Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (19 page)

THE JEWS ARE GUILTY
! Goebbels thundered in
Der Angriff
: “The Jews are guilty, the punishment is coming…. The hour will strike when the state prosecutor will have other tasks to fulfill than to protect the traitors to the people from the anger of the people. Forget it never, comrades! Tell it to yourself a hundred times a day, so that it may follow you in your deepest dreams: the Jews are guilty! And they will not escape the punishment they deserve.”
¹⁶³

In a moment of sheer frustration, Hitler had abandoned his carefully constructed facade of respectability and given vent to relentless and murderous rage. Nonetheless, during those same weeks of the summer and fall of 1932, Hitler continued to oppose the use of force for toppling the regime and went on negotiating and maneuvering in order to reach his goal.
¹⁶⁴
What emerges here with uncanny clarity is a personality in which cold calculation and blind fury coexisted and could find almost simultaneous expression. If a third ingredient—Hitler’s ideological fanaticism—is added, an insight into the psychological makeup that led to the Nazi leader’s most crucial decisions may be possible, also with regard to the Jews.

Ideological fanaticism and pragmatic calculation constantly interacted in Hitler’s decisions. The ideological obsession was unwavering, but tactical considerations were no less compelling. Sometimes, however, the third element, uncontrolled fury, would burst into the open—triggered by some obstacle, some threat, some defeat—sweeping away all practical considerations. Then, fed by the torrent of ideological fanaticism, the murderous fury would explode in an unlimited urge for destruction and death.

CHAPTER
4

The New Ghetto

I

“Cell 6: approximately 5 m. high, window approx. 40 × 70 cm. at a height of 4 meters, which gives the feeling of a cellar…. Wooden plank with straw mat and two blankets, a wooden bucket, a jug, a basin, soap, a towel, no mirror, no toothbrush, no comb, no brush, no table, no book from January 12 [1935] until my departure on September 18; no newspaper from January 12 to August 17; no bath and no shower from January 12 to August 10; no leaving of the cell, except for interrogations, from January 12 to July 1. Incarceration in an unlighted cell from April 16 to May 1, then from May 15 to August 27, a total of 119 days.”
¹

This was the Würzburg wine merchant Leopold Obermayer writing about the first of his imprisonments in Dachau, in a seventeen-page report, dated October 10, 1935, which he managed to smuggle out to his lawyer. It was seized by the Gestapo and found after the war in their Würzburg files. Obermayer had a doctorate in law (from Frankfurt University); and he was a practicing Jew and a Swiss citizen. October 29, 1934, he had complained to the Würzburg police that his mail was being opened. Two days later, having been ordered to report to headquarters, he was arrested. From then on he became a special case for the local Gestapo chief, Josef Gerum, a Nazi “old fighter” with a bad reputation even among his colleagues. Gerum accused Obermayer of spreading accusations about the new regime. Shortly afterward nude photographs of Obermayer’s male lovers were found in his bank safe. Both a Jew and a homosexual: For Gerum this was indeed a rewarding catch.

In his report Obermayer alludes many times to his tormentors’ boundless hatred of the Jews; they assured him that he would never be set free, and tried to drive him to suicide. Why didn’t they kill him? Writing about Obermayer’s story, Martin Broszat and Elke Fröhlich give no clear explanation. It seems, however, that murdering a Swiss citizen, albeit a Jewish one, was not yet done lightly in 1935, all the more so since the Swiss consulate in Munich, and later the legation in Berlin, were aware of Obermayer’s incarceration; the Ministry of Justice in particular was worried about the possibility of Swiss intervention.
²

Under interrogation Obermayer was pressed to give details about his lovers; he refused and was beaten up. On May 15, as he was once more being taken to the camp commander’s office for interrogation, he asked an SS man named Lang, who had just threatened to shoot him, whether he had any compassion at all. Lang replied: “No, for Jews I have none.” Obermayer complained to the commander, SS-Oberführer Deubel, about the way he was being treated. “Thereupon the SS-Truppenführer standing at the window said: ‘You are not a human being, you are a beast!’ I started to answer: ‘Frederick the Great was also one….’ Before I could say another word, this Truppenführer hit me in the face: my upper middle tooth was knocked out and I started bleeding from the mouth and nose: ‘You Jewish pig, comparing yourself to Frederick the Great!’” Further retribution was immediate: unlighted cell, no straw mat on the wooden plank, arms tied behind the back, manacles left unopened for up to thirty-six hours, so that, Obermayer wrote, he had to defecate and urinate in his trousers.
³

