Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (60 page)

128. “An dieser Stelle erklärte er noch, dass er in dem Falle eines Krieges auf allen Fronten, bereit zu allen Konsequenzen, sei.” Philippe Burrin,
Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust
(New York, 1994), pp. 48–49. In his book Burrin emphasizes the significance of Hitler’s threat in case of a war “on all fronts”—that is, in a situation similar to that of 1914–18. For Germany World War II became such a war, as the Russian campaign did not result in a rapid German victory. The relation between this situation and Hitler’s decision to exterminate the Jews will be discussed in volume 2 of
Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination
.

Chapter 5 The Spirit of Laws

1. Minister of Education…, decree, 13.9.1935, Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft u. Erziehung, microfilm MA–103/1, IfZ, Munich.

2. Klemperer,
Ich will Zeugnis ablegen
, vol. 1, p. 195.

3. Neliba,
Wilhelm Frick
, pp. 198ff.

4. For these various details see David Bankier,
The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism
(Oxford, 1992), pp. 43–44.

5. Neliba,
Wilhelm Frick
, pp. 200ff.

6. Goebbels,
Tagebücher
, part 1, vol. 2, p. 488.

7. For Lösener’s attitude see Bankier,
The Germans and the Final Solution
, p. 43.

8. Robert L. Koehl,
The Black Corps: The Structure and Power Struggles of the Nazi SS
(Madison, Wis., 1983), p. 102.

9. Bernhard Lösener, “Als Rassereferent im Reichsministerium des Innern,”
VfZ
3 (1961): 264ff.

10. Ibid., pp. 273–75.

11. Ibid., p. 276.

12. Ibid., p. 281.

13. For a thorough analysis see Noakes, “Wohin gehören die ‘Judenmischlinge’?” pp. 74ff.

14. Ibid.

15. Walk,
Das Sonderrecht
, p. 139.

16. Ibid.

17. Noakes, “Wohin gehören die ‘Judenmischlinge’?” pp. 85–86.

18. Walk,
Das Sonderrecht
, p. 139.

19. Führer’s Deputy Circular No 228/35, 2.12.1935, Stellvertreter des Führers (Anordnungen…), Db 15.02, IfZ, Munich.

20. Friedlander and Milton,
Archives of the Holocaust
, vol. 20,
Bundesarchiv of the Federal Republic of Germany, Koblenz and Freiburg
, pp. 28–30.

21. Führer’s Deputy Circular 2.12.1935, Stellvertreter des Führers (Anordnungen…), 1935, Db 15.02, IfZ, Munich.

22. Herbert A. Strauss, “Jewish Emigration from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses (I),”
LBIY
25 ([London] 1980): 317. Werner Cohn, in his 1988 study on “non-Aryan” Christians, also offers a thorough statistical analysis. He estimates the population of partial Jews at 228,000 in 1933, which could roughly correspond to the 200,000 estimate for 1935. See Werner Cohn, “Bearers of a Common Fate? The ‘Non-Aryan’ Christian ‘Fate Comrades’ of the
Paulus-Bund
, 1933–1939,”
LBIY
33 (1988): 350ff. H. W. Friedmann, of the
Paulus-Bund
, also evaluated the number of “non-Jewish non-Aryans” at 200,000, which according to him was considered much too low by the Racial Policy Office of the Party. See
Akten deutscher Bischöfe
, vol. 2,
1934–1935
, p. 133.

23. Dr. E. R——x, “Die nichtjüdischen Nichtarier in Deutschland,”
CV Zeitung
20, no. 1 (Beiblatt): 16 May 1935. I am grateful to Sharon Gillerman for drawing my attention to this article.

24. Bernhard Lösener and Friedrich U. Knost,
Die Nürnberger Gesetze
(Berlin, 1936), pp. 17–18.

25. Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke,
Kommentare zur deutschen Rassengesetzgebung
, vol. 1 (Munich, 1936).

26. Ibid., pp. 65–66.

27. The example given by Stuckart and Globke was obviously meant as the most extreme illustration of the principle that lay at the very basis of the Nuremberg Laws. Yet the manifest absurdity of determining race by religion must have been troublesome enough to induce the ministerial bureaucracy to issue at least one clarification. On November 26, 1935, a circular was issued by the Ministry of the Interior: “In assessing whether a person is Jewish or not, it is basically not the fact of belonging to the Jewish religious community that is decisive, but that of belonging to the Jewish race. However, in order to avoid difficulties in dealing with [individual] cases, it has been expressly decided that a grandparent who has belonged to the Jewish religion unquestionably belongs to the Jewish race; counter-evidence is not permitted.” Quoted in Noakes, “Wohin gehören die ‘Judenmischlinge’?” p. 84.

