Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (20 page)

The notion of race as such, defined as a set of common physical and mental characteristics transmitted within a group by the force of tradition or even in some biological way, had been used by Jews themselves from Moses Hess to Martin Buber, particularly in Buber’s 1911 Prague lectures, published as
Three Speeches on Judaism
. It had not disappeared in postwar Germany. Thus, in a February 1928 speech on the problems facing German Jewry, the director of the Zentralverein, Ludwig Holländer, after asserting that the Jews had been a race since biblical times as a result of their common descent and nonetheless expressing doubts whether the concept of race was applicable to the modern Jew, went on, however, to tell his listeners: “Extraction remains, that is, the racial characteristics are still present, albeit diminished by the centuries; they are present in external as well as mental features.”
²²
In 1932 a fierce internal Jewish controversy arose around the publication by the Zionist author Gustav Krojanker of a booklet entitled
On the Problem of the New German Nationalism
. According to Krojanker, the Zionist revolt against liberalism, which was in response to a will aroused by the imperatives of the blood, should allow for a deep understanding of the political developments in Germany.
²³

Such rather extreme positions were those of a small minority, but they show the influence of
völkisch
thinking on some German Jews.
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Here and there some Jewish voices even pleaded for “racial purity of the Jewish stock” and for investigations according to the rules of “racial science” for more ample and precise information regarding “the extent of miscegenation between Jews and Christians [
sic
], thus between members of the Semitic and Aryan race.”
²⁵
But these various statements had the connotation neither of racial hierarchy based on biological criteria nor of a struggle between races.

It seems, at the outset at least, that a widespread belief existed in the party that scientific racial criteria for identifying the Jew could be discovered. Thus, in a letter of September 1, 1933, to Baden’s minister of the interior (with copies to all relevant authorities in the Reich), Wilhelm Frick made it clear that the identification of the “non-Aryan” was not dependent on parents’ or grandparents’ religion, but “on descent, on race, on blood.” This meant that even if the religious affiliation of parents or grandparents was not Jewish, another criterion could be found.
²⁶
This was the line of thinking that guided the Jena racial anthropologist Hans F. K. Günther in his attempt to identify various external physical characteristics of the Jew, as it did his Leipzig colleague Paul Reche to pursue his yearlong research on racially determined blood types. But even Reche had to admit that “no single blood type was typical among Jews.”
²⁷
This failure, however, though soon recognized by most Nazi scientists,
²⁸
did not deter publications specializing in scientific vulgarization from announcing that, on this front as on all others, decisive breakthroughs had been achieved.

In the October 1934 issue of the
Volksgesundheitswacht
(People’s health guardian), a Doctor Stähle offered “new research results” concerning “blood and race.” He traced some illnesses specifically attributed to Jews (commenting ironically that these were “accumulative diseases”), referring mainly to the work of a Leningrad “scientist” named E. O. Manoiloff. This Russian claimed that, with an accuracy of 90 percent, he could distinguish Jewish from Russian blood by chemical means. Stähle conveyed appropriate enthusiasm to his readers: “Think what it might mean if we could identify non-Aryans in the test tube! Then neither deception, nor baptism, nor name change, nor citizenship, and not even nasal surgery could help…. One cannot change one’s blood!”
²⁹
Stähle was head of the local medical society in Württemberg.
³⁰

Despite Stähle’s optimism, biological criteria for defining the Jew remained elusive, and it was on the basis of the religious affiliation of parents and grandparents that the Nazis had to launch their crusade for racial purification of the
Volk
.

