Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (46 page)

Himmler made no mention of the Paris shooting the day before, and most of his speech dealt with the organization and tasks of the SS. But the Jewish question was ominously there. Himmler warned his audience that, within ten years, the Reich would face unprecedented confrontations “of a critical nature.” The Reichsführer referred not only to national confrontations but, in particular, to the clash of worldviews in which the Jews stood behind all other enemy forces and represented the “primal matter of all that was negative.” The Jews—and the forces they directed against the Reich—knew that “if Germany and Italy were not annihilated, they themselves would be annihilated.” “In Germany,” Himmler prophesied, “the Jew will not be able to maintain himself; it is only a matter of years.” How this would be achieved was obvious: “We will force them out with an unparalleled ruthlessness.” There followed a description of how anti-Semitism was intensifying in most European countries, as a result of the arrival of Jewish refugees and the efforts of Nazi propaganda.

Then Himmler launched into his own vision of the final phase. Trapped, the Jews would fight the source of all their troubles, Nazi Germany, with all the means at their disposal. For the Jews the danger would be averted only if Germany were burned down and annihilated. There should be no illusions, said Himmler, and repeated his warning that in case of a Jewish victory, there would be total starvation and massacre; not even a reservation of Germans would remain: “Everybody will be included, the enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich and the others; speaking German and having had a German mother would suffice.”
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The implicit corollary was clear.

In October 1935, in the immediate wake of the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, Goebbels had issued a decree according to which the names of fallen Jewish soldiers would not be inscribed on any memorial erected in Germany from then on.
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It so happened, however, that when on June 14, 1936, a memorial was unveiled in the small town of Loge, in Eastern Friesland, the name of the Jewish soldier Benjamin was inscribed among those who had fallen in 1915. Loge’s Gruppenleiter took the initiative of having Benjamin’s name deleted and replaced (to fill the conspicuous void) by that of a local soldier who had died of his wounds soon after the war’s end. Local protests, including those of Dutch citizens living in this border town, such as the retired ambassador Count van Wedel, led to the removal of the new name. Was, then, the Jewish soldier Benjamin to be reinscribed? The Gauleiter of Weser-Ems decided that such a move would be “intolerable.”
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The overall problem remained unsolved until the pogrom of November 1938. On November 10 Paul Schmitthenner, rector of Heidelberg University, wrote to the Baden minister of education in Karlsruhe: “In view of the struggle of world Jewry against the Third Reich, it is intolerable that the names of members of the Jewish race remain on plaques of the war dead. The students,” Schmitthenner continued, “were demanding the removal of the plaque, but this was not done out of respect for the German dead.” The rector therefore asked the ministry to find an immediate solution to the problem in cooperation with the Reich student leader: “I consider removal of the Jewish names necessary,” Schmitthenner concluded. “It should take place in an orderly and dignified way in the spirit of the regulations I am asking for.”
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The minister of education of Baden forwarded Schmitthenner’s letter to the Reich minister of education with the following comment: “In my opinion, as the question is of fundamental significance, it should be submitted to the Führer for decision.”
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Rust did so, and on February 14 he was able to announce Hitler’s decision: Names of Jews on existing memorials would not be removed. Newly erected memorials would not include names of Jews.
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Schmitthenner’s resolve to eliminate the names of fallen Jewish soldiers from the halls of Heidelberg was echoed by the no less determined action of Friedrich Metz, the Freiburg University rector, who thereby preempted a decision that would be taken in Berlin on December 8. “I have been informed,” Metz wrote to the university library director on November 17, “that the library of the university and the academic reading room are still being visited by Jews. I have already instructed former members of the faculty Professor Jonas Cohn and Professor Michael, who are in question in this matter, to abstain from using any services of the Albert-Ludwig University in order to avoid unpleasantness. I authorize you herewith to act in the same spirit if the university library or the academic reading room are visited by other Jews.”
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III

“Regarding your request concerning a residence permit for your wife, I have to inform you of the following.” Thus started a letter that Party Comrade Seller, the Kreisleiter of Neustadt on the Aisch, near Nuremberg, addressed on November 21, 1938, to the German farmer and grocery store owner Fritz Kestler of Ühlfeld. Kesder’s wife, the mother of his four children and the family member in charge of the grocery store, had been expelled from Ühlfeld during the November pogrom and was temporarily staying with relatives in Nuremberg.

