The Coming of the Third Reich (8 page)

Towards the end of 1889, a Berlin primary school headmaster, Hermann Ahlwardt, was facing the prospect of financial ruin. Born in 1846 into an impoverished family in Pomerania, he found the income he earned in his lowly position in the Prussian educational hierarchy too little to cover his considerable daily living expenses. In desperation, he committed a crime that seemed almost deliberately calculated to shock the sensibilities of his superiors: he stole money from the funds collected to pay for the children’s Christmas party at his school. Soon enough, his misdemeanour was discovered and he was dismissed from his post. This deprived him of his last remaining source of income. Many people would have been crushed by these disasters and overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and remorse. But not Hermann Ahlwardt. ‘The headmaster’, as he soon came to be known by the general public, decided to go onto the offensive. Looking around for someone to blame for his misfortunes, his attention quickly focused on the Jews.
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Germany’s Jewish community at this time was a highly acculturated, successful group distinguished from other Germans mainly by its religion.
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In the course of the nineteenth century, civil disabilities attaching to non-Christians in the German states had gradually been removed, much as formal religious discrimination in other countries had been abolished - for example, in Britain through Catholic Emancipation in 1829. The last remaining legal impediments to full and equal legal rights were swept away with German unification in 1871. Now that civil marriage had been introduced in place of religious ceremonies all over Germany, the number of intermarriages between Jews and Christians began to grow rapidly. In Breslau, for instance, there were 35 Jewish-Christian marriages for every 100 purely Jewish marriages by 1915, compared with only 9 in the late 1870s. Very few of the Christian partners in such marriages came from the families of converted Jews themselves, and the marriages were scattered right across the social scale. In 1904, 19 per cent of Jewish men in Berlin and 13 per cent of Jewish women married Christian partners. In Düsseldorf, a quarter of all Jews who married had Christian partners in the mid-1900s, rising to a third by 1914. By the eve of the First World War, there were 38 intermarriages for every 100 purely Jewish marriages; in Hamburg the figure was as high as 73. Jews also began to convert to Christianity in growing numbers; 11,000 converted in the first seventy years of the nineteenth century and 11,500 in the remaining three decades. Between 1880 and 1919, some 20,000 German Jews were baptized. Success was slowly dissolving the identity of the Jewish community as an enclosed religious group.
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The 600,000 or so practising Jews who lived in the German Empire were a tiny religious minority in an overwhelmingly Christian society, constituting around 1 per cent of the population as a whole. Excluded for centuries from traditional sources of wealth such as landowning, they remained outside the ranks of the Reich’s establishment as informal social discrimination continued to deny them a place in key institutions such as the army, the universities and the top ranks of the civil service; indeed, their access to such institutions actually declined in the 1890s and 1900s.
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Converted Jews suffered sufficiently from everyday antisemitism for many of them to change their names to something more Christian-sounding.
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As many as 100,000 German Jews reacted to discrimination in the nineteenth century by emigrating, notably to the United States; but most stayed, particularly as the economy began to boom towards the end of the century. Those who remained were concentrated in the larger towns and cities, with a quarter of Germany’s Jews living in Berlin by 1910, and nearly a third by 1933. Within these cities they clustered into particular districts; nearly half of Hamburg’s Jews lived in the two middle-class precincts of Harvestehude and Rotherbaum in 1885, nearly two-thirds of Frankfurt’s Jews in four of the city’s fourteen precincts in 1900; 70 per cent of Berlin’s Jews lived in five central and western districts, most of them overwhelmingly middle class, by 1925. Even in the cities with the largest Jewish populations - Berlin, Breslau and Frankfurt - they constituted a very tiny minority, making up no more than 4.3 per cent, 6.4 per cent and 7.1 per cent of the population respectively in 1871.
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Many Jews found a place in business and the professions. Alongside the great banking family of the Rothschilds there emerged many other important Jewish-owned finance houses, such as the banking firm of Bleichröder, to whom Bismarck entrusted his personal finances.
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New types of retailing such as the department stores, of which there were about 200 in Germany before the First World War, often had Jewish owners such as the Tietz family or the Wertheim brothers.
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Jewish men were particularly well represented in medicine, the law, science and research, university teaching, journalism and the arts.
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The Jewish community was turning slowly from an ostracized religious minority into one ethnic group among many in an increasingly multi-cultural society, alongside other minorities like Poles, Danes, Alsatians, Sorbs and the rest. Like the other groups, it had its own increasingly secular representative institutions, notably the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, founded in 1893. Unlike most of the other groups, however, it was generally economically successful, and, rather than having their own political party, its members tended to join, and sometimes take leading positions in, mainstream political parties, particularly on the left and in the centre of the political spectrum. Most Jews identified strongly with German nationalism, and if the liberal parties were particularly attractive to them, this was not least because of their unequivocal support for the creation of a German nation-state.
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By and large, then, the Jewish story in the late nineteenth century was a success story, and Jews were associated above all with the most modern and progressive developments in society, culture and the economy.
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It was developments such as these that made the Jews the target for disgruntled and unscrupulous agitators like Hermann Ahlwardt. For the disaffected and the unsuccessful, those who felt pushed aside by the Juggernaut of industrialization and yearned for a simpler, more ordered, more secure, more hierarchical society such as they imagined had existed in the not-too-distant past, the Jews symbolized cultural, financial and social modernity. Nowhere was this more the case than in Ahlwardt’s adopted city of Berlin. In 1873, the city’s economy was dealt a hammer-blow when the frantic round of spending and investing that had accompanied the euphoria of the Reich’s foundation came to an abrupt end. A worldwide economic depression, sparked by the failure of railway investments in the United States, brought widespread bankruptcies and business failures in Germany. Small businesses and workshops were particularly badly hit. In their incomprehension of the wider forces that were destroying their livelihood, those most severely affected found it easy to believe the claims of Catholic and conservative journalists that Jewish financiers were to blame.

