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

by Saul Friedlander

  Resuming its activities—briefly curtailed after the November 1938 pogrom—early in the year on orders from above, the Kulturbund in its Berlin theater that April staged People at Sea, a drama by English writer J. B. Priestley. An American correspondent, Louis P. Lochner of the Associated Press, covered the April 13 opening: “Because…the British playwright has renounced all claims to royalties from German Jews, the Jewish Kulturbund was able tonight to present a beautiful premiere rendition in German of Men at Sea [sic]. The translation was by Leo Hirsch, the stage setting by Fritz Wisten. Almost 500 attentive, art-loving Jews witnessed the performance and applauded generously. Outranking all others in the depth of her emotional acting was Jenny Bernstein as Diana Lissmore. Alfred Berliner, with his face made up to look much like Albert Einstein’s, also scored signally with his interpretation of the role of Professor Pawlet. The audience wistfully nodded when Fritz Grünne as Carlo Velburg complained again and again that he had no passport. Thirty-nine performances of the Priestley play are planned for the coming weeks.”79

  The play tells of the terrors and hopes of twelve people on a ship in the Caribbean disabled by fire, adrift, and in danger of sinking. The characters depicted on the stage are saved at the end. Most of the Jews seated in the Kommandantenstrasse theater that night were doomed.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Clearly sharing no common ground with us is the small group of historians of the same generation whose apologetic interpretations of Nazism and the Holocaust were sharply confronted during the “historians’ controversy” of the mid-1980s. For that specific debate see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), and Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989); for a particularly perceptive discussion of the issues, see Steven E. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York, 1996). For this and other debates on the historical representation of the Holocaust, see the essays included in Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians (Boston, 1990), and in Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

  2. One of the earliest examples of the first approach is Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961); the best illustration of the second is Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York, 1975).

  3. In representing the life of the victims and some attitudes of surrounding society I have drawn most of my illustrations from everyday life. In this respect, and with regard to some other issues brought forth in this book, I have accepted some of Martin Broszat’s insights that I criticized in my debate with him in the late 1980s. Yet, I have attempted to avoid some of the pitfalls of the historicization of National Socialism precisely by emphasizing the everyday life of the victims rather than that of the Volksgemeinschaft. For the debate, see Martin Broszat, “A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism” in Baldwin, Reworking the Past; Saul Friedländer, “Some Thoughts on the Historicization of National Socialism,” ibid.; Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism,” ibid.

  4. For the importance of this wider context, see Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, New York, 1996. For the impact of modernity as such on the genesis of the “Final Solution,” see, among many other studies, Detlev J. K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York, 1993); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (New York, 1989); Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Hamburg, 1991). For an excellent presentation of related issues in the history of Nazism see Michael Burleigh, ed., Confronting the Nazi Past: New Debates on Modern German History (London, 1996).

  5. For internal competition as the basis of Nazi radicalization, see mainly the works of Hans Mommsen, particularly “The Realization of the Unthinkable,” in From Weimar to Auschwitz (Princeton, N.J., 1991). For the cost-benefit calculations of technocrats as incentives for the “Final Solution,” see Aly and Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung.

  6. Redemptive anti-Semitism is different, as I shall indicate, from the “eliminationist anti-Semitism” referred to by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). Moreover, it represented an ideological trend shared at the outset by a small minority only, and, in the Third Reich, by a segment of the party and its leaders, not by the majority of the population.

  7. Because of my emphasis upon the interaction between Hitler, his ideological motivations, and the constraints of the system within which he acted, I hesitate to identify my approach as “intentionalist.” Moreover, whereas during the thirties Hitler decided on all major anti-Jewish steps and intervened in the details of their implementation, later his guidelines left much greater leeway to his subordinates in the implementation of the concrete aspects of the extermination. As for Hitler’s impact on the Germans, it has been the subject of countless studies and the basic theme of major biographies. For a complex approach both to Hitler’s charismatic effect and to his interaction with the populace, see in particular J. P. Stern, Hitler, The Fuehrer and the People (Glasgow, 1975), and Ian Kershaw, Hitler (London, 1991).

