Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (12 page)

The American consul general in Berlin reached the same conclusion.” One of the most unfortunate features of the situation,” George S. Messersmith wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on November 1, 1933, “is that, as I have already pointed out in previous dispatches and again in this one, Mr. Hitler himself is implacable and
unconvinced
and is the real head of the anti-Jewish movement. He can be reasonable on a number of subjects, but on this he can only be passionate and prejudiced.”
¹¹⁹

Hitler did not express his obsession with the Jewish peril in major public utterances during 1933, but its lurking presence can be perceived in his remarks about the Concordat, in the last part of the letter to Hindenburg, in the discussion with Bishop Berning, as well as in outbursts such as those reported by foreign diplomats. It is no less apparent, however, that the new chancellor was not yet sure of the leeway granted him by the shifting political and economic situation. International reactions did concern him. As he put it in his meeting with the Reich district governors, on July 6, 1933, for Germany the most dangerous front at the time was the external one: “One should not irritate it, when it is not necessary to deal with it. To reopen the Jewish question would mean to start a world-wide uproar again.”
¹²⁰
Clearly the shaky economic circumstances of the Reich were also a major factor in his decisions, as already noted. Once the bumbling minister of the Economy, Alfred Hugenberg, and his ineffective successor Kurt Schmitt, had been eased out, Hitler, on July 30, 1934, appointed Hjalmar Schacht, the conservative “wizard,” as minister and overlord of the economy of the Reich. For practical economic reasons, Schacht insisted that no major interference with Jewish business would be allowed.
¹²¹
In general terms Hitler backed Schacht’s position until the new transition period of 1936–37. Finally, on some matters such as the issue of Jewish physicians, Hitler certainly took into account German public opinion: In other words he understood the need for tactical pragmatism regarding immediate anti-Jewish measures, and thus his policy had to remain, for a time at least, close to the preexisting anti-Jewish agenda of the conservatives.

The extent to which Hitler was torn between hatred of the Jews and desire for radical action on the one hand, and the need for tactical restraint on the other, emerged clearly in the July 14 cabinet meeting, at which he declared that the Concordat with the Vatican would help the Reich in its struggle against world Jewry. When, during discussion of criteria for the continued exercise of the legal profession by Jews, several ministers suggested that the identification of frontline veterans should be based on membership in combat units, Hitler protested: “The Jewish nation in its totality was being rejected. Therefore all Jews had to be dismissed [from the professions]. One could make an exception only for those who had taken part in direct combat. Only participation in combat, and not mere presence in the combat zone, was decisive. A commission to check the rolls of the various units was necessary.”
¹²²
But how was this need for an ongoing struggle against the Jews to find its expression in the economic sphere, for example, without leading to the dangerous results of which Hitler was well aware? When the topic was raised at the same cabinet meeting, the Reich chancellor launched into an explanation that clearly laid bare the dilemma facing him. “The Jews were continuing their silent boycott of Germany,” Hitler explained, “and their aim was to bring about the downfall of the present regime. Therefore it was only just that the Jews in Germany be the first to feel the effects of this boycott. There were too many enterprises in Germany, and clearly some would have to disappear. In this situation the opponent, Jewish enterprises, had to be the first to go—equal treatment in this domain would be wrong.”
¹²³
In other words, Jewish enterprises had to be discriminated against—to a point: Within the category of those enterprises that had to disappear, the Jewish ones were to be the first on the list. Such a statement could be read in many ways.

That Hitler also manipulated the Jewish issue in order to achieve some general political goals is not impossible. Although the economic boycott of Jewish businesses had to stop, at least officially, the menacing party rhetoric clearly indicated that henceforward the Jews were considered potential hostages whose fate would depend upon the outside world’s attitude toward the new Germany. Such use of the Jews would, incidentally, remain as a threatening theme throughout the thirties and find its most violent expression after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 and during the last months of peace, particularly in Hitler’s Reichstag speech of January 1939. Moreover, the April 1933 boycott and the other early anti-Jewish measures allowed for some release of the pent-up violence simmering among the “party radicals.” Throughout the coming months and years, but particularly in 1935, Hitler would use his anti-Jewish policies as a safety valve against a buildup of ideological or material resentment among the party rank and file and the more extreme of his underlings.

Finally, as far as the regime’s first year is concerned, were there any indications that—beyond general ideological obsession and immediate tactics—Hitler was already considering further systematic steps against the Jews of Germany? It seems indeed that the idea of establishing a fundamental legal distinction between German (Aryan) citizens and the Jews living in Germany, a staple demand of many conservatives in the past and an item of the Nazi Party program, was on both the conservative civil service’s agenda and Hitler’s mind from the very outset of his government.

