by Ian Kershaw
Chiefly on account of foreign-policy sensitivities and economic precariousness, the regime had during 1934 reined in the violence against Jews which had characterized the early months of Nazi rule. Barbarity had merely subsided – and far from totally. Ferocious discrimination continued unabated. Intimidation was unrelenting. In some areas, like Streicher’s Franconia, the economic boycott remained as fierce as ever and the poisonous atmosphere invited brutal actions. In one of the worst incidents encountered, in spring 1934, a local pogrom led by the SA and whipping up a mob of over 1,000 people had brought a vicious assault on thirty-five Jews. Two Jews were so terrified that they committed suicide.155 Such a horrific explosion of violence was unusual at this time, even for Franconia. But it was the clearest indicator that any decline in the general scale of persecution was relative, less than universal, and likely to be temporary. Even so, the exodus of Jews fleeing from Germany slowed down markedly; some even came back, thinking the worst over.156 Then, early in 1935 with the Saar plebiscite out of the way, the brakes on antisemitic action began to be loosened. Written and spoken propaganda stoked the fires of violence, inciting action from party formations – including units of the Hitler Youth, SA, SS, and the small traders’ organization, N S – Hago – that scarcely needed encouragement. The Franconian Gauleiter, Julius Streicher, the most rabid and primitive antisemite among the party leaders, was at the forefront. Other Gauleiter – Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin, Wilhelm Kube of the Kurmark, Jacob Sprenger of Hesse, and Josef Grohé of Cologne-Aachen – also distinguished themselves by their antisemitic tirades.157 Party organs – particularly the newly-founded Der Judenkenner (The Jewish Expert) and Goebbels’s Der Angriff (both of which aped much of Der Stürmer’s style) – stirred up heated feeling against Jews and pressed for immediate action to fulfil the party’s programme.158 Streicher’s own quasi-pornographic newspaper, Der Stürmer, which had never ceased dispensing its poison despite frequent brushes even with Nazi authorities, now excelled itself in a new and intensified campaign of filth, centring upon endless stories of ‘racial defilement’. The newspaper was displayed in the notorious ‘Stürmer Cases’ in the streets and squares of cities, towns, and even villages in the backwaters. Posters advertising it could scarcely be missed. Sales quadrupled during 1935, chiefly on account of the support from local party organizations.159
The tone was changing at the very top. In March 1934, Heß had banned anti-Jewish propaganda by the NS-Hago, indicating that Hitler’s authorization was needed for any boycott.160 But at the end of April 1935, Wiedemann told Bormann that Hitler did not favour the prohibition, sought by some, of the anti-Jewish notice-boards – ‘Jews Not Wanted Here’ (or even more threatening versions) – on the roadside, at the entry to villages, and in public places.161 The notice-boards as a result now spread rapidly. Radicals at the grass-roots gleaned the obvious message from the barrage of propaganda and the speeches of party notables that they were being given the green light to attack the Jews in any way they saw fit.
The party leaders were, in fact, reacting to and channelling pressures emanating from radicals at the grass-roots of the Movement. The continuing serious disaffection within the ranks of the SA, scarcely abated since the ‘Röhm affair’, was the underlying impetus to the new wave of violence directed at the Jews. Feeling cheated of the brave new world they thought was theirs, alienated and demoralized, the young toughs in the SA needed a new sense of purpose.162 As internal SA reports indicated, they were also more than spoiling for a fight with their ideological enemies – Jews, Catholics, and capitalists. There was an expectation that, once the Saar plebiscite was out of the way, the true Nazi revolution – which the SA saw as derailed by conservatives – would regain its drive.163 Against the bastions of economic power, the nihilistic fanaticism of S A and party radicals had little chance, and was kept closely in check. Against the Catholic Church, the most dominant remaining ideological barrier against Nazism in large tracts of the country, radicals could engage in a protracted war of attrition but faced the enormous resilience of a powerful establishment as well as widespread unpopularity at the grass-roots. But against the Jews, the prime ideological target, given a green light from above, they encountered no barrier and, in fact, every encouragement. The feeling among party activists, and especially stormtroopers, summarized in one Gestapo report in spring 1935, was that ‘the Jewish problem’ had to be ‘set in motion by us from below’, and ‘that the government would then have to follow’.164
The instrumental value of the new wave of agitation and violence was made plain in reports from the Rhineland from Gauleiter Grohé of Cologne-Aachen, who thought in March and April 1935 that a new boycott and intensified attack on the Jews would help ‘to raise the rather depressed mood among the lower-middle classes (Mittelstandy).165 Grohé, an ardent radical in the ‘Jewish Question’, went on to congratulate himself on the extent to which party activism had been revitalized and the morale of the lower-middle class reinvigorated by the new attacks on the Jews.166 The new anti-Jewish wave was in the first instance, as such comments indicate, a release-valve allowing activists, frustrated and alienated by the evaporation of the revolutionary drive and purpose of the Movement, to let off steam at the expense of a disliked, unprotected, and brutally exposed minority.
