Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (5 page)

During the first years of the regime, however, there are indications of a somewhat unexpected moderation and even helpfulness on the part of big business in its dealings with non-Aryan firms. Pressure for business takeovers and other ruthless exploitation of the weakened status of Jews came mainly from smaller, midsized enterprises, and much less so, at least until the fall of 1937, from the higher reaches of the economy.
⁷⁷
Some major corporations even retained the services of Jewish executives for years. But some precautions were taken. Thus, although most Jewish board members of the chemical industry giant I. G. Farben stayed on for a while, the closest Jewish associates of its president, Carl Bosch, such as Ernst Schwarz and Edmund Pietrowski, were reassigned to positions outside the Reich, the former in New York, the latter in Switzerland.
⁷⁸

Highly visible Jews had to go, of course. Within a few months, the banker Max Warburg was excluded from one corporate board after another. When he was banished from the board of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, the dignitaries assembled to bid him good-bye were treated to a strange scene. As, in view of the circumstances, no one else seemed ready with a valedictory, the Jewish banker himself delivered a farewell address: “To our regret,” he began, “we have learned that you have decided to leave the board of the company and consider this decision irrevocable,” and he ended no less appropriately: “And now I would like to wish you, dear Mr. Warburg, a
calm old age
, good luck and many blessings to your family.”
⁷⁹

IV

When the Nazis acceded to power, they could in principle refer to the goals of their anti-Jewish policy as set down in the twenty-five-point party program of February 24, 1920. Points 4, 5, 6, and 8 dealt with concrete aspects of the “Jewish question.” Point 4: “Only members of the nation may be citizens of the State. Only those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. Accordingly no Jew may be a member of the nation.” Point 5: “Non-citizens may live in Germany only as guests and must be subject to laws for aliens.” Point 6: “The right to vote on the state’s government and legislation shall be enjoyed by the citizens of the state alone.” Point 8: “All non-German immigration must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who entered Germany after 2 August 1914 shall be required to leave the Reich forthwith.” Point 23 demanded that control of the German press be solely in the hands of Germans.
⁸⁰

Nothing in the program indicated ways of achieving these goals, and the failure of the April 1933 boycott is a good example of the total lack of preparation for their tasks among Germany’s new masters. But, at least in their anti-Jewish policy, the Nazis soon became masters of improvisation; adopting the main points of their 1920 program as short-term goals, they learned how to pursue them ever more systematically.

On March 9 State Secretary Hans-Heinrich Lammers conveyed a request from the Reich chancellor to Minister of the Interior Frick. He was asked by Hitler to take into consideration the suggestion of State Secretary Paul Bang of the Ministry of the Economy about the application of “a racial [
völkisch
] policy” toward East European Jews: prohibition of further immigration, cancellation of name changes made after 1918, and expulsion of a certain number of those who had not yet been naturalized.
⁸¹
Within a week Frick responded by sending instructions to all states (
Länder
):

In order to introduce a racial policy (
völkische Politik
), it is necessary to:

1. Oppose the immigration of Eastern Jews.
   
2. Expel Eastern Jews living in Germany without a residence permit.
   
3. Stop the naturalization of Eastern Jews.
   ⁸²
   

Bang’s suggestions were in line with Points 5 (on naturalization) and 8 (on immigration) of the 1920 party program. As early as 1932, moreover, both the German National Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Freiherr von Gayl and the Nazi Helmut von Nicolai had formulated concrete proposals regarding East European Jews,
⁸³
and a month before Frick issued his guidelines the Prussian Ministry of the Interior had already taken the initiative to cancel an order previously given to the police to avoid the expulsion of East European Jews who had been accused by the police of “hostile activities” but had lived in Germany for a long period.
⁸⁴
On July 14, 1933, these measures were enhanced by the Law for the Repeal of Naturalization and Recognition of German Citizenship, which called for the cancellation of naturalizations that had taken place between November 9, 1918, and January 30, 1933.
⁸⁵

