Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (16 page)

this goal. Economic activity on the part of the Jews should only be permitted in so

far as it constitutes supporting themselves, but their economic and political

situation should not be permitted to suppress their desire to emigrate.’ Walter

Sommer, a senior official on the staff of the Führer’s Deputy, added that ‘rich Jews

will not generally be keen to emigrate. The Jews should therefore not be given very

much room for economic activity. But on the other hand, a Jewish proletariat

should also be prevented from forming.’

This premise—the restriction of Jewish economic activity and the prevention of

proletarianization—was used as the basis for a series of measures. However,

discussion revealed that, because of the general economic situation in Germany,

it was necessary to step back from implementing most of the suggested anti-

Jewish measures: there was no appetite either for imposing on the public purse a

general ban against dealing with Jews or for requiring the enforced dismissal of all

Jewish salesmen active in German firms.

On 1 December 1936 two laws were finally passed that put into practice Hitler’s

demands in the memorandum on the Four-Year Plan. One was a law against

economic sabotage assigning the death penalty to anyone transferring their wealth

abroad,
62
the other was a modification of the law on currency management that included so-called security measures against anyone suspected of transferring currency abroad.
63
Both laws were subsequently to provide the basis for the largely arbitrary confiscation of large sums of money, mainly from Jews, and for condemning

those who had such sums—‘economic saboteurs’—to long periods of detention.

Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7

65

In addition to this, as 1936 moved into 1937 the civil service produced three

more drafts for anti-Semitic laws. They responded to the plans articulated in the

memorandum on the Four-Year Plan for introducing a ‘special Jewish tax’, for

identifying and labelling Jewish businesses, and for formulating a Reich citizenship

law.
64
All three drafts were put on hold after further consultation in the spring and summer of 1937. In fact, the exclusion of Jews from the economy that began in

earnest at the end of 1936 was at first not achieved by spectacular acts of legislation

but via more subtle policies of exclusion and isolation that took many forms.

In the first of these, the boycott of Jewish retail trade took on such proportions

that the complete economic annihilation of the few Jews remaining in this sphere

could confidently be predicted in the near future. The records of the Centralverein

contain many examples of campaigns against Jewish business activity that were

implemented with renewed vigour during the Christmas period at the end of

1936
.65
Above all it was on the rural population that pressure was applied to break off business contacts with Jewish cattle dealers. Gestapo reports for 1937 are

unanimous, however, in suggesting that despite intensive propaganda many

farmers were not prepared to take the initiative in breaking off contact with

Jews. In the face of this situation, the Gestapo undertook an operation across

the whole area of the Reich in the summer of 1937. With the support of the local

authorities, the local police and the Reich Food Estate, farmers who continued to

trade with Jews were arrested.
66
Through the continuation and intensification of the ‘boycott’, conditions were achieved under which many Jews were forced to sell

their firms in haste and at less than their true value, only to lose the proceeds in

large part or even entirely in the maze of currency regulations.

A second element in the politics of exclusion can be seen in Heydrich’s nomin-

ation as the head of the Currency Investigation Office in summer 1936 and the

introduction of the law authorizing currency management alterations in December

of that year, which effectively completed the mechanisms for confiscating the assets

of Jews suspected of being about to emigrate (‘im Auswanderungsverdacht’). The

completely arbitrary nature of this process emerges clearly from the fact that

emigration, itself the very goal of NS anti-Jewish policies, was now being used as

a pretext to secure assets for the state. The financial authorities and the branches of

the Reichsbank had to cooperate actively in the compilation of the documentation

necessary to support a suspicion of emigration.
67
By June 1938, according to a communication from the Currency Investigation Office, the Customs Investigation Centres were ‘almost exclusively’ concerned with ‘securing’ the assets of Jews

who had raised suspicions that they were intending to leave the country.
68

Via a network of special submissions and regulations for the granting of

exemptions, the assets of Jewish businessmen were systematically appropriated

by the state. According to paragraph 1 of the Tax Adjustment Law of October 1934,

Inland Revenue offices were required to interpret all taxation regulations in

accordance with the ‘National Socialist world-view’, which was in effect equivalent

66

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

to a blanket instruction to apply the severest imaginable criteria in dealing with

Jewish taxpayers.
69
Eventually, as the regulations concerning the tax on leaving the Reich introduced in 1931 were tightened up, and as the premium to be paid on

capital transfers was raised ever higher—reaching the level of 90 per cent in June

1938—the assets of emigrating Jews were plundered almost entirely.
70

Another aspect is demonstrated by the various measures taken to force Jews to

hand their business over to ‘Aryan’ owners or to have them liquidated, often to the

advantage of ‘Aryan’ competitors.
71
The so-called ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish firms—

their transfer to a non-Jewish proprietor usually at a price far below their market-

value—was a process that had begun long before it received formal legal sanction

in 1938. To all appearances this ‘creeping Aryanization’ took the form of run-of-

the-mill business sales, but in reality such deals were often the enforced result of

the threats and obstructions to Jewish economic activity that have been described

above. As a direct result of the boycott, from 1933 onwards the number of Jewish

businesses being ‘Aryanized’ grew year on year and the sale prices dropped as

increasing pressure was applied to their owners. In addition to the direct sale of

some firms, others were ‘indirectly Aryanized’ as a result of liquidation proceed-

ings that allowed the competition to strip them of their plant and equipment and

eventually take over entirely what was left of each firm or the relevant sector of the

market.
72
Barkai estimates that by 1935 some 20–5 per cent of all Jewish businesses had been liquidated or transferred to non-Jewish ownership.
73