“Your wife, born Else Rindeberg,” the letter continued, “is a full-blooded Jewess. That is why she has repeatedly shown to all members of her race, through personal contact and all possible help, that she feels that she totally belongs to them. That is why, for instance, she took the reponsibility for the reimbursements of debts owed to Ühlfeld Jews. Moreover, she has given shelter to Jews who felt threatened. Further, she allowed Volksgenossen who have not learned a thing and who wished to buy at the Jew Schwab’s to walk through her store and enter Schwab’s premises from the back. Your wife has proved thereby that she considers herself a Jew and that she thinks she can make fools of the political leadership and the authorities.

“I am not astonished that you were not enough of a man to put an end to this, since someone who admits that he has been happily married to a Jewess for twenty-five years shows that he is badly contaminated by this evil Jewish spirit. If, at the time, you were oblivious enough of your race to marry a Jewess against the warnings of your parents, you cannot expect today to have the right to ask that an exception be made for your Jewish wife.” After warning Kestler that his wife should not try to return, Kreisleiter Seller ended his letter with the appropriate flourish: “Your question regarding what should now happen to your wife is of as little interest to me as twenty-five years ago it was of interest to you what would become of the German people if everybody entered a marriage that defiled the race.”
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Seiler’s anti-Jewish fury was not shared by the majority of Germans. On November 10 a clear difference emerged from the outset between activists and onlookers on the streets of the large cities: “I myself,” the counselor of the British Embassy reported to his foreign minister a few days later, “and members of the staff were witnesses of the later stages of the excesses in Berlin, which lasted until well into the night of the 10th. Gangs of youths in plain clothes and armed with poles, hammers and other appropriate weapons were visiting the Jewish shops and completing the work of destruction, done in the early morning. In some cases the premises had been entirely looted, in others the stock in trade was only mishandled and scattered. And at one or two places a crowd was gaping in silent curiosity at the efforts of the owners to tidy up the
débris
. I especially noted the demeanor of the groups which followed each band of marauders. I heard no expression of shame or disgust, but, in spite of the complete passiveness of many of the onlookers, I did notice the inane grin which often inadvertently betrays the guilty conscience.”
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Whereas the British diplomat recognized the signs of a troubled conscience on the onlookers’ faces, the French chargé d’affaires perceived “silent condemnation” in the attitude of the people on the streets.
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The SD reports show widespread popular criticism of the violence and the damage caused during the pogrom. Some of the criticism, expressed even by people usually favorable to the regime, was motivated by practical considerations: the wanton destruction of property and the losses thus incurred not only by all Germans but also by the state. When news of the billion-mark fine imposed on the Jews was announced, and when official propaganda stressed the immense wealth still possessed by the Jews, the general mood improved.
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Sometimes, however, the reactions of the population were not negative at all. Thus, according to a SOPADE report of December 1938, “the broad mass of people has not condoned the destruction, but we should nevertheless not overlook the fact that there are people among the working class who do not defend the Jews. There are certain circles where you are not very popular if you speak disparagingly about the recent incidents. The anger was not, therefore, as unanimous as all that. Berlin: the population’s attitude was not fully unanimous. When the Jewish Synagogue was burning…a large number of women could be heard saying, ‘That’s the right way to do it—it’s a pity there aren’t any more Jews inside, that would be the best way to smoke out the whole lousy lot of them.’ No one dared to take a stand against these sentiments…. If there has been any speaking out in the Reich against the Jewish pogroms, the excesses of arson and looting, it has been in Hamburg and the neighboring Elbe district. People from Hamburg are not generally anti-Semitic, and the Hamburg Jews have been assimilated far more than the Jews in other parts of the Reich. They have intermarried with Christians up to the highest levels of officialdom and the wholesale and shipping trades.”