Despite the aims of the Nazi programme, in the eyes of the Movement’s radicals little had been done by early 1935 to eradicate the Jews from German society. There was a good deal of feeling among fanatical antisemites that the state bureaucracy had deflected the party’s drive and not produced much by way of legislation to eliminate Jewish influence. The new wave of violence now led, therefore, to vociferous demands for the introduction of discriminatory legislation against the Jews which would go some way towards fulfilling the party’s programme. The state bureaucracy also felt under pressure from actions of the Gestapo, demanding retrospective legal sanction for its own discriminatory measures, such as its ban, independently declared, in February 1935 on Jews raising the swastika flag.167
Attempts to mobilize the apathetic masses behind the violent antisemitic campaign of the party formations backfired. Beyond committed Nazis, the mood – to go from Gestapo and other internal reports as well as those from the exiled Social Democrats’ (Sopade) underground network – was poor. The euphoria following national triumphs such as the return of the Saar and the reintroduction of military service was short-lived. The greyness of daily life returned all too soon for most ordinary citizens. Economic worries affecting different parts of the population, resentment among both Protestant and Catholic church-goers about the intensified attacks on the Churches, and antagonism towards local representatives of the party all contributed to the wide-ranging disaffection.168 Instead of galvanizing the discontented, however, the antisemitic wave merely fuelled already prominent criticism of the party. There was little participation from those who did not belong to party formations. Many people ignored exhortations to boycott Jewish shops and stores. And the public displays of violence accompanying the ‘boycott movement’, as Jews were beaten up by Nazi thugs and their property vandalized, met with wide condemnation.169 Not much of the criticism was on humanitarian grounds. Economic self-interest played a large part. So did worries that the violence might be extended to attacks on the Churches. The methods rather than the aims were attacked. There were few principled objections to discrimination against Jews. What concerned people above all were the hooliganism, mob violence, distasteful scenes, and disturbances of order.170
Accordingly, across the summer the violence became counter-productive, and the authorities felt compelled to take steps to condemn it and restore order. So heated was the mood in Munich, following riotous anti-Jewish ‘demonstrations’ in the city centre in the middle of May, that Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter of Munich-Upper Bavaria and Bavarian Minister of the Interior, went on the radio to denounce the ‘terror groups’ responsible. Wagner had, in fact, himself secretly instigated the action.171 Unruly scenes on Berlin’s
Kurfürstendamm on 15 July 1935, when Jewish shops had been vandalized and Nazi thugs had beaten up Jews, scandalized onlookers and led immediately to the dismissal – already long desired by Goebbels and the Berlin party – of the Berlin Police Chief Magnus von Levetzow. The last straw had been when a group of Jews had protested in the darkness of a Berlin cinema against an antisemitic film. Goebbels immediately persuaded Hitler, who had just returned from a few days’ holiday with the Propaganda Minister in Heiligendamm, a resort on the Baltic, to have Levetzow dismissed as police chief of the capital. He was replaced by Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, up to then police chief in Potsdam, of Saxon aristocratic descent, former head of the Berlin SA, with a reputation deeply sullied by scandal about his financial affairs and private life, but – compensating for everything – a radical antisemite who, the Propaganda Minister reckoned, would help him ‘make Berlin clean again’.172 Helldorf immediately had Jewish stores on the Kurfürstendamm closed. A week later, he banned ‘individual actions’ (Einzelaktionen) in the capital, blaming ‘provocateurs’ for the outrages.173 The terror on the streets had done its job for the time being. It had pushed the discrimination still further. The radicalization demanded action from above.
At last, Hitler, silent on the issue throughout the summer, was forced to take a stance. Schacht had warned him in a memorandum as early as 3 May of the economic damage being done by combating the Jews through illegal means.174 Hitler had reacted at the time only by commenting that everything would turn out all right as matters developed. But now, on 8 August, he ordered a halt to all ‘individual actions’, which Heß relayed to the party the following day.175 On 20 August, Minister of the Interior Frick took up Hitler’s ban in threatening those continuing to perpetrate such acts with stiff punishment.176 The stage had now been reached where the state authorities were engaged in the repression of party members seeking to implement what they knew Hitler wanted and what was a central tenet of party doctrine. It was little wonder that the police, increasingly compelled to intervene against party activists engaged in violent outrages against Jews, also wanted an end to the public disturbances.177 Hitler stood aloof from the fray but uneasily positioned between the radicals and the conservatives. His instincts, as ever, were with the radicals, whose bitter disappointment at what they saw as a betrayal of Nazi principles was evident.178 But political sense dictated that he should heed the conservatives. Led by Schacht, these wanted a regulation of antisemitic activity through legislation. This in any case fed into growing demands within the party for tough discriminatory measures, especially against ‘racial defilement’. Out of the need to reconcile these conflicting positions, the Nuremberg Laws emerged.
