Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  Hitler’s diatribe had the desired effect. In the free city of Danzig, where the Nazis, led by Gauleiter Albert Forster, had succeeded in bringing all institutions into line politically, there was major anti-Semitic violence in late October 1937.7 At the same time, a new wave of anti-Jewish boycotts began in many parts of the Third Reich. They were aimed at forcing Jews to stop doing business and thus increasing the pressure on them to emigrate. “The campaign of economic destruction against Jews in Germany is being pursued with extreme severity,” the Breslau teacher Willy Cohn wrote on 26 October. “The pressure to sell businesses is growing from day to day.”8 The removal of Hjalmar Schacht as economics minister in late November got rid of a further obstacle to economically plundering Jews.9 In an article in late January 1938, the German correspondent of the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung remarked that the “elimination of the Jewish element in all branches of the economy…had been pursued for some time now with increasing virulence.” The policy of “Aryanisation,” he added, was “depriving Jews of every basis of existence.”10 Of the approximately 50,000 Jewish businesses in Germany before the Nazis came to power, only 9,000—including 3,600 in Berlin—still existed by the summer of 1939.11

  Those forced to sell their business usually only received a fraction of the true value. And those who decided to emigrate had to pay a series of fees, including a “tax for fleeing the Reich,” which meant that not much remained of their former assets. A new economic start abroad was made that much more difficult. In a letter to his local chamber of commerce in April 1938, one Munich businessman who identified himself as a National Socialist and an admirer of Hitler was “so disgusted by the brutal measures and the way Jews were coerced” that he refused to serve as an adviser for further Aryanisation of Jewish businesses. “As an old-fashioned, upright and honest merchant,” he wrote, he could no longer stand back and watch “how shamelessly many ‘Aryan’ businessmen, entrepreneurs, etc….try to get their claws on Jewish businesses, factories, etc. for a pittance.” He added: “To me these people are like vultures, with runny eyes and tongues lolling out, swooping down upon the Jewish cadaver.”12 But voices like this one were the absolute exception. A good many Germans enriched themselves at Jews’ expense, unscrupulously exploiting the desperate situation into which a harassed and persecuted minority had been forced.

  This wave of plunder was accompanied by a furious anti-Jewish smear campaign. On 8 November 1937, Julius Streicher and Goebbels opened an exhibition entitled “The Eternal Jew”—the German equivalent of the Wandering Jew—at Munich’s German Museum. It was intended to enlighten visitors about the “deleterious effect of Jewry all over the world.” An SPD-in-exile observer reported that “large yellow posters scream out announcements of the exhibition throughout the streets, and everywhere you can see the face of the Eternal Jew.” The exhibition, the observer predicted, would hardly fail to have the desired effect on ill-informed museum-goers since truth and lies had been “combined so cleverly” that the “lies will necessarily appear to be true.”13

  —

  As of the autumn of 1937, the ever more severe execution of anti-Jewish policies was directly connected with the regime’s transition to a foreign policy of aggressive expansionism. Hitler and his underlings largely ceased showing the sort of regard for foreign opinion that had previously encouraged them to maintain a degree of moderation. By then Jews’ economic position in Germany had been so undermined that there was little need to fear their final removal from commercial life would damage the German economy.14 On the contrary, the complete Aryanisation of Jewish assets promised relief for the Reich’s tight financial situation. The monies generated by plundering Jews could be used to finance armaments and preparations for war.

  The amalgamation of Austria into the Reich in March 1938 noticeably radicalised the persecution of Jews. In 1933, over half a million Jews lived in Germany. By late 1937, 152,000 had emigrated, while 363,000 were still sticking it out in the country.15 All at once, 190,000 Austrian Jews were added to that number, and that rise, in the short term, seemed like a setback to German authorities’ efforts to get as many Jews as possible to leave the country. In fact, however, the Anschluss provided a new dynamic to the process of “de-Jewification.” It would reach a temporary zenith in the Kristallnacht pogrom on 9 and 10 November 1938. In the initial hours after German troops entered Austria, the violence against Jews on the streets of Vienna exceeded anything that had occurred in the “old Reich” after 1933. “That evening, all hell broke loose,” the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer recalled.

