Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (23 page)

Section II 112 (the Jewish section) of the SD also had its eye on Jewish musicians, dead or alive. On November 27, 1936, it noted the fact that in the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic, the cast for a bust of “the Jew Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy” still remained among the casts of famous German composers. As the performance of music by Jewish composers had been forbidden, the note concluded, “the removal of the cast is absolutely necessary.”
⁸⁸
Sometime later the section noticed that a Jewish bass singer, Michael Bohnen, had “recently appeared again in a film.” To inform his addressees about Bohnen, the anonymous agent of II 112 quoted the singer’s biographical entry in the
Encyclopedia Judaica
.
⁸⁹

What would have been the use of cleansing all unseemly Jewish names from the German world of art if the Jews could camouflage their identity by borrowing Aryan names? On July 19, 1935, as a result of the case presented by Gürtner in his complaint against
Der Stürmer
, Frick (who had started to battle against name changes in December 1934) submitted a draft proposal to Hitler that Aryans who bore names commonly considered to be Jewish would be allowed to change them. Generally, Jews would not be allowed to change names unless their name was a source of mockery and insults; in that case another Jewish name could be chosen.
⁹⁰
On July 31, from Berchtesgaden, Lammers conveyed Hitler’s agreement.
⁹¹
Frick did not rest with that, and in a communication of August 14, raised with Gürtner the possibility of compelling the descendants of Jews who in the early nineteenth century had chosen princely German names to revert to a Jewish name; this was done, he wrote, on the demand of a Reichstag member, Prince von und zu Loewenstein.
⁹²
It seems that no decision was reached, although Secretary of State Hans Pfundtner at that time ordered the Reich Office for Ancestry Research to prepare lists of German names chosen by Jews since the emancipation.
⁹³
Soon, as will be seen, the strategy was to change: Instead of being forced to abandon their German-sounding names, the Jews would have to take additional—and obviously Jewish—first names.

Hans Hinkel moved to Goebbels’s ministry in 1935 to become one of the three supervisors of the Reichskulturkammer. Soon afterward, an unusual title was added to those he already bore: Special Commissioner for the Supervision and Monitoring of the Cultural and Intellectual Activity of All Non-Aryans Living in the Territory of the German Reich.”
⁹⁴
The new title was accurate to the extent that Hinkel, apart from his repeated cleansing forays in the RKK, could now boast of having gently prodded the various regional Jewish Kulturbünde to abandon their relative autonomy and become members of a national association with its seat in Berlin. The decisive meeting, in which the delegates of the Kulturbünde were told in very polite but no uncertain terms that Hinkel considered the establishment of one national organization to be highly desirable, took place in Berlin on April 27 and 28, with Hinkel’s participation and in the silent presence of Gestapo representatives.

Hinkel was speaking to the Jewish delegates “in confidence,” he said, and any disclosure of the meeting could lead to “unpleasantness”; the decision to form a national organization would really be left to the delegates’ “free choice,” but the only way of rationally solving a host of technical problems was to establish a single organization. Kurt Singer, who at Hinkel’s behest had convened the meeting, was strongly in favor of such unification and seemingly at one with State Secretary Hinkel. He and Singer so briskly managed the meeting that at the end of the first session (the only one Hinkel attended), Singer was able to declare: “I hereby make the official announcement to the State Secretary and to the gentlemen of the State Police that the creation of an umbrella organization of the Jewish Kulturbünde in the Reich was unanimously agreed upon by the delegates present here.”
⁹⁵

In a 1936 speech Hinkel restated the immediate aim of Nazi cultural policy regarding the Jews: they were entitled to the development of their own cultural heritage in Germany, but only in total isolation from the general culture. Jewish artists “may work unhindered as long as they restrict themselves to the cultivation of Jewish artistic and cultural life and as long as they do not attempt—openly, secretly, or deceitfully—to influence our culture.”
⁹⁶
Heydrich summed up the utility of centralization in slightly different terms: “The establishment of a Reich organization of Jewish Kulturb¨nde has taken place in order to allow easier control and surveillance of all the Jewish cultural associations.”
⁹⁷
All Jewish cultural groups not belonging to the new national association were prohibited.

