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

by Saul Friedlander

  The party press in Stuttgart initiated a similar campaign, the NS-Kurier reporting on July 8 that during the preceding week several Jewish women had had to be expelled from the city’s swimming pools because of “their impudent behavior.” The paper took the opportunity to point out that there were no signs forbidding access to Jews. With the city council divided on the issue, such signs were not finally posted in Stuttgart until after the 1936 Olympic Games.43

  The process of exclusion seemed to follow a well-established pattern. Sometimes, however, minor hitches occurred. On August 1, 1935, the Bavarian Political Police reported an incident at the Heigenbrücken swimming pool on July 14, when some fifteen or twenty youths chanted for “the removal of the Jews…from ‘the German baths.’” According to the police report: “A considerable number of other bathers joined in the chanting, so that probably the majority of visitors were demanding the removal of the Jews. In view of the general indignation and the danger of disturbances, the district leader of the NSDAP, Mayor Wohlgemuth of Aschaffenburg, who happened to be in the swimming pool, went to the supervisor of the baths and demanded that he remove the Jews. The supervisor refused on the grounds that he was obliged to follow only the instructions of the baths’ administration and moreover, could not easily distinguish the Jews as such. As a result of the supervisor’s statement, there was a slight altercation between him and the mayor, which was later settled by the baths’ administration. In view of this incident, the Spa Association today placed a notice at the entrance of the baths with the inscription: ENTRY FORBIDDEN TO JEWS.”44

  Among the newspapers spewing a constant stream of anti-Jewish abuse, Streicher’s Der Stürmer was the most vicious; its ongoing campaign and the wide distribution it achieved by means of public display may have been abhorrent to the educated middle class or even to educated party members, but its appeal among the general population, school youngsters, and the Hitler Youth, possibly because of its pornographic and sadistic streak, seems to have been quite widespread.

  On May 1, 1934, Der Stürmer published its notorious special issue on Jewish ritual murder. The front-page headline, THE JEWISH MURDER PLOT AGAINST NON-JEWISH HUMANITY IS UNCOVERED, was graced by a half-page drawing of two particularly hideous-looking Jews holding a vessel to collect the blood streaming from the naked bodies of angelic Christian children they have just murdered (one of the Jews is holding a bloodstained knife). In the background stands a cross. The next day the National Representation of German Jews wired Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller: “We feel obliged to draw your attention to the special issue of the Der Stürmer of May 1. We have sent the following telegram to the Reich chancellor: ‘Der Stürmer has come out with a special issue which, using incredible insults and horrifying descriptions, accuses Jewry of ritual murder. Before God and humanity, we raise our voice in solemn protest against this unheard-of profanation of our faith.’ We are convinced that the deep outrage that we are feeling is shared by every Christian.” Neither Hitler nor Reich Bishop Müller replied.45

  Along with great issues such as ritual murder, Der Stürmer also addressed more mundane items (although, in true Stürmer fashion, the mundane always led to the broader historical panorama), like one that came up in the summer of 1935. In its August 1935 issue (no. 35), Streicher’s paper took up a story previously published by the Reutlinger Tageblatt about a Jewish chemist, Dr. R.F., who had been accused of torturing a cat to death. According to Der Stürmer, in order to kill the cat, F. had tied it up in a sack, which he then threw onto the concrete in front of his door. “After that, he jumped with both feet on the poor animal, performing a true Negro dance on it. As he could not kill the animal in that way, although it bled through the sack, he took a board and hit the cat with the edge until he killed it.” Der Stürmer linked the killing of the cat to “the slaughter of 75,000 Persians in the Book of Esther” and to the killing of “millions of non-Jews” in “the most horrible way” in contemporary Russia. “The complacent bourgeois thinks far too little about what would happen in Germany if the Jews came to power once more,” Der Stürmer concluded.46 As could be expected, the Stürmer story aroused reader reactions. A woman from Munich addressed her letter to the culprit: “The opinion of all my female and male colleagues is that one should not treat you one hairsbreadth better [than the cat] and that you should be kicked and hit until you croak. In the case of such a wretched, disgusting, horrifying, flat-footed, hook-nosed dirty Jew, it would, by God, be no loss…. You should croak like a worm.”47

