Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (35 page)

Much of what Blum did during his two brief tenures as prime minister of the Popular Front government seemed to play into the hands of the Right. Admirable as his social achievements—the forty-hour work week and the two-week paid annual vacation—were, they appeared manifestly to contradict his urge to speed up rearmament in the face of the Nazi menace. In any event, if it was somewhat incongruous to see traditional pacifists turn into the military guardians of France, it was certainly much worse to watch the shift of right-wing nationalists toward outright appeasement of Nazi Germany, among other reasons out of hatred for the enemy within. “Better Hitler than Blum” was just one of the slogans; worse were to come.

As in Germany in previous decades, notwithstanding the visibility of some Jewish left-wing activism, the majority of the Jews in France were in fact anything but politically supportive of the Left. The Consistoire was an essentially conservative body that did not hesitate to welcome the presence of right-wing organizations, such as La Rocque’s Croix de Feu, at its commemorative occasions; it openly backed, at least until 1935, a Jewish patriotic and ultraconservative movement, Édouard Bloch’s Union Patriotique des Français Israelités.
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Even among the immigrants from Eastern Europe, support for the Left was not pervasive. In the 1935 Paris municipal elections and in the decisive 1936 elections for the legislature, official immigrant bodies were readier to give their support to right-wing than to Communist candidates.
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Blum himself often seemed impervious to the role played by anti-Semitism in the mobilization of right-wing opinion against his leadership. Or possibly his awareness was of the detached and fatalistic kind that characterized Rathenau’s acceptance of the hatred directed against him in the months preceding his assassination. In February 1936 Blum himself was slightly wounded by right-wing demonstrators as his car passed the funeral cortege of the Action Française historian Jacques Bainville.
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Blum’s imperviousness made it easy for the extreme right to point to the number of Jewish ministers in his cabinets.
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Anti-Semitism did not play a central role in the programs or the propaganda of the French parties closest to fascism, at least during the thirties. Although anti-Jewish slogans were part of the repertory of Solidarité Française and other leagues, Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français became anti-Semitic only after 1938 in order to attract voters from among the notoriously anti-Semitic French settlers in North Africa.
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But anti-Jewish themes were the major staple of a host of right-wing periodicals that carried the message to hundreds of thousands of French homes:
L’Action Française, Je suis partout
, and
Gringoire
were merely the most widely read among them. On April 15, 1938,
Je suis partout
published the first of its special issues on “the Jews.” The articles carried such titles as “The Jews and Germany,” “Austria and the Jews,” “The Jews and Anti-Semitism,” “The Jews and the Revolution,” “When Israel Is King: The Jewish Terror in Hungary,” and so on. Brasillach’s lead article demanded that the Jews in France be put under alien status.
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The continuing stream of anti-Semitic articles reached such proportions that, in April 1939, a law was passed to prohibit press attacks “against a group of persons belonging by their origin to a given race or religion, when these attacks aim at inciting hatred among citizens or inhabitants.” The perceived need for such a law was a sign of the times. Another such sign, also in April 1939, was that the newly elected pope, Pius XII, repealed the ban on
Action Française
. Neither the ban nor its repeal had anything to do with anti-Semitism, but nonetheless, as of 1939 Maurras’s doctrine of anti-Jewish hatred was no longer beyond the official Catholic pale.

Nazi Germany encouraged the spread of anti-Semitism all over Europe and beyond. Sometimes these initiatives were indirect: In France the France-Allemagne Committee, organized by Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Policy Office and guided by the future Nazi ambassador to occupied France, Otto Abetz, carefully supported various cultural activities, most of which carried a subtle pro-Nazi ideological slant.
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On the other hand, the function of Nazi organizations, such as the Stuttgart-based press agency Weltdienst, was worldwide anti-Jewish propaganda.
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Yet it was not the Nazi-like and sometimes Nazi-financed groups of French, Belgian, Polish, and Romanian Jew-haters who were of significance during the immediate prewar period. The really ominous aspect in these countries was the exacerbation of homegrown varieties of anti-Semitism; Nazism’s contribution was that of an indirect influence. At this time the upsurge of anti-Jewish passion, with or without Nazi incitement, had some immediate impact both on attitudes toward local Jewish communities and on immigration policies toward Jews trying to flee from Germany, Austria, and the Czech Protectorate. In more general terms, it prepared the ground for active collaboration by some, and passive acquiescence by many more, in the sealing of the fate of European Jewry only three or four years hence.

