Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (21 page)

Through the discriminatory measures in the economic field something like an

autonomous Jewish business cycle came into being: Jews were increasingly forced

to fall back on Jews as suppliers and customers, although that Jewish ‘internal

economy’ did not offer sufficient opportunities to make a livelihood; most busi-

nesses lived on their capital.
76
A closed Jewish labour market was supported by a Jewish labour exchange until it was closed down late in 1936. It was characteristic

of the Jewish commercial sector that the amount of credit provided by loan offices

increased steadily until 1936, while the activity of the agency that was supposed to

help with the reconstruction of livelihoods declined, since fewer and fewer Jews

wanted to engage in businesses.
77

Under the increasing pressure of exclusion on the one hand, and impelled by

Jewish attempts at self-assertion and self-organization on the other, an ‘autonomous

Jewish sector’ came into being, and not only in the commercial world, which

Interim Conclusions

87

facilitated survival for those Jews who had remained in Germany and gave them one

last means of support before complete impoverishment. As a result of segregation

something like a Jewish ‘public service’ came into being: Jewish health and educa-

tion, Jewish welfare, and social security
78
reached a considerable size; a considerable administrative apparatus was maintained in the Jewish communities and in organizations such as the Central Committee and the Reich Board. The establishment of

Jewish institutions and the exclusion of Jews from the institutions accessible to the

general population occurred as a complementary process.

In 1935–6 the Reich Board of Deputies of the Jews in Germany (originally

founded, as an umbrella organization, as the Reich Board of Deputies of German

Jews, it had been obliged to assume this new name after the introduction of the

Nuremberg Laws in 1935) began to develop more collective places of education.
79

While it transpired that the redistribution of adults did not increase chances of

emigration to any significant extent, after 1935–6 these institutions undertook

above all the initial training of young Jewish people who were unable find an

apprenticeship, or whose training in the commercial professions preferred by Jews

seemed pointless.

By 1938 some 30,000 people had been trained in training farms and training

centres, two-thirds of them younger than 20. These included a considerable

number of young people who were able to train in agricultural professions outside

Germany. About 15 per cent of young people between 14 and 25 had thus been

covered by the educational measures by 1938.80

Finally, the construction of an autonomous Jewish cultural life made further

progress.
81
Alongside a sizeable Jewish press
82
this found expression above all in the establishment of Jewish cultural organizations. March 1935 saw the foundation

of the Reich Association of Jewish Cultural Societies in Germany, under the

supervision of the Propaganda Ministry. With the appointment of Hans Hinkel,

the Commissar in the Prussian Ministry of Culture originally commissioned to

undertake the ‘Entjudung of cultural life’, as ‘Special Agent for the Cultural

Activity of all Non-Aryans’ in this ministry in July 1935, and through its simul-

taneous function as one of the managers of the Reich Chamber of Culture, a close

connection was established between the Entjudung of the general cultural indus-

try, and the construction of an autonomous Jewish culture was produced. From

August 1935 cultural associations had to become members of the Reich Associ-

ation, which thus became something resembling a Jewish Chamber of Culture. All

programmes of cultural events now needed—after being presented to the Reich

Association—permission from the Hinkel Office; organizers, performing artists,

and audiences had to be members of the Reich Association. In 1938 there were a

total of 76 cultural associations, involving about 50,000 people. The creation of an

efficient Jewish cultural organization was—and this connection should not be

overlooked—one of the preconditions for the exclusion of the Jews from the

general cultural life.

88

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

The Jewish school system was considerably expanded under the pressure of

persecution. At the start of the Nazi era only around 25 per cent of Jewish primary

schoolchildren attended Jewish schools, about half each in private and public

schools. During the 1930s the following developments can be observed: the

number of Jewish primary schoolchildren declined overall, due to emigration

and the falling birth rate, while an ever greater proportion of Jewish schoolchil-

dren left general primary schools. The result of these movements in the Jewish

student body for the Jewish public schools was a steady loss of pupils; the number

of these establishments, most of which had been barely sustainable one-room

schools even before 1933, thus declined from 148 in 1932–3 to 76 in 1937.
83

The private Jewish primary schools, on the other hand, registered a constant

increase in pupil numbers, at least until 1938; later the figures fell again. The

number of these schools rose between 1933 and 1937 from twenty-seven to seventy-

two.
84
The number of pupils at the public secondary schools—ten schools in all—

increased slightly until 1937, while the role of the private Jewish secondary schools

remained insignifant.
85

In 1934 the Reich Board drew up guidelines for education in Jewish primary

schools, which were understood as a complement to the state curricula which were

also valid for the Jewish schools, and which effectively represented a compromise

between German-Jewish, Orthodox, and Zionist educational goals.
86
In 1937 the Reich Board issued new guidelines which took into account the altered outlook for

those Jews still living in Germany: unlike 1934, the emphasis was no longer on the

rootedness of Jewish culture in the German environment; instead the pupils’

orientation towards Jewish tradition and preparation for emigration, especially

to Palestine,
87
found expression, for example, in a larger amount of Hebrew education, a greater emphasis on sport and handicraft, as well as in increased

efforts to teach ‘Palestinian studies’.

