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

by Saul Friedlander

  68. Ernst Noam and Wolf-Arno Kropat, Juden vor Gericht, 1933–1945: Dokumente aus hessischen Justizakten (Wiesbaden, 1975), pp. 84–86.

  69. Files of the NSDAP Main Office, microfiche 581 00181, IfZ. (Parteikanzlei der NSDAP)

  70. David Bankier, “The German Communist Party and Nazi Anti-Semitism, 1933–1938,” LBIY 32 (1987): 327.

  71. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, p. 17.

  72. Ibid., p. 72. As a result, part of the shares of Tietz were acquired by major German banks. In 1934 the Tietz brothers sold the remainder; the firm was Aryanized and renamed Hertie AG.

  73. National Socialist enterprise cell of Ullstein Verlag to Reich Chancellor, 21.6.1933, Max Kreuzberger Research Papers, AR 7183, Box 10, Folder 1, Leo Baeck Institute [hereafter LBI], New York.

  74. Ron Chernow, The Warburgs (New York, 1993), p. 377.

  75. Harold James, “Die Deutsche Bank und die Diktatur 1933–1945,” in Lothar Gall et al., eds., Die Deutsche Bank 1870–1995 (Munich, 1995), p. 336.

  76. Ibid.

  77. The overall argument and a wealth of supporting archival material is presented in Peter Hayes, “Big Business and ‘Aryanisation’ in Germany, 1933–1939,” in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 3 (1994), pp. 254ff.

  78. Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (New York, 1987), p. 93.

  79. Chernow, The Warburgs, pp. 379–80.

  80. Jeremy Noakes and G. Pridham, eds., Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts 1919–1945, vol. 1 (New York, 1983), pp. 14–16.

  81. Herbert Michaelis and Ernst Schraepler, eds., Ursachen und Folgen: Vom deutschen Zusammenbruch 1918 und 1945 bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutscblands in der Gegenwart: Eine Urkunden- und Dokumentsammlung zur Zeitgeschichte, vol. 9 (Berlin, n.d.), p. 383.

  82. Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat (Heidelberg, 1981), p. 4.

  83. Hermann Graml, Anti-Semitism in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 97.

  84. Walk, Das Sonderrecht, p. 3.

  85. Ibid., p. 36.

  86. For a detailed description of these laws, see in particular Schleunes, The Twisted Road, pp. 102–4.

  87. To this day the best overall analysis of the Civil Service Law is still to be found in Hans Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 39ff.

  88. Walk, Sonderrecht, pp. 12–13. The party program of 1920 excluded Jews from party membership. After 1933 most organizations directly affiliated with the party, such as the German Labor Front, for instance, excluded membership for anyone with Jewish ancestry after 1800. See Jeremy Noakes, “Wohin gehören die Judenmischlinge? Die Entstehung der ersten Durchführungsverordnungen zu den Nürnberger Gesetzen,” in Ursula Büttner, Werner Johe, and Angelika Voss, eds., Das Unrechtsregime: Internationale Forschung über den Nationalsozialismus, vol. 2, Verfolgung, Exil, belasteter Neubeginn (Hamburg, 1986), p. 71.

  89. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 54. For Hilberg there was a straight line between the first definition and the ultimate extermination.

  90. For details regarding the origins of the anti-Jewish paragraph of the Civil Service Law, see Günter Neliba, Wilhelm Frick: Der Legalist des Unrechtsstaates: Eine Politische Biographie (Paderborn, 1992), pp. 168ff.

  91. Ibid., p. 171; see also Mommsen, Beamtentum, pp. 48, 53.

  92. Hans-Joachim Dahms, “Einleitung” in Heinrich Becker, Hans-Joachim Dahms, Cornelia Wegeler, eds., Die Universität Göttingen unter dem Nationalsozialismus: verdrängte Kapitel ihrer 250 jährigen Geschichte (Munich, 1987), pp. 17–18.

  93. Achim Gercke, “Die Lösung der Judenfrage,” Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 38 (May 1933): 196. Gercke did not simply write that the laws were “educational” but that they were “educational insofar as they indicated a direction.”

  94. Walk, Das Sonderrecht, p. 12.

  95. Comité des Délégations Juives, ed., Das Schwarzbuch: Tatsachen und Dokumente: Die Lage der Juden in Deutschland 1933 (Paris, 1934; reprint, Berlin, 1983), p. 105.

