Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution
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Landauer’s description found an uncanny echo in an SD report two months later: “The defense measures taken by the Party and the state, which follow each other in quick succession, no longer allow the Jews to catch their breath; a real hysteria has set in among both Jewish women and men. Their mood of helplessness is possibly best expressed by the words of a Ludwigsburg Jewess, who declared ‘that if she didn’t have children, she would long ago have committed suicide.’”26
For some time the Nazis had been aware that, in order to expedite the emigration of the Jews, they had to hold them in an even tighter organizational grip than before, and that they themselves also needed to set up a centralized emigration agency on the Viennese model, so as to coordinate all the emigration measures in the Reich.
The establishment of the new body that henceforth was to represent the Jews in Germany was initiated in the summer of 1938. By the beginning of 1939, its shape and function were clear. According to a February memorandum from the Düsseldorf Gestapo, “the Jewish organizations must be associated with all measures taken to prepare for the emigration of the Jews. To further that aim, it is necessary to bring together in one single organization for the whole Reich the means dispersed among the various organizations. The Reichsvertretung has therefore been given the task of building a so-called Reichvereinigung [Reich Association of the Jews in Germany] and of ensuring that all existing Jewish organizations disappear and put all their installations at the disposal of the Reichsvereinigung.”27
The Reichsvereinigung was finally established on July 4, 1939, by the tenth supplementary decree to the Reich Citizenship Law. Its main function was clearly defined in Article 2: “The purpose of the Reichsvereinigung is to further the emigration of the Jews.”28 But despite the Nazis’ clear priorities, the bulk of the decree dealt with the other functions, such as education, health, and especially welfare: “The Reichsvereinigung is also the independent Jewish welfare system.” And the minister of the interior was entitled to add further responsibilities to the new organization.29 Thus the structure of the decree clearly conveyed the impression that the Nazis themselves did not believe in the success of the emigration drive. For all practical purposes, the Reichsvereinigung was becoming the first of the Jewish Councils, the Nazi-controlled Jewish organizations that, in most parts of occupied Europe, were to carry out the orders of their German masters regarding life and death in their respective communities.
A few months earlier, on January 24, Göring informed the minister of the interior that a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Reichszentrale fur Jüdische Auswanderung) was being set up within the framework of the ministry, but as Heydrich’s sole responsibility: “The Reich Central Office will have the task of devising uniform policies as follows: (1) measures for the preparation of increased emigration of Jews; (2) the channeling of emigration, including, for instance, preference for emigration of the poorer Jews…; (3) the speeding up of emigration in individual cases.”30 Heydrich appointed the head of the Gestapo, SS-Standartenführer Heinrich Müller, chief of the new Reich Central Office.
On October 30, 1938, the local party leader in Altzenau (Franconia) wrote to the district party office in Aschaffenburg that two houses belonging to different members of a Jewish family named Hamburger were being acquired by party members, each for half its market value of 16,000 RM. The local party section requested the right to acquire one of these two houses. The authorization was granted in June 1939 and the price established by the party district office at 6,000 RM, slightly more than a third of the real value. In December 1938 the same Altzenau party chief informed his district leader that Jews who—as of January 1, 1939—would no longer be allowed to engage in business, were selling off their goods at rock-bottom prices. The local population was asking whether it could buy the Jewish merchandise, the ban on commerce with Jews notwithstanding.31
The Jews of Germany who had not managed to flee were increasingly dependent on public welfare. As noted in the previous chapter, from November 19, 1938, on, Jews were excluded from the general welfare system: They had to apply to special offices, and they were subjected to different and far more stringent assessment criteria than the general population. The German welfare authorities attempted to shift the burden onto the Jewish welfare services, but there too the available means were overstrained by the increasing need. The solution to the problem soon became evident, and on December 20, 1938, the Reich Labor Exchange and Unemployment Insurance issued a decree ordering all unemployed Jews who were fit for work to register for compulsory labor. “It was obvious that only carefully chosen hard and difficult work was to be assigned to the Jews. Building sites, road and motorway work, rubbish disposal, public toilets and sewage plants, quarries and gravel pits, coal merchants and rag and bone works were regarded as suitable.”32 But from a Nazi point of view, the decree created a series of new problems.
