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

by Saul Friedlander

  On July 21 the Ministry of Labor forwarded Berthold’s file (which by then included seventeen appended documents) to the Ministry of the Interior with a request for speedy evaluation. On September 8, the ministry’s specialist for racial research, Achim Gercke, gave his opinion: Carl Blumenfeld’s paternity was confirmed, but Gercke could not avoid mentioning that, according to all available dates, Blumenfeld must have been only thirteen years old when Karl Berthold was conceived: “The impossibility of such a fact cannot be taken for granted,” Gercke wrote, “as among Jews sexual maturity comes earlier, and similar cases are known.”108

  It did not take long for the main office in Dresden to be informed of Gercke’s computations and to do some simple arithmetic of its own. On September 26 the Dresden office wrote to the Ministry of Labor pointing out that, as Berthold had been born on March 23, 1890—when Blumenfeld was still under thirteen—the baby had to have been conceived “when the artist Carl Blumenfeld was only eleven and a half. It is difficult to assume,” the Dresden letter continued, “that a boy of eleven and a half could have fathered a child with a woman of twenty-five.” The Dresden office demanded that the obvious be recognized: Karl Berthold was not Carl Blumenfeld’s child.109 Needless to say, that opinion was rejected.

  Berthold’s story, which with its ups and downs would continue to unfold until 1939, is in many ways a parable; it will reappear sporadically until the paradoxical decision that settled Berthold’s fate.

  As denunciations poured in, investigations came to be conducted at all levels of the civil service. It took Hitler’s personal intervention to put an end to an inquiry into the ancestry of Leo Killy, a member of the Reich Chancellery staff accused of being a full Jew. Killy’s family documents cleared him of any suspicion, at least in Hitler’s eyes.110 The procedures varied: Fräulein M., who merely wished to marry a civil servant, wanted to be reassured about her Aryan ancestry, as her grandmother’s name, Goldmann, could raise some doubts. The examination was performed in Professor Otmar von Verschuer’s genetics department in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin. One of the questions Verschuer’s specialists had to solve was: “Can Fräulein M. be described as a non-Aryan in the sense that she can be recognized as such by a layman on the basis of her mental attitude, her environment, or her outward appearance?” The “genetic examination,” based on photographs of Fräulein M.’s relatives and on aspects of her own physical appearance, led to most positive results. The report excluded any signs of Jewishness. Although Fräulein M. had “a narrow, high and convexly projecting nose,” it concluded that she had inherited the nose from her father (not from the grandmother burdened with the name Goldmann) and thus was a pure Aryan.111

  In September 1933 Jews were forbidden to own farms or engage in agriculture. That month the establishment, under the control of the Propaganda Ministry, of the Reich Chamber of Culture, enabled Goebbels to limit the participation of Jews in the new Germany’s cultural life. (Their systematic expulsion, which would include not only writers and artists but also owners of important businesses in the cultural domain, was for that reason delayed until 1935.)112 Also under the aegis of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, Jews were barred from belonging to the Journalists’ Association and, on October 4, from being newspaper editors. The German press had been cleansed. (Exactly a year later, Goebbels recognized the right of Jewish editors and journalists to work, but only within the framework of the Jewish press.)113

  In Nazi racial thinking, the German national community drew its strength from the purity of its blood and from its rootedness in the sacred German earth. Such racial purity was a condition of superior cultural creation and of the construction of a powerful state, the guarantor of victory in the struggle for racial survival and domination. From the outset, therefore, the 1933 laws pointed to the exclusion of the Jews from all key areas of this utopian vision: the state structure itself (the Civil Service Law), the biological health of the national community (the physicians’ law), the social fabric of the community (the disbarring of Jewish lawyers), culture (the laws regarding schools, universities, the press, the cultural professions), and, finally, the sacred earth (the farm law). The Civil Service Law was the only one of these to be fully implemented at this early stage, but the symbolic statements they expressed and the ideological message they carried were unmistakable.