  The underworld opened its gates and released its most base, most horrible and most filthy spirits. The city was transformed into a nightmare vision of Hieronymus Bosch. Lemurs and half-demons seemed to have hatched from squalid eggs and crawled from dank holes in the ground. The air was filled with a constant piercing, wild, hysterical screaming.16

  For days Austrian Nazis and their sympathisers vented their pent-up anti-Semitic aggression on Viennese Jews, who were humiliated and abused in every way imaginable in front of salacious onlookers. “University professors were made to scrub the streets with their bare hands, and pious old men with white beards were forced into temples and compelled to perform leg squats and yell ‘Heil Hitler’ in unison,” the Viennese author Stefan Zweig recorded in his autobiography. “Innocent people were herded together on the street like rabbits and taken to sweep the grounds of SA barracks. All the hateful, sick, dirty fantasies that had been conceived in nocturnal orgies of the imagination were rampantly visible on the streets in broad daylight.”17 The uncontrolled terrorising of Jews reached such proportions that on 17 March Reinhard Heydrich threatened Gauleiter Josef Bürckel, who had been appointed Reich commissioner and made responsible for integrating Austria into the Reich, that he would arrest any Nazis who took part in “undisciplined” attacks.18 But it still took a while for the waves of violence to ebb. “On the streets today gangs of Jews, on their hands and knees scrubbing the Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalks, with jeering storm troopers standing over them and taunting crowds around them,” wrote William Shirer on 22 March.19 In late April, the Italian ambassador in Vienna, Ubaldo Rochira, still reported renewed anti-Jewish attacks. In one of the large streets of the second district, he wrote, “around a hundred Jews had been forced to walk on all fours or crawl in the dust.” The ambassador was surprised at the virulence of the anti-Semitism he encountered in all classes of the Viennese population, from intellectuals to ordinary workers.20

  Panicked, many Viennese Jews immediately sought to leave Austria, and the number of suicides shot up dramatically.21 Within a short span of time, Germany’s special anti-Semitic laws were extended to the newly acquired part of the Reich. Within the space of a few months the process of Aryanisation, which had been in the hands of a so-called “Assets Office” in Vienna since May 1938, was also completed.22 To step up the pace with which Austrian Jews were driven from their home country, a “Central Office for Jewish Emigration” was set up in the former Rothschild Palace under the directorship of Adolf Eichmann, a member of the Jewish Office in the Reich Security Main Office (Division II 112). This committed anti-Semite and dutiful bureaucrat developed an efficient procedure for pushing through Jewish emigration. It allowed applicants to be processed quickly in the same building almost in the manner of a conveyor belt. Eichmann had the assets of wealthy members of Vienna’s Jewish community confiscated, using them to finance the emigration of poorer Jews. By May 1939, 100,000 Jews—more than half of Austria’s Jewish population—had left the country. The “Vienna model” was so successful that it served as the basis for similar initiatives in the “old Reich.”23

  “Since the amalgamation of Austria, the fate of German Jews has entered a new stage,” an SPD-in-exile observer commented in July 1938.

  The National Socialists have concluded from their experiences in Austria that rapidly pursuing anti-Jewish persecution does no harm to the system, and that unleashing the anti-Semitic instincts in the
ranks of their members and tolerating open pogroms do not cause any economic difficulties or any loss of prestige in the world at large. Guided by this conception…the regime is ruthlessly applying the Viennese methods to the older parts of the Reich.24

  Beginning in the spring of 1938, one discriminatory law followed another, all aimed at destroying the economic existence of Jews in the “Greater German Reich” and making their lives as difficult as possible. Jewish families were denied income tax deductions for children (1 February); Jewish business people were not allowed to compete for public contracts (1 March); and Jewish communities lost their legal status as public bodies (28 March). Especially pernicious was the decree of 26 April that required Jews to declare all of their assets in excess of 5,000 marks by 30 June. “What is the point of this ordinance?” asked Victor Klemperer, who filled out the form on 29 June. “We are used to living in this condition of having no rights and in expectation of the next outrage. It hardly ruffles our feathers.”25