In mid-September 1935 Obermayer was transferred from Dachau to an ordinary prison in Ochsenfurt, pending court interrogation. In the meantime Obermayer’s lawyer, Rosenthal, a Jew, had also been arrested, and it was in his house that Gerum found the incriminating report about the conditions of Obermayer’s detention in Dachau. Rosenthal was released and later left Germany: His wife had committed suicide. The court in Ochsenfurt did not keep Obermayer for long. At Gerum’s insistence the Jewish homosexual was taken back to Dachau on October 12, 1935.
⁴
Obermayer will reappear in these pages.

At this time Germany and the world were witnessing a dramatic consolidation of Hitler’s internal and international power. The murder of Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders on the notorious Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 eliminated even the faintest possibility of an alternative source of power within the party. Immediately following Hindenburg’s death, the naming of Hitler as Führer and chancellor on August 2 made him the sole source of legitimacy in Germany. Hitler’s popularity reached new heights in 1935: On January 13 an overwhelming majority of the Saar population voted for return of the territory to the Reich. On March 16 general conscription and establishment of the Wehrmacht were announced. No foreign power dared to respond to these massive breaches of the Versailles Treaty; the common front against Germany formed at Stresa by Britain, France, and Italy in April 1935, in order to defend Austria’s independence against any German annexation attempt and preserve the status quo in Europe, had crumbled by June, when the British signed a separate naval agreement with Germany. On March 17 of that year, Hitler had been in Munich, and a report for the clandestine Socialist Party vividly captured the overall mood:

“Enthusiasm on 17 March enormous. The whole of Munich was on its feet. People can be forced to sing, but they can’t be forced to sing with such enthusiasm. I experienced the days of 1914 and can only say that the declaration of war did not make the same impact on me as the reception of Hitler on 17 March…. Trust in Hitler’s political talent and honest intentions is getting ever greater, just as generally Hitler has again won extraordinary popularity. He is loved by many.”
⁵

Between 1933 and 1936 a balance of sorts was kept between the revolutionary-charismatic impulse of Nazism and the authoritarian-conservative tendencies of the pre-1933 German state: “The marriage of an authoritarian system of government with the mass movement of National Socialism seemed to be successful in spite of considerable friction over key points, and also [seemed] to have overcome the shortcomings of the authoritarian system,” wrote Martin Broszat.
⁶
Within this temporary alliance Hitler’s role was decisive. For the traditional elites the new “belief in the Führer” became associated with the authority of the monarch. Basic elements of the Imperial state and of the National Socialist regime were linked in the person of the new leader.
⁷

Such “belief in the Führer” led quite naturally to an urge for action on the part of state and party agencies according to the general guidelines set by Hitler, without the constant necessity of specific orders from him. The dynamics of this interaction between base and summit was, as British historian Ian Kershaw pointed out, “neatly captured in the sentiments of a routine speech of a Nazi functionary in 1934”:

“‘Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realize sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Führer. Very often and in many spheres it has been the case—in previous years as well—that individuals have simply waited for orders and instructions. Unfortunately, the same will be true in the future; but in fact it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Führer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.’”
⁸

Thus the majority of a society barely emerging from years of crisis believed that the new regime offered solutions that, in diverse but related ways, would give answers to the aspirations, resentments, and interests of its various sectors. This belief survived the difficulties of the early phase (such as a still sluggish economy) as a result of a new sense of purpose, of a series of successes on the international scene, and, above all, of unshaken faith in the Führer. As one of its corollaries, however, that very faith brought with it widespread acceptance, passive or not, of the measures against the Jews: Sympathy for the Jews would have meant some distrust of the rightness of Hitler’s way, and many Germans had definitely established their individual and collective priorities in this regard. The same is true in relation to the other central myth of the regime, that of the
Volksgemeinschaft
. The national community explicitly excluded the Jews. Belonging to the national community implied acceptance of the exclusions it imposed. In other words, adherence to “positive” tenets of the regime, to mobilizing myths such as the myth of the Führer and that of the
Volksgemeinschaft
, sufficed to undermine explicit dissent against anti-Jewish measures (and other of the regime’s persecutions). Yet, as we shall see, despite these general trends, there were nuances in German society’s attitudes toward the “outsiders” in its midst.

