Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (34 page)

“Let us beware of those who endeavor to bring about anti-Jewish excesses. They serve a bad cause. Do you know whose orders they are obeying in so doing? Do you know in whose interest such disorders are fomented? The good cause gains nothing from such inconsiderate acts. And the blood which sometimes flows on such occasions is Polish blood.”
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This is precisely the translation of Cardinal Hlond’s pastoral letter that was sent from Poland to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York on February 9, 1937. According to the sender, “The statements contained in the first part concerning the moral inferiority and crimes of the Jews have been surpassed in a pronouncement by the prince-bishop of Cracow, Sapieha. But both these pronouncements have been surpassed by the mischief-making public addresses and the recently published book by the prelate Trzeciak, which might compete with the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
.”
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Traditional Polish Christian anti-Jewishness was fueled by a particularly difficult demographic and socioeconomic context. When the Polish state was reestablished in the wake of World War I, approximately 10 percent of its population was Jewish (3,113,933 in 1931, i.e., 9.8 percent of the general population). But about 30 percent of the urban population was Jewish (this average was valid for the largest cities such as Warsaw, Cracow, and Lodz, but the Jewish population was more than 40 percent in Grodno and reached 60 percent in Pinsk).
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The social stratification of Polish Jewry added to the difficulties created by sheer numbers and urban concentration: the majority, or more than two million, of the Jewish population belonged to the politically crucial petty bourgeoisie.
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Finally, contrary to the situation in Germany, France, Great Britain, and other Western countries, where the Jews aspired above all to be considered nationals of their respective countries—even though the majority insisted on keeping some form of Jewish identity—in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland, the self-definition of minorities was often that of a separate “nationality.” Thus, in the Polish census of 1921, 73.76 percent of the overall number of Jews by religion also declared themselves to be Jews by nationality, and in the 1931 census, 79.9 percent declared that Yiddish was their mother tongue, while 7.8 percent (an implausibly high number, presumably influenced by Zionism) declared that Hebrew was their first language. That left only a small percentage of Polish Jews who declared Polish to be their mother tongue.”
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Thus the basically religious anti-Jewish feelings of the Polish population were reinforced by what was perceived as a Jewish hold on a few key professions and on entire sectors of lower-middle-class activities, mainly commerce and handicrafts. Moreover, the clear identification of the Jews as an ethnic minority within a state that comprised several other minority groups but aimed, of course, at Polish national supremacy, led the Polish nationalists to consider Jewish religious and national-cultural “separatism” and Jewish dominance in some sectors of the economy to be a compound threat to the new state. Finally the Poles’ exacerbated anti-Bolshevism, fed by new fears and an old, deep hatred of Russia, identified Jewish socialists and Bundists with their Communist brethren, thereby inserting the standard equation of anti-Bolshevism with anti-Semitism into a specifically Polish situation. This tendency became more pronounced in the mid—1930s, when the Polish “regime of the colonels” moved to what was in fact a semifascist position, not always very different in its nationalist-anti-Semitic stance from Roman Dmowski’s Endek (National Democratic) Party. The Endeks brandished the specters of a Folksfront (that is, a popular front like the one in France; for Poles, the spelling with an “F” signaled Yiddish and thus Jewish origin) and Zydokomuna (in the sense of Jewish communism) to identify the Jews and their political activities.
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They were for a massive transfer of Jews to Palestine and for a Jewish quota in universities, and their action squads found the smashing of Jewish shops particularly attractive.
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The trouble was that, despite official declarations, the government and the church were not loath on occasion to encourage similar policies and activities, albeit in an indirect way.
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Estimates in the Polish press in 1935 and 1936 that hundreds of Jews died in the pogroms that erupted at the time in no fewer than 150 Polish cities were probably too low.
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A hidden quota in the universities brought the percentage of Jewish students down from 20.4 percent in 1928–29 to 9.9 percent in 1937–38.
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What happened in the universities took place more openly in the economic field, with a boycott of Jewish commerce leading to a sharp decrease in the number of Jewish businesses during the years immediately preceding the war.
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The pauperization of wide sectors of the Jewish population had begun long before the war, but in the post-Pilsudski era, the economic boycott was supported by the government itself. To be sure, anti-Jewish violence was officially condemned, but, as Prime Minister Felician Slawoj-Skladkowski put it in 1936, “at the same time, it is understandable that the country should possess the instinct compelling it to defend its culture, and it is natural that Polish society should seek economic self-sufficiency.” The prime minister explained what he meant by self-sufficiency: “economic struggle [against the Jews] by all means—but without force.”
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By 1937–38 Polish professional associations were accepting Gentile members only. As for the civil service, at the national or at the local level, by then it had entirely ceased employing Jews.
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One of the by-products of the “Jewish problem” in Poland was the reemergence in the mid-1930s of an idea that had first been concocted by the German anti-Semite Paul de Lagarde: transfer of part of the Jewish population to the French island colony of Madagascar.
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In January 1937 the positive attitude of Marius Moutet, the French Socialist colonial minister in Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, gave this plan a new lease on life, and soon negotiations between Poland and France regarding practical ways and means for implementing such a population transfer got under way. The Paris government agreed that a three-man Polish investigation commission, two of them Jews, be sent to the island. On their return the Jewish members submitted a report pessimistic about Madagascar’s absorptive capacities, but the Polish government adopted the favorable view of the commission’s Polish chairman, Mieczyslaw Lepecki. Thus, negotiations with the French continued and, at the beginning of 1938, Warsaw still seemed to be giving serious support to the project.

