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

by Saul Friedlander

  Between 1933 and 1936 a balance of sorts was kept between the revolutionary-charismatic impulse of Nazism and the authoritarian-conservative tendencies of the pre-1933 German state: “The marriage of an authoritarian system of government with the mass movement of National Socialism seemed to be successful in spite of considerable friction over key points, and also [seemed] to have overcome the shortcomings of the authoritarian system,” wrote Martin Broszat.6 Within this temporary alliance Hitler’s role was decisive. For the traditional elites the new “belief in the Führer” became associated with the authority of the monarch. Basic elements of the Imperial state and of the National Socialist regime were linked in the person of the new leader.7

  Such “belief in the Führer” led quite naturally to an urge for action on the part of state and party agencies according to the general guidelines set by Hitler, without the constant necessity of specific orders from him. The dynamics of this interaction between base and summit was, as British historian Ian Kershaw pointed out, “neatly captured in the sentiments of a routine speech of a Nazi functionary in 1934”:

  “‘Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realize sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Führer. Very often and in many spheres it has been the case—in previous years as well—that individuals have simply waited for orders and instructions. Unfortunately, the same will be true in the future; but in fact it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Führer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.’”8

  Thus the majority of a society barely emerging from years of crisis believed that the new regime offered solutions that, in diverse but related ways, would give answers to the aspirations, resentments, and interests of its various sectors. This belief survived the difficulties of the early phase (such as a still sluggish economy) as a result of a new sense of purpose, of a series of successes on the international scene, and, above all, of unshaken faith in the Führer. As one of its corollaries, however, that very faith brought with it widespread acceptance, passive or not, of the measures against the Jews: Sympathy for the Jews would have meant some distrust of the rightness of Hitler’s way, and many Germans had definitely established their individual and collective priorities in this regard. The same is true in relation to the other central myth of the regime, that of the Volksgemeinschaft. The national community explicitly excluded the Jews. Belonging to the national community implied acceptance of the exclusions it imposed. In other words, adherence to “positive” tenets of the regime, to mobilizing myths such as the myth of the Führer and that of the Volksgemeinschaft, sufficed to undermine explicit dissent against anti-Jewish measures (and other of the regime’s persecutions). Yet, as we shall see, despite these general trends, there were nuances in German society’s attitudes toward the “outsiders” in its midst.

  Hitler’s tactical moderation on any issue that could have negative economic consequences shows his conscious alignment with the conservative allies. But when it came to symbolic expressions of anti-Jewish hatred, the Nazi leader could barely be restrained. In April 1935 Martin Bormann, then Rudolf Hess’s chief of staff, inquired whether Hitler wished to remove the anti-Jewish placards that were sprouting up all over the Reich. Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s adjutant, informed Bormann that the Führer was opposed to their removal.9 The matter soon resurfaced when Oswald Leewald, president of the German Olympic Committee, complained that these signs were contributing to ongoing anti-Jewish agitation in such major Olympic sites as Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The Olympic Games will be dealt with later on, but with regard to the anti-Jewish notices, Hitler refused at first to act against the initiatives of the regional party chiefs; only when he was told they could cause serious damage to the Winter Olympics did he give the order to remove the offensive signs.10 Finally a general compromise solution was found. On June 11, 1935, the Ministry of Propaganda ordered that in view of the forthcoming Olympics, signs such as those reading JEWS UNWANTED should quietly be removed from major roads.11 This may have been asking too much, for a few days before the beginning of the Winter Olympics, Hess’s office issued the following decree: “In order to avoid a making a bad impression on foreign visitors, signs with extreme inscriptions should be taken away; signs such as ‘Jews Are Unwanted Here’ will suffice.”12

