Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (32 page)

The most astonishing aspect of this system was its concreteness. Very precise—and totally imaginary—Jewish plots were uncovered, names and addresses provided, countermeasures taken. Thus, in his lecture, “World Jewry,” at the November 1 conference, Eichmann listed a whole series of sinister Jewish endeavors. An attempt on the life of the Sudeten German Nazi leader Konrad Henlein had been planned at the Paris Asyle de Jour et de Nuit (a shelter for destitute Jews). It had failed only because Henlein had been warned and the murderer’s weapon had not functioned. Worse still, Nathan Landsmann, the president of the Paris-based Alliance Israelite Universelle (a Jewish educational organization), was in charge of planning attempts on the Fiihrer’s life—and also on Julius Streicher’s. To that effect, Landsmann was in touch with a Dutch Jewish organization, the Komitee voor Bizondere Joodsche Belange in Amsterdam, which in turn worked in close cooperation with the Dutch (Jewish) Unilever Trust, including its branches in Germany.
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This is a mere sample of Eichmann’s revelations.

For Heydrich and his men, it was probably inconceivable that connections among Jewish institutions were very loose and of very little importance in Jewish life.
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As described by him in a pamphlet published at the end of 1935,
Wandlungen unseres Kampfes
(The transformations of our struggle), the network of Jewish organizations acting against the Reich was a deadly threat.
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It appeared as such on the fictional charts growing apace in the SD offices at 102 Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin. This was the police face of redemptive anti-Semitism.

In its policy recommendations, II 112 backed any action to accelerate Jewish emigration, including the potentially positive effects of instigated violence.
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As early as May 1934, an SD memorandum addressed to Heydrich had opened with the unambiguous statement that “the aim of the Jewish policy must be the complete emigration of the Jews.” In the context of 1934 the lines that followed were unusual: “The life opportunities of the Jews have to be restricted, not only in economic terms. To them Germany must become a country without a future, in which the old generation may die off with what still remains for it, but in which the young generation should find it impossible to live, so that the incentive to emigrate is constantly in force. Violent mob anti-Semitism must be avoided. One does not fight rats with guns but with poison and gas….”
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Yet, as has been seen, in September 1935 Heydrich did not set emigration at the center of his policy proposals. It was within the overall shifting of Nazi goals in 1936 that the policy of the SD became an active element in a general drive of all Nazi agencies involved in Jewish matters: For all of them, emigration was the first priority.

Palestine was considered one of the more promising outlets for Jewish emigration, as it had been since 1933. Like the Foreign Ministry and the Rosenberg office (which was mainly in charge of ideological matters, including contacts with foreign Nazi sympathizers), the SD was confronted with the dilemma entailed by the need to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine on the one hand, and, on the other, the danger that such emigration could lead to the creation of a strategic center for the machinations of world Jewry: a Jewish state. It is in relation to such policy considerations that Heydrich allowed Hagen and Eichmann to visit Palestine in the fall of 1937 and to meet with their Haganah “contact,” Feivel Polkes.

For Eichmann at least the mission appears to have raised great expectations: “As during the trip negotiations with Arab princes are foreseen, among other things,” the ex-traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company in Upper Austria wrote to the head of II 1, Albert Six, “I will need one light and one dark suit as well as a light overcoat.” Eichmann’s dreams of Oriental elegance remained unfulfilled; instead both travelers were repeatedly warned about strict secrecy measures: no use of terms like “SS,” “SD,” “Gestapo”; no sending of postcards to friends in the service, and so on.
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The mission failed miserably: The British did not allow the two SD men to stay in Palestine more than a day, and their conversations with Polkes—who came to meet them in Cairo—produced no valuable information whatsoever. But the favorable SD view of Palestine as a destination for German Jews did not change. Later on it was with the SD that Zionist emissaries organized the departure of convoys of emigrants to Yugoslav and Romanian ports, from which they attempted to sail for Palestine in defiance of the British blockade.