Hitler’s tactical moderation on any issue that could have negative economic consequences shows his conscious alignment with the conservative allies. But when it came to symbolic expressions of anti-Jewish hatred, the Nazi leader could barely be restrained. In April 1935 Martin Bormann, then Rudolf Hess’s chief of staff, inquired whether Hitler wished to remove the anti-Jewish placards that were sprouting up all over the Reich. Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s adjutant, informed Bormann that the Führer was opposed to their removal.
⁹
The matter soon resurfaced when Oswald Leewald, president of the German Olympic Committee, complained that these signs were contributing to ongoing anti-Jewish agitation in such major Olympic sites as Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The Olympic Games will be dealt with later on, but with regard to the anti-Jewish notices, Hitler refused at first to act against the initiatives of the regional party chiefs; only when he was told they could cause serious damage to the Winter Olympics did he give the order to remove the offensive signs.
¹⁰
Finally a general compromise solution was found. On June 11, 1935, the Ministry of Propaganda ordered that in view of the forthcoming Olympics, signs such as those reading
JEWS UNWANTED
should quietly be removed from major roads.
¹¹
This may have been asking too much, for a few days before the beginning of the Winter Olympics, Hess’s office issued the following decree: “In order to avoid a making a bad impression on foreign visitors, signs with extreme inscriptions should be taken away; signs such as ‘Jews Are Unwanted Here’ will suffice.”
¹²

II

On January 1, 1935, a Tübingen Jewish merchant, Hugo Loewenstein, received a medal “in the name of the Führer and Reichskanzler” for his service during World War I.
¹³
The same distinction was awarded to Ludwig Tannhäuser, a Stuttgart Jewish businessman, as late as August 1, 1935.
¹⁴
Yet, nearly a year and a half earlier, on February 28, 1934, Minister of Defense Werner von Blomberg had ordered that the Aryan paragraph be applied to the army.
¹⁵
When the Wehrmacht was established, in March 1935, “national” Jews petitioned Hitler for the right to serve in the new armed forces.
¹⁶
To no avail: On May 21 military service was officially forbidden to Jews.
¹⁷
“Mixed breeds [
Mischlinge
] of the first and second degree” (these categories had already been in use at the Ministry of Defense before the Nuremberg Laws) could, however, be allowed to serve in the armed forces as individual exceptions.
¹⁸

Earlier the army had attempted to help Jewish officers who were being dismissed. On May 16, 1934, a member of the Reichswehr Staff had approached a Chinese diplomat in Berlin with the suggestion that the Chinese Army find positions for some of the younger Jewish Reichswehr officers. Legation Secretary Tan expressed his personal interest in the idea, but was skeptical about its implementation: Nazi Party officials had already been in touch with the Chinese government to dissuade it from hiring German Jewish officers on the grounds that Jews were not representative of the German people, and thus the German Reich saw no value in any activity of theirs abroad.
¹⁹

Goebbels could not lag far behind the military. Less than a month after Blomberg’s order, on March 24, 1934, the propaganda minister announced that, as a matter of general principle, all Jews would be excluded from membership in the Reich Chamber of Culture. Preparations started immediately, and in early 1935 the remaining Jewish members of the various specific chambers began to be dismissed.
²⁰
On November 15, 1935, at its annual meeting in Berlin, Goebbels was able to announce—somewhat prematurely, as will be seen—that the Reich Chamber of Culture was now “free of Jews.”
²¹

The relentlessness of the efforts to segregate the Jews was unmistakable. In ideological terms the most crucial domain was that of physical—that is, biological—separation; much in advance of the Nuremberg legislation, mixed marriages and sexual relations between Germans and Jews became targets of unceasing, often violent party attacks. The party press spearheaded this campaign, and the flow of anti-Jewish abuse spread by a paper such as Streicher’s
Der Stürmer
did not remain without effect. On the other hand, however, contrary to the main thrust of party agitation, some groups of the population not only rejected anti-Jewish violence and hesitated to sever their economic ties with Jews, but even at times showed signs of sympathy for the victims. Beyond such reluctance to segregate the Jews completely, the “cleansing” of various areas of German life of any trace of Jewish presence encountered countless other difficulties. Thus, during this early phase of the regime, Jews still remained, in one way or another, in various domains of German life, although as a result of party agitation their situation worsened in the spring and summer of 1935.