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

by Saul Friedlander

  Nazi sarcasm had a field day. For the SD Evian’s net result was “to show the whole world that the Jewish problem was in no way provoked only by Germany, but was a question of the most immediate world political significance. Despite the general rejection by the Evian states of the way in which the Jewish question has been dealt with in Germany, no country, America not excepted, declared itself ready to accept unconditionally any number of Jews. It was remarkable that the Australian delegate even mentioned that Jewish emigration would endanger his own race.”41 There was no fundamental difference between the German assessment and the biting summary of Evian by the Newsweek correspondent there: “Chairman Myron C. Taylor, former U.S. Steel head, opened the proceedings: ‘The time has come when governments…must act and act promptly.’ Most governments represented acted promptly by slamming their doors against Jewish refugees.”42 The Völkischer Beobachter headlined triumphantly: “Nobody wants them.”43

  For Hitler too, this was an opportunity not to be missed. He chose to insert his comments into the closing speech of the party rally on September 12. Its main theme, the Sudeten crisis, riveted the attention of the world; never since 1918 had the danger of war seemed closer, but the Jews could not be left unmentioned: “They complain in these democracies about the unfathomable cruelty that Germany—and now also Italy—uses in trying to get rid of their Jews. In general, all these great democratic empires have only a few people per square kilometer, whereas Germany, for decades past, has admitted hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these Jews, without even batting an eye.

  “But now, as the complaints have at last become too strong and as the nation is not willing any more to let itself be sucked dry by these parasites, cries of pain arise all over. But it does not mean that these democratic countries have now become ready to replace their hypocritical remarks with acts of help; on the contrary, they affirm with complete coolness that over there, evidently, there is no room! Thus, they expect that Germany with its 140 inhabitants per square kilometer will go on keeping its Jews without any problem, whereas the democratic world empires with only a few people per square kilometer can in no way take such a burden upon themselves. In short, no help, but preaching, certainly!”44

  The Evian debacle acquires its full significance from its wider context. The growing strength of Nazi Germany impelled some of the countries that had aligned themselves with Hitler’s general policies to take steps that, whether demanded by Germany or not, were meant to be demonstrations of political and ideological solidarity with the Reich. The most notorious among such initiatives were the Italian racial laws, approved by the Fascist Grand Council on October 6, 1938, and taking effect on November 17.

  In Italy the Jewish community numbered barely more than fifty thousand and was fully integrated into the general society. Anti-Semitism had become rare with the waning of the church’s influence, and even the army—and the Fascist Party—included prominent Jewish members. Finally Mussolini himself had not, in the past, expressed much regard for Nazi racial ideology. Devised on the Nuremberg pattern, the new anti-Jewish laws caused widespread consternation among Italian Jews and many non-Jews alike.45

  The October laws had been preceded, in mid-July, by the Racial Manifesto, a declaration setting forth Mussolini’s concoction of racial anti-Semitism and intended as the theoretical foundation of the forthcoming legislation. Hitler could not but graciously acknowledge so much goodwill. He duly did so on September 6, in the first of his speeches to the Nuremberg party rally: “I think that I must at this point announce, on my own behalf and on that of all of you, our deep and heartfelt happiness in the fact that another European world power has, through its own experiences, by its own decision and along its own paths arrived at the same conception as ourselves and with a resolution worthy of admiration has drawn from this conception the most far-reaching consequences.”46 The first anti-Jewish law introduced in Hungary, in May 1938, was greeted with less fanfare than Mussolini’s decision, but it pointed to the same basic evidence: The shadow of Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy was lengthening over ever larger parts of Europe.47

  While the Jews were becoming targets of legal discrimination in a growing number of European countries, and while international efforts to solve the problem of Jewish refugees came to naught, an unusual step was being taken in complete secrecy. In the early summer of 1938, Pope Pius XI, who over the years had become an increasingly staunch critic of the Nazi regime, requested the American Jesuit John LaFarge to prepare the text of an encyclical against Nazi racism and Nazi anti-Semitism in particular. LaFarge had probably been chosen because of his continuous antiracist activities in the United States and his book Interracial Justice, which Pius XI had read.48

