Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (3 page)

A benefit for Jewish handicrafts had taken place at Berlin’s Café Leon on January 30, 1933. The news of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship became known shortly before the event began. Among the attending representatives of Jewish organizations and political movements, only the Zionist rabbi Hans Tramer referred to the news and spoke of it as a major change; all the other speakers kept to their announced subjects. Tramer’s speech “made no impression. The entire audience considered it panic-mongering. There was no response.”
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The board of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Zentralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens) on the same day concluded a public declaration in the same spirit: “In general, today more than ever we must follow the directive: wait calmly.”
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An editorial in the association’s newspaper for January 30, written by the organization’s chairman, Ludwig Holländer, was slightly more worried in tone, but showed basically the same stance: “The German Jews will not lose the calm they derive from their tie to all that is truly German. Less than ever will they allow external attacks, which they consider unjustified, to influence their inner attitude toward Germany.”
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By and large there was no apparent sense of panic or even of urgency among the great majority of the approximately 525,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933.
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As the weeks went by, Max Naumann’s Association of National German Jews and the Reich Association of Jewish War Veterans hoped for no less than integration into the new order of things. On April 4, the veterans’ association chairman, Leo Löwenstein, addressed a petition to Hitler including a list of nationalistically oriented suggestions regarding the Jews of Germany, as well as a copy of the memorial book containing the names of the twelve thousand German soldiers of Jewish origin who had died for Germany during the World War. Ministerial Councillor Wienstein answered on April 14 that the chancellor acknowledged receipt of the letter and the book with “sincerest feelings.” The head of the Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, received a delegation of the veterans on the twenty-eighth,
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but with that the contacts ceased. Soon Hitler’s office stopped acknowledging petitions from the Jewish organization. Like the Central Association, the Zionists continued to believe that the initial upheavals could be overcome by a reassertion of Jewish identity or simply by patience; the Jews reasoned that the responsibilities of power, the influence of conservative members of the government, and a watchful outside world would exercise a moderating influence on any Nazi tendency to excess.

Even after the April 1 Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, some well-known German-Jewish figures, such as Rabbi Joachim Prinz, declared that it was unreasonable to take an anti-Nazi position. For Prinz, arguing against Germany’s “reorganization,” whose aim was “to give people bread and work…was neither intended nor possible.”
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The declaration may have been merely tactical, and it must be kept in mind that many Jews were at a loss how to react. Some eccentrics went much further. Thus, as late as the summer of 1933, in the opening statement of his lectures on the Roman poet Horace, the Kiel University historian Felix Jacoby declared: “As a Jew I find myself in a difficult situation. But as a historian I have learned not to consider historical events from a private perspective. Since 1927, I have voted for Adolf Hitler, and I consider myself lucky to be able to lecture on Augustus’ poet in the year of the national revival. Augustus is the only figure of world history whom one may compare to Adolf Hitler.”
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This, however, was a rather exceptional case.

For some Jews the continuing presence of the old, respected President Paul von Hindenburg as head of state was a source of confidence; they occasionally wrote to him about their distress. “I was engaged to be married in 1914,” Frieda Friedmann, a Berlin woman, wrote to Hindenburg on February 23: “My fiancé was killed in action in 1914. My brothers Max and Julius Cohn were killed in 1916 and 1918. My remaining brother, Willy, came back blind…. All three received the Iron Cross for their service to the country. But now it has gone so far that in our country pamphlets saying, ‘Jews, get out!’ are being distributed on the streets, and there are open calls for pogroms and acts of violence against Jews…. Is incitement against Jews a sign of courage or one of cowardice when Jews comprise only one percent of the German people?” Hindenburg’s office promptly acknowledged receipt of the letter, and the president let Frieda Friedmann know that he was decidedly opposed to excesses perpetrated against Jews. The letter was transmitted to Hitler, who wrote in the margin: “This lady’s claims are a swindle! Obviously there has been no incitement to a pogrom!”
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The Jews finally, like a considerable part of German society as a whole, were not sure—particularly before the March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections—whether the Nazis were in power to stay or whether a conservative military coup against them was still possible. Some Jewish intellectuals came up with rather unusual forecasts. “The prognosis,” Martin Buber wrote to philosopher and educator Ernst Simon on February 14, “depends on the outcome of the imminent fight between the groups in the government. We must assume that no shift in the balance of power in favor of the National Socialists will be permitted, even if their parliamentary base vis à-vis the German nationalists is proportionally strengthened. In that case, one of two things will happen: either the Hitlerites will remain in the government anyway; then they will be sent to fight the proletariat, which will split their party and render it harmless for the time being…. Or they will leave the government…. As long as the present condition holds, there can be no thought of Jew-baiting or anti-Jewish laws, only of administrative oppression. Anti-Semitic legislation would be possible only if the balance of power shifted in favor of the National Socialists, but as I have said above, this is hardly to be expected. Jew-baiting is only possible during the interval between the National Socialists’ leaving the government and the proclamation of a state of emergency.”
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III

The primary political targets of the new regime and of its terror system, at least during the first months after the Nazi accession to power, were not Jews but Communists. After the Reichstag fire of February 27, the anti-Communist hunt led to the arrest of almost ten thousand party members and sympathizers and to their imprisonment in newly created concentration camps. Dachau had been established on March 20 and was officially inaugurated by SS chief Heinrich Himmler on April 1.
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In June, SS Group Leader Theodor Eicke became the camp’s commander, and a year later he was appointed “inspector of concentration camps”: Under Himmler’s aegis he had become the architect of the life-and-death routine of the camp inmates in Hitler’s new Germany.

