Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (41 page)

On April 26 all Jews were ordered to register their property.
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On June 14 the problem that had defeated the boycott committee on April 1, 1933, was solved. According to the third supplementary decree to the Reich Citizenship Law, “a business was Jewish if the proprietor was a Jew, if a partner was a Jew, or if, on January 1, 1938, a member of the board of directors was a Jew. Also considered Jewish was a business in which Jews owned more than one quarter of the shares or more than one half of the votes, or which was factually under predominantly Jewish influence. A branch of a Jewish business was considered Jewish if the manager of the branch was a Jew.”
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On July 6, 1938, a law established a detailed list of commercial services henceforth forbidden to Jews, including credit information, real estate brokerage, and so on.
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On July 25, the fourth supplementary decree to the Reich Citizenship Law put an end to Jewish medical practice in Germany: The licenses of Jewish physicians were withdrawn as of September 30, 1938.
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As Raul Hilberg indicates, “That was no more than a re-enactment of canon law, but the modern innovation was the provision that leases for apartments rented by Jewish physicians were terminable at the option of either landlord or tenant.”
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The last line of the decree related neither to canon law nor to modern innovations, but was entirely in the spirit of the new Germany: “Those [physicians] who receive an authorization [to give medical services to Jewish patients] are not authorized to use the appellation ‘physician,’ but only the appellation ‘caretakers of the sick.’”
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Incidentally, the decree was signed and promulgated in Bayreuth: Hitler was attending the festival.

On September 27, 1938, on the eve of the Munich conference, Hitler signed the fifth supplementary decree, forbidding Jews to practice law.
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The decree was not immediately made public because of the international tension. Finally, on October 13, he allowed the announcement to be made the next day.
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The decree was to take effect in the Altreich on November 30 and in former Austria (with a partial and temporary exception in Vienna) on December 31.