  With the help of two other Jesuit priests, the French Gustave Desbuquois and the German Gustav Gundlach, LaFarge completed the draft of Humani Generis Unitas (The unity of humankind) by the autumn of 1938 and delivered it to the general of the Jesuit order in Rome, the Pole Wladimir Ledochowski, for submission to the pope.49 In the meantime Pius XI had yet again criticized racism on several other occasions. On September 6, 1938, speaking in private to a group of Belgian pilgrims, he went further. With great emotion, apparently in tears, the pope, after commenting on the sacrifice of Abraham, declared: “It is impossible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. We recognize that everyone has the right to self-defense and may take the necessary means for protecting legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”50

  In this declaration, made in private and thus not mentioned in the press, the pope’s condemnation of anti-Semitism remained on theological grounds: He did not criticize the ongoing persecution of the Jews, and he included a reference to the right of self-defense (against undue Jewish influence). Nonetheless his statement was clear: Christians could not condone anti-Semitism of the Nazi kind (or for that matter, as it was shaping up in Italy at the very same time).

  The message of the encyclical was similar: a condemnation of racism in general and the condemnation of anti-Semitism on theological grounds, from the viewpoint of Christian revelation and the teachings of the church regarding the Jews.51 Even so, the encyclical would have been the first solemn denunciation by the supreme Catholic authority of the anti-Semitic attitudes, teachings, and persecutions in Germany, in Fascist Italy, and in the entire Christian world.

  Ledochowski was first and foremost a fanatical anti-Communist who moreover hoped that some political arrangement with Nazi Germany remained possible. He procrastinated. The draft of Humani Generis Unitas was sent by him for further comment to the editor in chief of the notoriously anti-Semitic organ of the Roman Jesuits, Civiltà Cattolica.” It was only after LaFarge had written directly to the Pope that, a few days before his death, Pius XI received the text. The pontiff died on February 9, 1939. His successor, Pius XII, was probably informed of the project and probably took the decision to shelve Humani Generis Unitas.53

  III

  Even in 1938, small islands of purely symbolic opposition to the anti-Jewish measures still existed inside Germany. Four years earlier, the Reich Ministry of Education had ordered the German Association for Art History to expel its Jewish members. The association did not comply but merely reshuffled its board of directors. Internal ministry memoranda indicate that Education Minister Rust repeated his demand in 1935, again apparently to no avail. In March 1938 State Secretary Werner Zschintsch sent a reminder to his chief: All funds for the association were to be eliminated, and, if the order was not obeyed, it would no longer be allowed to call itself “German.” “The Minister must be interested,” Zschintsch concluded, “to have the association finally comply with the principles of the National Socialist world-view.”54 We do not know what the association then decided to do; in any case its Jewish members were certainly not retained after the November 1938 pogrom.

  There were some other—equally unexpected—signs of independence. Such was to be the case at the 1938 Salzburg Festival. After t
he Anschluss, Arturo Toscanini, who had refused to conduct at Bayreuth in 1933, turned Salzburg down as well.

  Salzburg was emblematic in more ways than one. From the very outset, in 1920, when Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt had organized the first festival around a production of Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann (Everyman; based on the medieval mystery play of the same name), the Austrian anti-Semitic press had raved against the Jewish cultural invasion and the exploitation by three Jews (the third was the actor Alexander Moissi) of Christianity’s loftiest heritage.55 Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann nonetheless opened the festival year in year out (except for performances of his Welttkeater in 1922 and 1924). In 1938 Jedermann was of course removed from the repertory.56 The Jewish invasion had been stemmed.

  Wilhelm Furtwängler agreed to take Toscanini’s place at Salzburg. Throughout his career in Nazi Germany, Furtwängler showed himself to be a political opportunist who had moments of courage. In Salzburg he agreed to conduct Wagner’s Meisfersinger on condition that the Jew Walter Grossmann be kept as the understudy in the role of Hans Sachs. As it happened, on opening night Karl Kammann, the scheduled Hans Sachs, fell ill, and Walter Grossmann sang: “A glittering crowd headed by Joseph Goebbels and his entourage sat dutifully enthralled through the Führer’s favorite opera, while Grossmann brought Nuremberg’s most German hero to life.”57 But neither the actions of the art historians’ association nor Walter Grossmann’s performance could stem the ever growing tide—and impact—of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda.