The first draft of a new citizenship law appears to have emerged in the Ministry of the Interior at the end of May 1933, and was submitted to the Committee of Experts for Population and Racial Policy of the Ministry in the following month.
¹²⁴
No immediate results came of these efforts, but Hitler, it seems, was considering similar plans for the future. Thus, at a September 28 meeting with the minister of the interior and the Reich district governors, “Hitler explained that he would have preferred to take a step-by-step approach toward sharpening anti-Jewish measures; this could have been achieved had a citizenship law been established which would then have allowed him to take further, sharper steps. However, the boycott started by the Jews had called for an immediate and very sharp reaction.”
¹²⁵

As will be seen, even in the atmosphere of uncertainty following his accession to power, Hitler did not lose sight of his ideological goals with regard to the Jews, as well as in relation to the other issues that formed the core of his worldview. Although he avoided public statements on the Jewish issue, he could not restrain himself entirely. In his closing speech at the September 1933 Nuremberg party rally, called (for the occasion) the Congress of Victory, he launched into disparaging comments about the Jews in his expostulations on the racial foundations of art: “It is a sign of the horrible spiritual decadence of the past epoch that one spoke of styles without recognizing their racial determinants…. Each clearly formed race has its own handwriting in the book of art, insofar as it is not, like Jewry, devoid of any creative artistic ability.”
¹²⁶
As for the function of a worldview, Hitler defined it in his address: “Worldviews,” he declared, “consider the achievement of political power only as the precondition for the beginning of the fulfillment of their true mission. In the very term ‘worldview’ there lies the solemn commitment to make all enterprise dependent upon a specific initial conception and a visible direction. Such a conception can be right or wrong; it is the starting point for the attitude to be taken toward all manifestations and occurrences of life and thereby a compelling and obligatory rule for all action.”
¹²⁷
In other words a worldview as defined by Hitler was a quasi-religious framework encompassing immediate political goals. Nazism was no mere ideological discourse; it was a political religion commanding the total commitment owed to a religious faith.
¹²⁸

The “visible direction” of a worldview implied the existence of “final goals” that, their general and hazy formulation notwithstanding, were supposed to guide the elaboration and implementation of short-term plans. Before the fall of 1935 Hitler did not hint either in public or in private what the final goal of his anti-Jewish policy might be. But much earlier, as a fledgling political agitator, he had defined the goal of a systematic anti-Jewish policy in his notorious first political text, the letter on the “Jewish question” addressed on September 16, 1919, to one Adolf Gemlich. In the short term the Jews had to be deprived of their civil rights: “The final aim however must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether.”
¹²⁹

CHAPTER
3

Redemptive Anti-Semitism

I

On the afternoon of November 9, 1918, Albert Ballin, the Jewish founder and chairman of the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, took his life. Germany had lost the war, and the Kaiser, who had befriended him and valued his advice, had been compelled to abdicate and flee to Holland, while in Berlin a republic was proclaimed. On the thirteenth, two days after the Armistice, Ballin was buried at Ohlsdorf, a suburb of Hamburg. “In the midst of revolution,” writes Ballin’s biographer, “the city paused to pay tribute to its most distinguished citizen, and from Amerongen the ex-Kaiser telegraphed his condolences to Frau Ballin.”
¹

Ballin’s life and death were but one last illustration of the paradoxical existence of the Jews of Germany during the Second Reich. Some had achieved remarkable success but were held at arm’s length; many felt “at home in Germany” but were perceived as strangers; almost all were loyal citizens but engendered suspicion. Thus, two years before the collapse, on October 11, 1916, by which time the military situation had reached a complete stalemate, the Prussian war minister signed a decree ordering a census of all Jews in the armed forces “to determine…how many Jews subject to military duty were serving in every unit of the German armies.”
²
The War Ministry explained that it was “continually receiving complaints from the population that large numbers of men of the Israelite faith who are fit for military service are either exempt from military duties or are evading their obligation to serve under every conceivable pretext.”
³
The census was held on November 1, 1916.

From the beginning of the war, the Jews of Germany had, like all other Germans, joined the army; very soon a number of them became officers. For the castelike Prussian officer corps in particular, this was a bitter pill to swallow, and officer organizations turned to anti-Semitic groups to find ways of putting an end to these promotions.
⁴
A wave of rumors, originating both within and outside the army, described Jewish soldiers as lacking in ability and courage, and accused Jews in great numbers of shirking frontline duty, settling into rear-echelon office jobs or flocking into the “war economy corporations” established for the acquisition of raw materials and food supplies.
⁵