III

On September 29, 1936, the state secretary in the German Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, convened a conference of high officials from his own agency, from the Ministry of the Economy, and from the Office of the Deputy Führer in order to prepare recommendations for a meeting of ministers regarding the further steps to be taken in regard to the Jews at this post-Nuremberg stage. As the Office of the Deputy Führer represented the party line, the Ministry of the Interior (though headed by the Nazi Wilhelm Frick) often represented middle-of-the-road positions between the party and the conservative state bureaucracy, and the Ministry of the Economy (still headed by Schacht), was decidedly conservative, it is remarkable that, at this conference, the highest officials of the three agencies were entirely in agreement.

All those present recognized that the fundamental aim now was the “complete emigration” of the Jews and that all other measures had to be taken with this aim in mind. After restating this postulate, Stuckart added a sentence that was soon to find its dramatic implementation: “Ultimately one would have to consider carrying out compulsory emigration.”
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Most of the discussion was concentrated on dilemmas that were to bedevil German choices until the fall of 1938: First, what measure of social and economic activity should be left to Jews in the Reich so as to prevent their becoming a burden to the state and yet not diminish their incentive to emigrate? Second, toward which countries was Jewish emigration to be channeled without it leading to the creation of new centers of anti-German activity? The participants agreed that all emigration options should be left open, but that German means should be used only to help the emigration to Palestine. In answer to the question whether the press was not slowing down Jewish emigration to Palestine by reporting the Arab anti-Jewish unrest there, Ministerial Director Walther Sommer (from the Deputy Führer’s Office) indicated that “one could not reproach other nations for defending themselves against the Jews.” No measures regarding the press reports were to be taken.
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And no decision was made regarding the problem of the identification of Jewish businesses.
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The September 1936 conference was the first high-level policy-planning meeting devoted to the regime’s future anti-Jewish measures in which the priority of total emigration (compulsory emigration: that is, expulsion if need be) was clearly formulated. Before the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, segregation had been the main goal, and it was only in September 1935 that Hitler, in his declaration to Walter Gross, mentioned “more vigorous emigration” of the Jews from Germany as one of his new objectives. Thus, some time at the end of 1935 or in 1936, Hitler’s still tentative formulations became a firm guideline for all related state and party agencies. The move to new objectives tallied, as has been seen, with the new radicalization in both the internal and the external domains.

Simultaneously the “cleansing” process was relentlessly going forward: The major initiatives stemmed from Hitler, yet, when other initiatives were submitted to him by cabinet ministers or high party leaders, his approval was far from being automatic.

On April 1, 1933, some 8,000 to 9,000 Jewish physicians were practicing in Germany. By the end of 1934, approximately 2,200 had either emigrated or abandoned their profession, but despite a steady decline during 1935, at the beginning of 1936, 5,000 Jewish physicians (among them 2,800 in the Public Health Service) were still working in the Reich. The official listing of the country’s physicians for 1937 identified Jewish physicians as Jews according to the Nuremberg criteria; by then their total was about 4,200, approximately half the number of those listed in 1933,
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but in Nazi eyes still too many by far.

On December 13, 1935, the minister of the interior submitted the draft of a law regulating the medical profession. According to the protocol of the cabinet meeting (which gave no details of the draft), Frick drew the ministers’attention to the fact that articles 3 and 5 “settled the Aryan issue for the physicians.” The proposal was accepted.
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It seems, however, that for an unspecified reason the final drafting of the law was postponed for more than a year.