  On 6 July, a new addendum to the trade laws forbade Jews from engaging in various professions, including property, marriage-brokering and door-to-door sales. In late July, Jewish doctors had their licences revoked. An ordinance on 17 August required Jewish men and women to go by first names contained on a list or add “Israel” or “Sara” to their own names. “If the lists had been drawn up under other circumstances,” Saul Friedländer has remarked, “they could have served as evidence of the intellectual constitution of bureaucratic fools.”26 The lists had been compiled by the ministerial official at the Interior Ministry and legal commentator on the Nuremberg Laws, Hans Globke, who like so many other Nazis was allowed to continue his career after the war.27

  —

  Once again, administrative measures “from above” and violence “from below” combined to hasten radicalisation. Anti-Semitic rioting broke out in many parts of the “old Reich” in the spring of 1938 in the wake of the pogrom in Vienna.28 As he had in 1935, Goebbels seized the initiative. In late April, he conferred with Berlin Police President Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf about how to further ramp up anti-Jewish persecution. “Jewish businesses get combed out, and what happens? Jews open up a new swimming pool and a couple of new cinemas and cafés,” Goebbels wrote in his diaries. “We’re going to end the Jewish paradise in Berlin. Jewish businesses are going to be designated as such. In any case, we’re now going to proceed more radically.” Hitler declared himself in agreement with the idea but asked that concrete action only be undertaken after his trip to Italy in early May 1938.29 At Helldorf’s behest, the state police office in Berlin came up with a “Memorandum on the Treatment of Jews in the Reich Capital in all Areas of Public Life” on 17 May. It foresaw a host of discriminatory measures: from the introduction of special badges for Jews and the abolition of compulsory education for Jewish children to the visual identification of Jewish businesses and the establishment of segregated train carriages for Jews.30

  The section of the Security Service responsible for Jewish affairs objected that “addressing the question of how to regulate the Jewish problem in Berlin independently of the Reich in its entirety is counter to our purposes.”31 But Goebbels insisted that the Reich capital had to lead the way. On 24 May, he once again conferred with Helldorf about the “Jewish question” in Berlin. “We want to force Jews out of economic and cultural life, indeed out of public life altogether,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “We have to start somewhere.” Five days later he reassured himself of Hitler’s support, and on 30 May he instructed the police president to “initiate the anti-Jewish programme.”32 On 31 May, Berlin police staged a large-scale raid on Kurfürstendamm and arrested 300 Jews, although most of them were released the following day. Goebbels was indignant, writing: “I’m going to kick up a storm as never before.” In a speech to police officers on 10 June, he tried to win them over to his line: “I’m rebelling. Against every form of sentimentality. The watchword is not the law, but harassment. The Jews leave Berlin. And the police are going to help me.”33

  Beginning on 11 June, anti-Jewish activities were reported in most Berlin districts. “Starting late Saturday afternoon, groups of civilians, consisting usually of two or three men, were to be observed painting on the windows of Jewish shops the word ‘JUDE’ in large red letters, as well as the Star of David and caricatures of Jews,” relayed the U.S. ambassador in Berlin, Hugh R. Wilson, to his secretary of state. “The painters in each case were followed by large groups of spectators who seemed to enjoy the proceedings enormously.”34 Wilson understood this action as an organised attempt to identify all Jewish businesses, and he remarked that it went further than anything which had happened since 1933. The excesses reached their temporary zenith on 20 and 21 June. The journalist Bella Fromm, who would emigrate a few weeks later to the United States, wrote in her diary:

  The entire Kurfürstendamm was full of graffiti and posters…In the district [behind Alexanderplatz] where the small Jewish shops are located, the SA went on a particularly terrible rampage. Everywhere you could see repulsive, bloodthirsty drawings of Jews beheaded, hanged or hacked to bits, accompanied by disgusting slogans. Windows had been smashed, and “plunder” from poor little shops lay scattered on the pavements and in the gutters.35

  The corresponding report of the responsible Security Service officer noted laconically: “The operation was carried out with permission from local Berlin police authorities.”36 But the Berlin police did not just sit on their hands. As part of a large-scale operation targeting so-called “antisocials,” they arrested some 1,500 Jews in mid-June 1938; most of them were taken to Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. Goebbels was satisfied, writing: “Helldorf is now proceeding radically on the Jewish question. The party is helping him. Many arrests…We will make Berlin Jew-free. I’m not going to let up.”37

