Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (36 page)

The discussion on this topic, which developed throughout 1936 and the early months of 1937, involved the Ministry of Education, the deans of the philosophy faculties at both Berlin and Leipzig Universities, the rectors of these universities, the Reichstatthalter of Saxony, and the Office of the Deputy Führer. The Ministry of Education’s attitude was to adhere to the law regarding Jewish attendance at German universities: As long as Jewish students were allowed to study in German universities, their right to acquire a doctoral degree could not be canceled. The best way of handling the situation was to appeal to the national feelings of the professors and prevail upon them not to accept Jews as doctoral students.
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But some deans (particularly the dean of the philosophical faculty at Leipzig) declared that, as party members, they could no longer bear the thought of signing doctoral degrees for Jews.

On February 29, 1936, the philosophy dean at Berlin University emphasized the negative consequences that stemmed from the rejection of the dissertations of all four Jewish doctoral candidates (Schlesinger, Adler, Dicker, and Heller) in his faculty. Since in each instance the dissertation topics had been suggested by “Aryan members of the faculty,” rejection of the theses also affected the professors concerned. The dean cited one of them, Professor Holtzmann, sponsor of “the Jew Dicker’s” rejected thesis on the Jews of Ulm: “Filled with anger, Holtzmann declared that he had had enough, and that he would no longer direct the doctoral work of any Jew.”
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On October 15, 1936, Bormann intervened. For him, appealing to “the national consciousness of the professors” was not the right way to handle the matter. “In particular,” Bormann wrote to Frick, “I would not want the implementation of basic racial tenets that derive from the worldview of National Socialism to be dependent upon the goodwill of university professors.” Bormann did not hesitate: A law prohibiting the award of doctoral degrees to Jewish students was necessary, and it was to be aimed at the professors, not the students. As for foreign reactions, Bormann thought that the impact of the law would be beneficial; in justifying this claim he used an argument whose significance extended well beyond the issue at hand: “Furthermore, I believe that the decree will fall on favorable ground, particularly in racially alien countries, which feel slighted by our racial policy, as thereby Jewry will once more be consciously set apart from other foreign races.” There was no objection to granting the doctoral degree to Jewish students who had already fulfilled all the necessary requirements.
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A decree reflecting Bormann’s view was drafted by the minister of education on April 15, 1937: The universities were ordered not to allow Jewish students of German citizenship to sit for doctoral exams. Exemptions were granted to
Mischlinge
under various conditions, and the rights of foreign Jews remained as before.
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The matter seemed settled. But only a few days later, on April 21, a telegram from Dean Weinhandel of the Kiel University philosophy faculty arrived at the Ministry of Education requesting “a decision whether reservations exist against acceptance of anthropology doctoral dissertation when candidate has Jewish or not purely Aryan wife.”
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The purification process also duly progressed at the local level. Thus, the Munich city fathers, who had excluded the Jews from public swimming pools in 1935, took a further bold step in 1937. Now the Jews were to be forbidden access to municipal baths and showers. But as the matter was weighty, Bormann’s authorization was requested. It was refused,
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although it is not clear what Bormann’s reasons were.

Slowed down in one area, the Munich authorities pushed ahead in another. Since 1933 the city streets that bore Jewish names had gradually been renamed. At the end of 1936, however, Mayor Karl Fiehler and the Construction Commission discovered that eleven Jewish street names still remained. During 1937, therefore, with assistance from the municipal archive, the names that were undoubtedly Jewish were changed. But as an archive official put it, there was always the possibility that “as a result of more thorough research, one or more street names might be identified as being Jew-related.
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In Frankfurt the problems created by Jewish street names were worse. It seems that the first person to raise the issue publicly was a woman party member, who on December 17, 1933, wrote an open letter to the
Frankfurter Volksblatt
: “Please do me the great favor of seeing whether you could not use your influence to change the name of our street, which is that of the Jew Jakob Schiff. Our street is mainly inhabited by people who are National Socialist-minded, and when flags are flown, the swastika flutters from every house. The ‘Jakob Schiff’ always gives one a stab to the heart.”