  Streicher’s paper did not hesitate to attack the party’s faithful conservative allies when any kind of (usually false) information about assistance extended to a Jew reached the paper. Thus on May 20, 1935, Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner himself had to write to Hitler to clear a Stuttgart court of a Stürmer accusation that it had helped a Jew named David Isak to change his name to Fritsch (a double scandal, so to speak, given that Fritsch was the name of one of the “great forerunners of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany”). Gürtner went into details: The Isaks were of proven Catholic peasant stock going back more than two hundred years, for which parish records were available. In early 1935 David Isak had asked to change his name to Rudolf Fritsch, as his Jewish-sounding name made for growing difficulties in his work. Despite these easily established facts, Der Stürmer had launched a smear campaign against the Ministry of Justice, and Gürtner demanded that Streicher’s paper be compelled to recant publicly.48 A month later Chancellery head Hans Lammers informed the minister that Hitler had agreed to his demand.49 This incident had far-reaching consequences: the beginning of lengthy administrative debates about Jewish names, name changes, and special names for Jews.

  Such complaints against Der Stürmer may have convinced Hitler that Streicher’s paper could damage the party’s reputation. On June 12, 1936, Bormann wrote to the Minister of Justice that, according to the Führer’s decision, “Der Stürmer is not a mouthpiece of the NSDAP.”50

  The populace appears to have been mainly passive in the face of such ongoing party agitation: Although there was no resistance to it, outright anti-Jewish violence often encountered disapproval. An incident in the spring of 1935 is quite telling. Police interrogation of a man suspected of vandalizing a Jewish cemetery in the Rhineland revealed the following story: The suspect and his friends Gross and Remle had met at a tavern in Hassloch and, after hearing from the local SS leader, Strubel, that “the Jews were to be considered fair game,” they set out for the Jewish livestock dealer Heinrich Heene’s house. They hurled abuse at Heene and his family while unsuccessfully attempting to break into the courtyard. The people, who by now had gathered in front of Heene’s house, gave the three men no aid in their efforts to break down the gate. “When Gross saw…that the assembled crowd did not support him,” the police report went on, “he yelled at them: ‘You call yourselves men, but you’re not helping me bring out this pack of Jews.’ He then tried with great force to break down the door, kicking against it more wildly than before. The crowd, however, was not in favor of Gross’s deed, and one could hear voices growing louder with disapproval—that this was unjust.”51

  Remle, Gross, and the suspect were party members who had taken their cues from the local SS leader and encountered signs of reluctance from a group of townspeople when they moved toward violence. This does not mean that sporadic (and traditional) anti-Jewish violence was unknown in all areas.52 In one case at least, in Guenzenhausen (Lower Franconia) in the spring of 1934, it led to the deaths of two local Jews.” But such occurences were rare.

  The peasantry seemed unwilling to forgo the services of the Jew as shopkeeper or cattle dealer:54 “because of the economic advantages they gained from dealing with Jews who paid cash and sold on credit, they [the peasants] were reluctant to make the move to the Aryan cattle dealers whom the Nazis tried to encourage.”55 On more general grounds, the peasantry often “chose to buy almost solely in Jewish stores,” as was reported from Pomerania for the month of June 1935, “because at the
Jew’s it is cheaper and one has a greater choice [of merchandise].”56 Probably for the same reasons, a sizable number of Volksgenossen still gave preference to Jewish stores and businesses in small towns no less than in large cities. When, according to Victor Klemperer s diary, non-Jews of Falkenstein, in Saxony, were forbidden to patronize local Jewish stores, they traveled to neighboring Auerbach, where they could still patronize the Jewish stores; in turn, non-Jews of Auerbach traveled to Falkenstein for the same purpose. For large-scale purchases, non-Jews from both towns traveled to Plauen, where there was a Jewish department store: “If you happened to know someone you ran into there, neither of you had seen the other. That was the tacit understanding.”57