After the mass arrests that followed the Reichstag fire, it was clear that the “Communist threat” no longer existed. But the new regime’s frenzy of repression—and innovation—did not slacken; quite the contrary. A presidential decree of February 28 had already given Hitler emergency powers. Although the Nazis failed to gain an absolute majority in the March 5 elections, their coalition with the ultraconservative German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP) obtained it. A few days later, on March 23, the Reichstag divested itself of its functions by passing the Enabling Act, which gave full legislative and executive powers to the chancellor (at the outset new legislation was discussed with the cabinet ministers, but the final decision was Hitler’s). The rapidity of changes that followed was stunning: The states were brought into line; in May the trade unions were abolished and replaced by the German Labor Front; in July all political parties formally ceased to exist with the sole exception of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP). Popular support for this torrential activity and constant demonstration of power snowballed. In the eyes of a rapidly growing number of Germans, a “national revival” was under way.
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It has often been asked whether the Nazis had concrete goals and precise plans. In spite of internal tensions and changing circumstances, short-term goals in most areas were systematically pursued and rapidly achieved. But the final objectives of the regime, the guidelines for long-term policies, were defined in general terms only, and concrete steps for their implementation were not spelled out. Yet these vaguely formulated long-term goals were essential not only as guidelines of sorts but also as indicators of boundless ambitions and expectations: They were objects of true belief for Hitler and his coterie; they mobilized the energies of the party and of various sectors of the population; and they were expressions of faith in the correctness of the way.

Anti-Jewish violence spread after the March elections. On the ninth, Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA) seized dozens of East European Jews in the Scheunenviertel, one of Berlin’s Jewish quarters. Traditionally the first targets of German Jew-hatred, these
Ostjuden
were also the first Jews as Jews to be sent off to concentration camps. On March 13 forcible closing of Jewish shops was imposed by the local SA in Mannheim; in Breslau, Jewish lawyers and judges were assaulted in the court building; and in Gedern, in Hesse, the SA broke into Jewish homes and beat up the inhabitants “with the acclamation of a rapidly growing crowd.” The list of similar incidents is a long one.
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There were also killings. According to the late March (bimonthly) report of the governing president of Bavaria, “On the 15th of this month, around 6 in the morning, several men in dark uniforms arrived by truck at the home of the Israelite businessman Otto Selz in Straubing. Selz was dragged from his house in his nightclothes and taken away. Around 9:30 Selz was shot to death in a forest near Wang, in the Landshut district. The truck is said to have arrived on the Munich-Landshut road and to have departed the same way. It carried six uniformed men and bore the insignia II.A. Several people claim to have noticed that the truck’s occupants wore red armbands with a swastika.”
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On March 31 Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick wired all local police stations to warn them that Communist agitators disguised in SA uniforms and using SA license plates would smash Jewish shop windows and exploit the occasion to create disturbances.
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This could have been standard Nazi disinformation or some remaining belief in possible Communist subversion. On April 1, the Göttingen police station investigating the damage to Jewish stores and the local synagogue on March 28, reported having caught two members of the Communist Party and one Social Democrat in possession of parts of Nazi uniforms; headquarters in Hildesheim was informed that the men arrested were the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish action.
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Much of the foreign press gave wide coverage to the Nazi violence. The
Christian Science Monitor
, however, expressed doubts about the accuracy of the reports of Nazi atrocities, and later justified retaliation against “those who spread lies against Germany.” And Walter Lippmann, the most prominent American political commentator of the day and himself a Jew, found words of praise for Hitler and could not resist a sideswipe at the Jews. These notable exceptions notwithstanding, most American newspapers did not mince words about the anti-Jewish persecution.
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Jewish and non-Jewish protests grew. These very protests became the Nazis’ pretext for the notorious April 1, 1933, boycott of Jewish businesses. Although the anti-Nazi campaign in the United States was discussed at some length during a cabinet meeting on March 24,
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the final decision in favor of the boycott was probably made during a March 26 meeting of Hitler and Goebbels in Berchtesgaden. But in mid-March, Hitler had already allowed a committee headed by Julius Streicher, party chief of Franconia and editor of the party’s most vicious anti-Jewish newspaper,
Der Stürmer
, to proceed with preparatory work for it.

In fact, the boycott had been predictable from the very moment the Nazis acceded to power. The possibility had often been mentioned during the two preceding years,
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when Jewish small businesses had been increasingly harassed and Jewish employees increasingly discriminated against in the job market.
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Among the Nazis much of the agitation for anti-Jewish economic measures was initiated by a motley coalition of “radicals” belonging either to the Nazi Enterprise Cells Organization (Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation, or NSBO) headed by Reinhold Muchow or to Theodor Adrian von Renteln’s League of Middle-Class Employees and Artisans (Kampfbund für den gewerblichen Mittelstand), as well as to various sections of the SA activated for that purpose by Otto Wagener, an economist and the SA’s former acting chief of staff. Their common denominator was what former number two party leader Gregor Strasser once called an “anti-capitalist nostalgia”;
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their easiest way of expressing it: virulent anti-Semitism.

Such party radicals will be encountered at each major stage of anti-Jewish policy up to and including the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. In April 1933 they can be identified as members of the party’s various economic interest groups, but also among them were jurists like Hans Frank (the future governor-general of occupied Poland) and Roland Freisler (the future president of the People’s Tribunal) and race fanatics like Gerhard Wagner and Walter Gross, not to speak of Streicher, Goebbels, the SA leadership, and, foremost among them, Hitler himself. But specifically as a pressure group, the radicals consisted mainly of “old fighters”—SA members and rank-and-file party activists dissatisfied with the pace of the National Socialist revolution, with the meagerness of the spoils that had accrued to them, and with the often privileged status of comrades occupying key administrative positions in the state bureaucracy. The radicals were a shifting but sizable force of disgruntled party members seething for increased action and for the primacy of the party over the state.
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