The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (45 page)

The first concrete measures against the Jews taken by the Nazis were concerned with economics rather than miscegenation. There was a brief boycott of Jewish businesses and shops – brief because of the domestic disorder and international outrage it threatened to unleash. In April 1933, under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, all Jewish civil servants, including judges, were removed from office, followed a month later by university lecturers. Victor
Klemperer was to be among the victims of this later purge, an experience he pondered in his diary:

March 10, 1933… It is astounding how easily everything collapses… wild prohibitions and acts of violence. And with it, on streets and radio, never-ending propaganda. On Saturday… I heard a part of Hitler’s speech in Kö nigsberg… I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling, of a priest… How long will I retain my professorship?

In fact, Klemperer managed to hang on to his chair for another two years. On May 2, 1935, however, the blow fell:

On Tuesday morning, without any previous notification – two sheets delivered by post. ‘On the basis of para 6 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service I have… recommended your dismissal’… At first I felt alternately dumb and slightly romantic; now there is only bitterness and wretchedness.

Five months later, to add insult to injury, he was barred from the university library reading room ‘as a non-Aryan’. What followed was a kind of whittling away of his rights as a citizen. The authorities successively confiscated his sabre – a souvenir of his military service – his typewriter, his driving licence and finally his car. He was banned from public parks. He was banned from smoking. Segregation took myriad forms: Jews were barred from swimming baths and specified park benches. Much more problematic, however, was what to do about Klemperer’s marriage to an Aryan woman.

Although Alfred Rosenberg and the lawyer Roland Freisler had expressed support for a legal ban on sexual relations between Jews and Aryans, in July 1934 the Supreme Court had refused to annul the marriage of an Aryan petitioner who had married a Jew in 1930 and who now wanted a divorce on racial grounds. The following year, however, supposedly spontaneous actions by party activists – including the public humiliation of women accused of sleeping with Jews – as well as police reports about Jewish employers molesting their Aryan female employees provided the government with a cue for action. In July 1935 the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick issued
a circular to registrars informing them that ‘the question of marriage between Aryans and Non-Aryans’ would soon be ‘regulated… through a general law’ and that until then all mixed marriages between ‘full Aryans’ and ‘full Jews’ should be postponed. In the same month, the head of the SS
Sicherheitsdienst
, Reinhard Heydrich, demanded ‘that in view of the disturbance among the population by the racial miscegenation of German women… the prevention of mixed marriages [should] be legally fixed but also extramarital sexual relations between Aryans and Jews should be punished’. At a rally in Berlin in August 1935 a giant banner proclaimed: ‘The Jews are our Misfortune. Women and Girls, the Jews are Your Ruin’. All this points to an orchestrated campaign instigated from above. The crucial legislation was duly drafted before or during the September 1935 Nuremberg party rally, following a call by the Reich Doctors’ leader Gerhard Wagner for action to prevent further ‘bastardization’ of the German people. In addition to laws stripping Jews of their citizenship and prohibiting them from raising the Nazi flag, a Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour was drafted which banned not only ‘marriages between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood’, but also extramarital sexual relations between them. Jews were also forbidden ‘to employ female citizens of German or kindred blood under 45 years of age as domestic servants’ – the implication being that Jewish masters habitually indulged in sexual abuse of their maids. The penalties for these new crimes of
Rassenschande
(racial defilement) included imprisonment and hard labour.