  II

  On January 1, 1935, a Tübingen Jewish merchant, Hugo Loewenstein, received a medal “in the name of the Führer and Reichskanzler” for his service during World War I.13 The same distinction was awarded to Ludwig Tannhäuser, a Stuttgart Jewish businessman, as late as August 1, 1935.14 Yet, nearly a year and a half earlier, on February 28, 1934, Minister of Defense Werner von Blomberg had ordered that the Aryan paragraph be applied to the army.15 When the Wehrmacht was established, in March 1935, “national” Jews petitioned Hitler for the right to serve in the new armed forces.16 To no avail: On May 21 military service was officially forbidden to Jews.17 “Mixed breeds [Mischlinge] of the first and second degree” (these categories had already been in use at the Ministry of Defense before the Nuremberg Laws) could, however, be allowed to serve in the armed forces as individual exceptions.18

  Earlier the army had attempted to help Jewish officers who were being dismissed. On May 16, 1934, a member of the Reichswehr Staff had approached a Chinese diplomat in Berlin with the suggestion that the Chinese Army find positions for some of the younger Jewish Reichswehr officers. Legation Secretary Tan expressed his personal interest in the idea, but was skeptical about its implementation: Nazi Party officials had already been in touch with the Chinese government to dissuade it from hiring German Jewish officers on the grounds that Jews were not representative of the German people, and thus the German Reich saw no value in any activity of theirs abroad.19

  Goebbels could not lag far behind the military. Less than a month after Blomberg’s order, on March 24, 1934, the propaganda minister announced that, as a matter of general principle, all Jews would be excluded from membership in the Reich Chamber of Culture. Preparations started immediately, and in early 1935 the remaining Jewish members of the various specific chambers began to be dismissed.20 On November 15, 1935, at its annual meeting in Berlin, Goebbels was able to announce—somewhat prematurely, as will be seen—that the Reich Chamber of Culture was now “free of Jews.”21

  The relentlessness of the efforts to segregate the Jews was unmistakable. In ideological terms the most crucial domain was that of physical—that is, biological—separation; much in advance of the Nuremberg legislation, mixed marriages and sexual relations between Germans and Jews became targets of unceasing, often violent party attacks. The party press spearheaded this campaign, and the flow of anti-Jewish abuse spread by a paper such as Streicher’s Der Stürmer did not remain without effect. On the other hand, however, contrary to the main thrust of party agitation, some groups of the population not only rejected anti-Jewish violence and hesitated to sever their economic ties with Jews, but even at times showed signs of sympathy for the victims. Beyond such reluctance to segregate the Jews completely, the “cleansing” of various areas of German life of any trace of Jewish presence encountered countless other difficulties. Thus, during this early phase of the regime, Jews still remained, in one way or another, in various domains of German life, although as a result of party agitation their situation worsened in the spring and summer of 1935.

  The notion of race as such, defined as a set of common physical and mental characteristics transmitted within a group by the force of tradition or even in some biological way, had been used by Jews themselves from Moses Hess to Martin Buber, particularly in Buber’s 1911 Prague lectures, publi
shed as Three Speeches on Judaism. It had not disappeared in postwar Germany. Thus, in a February 1928 speech on the problems facing German Jewry, the director of the Zentralverein, Ludwig Holländer, after asserting that the Jews had been a race since biblical times as a result of their common descent and nonetheless expressing doubts whether the concept of race was applicable to the modern Jew, went on, however, to tell his listeners: “Extraction remains, that is, the racial characteristics are still present, albeit diminished by the centuries; they are present in external as well as mental features.”22 In 1932 a fierce internal Jewish controversy arose around the publication by the Zionist author Gustav Krojanker of a booklet entitled On the Problem of the New German Nationalism. According to Krojanker, the Zionist revolt against liberalism, which was in response to a will aroused by the imperatives of the blood, should allow for a deep understanding of the political developments in Germany.23

  Such rather extreme positions were those of a small minority, but they show the influence of völkisch thinking on some German Jews.24 Here and there some Jewish voices even pleaded for “racial purity of the Jewish stock” and for investigations according to the rules of “racial science” for more ample and precise information regarding “the extent of miscegenation between Jews and Christians [sic], thus between members of the Semitic and Aryan race.”25 But these various statements had the connotation neither of racial hierarchy based on biological criteria nor of a struggle between races.