The final blow that destroyed all Jewish economic life in Germany came on November 12, when, just after the Kristallnacht pogrom, Göring issued a ban on all Jewish business activity in the Reich. Meanwhile, however, National Socialist physicians and lawyers were still not satisfied with having definitively driven the Jews out of their professions. As was usual in the world of Nazi anti-Jewish measures, concrete destruction had to find a symbolic expression as well. On October 3, 1938, the Reich Physicians’ Chamber (Reichsärztekammer) had demanded of the Minister of Education that Jewish physicians, now forbidden to practice, should also suffer further deprivation: “I am therefore requesting,” Reich physicians leader Wagner concluded his letter to Rust, “that the title ‘Doctor’ should be taken away from these Jews as soon as possible.”
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The minister of education and the minister of justice consulted on the matter: their common proposal to the Ministry of the Interior was not to cancel the title of doctor in medicine and law only, but rather to consider drafting a law that would strip Jews of all tides, academic degrees, and similar distinctions.
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On the morrow of the November 9–10 pogrom, the matter was postponed.
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The atmosphere permeating German business circles as the forced Aryanization—or more precisely, confiscation of all Jewish property—became law is revealed in a letter from a Munich businessman who had been asked by the authorities to serve as a consultant in the Aryanization transactions. The author of the letter described himself as a National Socialist, a member of the SA, and an admirer of Hitler. He then added: “I was so disgusted by the brutal…and extraordinary methods employed against the Jews that, from now on, I refuse to be involved in any way with Aryanizations, although this means losing a handsome fee…. As an old, honest and upstanding businessman, I [can] no longer stand by and countenance the way many Aryan’ businessmen, entrepreneurs and the like…are shamelessly attempting to grab up Jewish shops and factories, etc. as cheaply as possible and for a ridiculous price. These people are like vultures swarming down, their eyes bleary, their tongues hanging out with greed, to feed upon the Jewish carcass.”
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The wave of forced Aryanization swept away the relatively moderate behavior that, as we have seen, major corporations had adhered to until then. The new economic incentives, the pressure from the party, the absence of any conservative ministerial countervailing forces (such as Schacht had represented) put an end to the difference between low-grade grabbing and high-level mannerliness. In some cases Hitler’s direct intervention can be traced. Thus, in mid-November 1937, “Herbert Göring and Wilhelm Keppler at Hitler’s Chancellery [now] summoned Otto Steinbrinck, [steel magnate] Friedrich Flick’s chief operative in Berlin, in order to bribe or bully Flick into leading a drive to Aryanize’ the extensive mining properties of the Julius and Ignaz Petschek families.”
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It seems that recently established enterprises were more aggressive than older ones: Flick, Otto Wolf, and Mannesmann, for example, three of the fast-growing new giants of heavy industry, were more energetically involved in the Aryanizations than were Krupp or the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steelworks). The same happened in banking, the most aggressive being the regional banks in search of fast expansion, and some of the private banks (Merck, Fink, Richard Lenz), The Dresdner Bank, in need of capital, took the lead in brokering the takeovers, whereas the Deutsche Bank showed more restraint, and the 2 percent commission it levied on the sales prices of Jewish businesses accumulated to several millions of Reichsmarks from 1937 to 1940.
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Not all these operations were as easy as the Nazis would have wished. Some of the major Aryanization initiatives kept them on tenterhooks for months and even years, without Berlin being able to claim full victory.
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The most notorious cases involved complex negotiations with the Rothschilds for control of the Witkowitz steel works in Czechoslovakia (the Viennese Rothschild, Baron Louis, was held hostage for the duration of the negotiations), and with the Weinmanns and also with Hitler s targets, the Petscheks, for control of steelworks and coal mines in the Reich. The Nazis were caught in a maze of foreign holdings and property transfers aptly initiated by their prospective victims which, during the Petschek negotiations, led Steinbrinck to write in an internal memorandum: “Eventually we will have to consider the use of violence or direct state intervention.”
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The Nazis were well aware of the dilemma exacerbated by accelerated Aryanization: The rapid pauperization of the Jewish population and the growing difficulties in the way of emigration were creating a new Jewish social and economic problem of massive proportions. At the outset men like Frick still had very traditional views of what could be done. According to a report of June 14, 1938, entitled “Jews in the Economy,” in a discussion held in April of that year, Frick had apparently summed up his views as follows: “Insofar as Jews in Germany are able to live off the proceeds of their commercial and other assets, they require strict state supervision. Insofar as they are in need of financial assistance, the question of
Republic
support must be solved. Greater use of the various organizations for social welfare appears to be unavoidable.”
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In the early fall of 1938, another measure, this time involving locally planned economic extortion, was initiated in Berlin. One of the largest low-rent housing companies, the Gemeimitzige Siedlungs-und Wohnungsbaugesellschaft (GSW) Berlin, ordered the registration of all its Jewish tenants and canceled most of their leases. Some of the Jewish tenants left, but others sued the GSW. Not only did the Charlottenburg district court back the housing company, it indicated that similar measures could be more generally applied. The court would probably have reached the same decision without external pressure, but it so happened that pressure was applied upon the Ministry of Justice by Albert Speer, whom, in early 1937, Hitler had appointed general inspector for the construction of Berlin. The eager general inspector was simultaneously negotiating with the capital’s mayor for the construction of 2,500 small apartments to which to transfer other Jews from their living quarters.
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These details seem to have escaped Speer’s highly selective memory.
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Anti-Jewish violence had erupted again in the Altreich in the spring and early summer of 1938. In June, on Heydrich’s orders, some ten thousand “asocials” were arrested and sent to concentration camps: Fifteen hundred Jews with prior sentences were included and shipped off to Buchenwald (which had been set up in 1937).
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A few weeks before, at the end of April, the propaganda minister (and Gauleiter of Berlin) had asked the Berlin police chief, Count Wolf Heinrich Helldorf, for a proposal for new forms of segregation and harassment of the city’s Jews. The result was a lengthy memorandum prepared by the Gestapo and handed to Helldorf on May 17. At the last moment the document was hastily reworked by the SD’s Jewish section, which was critical of the fact that the maximal segregation measures proposed by the Gestapo would make the first priority, emigration, even more difficult than it already was. The final version of the proposal was passed on to Goebbels and possibly discussed with Hitler at a meeting on July 24.
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Some of the measures envisaged were already in preparation, others were to be applied after the November pogrom, and others still after the beginning of the war.