The new legislation was implemented with some zeal: altogether between 1935 and 1939 there were 1,670 prosecutions for alleged racial defilement. Roughly half of all cases arose in three cities: Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg. In Hamburg between 1936 and 1943 a total of 429 men were prosecuted, of whom 270 were Jews; altogether 391 of those accused were convicted and jailed. Overall, around 90 per cent of those charged were found guilty. At first (as the Gestapo complained), their sentences were relatively lenient, ranging from six weeks to one and a half years, but that soon changed. Half of all those sentenced in Hamburg received between two and four years, and some received six years. A typical case
was that of a Jewish man who was found guilty of continuing a long-standing relationship with an Aryan woman. He was sentenced to two and a half years’ penal servitude. Elsewhere, the courts went well beyond the letter of the law. In Frankfurt a fifty-six-year-old Jewish teacher was sentenced to ten months in prison for ‘molesting’ two Aryan women in a department store; it is not clear from the record whether he so much as laid a finger on them. To encourage such broad interpretations, but also to avoid ‘confront[ing] the courts with almost insuperable difficulties of proof and… necessitating] the discussion of the most embarrassing questions’, the Reich Supreme Court ruled that with respect to the Nuremberg Laws ‘the concept of sexual intercourse… includes all natural and unnatural intercourse, i.e., a part from intercourse itself, all sexual activities with a member of the opposite sex which are intended in place of actual intercourse to satisfy the sexual urges of at least one of the partners’.

The significance of the ‘racial defilement’ trials is twofold. They reveal the way that German lawyers and judges were willing to transform the crude prejudices of the Nazi leadership into a sophisticated system of discrimination and humiliation. But they also reveal how ordinary people instrumentalized anti-Semitic legislation for their own purposes. For the most important point to note about the prosecutions for ‘racial defilement’ is how most of them originated – not as the result of Gestapo investigations, but as the result of denunciations by members of the public.

Nazi Germany was a police state, increasingly under the control of Himmler and his henchman Heydrich,
*
but it was an understaffed
one. The twenty-two Gestapo officials in Würzburg, for example, were responsible for the entire population of Lower Franconia, which numbered more than 840,000 in 1939. The town of Krefeld was more closely supervised; around 170,000 people lived there, under the watchful eye of between twelve and fourteen Gestapo officers. In both towns, the Gestapo had to rely heavily on local people for tip-offs about breaches of the law. The surviving police files reveal that these were not in short supply. Of the eighty-four cases of ‘racial defilement’ investigated in Würzburg between 1933 and 1945, forty-five – more than half – originated with a denunciation from a member of the public. The character of these denunciations sheds vital light on popular attitudes towards the ‘Jewish Question’. A Jewish man and an Aryan woman were arrested because the woman’s estranged husband alleged they were having a sexual relationship; their accuser’s main motive seems to have been to get rid of his wife, but her alleged lover committed suicide in custody. An apparently mixed couple having a drink together were reported to the Gestapo because the man was blond-haired (both parties were in fact Jewish, so no charge could be pressed). In Krefeld the Gestapo were able to be more active: the proportion of cases involving Jews rose sharply from less than 10 per cent before 1936 to around 30 thereafter. Of these cases, some 16 per cent were decided by the courts; in over two-fifths of cases, however, the Gestapo sent the individuals concerned to concentration camps or imposed ‘protective custody’. Yet even in Krefeld more than two-fifths of the cases brought against Jews before the war were initiated by denunciations, a much higher proportion than for other cases, suggesting that denunciation was disproportionately directed against Jews.