  But on 22 June, from the Obersalzberg, Hitler ordered an immediate stop to the operation. Goebbels, who gave a virulently anti-Semitic speech in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium to celebrate the summer solstice that evening,38 had to retreat. The anti-Semitic campaign in Berlin had created an enormously negative echo in the foreign press at a point where international tensions were rising daily because of the “Sudetenland crisis” provoked by the Nazi regime. Hitler thus decided for tactical reasons to temporarily put a lid on anti-Jewish activism.39 He had not given up his ultimate goal, of course, and Hitler and Goebbels reached a mutual understanding during the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth on 24 June 1938. Goebbels noted: “The main thing is that the Jews will be forced out. In ten years they must be completely removed from Germany. But in the short term we want to keep the rich ones as collateral.”40

  In late June Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf issued to all Berlin police officers “Guidelines for the Treatment of Jews and Jewish Affairs,” in which he drew on the lessons from the operation in June. The goal, he wrote, was “to cause Jews to emigrate and not just to harass them randomly without any hope of achieving this end.”41 All Berlin police officers were called upon to “free Berlin from Jews and in particular the Jewish proletariat as much as possible.” A catalogue encompassing seventy-six points described in detail how officers could put pressure on the defamed minority in daily life without exceeding the limits of the discriminatory laws already in place. “Helldorf has given me a list of the measures taken against Jews in Berlin,” Goebbels noted, pleased with the work of the police president. “They are rigorous and comprehensive. In this way we’ll be able to drive the Jews from Berlin in the foreseeable future.”42

  —

  But there was an internal contradiction within the policy of forcibly driving away Jews. By doing everything in its power to rob Jews of the basis of their economic existence, the Nazi regime restricted their ability to emigrate. “While Jews are quickly being transformed into a proletarian community, which will soon be dependent on public welfare,” reported Argentina’s ambassador to Germany, Eduardo Labougle Carranza, in August 1938, “it is growing more difficult for them to emigrate, es
pecially where money is concerned.”43 At Security Service headquarters, the dilemma was no secret either. One could no longer ignore, read a report for the months of April and May 1938, “that the chances for emigration have decreased just as much as the pressure to emigrate has grown.” The increasing exclusion of Jews from economic life, the report added, was causing a reduction in income to Jewish communities and aid organisations, which came up with most of the money used to pay for Jewish emigration.44

  To make matters worse, the readiness of Western countries to take in Jews was by no means rising as quickly as the persecution of Jews in Germany was intensifying. At a conference called in the French spa town of Evian on the initiative of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1938, none of the thirty-two participating countries was willing to significantly raise its quotas for German-Jewish immigration. In this regard they played right into the hands of Nazi propaganda. “No one wants them,” jeered the Völkischer Beobachter.45 In his concluding speech at the Nuremberg rally in 1938, Hitler made fun of the hypocrisy of Western democracies that complained, on the one hand, about the “boundless cruelty” with which the Third Reich was trying to “rid itself of its Jewish element” while shrinking back, on the other, from the burdens connected with accepting such a large number of Jewish immigrants. “Plenty of morality,” Hitler scoffed, “but no help at all.”46

  The experts in the Security Service envisioned Jewish emigration to Palestine as the solution to the situation, but the Nazi leadership saw itself facing the dilemma that if it encouraged Zionist activities, it might help create a new centre of “global Jewry,” whose alleged power the regime was trying to break. In June 1937, Foreign Minister von Neurath told the German embassy in London in no uncertain terms: “The formation of a Jewish state or a state apparatus run by Jews under a British mandate is not in German interests.”47 One year later, while the conference in Evian was going on, Alfred Rosenberg published an editorial in the Völkischer Beobachter with the headline “Where to with the Jews?” It summarised the mains points of the debate. First: “Palestine is out of the question as a large centre for immigration.” Second: “The states of the world do not consider themselves in a position to take in the Jews of Europe.” Third: “We will have to look around for a closed territory not settled by Europeans.”48 In this context, in the spring of 1938, the island of Madagascar off the eastern coast of Africa began to play a role in Hitler’s calculations. On 11 April, Goebbels noted: “Talked for a long time over breakfast. Discussed the Jewish question. The Führer wants to drive the Jews entirely out of Germany. To Madagascar or somewhere like it. Correct! He’s convinced that they originated in a former penal colony. It’s possible. A people condemned by God.”49