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How did people closer to Hitler who were neither committed party members nor “old-fashioned” conservatives react? In his memoirs, Albert Speer indicates a measure of unease, if only because of the material destruction and the “disorder”: “On November 10, driving to the office, I passed by the still smoldering ruins of the Berlin synagogues…. Today this memory is one of the most doleful of my life, chiefly because what really disturbed me at the time was the aspect of disorder that I saw on Fasanenstrasse: charred beams, collapsed façades, burned-out walls,…The smashed panes of shop windows offended my sense of middle-class order.”
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But even this lack of any human empathy compounded with later pseudo-candor demands some qualification. According to Speer’s recent biographer, Gitta Sereny, there was nothing about Kristallnacht in the early draft of Speer’s book, and it was only after the proddings of his publisher, Wolf Jobst Siedler, and of Hitler’s biographer Joachim Fest that Speer came up with his feelings of annoyance at the material damage.
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Thus, even a questionable but clever sincerity may have been entirely faked: Speer may simply not have felt anything at all, as was probably the case when he planned the eviction of Jewish tenants from their Berlin apartments. As for Speer’s secretary, Annemarie Kempf, she knew nothing and saw nothing: “I just never knew about it,” she declared, “I remember that someone was shot in an embassy abroad, and Goebbels gave speeches, and there was a lot of anger. But that’s all.”
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Again, however, even among these young technocrats the reactions were not all the same. Consider one of “Speer s men,” Hans Simon. “When [Kristallnacht] happened,” another witness later told Sereny, “Simon said: for people like that, I don’t work. And he resigned from the GBI [Generalbauinspektorat, or Construction Inspectorate General].”
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No criticism of the pogrom was publicly expressed by the churches. Only a month after the events, in a message to the congregations, did the Confessing Church make an oblique reference to the most recent persecutions, albeit in a peculiar way. After declaring that Jesus Christ was the “propitiation of our sins” and “also the propitiation for the sins of the Jewish people,” the message continued with the following words: ‘We are bound together as brethren with all the believers in Christ of the Jewish race. We will not separate ourselves from them, and we ask them not to separate themselves from us. We exhort all members of our congregations to concern themselves with the material and spiritual distress of our Christian brothers and sisters of the Jewish race, and to intercede for them in their prayers to God.’ The Jews as such were excluded from the message of compassion and, as has been noted, “the only reference to the Jewish people as a whole was a mention of their sin.”
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Some individual pastors did protest; we know of them mainly from brief mentions in surveillance reports. Thus the monthly report for November 1938 for Upper and Mid-Franconia notes laconically: “Pastor Seggel of Mistelgau, administrative district Bayreuth, expressed himself critically on the Day of Prayer and Repentance regarding the actions against the Jews. The State Police of Nuremberg-Fürth was informed.”
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The overall attitude of the Catholic Church was no different. Apart from Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg of Berlin’s St. Hedwig Cathedral, who declared on November 10 that “the temple which was burnt down outside is also the House of God,” and who later was to pay with his life for his public prayers for the Jews deported to the East,
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no powerful voice was raised. Quite to the contrary, Cardinal Faulhaber found it necessary to proclaim in his New Year’s Eve sermon, less than two months after the pogrom: “That is one advantage of our time; in the highest office of the Reich we have the example of a simple and modest alcohol- and nicotine-free way of life.”
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No open criticism (or even indirect protest) came from the universities. Some strong condemnations of the pogrom were committed to private correspondence and, probably, to the privacy of diaries. On November 24, 1938, the historian Gerhard Ritter wrote to his mother: “What we have experienced over the last two weeks all over the country is the most shameful and the most dreadful thing that has happened for a long time.”
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Ritter’s indignation, however, and the initiative that followed, paradoxically shed some light on the anti-Semitism that underlay the attitudes of the churches and the universities.