The measures taken against the so-called Eastern Jews were overshadowed by the laws of April 1933.
⁸⁶
The first of them—the most fundamental one because of its definition of the Jew—was the April 7 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. In its most general intent, the law aimed at reshaping the entire government bureaucracy in order to ensure its loyalty to the new regime. Applying to more than two million state and municipal employees, its exclusionary measures were directed against the politically unreliable, mainly Communists and other opponents of the Nazis, and against Jews.
⁸⁷
Paragraph 3, which came to be called the “Aryan paragraph,” reads: “1. Civil servants not of Aryan origin are to retire….” (Section 2 listed exceptions, which will be examined later.) On April 11 the law’s first supplementary decree defined “non-Aryan” as “anyone descended from non-Aryan, particularly Jewish, parents or grandparents. It suffices if one parent or grandparent is non-Aryan.”
⁸⁸

For the first time since completion of the emancipation of the German Jews in 1871, a government, by law, had reintroduced discrimination against the Jews. Up to this point the Nazis had unleashed the most extreme anti-Jewish propaganda and brutalized, boycotted, or killed Jews on the assumption that they could somehow be identified as Jews, but no formal disenfranchisement based on an exclusionary definition had yet been initiated. The definition as such—whatever its precise terms were to be in the future—was the necessary initial basis of all the persecutions that were to follow.
⁸⁹

Wilhelm Frick was at the immediate origin of the Civil Service Law; he had already proposed the same legislation to the Reichstag as far back as May 1925. On March 24, 1933, he submitted the law to the cabinet. On March 31 or April 1, Hitler probably intervened to support the proposal. The atmosphere surrounding the boycott undoubtedly contributed to the rapid drafting of the text. Although the scope of the law was general, the anti-Jewish provision represented its very core.
⁹⁰

The definition of Jewish origin in the Civil Service Law was the broadest and most comprehensive, and the provisions for assessment of each doubtful case the harshest possible. In the elaboration of the law we find traces of the anti-Semitic and racial zeal of Achim Gercke, the specialist for race research at the Ministry of the Interior,
⁹¹
a man who during his student days at Göttingen had started, with some help from faculty and staff, to set up a card index of all Jews—as defined by racial theory; that is, in terms of Jewish ancestry—living in Germany.
⁹²
For Gercke the anti-Jewish laws were not limited to their immediate and concrete object; they also had an “educational” function: Through them “the entire national community becomes enlightened about the Jewish question; it learns that the national community is a community of blood; for the first time it understands race thinking and, instead of an overly theoretical approach to the Jewish question, it is confronted with a concrete solution.”
⁹³

In 1933 the number of Jews in the civil service was small. As a result of Hindenburg’s intervention (following a petition by the Association of Jewish War Veterans that was also supported by the elderly Field Marshal August von Mackensen), combat veterans and civil servants whose fathers or sons had been killed in action in World War I were exempted from the law. Civil servants, moreover, who had been in state service by August 1, 1914, were also exempt.
⁹⁴
All others were forced into retirement.

Legislation regarding Jewish lawyers illustrates, even more clearly than the economic boycott, how Hitler maneuvered between contradictory demands from Nazi radicals on the one hand and from his DNVP allies on the other. By the end of March, physical molestation of Jewish jurists had spread throughout the Reich. In Dresden, Jewish judges and lawyers were dragged out of their offices and even out of courtrooms during proceedings, and, more often than not, beaten up. According to the
Vossische Zeitung
(quoted by the
Jüdische Rundschau
of March 28), in Gleiwitz, Silesia, “a large number of young men entered the court building and molested several Jewish lawyers. The seventy-year-old legal counselor Kochmann was hit in the face and other lawyers punched all over. A Jewish woman assessor was taken to jail. The proceedings were interrupted. Finally, the police had to occupy the building in order to put an end to the disturbances.”
⁹⁵
There were dozens of similar events throughout Germany. At the same time local Nazi leaders such as the Bavarian justice minister, Hans Frank, and the Prussian justice minister, Hanns Kerrl, on their own initiative announced measures for the immediate dismissal of all Jewish lawyers and civil servants.