  8. This point is made both in Michael Wildt, Die Judenpolitik des SD 1935 bis 1938 (Munich, 1996) and in Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996). For a discussion of this theme, see chapter 6.

  9. The reference here is to the opposed theses of Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992), and of Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The issue will be discussed at length in volume 2. The impact of Nazi ideology on various Wehrmacht units and its relation to the extreme barbarization of warfare on the Eastern front must also be considered in that context. For this issue see mainly Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (New York, 1991).

  10. See Martin Broszat, “A Plea,” in Baldwin, Reworking the Past.

  11. The issue is thoroughly discussed in Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994).

  Chapter 1 Into the Third Reich

  1. Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno (Chicago, 1994), p. 406.

  2. Lion Feuchtwanger and Arnold Zweig, Briefwechsel 1933–1958, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), p. 22.

  3. Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (New York, 1994), p. 42; Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil’s Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler (New York, 1992), pp. 150–51.

  4. Alan E. Steinweis, “Hans Hinkel and German Jewry, 1933–1941,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook [hereafter LBIY] 38 (1993): 212.

  5. Shirakawa, The Devil’s Music Master, p. 151.

  6. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, part 1, 1924–1941, vol. 2, 1.1.1931–31.12.1936 (Munich, 1987), p. 430.

  7. Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), pp. 41–42. For a more thorough discussion of the dismissal of Jewish musicians, see Levi, Music in the Third Reich, pp. 41ff.

  8. Ibid., p. 41.

  9. Lawrence D. Stokes, Kleinstadt und Nationalsozialismus: Ausgewählte Dokumente zur Geschichte von Eutin 1918–1945, (Neumünster, 1984), p. 730. (Initials are used instead of full names as indicated in the source.)

  10. Klaus Mann, Mephisto (New York, 1977), p. 157. (Klaus Mann was one of Thomas Mann’s sons. The original German edition was published in Amsterdam in 1936; Mann describes Höfgens’
s happiness at not being Jewish as it found expression in 1933, soon after the Machtergreifung.)

  11. On the details of this issue see Peter Stephan Jungk, Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood (New York, 1990), p. 140.

  12. Quoted and excerpted in Golo Mann, Reminiscences and Reflections: A Youth in Germany (New York, 1990), p. 144.

  13. Jungk, Franz Werfel, pp. 141–44.

  14. Ibid., p. 145.

  15. Joseph Wulf, ed., Die bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh, 1963), pp. 36, 81ff.

  16. Ibid., p. 36.

  17. Thomas Mann, The Letters of Thomas Mann 1889–1955 (London, 1985), p. 170.

  18. Ibid., p. 191.

  19. Ronald Hayman, Thomas Mann: A Biography (New York, 1995), pp. 407–8.

  20. Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1933–1934, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), p. 46.

  21. Ibid., p. 473.

  22. On Thomas Mann’s anti-Jewish stance see Alfred Hoelzel, “Thomas Mann’s Attitudes toward Jews and Judaism: An Investigation of Biography and Oeuvre,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 6 (1990): 229–54.

  23. Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1933–1934, p. 473.