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The letter was sent to the municipal chancellery, which forwarded it to the city commission for street names. In March 1934 the commission advised the mayor of all the donations made by the Jewish-American financier Jacob Schiff to various Frankfurt institutions, including the university, and therefore suggested rejecting the proposed name change, especially since, given the importance of the Jacob Schiff private banking house in the United States, such a change would be widely reported and could lead to a demand for restitution of the monies that had been given to the city.
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The letter in the
Volksblatt
had, however, triggered a number of similar initiatives, and on February 3, 1935, after a lengthy correspondence, the city commission for street names requested the mayor’s agreement to the following proposal: The names of fourteen streets or squares were to be changed immediately, starting with Borne Square, which was to become Dominicans’ Square. When Nazi propaganda “discovered” that Schiff had heavily financed the Bolsheviks, Jakob-Schiff-Strasse became Mumm-Strasse (in honor of a former Frankfurt mayor).
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Twelve more streets were to be renamed in 1936, and twenty-nine others whose renaming had been suggested were to keep their names, either because their real meaning could be explained away (Mathilden-Strasse, Sophien-Strasse, Luisen-Strasse, and Luisen-Platz, all in fact named after women of the Rothschild family, would now be regarded as merely named for generic women) or because no sufficient or valid reason could be found for the change. In the case of Jakoby-Strasse, for instance, the name’s possibly Aryan origins had still to be researched; as for Iselin-Strasse, “Isaac Iselin was not a Jew (the biblical first name was common among Calvinists from Basel).”
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In Stuttgart the exclusion of Jews from public swimming pools was postponed until after the Olympic Games; anti-Jewish initiatives did not, however, lag behind those in other German cities. Quite the contrary. The local party leaders were infuriated by the fact that, at least until 1937, the Jewish population of the city was growing rather than declining. Jews from the small towns and villages of surrounding Württemberg were fleeing to the city in the hope of finding both the protection of anonymity and the support of a larger community. Thus, whereas during the first seven months of 1936, 582 Jews left Stuttgart, 592 moved in. It was only at the end of 1937 that the four-thousand-strong Jewish population started to decline.
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The city council decided to take Jewish matters in hand. After asking for advice from, of all places, Streicher’s Nuremberg, the council decided at its September 21, 1936, meeting that old people’s homes, nursery schools, and (finally) swimming pools belonging to the city were forbidden to Jews; in hospitals Jews were to be separated from other patients; city employees were forbidden to patronize Jewish shops and consult Jewish physicians; Jewish businessmen were forbidden to attend markets and fairs; and the city canceled all its own real estate and other business transactions with Jews.
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Paradoxically these initiatives led to a clash with the state administration of Württemberg, when the latter demanded that a Stuttgart Jewish developer be exempted from the building limitations. The city council complained to the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior, and Stuttgart mayor Karl Strölin mentioned the incident as an example of the differences that could arise between city and state authorities regarding the implementation of anti-Jewish policies.
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Such confrontations, mainly between regional bureaucracies and local party members, were actually not unusual. In Offenburg, in Baden, one started on March 19, 1937, with a complaint sent by a Jewish attorney, Hugo Schleicher, to the Offenburg district office in the name of the local Jewish community and of the Jews of Gengenbach, an Offenburg suburb. A grocer there, a certain Engesser, had refused to sell groceries and milk to a Jewish customer named Ferdinand Blum. The reason, it soon appeared, was that the mayor of Gengenbach, who also chaired the finance committee of the local hospital, had informed Engesser that he would not be allowed to sell his wares to the hospital if he continued to sell goods to Jews. As all grocers in Gengenbach were allowed to sell to the hospital, the mayor’s tactics would quickly achieve a result that Schleicher clearly defined in his letter: “The final consequence of this measure will be that the Jewish population of Gengenbach will no longer be provided with food and milk.”