  What seems to have been most galling to party authorities was the fact that even party members, some in full uniform, were not deterred from doing business with Jews. Thus, in the early summer of 1935, the persistence of such reprehensible behavior was reported from Dortmund, Frankfurt an der Oder, Königsberg, Stettin, and Breslau.58 In short, while hordes of party activists were beating up Jews, other party members were faithfully buying at Jewish shops. Some party members went even further. According to an SD report, addressed on October 11, 1935, to the party district court in Berlin-Steglitz, party member Hermann Prinz had been seen, six months earlier, in the Bad Polzin area dealing in rugs in partnership with the Jew Max Ksinski; he had even been wearing party insignia while doing this business.59

  In the summer of 1935, when Jews, as we have seen, were forbidden access to swimming pools and other bathing facilities in numerous German cities, and the very presence of Jews was not allowed in many small towns and villages, a surrealistic situation developed in some of the Baltic seaside resorts, where Der Stürmer was widely displayed. It seems that a number of popular guesthouses in these resorts belonged to Jews. In Binz, for instance, a Hungarian Jew owned the most prominent guesthouse, which, according to a Gestapo report, the local population was boycotting, when who should choose to stay there at Whitsuntide but Gauleiter and Reich Governor (Reichsstatthalter) Löper!60 And, adding insult to injury, a month later, in July, it was the Hungarian Jew’s guesthouse that was favored by officers and men from the Köln on the naval cruiser’s visit to Binz.61 This paradoxical situation lasted for three more years, coming to an end in the spring of 1938, when the director of the Binz office of Baltic Sea resorts announced that “the efforts of recent months have been successful”: All the formerly Jewish-owned guesthouses were now in Aryan hands.62

  The clash between party propaganda against business relations with Jews and the economic advantages brought by such relations was only a reflection of the contradictory nature of the orders from above: on the one hand, no contacts between Jews and Volksgenossen; on the other, no interference with Jewish economic activities. This contradiction, which stemmed from two momentarily irreconcilable priorities—the ongoing struggle against the Jews and the need to further Germany’s economic recovery—found repeated expression in reports from local authorities. The president of the Kassel administrative district addressed the issue in very direct terms in his monthly report of August 8, 1934: “The Jewish question still plays a significant role. In business life the Jewish presence is still getting stronger. They again have complete control of the cattle market. The attitude of the National Socialist organizations in regard to the Jewish question remains unchanged and is often in conflict with the instructions of the Minister of the Economy, particularly with regard to the treatment of Jewish businesses. I have repeatedly been compelled, together with the State Police, to cancel boycott initiatives as well as other violations by local authorities.”63

  Such contradictions and dilemmas were often particularly visible at the small-town level. On July 2, 1935, a report was sent by Laupheim town officials to the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior: “Under present circumstances, the Jewish question has increasingly become a source of uncertainty for the Laupheim authorities…. If the fight against the Jews…continues, one has to take into account that the local Jewish businesspeople will emigrate as fast as possible. The municipality of Laupheim will thereby have to expect a further acute loss of income and will have to raise taxes in order to meet its obligations.” The author of the report believed that the dying out of the older Jews and the emigration of the younger would cause the Jewish question to resolve itself within thirty years. Meanwhile, he suggested, let the Jews stay as they were, the more so since, apart from a few exceptions, they were a community of well-established families. If Jewish tax revenues were to disappear with no replacement, “the decline of Laupheim into a big village would be unavoidable.”64

  This tension between party initiatives and economic imperatives was illustrated at length in a report devoted entirely to the Jews, sent on April 3, 1935, by the SD “major region Rhine” to SS-Gruppenführer August Heissmeyer in Koblenz. A “quiet boycott” against the Jews is described as having been mainly initiated by the party and its organizations repeatedly asking members in “closed meetings” not to patronize Jewish stores. The report then points to the fact that, “despite more limited possibilities of control in the cities, the boycott is more strictly adhered to there than in rural areas. In Catholic regions in particular, the peasants buy as they did before, mainly from Jews, and this turns in part into an antiboycott movement, which gets its support from the Catholic clergy.”