  “The Eternal Jew” (Der ewige Jude), the largest anti-Jewish exhibition of the prewar years, opened on November 8, 1937, in Munich’s Deutsches Museum. Streicher and Goebbels gave speeches. On the same evening the director of the Bavarian State Theater organized a cultural event in the Residenz Theater, which, according to the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, expressed “the basic themes of the exhibition.” The first part of the program offered a staged rendition of excerpts from Luther’s notorious pamphlet Wider diejuden und ihre Lügen (Against the Jews and their lies); the second part presented readings from other anti-Jewish texts, and the third, the Shylock scenes from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.58

  A SOPADE report written a few weeks after the opening stressed that the exhibition “did not remain without effect on the visitors.” In the first hall the viewer was faced with large models of Jewish body parts: “Jewish eyes…, the Jewish nose, the Jewish mouth, the lips,” and so on. Huge photographs of various “racially typical” Jewish faces and mannerisms followed—Trotsky gesticulating, Charlie Chaplin, and so on—” all of it displayed in the most repulsive way.” Material (extracts from the Book of Esther, for instance), and caricatures, slogans, and descriptions of “Jews in politics,” “Jews in culture,” “Jews in business”—and accounts of Jewish goals and methods in these various domains—filled room after room. According to the report, “Jews in film” was particularly effective: An unbearably kitschy commercial production was shown in that section; at the end Alfred Rosenberg appeared on the screen and declared: “You are horrified by this film. Yes, it is particularly bad, but it is precisely the one we wanted to show you.”

  The author of the SOPADE report admits that he was deeply impressed on leaving the exhibition; so was his companion. She asked questions about what they had seen: “I couldn’t tell her the truth,” he admits. “I did not have sufficient knowledge for that.”59 Some SA units were so inspired by the exhibition that they started a boycott action of their own as an “educational follow-up” to what they had learned at the Deutsches Museum.60

  An exhibition such as The Eternal Jew was merely the most extreme expression of the ongoing effort to assemble any kind of damning material about the Jews. Diverse forms of this endeavor were encountered during the first years of the regime. Now, at the end of 1937 and throughout 1938, the search went on with renewed inventiveness. On February 24, 1938, the minister of justice informed all prosecutors that it was no longer necessary to forward a copy of every indictment against a Jew to the ministry’s press division, as it had already acquired a sufficient perspective on the criminality of Jews. The kinds of criminal acts by Jews that still had to be included were “cases that raised new legal points; those in which the perpetrator had demonstrated a particularly evil intention or had used particularly objectionable methods; those in which the crime had been perpetrated on an especially large scale or had caused particularly great damage or aroused uncommon interest among the public; finally, cases of racial defilement in which the perpetrator was a recurrent offender or had abused a position of power.”61 Such instances of Jews in Germany abusing their positions of power in order to commit Rassenschande must have been rather rare in the year of grace 1938….

  In March 1938 the issue of Jewish Mischlinge and persons related to Jews still in government employment came to the fore. The order for an investigation seems to have originated with Hitler himself, since it was a member of the Führer’s Chancellery, Hans Hefelmann, who on March 28, 1938, asked the SD, and specifically section II 112, to collect all the relevant documentation. The II 112 officials pointed out that the forthcoming population census would give an exact account of this particular group and that, in any case, such files as existed were most probably to be found in the higher reaches of each ministry, as any promotion had to take into consideration the candidate’s partly Jewish origin or Jewish family connections.62

  By the beginning of 1938 all German Jews had had to turn in their passports (new ones were issued only to those Jews who were about to emigrate).63 But another identification document was soon decided upon. In July 1938 the Ministry of the Interior decreed that before the end of the year all Jews had to apply to the police for an identity card, which was to be carried at all times and shown on demand.64 On August 17 another decree, prepared by Hans Globke, announced that from January 1, 1939, Jews who did not bear the first names indicated on an appended list were to add the first name Israel or Sara to their names.65 The appended list of men’s names started with Abel, Abieser, Abimelech, Abner, Absalom, Ahab, Ahasja, Ahaser,66 and so on; the list of women’s names was of the same ilk. (Had these lists been compiled under other circumstances, they could stand as an appropriate illustration of the mind-set of bureaucratic half-wits.)