  It seems, at the outset at least, that a widespread belief existed in the party that scientific racial criteria for identifying the Jew could be discovered. Thus, in a letter of September 1, 1933, to Baden’s minister of the interior (with copies to all relevant authorities in the Reich), Wilhelm Frick made it clear that the identification of the “non-Aryan” was not dependent on parents’ or grandparents’ religion, but “on descent, on race, on blood.” This meant that even if the religious affiliation of parents or grandparents was not Jewish, another criterion could be found.26 This was the line of thinking that guided the Jena racial anthropologist Hans F. K. Günther in his attempt to identify various external physical characteristics of the Jew, as it did his Leipzig colleague Paul Reche to pursue his yearlong research on racially determined blood types. But even Reche had to admit that “no single blood type was typical among Jews.”27 This failure, however, though soon recognized by most Nazi scientists,28 did not deter publications specializing in scientific vulgarization from announcing that, on this front as on all others, decisive breakthroughs had been achieved.

  In the October 1934 issue of the Volksgesundheitswacht (People’s health guardian), a Doctor Stähle offered “new research results” concerning “blood and race.” He traced some illnesses specifically attributed to Jews (commenting ironically that these were “accumulative diseases”), referring mainly to the work of a Leningrad “scientist” named E. O. Manoiloff. This Russian claimed that, with an accuracy of 90 percent, he could distinguish Jewish from Russian blood by chemical means. Stähle conveyed appropriate enthusiasm to his readers: “Think what it might mean if we could identify non-Aryans in the test tube! Then neither deception, nor baptism, nor name change, nor citizenship, and not even nasal surgery could help…. One cannot change one’s blood!”29 Stähle was head of the local medical society in Württemberg.30

  Despite Stähle’s optimism, biological criteria for defining the Jew remained elusive, and it was on the basis of the religious affiliation of parents and grandparents that the Nazis had to launch their crusade for racial purification of the Volk.

  Almost three years before Hitler’s accession to power, the Nazis had unsuccessfully demanded an amendment of the Law for the Protection of the Republic so as to define “betrayal of the race” (Rassenverrat) as a crime punishable by imprisonment or even by death. Such an offender would be anyone “who contributes or threatens to contribute to the racial deterioration and dissolution of the German people through interbreeding with persons of Jewish blood or the colored races.”31

  In September 1933 Hanns Kerrl, justice minister of Prussia, and his undersecretary, Roland Freisler, suggested to the party (in a memorandum entitled “National Socialist Criminal Law”) that marriages and extramarital sexual relations between “those of German blood” and “members of racially alien communities” be considered “punishable offenses against the honor of the race and endangerment of the race.”32 At the time these proposals were not followed up. After the establishment of the new regime, however, the situation started to change de facto. Officials increasingly referred to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in order to refuse, on the basis of the law’s “general national principles,” to perform marriage ceremonies between Jews and “those of German blood.”33 The pressure grew to such a point that on July 26, 1935, Frick announced that, since the legal validity of “marriages between Aryans and non-Aryans” would be officially addressed in the near future, such marriages should be “postponed until further notice.”34

  The refusal to perform marriages was an easy matter compared to the other “logical” corollary stemming from the situation: the dissolution of existing mixed marriages. The Civil Code allowed for divorce on the basis of wrongdoing by one of the partners, but it was difficult to equate belonging to a particular race with the notion of wrongdoing.