The industrialist Walther Rathenau, who was Jewish, had in fact become the head of the new War Resources Department in the War Ministry, and on the initiative of Ballin, the bankers Max Warburg and Carl Melchior (also Jewish), the Central Purchasing Company was established for acquiring foreign food products through a network of war corporations. According to extreme nationalist Germans, these corporations were becoming instruments of Jewish speculation and exploitation of the nation in its time of peril: “The war profiteers were first of all essentially Jews,” wrote Gen. Erich Ludendorff in his memoirs. “They acquired a dominant influence in the ‘war corporations’…which gave them the occasion to enrich themselves at the expense of the German people and to take possession of the German economy, in order to achieve one of the power goals of the Jewish people.”
⁶
Hitler, in
Mein Kampf
, wrapped it all up in his own typical style: “The general mood [in the army] was miserable…. The offices were filled with Jews. Nearly every clerk was a Jew and nearly every Jew was a clerk…. As regards economic life, things were even worse. Here the Jewish people had become really ‘indispensable.’ The spider was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the people’s pores. Through the war corporations, they had found an instrument with which, little by little, to finish off the nation’s free economy.”
⁷

Due to the professional structure of the Jewish population, approximately 10 percent of the directors of the war corporations were Jews.
⁸
Continuous anti-Jewish attacks induced a Catholic Center deputy, Matthias Erzberger, to demand a Reichstag inquiry.
⁹
He was supported by a coalition of liberals and conservatives. Even some Social Democrats joined in.
¹⁰
It was in this atmosphere that the Prussian War Ministry announced its decision to conduct its census of Jews (
Judenzählung
).

The Jews reacted, but only meekly. Warburg, then already one of the most influential Jews in imperial Germany, met with War Minister Stein in March 1917 to ask for the release of a statement that Jews were fighting as bravely as other Germans. Stein refused, and in order to underline the Jewish traits he most disliked, lectured Warburg about Heinrich Heine.
¹¹

The results of the census were not published during the war, ostensibly out of consideration for the Jews, as they were termed “devastating” by officials of the War Ministry.
¹²
Immediately after the Armistice, pseudo results were leaked to the radical anti-Semitic Völkischer Schutz- und Trutz-bund by the Jew-hating General Wrisberg and used as anti-Jewish propaganda on a massive scale.
¹³
Only at the beginning of the 1920s did a systematic study of the material show it to be “the greatest statistical monstrosity of which an administration had ever been responsible.”
¹⁴
Detailed analysis indicated that Jewish participation in frontline service was equivalent to that of the general population, with a minimal deviation due to age and occupational structure. The damage had nonetheless been done.

Ernst Simon, who had volunteered for the army to find a sense of community with the German nation, perceived that the
Judenzählung
was more than the initiative of some malevolent officials. It was the “real expression of a real mood: that we were strangers, that we did not belong, that we had to be specially tagged, counted, registered and dealt with.”
¹⁵
Walther Rathenau wrote to a friend in the summer of 1916: “The more Jews are killed [in action] in this war, the more obstinately their enemies will prove that they all sat behind the front in order to deal in war speculation. The hatred will grow twice and threefold.”
¹⁶

After almost two decades of relative latency, the Jewish issue had resurfaced in full force in German political life during the 1912 Reichstag elections, which were soon dubbed the “Jewish elections” (
Judenwahlen
).
¹⁷
The real political issue was the growth of the Left. However, as the Jews—opposed to (and by) the Conservatives and disappointed by the stand taken toward them by the National Liberals—turned to the Progressives and, in particular, to the Social Democrats, they became identified with the left-wing peril.
¹⁸

The elections marked the disappearance of the anti-Semitic splinter parties and represented a significant setback for the Conservative right. The Social Democrats emerged as the strongest single party on the German scene, more than doubling their number of seats in the Reichstag from 53 to 110. Of the 300 candidates favored by organizations in which Jews were prominent, 88 were elected.
¹⁹
These results proved that the majority of the voters did not manifestly harbor intense anti-Jewish feelings, but the reaction of the Right was different and immediate. It had become obvious to the right-wing press that Jewish money and the Jewish spirit were in control of the “gold” and the “red” internationals, those two most dangerous enemies of the German nation. Even for a publication as close to the Lutheran Church as the
Christlichsoziale Reichsbote
, the workers who voted for the Social Democrats were “driven by the Jewish whip” held by “the manipulators of international Jewish capitalism.”
²⁰

Frantic activity now spread throughout the extreme right, with approximately twenty new ultra-nationalist and racist organizations springing up on the political scene. Some of them, such as the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden, were coalitions of previously existing groups.
²¹
Among larger groups, the evolution of the Pan-German League is particularly telling. In his previously mentioned 1912 pamphlet,
If I Were the Kaiser
, league president Heinrich Class fully spelled out a program for the complete expulsion of the Jews from German public life—that is, from public office, from the liberal professions, and from banks and newspapers. Jews would lose the right to own land. Jewish immigration would be banned, and all Jewish noncitizens deported. Those who were citizens would be subject to “alien Status” (
Fremdenrecht
). A Jew would be defined as a person belonging to the Jewish religious community on January 18, 1871, the day the German Empire was proclaimed, as would all the descendants of such persons, even if only one grandparent was Jewish.
²²