  96. Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), pp. 50ff., 65ff. For Schlegelberger’s report to Hitler on April 4, see Akten der Reichskanzlei, part 1, vol. 1, p. 293n. For Hitler’s statement, see the protocol of the cabinet meeting of April 7, 1933, ibid., p. 324.

  97. Dirk Blasius, “Zwischen Rechtsvertrauen und Rechtszerstörung: Deutsche Juden 1933–1935,” in Dirk Blasius and Dan Diner, eds., Zerbrochene Geschichte: Leben und Selbstverständnis der Juden in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), p. 130.

  98. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, p. 4.

  99. Konrad H. Jarausch, “Jewish Lawyers in Germany, 1848–1938: The Disintegration of a Profession,” LBIY 36 (1991): 181–82.

  100. Comité des Delegations Juives, Das Schwarzbuch, pp. 195–96.

  101. Akten der Reichskanzlei, part 1, vol. 1, p. 324. (“Hier müsse eine umfassende Aufklärung einsetzen.”)

  102. Walk, Das Sonderrecht, p. 17; Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen, “Die ‘Nichtarischen’ Studenten an den deutschen Hochschulen: Zur nationalsozialistischen Rassenpolitik 1933–1945,” VfZ 14, no. 2 (1966): 177ff.

  103. Ibid., p. 180.

  104. For this point see Kurt Pätzold, Faschismus, Rassenwahn, Judenverfolgung: Eine Studie zur politischen Strategie und Taktik des faschistischen deutschen Imperialisms (1933–1935) ([East]Berlin, 1975), p. 105.

  105. For the case of Karl Berthold (name changed) and the appended documentation, see Hans Mommsen, “Die Geschichte des Chemnitzer Kanzleigehilfen K.B.,” in Detlev Peukert und Jürgen Reulecke, eds., Die Reihen fast geschlossen: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alltags unterm Nationalsozialismus (Wuppertal, 1981), pp. 337ff. In present-day terminology, a Versorgungsamt is “a social benefits office for state employees.” Here I shall refer merely to the “social benefits office.”

  106. Ibid., p. 348.

  107. Ibid., p. 350.

  108. Ibid., p. 350.

  109. Ibid., p. 351.

  110. Lammers to Hess, 6.6.1933, Parteikanzlei der NSDAP, microfiche 10129934, IfZ.

  111. For the details of this case, see Jeremy Noakes, “The Development of Nazi Policy Towards the German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge’ 1933–1945,” LBIY 34 (1989): 316–17.

  112. Volker Dahm, “Anfänge und Ideologie der Reichskulturkammer,” VfZ 34, no. 1 (1986): 78. See also Alan Edward Steinweis, Art, Ideology and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chamber of Culture and the Regulation of the Culture Professions in Nazi Germany (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), pp. 322ff.

  113. For details on this issue, see in particular Herbert Freeden, “Das Ende der jüdischen Presse in Nazideutschland,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 65 (1983): 4–5.

  114. James, “Die Deutsche Bank,” p. 337.

  115. Mommsen, Beamtentum, p. 49.

  116. Quoted in Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 112.

  117. Donald M. McKale, “From Weimar to Nazism: Abteilung III of the German Foreign Office and the Support of Antisemitism, 1931–1935,” LBIY 32 (1987): pp. 297ff. On the attitude of the Wilhelmstrasse regarding the “Jewish Question” during the early phase of the regime, see also Christoper R. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (New York, 1978).

  118. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 2, pp. 526–27.

  119. A first summary of this document was published in Hebrew in Ha’aretz by the Israeli historian Shaul Esh on April 1, 1963; it was interpreted as a master plan for the whole Nazi anti-Jewish program. For the English translation, with comments, see Uwe Dietrich Adam, “An Overall Plan for Anti-Jewish Legislation in the Third Reich?” Yad Vashem Studies 11 (1976): 33–55.

  120. Ibid., p. 40.

  121. First published in Michaelis and Schraepler, Ursachen, pp. 393–95. Translated by Dieter Kuntz in Benjamin C. Sax and Dieter Kuntz, eds., Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (Lexington, Ky., 1992), pp. 4
01–3. The translation has been very slightly revised. For another translation see Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series C, pp. 253–5.

  122. Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler, part 1, vol. 1, pp. 391–92.