IV

From the beginning of 1935, intense anti-Jewish incitement had newly surfaced among party radicals, with discontent and restlessness spreading among the party rank and file and SA members still resenting the murder of their leaders the year before. Lingering economic difficulties, as well as the absence of material and ideological compensations for the great number of party members unable to find positions and emotional rewards either on the local or the national level, were leading to increasing agitation.

A first wave of anti-Jewish incidents started at the end of March 1935; during the following weeks, Goebbels’s
Der Angriff
thickened the pogrom-like atmosphere.
⁹⁸
An announcement by the Ministry of the Interior of forthcoming anti-Jewish legislation and the exclusion of Jews from the new Wehrmacht did not calm the growing unrest.

The first city to witness large-scale anti-Jewish disturbances was Munich, and a carefully drafted police report offers a precise enough description of the sequence of events there. In March and April, Jewish stores were sprayed nightly with acid or smeared with such inscriptions as
JEW, STINKING JEW, OUT WITH THE JEWS
, and so on. According to the report, the perpetrators knew the police patrol schedule exactly, and could therefore act with complete freedom. In May the smashing of window panes of Jewish shops began. The police report indicates involvement by Hitler Youth groups in one of these early incidents. By mid-May the perpetrators were not only attacking Jewish stores in broad daylight but also assaulting their owners, their customers, and sometimes even their Aryan employees.

On Saturday, May 25, the disturbances took on a new dimension. By midafternoon the attacks had spread to every identifiably Jewish business in the city. According to the police, the perpetrators were “not only members of the Party and its organizations but also comprised various groups of a very questionable nature.” In the late afternoon there were clashes outside the central railroad station between police and a crowd of around four hundred people (mainly Austrian Nazis who were training at the SS auxiliary camp at Schleissheim); soon there were other such encounters in other parts of the city. At about six o’clock a crowd tried to attack the Mexican Consulate. Among those arrested there proved to be SS men in civilian clothes. It was not until about nine in the evening that some measure of order was reestablished in the Bavarian capital.”
⁹⁹

A second major outbreak, one more usually referred to, occurred in mid-July in Berlin, mainly on the Kurfürstendamm, where elegant stores owned by Jews were still relatively active. Jochen Klepper, a deeply religious Protestant writer whose wife was Jewish, wrote in his diary on July 13: “Anti-Semitic excesses on the Kurfürstendamm…. The cleansing of Berlin of Jews threateningly announced.”
¹⁰⁰
A week later Klepper again wrote of what had happened on the Kurfürstendamm: Jewish women had been struck in the face; Jewish men had behaved courageously. “Nobody came to their help, because everyone is afraid of being arrested.”
¹⁰¹
On September 7 Klepper, who in 1933 had lost his position with the radio because of his Jewish wife, was fired from the recently Aryanized Ullstein publishing house, where he had found some employment. That day he noticed that the signs forbidding Jews access to the swimming pool were up, and that even the small street in which he took walks with his wife had the same warning on one of its fences.
¹⁰²

The exiled German Socialist Party’s clandestine reports on the situation in the Reich (the so-called
SOPADE
[Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands] reports), prepared in Prague, extensively described the spread of anti-Jewish violence throughout Germany during the summer months of 1935. As has been seen, the wrath of Nazi radicals was particularly aroused by Jews who dared to use public swimming pools, by Jewish shops and Jews in marketplaces, and of course by Jewish race defilers. Sometimes the wrong targets were chosen, such as the Gestapo agent from Berlin who on July 13 was mistaken for a Jew in the Kassel swimming pool and beaten up by SA activists.
¹⁰³
Mostly though, there were no mistakes. Thus, on July 11, for example, approximately one hundred SA men descended on the cattle market in Fulda (as previously mentioned, many cattle dealers were Jews) and indiscriminately attacked both dealers and their customers, causing some to suffer severe injuries. According to the
SOPADE
report, “The cattle ran aimlessly through the streets and were only gradually brought back together again. The whole of Fulda was in agitation for days on end.” The
Jüdisches Familienblatt
, tongue in cheek, said that the Jewish dealers had brought to the market cows that had not been milked for an entire day; this angered the population, causing it to side with the suffering cows and against their Jewish tormentors.
¹⁰⁴

