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

by Saul Friedlander

  The beginning of the war interrupted the preparations of both prosecution and defense. When the Germans occupied France, the Vichy government duly delivered to them the young Jew they were searching for. Grynszpan was incarcerated in Germany, and Goebbels started to plan a huge show trial in which Herschel Grynszpan would have stood for “international Judaism.” Nothing came of it, as in 1942 the accused suddenly announced that he had had a homosexual relationship with Rath. Such a line of defense, if presented in public, would have been disastrous in the eyes of the Nazis. Grynszpan did not survive the war; the circumstances of his death remain unknown.124

  During these early months of 1939, the expulsion of the Jews from the Reich continued to follow the pattern inaugurated in 1938; the Jews were sent over the borders, but usually to no avail. In February 1939 a SOPADE report described a scene witnessed in the west of the country, near the border with France. The Jews were taken from their homes and herded together in the city square. In the evening they were transported to the border, only to be brought back the next day, as the French would not let them through. Later they were shipped off to Dachau.

  The report described the jeering and the insults coming from youths and “hysterical women.” But “most of the older people who accidentally came upon this scene could not hide their indignation over this spectacle. Words were exchanged with people who wanted to defend the measures against the Jews. People said: ‘They [the Jews] are no worse than other businessmen; and those who took over their businesses are more expensive and have poorer quality goods.’ The excitement was so great that nothing could be undertaken [by the authorities] against these dissidents. A large segment of those previously transported are here again, and have been received kindly by the public. People ask them sympathetically if they have no possibilities of emigrating. Some answer that they are trying, and others point to the great difficulties. Now it has reached the point where children confront Jews and demand money. Some give it to them and create the impression that they themselves have become childish.”125

  On December 23, 1938, very strict orders had been issued by Gestapo headquarters to all stations on the western borders of the Reich to prevent illegal crossings of Jews into neighboring countries, due to increasing complaints. However, as the SOPADE report indicates, and as a further Gestapo order of March 15, 1939, confirms, such illegal crossings, mostly initiated, it seems, by local authorities, must have continued well into the spring of that year.126 On exceptionally rare occasions, officials on the non-German side of the borders took the risk of aiding the illegal entry of Jews into their countries, whether the refugees were pushed over the frontier by the Germans or were trying to cross on their own. Such was the case of Paul Gruninger, the commander of the border police in the Swiss canton Saint Gall. By predating visas and falsifying other documents, he helped some 3,600 Jewish refugees to enter Switzerland in late 1938 and early 1939. Gruninger’s activities were discovered. In April 1939 he was dismissed and, later, sentenced to a heavy fine and to the loss of his pension rights.127 As the result of a lengthy public campaign, Gruninger was rehabilitated—fifty-four years after his sentencing, twenty-three years after his death.128

  One escape route was still open, but only for a very short time. An interministerial conference held in Tokyo on December 6, 1938, decided on a lenient policy toward Jewish refugees, making Japanese-occupied Shanghai accessible to them and even permitting prolonged transit stays in Japan itself. The Japanese seem to have been moved by their distrust of Germany and possibly by humane considerations, but undoubtedly too, as accounts of the conference show, by their belief in Jewish power—a belief reinforced by Nazi propaganda and by study of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—and its possible impact on Japanese interests in Great Britain and the United States. Be that as it may, Shanghai, where no visa was required, became an asylum for desperate German and Austrian Jews. By the end of 1938, fifteen hundred refugees had arrived; seven months later the number had reached fourteen thousand, and if the Japanese had not begun curtailing access to the city because of local conditions, the total would have mushroomed. On the eve of the war, the Jews who had reached the safe shores of the China Sea numbered between seventeen and eighteen thousand.129 This influx triggered a fear of economic competition among some of the earlier Jewish settlers who had not yet established themselves, as well as among the large community of White Russian exiles. Some aspects of the European pattern reappeared with uncanny similarity. But there were very few reactions among the great majority of the Shanghai population, the Chinese themselves, because their standard of living was too low for any sort of competition.130

  Thus some tens of thousands of Jews managed to leave Germany for neighboring European countries, North, Central, and South America, and remote Shanghai. Tiny groups were driven over Germany’s borders. And finally, despite British policy, Jewish emigrants managed to reach Palestine by way of illegal transports organized secretly both by the majority Zionist leadership and by its right-wing rivals, the Revisionists. These illegal operations were backed by Heydrich and all branches of the SD and the Gestapo, with the full knowledge of the Wilhelmstrasse. On the occasion of the first working session of the newly established Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration, on February 11, 1939, Heydrich was quite explicit: “He [Heydrich] stated that any illegal emigration should be opposed on principle, to be sure. In the case of Palestine, however, matters were such that illegal transports were already going there at the present time from many other European countries, which were themselves only transit countries, and in these circumstances this opportunity could also be utilized in Germany, though without any official participation. Senior Counselor Walter Hinrichs and Minister Ernst Eisenlohr from the Foreign Ministry had no objection to this and expressed the viewpoint that every possibility for getting a Jew out of Germany ought to be taken advantage of.”131