Jewish welfare organizations attempted to support the Jews, who were increas-

ingly excluded from official services, in a great variety of ways, through food

agencies, services of goods and money, through measures in the field of open social

work, health care, and care for the elderly, etc.
88
In 1937 there were only twenty-one Jewish hospitals, fifteen sanatoria, forty-nine children’s homes and orphanages, and

seventy-six old people’s homes and hospices.
89
One of the most successful projects was a Jewish Winter Aid scheme. Once Jews were excluded from the official Winter

Aid scheme by the Nuremberg Laws, the Reich Board set up a Winter Aid scheme

of its own, under the control of the Reich Commissioner for Winter Aid. It was

financed, on the model of the official Winter Aid scheme, by tax-like donations

drawn directly from wages or other income, and levied throughout the whole six

months of winter.
90
The proportion of the Jewish population who received support from Jewish Winter Aid rose from 20.5 per cent (1935–6) to 24.3 per cent (1938–9).
91

The creation of autonomous Jewish organizations designed to rescue the Jews

excluded from the various social spheres and give them the support they needed

Interim Conclusions

89

to survive also led to the further intensification of the segregation and isolation

of the Jewish minority that had been set in motion by the regime. Further to

this, the formation of purely Jewish organizations in a later phase of Juden-

politik, in which they were turned into the organs of a state-controlled enforced

community, in many ways made it easier for the NS state to record and control

the Jews. It was to prove fatal that Nazi Judenpolitik was able to use the

extensive attempts to achieve Jewish self-organization for the further intensifi-

cation of persecution.

chapter 4

THE INTENSIFICATION OF THE RACIAL

PERSECUTION OF NON-JEWISH GROUPS BY

THE POLICE APPARATUS, 1936–1937

In the first years of the ‘Third Reich’, National Socialist ‘Racial policy’ was defined

above all by two strategies. By the exclusion and segregation of the Jewish minority,

and by the attempt to prevent the reproduction of the so-called erbkrank, or

hereditarily ill. After the mid-1930s further racial policy measures were added, mainly

by the police apparatus and directed specifically against particular groups.

After Himmler took over and reorganized the entire German police force in

1936, over the course of 1937 the Sicherheitspolizei, or ‘security police’, formed by

the merger of the Gestapo and the criminal police (Kripo), intensified the perse-

cution and systematic elimination of marginal groups which were seen as a public

danger because of their supposedly ‘inferior’ hereditary predispositions. In this

way the security police acted as an instrument of ‘racial general prevention’.
1
This policy, which was closely connected to the continuing segregation of the Jews

occurring at the same time, affected four groups in particular: people of non-

European origin or children of Germans and non-Europeans, Gypsies, ‘asocials’,

and homosexuals. The exclusion and persecution of groups stigmatized by their

different ‘racial affiliation’ or supposed ‘hereditary predispositions’ granted the

police extensive opportunities for access and control with regard to the population

Persecution of Non-Jewish Groups by the Police, 1936–7

91

as a whole, whose everyday and social relations were subjected to a dense network

of prohibitions and prescriptions.

During the first few years of the ‘Third Reich’, the criminal police had, under

the watchword of ‘preventive crime-fighting’, attempted through the use of

preventive detention, preventive custody, and surveillance measures, systematic-

ally to eliminate so-called ‘professional criminals’. After the formation of the

Reich Criminal Police Office in July 1937 and the centralization of the Kripo as a

whole, there was an increasingly apparent tendency to organize crime-fighting on

the basis of the findings of ‘Criminal Biology’. To this end, after autumn 1937 the

Reich Criminal Police Office worked closely with the ‘Racial Hygiene Research

Institute’ in the Reich Health Office, and at the same time the Reich Minister of

Justice set up a special ‘Criminal Biology Service’,
2
and from the beginning of 1938

there was also a ‘Headquarters of Criminal Genealogy’
3
within the Reich Criminal Police Office. The findings of ‘Criminal Biology’ provided the Kripo, within the

context of ‘preventive crime-fighting’, with the strategy of eliminating ‘social

misfits’ as the class actually responsible for criminality. The legal basis for this

lay in the unpublished ‘Fundamental Decree Concerning Preventive Crime-

Fighting by the Police of 14 December 1937’ signed by the Reich Interior Minister.

This document particularly regulated which group could be taken into the

preventive custody of the Criminal Police: ‘professional and habitual criminals’,

people who gave inadequate information about their personal details, as well as

‘those who, although not professional and habitual criminals, endanger

the generality by their antisocial behaviour’. Preventive custody, fundamentally

unlimited, was to be served in ‘closed rehabilitation and labour camps . . . or in

some other way’; in fact it was to be served in concentration camps.
4

In the implementation guidelines for this decree of early April 1938, the Kripo

defined ‘asocials’ (Asoziale) on the one hand as ‘individuals who through minor

but repeated transgressions of the law refuse to fit in with the order taken for

granted in a National Socialist state (for example beggars, tramps (Gypsies)),

prostitutes, alcoholics, individuals carrying infectious diseases, particularly ven-

ereal diseases, who escape the measures of the public health department’; but

according to this ‘asocial’ could also refer to individuals without a previous

conviction if they ‘evade the duty of work and leave concern for their keep to

the generality (e.g. the work-shy, those who refuse to work, alcoholics)’.
5

Since ‘preventive crime-fighting’ (as expressly stressed in the fundamental

decree of 14 December 1937) was to take its bearings from the findings of

‘Criminal Biology’, for the use of ‘preventive’ measures the assessment of the

potential perpetrator’s family history in terms of ‘hereditary biology’ was crucial.
6

This form of assessment was of particular importance in the case of ‘asocials’,

since this group could not be defined by any unambiguous criterion (such as

previous convictions, for example), but chiefly on the basis of its ‘hidden’ inferior

inherited predispositions: for example, someone not in gainful employment