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The Offenburg district office forwarded the complaint to Gengenbach’s mayor and asked for an answer. On April 2 the mayor wrote back “concerning the complaint of the Jew H. Schleicher”: “The facts presented in the complaint are correct. At the crow-black Engesser’s [“crow-black” meant that Engesser was a devout Catholic], the customers, apart from the Jews, are the blackest types of Gengenbach, so that his store has become a meeting place for all the obscurantists of our time.
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I confronted Engesser with the option of giving up either his deliveries to the hospital or his Jewish customers. He immediately declared that he was ready to give up his Jewish customers. Whether the Jews here get food or whether they croak is one and the same to me; they can leave for more fertile regions where milk and honey already flowed in Abraham’s time. In no way shall I permit deliveries to an institution under my authority to be made by Jew lackeys; neither will I allow myself to be held responsible because of a Jew’s complaint, and as a National Socialist I reject the demand for explanations and answers. I ask that the Jew be given the appropriate answer.”
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The district office soon answered. On April 5 the mayor’s letter was sent back to him because of its “entirely irrelevant and incredible tone, totally inappropriate and unacceptable in addressing superior authority.” This was the message throughout: “When superior authority demands a report, it is the duty of your office to present it in a factual and relevant way. I am now expecting such a concretely formulated report, which will also state whether and how the provision of milk will be assured in Gengenbach to the Blum family.”
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IV

For Jews and Germans alike, the fundamental criterion for measuring the success of the anti-Jewish segregation policies was the level of Jewish economic presence in Germany. Some local occurrences seemed, on occasion, to point to unexpected resilience. Thus, on February 2, 1937, the Stuttgart
NS-Kurier
published a lengthy article on a particular instance of “wretchedness and lack of character.” The wife of the director of a city enterprise (whose name was withheld) had been seen buying laundry soap in the Jewish department store Schocken.
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Still worse, on March 20 that same year, the
NS-Kurier
must have deeply angered its readers when it reported that the Munich Jewish-owned fashion house Rothschild had presented its designs at the Marquardt Hotel, and that “some German women, rich and accordingly devoid of convictions,” had accepted the Jewish invitation to attend.
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Sometimes silence was a safer option for the local party press. No Munich newspaper published anything about the four-hour visit paid in 1936 by Göring, accompanied by his adjutant, Prince Philipp von Hessen, to Otto Bernheimer’s carpet and tapestry store. Although Bernheimer s was well known as a Jewish-owned business, Göring paid 36,000 Reichsmarks for two rare carpets, which were duly sent to their lofty destination in Berlin.
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Indeed, Göring was no exception, nor were the Stuttgart society ladies. Gestapo reports from various parts of the Reich indicate that at the end of 1935 and in 1936, many Germans were still not hesitating to do business with Jews. Despite the party’s growing concern, the cattle trade in rural areas remained largely Jewish; according to a Gestapo report on the month of November 1935 “the Jews almost totally control the cattle trade [in Hesse]. They have transferred their activities to the late evening hours or to night time. Sometimes it even happens that Volksgenossen put themselves at the Jews’ disposal as hidden representatives, i.e., under their own name but for the benefit of the Jews, and do business for them in the large markets of cattle for slaughter in Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, and Koblenz.”
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Almost one year later, a report from the Franconian district of Hipoltstein sounded the alarm: “The peasants’ business relations with Jews have assumed such a dimension that the political leadership felt prompted to intervene energetically.”
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In the cities the annual late-winter sales at Jewish stores were big occasions. Thus in February 1936, the Munich police directorate reported that the sale at the Jewish-owned textile house Sally Eichengrün had drawn “large crowds.” At times as many as three hundred eager female customers stood in line on the street outside the store.
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And various SD reports indicate that even in 1937 economic relations between Germans and Jews still remained active in several domains, with, for example, members of the aristocracy, of the officer corps, and of the high bourgeoisie still keeping their assets in Jewish banks.
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