The process of ‘Aryanization’ was such that direct support from the police and the

judiciary meant that the buyer was often in a position to force the seller to ‘Aryanize’

and to tailor the terms of transfer to suit his own best interests. In the very earliest

years of the ‘Third Reich’ accusations of ‘racial defilement’, or arrests on suspicion of commercial irregularities, or arbitrary intervention on the part of the Gestapo all

proved suitable means to ensure that Jewish proprietors became compliant.
74

According to an analysis of ‘Aryanization’ reports in the Jüdische Rundschau

undertaken by the German historian Helmut Genschel, after a temporary lull in

1936 and a reduction in the first half of 1937, there was a slow but significant rise in

the instances of ‘Aryanization’ in the third and fourth quartiles of 1937, which was

followed in 1938 by a much more rapid increase in takeovers.
75
Since 1936 the Gestapo had played a regular part in the processes of ‘Aryanization’. The Party’s

Gau economic advisers played a central role and their assent to the transfer of

Jewish assets gradually became a necessary part of the process.
76

Even without legal measures to restrict Jewish commercial activity, and without

large-scale anti-Jewish rallies, the process of commercially displacing the German

Jews continued ‘inexorably in the years 1936 and 1937’.
77
The so-called ‘creeping Aryanization’ took place according to a logic that was characterized in the 1937 report

of the North-Eastern Sector of the SD thus: ‘In some areas it has been possible to

eliminate Jewish influence immediately using laws and decrees passed by the state, but

in the commercial sector it has had to be undermined only gradually.
’78

Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7

67

Increases in Measures to Expel the Jews

With its efforts in the latter half of 1936 to expel the Jews from the economic

sphere, the National Socialist regime was pursuing two main goals: the financing

of rearmament and the expulsion of the Jewish minority from Germany. Eco-

nomic pressure was intended to increase the Jewish population’s willingness to

emigrate and to improve the incoming flow of capital for the state.

After the first wave of emigration in 1933, when some 37,000 people of Jewish

origin left Germany, 1934 saw approximately 23,000 leave; in 1935 there were

21,000 and in 1936 some 25,000
.79
In the latter half of 1937 it became more and more difficult for German Jews to find a place that would take them. On the one

hand, after the announcement of British plans to divide Palestine and, after the

Arab revolts of April 1936–8, the number of Jews leaving for the British Mandate

went down; on the other, there were increasing signs that countries that had so far

been willing to accept Jews who wished to emigrate were becoming more restrict-

ive in their immigration policies, as South Africa and Brazil had already shown in

1937. Whilst it is true that some 23,000 Jews left Germany in 1937, the reports of the

Jewish Reich National Association indicate that the numbers emigrating began to

stagnate in the third quarter of 1937.
80

During the whole of 1937, representatives of the National Socialist regime were

occupied with the question of whether increased emigration to Palestine was

desirable from a German perspective if this were to improve chances for the

foundation of a Jewish state. The regime had to decide whether it wished to

continue its policies intended to drive out the Jews without taking account of the

international situation or of their consequences for German foreign policy.

At the beginning of the year the Reich government’s policy on the Palestine

question seemed clear: on 16 January 1937, the Reich Minister of the Interior

informed the German Foreign Office that it was planning to continue to support

the policy of Jewish emigration regardless of the destination countries.
81
But after it began to emerge in early 1937 that Britain’s Peel Commission might opt for a

Jewish state in Palestine, on 1 June the Foreign Minister, Neurath, sent guidelines

to the embassies in London and Baghdad and to the Consul General in Jerusalem

in which he made it crystal clear that he was against the formation of a Jewish state

or ‘anything resembling a state’. Such a state would not be sufficient, he said, to

receive all the Jews, and like the Vatican for the Catholic Church or Moscow for

the Komintern, it would serve as an internationally recognized power base for

world Jewry.
82
As formulated in a general order sent to all German consulates by the Foreign Office on 22 June, in contrast to the expected recommendations of the

Peel Commission, there was ‘significant German interest in making sure that the

fragmented condition of the Jews was preserved’.
83

68

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

However, at an inter-ministerial meeting on 29 July the representative from the

Reich Ministry of the Interior announced that Hitler was in favour of emigration

to Palestine and thus of ‘concentrating’ the Jews in that area—in direct contra-

diction of the idea of ‘fragmenting’ Jewish emigration put forward in the Foreign

Office order the previous month. On 21 September, however, this was modified by

a representative from the Reich Ministry of the Interior to clarify that the ‘Führer’

was clearly in favour of the emigration of the Jews, but that he had not made any

specific comments on Palestine.
84
Another declaration of principle on Hitler’s part has been preserved from January 1938, and from that it is clear that he was

positive about emigration to Palestine.
85
This established that the continued expulsion of German Jews, using all available means, took priority over any

foreign-policy reservations.

The Judenpolitik of the Security Service

In addition to the state administration, the Party, the Four-Year Plan, and

the Gestapo, in spring 1937 the division of the Party’s Security Service (SD)

responsible for Jewish affairs increased its involvement in anti-Semitic persecu-

tion. Previously this division—which, as a part of the Party organization, had no

claim to any official state executive functions—had concentrated mainly on the

collection and analysis of information, but this situation changed when Dieter