  123. Walk, Das Sonderrecht, p. 8.

  124. Ibid., p. 9.

  125. Ibid., p. 10.

  126. Ibid., p. 13.

  127. Ibid., p. 14.

  128. Ibid., p. 15.

  129. Ibid., p. 16. (For example, one would not be allowed to say “A for Abraham.”)

  130. Ibid., p. 19.

  131. Ibid., p. 21.

  132. Ibid., p. 23.

  133. Ibid., p. 25.

  134. Kommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden, ed., Dokumente zur Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1963), p. 95.

  135. Chronik der Stadt Stuttgart 1933–1945 (Stuttgart, 1982), p. 21.

  136. Ibid., p. 22.

  137. Ibid., p. 22.

  138. Ibid., p. 25.

  139. Ibid., p. 26.

  140. Ibid., p. 27.

  141. William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1930–1935 (London, 1965), pp. 209–10.

  142. Ibid., p. 212.

  143. Ibid., p. 213.

  144. Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, Conn., 1991), p. 22.

  145. Richarz, Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland, p. 232.

  146. Götz Aly and Karl-Heinz Roth, Die restlose Erfassung: Volkszählen, Identifizieren, Aussondern im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 1984), p. 55.

  147. Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 95.

  148. Jeremy Noakes, “Nazism and Eugenics: The Background to the Nazi Sterilization Law of 14 July 1933,” in R. J. Bullen, H. Pogge von Strandmann, and A. B. Polonsky, eds., Ideas into Politics. Aspects of European History 1880–1950 (London, 1984), pp. 83–84.

  149. For the economic impact of the Great Depression on psychiatric care, see Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany 1900–1945 (Cambridge, England, 1994), pp. 33ff.

  150. Ibid., pp. 84–85.

  151. Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen, 1986), pp. 49–51, 55–56.

  152. Noakes, “Nazism and Eugenics,” p. 85.

  153. Ibid., p. 86.

  154. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, “Reformpsychiatrie und Massenmord,” in Michael Prinz und Rainer Zitelmann, eds., Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt, 1991), p. 249.

  155. Noakes, “Nazism and Eugenics,” p. 87.

  156. Schmuhl, “Reformpsychiatrie und Massenmord,” p. 250.

  Chapter 2 Consenting Elites, Threatened Elites

  1. Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder, Juden-Christen-Deutsche, vol. 1, 1933–1935 (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 120ff.

  2. Klaus Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, vol. 1, Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen 1918–1934 (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), pp. 338ff.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Wolfgang Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen: Bekennende Kirche und die Juden (Berlin, 1987), p. 42.

  5. Akten deutscher Bischöfe über die Lage der Kirche 1933–45, vol. 1: 1933–1934, ed. Bernhard Stasiewski (Mainz, 1968), pp. 42n, 43n.

  6. Ernst Christian Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler: Background, Struggle and Epilogue (Detroit, 1979), pp. 276–77. For the German original see Akten deutscher Bischöfe, vol. 2, p. 54n.

  7. Ernst Klee, “Die SA Jesu Christi”: Die Kirche im Banne Hitlers (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), p. 30.

  8. For the quotations see Helmreich, The German Churches, pp. 276–77.

  9. Klaus Scholder, “Judaism and Christianity in the Ideology and Politics of National Socialism,” in Otto Dov Kulka and Paul Mendes-Flohr, eds., Judaism and Christianity Under the Impact of National Socialism 1919–1945 (Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 191ff.

  10. Quoted in Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), p. 23. On November 13, 1933, the leader of the Berlin district of German Christians, one Dr. Krause, declared at a meeting of the movement at the Sportpalast: “What belongs to it [the new Christianity] is the liberation from all that is un-German in the ritual and faith, the liberation from the Old Testament with its Jewish retribution morals and its stories of cattle dealers and pimps…. In the German Volk Church there is no place for people of foreign blood, either at the pulpit or below the pulpit. All expressions of a foreign spirit which have penetrated it…must be expelled from the German Volk Church.” Ulrich Thürauf, ed., Schulthess Europäischer Geschichtskalender 74 (1933), p. 244.

  11. Quoted in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, “Ambivalent Dialogue: Jewish-Christian Theological Encounter in the Weimar Republic,” in Kulka and Mendes-Flohr, Judaism and Christianity, p. 121.

  12. Uriel Tal, “Law and Theology: on the Status of German Jewry at the outset of the Third Reich,” in Political Theology and the Third Reich (Tel Aviv, 1989), p. 16. The English version of this text appeared as a brochure published by Tel Aviv University, 1982.