Almost three years before Hitler’s accession to power, the Nazis had unsuccessfully demanded an amendment of the Law for the Protection of the Republic so as to define “betrayal of the race” (
Rassenverrat
) as a crime punishable by imprisonment or even by death. Such an offender would be anyone “who contributes or threatens to contribute to the racial deterioration and dissolution of the German people through interbreeding with persons of Jewish blood or the colored races.”
³¹

In September 1933 Hanns Kerrl, justice minister of Prussia, and his undersecretary, Roland Freisler, suggested to the party (in a memorandum entitled “National Socialist Criminal Law”) that marriages and extramarital sexual relations between “those of German blood” and “members of racially alien communities” be considered “punishable offenses against the honor of the race and endangerment of the race.”
³²
At the time these proposals were not followed up. After the establishment of the new regime, however, the situation started to change de facto. Officials increasingly referred to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in order to refuse, on the basis of the law’s “general national principles,” to perform marriage ceremonies between Jews and “those of German blood.”
³³
The pressure grew to such a point that on July 26, 1935, Frick announced that, since the legal validity of “marriages between Aryans and non-Aryans” would be officially addressed in the near future, such marriages should be “postponed until further notice.”
³⁴

The refusal to perform marriages was an easy matter compared to the other “logical” corollary stemming from the situation: the dissolution of existing mixed marriages. The Civil Code allowed for divorce on the basis of wrongdoing by one of the partners, but it was difficult to equate belonging to a particular race with the notion of wrongdoing.

Paragraph 1333 of the Civil Code did, however, stipulate that a marriage could be challenged if a spouse had been unaware, on contracting the marriage, of “personal qualities” or circumstances that would have precluded the union. But it could only be invoked within six months of the wedding, and racial identity could hardly be defined as a personal quality; finally it is unlikely that partners to a marriage were unaware of such racial identity at the time of their decision. Nevertheless, paragraph 1333 increasingly became the prop of Nazi legal interpretation, on the grounds that “Jewishness” was indeed a personal quality whose significance had become clear only as a result of the new political circumstances. Consequently, the six-month period could be counted from the date when the significance of Jewishness became a major element in public consciousness, that is, from January 30 (Hitler’s accession) or even April 7, 1933 (the Civil Service Law’s promulgation).
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As an increasing number of courts started basing their decisions on the new interpretation of the Civil Service Law, leading Nazi jurists, such as Roland Freisler, had to intervene in order to restore a semblance of order.
³⁶
It was only with the law of July 6, 1938, that “racially” mixed marriages could in fact be legally annulled. The judges, lawyers, and registrars who were intent on the dissolution of mixed marriages were not necessarily members of the party; in their determination to segregate the Jews from society, they went beyond the immediate instructions of the Nazi leadership.

The anti-Jewish zeal of the courts regarding mixed marriages was reinforced by police initiatives and even by mob demonstrations against any form of sexual relations between Jews and Aryans: “Race defilement” was the obsession of the day. Thus on August 19, 1935, a Jewish businessman was arrested on that charge in Stuttgart. As he was brought to the police station, a crowd gathered and demonstrated against the accused. Shortly afterward, according to the city chronicle, a Jewish woman merchant who had had a stall in the market hall since 1923 lost her permit because she allowed her son to have a relationship with a non-Jewish German girl.
³⁷

Whether the demonstrators assembled in front of the Stuttgart police station were party activists, a mob drummed up by the party, or a random crowd of Germans is hard to say. The agitation against mixed marriages and race defilement reported from all parts of the Reich during the summer of 1935 offers no further clues. Thus a Gestapo report from Pomerania for the month of July 1935 indicates that
Volksgenossen
demonstrated in Stralsund on the 14th “because here various Jews had married Aryan girls,” and in Altdamm on the 24th “because here a Jew had committed race defilement with a married Aryan woman.”
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The party press spared no effort to fan the fury of the
Volksgenossen
against such pollution. Jewish race defilers must be castrated, demanded the
Westdeutscher Beobachter
on February 19, 1935. On April 10 the SS periodical
Das Schwarze Korps
called for dire punishment (up to fifteen years’ imprisonment even for the German partner) for sexual relations between Germans and Jews.
³⁹
All aspects of the witch-hunt that was to characterize the period following the passage of the Nuremberg racial laws were already visible.