Finally the SD Jewish subsubsection participated with increasing energy in the surveillance activities of the Gestapo, and in this domain its share of the common work grew throughout 1937. On September 18, for example, the SD main region Rhine submitted a report on a Jewish student named Ilse Hanoch. According to the report, Hanoch (“who supposedly is studying in London”) was traveling on the 6:25 train from Trier to Luxembourg, when, “shortly before arriving at the border-control station, Hanoch looked very uncertain and started tearing pieces of paper from her notebook, crumpled them, and threw them into the ashtray.” She underwent a thorough search at the border station, but without any result. The SD report assumed, on the basis of Hanoch’s travel schedule to and from Germany (as indicated on her passport) and, from the names of various Jewish families that were found on the pieces of paper she had torn and thrown away, that the so-called student was a messenger between Jews who had emigrated and those still living in Germany. Instructions were issued to all border control stations that she “be most thoroughly searched when reentering the country and that she be put under the strictest surveillance during her travels in Germany.”
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It is unknown whether Ilse Hanoch ever returned to Germany.

Strangely enough, however, when no clear instructions were given or when the framework for violence was not preestablished, the anti-Jewish actions of the SS had their built-in limitations, at least in the mid-thirties. Consider the case of SS-Sturmmann (SS Private) Anton Beckmann, of the headquarters staff of the Columbia SS detention center in Berlin. On January 25, 1936, he went into a shop on the Friesenstrasse and bought a pair of suspenders. As he left the shop, a passerby told Beckmann, who was wearing his SS uniform, that he had just been patronizing a Jewish store. He immediately tried to return the suspenders but to no avail: “The Jewess Joel [the store owner] insolently told him that she wouldn’t even think of taking back purchased goods, and furthermore, that she had a lot of SS customers, even some high-ranking ones.” SS-Obersturmführer Kern, summoned by Beckmann to help him return the suspenders, had no greater success. The commandant of the Columbia detention center sent a report on the matter demanding the arrest of “the Jewess Joel” for spreading false rumors about SS members, adding that “it would be a welcome step in the interest of all National Socialists, if finally, as in other regions, the Jewish shops in Berlin were to be marked.”
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On receipt of the commandant’s letter, the Inspector of concentration camps, Gruppenführer Eicke, had to admit that he felt “powerless in this matter” and transmitted the request to the chief of the SS Personnel Office, Gruppenführer Heissmeyer,
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who passed it on to the Berlin area SS commander with a comment of his own: “In Berlin, of all places, everyone is in danger of unwittingly buying in Jewish stores, whereas in other cities, Frankfurt, for example, this danger is avoided by the use of a standard sign reading
GERMAN ESTABLISHMENT
.”
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The evolution of the shop-marking issue has already been noted, but what of the “Jewess Joel”? An absence of orders regarding her and the imminence of the Olympic Games suggest that, despite her “insolence,” she might not have been imprisoned.

The Joel incident, as minute as it was, points to an issue that was of central significance for the prewar anti-Jewish Nazi policy. Among the main obstacles faced by the regime in its attempt to eliminate the Jews from Germany was the fact that the victims had been part and parcel of every field of activity in German society. In consequence, if direct violence was not (yet) possible, the system had to elaborate ever new administrative or legal measures in order to undo, stage by stage and step by step, the existing ties between that society and the Jews. And, as we have seen, at each stage, any number of unforeseen exceptions demanded additional administrative solutions. In other words it was not yet easy merely to arrest the “Jewess Joel,” who was legally selling her wares and was still protected by the general instructions regarding the economic activity of the Jews: Marking Jewish shops, for example, entailed possible internal and external consequences the regime was not yet ready to face.

V

Although the total number of concentration camp inmates in 1936–37 (about 7,500) was at its lowest point
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, compared to the first two years of the regime and mainly to what happened later, the categories of targeted prisoners were increasing considerably. Apart from political opponents, the inmates were mainly members of religious sects such as Jehovah’s Witnesses; homosexuals; and “habitual criminals” or “asocials,” a group the Ministry of the Interior defined as follows:

“Persons who through minor, but repeated, infractions of the law demonstrate that they will not adapt themselves to the natural discipline of the National Socialist state, e.g., beggars; tramps (Gypsies); alcoholics; whores with contagious diseases, particularly sexually transmitted diseases, who evade the measures taken by the health authorities.”