For instance, some of the tasks alloted to the Jews had a special national significance or were linked to the name of the Führer, an unacceptable outrage for some party members. “The assignment of Jews to work on the Reichsautobahnen [Reich freeways], the inspector-general of German roads wrote to the Reich Labor Minister on June 22, 1939, “cannot in my opinion be in accord with the prestige given to the Reichsautobahnen as Roads of the Führer.” The general inspector suggested that Jews be used only in work indirectly related to the construction or repair of the motorways, such as in stone quarries and the like.33
The December 1938 decree had imposed strict segregation on Jewish workers: They had to be kept “separated from the community.”34 But in many cases, mostly on farms, contact was unavoidable. The reactions from party activists were foreseeable. On April 13, 1939, a party district leader in Baden wrote to a local labor exchange: “Peasants who are still employing Jews are those who know the Jews very well, who did business with them and possibly still owe them money. An honest German peasant with but a minimum of National Socialist consciousness would never take a Jew into his house. If, on top of that, Jews were allowed to stay overnight, our race laws would be worthless.”35
Even more serious concern was expressed in a letter from a party district leader in Mannheim to the director of the Labor Exchange in that city. The subject was the employment of “the Jew Doiny” by a local bakery. The district leader was unable to understand how a Jew could be employed in food-related business. Should the Volksgenossen patronize a bakery in which bread is baked by a Jew?36 At times such dangerous contacts could be eliminated in a summary fashion. On August 29, 1939, the district governor of Hildesheim could inform all of the area’s heads of administrative regions and mayors of rather momentous news: “In the district of Hildesheim, all business activity of Jewish barbers and Jewish undertakers is terminated.”37
In the meantime, throughout the prewar months of 1939, the concentration of Jews in Jewish-owned dwellings continued; it was made easier, as has been noted, by the April 30, 1939, decree allowing rescinding of leases with Jews. In Berlin the entire operation was spurred by Speer’s agency, and the municipal authorities, supported by the party, started pressuring Aryan landlords to put an end to their contracts with Jewish tenants. Pressure was indeed necessary, according to an official report, “since for political reasons, the Jews were the quietest and the most unassuming tenants” and did not “cause any trouble” to their landlords.38 Once the transfers had taken place, it became clear that the areas cleared of Jews coincided exactly with the those designated by Speer’s offices to be “Jew free.”39
At some stage the Propaganda Ministry discovered that 1,800 window openings belonging to Jewish inhabitants would face the planned huge avenue called the East-West Axis. As that could be dangerous, Hitler was to be asked what appropriate measures should be taken.40
Even the most brutal systems sometimes make exceptions among their designated victims. In Nazi Germany such exceptions never applied to “full” Jews but only to some Mischlinge who were deemed unusually useful (Milch, Warburg, Chaoul) or
especially well connected (Albrecht Haushofer). But in the rarest of cases, exceptions could also apply to Mischlinge of the first degree who were so insignificant and so persistent that both state and party bureaucracies were finally worn down. This was to be the unlikely conclusion of the story of Karl Berthold, the Chemnitz civil servant whose struggle to keep his job has been followed in these pages since its beginning, in 1933.
In her January 23, 1936, letter to the Reich minister of labor, Ada Berthold, Karl Berthold’s wife, had expressed only desperation: her husband’s three-year struggle had left both of them devastated in health and spirit. For Ada Berthold, there was now only one hope: A meeting with Hitler.41 The appointment was not granted, and, at that very same time, Berthold was ordered by the Ministry of the Interior’s Reich Office for Kinship Research to undergo a racial examination at the Institute for Racial Science and Ethnology at the University of Leipzig.42 Meanwhile the Office for Kinship Research had found the presumed Jewish father in Amsterdam; but the man denied being Karl Berthold’s father. The racial examination, however, was not in the subject’s favor: “A number of indices point to a Jewish begetter.”43 In November 1938 the verdict came down: Berthold must be dismissed from his job. It was then that he played his last card: a personal petition to Hitler. In it Berthold very clearly summed up his situation: “Since April 1924, I have been a permanent employee of the Social Benefits Office in Chemnitz, where, for almost five years now [actually more than five], a procedure for my dismissal has been pending because of my inability to prove my Aryan descent. Since then, there has been a search for my father (he is totally unknown to me, as I was an illegitimate child). No paternity was ever recognized in court. It is only because of the circumstance that my deceased mother mentioned a Jewish name that this matter has become fateful to me, without any objective proof. In consequence of the fact that, as already mentioned, the begetter could never be identified, I was ordered to undergo an examination at the Racial Science Institute in Leipzig, with which I complied. Then, it was supposedly ascertained that I showed Jewish characteristics. On the basis of this attestation of origins of May 23, 1938, the Minister of Labor has ordered my dismissal from the Social Benefits Office in Chemnitz.”
After describing the tragic consequences of this situation for himself and his family, Berthold continued: “I feel myself to be a true German, with a true German heart, who has never seen or heard anything of Jews and who has no desire ever to know them.” He listed the events of German nineteenth-century history in which his maternal ancestors had taken part and all the national duties he and his mother had fulfilled in the war. He had been a party member since March 1933 and had “foolishly” resigned his membership in 1936 because of the ongoing investigation. Of his three sons, the youngest was a member of the Jungvolk, the next oldest a Hitler Youth, and the oldest in his third year of military service.