The presence of Jews in public swimming pools was a major theme, second only to outright race defilement, in the Nazis’ pornographic imagination: It expressed a “healthy” Aryan revulsion at the sight of the Jewish body,
⁴⁰
the fear of possible contamination resulting from sharing the water or mingling in the pool area and, most explicitly, the sexual threat of Jewish nakedness, often alluded to as the impudent behavior of Jewish women and outright sexual harassment of German women by Jewish men. As could be expected, the theme surfaced in Nazi literature. Thus, in Hans Zöberlein’s 1937 novel
Der Befehldes Gewissens
(Conscience commands), which takes place during the years immediately after World War I, the Aryan Berta is molested by Jews in an open-air swimming pool in Bavaria: “These Jewish swine are ruining us,” she exclaims. “They are polluting our blood. And blood is the best and the only thing we have.”
⁴¹

In most German cities the expulsion of Jews from public bathing facilities became a prime party objective. In Dortmund, for example, the party press harped on the danger posed by the presence of Jews in municipal swimming pools until it achieved its goal with the publication of an announcement on July 25, 1935, by the city’s mayor: “As a result of various unpleasant occurrences and due to the fact that the immense majority of the members of our German national community feels burdened by the presence of Jews, I have forbidden Jews the use of all public swimming pools, indoor public bathing facilities, and public sun-decks. At all these premises, warning signs will carry the following inscription:
ACCESS TO THESE FACILITIES IS FORBIDDEN TO JEWS
.
⁴²

The party press in Stuttgart initiated a similar campaign, the
NS-Kurier
reporting on July 8 that during the preceding week several Jewish women had had to be expelled from the city’s swimming pools because of “their impudent behavior.” The paper took the opportunity to point out that there were no signs forbidding access to Jews. With the city council divided on the issue, such signs were not finally posted in Stuttgart until after the 1936 Olympic Games.
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The process of exclusion seemed to follow a well-established pattern. Sometimes, however, minor hitches occurred. On August 1, 1935, the Bavarian Political Police reported an incident at the Heigenbrücken swimming pool on July 14, when some fifteen or twenty youths chanted for “the removal of the Jews…from ‘the German baths.’” According to the police report: “A considerable number of other bathers joined in the chanting, so that probably the majority of visitors were demanding the removal of the Jews. In view of the general indignation and the danger of disturbances, the district leader of the NSDAP, Mayor Wohlgemuth of Aschaffenburg, who happened to be in the swimming pool, went to the supervisor of the baths and demanded that he remove the Jews. The supervisor refused on the grounds that he was obliged to follow only the instructions of the baths’ administration and moreover, could not easily distinguish the Jews as such. As a result of the supervisor’s statement, there was a slight altercation between him and the mayor, which was later settled by the baths’ administration. In view of this incident, the Spa Association today placed a notice at the entrance of the baths with the inscription:
ENTRY FORBIDDEN TO JEWS
.”
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Among the newspapers spewing a constant stream of anti-Jewish abuse, Streicher’s
Der Stürmer
was the most vicious; its ongoing campaign and the wide distribution it achieved by means of public display may have been abhorrent to the educated middle class or even to educated party members, but its appeal among the general population, school youngsters, and the Hitler Youth, possibly because of its pornographic and sadistic streak, seems to have been quite widespread.

On May 1, 1934,
Der Stürmer
published its notorious special issue on Jewish ritual murder. The front-page headline,
THE JEWISH MURDER PLOT AGAINST NON-JEWISH HUMANITY IS UNCOVERED
, was graced by a half-page drawing of two particularly hideous-looking Jews holding a vessel to collect the blood streaming from the naked bodies of angelic Christian children they have just murdered (one of the Jews is holding a bloodstained knife). In the background stands a cross. The next day the National Representation of German Jews wired Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller: “We feel obliged to draw your attention to the special issue of the
Der Stürmer
of May 1. We have sent the following telegram to the Reich chancellor: ‘
Der Stürmer
has come out with a special issue which, using incredible insults and horrifying descriptions, accuses Jewry of ritual murder. Before God and humanity, we raise our voice in solemn protest against this unheard-of profanation of our faith.’ We are convinced that the deep outrage that we are feeling is shared by every Christian.” Neither Hitler nor Reich Bishop Müller replied.
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