A further category of asocials was the “work-shy”: “Persons against whom it can be proven that on two occasions they have, without reasonable grounds, turned down jobs offered to them, or who, having taken a job, have given it up after a short while without a valid reason.” During the following years, asocials of these various kinds were increasingly picked up by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps.
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The entirely arbitrary nature of the arrests and incarcerations in camps, even by the Third Reich’s standards of justice, can be illustrated by two police orders. In September 1935 the Bavarian Political Police demanded that the release date of all prisoners “who had been sentenced by a People’s Court be communicated well in advance so that, upon their release, they could immediately be transferred to a concentration camp. In other words, the police were “correcting” the courts’ sentences.
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And on February 23, 1937, Himmler ordered the Criminal Police to rearrest about two thousand habitual criminal offenders and to incarcerate them in concentration camps.
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These were individuals who had not been sentenced anew; choosing the victims was entirely up to the Criminal Police’s judgment—whereby “the overall number of arrests ordered could only encourage the arbitrariness of the choice.”
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In the thirties the Nazi regime used two different but complementary methods to achieve the complete exclusion of racially dangerous groups from the
Volksgemeinschaft
. segregation and expulsion on the one hand, sterilization on the other. The first method was used in its various aspects against the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals; the second method was applied to the carriers of hereditary diseases (physical or mental) and to persons showing dangerous characteristics deemed hereditary, as well as to “racially contaminated individuals” who could not be expelled or put into camps. As for the struggle against the Jew as the world enemy, it took additional and different forms, both on the ideological level and in terms of its all-encompassing nature.

Besides the asocials the main groups designated for segregation and diverse forms of imprisonment in existing camps or newly established camplike areas were the Gypsies and the homosexuals. Like the Jews the Gypsies dwelt in the phantasmic recess of the European mind, and like them they were branded as strangers on European soil. As was seen, the applicability of the Nuremberg Laws to the Gypsies was announced soon after their proclamation. As “carriers of alien blood,” the Gypsies were barred from marrying or having sexual contact with members of the German race.
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But although the decision was applied on the basis of general criteria of appearance and behavior, the task of actually defining the racial nature of “Gypsies” still lay ahead. From 1936 on it became the project of the University of Tübingen’s Robert Ritter.

With financing from the state-funded German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or DFG), the SS, and the Reich Health Ministry, Ritter took upon himself the classification of the thirty thousand Gypsies living in Germany. (Today identified as Sinti and Roma, these ethnic groups were generally called Gypsies [
Zigeuner
in German] long before and during the Third Reich, and most often to this day.) According to the Tübingen specialist, the Gypsies came from northern India and were originally Aryan, but in their migrations they had mingled with lesser races and were now nearly 90 percent racially impure.
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Ritter’s conclusions were to become the basis for the next step on the road to segregation, deportation, and extermination: Himmler’s order of December 8, 1938, regarding the measures to be taken against the Sinti and Roma.

The police were not passive while racial laws barring marriage and sexual intercourse between Gypsies and Germans were being promulagated and Ritter and his assistants were researching photographs and measurements. The Sinti and Roma had traditionally been subjected to harassment, mainly in Bavaria; after 1933, however, direct harassment became systematic, with the expulsion from the country of foreign Gypsies, and with others incarcerated as vagrants, habitual criminals, and various other kinds of asocials. Taking the Olympic Games as a pretext, the Berlin police in May 1936 arrested hundreds of Gypsies and transferred whole families, with their wagons, horses, and other belongings to the so-called Marzahn “rest place,” next to a garbage dump on one side and a cemetery on the other. Soon the rest place was enclosed with barbed wire. A de facto Gypsy concentration camp had been established in a suburb of Berlin. It was from Marzahn, and from other similar rest places soon set up near other German cities, that a few years later thousands of Sinti and Roma would be sent to the extermination sites in the East.
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