Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (25 page)

To how many people did the Nuremberg Laws apply? According to statistics produced by the Ministry of the Interior on April 3, 1935, living in Germany at the time were some 750,000
Mischlinge
of the first and second degree. In this document, signed by Pfundtner and submitted to Hitler by his military adjutant, Col. Friedrich Hossbach, it was not clear how this total had been arrived at. (The ministry, in fact, admitted that there was no precise method for making such an estimate.) Apart from the
Mischlinge
, the document also listed 475,000 full Jews belonging to the Jewish religion and 300,000 full Jews not belonging to it, which made a total of approximately 1.5 million, or 2.3 percent of the population of Germany. A further figure was mentioned, probably at Hitler’s demand: Within this total there were 728,000 men, among them about 328,000 of military age.
²⁰

Even after the proclamation of the laws and the first supplementary decrees in November, Rudolf Hess had the numbers wrong in his circular, giving 300,000 as the overall total of
Mischlinge
.
²¹
This number was also an exaggeration.

Recent studies have set the number of
Mischlinge
at the time of the decrees at about 200,000.
²²
A detailed demographic inquiry conducted by the
CV Zeitung
(the newspaper of the Central Association of German Jews) and published on May 16, 1935, had reached the same result. According to the
CV
inquiry, some 450,000 full Jews (with four Jewish grandparents and belonging to the Jewish religion) were living in Germany at the time. “Non-Jewish non-Aryans”—among them converted full Jews and converted
Mischlinge
with one to three Jewish grandparents—numbered some 250,000. As the author of the inquiry included 50,000 converted full Jews and 2,000 converted three-quarter Jews in his statistics, the numbers according to the Nuremberg degree-categories became the following: full Jews (in racial terms): approximately 502,000 (450,000 plus 50,000 plus 2,000); half Jews: 70,000 to 75,000; quarter Jews: 125,000 to 130,000; total
Mischlinge
: 195,000 to 205,000. (In the
CV
inquiry the half Jews were all converted Jews, and thus, according to the Nuremberg Laws, would not have been counted as Jews but as
Mischlinge
of the first degree.)
²³

II

“In Germany,” according to a book published in 1936 by Lösener and Knost, “the Jewish question is simply the race question. How this came about,” the authors went on, “need not be described here once again. Here we are dealing only with the solution to this question which has now been decisively set in motion and which represents one of the basic prerequisites for the construction of the new Reich. According to the Führer’s will, the Nuremberg Laws are not measures intended to breed and perpetuate race hatred, but measures which mean the beginning of an easing in the relations between the German and the Jewish peoples.” Zionism had the right understanding of the issue, the authors asserted, and in general the Jewish people, itself so intent on preserving the purity of its blood over the centuries, should welcome laws intended to defend purity of blood.
²⁴

The main commentary on the “German racial legislation,” published that same year, was coauthored by Secretary of State (in the Ministry of the Interior) Wilhelm Stuckart, and another official from the same ministry, Hans Globke, whose passion for identifying Jews by their names will be encountered later.
²⁵
It reveals starkly some of the most perplexing aspects—even from the Nazi viewpoint—of the Nuremberg Laws. In order to illustrate the absolute validity of religious affiliation as the criterion for identifying the race of the descendants, Stuckart and Globke gave the hypothetical example of a woman, fully German by blood, who had married a Jew and converted to Judaism and then, having been widowed, returned to Christianity and married a man fully German by blood. A grandchild deriving from this second marriage would, according to the law, be considered partly Jewish because of the grandmother’s one-time religious affiliation as a Jew. Stuckart and Globke could not but state the following corollary: “Attention has to be given to the fact that…[in] terms of racial belonging, a full-blooded German who converted to Judaism is to be considered as German-blooded after that conversion as before it; but in terms of the racial belonging of his grandchildren, he is to be considered a full Jew.”
²⁶