  Some of the names on Globke’s lists were entirely fictitious and others were grotesque choices manifestly resulting from a compounded intention of identification and degradation. A surprising inclusion among the typically Jewish names was that of Isidor. As has been pointedly remarked, “Saint Isidor of Seville, the anti-Jewish church father, and Saint Isidor of Madrid, the patron saint of so many village churches in Southern Germany, would have been astonished.”67 But it may well be that Globke was merely following the current custom: In Germany at the time, Isidor was a name borne mainly by Jews.68

  A few months after the Anschluss, Streicher demanded from Himmler that his researchers be granted access to the Rothschild archives in Vienna in order to collect material for a “monumental historical work about Jews, Jewish crimes and Jewish laws in Germany from past to present.” Himmler agreed but insisted on the presence of an SD representative during the perusal of the documents.69 The Rothschild archives exercised a widespread fascination. Rosenberg planned an official exhibition at the September 1938 party congress, whose theme was to be “Europe’s Fate in the East.” His office turned to SS-Hauptsturmführer Hard of the Vienna Gestapo, who had impounded the Rothschild archives, in the hope of finding documents illustrating that Jewry in the East maintained contacts with both industrialists and Marxist leaders: “We assume,” wrote Rosenberg’s delegate, “that among the confiscated material in the Rothschild House, some valuable original information on this subject will be found.” Hartl’s office answered a few weeks later: No material relevant to the exhibition theme could be found in the Rothschild papers.70 At approximately the same time, SS-Oberführer Albert indicated to his SD colleague, SS-Standartenführer Six, that he was particularly interested in acc
ess to the Rothschild archives for “research purposes”; Six assured Albert that the material was accessible, although it had now been moved to several different places; its curators, it should be noted, were not all ordinary archivists: the Frankfurt Rothschild material and the thirty-thousand-volume library that came with it were being kept secure in the SS main region Fulda-Werra.71

  After the annexation of the Sudetenland, Rosenberg turned to the leader of the Sudeten Germans, Konrad Henlein, with demands for any Marxist, Jewish, and also religious literature that “offers invaluable resources to the library and the scientific research work of the ‘Hohe Schule’ [institute] that is being established.”72

  It stands to reason that in such a far-flung research drive, some borderline issues presented serious challenges to the Nazi sense of fine distinctions. Thus, on March 9, 1938, Otto Winter, the owner of the Carl Winter University Publishing House in Heidelberg, turned to Rosenberg for advice on a rather delicate matter. In the twenties Winter had published four volumes of a projected five-volume standard edition of Baruch Spinoza’s works; the type for the fifth volume had been set in 1932, but the book had not been printed. Winter felt that he could not decide on his own whether to publish the last volume (in his letter he emphasized his longtime party membership and extended involvement in Nazi publishing activities).73 On March 18 Rosenberg’s Main Office for Science (Amt Wissenschaft) authorized publication (probably on the recommendation of party philosopher Alfred Baumler).74 Winter, however, was not an old-time party member for nothing: On March 30 he thanked Rosenberg for the authorization and asked whether he could allude to it in the advertisement he was planning to place in the Bulletin of the German Book Trade: “I attach importance to it,” he added, “in order to protect myself from unjustified attacks.” The reaction to Winter’s request left immediate traces in the letter’s margin: two bold question marks and a “Nein” underlined four times.75 Winter was told the same in no uncertain terms a few days later. To make sure that Winter would not attempt any foul play, the Amt Wissenschaft letter was sent by registered mail.76