Does this confirm the thesis that most ordinary Germans were anti-Semites? No. At most, denouncers amounted to just 2 per cent of the population. What it does suggest is that anti-Semitic legislation was a powerful weapon in the hands of a minority of Germans: the morally vacuous lawyers who drafted and implemented it, the Gestapo zealots who enforced it, and the odious sneaks who supplied the Gestapo with incriminating information. There was one major stumbling block for this unholy trinity, however. The legacy of decades of
intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was a substantial group of people who defied clear-cut racial categorization because they had only one Jewish parent, or fewer than four Jewish grandparents. Were they Jews? Characteristically, when he was presented with four alternative drafts of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, Hitler chose the least radical, but struck out a crucial sentence – ‘This law is only valid for full Jews’. This created the potential for a broad interpretation of the new law and was welcomed by the party rank-and-file at Nuremberg. The result was interminable arguments between the Ministry of the Interior and party representatives about degrees of Jewishness. While Frick was willing to exempt anyone with fewer than three Jewish grandparents from legal discrimination, Wagner wished to include those with just two Jewish grandparents as well, so that only ‘quarter Jews’ (with one Jewish grandparent) could be given the status of ‘Reich citizens’. The First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law, issued in November 1935, represented a victory for Frick, in that it defined a Jew as ‘anyone who is descended from at least three grandparents who were racially full Jews’ and ‘an individual of mixed Jewish blood (
Mischling
)’ as anyone ‘descended from one or two grandparents who were racially full Jews’. It also marked a retreat for the party’s racial theorists, in that the decree explicitly identified ‘membership of the Jewish religious community’ as the criterion for determining a grandparent’s race. However, someone with only two Jewish grandparents could still be categorized as a Jew if he or she belonged to the Jewish religious community, married another Jew or was the issue of a mixed marriage or sexual relationship which post-dated the Nuremberg Laws. And the power to distinguish between so-called ‘
Mischlinge
of the first degree’ (individuals with two Jewish grandparents) and those ‘of the second degree’ (one Jewish grandparent) was given to ‘racial experts’, who were empowered to take physical as well as religious factors into account. A further modification of the legal status of
Mischlinge
followed in December 1938, when a distinction was introduced between couples with children in which ‘the father is a German and the mother a Jewess’, those in which ‘the father is a Jew and the mother a German’ and those without children. Childless couples with
a Jewish male partner were ‘to be proceeded against as if they were full-blooded Jews’. There was an explicit incentive for the non-Jewish wives in such cases to divorce their husbands. In the end, however, bureaucratic inertia prevented the majority of German
Mischlinge
from being categorized as Jews. This was a source of considerable frustration to the likes of Richard Schulenburg,
Oberkriminalsekretär
of the Krefeld Gestapo, who thirsted to make his small part of the folk-community 100 per cent ‘Jew-free’s (
judenrein
).

The Nuremberg Laws, needless to say, were only a part of the Nazis’ efforts to preserve and enhance the biological purity of the Aryan race. Jews were not the only ‘alien’ group to be victims of escalating discrimination. The provisions of the Nuremberg Laws were also extended to Germany’s 30,000 Sinti and Roma – so-called gypsies – whose fate became the preoccupation of a Reich Central Office for the Fight against the Gypsy Nuisance, established as part of the Reich Criminal Police Office in 1938. The mentally ill were the first group to be subjected to compulsory sterilization under the terms of the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny. Between 1933 and 1945 at least 320,000 people were sterilized on the basis of this law, including sufferers from schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, deafness, deformity and even chronic alcoholism. In 1935 the law was amended to allow abortion up to the end of the second trimester for pregnant mentally ill women. Still Hitler was not content. As early as 1935, he told a senior Nazi medic that ‘if war should break out, he would take up the euthanasia question and implement it’. In fact, he did not even wait for the war. In July 1939 he initiated what became known as the
Aktion T-4.
It was, he said, ‘right that the worthless lives of seriously ill mental patients should be got rid of.’ Here, as with the persecution of the Jews and Gypsies, the regime encountered little popular resistance and some active support. In a poll of 200 parents of mentally retarded children conducted in Saxony, 73 per cent had answered ‘yes’ to the question: ‘Would you agree to the painless curtailment of the life of your child if experts had established that it was suffering from incurable idiocy?’ Some parents actually petitioned Hitler to allow their abnormal children to be killed. Apart from the Catholic
Bishop Clemens von Galen, whose sermons against the euthanasia programme in July and August 1941 led to a temporary halt in the killings, only a handful of other individuals openly challenged ‘the principle that you can kill “unproductive” human beings’. Others who objected turn out, on closer inspection, merely to have disliked the procedures involved. Some wished for formal legality – a proper decree and public ‘sentencing’; others (especially those living near the asylums) simply wanted the killing to be carried out less obtrusively.

Cleansing the
Volk
was a multifaceted undertaking. In 1937 the so-called Rhineland bastards were compulsorily sterilized by Gestapo Special Commission No. 3, after Göring had referred the matter to Dr Wilhelm Abel of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Heredity and Eugenics. Homosexuals were manifestly of no racial value; between 1934 and 1938 the number prosecuted annually under Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code rose by a factor of ten to 8,000. Since criminality was viewed as hereditary, those who broke the law were also targeted as asocial. The November 1933 Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals authorized the castration of sexual offenders.