28. Stuckart and Globke,
Kommentare
, p. 5.

29. Burleigh and Wippermann,
The Racial State
, p. 49.

30. Ibid.

31. Adjutantur des Führers, microfilm MA–287, IfZ, and Munich.

32. Monthly Report, 8.12.1937,
Die Kirchliche Lage in Bayern nach den Regierungspräsidentenberichten 1933–1943
, vol. 2,
Regierungsbezirk Ober- und Mittelfranken
, ed. Helmut Witeschek (Mainz, 1967), p. 254.

33. Karl Haushofer, the founder of German geopolitics, was Hess’s teacher at the University of Munich, and by way of Hess he influenced parts of
Mein Kampf
regarding international affairs and world strategy; although himself a declared anti-Semite, Haushofer was married to a “half-Jewish” woman, Martha Mayer-Doss. From 1934 to 1938 Karl’s son, Albrecht, was employed by the foreign affairs agency “Office Ribbentrop”
—Dienststelle Ribbentrop
. For Karl’s and Albrecht’s attitudes to Judaism and the Jews, and for their personal situation in this respect, see Hans-Adolf Jacobsen,
Karl Haushofer: Leben und Werke
, 2 vols. (Boppard, 1979); and Ursula Laak-Michael,
Albrecht Haushofer und der Nationalsozialismus
(Stuttgart, 1974); for an overall interpretation see Dan Diner, “Grundbuch des Planeten: Zur Geopolitik Karl Haushofers,” in Dan Diner,
Weltordnungen: Über Geschichte und Wirkung von Recht und Macht
(Frankfurt am Main, 1993), pp. 131 ff.

34.
Akten der Parteikanzlei der NSDAP
, microfiches, 30100219–30100223, IfZ, Munich.

35. See Shlomo Aronson,
Reinhard Heydrich und die Frühgeschichte von Gestapo und SD
(Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 11–12; Werner Maser,
Adolf Hitler: Legende, Mythos, Wirklichkeit
(Munich, 1971), pp. 11ff.

36.
Akten der Parteikanzlei der NSDAP
(abstracts), part 1, vol. 2, p. 226.

37. Lothar Gruchmann, “Blutschutzgesetz und Justiz: Zu Entstehung und Auswirkung des Nürnberger Gesetzes vom 15 September 1935,”
VfZ
3 (1983): 419.

38.
Akten der Parteikanzlei der NSDAP
(abstracts), part 1, vol. 1, p. 55. On various levels, German racial laws and racial discrimination continued to be a source of difficulties in the relations between the Reich and numerous countries. Thus, according to a 1936 report from the German legation in Bangkok, discriminatory measures were applied to “colored” passengers (Japanese, Chinese, and Siamese, among others) on German ships in the Far East. The Ministry of Transportation in Berlin requested German shipping companies to be aware of the negative consequences of such measures. Ibid., p. 178. During the same year the Wilhelmstrasse had to assuage the worries of Egyptian authorities: There were no obstacles to the marriage of a German non-Jewish woman with an Egyptian non-Jewish man; as for the difficulties regarding the marriage of non-Jewish German men with non-Jewish foreign women, they were of a general nature and in no way discriminated against Egyptians. Ibid., part 2, vol. 3, p. 108. All in all, various states in the Middle East felt targeted by German legislation regarding non-Aryans, despite all efforts of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. Ibid., p. 109. Turkey was placated by a German declaration that the Turks were of “related racial stock,” but the ruling as far as other Middle Eastern nations were concerned was not clear at all. Ibid., p. 104.

39. Ibid., part 1, vol. 2, p 168.

40. For a strong affirmation of the primacy of the wider biological vision, and for the victimization of women that it implied, see, in particular, Bock,
Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus;
regarding the 1935 laws see particularly pp. 100–103. In her more recent writings Gisela Bock has formulated positions closer to those presented here. See Gisela Bock, “Krankenmord, Judenmord und nationalsozialistische Rassenpolitik,” in Frank Bajohr et al., eds.,
Zivilisation und Barbarei: die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne
(Hamburg, 1991), pp. 285ff. and particularly pp. 301–3. Throughout the twelve years of the Nazi regime, a number of university research institutes were bolstering the racial policies with so-called scientific data: The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Biology in Berlin; the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography at Breslau University; the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene at Frankfurt University; the Racial-Biological Institutes at Königsberg and Hamburg Universities; the Thüringian Center for Racial Questions, linked to Jena University; and the Research Institute in Hereditary Biology at Alt-Rhese in Mecklenburg. Klaus Drobisch et al.,
Juden unterm Hakenkreuz: Verfolgung und Ausrottung der deutschen Juden 1933–1945
(Frankfurt am Main, 1973), pp. 162–63.

