Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (8 page)

Soon after he took power, and intent on signing a Concordat with the Vatican, Hitler tried to blunt possible Catholic criticism of his anti-Jewish policies and to shift the burden of the arguments onto the church itself. On April 26 he received Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück as delegate from the Conference of Bishops, which was meeting at the time. The Jewish issue did not figure on Berning’s agenda, but Hitler made sure to raise it on his own. According to a protocol drafted by the bishop’s assistant, Hitler spoke “warmly and quietly, now and then emotionally, without a word against the church and with recognition of the bishops: ‘I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc., because it recognized the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognized. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.’”
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The protocol does not record any response by Bishop Berning.

On the occasion of the ratification of the Concordat, in September 1933, Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli sent a note to the German charge d’affaires defining the church’s position of principle: “The Holy See takes this occasion to add a word on behalf of those German Catholics who themselves have gone over from Judaism to the Christian religion or who are descended in the first generation, or more remotely, from Jews who adopted the Catholic faith, and who for reasons known to the Reich government are likewise suffering from social and economic difficulties.”
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In principle this was to be the consistent position of the Catholic and the Protestant churches, although in practice both submitted to the Nazi measures against converted Jews when they were racially defined as Jews.

The dogmatic confrontation the Catholic hierarchy took up was mainly related to the religious link between Judaism and Christianity. This position found an early expression in five sermons preached by Cardinal Faulhaber during Advent of 1933. Faulhaber rose above the division between Catholics and Protestants when he declared: “We extend our hand to our separated brethren, to defend together with them the holy books of the Old Testament.” In Scholder’s words: “Faulhaber’s sermons were not directed against the practical, political anti-Semitism of the time, but against its principle, the racial anti-Semitism that was attempting to enter the Church.”
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Undoubtedly this was the intention of the sermons and the main thrust of Faulhaber’s argumentation, but the careful distinctions established by the cardinal could mislead his audience about his and the church’s attitude toward the Jews living among them.

“So that I may be perfectly clear and preclude any possible misunderstanding,” Faulhaber declared, “let me begin by making three distinctions. We must first distinguish between the people of Israel before and after the death of Christ. Before the death of Christ, during the period between the calling of Abraham and the fullness of time, the people of Israel were the vehicle of Divine Redemption…. It is only with this Israel and the early biblical period that I shall deal in my Advent sermons.” The cardinal then described God’s dismissal of Israel after Israel had not recognized Christ, adding words that may have sounded hostile to the Jews who did not recognize Christ’s revelation: “The daughters of Zion received their bill of divorce and from that time forth, Ahasuerus wanders, forever restless, over the face of the earth.” Faulhaber’s second theme now followed:

“We must distinguish between the Scriptures of the Old Testament on the one hand and the Talmudic writings of post-Christian Judaism on the other…. The Talmudic writings are the work of man; they were not prompted by the spirit of God. It is only the sacred writings of pre-Christian Judaism, not the Talmud, that the Church of the New Testament has accepted as her inheritance.

“Thirdly, we must distinguish in the Old Testament Bible itself between what had only transitory value and what had permanent value…. For the purpose of our subject, we are concerned only with those religious, ethical and social values of the Old Testament which remain as values also for Christianity.”
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Cardinal Faulhaber himself later stressed that, in his Advent sermons, he had wished only to defend the Old Testament and not to comment on contemporary aspects of the Jewish issue.
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In fact, in the sermons he was using some of the most common clichés of traditional religious anti-Semitism. Ironically enough, a report of the security service of the SS interpreted the sermons as an intervention in favor of the Jews, quoting both foreign newspaper comments and the Jewish Central Association’s newspaper, in which Rabbi Leo Baerwald of Munich had written: “We take modest pride that it is through us that revelation was given to the world.”
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Discussion of the Concordat with the Vatican was item 17 on the agenda of the July 14 cabinet meeting. According to the minutes, the Reich chancellor dismissed any debate about the details of the agreement. “He expressed the opinion that one should only consider it as a great achievement. The Concordat gave Germany an opportunity and created an area of trust which was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry.”
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This remark can hardly be interpreted as merely a political ploy aimed at convincing the other members of the government of the necessity of accepting the Concordat without debate, as the fight against world Jewry was certainly not a priority on the conservative ministers’ agenda. Thus a chance remark opens an unusual vista on Hitler’s thoughts, again pointing toward the trail of his obsession: the “developing struggle” against a global danger—world Jewry. Hitler, moreover, did indeed consider the alliance with the Vatican as being of special significance in this battle. Is it not possible that the Nazi leader believed that the traditional anti-Jewish stance of the Christian churches would also allow for a tacit alliance against the common enemy, or at least offer Nazism the advantage of an “area of trust” in the “developing struggle”? Did Hitler not in fact say as much to Bishop Berning? For a brief instant there appears to be an ominous linkage between the standard procedures of politics and the compulsions of myth.

II

The questionnaire addressed to university professors (in Germany they were civil servants) reached Hermann Kantorowicz, professor of the philosophy and history of law at the University of Kiel, on April 23, 1933. To the question about the racial origins of his grandparents, he replied: “Since there is no time to inquire as to which sense of the term ‘race’ is being utilized, I shall limit myself to the following declaration: as all four of my grandparents died a long time ago and the necessary measurements, etc., were never made, I am unable to ascertain scientifically (anthropologically) what racial group they belonged to. Understood in its common significance, their race was German, as they all spoke German as their mother tongue, which means that it was Indo-European or Aryan. Their race in the sense of the first supplementary decree to the Law of April 7, 1933, section 2, paragraph 1, sentence 3 was the Jewish religion.”
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One may wonder what made a greater impression on the official who received the filled-out form: the sarcasm or the thoroughness?