The racial mutation caused by such temporary contact with the Jewish religion is mysterious enough. But the mystery is compounded when it is remembered that in Nazi eugenics or racial anthropology, the impact of environmental factors was considered negligible in comparison with the effect of heredity. Here, however, an ephemeral change in environment mysteriously causes the most lasting biological transformation.
²⁷
But whatever their origins, racial differences could lead to dire consequences in cases of prolonged mixing:

“The addition of foreign blood to one’s own brings about damaging changes in the body of the race because the homogeneity, the instinctively certain will of the body, is thereby weakened; in its stead an uncertain, hesitating attitude appears in all decisive life situations, an overestimation of the intellect and a spiritual splitting. A blood mixture does not achieve a uniform fusion of two races foreign to each other but leads in general to a disturbance in the spiritual equilibrium of the receiving part.”
²⁸

Two laws directed against individuals and groups other than Jews followed the September laws. The first of these was the October 18, 1935, Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People, which aimed at registering “alien races” or racially “less valuable” groups and imposed the obligation of a marriage license certifying that the partners were (racially) “fit to marry.”
²⁹
This law was reinforced by the first supplementary decree to the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor of November 14, which also forbade Germans to marry or have sexual relations with persons of “alien blood” other than Jews. Twelve days later a circular from the Ministry of the Interior was more specific: Those referred to were “Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards.”
³⁰

Proof that one was not of Jewish origin or did not belong to any “less valuable” group became essential for a normal existence in the Third Reich. And the requirements were especially stringent for anyone aspiring to join or to remain in a state of party agency. Even the higher strata of the civil service, the party, and the army could not escape racial investigation. The personal file of Gen. Alfred Jodl, who was soon to become deputy chief of staff of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, contains a detailed family tree in Jodl’s handwriting, which, in 1936, proved his impeccable Aryan descent as far back as the mid-eighteenth century.
³¹

Exceptions were rarely made. The best-known case was that of the state secretary at the Aviation Ministry, Erhard Milch, a
Mischling
of the second degree who was turned into an Aryan. Incidentally, such rare occurrences rapidly became known, even among the general population. Thus, in December 1937, charges were brought against a Father Wolpert, of Dinkelsbuhl, in Bavaria, because he had stated in a religion class that General Milch was of Jewish origin.
³²
In every such matter the final decision rested with Hess and often with Hitler himself. Whether Hess consulted Hitler in every instance is hard to know; that he consulted him in highly visible ones is probable. It is unlikely, for example, that Hess decided alone—a few days after the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, and after Hitler had told Lammers that he would no longer agree to any exceptions regarding persons of Jewish descent—to issue a “protection letter” for the geopolitician Karl Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, a
Mischling
of the second degree according to the Nuremberg Laws.
³³
Sometimes Hitler’s hypochondriacal worries played a role. It will be remembered that the cancer researcher and “
Mischling
of the first degree” Otto Warburg was transformed into a “
Mischling
of the second degree” on Göring’s orders. Something similar occurred in early 1937, when a professor of radiology at the clinic of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, Henri Chaoul—who, according to one investigation, was descended from Syrian Maronites and Greek Cypriots, and to another, more plausible one, “was not Aryan in the sense of the Civil Service Law” (in other words, was of Jewish origin)—was shielded from any difficulties on Hitler’s explicit demand, and appointed director of a newly established central radiology institute in Berlin.
³⁴

The investigations probably stopped at the very highest party leadership. Rumors, however, knew no such bounds, and, as is well known, both Hitler and Heydrich, among others, were suspected of hiding non-Aryan ancestors. In both cases the rumors proved unfounded,
³⁵
but under the circumstances the insinuation was certainly meant to be damaging. Sometimes disgruntled party leaders used the accusation of non-Aryan origins against rivals. Thus, in April 1936, Wilhelm Kube, Gauleiter of the Kurmark (part of Prussia), sent an anonymous letter (signed “some Berlin Jews”) to the party chancellery stating that the wife of the head of the party tribunal, Walter Buch, and Bormann’s mother-in-law were of Jewish origin. An ancestry investigation proved that the accusations were baseless; Kube admitted having written the letter and was temporarily removed by Hitler from all his functions.
³⁶

The new marriage laws in fact followed the memorandum, drafted in September 1933 by Hans Kerrl and Roland Freisler, 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.” During the first three years of the regime, the very strong reactions of a number of Asian and South American countries (including the boycotting of German goods) led, among other reasons, to the shelving of the initiative.
³⁷
There can be no doubt, however, that the early proposals, the third Nuremberg Law, and the marriage laws that followed could be considered the expression of a
general
racial-biological point of view, along with the policies directed against the specific Jewish peril.