Whereas at the outset, the European Jewish press was reporting positively on the initiative, and official Nazi comment originating in the Paris and Warsaw embassies appeared only noncommittal, the Nazi press became highly sarcastic once it became clear, at the end of 1937, that the plan had little chance of implementation. “Madagascar could become a ‘promised land’ for the Jews Poland wants to get rid of,” said the
Westdeutscher Beobachter
on December 9, “only if they [the Jews] could lead a life of masters there, without effort of their own, and at the expense of others. It is therefore questionable whether the invitation for an exodus of the Children of Israel to Madagascar will soon free Poland of any great part of these parasites.”
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The plan nonetheless seems to have attracted Heydrich’s attention, and on March 5, 1938, a member of his staff sent the following order to Adolf Eichmann:

“Please put together in the near future material for a memorandum which should be prepared for C [Heydrich] in cooperation with II B4 [the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section]. It should be made clear in the memorandum that on its present basis (emigration), the Jewish question cannot be solved (financial difficulties, etc.) and that therefore we must start to look for a solution through foreign policy, as is already being negotiated between Poland and France.”
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II

There were 90,000 Jews in France at the beginning of the century; in 1935 their number had reached 260,000. On the eve of the war, the Jewish population had risen to approximately 300,000, two-thirds of it in Paris.
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The most detailed counts of Jews were conducted later by the Vichy government and by the Germans in the occupied zone, in accordance, of course, with their own definition of who was Jewish. The results nonetheless give a more or less precise image of the immediate prewar situation. In mid-1939 approximately half the Jewish population in Paris was French and half was foreign. But even among the French Jews, only half were French-born. In the Paris region 80 percent of the foreign Jews were of East European origin, half of them from Poland.
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Although there were three million foreigners living in France in the late thirties, of whom only about 5 percent at most were Jews,
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the Jews were more conspicuous than the others. In the eyes of both the authorities and the population, the foreign Jews were likely to create problems. This was the opinion of many French Jews as well. “As early as 1934,” writes Michael Marrus, “R. R. Lambert, editor of the
Univers Israélite
and one of the leading figures of the Franco-Jewish establishment, warned his coreligionists that other Frenchmen were losing their patience: in the current state of affairs, mass emigration [to France] is no longer possible. Foreign Jews should watch their step, should abandon their tendency to cling closely to one another and should accelerate their assimilation into French society.”
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Actually Lambert was relatively compassionate and did not advocate expelling the refugees; Jacques Helbronner, president of the Consistoire, the central representative body of French Jews, thought otherwise: “France, like every other nation,” Helbronner declared as early as June 1933, “has its unemployed, and not all the Jewish refugees from Germany are people worth keeping…. If there are 100 to 150 great intellectuals who are worthy of being kept in France since they are scientists or chemists who have secrets our own chemists don’t know…these we will keep, but the 7, 8, or perhaps 10,000 Jews who will come to France, is it really in our best interests to keep them?”
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Helbronner continued for years to hold this view; in 1936 he expressed regrets about the liberal French immigration policy of 1933. For him, the Jewish refugees were simply “riff-raff, the rejects of society, the elements who could not possibly have been of any use to their own country.”
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Even after the defeat of France, it should be added, Helbronner, still head of the Consistoire, kept his antipathy toward foreign Jews. His attitude changed only in the course of 1943. Soon after this change of heart had taken place, the Nazis caught up with him as well: In October of that year he was arrested, deported to Auschwitz with his wife, and murdered.

The Consistoire’s position had its effect, and from 1934 on, material help to the refugees almost totally ceased. “Clearly the French Jewish establishment was giving up all efforts to reconcile its competing loyalties and obligations to the refugees and to France. In this struggle, French interests…dominated. The refugees were quite simply abandoned.”
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The first official measures against foreigners (expulsion of those whose papers were not in order) were taken during the first half of the thirties, mainly in 1934 under the premiership of Pierre-Etienne Flandin.
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After a brief improvement under the Blum governments, anti-immigrant measures became ever more draconian, culminating in the highly restrictive law of November 1938, which facilitated the immediate expulsion of aliens and made their assigned residence in some remote corner of the country a matter of simple administrative decision. Stripping naturalized foreigners of their newly acquired French nationality also became possible, and a number of professional groups that considered recently arrived Jews to be dangerously competitive began to lobby for their exclusion from various domains such as medicine and the law.
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However, there was more to the rapid rise of French anti-Semitism in the mid-thirties than the problems of Jewish immigration.
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As the economic crisis was worsening, in late 1933 the Stavisky Affair, a scandal involving a series of shady financial deals in which the central role was played by a Russian Jew named Serge-Alexandre Stavisky and in whose mysterious ramifications major French political figures were implicated, came to a head. In the early days of 1934, Stavisky’s body was discovered near Chamonix in the French Alps. The Radical Socialist government of Camille Chautemps was brought down and replaced by the ephemeral premiership of Édouard Daladier, also a Radical Socialist, and the entire array of extreme right-wing organizations, from the Action Française of Maurras and Daudet to the Croix de Feu, the war veterans’ organization headed by Fraçois de La Rocque, was in an uproar. A riot was quelled in Paris on February 6, 1934: Eighteen rightists were killed by the police on the Place de la Concorde and the rue Royale as they tried to storm the Chambre des Députés. The republic survived the crisis, but the internal rift that had divided French society since the Revolution and dominated the political life of the country from the time of the restoration to that of the Dreyfus affair was wide open again.

A turning point came with the confrontations that preceded and followed the 1936 elections, with the overwhelming victory of the Popular Front led by Léon Blum. When, on June 6, the new government was sworn in, Xavier Vallat, the future Vichy delegate general for Jewish Affairs, turned to Blum at the rostrum of the Chambre des Députés: “Your accession to power, Mr. Prime Minister, is an undeniably historic occasion. For the first time, this ancient Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew. I dare say aloud what the country thinks: that it would be preferable to put at the head of this country a man whose roots belong to its soil rather than a subtle Talmudist.”
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