It was somewhat gratuitous to send the questionnaire to Kantorowicz, since Minister of Education Bernhard Rust, citing paragraph 3 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, had already dismissed him on April 14, along with a number of other, mainly Jewish, professors. Sixteen prominent names among them were published in the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
on that same day.
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During the year 1933, about twelve hundred Jews holding academic positions would be dismissed.
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In Göttingen, where some of the most illustrious members of the theoretical physics and mathematics faculties were Jews (or, in one instance, married to one), each of the three main figures chose a different response: Nobel laureate James Franck sent a public letter of resignation (published in the
Göttinger Zeitung
) but planned to stay in Germany, Max Born (who, after the war, would also receive a Nobel Prize in physics) left the university quietly, and Richard Courant decided to utilize the exception clauses of the law in order to keep his position. Within a few months, however, all three emigrated.
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In his letter Franck rejected the exemption granted to him as a war veteran because, in his words, “we Germans of Jewish origin are being treated like foreigners and like enemies of our country.” Franck’s letter led to a public declaration by forty-two of his Göttingen colleagues describing the Jewish physicist’s statement as an “act of sabotage” and expressing the hope that “the government would speed up the necessary cleansing measures.”
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At Tübingen old traditions and new impulses neatly converged. The number of Jewish faculty members dismissed was distinctly low—for a simple reason: No Jew had ever been appointed to a full professorship at this institution, and there were very few Jews among the lower-ranking appointees. Nonetheless, whoever could be expelled was expelled. Hans Bethe, a future Nobel Prize winner in physics, was told to go because of his Jewish mother; the philosophy professor Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich was dismissed on the pretext that he was not politically reliable, but in reality because his wife was of Jewish origin. The same fate almost befell the non-Jewish art historian Georg Weise. The suspicion that Weise’s wife was Jewish led to his dismissal, until unimpeachable documentary evidence of Frau Weise-Andrea’s Aryan origins was produced and led to Weise’s reinstatement.
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What happened in Freiburg seems paradigmatic. On April 1 the local Nazi paper,
Der Allemanne
, published lists of Jewish physicians, dentists, and so on, who were to be boycotted; some days later the same paper ran a list of Jewish members of the university medical faculty (the list had been provided by the head of psychiatry). In the meantime, on April 6, the Reich governor of Baden, Robert Wagner, moving ahead of decisions about to be taken in Berlin, ordered the dismissal of Jewish civil servants. On April 10 a delegation of Freiburg University deans and professors traveled to Karlsruhe to plead on behalf of the mayor of Freiburg, who was being threatened with dismissal on political grounds. During their meeting at the ministry, the delegation was reminded that dismissals of Jewish faculty members had to be carried out promptly. According to notes taken by the official in charge of university matters, “The professors promised that the decree would be loyally implemented.” It was. On the same day the rector instructed the deans of all schools to dismiss all faculty members of Jewish religion or origin and, for verification, to obtain their signatures on the notices of dismissal. On April 12 the ministry in Karlsruhe was informed that “by 10
A.M.
the order had been completely fulfilled.” The notification to the Jewish members of the medical school faculty read in its entirety: “According to the order of the academic rectorate, I inform you that, with reference to Ministry Order No. A 7642, you are placed on indefinite leave. Signed: the Dean, Rehn.”
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In Heidelberg, where the number of professors of Jewish origin was particularly significant, there were attempts at procrastination by the academic senate and the rector, but to no avail. At the beginning of the summer semester of 1933, forty-five “non-Aryans” were still teaching; by August of the same year, only twenty-four were left (those who benefited from the various exception clauses).
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No organized or individual protests were recorded.

The attitude of some of the privileged non-Aryan scholars was often ambiguous—or worse. On April 25 the Kaiser Wilhelm Society administration in Berlin had been notified by the Ministry of the Interior that all Jewish and half-Jewish department heads and staff members had to be dismissed; directors of institutes were exempted from this measure. Fritz Haber, a Jew and a Nobel laureate, who would have had to dismiss three of his four department heads and five of his thirteen staff members, resigned on April 30. “The other directors (including those who were themselves Jewish) reported their Jewish employees according to instructions.”
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Among those who thus conformed, the Jews Jakob Goldschmidt and Otto Meyerhof, and the half-Jewish Otto Warburg, were the most prominent. For the geneticist Goldschmidt, “Nazism was preferable to Bolshevism,” and Otto Warburg, it seems, thought the regime would not last beyond 1934,
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a belief that did not hamper his retaining his position throughout the whole Nazi period. Warburg’s case was strange indeed. His cancer research was so highly valued by the Nazis—apparently even by Hitler himself—that in 1941, when the possibility of dismissal arose because of his half-Jewish origins, he was turned into a quarter Jew on Göring’s instructions.
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As for Meyerhof, he apparently tried to shield some of his Jewish employees, only to be denounced by his codirector, Professor Richard Kuhn.
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He emigrated in 1938.

It seems, therefore, safe to suggest that when, in January 1934, on the anniversary of the foundation of the German Empire, the Göttingen professor of ancient history Ulrich Karstedt declared that “one should not grumble…because in a Jewish shop a window pane has been smashed or because the daughter of the cattle dealer Levi was refused admission to a student corporation,”
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he was making something of an understatement, not only with regard to the general situation of the Jews in Germany but in the universities as well.
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