“Such are my circumstances,” Berthold added. “They certainly are to be considered as normal, and it can be derived from them that I have nothing to do in any way with the Jewish rabble.”44
Berthold’s petition was forwarded by Hitler’s Chancellery to that of Deputy Führer Hess. In February 1939 it appeared that the answer would be negative. However, on August 16, 1939, a letter from the Deputy Führer to the labor minister “concerning the continuing employment of a Jewish Mischling in public service” announced the verdict: Karl Berthold was to be allowed to keep his position as an employee of the Chemnitz Social Benefits Office.45
Karl Berthold’s story throughout the first six years of the regime shows in microcosm how a modern bureaucracy could be the efficient purveyor of exclusion and persecution and, at the same time, could be slowed down by an individual’s use of the system’s loopholes, the ambiguity of decrees, and the immense variety of individual situations. Since, the party and the state during the thirties, decided to deal with every issue related to the Jews in the most minute detail, and, in particular, to resolve each case of legal or administrative exception, the entire policy might have ground to a halt as a result of the very complexity of the task. That this did not happen is possibly the most telling proof of the relentless obstinacy of the anti-Jewish effort, a kind of determination that mere bureaucratic routine alone could not have mobilized.
It is difficult to obtain a clear picture of the attitudes of ordinary Germans toward the increasingly more miserable Jews living in their midst in the spring of 1939. As we saw from the SOPADE report about the populace’s responses to the group of Jews being sent back and forth over the western border during those weeks, hatred and sympathy were mixed, possibly according to differences in age. One obtains the same mixed impression from memoirs, such as those of Valentin Senger, a Jew who survived the Nazi period in Frankfurt,46 or from Klemperer’s diaries. There is no doubt that, at least in smaller towns and villages, some people were still patronizing Jewish stores, although in principle no Jewish business (unless it was an exporter or belonged to foreign Jews) was allowed to function after January 1, 1939. How else to explain the confidential report addressed on February 6 by the Bernburg district party leadership to its counterpart in Rosenheim, regarding “lists of clients of Jewish stores in the Bernburg district”? The report not only gives the list of “verified customers of Jews” but also indicates the store owners’ names and the dates of the purchases and amounts paid.47
On May 5, 1939, the Fischbach police station informed the Labor Office in Augsburg of its attempt to send three men of a local Levi family (Manfred Israel, Sigbert Israel, and Leo Israel) to compulsory work at the Hartmann brick factory in Gebelbach. Whereas Manfred Levi was in Altona (a suburb of Hamburg) attending a Zionist professional training school to prepare for his emigration to Palestine, Sigbert and Leo’s German employers had come to the police station to request permission to retain the services of their Jewish carpenter and gardener.48
Gestapo surveillance of the churches reveals the same mixed attitudes. Thus, in January 1939, at a meeting of the Evangelical Church in Ansbach, one Knorr-Köslin, a physician, declared that in present-day Germany the sentence “all salvation comes from the Jews” should be deleted from the Bible; the report indicates that Knorr-Köslin’s outburst caused a protest from the audience; the protest might have been only on purely religious grounds.49 When, on the other hand, Pastor Schilffarth of Streitberg declared that “after baptism, Jews become Christians,” one of his young students retorted (“in a strong and well-deserved way,” says the report), “But Pastor, even if you pour six pails of water on a Jew’s head, he still remains a Jew.”50
In small towns some municipal officials avoided the mandatory forms of addressing Jews. When, in early 1939, the town officials of Goslar negotiated with the head of the local Jewish community for the acquisition of the synagogue building, their letters were addressed “Herrn Kaufmann W. Heilbrunn” (Mr. W. Heilbrunn, merchant), without using the obligatory “Israel.”51
And yet…In a December 1938 diary entry, Victor Klemperer told of a policeman who in the past had been friendly to him, even encouraging. When he encountered him that month, in the municipal office of the small town where the Klemperers owned a country house, the same policeman passed by him “looking fixedly ahead, as distant as could be. In his behavior,” Klemperer commented, “the man probably represents 79 million Germans.”52
Looking back over the first six years of the regime, this much can be said with a measure of certainty: German society as a whole did not oppose the regime’s anti-Jewish initiatives. Hitler’s identification with the anti-Jewish drive, along with the populace’s awareness that on this issue the Nazis were determined to push ahead, may have reinforced the inertia or perhaps the passive complicity of the vast majority about a matter that most, in any event, considered peripheral to their main interests. It has been seen that economic and religious interests triggered some measure of dissent, mainly among the peasantry and among Catholics and members of the Confessing Church. Such dissent did not, however, except in some
individual instances, lead to open questioning of the policies. Yet, during the thirties, the German population, the great majority of which espoused traditional anti-Semitism in one form or another, did not demand anti-Jewish measures, nor did it clamor for their most extreme implementation. Among most “ordinary Germans” there was acquiescence regarding the segregation and dismissal from civil and public service of the Jews; there were individual initiatives to benefit from their expropriation; and there was some glee in witnessing their degradation. But outside party ranks, there was no massive popular agitation to expel them from Germany or to unleash violence against them. The majority of Germans accepted the steps taken by the regime and, like Klemperer’s policeman, looked the other way.53
From within the party ranks hatred flowed in an ever more brutal and open way. Sometimes, as with anonymous informers, it is not known whether it originated in the party or among unaffiliated citizens. In any case, denunciations reached such proportions on the eve of the war that Frick, on orders from Göring, had to intervene, addressing a January 10, 1939, letter to the whole array of civilian and police authorities.