  24. After the death of the publisher Samuel Fischer, his son-in-law, Gottfried Bermann, took steps to transfer at least part of the firm out of the Reich. S. Fischer Verlag would remain in Germany, in Aryan hands. The new Bermann Fischer publishing house—and with it some of the most prestigious names of contemporary German literature (Mann, Döblin, Hofmannsthal, Wassermann, Schnitzler)—was ready to start activities in Zurich. This, however, was a serious misjudgment of Swiss hospitality on Bermann’s part. The main Swiss publishers opposed the move, and the literary editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Eduard Korrodi, did not mince words: The only German literature that had emigrated, he wrote in January 1936, was Jewish (“the hack-writers of the novel industry”). Bermann Fischer moved to Vienna. This time Thomas Mann reacted. His open letter to the newspaper was his first major public stand since January 1933: Mann drew Korrodi’s attention to the obvious: Both Jews and non-Jews were to be found among the exiled German writers. As for those who remained in Germany, “being völkisch is not being German. But the German or the German rulers’ hatred of the Jews is in the higher sense not directed against Europe and all loftier Germanism; it is directed, as becomes increasingly apparent, against the Christian and classical foundations of Western morality. It is the attempt…to shake off the ties of civilization. That attempt threatens to bring about a terrible alienation, fraught with evil potentialities, between the land of Goethe and the rest of the world…” Mann, The Letters, p. 209. Within a few months all members of the Mann family who had not yet been deprived of their German citizenship lost it, and on December 19, 1936, the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of Bonn University announced to Thomas Mann that his name had been “struck off the roll of honorary doctors.” Nigel Hamilton, The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871–1950 (London, 1978), p. 298.

  25. Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven, Conn., 1994), p. 168.

  26. Quoted in Moshe Zimmermann, “Die aussichtslose Republik—Zukunftsperspektiven der deutschen Juden vor 1933,” in Menora: Jahrbuch für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte 1990 (Munich, 1990), p. 164. This did not mean, however, that Jewish votes shifted to extremist parties. After the disappearance of the German Democratic Party (DDP), Jewish votes in the crucial elections of 1932 probably led to the election of two Social Democratic deputies and one deputy from the Catholic Center. Ernest Hamburger and Peter Pulzer, “Jews as Voters in the Weimar Republic,” LBIY 30 (1985): 66.

  27. Kurt Jakob Ball-Kaduri, Das Leben der Juden in Deutschland im Jahre 1933: Ein Zeitbericht (Frankfurt am Main, 1963), p. 34.

  28. Quoted in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Das Exil der kleinen Leute: Alltagserfahrung deutscher Juden in der Emigration (Munich, 1991), p. 16.

  29. Ibid., p. 17.

  30. According to the June 16, 1933, census, 499,682 persons of the “Mosaic faith” lived in Germany (the Saar territory not included) on that date, which amounts to 0.77 percent of the total German population. See Ino Arndt and Heinz Boberach, “Deutsches Reich” in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1991), p. 23. It is plausible that approximately 25,000 Jews had fled Germany between January and June 1933.

  31. For the petition and the other details, see Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler, 1933–1938, part 1, 1933–1934, ed. Karl-Heinz Minuth, vol. 1 (Boppard am Rhein, 1983), pp. 296–98, 298n.

  32. Zimmermann, “Die aussichtslose Republik,” p. 160.

  33. Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich, 1994), p. 271.

  34. Wolfgang Benz, ed., Die Juden in Deutschland 1933–1945: Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft (Munich, 1988), p. 18.

  35. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, eds., The Letters of Martin Buber (New York, 1991), p. 395.

  36. Jews were also shipped off to the new concentration camps: Four were killed in Dachau on April 12. Both in Dachau and in Oranienburg “Jewish units” were set up from the outset. See Klaus Drobisch, “Die Judenreferate des Geheimen Staatspolizeiamtes und des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1933 bis 1939,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 2 (1993): 231.

  37. To this day the most thorough study of the Nazi takeover during the years 1933 and 1934 remains Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer, and Gerhard Schulz, Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (Cologne, 1962).

  38. Drobisch, “Die Judenreferate,” p. 231.

  39. Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich, and Falk Wiesemann, eds., Bayern in der NS-Zeit: Soziale Lage und politisches Verhalten der Bevölkerung im Spiegel vertraulicher Berichte (Munich, 1977), p. 432.

  40. District President, Hildesheim, to Local Police Authorities of the District, 31.3.1933, Aktenstücke zur Judenverfolgung, Ortspolizeibehörde Göttingen, microfilm MA-172, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich (hereafter IfZ).