A few months later a memorandum was submitted to the crown prince, Wilhelm II’s eldest son, by another member of the league, Konstantin von Gebsattel; it proposed the same measures against the Jews as well as a “coup d’état” to put an end to parliamentarianism in Germany. The crown prince—who later would become a member of the SS—was “captivated” by Gebsattel’s memorandum and transmitted it to his father and to Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Himself a strange mix of traditional conservatism and radical right-wing opinions,
²³
the Kaiser was dismissive. He considered Gebsattel an “oddball,” the Pan-Germans who supported such plans “dangerous people,” and the idea of excluding the Jews from public life “downright childish”; Germany would be cutting itself off from civilized nations. The chancellor was more deferential to the crown prince, but no less negative.
²⁴

The Association Against Jewish Arrogance (Verband gegen die Überhebung des Judentums) was established on February 11, 1912, by the remnants of the old anti-Semitic parties and various other anti-Semitic organizations. Its aim was the creation, under nationalist auspices, of a mass movement to achieve political change. “One of their top priorities was to exclude the Jewish ‘race’ from the nation’s public life. The founding of the association, clearly linked to the 1912 elections, was but one more manifestation of the new right’s determined ‘defense’ against
Juda
.”
²⁵

II

Jews never represented more than approximately 1 percent of Germany’s overall population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between the beginning of the century and 1933, that percentage slightly declined. The Jewish community, however, gained in visibility by gradually concentrating in the large cities, keeping to certain professions, and absorbing an increasing number of easily identifiable East European Jews.
²⁶

The general visibility of the Jews in Germany was enhanced by their relative importance in the “sensitive” areas of business and finance, journalism and cultural activities, medicine and the law, and, finally, by their involvement in liberal and left-wing politics. The social discrimination to which the Jews were subjected, and their own striving for advancement and acceptance, easily explain their patterns of activity. Interpreted as Jewish subversion and domination, these patterns in turn led, at least in parts of German society, to further hostility and rejection.

Of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thirty were Jewish-owned. Later on Bismarck asked the Rothschilds to recommend a private banker (it was to be Gerson Bleichröder), and Kaiser Wilhelm I chose for himself the banker Moritz Cohn. When, at the turn of the century, many private banks became shareholding companies, Jews frequently held a controlling percentage of the shares or served as directors of the new enterprises. Add the banking aristocracy of the Warburgs, the Arnholds, the Friedländer-Fulds, the Simons, the Weinbergs, and so on, to such financial potentates as chain-store owners Abraham Wertheim and Leonhard and Oskar Tietz, founding electrical industrialist Emil Rathenau, publisher Rudolf Mosse, and shipping magnate Albert Ballin, and it becomes obvious that Jews held an eminent and visible place in the financial world of imperial Germany.
²⁷

The Jewish economic elite’s particular function during the nineteenth century had been its decisive role in capital mobilization and concentration through development of the Berlin stock market,
²⁸
and linkage of the still relatively parochial German economy with world markets.
²⁹
The centrality of “Jewish” banking during the Weimar period did not decrease,
³⁰
contrary to what has sometimes been argued. But there was no correlation between Jewish economic activity and any kind of lasting political influence in German society.

Culture was possibly the most sensitive domain. In March 1912 a telling exchange was triggered by an article written by a young Jewish intellectual, Moritz Goldstein, and published in the arts journal
Kunstwart
under the title “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass” (German-Jewish Parnassus). As Goldstein put it, “We Jews administer the spiritual possessions of a people that denies us the right and the capability of doing so.”
³¹
After admitting to Jewish influence on the press and in the literary world, Goldstein reemphasized the insuperable rift between the Jewish “administrators” of German culture, who believed they were speaking for and to the Germans, and the Germans themselves, who considered such presumption insufferable. What, then, was the way out? Zionism, Goldstein thought, was no option for people of his background and generation. In an emotional and most emphatic fashion, he called instead for an act of courage on the part of the Jews of Germany: that, in spite of their deep feelings for Germany and all things German, in spite of their centuries-long presence in the land, they must turn their backs on the host society and stop vowing ever-renewed and ever-unrequited love.
³²
On the cultural level Jews should now turn to Jewish issues, not only for their own sake but to create “a new type of Jew, new not in life but in literature.”
³³
Goldstein’s closing was on an emotional par with the rest: “We demand recognition of a tragedy that, with a heavy heart, we have exposed to all.”
³⁴