  Very few German Jews sensed the implications of the Nazi laws in terms of sheer long-range terror. One who did was Georg Solmssen, spokesman for the board of directors of the Deutsche Bank and son of an Orthodox Jew. In an April 9, 1933, letter addressed to the bank’s board chairman, after pointing out that even the non-Nazi part of the population seemed to consider the new measures “self-evident,” Solmssen added: “I am afraid that we are merely at the beginning of a process aiming, purposefully and according to a well-prepared plan, at the economic and moral annihilation of all members, without any distinctions, of the Jewish race living in Germany. The total passivity not only of those classes of the population that belong to the National Socialist Party, the absence of all feelings of solidarity becoming apparent among those who until now worked shoulder to shoulder with Jewish colleagues, the increasingly more obvious desire to take personal advantage of vacated positions, the hushing up of the disgrace and the shame disastrously inflicted upon people who, although innocent, witness the destruction of their honor and their existence from one day to the next—all of this indicates a situation so hopeless that it would be wrong not to face it squarely without any attempt at prettification.”114

  There was some convergence between the expressions of the most extreme anti-Semitic agenda of German conservatives at the beginning of the century and the Nazi measures during the early years of the new regime. In his study of the German Civil Service, Hans Mommsen pointed to the similarity between the “Aryan paragraph” of the Civil Service Law of April 1933 and the Conservative Party’s so-called Tivoli program of 1892.115 The program’s first paragraph declared: “We combat the widely obtrusive and subversive Jewish influence on our popular life. We demand a Christian authority for the Christian people and Christian teachers for Christian pupils.”116

  The Conservatives, in other words, demanded the exclusion of Jews from any government position and from any influence on German education and culture. As for the main thrust of the forthcoming 1935 Nuremberg laws—segregation of the Jews according to racial criteria and placing of the Jewish community as such under “alien status”—this had already been demanded by radical Conservative anti-Semites, particularly by Heinrich Class, president of the Pan-Germanic League, in a notorious pamphlet, entitled Wenn ich der Kaiser wär (If I Were the Kaiser), published in 1912. Thus, although what was to become the Nazi program of action was a Nazi creation, the overall evolution of the German right-wing parties during the Weimar years gave birth to a set of anti-Jewish slogans and demands that the extreme nationalist parties (the DNVP in particular) shared with the Nazis.

  The conservative state bureaucracy had sometimes anticipated Nazi positions on Jewish matters. The Foreign Ministry, for instance, tried, well before the Nazis came to power, to defend Nazi anti-Semitism. After January 1933, with the blessings of State Secretary Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow and Foreign Minister Neurath, senior officials of the Ministry intensified these efforts.117 In the spring of 1933, anti-Jewish propaganda work in the Foreign Ministry was bolstered by the establishment of a new Department Germany (Referat Deutschland), to which this task was specifically given.

  At the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, State Secretary Herbert von Bismarck of the DNVP participated in the anti-Jewish crusade with no less vehemence than Frick, the Nazi minister. Apparently stung by the recently published biography of his great-uncle Otto, the Iron Chancellor, by Emil Ludwig (his real name was Emil Ludwig Kohn), Bismarck demanded prohibition of the use of pseudonyms by Jewish authors. Moreover, as Bismarck put it, “national pride is deeply wounded by those cases in which Jews wit
h Eastern Jewish names have adopted particularly nice German surnames, such as, for example, Harden, Olden, Hinrichsen, etc. I consider a review of name changes urgently necessary in order to revoke changes of that kind.”118

  On April 6, 1933, an ad hoc committee—following an initiative that probably originated in the Prussian Interior Ministry—started work on a draft for a Law Regulating the Position of the Jews. Again the German Nationals were heavily represented on the eight-member drafting committee. A copy of this draft proposal, sent in July 1933 to the head of Department Germany of the Foreign Ministry, remained in the archives of the Wilhelmstrasse. The draft suggests the appointment of a “national guardian” (Volkswart) for dealing with Jewish affairs and employs the term “Jewish council” (Judenrat) in defining the central organization that is to represent the Jews of Germany in their dealings with the authorities, particularly with the Volkswart. Already in the draft are many of the discriminatory measures that were to be taken later,119 although at the time, nothing came of this initiative. Thus for part of the way at least, Nazi policies against the Jews were identical with the anti-Semitic agenda set by the German Conservatives several decades before Hitler’s accession to power.120