Pressure, violence, and indoctrination were not without their effects. An August 1935
SOPADE
report cited an impressive list of new, locally initiated, measures against the Jews: “Bergzabern, Edenkoben, Höheinod, Breunigweiler, and other places prohibit Jews from moving in and forbid the sale of real estate to them…. Bad Tölz, Bad-Reichenhall, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and the mountain areas of Bavaria do not allow Jews access to their health resorts…. In Apolda, Berka, Blankenstein, Suiza, Allstadt, and Weimar, Jews are forbidden to attend cinemas.” In Magdeburg, Jews were not allowed to use the libraries; in Erlangen the tramways displayed signs declaring
JEWS ARE NOT WELCOME
! The report lists dozens of other places and activities forbidden to Jews.
¹⁰⁵

Not all party leaders opposed the spreading of anti-Jewish violence. Gauleiter Grohe of Cologne-Aachen, for example, was in favor of intensifying anti-Jewish actions in order “to raise the rather depressed mood among the lower middle class [
Mittelstand
].”
¹⁰⁶
This was not, however, the prevalent position—not because of potential negative reactions among the populace,
¹⁰⁷
but mainly because the regime could ill afford to give the impression inside and outside Germany that it was losing control of its own forces by allowing the spread of unbridled violence, particularly in view of the forthcoming Olympic Games. Repeated orders to abstain from unauthorized anti-Jewish actions were issued in Hitler’s name by Hess and others, but without complete success.

For Schacht the spread of anti-Jewish violence was particularly unwelcome. In the United States the economic boycott of German goods had flared up again. On May 3 the minister of the economy sent a memorandum to Hitler regarding “the imponderable factors influencing German exports,” in which he warned of the economic consequences of the new anti-Jewish campaign. On the face of it at least, Hitler fully agreed with Schacht: At that stage the violence had to stop.
¹⁰⁸

It was in this atmosphere that on August 20, 1935, a conference was called by Schacht at the Ministry of the Economy. Among those present were Minister of the Interior Frick, Justice Minister Gürtner, Prussian Finance Minister Johannes Popitz, Gauleiter and Bavarian Minister of the Interior Adolf Wagner, and representatives of the SD, the Gestapo, and the party’s Racial Policy Office.
¹⁰⁹

Frick opened the discussion by describing the additional anti-Jewish legislation, in line with the party program, that was being prepared by the ministry. On the other hand, he took the strongest possible stand against the prevalent unruly anti-Jewish attacks and recommended strong police action.
¹¹⁰

Wagner concurred. Like Frick he favored further anti-Jewish legal measures, but mentioned that on this matter there were differences of opinion between party and state, as well as among various departments within the state apparatus itself. Not everything had to happen at once; in his opinion further measures had to be taken mainly against full Jews, not against mixed breeds (
Mischlinge
).
¹¹¹
Yet Wagner insisted that due to demands by a majority of the population for further anti-Jewish measures, new legal steps be taken against the economic activity of Jews.
¹¹²
At that stage Wagner’s demands went unheeded.

The use of exclusively legal methods was obviously the line adopted at the meeting by the conservative Gürtner: It was dangerous to let the radicals get away with the impression that they were in fact implementing what the government wanted but was unable to do itself because of possible international consequences. “The principle of the Führer-state,” argued Gürtner, “had to be imposed against such initiatives.”
¹¹³

As could have been expected, Schacht emphasized the damage caused by the anti-Jewish disorders and warned that the developing situation could threaten the economic basis of rearmament. He agreed that the party program had to be implemented, but that the implementation had to take place within a framework of legal instructions alone.
¹¹⁴
Schacht s motives, we have seen, were dictated by short-term economic expediency. The meeting’s conclusions were brought to Hitler’s attention, and the measures laid out by Frick were further elaborated during late August and early September.
¹¹⁵