  41. Local Police Authority, Göttingen, to District President, Hildesheim, 1.4.33, ibid.

  42. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933–1945 (New York, 1986), pp. 44–45. On Walter Lippmann’s positions see mainly Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, 1980), particularly pp. 330–33.

  43. Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler, part 1, vol. 1, p. 251.

  44. Zimmermann, “Die aussichtslose Republik,” pp. 155, 157–58.

  45. Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews 1933–1943 (Hanover, N.H., 1989), p. 15.

  46. Heinz Höhne, Die Zeit der Illusionen: Hitler und die Anfänge des Dritten Reiches 1933–1936 (Düsseldorf, 1991), p. 76.

  47. For a description of various components of this radical tendency, see Dietrich Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party 1933–1945, vol. 2 (Pittsburgh, 1973), pp. 40ff.

  48. Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany, 1925–1934 (New Haven, Conn., 1984), p. 107.

  49. David Bankier, “Hitler and the Policy-Making Process on the Jewish Question,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3, no. 1 (1988): 4.

  50. Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regiergung Hitler, part 1, vol. 1, p. 277.

  51. Memoranda of telephone conversations between the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, March 31, 1933, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1933, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1948), pp. 342 ff.

  52. Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, eds., Archives of the Holocaust, vol. 17, American Jewish Committee New York, ed. Frederick D. Bogin (New York, 1993), p. 4. In May 1933 a trilingual German, English, and French collection of various Jewish declarations was printed (probably in Berlin) by an ostensibly Jewish publisher, “Jakov Trachtenberg,” under the title Atrocity Propaganda Is Based on Lies, the Jews of Germany Themselves Say. (
Die Greuel-Propaganda ist eine Lügenpropaganda, sagen die deutschen Juden selbst.) The book was probably meant for worldwide distribution. I am indebted to Hans Rogger for drawing my attention to this publication.

  53. Yoav Gelber, “The Reactions of the Zionist Movement and the Yishuv to the Nazis’ Rise to Power,” Yad Vashem Studies 18 (1987): 46. From Gelber’s text it is not clear whether the telegram was sent before or after April 1.

  54. About the quandary of the American Jewish leadership see Gulie Ne’eman Arad, The American Jewish Leadership and the Nazi Menace (Bloomington, Ind., forthcoming [1997]).

  55. Gelber, “The Reactions of the Zionist Movement,” pp. 47–48. On the American Jewish boycott see mainly Moshe R. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933–1941: An Historical Analysis (New York, 1982).

  56. Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, vol. 2, pp. 398–99.

  57. Ibid., p. 400.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, p. 2.

  60. For a detailed account of the concrete problems encountered by the Nazis, see Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews 1933–1939 (Urbana, Ill., 1970), pp. 84–90.

  61. Ibid., p. 94.

  62. Peter Hanke, Zur Geschichte der Juden in München zwischen 1933 und 1945 (Munich, 1967), p. 85.

  63. Ibid., pp. 85–86.

  64. For Martha Appel’s memoirs see Monika Richarz, ed., Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte 1918–1945 (Stuttgart, 1982), pp. 231–32.

  65. Broszat, Fröhlich, and Wiesemann, Bayern in der NS-Zeit, vol. 1, p. 435.

  66. Helmut Genschel, Die Verdrängung der Juden aus der Wirtschaft im Dritten Reich (Göttingen, 1966), p. 58.

  67. On April 5 the German ambassador to France reported to Berlin: “How unfavorable the effects of the action against the Jews had been in France was best shown by the sympathy expressed by high-ranking Catholic and Protestant clergy at the French-Jewish demonstrations against the anti-Jewish movement in Germany…. There was no doubt…that the operation had been fully exploited by French circles antagonistic to Germany for material or political reasons and that they had fully attained their purpose of painting again in the darkest of colors, even to the rural population, the danger from a Germany inclining to deeds of violence.” Koester to Foreign Minister, 5 April 1933. Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series C (1933–1937), vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1957), p. 251.