On June 14, 1937, Wagner met with Hitler in the presence of Bormann: “As I submitted to the Führer that it was necessary to free the medical profession of the Jews,” Wagner wrote, “the Führer declared that he considered such cleansing exceptionally necessary and urgent. Nor did he consider it right that Jewish physicians should be allowed to continue to practice [in numbers] corresponding to the percentage of the Jewish population. In any case, these doctors had also to be excluded in case of war. The Führer considered the cleansing of the medical profession more important than for example that of the civil service, as the task of the physician was in his opinion one of leadership or should be such. The Führer demanded that we inform State Secretary Lammers of his order to prepare the legal basis for the exclusion of the Jewish physicians still practicing (cancellation of licenses).”
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Two months later Lammers informed State Secretary Pfundtner that the issue of Jewish physicians was on the agenda for a meeting, scheduled for September 1, of state secretaries with Hitler.
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Within a year the professional fate of the remaining Jewish physicians in Germany would be sealed.

Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, a party stalwart if ever there was one, nevertheless seemed to have underestimated the stepped-up pace of radicalization. It appears, from a November 25, 1936, Education Ministry memorandum, that at the beginning of the year, Frick had decided that there was no legal basis for the dismissal of Aryan civil servants with Jewish wives. In the memorandums words, “[Frick’s] position has not received the approval of the Führer and Reich Chancellor.” The corollary was simple: Frick’s initiative was invalid.
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A few months later Frick made up for his initial lack of creative legal-ism. On April 19, 1937, he issued the following ordinance: “My memorandum of December 7, 1936, which forbids the raising of the national colors over the house of a German living in a German-Jewish mixed marriage, also applies to civil servants. As a situation in which a civil servant cannot raise the national flag at home is not tenable in the long run, civil servants married to a Jewish wife are usually to be pensioned off.”
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Some exceptions were allowed, but the legal basis for dismissing civil servants with Jewish spouses had been found.

Generally, however, Frick could boast of outright success. On July 21, 1937, he solved another major problem: safety measures to be taken regarding the presence of Jews in health resorts and related establishments. Jews were to be housed only in Jewish-owned hotels and guesthouses, on condition that no German female employees under forty-five worked on the premises. The general facilities (for bathing, drinking spa waters, and the like) were to be accessible to Jews, but there was to be as much separation from the other guests as possible. As for facilities with no immediate health function (gardens, sports grounds), these could be prohibited to Jews.
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But as in previous years, Hitler hesitated when a measure could create unnecessary political complications. Thus, on November 17, 1936, he ordered further postponement of a law on Jewish schooling,
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a draft of which had been submitted to him by the minister of education. It seems that at the time Hitler was still wary of implementing the segregation of Jewish pupils on racial lines, as it would have entailed the transfer of Jewish children of Christian faith into Jewish schools and added further tension to relations with the Catholic Church.
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At times the cleansing measures turned into a totally surrealistic imbroglio. The issue of doctoral degrees for Jewish students was one such instance.
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The problem was apparently raised at the end of 1935 and discussed by the minister of the interior: Any restrictions on the right to obtain a doctoral degree were not to apply to foreign Jewish students; for German Jews the issue remained unresolved. At the beginning of 1936, it was brought up again by the notorious Wilhelm Grau, who was about to become head of the Jewish Section in Walter Frank’s Institute for the History of the New Germany. On February 10, 1936, Grau wrote to the secretary of state for Education that he had been asked to evaluate a dissertation on the history of the Jews of Ulm in the Middle Ages, submitted by a Jew at the faculty of philosophy of Berlin University. “Whereas in the above-mentioned case,” wrote Grau, “the dissertation is already inadequate from a scientific viewpoint, a general question also arises, namely whether Jews should be allowed to obtain a doctorate at all in a German university on such historical subjects. As our university professors unfortunately have little knowledge and even less instinct regarding the Jewish question, the most incredible things happen in this area.” Grau continued with a story mentioned in the discussion of his first contribution to the
Historische Zeitschriff
. “Last October, an Orthodox Jew called Heller obtained his doctorate at the University of Berlin with a dissertation on Jews in Soviet Russia, in which he attempted to deny entirely the Jewish contribution to Bolshevism by using a method that should raise extreme indignation in the National Socialist racial state. Heller simply does not consider those Jews he finds unpleasant, such as Trotsky and company, to be Jews but anti-Jewish ‘internationalists.’ With reference to this, I merely want to raise the question of the right of Jews to obtain a doctorate.”
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