  And yet the curtailment of the economic measures against the Jews was also a conservative demand, and whatever exceptions were introduced into the April laws were instigated by the most prominent conservative figure of all, President Hindenburg. Hitler understood perfectly how essentially different his own anti-Jewish drive was from the traditional anti-Semitism of the old field marshal, and in his answer to Hindenburg’s request of April 4, regarding exceptions to the exclusion of Jews from the civil service, limited himself to the regular middle-of-the-road anti-Jewish arguments of the moderate breed of conservatives to which Hindenburg belonged. It was in fact Hitler’s first lengthy statement on the Jews since he became chancellor.

  In his April 5 letter, Hitler started by using the argument of a Jewish “inundation.” With regard to the civil service, the Nazi leader argued that the Jews, as a foreign element and as people with ability, had entered governmental positions and “were sowing the seed of corruption, the extent of which no one today has any adequate appreciation.” The international Jewish “atrocity and boycott agitation” precipitated measures that are intrinsically defensive. Hitler nonetheless promised that Hindenburg’s request regarding Jewish veterans would be implemented. Then he moved to a strangely premonitory finale: “In general, the first goal of this cleansing process is intended to be the restoration of a certain healthy and natural relationship; and second, to remove from specified positions important to the state those elements that cannot be entrusted with the life or death of the Reich. Because in the coming years we will inevitably have to take precautions to ensure that certain events that cannot be disclosed to the rest of the world for higher reasons of state really remain secret.”121

  Again, Hitler was utilizing some of the main tenets of conservative anti-Semitism to the full: the over-representation of Jews in some key areas of social and professional life, their constituting a nonassimilated and therefore foreign element in society, the nefarious influence of their activities (liberal or revolutionary), particularly after November 1918. Weimar, the conservatives used to clamor, was a “Jewish republic.” Hitler had not forgetten to mention, for the special benefit of a field marshal and Prussian landowner, that in the old Prussian state the Jews had had little access to the civil service and that the officer corps had been kept free of them. There was some irony in the fact that a few days after Hitler’s letter to Hindenburg, the old field marshal himself had to answer a query from Prince Carl of Sweden, president of the Swedish Red Cross, about the situation of the Jews in Germany. The text of Hindenburg’s letter to Sweden was in fact dictated by Hitler, with the early draft prepared by Hindenburg’s office significantly changed (any admission of acts of violence against Jews was omitted, and the standard theme of the invasion of the Reich by Jews from the East strongly underlined).122 Thus, over his own signature, the president of the Reich sent a letter not very different from the one Hitler had addressed to him on April 4. But soon Hindenburg would be gone, and this source of annoyance would disappear from Hitler’s path.

  V

  The city of Cologne forbade the use of municipal sports facilities to Jews in March 1933.123 Beginning April 3 requests by Jews in Prussia for name changes were to be submitted to the Justice Ministry, “to prevent the covering up of origins.”124 On April 4 the German Boxing Association excluded all Jewish boxers.125 On April 8 all Jewish teaching assistants at universities in the state of Baden were to be expelled immediately.126 On April 18 the party district chief (Gauleiter) of Westphalia decided that a Jew would be allowed to leave prison only if the two persons who had submitted the request for bail, or the doctor who had signed the medical certificate, were ready to take his place in prison.”127 On April 19 the use of Yiddish was forbidden in cattle markets in Baden.128 On April 24 the use of Jewish names for spelling purposes in telephone communications was forbidden.129 On May 8 the mayor of Zweibrücken prohibited Jews from leasing places in the next annual town market.130 On May 13 the change of Jewish to non-Jewish names was forbidden.131 On May 24 the full Aryanization of the German gymnastics organization was ordered, with full Aryan descent of all four grandparents stipulated.132 Whereas in April Jewish doctors had been excluded from state-insured institutions, in May privately insured institutions were ordered to refund medical expenses for treatment by Jewish doctors only when the patients themselves were non-Aryan. Separate lists of Jewish and non-Jewish doctors would be ready by June.133

