of enemies of the people and cunning slanderers.”62 On the day of the boycott many Jewish businesses remained shut or closed early. Vast throngs of onlookers blocked the streets in the commercial districts of the city center to watch the unfolding event: They were passive but in no way showed the hostility to the “enemies of the people” the party agitators had expected.63 A Dortmund rabbi’s wife, Martha Appel, confirms in her memoirs a similarly passive and certainly not hostile attitude among the crowds in the streets of that city’s commercial sector. She even reports hearing many expressions of discontent with the Nazi initiative.64 This atmosphere seems to have been common in most parts of the Reich. The bimonthly police report in the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz, south of Munich, is succinct and unambiguous: “The only Jewish shop, ‘Cohn’ on the Fritzplatz, was not boycotted.”65

  The lack of popular enthusiasm was compounded by a host of unforeseen questions: How was a “Jewish” enterprise to be defined? By its name, by the Jewishness of its directors, or by Jewish control of all or part of its capital? If the enterprise were hurt, what, in a time of economic crisis, would happen to its Aryan employees? What would be the overall consequences, in terms of possible foreign retaliation, of the action on the German economy?

  Although impending for some time, the April boycott was clearly an improvised action. It may have aimed at channeling the anti-Jewish initiatives of the SA and of other radicals; at indicating that, in the long run, the basis of Jewish existence in Germany would be destroyed; or, more immediately, at responding in an appropriately Nazi way to foreign protests against the treatment of German Jews. Whatever the various motivations may have been, Hitler displayed a form of leadership that was to become characteristic of his anti-Jewish actions over the next several years: He usually set an apparent compromise cour
se between the demands of the party radicals and the pragmatic reservations of the conservatives, giving the public impression that he himself was above operational details.66 Such restraint was obviously tactical; in the case of the boycott, it was dictated by the state of the economy and wariness of international reactions.67

  For some Jews living in Germany, the boycott, despite its overall failure, had unexpected and unpleasant consequences. Such was the case of Arthur B., a Polish Jew who had been hired on February 1 with his band of “four German musicians (one of them a woman)” to perform at the Café Corso in Frankfurt. A month later B.’s contract was extended to April 30. On March 30, B. was dismissed by the café owner for being Jewish. B. applied to the Labor Court in Frankfurt to obtain payment of the money owed him for the month of April. The owner, he argued, had known when she hired him that he was a Polish Jew. She had been satisfied with the band’s work and thus had no right to dismiss him without notice and payment. The court rejected his plea and charged him with the costs, ruling that the circumstances created by Jewish incitement against Germany—which had led some customers to demand the bandleader’s dismissal and brought threats from the local Gau (main party district) leadership that the Café Corso would be boycotted as a Jewish enterprise if Arthur B. were to continue working there—could have caused severe damage to the defendant and was therefore sufficient reason for the dismissal. “Whether the defendant already knew when she hired him that the plaintiff was a Jew is irrelevant,” the court concluded, “as the national revolution with its drastic consequences for the Jews took place after the plaintiff had been hired; the defendant could not have known at the time that the plaintiff’s belonging to the Jewish race would later play such a significant role.”68

  The possibility of further boycotts remained open. “We hereby inform you,” said a letter of August 31 from the Central Committee of the Boycott Movement (Zentralkomitee der Boykottbewegung) in Munich to the party district leadership of Hannover-South, “that the Central Committee for Defense Against Jewish Atrocities and Boycott Agitation…continues its work as before. The organization’s activity will, however, be pursued quietly. We ask you to observe and inform us of any cases of corruption or other economic activities in which Jews play a harmful role. You may then wish to inform your district or local leadership in an appropriate way about such cases as just mentioned. As indicated in the last internal party instruction from the Deputy Führer [for Party affairs] Party Comrade [Rudolf] Hess, any public statements of the Central Committee must first be submitted to him.”69