  The report continues by describing the growing impact of Der Stürmer, “which is sometimes even used as teaching material in schools.” But when the paper openly incited its readers to boycott, there was counteraction by state authorities. According to the report, “The Jews conclude from this that the boycott is not wanted by the state. As a result one hears all kinds of complaints about Jewish insolence, which is again coming to the fore.”65

  III

  Sometimes genuine sympathy for the plight of the Jews and even offers of help found direct or indirect ways of expression. Thus, in a letter to the Jüdische Rundschau, the granddaughter of the poet Hoffmann von Fallersleben, author of the lyrics of the national anthem (the “Deutschlandlied”), offered to put a house on the Baltic shore at the disposal of Jewish children.66 A different and rather unexpected testimony to both Jewish resilience and Aryan sympathy reached the files of the Göttingen police in early 1935; signed by Reinhard Heydrich, it was a report sent to all Gestapo stations. Its subject: “Performances by Jewish Artists.”

  “It has recently been observed,” Heydrich wrote, “that Jewish artists have attempted in their public appearances to deal, in a veiled way, with government measures as well as with the political and economic situation in Germany and, before an audience of mainly non-Aryans, to exercise by their mimicry and their tone an intentionally destructive criticism, the aim of which is to publicly ridicule the State and the Party.” So much for Jewish artists addressing a Jewish public. But there was more: “The State authorities were also provoked by the fact that police intervention resulting from the undesirable cooperation of Aryan with non-Aryan artists has been turned into an occasion for ovations for the non-Aryan artists.” And, as if struck by an afterthought, Heydrich added: “The appearance of non-Aryan artists before an Aryan public is fundamentally undesirable, as complications are to be feared.” In short the Gestapo was being asked to stop any such shows immediately, although in legal terms some Jews were still exempted from such a prohibition. For Heydrich non-Aryan artists had to limit themselves to a Jewish public. Moreover, in the event that non-Aryan artists were again to allude to the situation in Germany, they must be arrested, “as any interference by non-Aryans in German matters cannot be tolerated.”67

  Repeated orders to party members and civil servants to avoid any further contacts with Jews are indirect proof that such contacts continued into 1935, and not only on economic grounds. On June 7 the mayor of Lörrach in Baden addressed a stern warning to all municipal employees: the Führer had freed Germany from the Jewish danger, and any German “who valued his racial honor” must be grateful to
the Führer for this achievement. “If it still happens nonetheless that Germans express their attachment to this foreign race by keeping friendly relations with its members, such behavior shows an absence of sensitivity which must be denounced in the sharpest form.”68

  The undercurrent of sympathy for the persecuted Jews must have been significant enough for Goebbels to address it in a speech that month. Goebbels “attacked those of his countrymen who…‘shamelessly,’ argued that the Jew, after all, was a human being too.” According to Robert Weltsch, who at the time was the editor of the Jüdische Rundschau, Goebbels’s wrath reveals that a whispering campaign was still going on, indicating some measure of indignation on the part of people whom Goebbels called bourgeois intellectuals. It was these Germans whom the Gauleiter [of Berlin, Goebbels] wanted to warn.”69

  It may be difficult to prove how effective Goebbels’s speech was in intimidating the “bourgeois intellectuals,” but it surely had other consequences. In its July 2, 1935, issue, the Jüdische Rundschau published an article by Weltsch entitled “The Jew Is Human Too: An Argument Put Forward by Friends of the Jews.” It was a subtly ironic comment on the minister’s tirade, and it did lead to the banning of the paper.70 After a few weeks and some negotiating, a letter written in Goebbels’s name (but signed “Jahnke”) was sent to Weltsch: “The Jüdische Rundschau No. 53, dated July 2, 1935, published an article ‘The Jew Is Human Too,’ which dealt with the part of my speech of 29.6.1935 referring to the Jewish question. My refutation of the bourgeois intellectual view that ‘the Jew is human too’ was attacked in this article which stated that not only was the Jew human too, but had of necessity to be consciously human and consciously Jewish. Your paper has been banned because of this article. The ban on the paper will be lifted, but in view of the polemic nature of the article I have to reprimand you most severely and expect to have no further cause to object to your publications.”71