As the depression went on, the journalists were joined by the court preacher Adolf Stocker. A man of humble origin who embarked on a crusade to win back the working classes from the influence of Social Democracy, Stocker founded a Christian Social Party that fought elections in the 1880s on an explicitly antisemitic platform. The new cause was aided by Max Libermann von Sonnenberg, who helped organize a national petition for the removal of Jews from public positions in 1880. Particularly extreme was Ernst Henrici, whose rhetoric was so vehement that it caused riots in the Pomeranian town of Neustettin, culminating in the burning of the local synagogue. It was towards this movement that Hermann Ahlwardt gravitated in the late 1880s, avenging his disgrace with a book blaming his financial misfortunes on the machinations of Jewish money-lenders and suggesting that Jews were all-powerful in German society. Unfortunately for him, the evidence he provided for his claims, in the shape of documents showing the German government to be in the pay of the Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder, turned out to have been written by Ahlwardt himself, and he was sentenced to four months in prison. No sooner was he released than he produced another set of sensational and equally unfounded claims, this time declaring that a Jewish arms manufacturer had supplied the army with rifles that were deliberately faulty, in order to further a Franco-Jewish conspiracy to undermine German military effectiveness. Predictably enough, these claims earned Ahlwardt another prison sentence, this time of five months.
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But he never served it. For in the meantime he had succeeded in persuading the peasant farmers of a deeply rural constituency in Brandenburg to elect him to the Reichstag. Travelling round their farms, he told them that their misfortunes, brought on them in fact by a world depression in agricultural prices, had been caused by the Jews, a distant and to them obscure religious minority who lived far away in the big towns and financial centres of Europe and the Reich. A seat in the Reichstag gave Ahlwardt parliamentary immunity. His success testified to the appeal of such demagogy to rural voters, and indeed other antisemites such as the Hessian librarian Otto Böckel succeeded in getting elected as well, not least by offering the peasants concrete measures such as co-operative organizations in order to get over their economic difficulties. By the early 1890s the threat of such antisemites to the electoral hegemony of the German Conservative Party in rural districts was perceived to be so serious that the party itself, alarmed by a government policy that seemed likely to damage farming interests still further, voted onto its programme a demand for the combating of the ‘widely obtruding and decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life’ at its Tivoli conference in 1893.
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This proved in the end to be a turning-point in the fortunes of Germany’s motley collection of political antisemites. Although a serious attempt was made by another antisemitic agitator, Theodor Fritsch, to bring the various strands of political antisemitism together and direct the movement’s appeal towards the economically discontented urban lower middle class, the egotism of figures like Böckel prevented any real union from taking place, and the antisemites were riven by internecine disputes. Fritsch’s influence was to be exerted in another way. He continued to publish innumerable popular antisemitic tracts which were widely read, right up to and beyond his death in September 1933, by which time he was sitting in the Reichstag as a representative of the Nazi Party. Throughout the prewar years, however, he remained a marginal political figure. By the early 1900s, the antisemites had been undermined by the effective coalition of the Berlin Christian Social movement with the Conservative Party, and stymied in Catholic areas by the willingness of the Centre Party to engage in a similar kind of antisemitic rhetoric. Mavericks such as Böckel and Ahlwardt lost their seats, and their parties, together with the urban-based organizations of antisemites such as Fritzsch, faded away into nothingness. Ahlwardt himself alienated even other antisemites with the violence of his language. He left for the United States for a while, and on his return devoted himself to combating the evils of Freemasonry. In 1909 he was in prison again, this time for blackmail; evidently his continuing financial difficulties had driven him to attempt even more directly criminal solutions than before. He finally died, somewhat anticlimactically, in a traffic accident, in 1914.
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II

Ahlwardt was an extreme but in some ways not untypical representative of a new kind of antisemitism that was emerging in Germany and elsewhere in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. Traditional antisemitism focused on the non-Christian religion of the Jews, and derived its political power from biblical sanction. The New Testament blamed the Jews for Christ’s death, condemning them to perpetual obloquy by declaring that they had willingly agreed to let Christ’s blood be upon them and their descendants. As a non-Christian minority in a society governed by Christian beliefs and Christian institutions, the Jews were obvious and easy targets for popular hatred in times of crisis such as the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, when rampaging mobs all over Europe blamed the Jews for the mortality that afflicted so many of the population, and took their revenge in countless acts of violence and destruction. It was no accident that the history of modern antisemitism in Germany began with the court preacher Adolf Stocker. Christian hostility to the Jews provided a crucial launch-pad for modern antisemitism, not least because it often harboured a strong element of racial prejudice itself and was subsumed into racial antisemitism in a variety of ways. But by the late nineteenth century it was becoming increasingly out of date, at least in its purest, most traditional form, particularly as the Jews were ceasing to be an easily identifiable religious minority and were beginning to convert and marry into Christian society at an increasing pace. Searching for a scapegoat for their economic difficulties in the 1870s, lower-middle-class demagogues and scribblers turned to the Jews, not as a religious but a racial minority, and began to advocate not the total assimilation of Jews into German society, but their total exclusion from it.
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