Goebbels simultaneously moved to direct incitement. According to his diary, he addressed three hundred Berlin police officers about the Jewish issue on June 10: “Against all sentimentality. Not law is the motto but harassment. The Jews must get out of Berlin. The police will help.”
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Party organizations were brought into action. Now that Jewish businesses had been defined by the decree of June 14, their marking could finally begin. “Starting late Saturday afternoon,” the American ambassador to Germany, Hugh R. Wilson, cabled Secretary of State Hull on June 22, 1938, “Civilian groups, consisting usually of two or three men, were to be observed painting on the windows of Jewish shops the word “JUDE” in large red letters, the star of David and caricatures of Jews. On the Kurfürstendamm and the Tauentzienstrasse, the fashionable shopping districts in the West, the task of the painters was made easy by the fact that Jewish shop-owners had been ordered the day before to display their names in white letters. (This step, which was evidently decreed in anticipation of a forthcoming ruling which will require Jews to display a uniform distinctive sign, disclosed that a surprisingly large number of shops in this district are still Jewish.) The painters in each case were followed by large groups of spectators who seemed to enjoy the proceedings thoroughly. The opinion in informed sections of the public was that the task was being undertaken by representatives of the Labour Front rather than as formerly has been the case by the S.A. or the S.S. It is understood that in the district around the Alexanderplatz boys of the Hitler Youth participated in the painting, making up for their lack of skill by a certain imagination and thoroughness of mutilation. Reports are received that several incidents took place in this region leading to the looting of shops and the beating up of their owners; a dozen or so broken or empty showcases and windows have been seen which lend credence to these reports.”
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Bella Fromm’s diary entry describing the Hitler Youth in action against Jewish retail shops is more graphic. “We were about to enter a tiny jewelry shop when a gang of ten youngsters in Hitler Youth uniforms smashed the shop window and stormed into the shop, brandishing butcher knives and yelling, ‘To hell with the Jewish rabble! Room for the Sudeten Germans!’” She continued: “The smallest boy of the mob climbed inside the window and started his work of destruction by flinging everything he could grab right into the streets. Inside, the other boys broke glass shelves and counters, hurling alarm clocks, cheap silverware, and trifles to accomplices outside. A tiny shrimp of a boy crouched in a corner of the window, putting dozens of rings on his fingers and stuffing his pockets with wristwatches and bracelets. His uniform bulging with loot, he turned around, spat squarely into the shopkeeper’s face, and dashed off.”
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An SD internal report also briefly described the “Jewish action” (
Judenaktion
) in Berlin, indicating that it had started on June 10. According to the SD, all party organizations participated with the authorization of the city Gauleitung.
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The situation soon got out of hand, however, and as the American ambassador was sending his cable, an order was emanating from Berchtesgaden: The Führer wished the Berlin action to stop.
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And so it did. Wide-scale anti-Jewish violence was not what Hitler needed as the international crisis over the fate of the Sudetenland was reaching its climax.

If Goebbels’s diary faithfully reproduced the gist of the views Hitler expressed during their July 24 meeting, then he must have been considering several options: “We discuss the Jewish question. The Führer approves my action in Berlin. What the foreign press writes is unimportant. The main thing is that the Jews be pushed out. Within ten years they must be removed from Germany. But for the time being we still want to keep the Jews here as pawns…”
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Soon, however, the Sudeten crisis would be over and an unforeseen occurrence would offer the pretext for anti-Jewish violence on a yet unseen level. The Berlin events had merely been a small-scale rehearsal.