A series of exchanges in late 1934 and early 1935 among the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Party Racial Policy Office clearly displayed the intertwining and the distinctions between these issues. The Wilhelmstrasse, worried by the impact of the Aryan legislation on the Reich’s foreign relations, suggested that the new laws be clearly limited to Jews and that other non-Aryans (such as Japanese and Chinese) be excluded. For Walter Gross, any basic change in the party’s attitude to racial questions was impossible, as it lay at the core of the Nazi worldview, but Gross promised that the party would avoid burdening Germany’s foreign relations with any inappropriate internal decisions. The replacement of the concept “non-Aryan” by “Jewish” was not yet deemed timely for official use: There was no objection in principle to such a change, but it was feared that the change would be interpreted as “a retreat.” In any case exceptions could be made in instances where the Aryan legislation affected non-Aryan, non-Jewish foreigners.
³⁸
Less than two weeks before the opening of the Nuremberg party congress, on August 28, 1935, Hess had expressed the desire that, out of consideration for the Semitic nations, at the rally the term “anti-Semitic” be replaced by “anti-Jewish.”
³⁹
For him Lösener and Knost s formula seemed indeed to be of the essence: “In Germany, the Jewish question is simply the race question.”

Lösener’s report on the final stages preceding the Nuremberg Laws clearly indicates that the September 14–15 discussions centered only on anti-Jewish legislation; this had been the object of party agitation during the preceding months, as it would be that of the discussions that followed (including those involving Hitler’s hesitations on September 29 and his decision on November 14). Thus,
the separateness and the compatibility of both the specific anti-Jewish and the general racial and eugenic trends were at the very center of the Nazi system
. The main impetus for the Nuremberg Laws and their application was anti-Jewish; but the third law could without difficulty be extended to cover other racial exclusions, and it logically led to the additional racial legislation of the fall of 1935. The two ideological trends reinforced each other.
⁴⁰

III

For the
Mischling
Karl Berthold, the Chemnitz social benefits employee whose story began to be told in chapter 1, the Nuremberg legislation did not solve the problem of his racial purity.
⁴¹
On April 18, 1934, the specialist for racial research in the Ministry of the Interior restated his case for Berthold’s exclusion from the civil service, arguing that, even if the details about the presumed father, Carl Blumenfeld, were uncertain, Berthold was related to the Blumenfeld family, and his mother had declared that he was the son of a Carl Blumenfeld, a “Jewish artist.” His non-Aryan origins could not be doubted.
⁴²

At this point Berthold’s aunt, his mother’s sister, briefly entered the scene and testified that his father was an Aryan who, in order to hide his identity, had taken the name Carl Blumenfeld. The main social benefits office in Dresden notified the minister of labor of this new development on June 30. At the end of July, the minister of labor was ready to allow Berthold to remain in public service and merely demanded confirmation by the minister of the interior. The specialist for “ancestry research” at the Ministry of the Interior, was not to be so easily fooled. A detailed report issued on September 14 indicated that the Jew Carl Blumenfeld, whose data had been referred to all along and whose age made it highly improbable that he was the father of Karl Berthold, was, in fact, a distant cousin of the circus artist Carl Blumenfeld, who by now was living in Amsterdam. On November 5 the main office in Dresden forwarded to the minister of labor one more request by Berthold for reexamination of the case, again including the testimony of Berthold’s aunt. A few weeks later, as no answer had been received, another petition was addressed to the minister of the interior, this time by Berthold’s wife, Frau Ada Berthold. Berthold would be dismissed from his position, she wrote, if a positive answer was not received by March 31, 1936.
⁴³
A new phase of his story was now beginning.