  13. For the intense theological debates raised by the introduction of the “Aryan paragraph,” see ibid.

  14. Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, pp. 612ff.

  15. Robert Michael, “Theological Myth, German Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: The Case of Martin Niemöller,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2 (1987): 112. (The title “Propositions on the Aryan Question” should be considered a euphemism, in the same way as “Aryan paragraph” in fact meant “Jewish paragraph.”)

  16. Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen, p. 87.

  17. Michael, “Theological Myth,” p. 113.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Quoted in Uriel Tal, “On Structures of Political Theology and Myth in Germany prior to the Holocaust,” in Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds., The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York, 1981), p. 55.

  20. Richard Gutteridge, Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb! The German Evangelical Church and the Jews 1879–1950 (Oxford, 1976), p. 122.

  21. Günther van Norden, “Die Barmen Theologische Erklärung und die ‘Judenfrage’,” in Ursula Büttner et al., eds., Das Unrechtsregime, vol. 1, Ideologie—Herrschaftssystem—Wirkung in Europa (Hamburg, 1986), pp. 315ff.

  22. Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York, 1964), p. 17.

  23. Ibid., p. 271.

  24. Akten deutscher Bischöfe, vol. 1, pp. 100–102.

  25. Klee to Foreign Ministry, September 12, 1933, Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series C, pp. 793–94.

  26. Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, p. 660.

  27. His Eminence Cardinal Faulhaber, Judaism, Christianity and Germany: Advent Sermons Preached in St. Michael’s, Munich, in 1933 (London, 1934), pp. 5–6. Faulhaber’s argument reflects a long-standing Christian polemic tradition regarding the Talmud. See in particular Amos Funkenstein, “Changes in Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the Twelfth Century,” in Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), pp. 172–201 and particularly 189–96.

  28. Helmreich, The German Churches Under Hitler, p. 262.

  29. Heinz Boberach, ed., Berichte des SD und der Gestapo über Kirchen und Kirchenvolk in Deutschland 1934–1944 (Mainz, 1971), p. 7. Although as a rule church dignitaries avoided comments regarding the contemporary aspects of the Jewish issue, some local Catholic newpapers drew the attention of their readers to the brutal treatment of the Jews. For example, on May 23, 1933, the Catholic Bamberger Volksblatt explicitly mentioned the death in Dachau of the young local court clerk, Willy Aron, who was Jewish. For the significance of the case, see Norbert Frei, Nationalsozialistische Eroberung der Provinzpresse: Gleichschaltung, Selbstanpassung und Resistenz in Bayern (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 273–75.

  30. Quoted in Walter Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1957), p. 130.


  31. Quoted in Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschenwürde 1933–1945 (Hamburg, 1984), p. 221.

  32. Gerhard Sauder, ed., Die Bücherverbrennung (Munich, 1983), pp. 50–52. The sixteen named were: Bonn (Berlin), Cohn (Breslau), Dehn (Halle), Feiler (Königsberg), Heller (Frankfurt am Main), Horkheimer (Frankfurt am Main), Kantorowicz (Frankfurt), Kantorowicz (Kiel), Kelsen (Cologne), Lederer (Berlin), Löwe (Frankfurt am Main), Löwenstein (Bonn), Mannheim (Frankfurt am Main), Mark (Breslau), Tillich (Frankfurt am Main), Sinzheimer (Frankfurt am Main).

  33. Doron Niederland, “The Emigration of Jewish Academics and Professionals from Germany in the First Years of Nazi Rule,” LBIY 33 (1988): 291. The numbers vary considerably from one field to another and from university to university. In biology, for example, the scientists defined as Jews or married to Jewish spouses who were dismissed between 1933 and 1939 (including the universities of Vienna and Prague) numbered approximately 9 percent of the entire faculty in the field (30 out of 337). See Ute Deichmann, Biologen unter Hitler: Vertreibung, Karrieren, Forschung (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), p. 34.

  34. Alan D. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler. Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven, Conn., 1977), pp. 22, 15–22. For parts of the text regarding the universities, see Saul Friedländer, “The Demise of the German Mandarins: The German University and the Jews 1933–1939,” in Christian Jansen et al., eds., Von der Aufgabe der Freiheit: Politische Verantwortung und bürgerliche Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1995), pp. 63ff.