  Paragraph 1333 of the Civil Code did, however, stipulate that a marriage could be challenged if a spouse had been unaware, on contracting the marriage, of “personal qualities” or circumstances that would have precluded the union. But it could only be invoked within six months of the wedding, and racial identity could hardly be defined as a personal quality; finally it is unlikely that partners to a marriage were unaware of such racial identity at the time of their decision. Nevertheless, paragraph 1333 increasingly became the prop of Nazi legal interpretation, on the grounds that “Jewishness” was indeed a personal quality whose significance had become clear only as a result of the new political circumstances. Consequently, the six-month period could be counted from the date when the significance of Jewishness became a major element in public consciousness, that is, from January 30 (Hitler’s accession) or even April 7, 1933 (the Civil Service Law’s promulgation).35

  As an increasing number of courts started basing their decisions on the new interpretation of the Civil Service Law, leading Nazi jurists, such as Roland Freisler, had to intervene in order to restore a semblance of order.36It was only with the law of July 6, 1938, that “racially” mixed marriages could in fact be legally annulled. The judges, lawyers, and registrars who were intent on the dissolution of mixed marriages were not necessarily members of the party; in their determination to segregate the Jews from society, they went beyond the immediate instructions of the Nazi leadership.

  The anti-Jewish zeal of the courts regarding mixed marriages was reinforced by police initiatives and even by mob demonstrations against any form of sexual relations between Jews and Aryans: “Race defilement” was the obsession of the day. Thus on August 19, 1935, a Jewish businessman was arrested on that charge in Stuttgart. As he was brought to the police station, a crowd gathered and demonstrated against the accused. Shortly afterward, according to the city chronicle, a Jewish woman merchant who had had a stall in the market hall since 1923 lost her permit because she allowed her son to have a relationship with a non-Jewish German girl.37

  Whether the demonstrators assembled in front of the Stuttgart police station were party activists, a mob drummed up by the party, or a random crowd of Germans is hard to say. The agitation against mixed marriages and race defilement reported from all parts of the Reich during the summer of 1935 offers no further clues. Thus a Gestapo report from Pomerania for the month of July 1935 indicates that Volksgenossen demonstrated in Stralsund on the 14th “because here various Jews had married Aryan girls,” and in Altdamm on the 24th “because here a Jew had committed race defilement with a married Aryan woman.”38

  The party press spared no effort to fan th
e fury of the Volksgenossen against such pollution. Jewish race defilers must be castrated, demanded the Westdeutscher Beobachter on February 19, 1935. On April 10 the SS periodical Das Schwarze Korps called for dire punishment (up to fifteen years’ imprisonment even for the German partner) for sexual relations between Germans and Jews.39 All aspects of the witch-hunt that was to characterize the period following the passage of the Nuremberg racial laws were already visible.

  The presence of Jews in public swimming pools was a major theme, second only to outright race defilement, in the Nazis’ pornographic imagination: It expressed a “healthy” Aryan revulsion at the sight of the Jewish body,40 the fear of possible contamination resulting from sharing the water or mingling in the pool area and, most explicitly, the sexual threat of Jewish nakedness, often alluded to as the impudent behavior of Jewish women and outright sexual harassment of German women by Jewish men. As could be expected, the theme surfaced in Nazi literature. Thus, in Hans Zöberlein’s 1937 novel Der Befehldes Gewissens (Conscience commands), which takes place during the years immediately after World War I, the Aryan Berta is molested by Jews in an open-air swimming pool in Bavaria: “These Jewish swine are ruining us,” she exclaims. “They are polluting our blood. And blood is the best and the only thing we have.”41

  In most German cities the expulsion of Jews from public bathing facilities became a prime party objective. In Dortmund, for example, the party press harped on the danger posed by the presence of Jews in municipal swimming pools until it achieved its goal with the publication of an announcement on July 25, 1935, by the city’s mayor: “As a result of various unpleasant occurrences and due to the fact that the immense majority of the members of our German national community feels burdened by the presence of Jews, I have forbidden Jews the use of all public swimming pools, indoor public bathing facilities, and public sun-decks. At all these premises, warning signs will carry the following inscription: ACCESS TO THESE FACILITIES IS FORBIDDEN TO JEWS.42