Franz Schlegelberger, state secretary of the Ministry of Justice, reported to Hitler that these local initiatives created an entirely new situation and demanded rapid legislation to impose a new, unified legal framework. Schlegelberger was backed by his minister, DNVP member Franz Gürtner. The Justice Ministry had prepared a decree excluding Jewish lawyers from the bar on the same basis—but also with the same exemptions regarding combat veterans and their relatives, and longevity in practice, as under the Civil Service Law. At the April 7 cabinet meeting Hitler unambiguously opted for Gürtner’s proposal. In Hitler’s own words: “For the moment…one has to deal only with what is necessary.”
⁹⁶
The decree was confirmed the same day and made public on April 11.

Because of the exemptions, the initial application of the law was relatively mild. Of the 4,585 Jewish lawyers practicing in Germany, 3,167 (or almost 70 percent) were allowed to continue their work; 336 Jewish judges and state prosecutors, out of a total of 717, were also kept in office.
⁹⁷
In June 1933 Jews still made up more than 16 percent of all practicing lawyers in Germany.
⁹⁸
These statistics should, however, not be misinterpreted. Though still allowed to practice, Jewish lawyers were excluded from the national association of lawyers and listed not in its annual directory but in a separate guide; all in all, notwithstanding the support of some Aryan institutions and individuals, they worked under a “boycott by fear.”
⁹⁹

Nazi rank-and-file agitation against Jewish physicians did not lag far behind the attacks on Jewish jurists. Thus, for example, according to the March 2
Israelitisches Familienblatt
, an SS physician, Arno Hermann, tried to dissuade a woman patient from consulting a Jewish physician named Ostrowski. The Physicians’ Honor Tribunal that heard Ostrowski’s complaint condemned Hermann’s initiative. Thereupon Leonardo Conti, the newly appointed Nazi commissioner for special affairs in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, violently attacked the Honor Tribunal’s ruling in an article published in the
Völkischer Beobachter
. In the name of the primacy of “inner conviction” and “world view,” Conti argued that “every nonde-generate woman must and will internally shrink from being treated by a Jewish gynecologist; this has nothing to do with racial hatred, but belongs to the medical imperative according to which a relation of mutual understanding must grow between spiritually related physicians and patients.”
¹⁰⁰

Hitler was even more careful with physicians than with lawyers. At the April 7 cabinet meeting, he suggested that measures against them be postponed until an adequate information campaign could be organized.
¹⁰¹
At this stage, after April 22, Jewish doctors were merely barred de facto from clinics and hospitals run by the national health insurance organization, with some even allowed to continue to practice there. Thus, in mid-1933, nearly 11 percent of all practicing German physicians were Jews. Here is another example of Hitler’s pragmatism in action: Thousands of Jewish physicians meant tens of thousands of German patients. Disrupting the ties between these physicians and a vast number of patients could have caused unnecessary discontent. Hitler preferred to wait.

On April 25 the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities was passed. It was aimed exclusively against non-Aryan pupils and students.
¹⁰²
The law limited the matriculation of new Jewish students in any German school or university to 1.5 percent of the total of new applicants, with the overall number of Jewish pupils or students in any institution not to exceed 5 percent. Children of World War I veterans and those born of mixed marriages contracted before the passage of the law were exempted from the quota. The regime’s intention was carefully explained in the press. According to the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
of April 27: “A self-respecting nation cannot, on a scale accepted up to now, leave its higher activities in the hands of people of racially foreign origin…. Allowing the presence of too high a percentage of people of foreign origin in relation to their percentage in the general population could be interpreted as an acceptance of the superiority of other races, something decidedly to be rejected.”
¹⁰³