41. For the beginning of this story see chapter 1, pp. 33ff.

42. Mommsen, “Die Geschichte,” p. 352.

43. Ibid., pp. 353–57.

44. For the inquiry and the quotes see Noakes, “The Development of Nazi Policy,” pp. 299ff.

45. Ibid., pp. 300–301.

46. Ursula Büttner, “The Persecution of Christian-Jewish Families in the Third Reich,”
LBIY
34 (1989): 277–78.

47. Adam,
Hochschule und Nationalsozialismus
, p. 117.

48. Cohn, “Bearers of a Common Fate?” pp. 360–61.

49. Müller,
Hitler’s Justice
, pp. 99–100.

50. Ibid., pp. 100–101.

51. Ibid., pp. 101–2.

52. I am using the title of Klaus Theweleit’s study,
Male Fantasies
, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, Minn., 1987–89).

53. Noam and Kropat,
Juden vor Gericht
, pp. 125–27.

54. Müller,
Hitler’s Justice
, p. 102–3.

55.
Akten der Parteikanzlei
, microfiche No. 031575, IfZ, Munich.

56. See Götz von Olenhusen, “Die ‘Nichtarischen’ Studenten,” note 52, and also Michael H. Kater, “Everyday Anti-Semitism in Prewar Nazi Germany: The Popular Bases,”
Yad Vashem Studies
16 (1984): 150.

57. Adolf Diamant,
Gestapo Frankfurt am Main
(Frankfurt am Main, 1988), p. 91.

58. Robert Gellately,
The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing the Racial Policy 1933–1945
(Oxford, 1990).

59. Ibid., p. 164.

60. Ibid., pp. 163–64.

61. Robert Gellately, “The Gestapo and German Society: Political Denunciations in the Gestapo Case Files,”
Journal of Modern History
60, no. 4 (December 1988): 672–74. According to Sarah Gordon, some evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, although in the thirties some
Rassenschänder
were first held in ordinary prisons (
Gefängnisse
), whereas the Jewish
Rassenschänder
were sent to the much harder forced-labor establishments (
Zuchthäser
), the fate of both categories of prisoners was ultimately the same. Sarah Gordon,
Hitler, Germans and the “Jewish Question
,” (Princeton, N.J., 1984), pp. 238ff.

62. Ministry of Justice, the Spokesman to all Justice press offices, 11.3.1936, Reichsjustizministerium, Fa 195/1936, IfZ, Munich.

63. Bankier,
The Germans and the Final Solution
, p. 77.

64. Ibid., p. 78.

65. Ibid., pp. 78–79.

66. Ibid., p. 79.

67. Richard Gutteridge, “German Protestantism and the Jews in the Third Reich,” in Kulka and Mendes-Flohr,
Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism
, p. 237. See also Gutteridge,
Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb!
pp. 153ff. and particularly pp. 156–58.

68. Bankier,
The Germans and the Final Solution
, p. 80.

69. Kulka, “Die Nürnberger Rassengesetze,” p. 602–3.

70. For this interpretation of the long-term impact of the laws on the population, see Drobisch,
Juden unterm Hakenkreuz
, p. 160.

71. Gestapa [the Gestap
a
was the central office of the Gestapo, in Berlin] to State police offices, 3.12.1935, Ortspolizeibehörde Göttingen, microfilm MA–172, IfZ, Munich.

72. Gestapa to Central Association of German Jews (CV) June 1, 1934, ibid.; State police Hannover, 16.8.1934, ibid.

73. Gestapa to all State police offices, 24.11.35, ibid.

74. Gestapa to all State police offices, 4.4.1936, ibid.

75. Gerlach,
Als die Zeugen schwiegen
, p. 166.

76. For this case see Friedlander and Milton,
Archives of the Holocaust
, vol. 11,
Berlin Document Center
, ed. Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (New York, 1992), part 1, pp. 210–22.

77.
Akten der Parteikanzlei
(abstracts), part 1, vol. 1, p. 121.

78. Friedlander and Milton,
Archives of the Holocaust
, vol. 11, part 1, pp. 210–22.

79. Abraham Margalioth, “The Reaction of the Jewish Public in Germany to the Nuremberg Laws,”
Yad Vashem Studies
12 (1977): 76.

80. Bankier, “Jewish Society Through Nazi Eyes 1933–1936,” pp. 113–14.

81. Margarete T. Edelheim-Mühsam, “Die Haltung der jüdischen Presse gegenüber der nationalsozialistischen Bedrohung,” in Robert Weltsch, ed.,
Deutsches Judentum: Aufstieg und Krise
(Stuttgart, 1963), p. 375.

82. Some Gestapo reports, such as the one emanating from Koblenz and dealing with October 1935, reported greater pessimism among the Jews and an urge to emigrate, also to Palestine. According to this report, the Jews did not believe in the possibility of staying in Germany and envisioned that “within approximately ten years the last Jew would have left Germany.” Heyen,
Nationalsozialismus im Alltag
, pp. 138–39.