  On April 10 the president of the state government and minister for religious affairs and education of Hesse had demanded of the mayor of Frankfurt that the Heinrich Heine monument be removed from its site. On May 18 the mayor replied that “the bronze statue was thrown off its pedestal on the night of April 26–27. The slightly damaged statue has been removed and stored in the cellar of the ethnological museum.”134

  In fact, according to the Stuttgart city chronicle, in the spring of 1933 hardly a day went by without some aspect of the “Jewish question” coming up in one way or another. On the eve of the boycott, several well-known local Jewish physicians, lawyers, and industrialists left the country.135 On April 5 the athlete and businessman Fritz Rosenfelder committed suicide. His friend, the World War I ace Ernst Udet, flew over the cemetery to drop a wreath.136 On April 15 the Nazi Party demanded the exclusion of Berthold Heymann, a Socialist (and Jewish) former cabinet minister in Württemberg, from the electoral list.137 On April 20 the Magistrate’s Court of Stuttgart tried the chief physician of the Marienspital (Saint Mary’s Hospital), Caesar Hirsch, in absentia. Members of his staff testified that he had declared he would not return to Nazi Germany, “as he refused to live in such a homeland.”138 On April 27 three hundred people demonstrated on the Königsstrasse against the opening of a local branch of the Jewish-owned shoe company Etam.139 On April 29 a Jewish veterinarian who wanted to resume his service at the slaughterhouse was threatened by several butchers and taken “into custody.”140 And so it continued, day in and day out.

  In his study of the Nazi seizure of power in the small city of Northeim (renamed Thalburg), near Hannover, William Sheridan Allen vividly describes the changing fate of the town’s 120 Jews. Mostly small businessmen and their families, they were well assimilated and for several generations had been an integral part of the community. In 1932 a Jewish haberdasher had celebrated the 230th anniversary of the establishment of his shop.141 Allen tells of a banker named Braun, who tried hard to maintain his German nationalist stance and to disregard the increasingly insulting measures introduced by the Nazis: “To the solicitous advice that was given to him to leave Thalburg, he replied, ‘Where should I go? Here I am the Banker Braun; elsewhere I would be the Jew Braun.’”142

  Other Jews in Thalburg were less confident. Within a few months the result was the same for all. Some withdrew from the
various clubs and social organizations to which they had belonged; others received letters of dismissal under various pretexts. “Thus,” as Allen expresses it, “the position of the Jews in Thalburg was rapidly clarified, certainly by the end of the first half-year of Hitler’s regime…. The new state of affairs became a fact of life; it was accepted. Thalburg’s Jews were simply excluded from the community at large.”143

  For young Hilma Geffen-Ludomer, the only Jewish child in the Berlin suburb of Rangsdorf, the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools meant total change. The “nice, neighborly atmosphere” ended “abruptly…. Suddenly, I didn’t have any friends. I had no more girlfriends, and many neighbors were afraid to talk to us. Some of the neighbors that we visited told me: ‘Don’t come anymore because I’m scared. We should not have any contact with Jews.’” Lore Gang-Salheimer, eleven in 1933 and living in Nuremberg, could remain in her school as her father had fought at Verdun. Nonetheless “it began to happen that non-Jewish children would say, ‘No I can’t walk home from school with you anymore. I can’t be seen with you anymore.’”144 “With every passing day under Nazi rule,” wrote Martha Appel, “the chasm between us and our neighbors grew wider. Friends with whom we had had warm relations for years did not know us anymore. Suddenly we discovered that we were different.”145