  The illegal road first led through Yugoslavia, then down the Danube to the Romanian harbor of Constantsa. The main problem was not for the emigrants to leave the Greater Reich, but for the Zionist organizations to find the money to bribe officials and buy ships, and then to avoid the British patrols along the Palestine coast. Some seventeen thousand illegal immigrants reached Palestine from early 1939 to the outbreak of the war.132 On September 2, 1939, off the beach at Tel-Aviv, a Royal Navy ship fired at the Tiger Hill, which was carrying fourteen hundred Jewish refugees, two of whom were killed. As Bernard Wasserstein ironically noted, “these were probably the first hostile shots fired by British forces after the [previous day’s German] attack on Poland.”133

  On March 15, 1939, the Wehrmacht had occupied Prague. Czecho-Slovakia ceased to exist. Slovakia became a German satellite; Bohemia-Moravia was turned into a protectorate of the Reich. The crisis had started in the early days of the month. Enticed and supported by the Germans, the Slovaks seceded from the already truncated Czecho-Slovakia. The elderly Czech President, Emil Hacha, was summoned to Berlin, threatened with the bombing of Prague, and bullied into acceptance of all the German demands. But before he even signed the document of his country’s submission, the first German units had crossed the border. Some 118,000 more Jews were now under German domination. Stahlecker was transferred from Vienna to Prague to become inspector of the security police and the SD in the new protectorate, and Eichmann soon followed; imitating the Viennese model, he set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague.134

  “At home for breakfast, I found that I myself had a refugee, a Jewish acquaintance who had worked many years for American interests,” the American diplomat George F. Kennan, who had been posted to the Prague legation a few months earlier, wrote in a March 15 memorandum. “I told him that I could not give him asylum, but that as long as he was not demanded by the authorities he was welcome to stay here and to make himself at home. For twenty-four hours he haunted the house, a pitiful figure of horror and despair, moving uneasily around the drawing room, smoking one cigarette after another, too unstrung to ea
t or think of anything but his plight. His brother and sister-in-law had committed suicide together after Munich, and he had a strong inclination to follow suit. Annelise pleaded with him at intervals throughout the coming hours not to choose this way out, not because she or I had any great optimism with respect to his chances for future happiness but partly on general Anglo-Saxon principles and partly to preserve our home from this sort of unpleasantness.”135

  CHAPTER 10

  A Broken Remnant

  I

  “Guests of the Jewish race,” read the “welcoming” card at the Hotel Reichshof in Hamburg sometime in early 1939, “are requested not to lounge in the lobby. Breakfast will be served in the rooms and the other meals in the blue room next to the breakfast hall on the mezzanine. The Management.” These words were addressed to lucky emigrants still managing to flee the Reich through its major northern harbor. On the back of the card was an advertisement for the travel agency located in the hotel lobby, where “you may obtain boat tickets.” The advertisement carried the slogan: “Travel is pleasant on the ships of the Hamburg-Amerika Line.”1

  Through a process of interpretation and innovation, party, state, and society gradually filled in the remaining blanks of the ever harsher code regulating all relations with Jews. What party agencies and the state bureaucracy left open was dealt with by the courts, and what the courts did not rule on remained for Volksgenossen (such as the Reichshof managers) to figure out.

  Sometimes court decisions may have appeared improbable or even paradoxical, but only at first glance. More closely considered, they expressed the essence of the system. Thus, on June 30, 1939, a Frankfurt district court ordered a language- school director to refund advance payments received from a Jew for English lessons not provided in full; the court then followed by ruling that a German woman had to pay (in monthly installments, with interest) for goods she had bought and not paid for when her husband, a party member, insisted on immediate cessation of the transaction on discovery of the seller’s Jewish identity. In both cases the German defendants also had to bear the court costs.2

  There was a slight twist, however, to this unexpected show of justice. The rulings most probably resulted from instructions regarding the legal status of Jews issued by the Ministry of Justice on June 23, 1939, to all presidents of regional higher courts; the guidelines had been agreed upon by the ministers concerned at the beginning of the year and had already been communicated orally at the end of January. Thus the courts were well aware of their “duty.”

  The opening paragraph of the memorandum conveyed the gist of the ministry’s position: “The exclusion of the Jews from the German economy must be completed according to plan and in stages on the basis of the existing regulations…. Businesses and other properties in the possession of Jews, which would allow for economic influence, will become German property in accordance with the prescribed ways.” There is no possible mistake about the goals here defined. At this point, though, the bureaucracy sets the “limits,” requiring that, beyond the aforesaid measures, the Jews (whether plaintiffs or defendants) be treated by the courts according to all accepted legal norms in any financial litigation: “Intervention in the economic situation of the Jews by the use of measures devoid of any explicit legal basis should be avoided. Therefore, the Jews should be able to turn to the courts with claims stemming from their [economic] activity and to have the rulings enforced when cases are decided in their favor.” The ministry did not conceal the reason for this sudden legal concern: “It is undesirable, on public welfare grounds alone, to let the Jews become totally impoverished.” In a prior paragraph this rather crass reasoning had been preempted by a declaration of high principles: “The enforcement [of rulings]…is not only a matter for the parties involved but also serves…as an expression of the authority of the state.” Even judges who were party members could not avoid the application of the law to Jews, because in their function as judges they were also part of an administrative organ.3

  This text represents a classic example of Nazi thinking. There is an absolute cleavage between the apparent significance of the text and the reality to which it alludes. The apparent significance here was that the Jews were entitled to their share of justice so that they would not become a burden on the state and because the enforcement of justice was the ultimate expression of state authority. But this declaration came after the Jews had been dispossessed of all their rights and of all possibilities of material subsistence by the very state authorities that were ordering that justice be enforced.

  Up to that point, there had been a measure of consonance between the significance of decrees, as brutal as they were, and the facts they dealt with, as calamitous as they were. The laws of exclusion were explicit and led to the dismissal of the Jews from public office and official life; the segregation edicts led to complete separation between Germans and Jews; the expropriation decrees dealt with the destruction of the concrete economic situation of the Jews in Germany. But the edict of June 1939 was calling for a measure of justice in a situation in which day in, day out, the Nazi authority that was demanding such justice was imposing ever harsher injustices, a situation in which court decisions on individual claims had become irrelevant in practice, given the public burden (the impoverishment of the Jews) the same authority had itself already created.

  Although the instructions given to the courts in January (and June) 1939 were unknown to the litigants, they introduced a new dimension within the administration itself: the double language that increasingly characterized all measures taken against the Jews—the internal camouflage that was to contribute to the success of the “Final Solution.” And, whereas concrete measures were increasingly disguised by a new form of language and concepts, open statements, particularly the utterances of the leadership and of the Nazi press, attained unequaled degrees of violence. Hitler threatened extermination; the Ministry of Justice enjoined abiding by the rules.

  II

  As in every year since 1933, the Reichstag was convened in festive session on January 30, 1939, to mark the anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power. Hitlers speech started at 8:15 in the evening and lasted for more than two and a half hours. The first part of the speech dealt with the history of the Nazi movement and the development of the Reich. Hitler then castigated some of the main British critics of appeasement, whom he accused of calling for a war against Germany. Since the Munich agreement Hitler had already twice lashed out in public against his English enemies, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Alfred Duff Cooper, and on one occasion at least, in his speech of October 9, he had explicitly mentioned the Jewish wire pullers he perceived behind the anti-German incitement.4 The same rhetoric unfurled on January 30. Behind the British opponents of Munich, the Führer pointed to “the Jewish and non-Jewish instigators” of that campaign. He promised that when National Socialist propaganda went on the offensive, it would be as successful as it had been within Germany, where “we knocked down the Jewish world enemy…with the compelling strength of our propaganda.”5

  After referring to the American intervention against Germany during World War I, which, according to him, had been determined by purely capitalistic motives, Hitler—probably infuriated by the American reactions to the November pogrom and to other Nazi measures against the Jews—thundered that nobody would be able to influence Germany in its solution of the Jewish problem. He sarcastically pointed to the pity expressed for the Jews by the democracies, but also to the refusal of these same democracies to help and to their unwillingness to take in the Jews to whom they were so sympathetic. Hitler then abruptly turned to the principle of absolute national sovereignty: “France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans.” This allowed for a renewed anti-Jewish tirade: The Jews had attempted to control all dominant positions within Germany, particularly in culture. In foreign countries there was criticism of the harsh treatment of such highly cultured people. Why then weren’t the others grateful for the gift G
ermany was giving to the world? Why didn’t they take in these “magnificent people”?

  From sarcasm Hitler moved to threat: “I believe that this [Jewish] problem will be solved—and the sooner the better. Europe cannot find peace before the Jewish question is out of the way…. The world has enough space for settlement, but one must once and for all put an end to the idea that the Jewish people have been chosen by the good Lord to exploit a certain percentage of the body and the productive work of other nations. Jewry will have to adapt itself to productive work like any other nation or it will sooner or later succumb to a crisis of unimaginable dimensions.” Up to that point, Hitler was merely rehashing an array of anti-Jewish themes that had become a known part of his repertory. Then, however, his tone changed, and threats as yet unheard in the public pronouncements of a head of state resonated in the Reichstag: “One thing I would like to express on this day, which is perhaps memorable not only for us Germans: In my life I have often been a prophet, and I have mostly been laughed at. At the time of my struggle for power, it was mostly the Jewish people who laughed at the prophecy that one day I would attain in Germany the leadership of the state and therewith of the entire nation, and that among other problems I would also solve the Jewish one. I think that the uproarious laughter of that time has in the meantime remained stuck in German Jewry’s throat.” Then came the explicit menace: “Today I want to be a prophet again: If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe again succeeds in precipitating the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”6