Shrill demands for harsh legislation against the Jews had mounted sharply in spring and summer 1935. Reich Minister of the Interior Frick had appeared in April to offer the prospect of a new, discriminatory law on rights of state citizenship, but nothing had emerged to satisfy those who saw a central feature of the Party Programme still not implemented after two years of Nazi rule.179 Party organs demanded in June that Jews be excluded from state citizenship and called for the death penalty for Jews renting property to ‘Aryans’, employing them as servants, serving them as doctors or lawyers, or engaging in ‘racial defilement’.180
The issue of banning intermarriage and outlawing sexual relations between Jews and ‘Aryans’ had by this time gone to the top of the agenda of the demands of the radicals. Racial purity, they claimed, could only be attained through total physical apartheid. Even a single instance of sexual intercourse between a Jew and an ‘Aryan’, announced Streicher, was sufficient to prevent the woman from ever giving birth to a ‘pure-blooded Aryan’ child.181 ‘Defilement’ of ‘German’ girls through predatory Jews, a constant allegation of the vicious Stürmer and its imitators, had by now become a central theme of the anti-Jewish agitation.
As early as 1930, Frick had introduced a draft bill ‘for the Protection of the German Nation’ in the Reichstag, threatening draconian punishment for engaging in sexual relations with Jews and ‘coloured races’. After 1933, the idea had been taken up by National Socialist lawyers, but Reich Justice Minister Gürtner had rejected as late as June 1934 the practicality of legislation for ‘racial protection’.182 Even so, the judicial authorities could advance only tactical, not principled, arguments.
The clamour for legislation in 1935 could have come as little surprise. Nazi doctors joined in – the Reich Doctors’ Leader Gerhard Wagner at their forefront. A meeting of physicians in Nuremberg had sent a telegram to Frick in December 1934 demanding ‘the heaviest punishment’ for any attempted sexual contact between a ‘German woman’ and a Jew. Only this way could German racial purity be maintained and ‘further Jewish-racial poisoning and pollution of German blood prevented’.183 Streicher spoke in May 1935 of a forthcoming ban on marriages between Jews and Germans. In early August, Goebbels proclaimed that such marriages would be prohibited. Meanwhile, activists were taking matters into their own hands. SA men demonstrated in front of the houses of newly-weds where one partner was Jewish.184 Even without a law, officials at some registry offices were refusing to perform ‘mixed marriages’.185 Since they were not legally banned, others carried out the ceremony. Still others informed the Gestapo of an intended marriage. The Gestapo itself pressed the Justice Ministry for a speedy regulation of the confused situation. A further impulse arose from the new Defence Law of 21 May 1935, banning marriage with ‘persons of non-Aryan origin’ for members of the newly formed Wehrmacht. By July, bowing to pressure from within the Movement, Frick had decided to introduce legislation to ban ‘mixed marriages’. Some form of draft bill had already been worked upon in the Justice Ministry. The delay in bringing forward legislation largely arose from the question of how to deal with the ‘Mischlinge’ – those of partial Jewish descent.186
Frick had told party members in early August that the ‘Jewish Question’ would be ‘slowly but surely solved by legal means’.187 On 18 August, in a speech in Königsberg, which, despite censorship in the official published version of those sections attacking the antisemitic violence, obtained wide circulation inside and outside Germany, Schacht had indicated that anti-Jewish legislation in accordance with the Party Programme was ‘in preparation’ and had to be regarded as a central aim of the government.188
Schacht summoned state and party leaders on 20 August to the Ministry of Economics to discuss the ‘Jewish Question’. At a packed meeting, lasting almost two hours, Frick gave an account of work being undertaken in his ministry to prepare legislation in line with the Party Programme. Adolf Wagner, representing Heß, spoke of popular pressure for legislation and said that he too disapproved of the ‘excesses’ (which, in Munich, he had been instrumental in stimulating).189 Nevertheless, the state had to take account of antisemitic public feeling by pursuing the exclusion of Jews from economic life through ‘legal, if gradual, measures’. He demanded preliminary legal measures to quell the unrest: the exclusion of Jews in the placing of public contracts, and the prohibition of establishment of new Jewish businesses. Schacht said he agreed in principle with such measures.190 Gürtner spoke of the need to combat the impression that the leadership was happy to turn a blind eye to breaches of the law since political considerations prevented it from the action it wanted to take. Johannes Popitz, the Prussian Finance Minister, pleaded for the government to set a specific limit to the treatment of Jews – it did not matter where, he stated – but then hold to it. Schacht himself fiercely attacked the party’s violent methods as causing great harm to the economy and rearmament drive, concluding that it was vital to carry out the party’s programme, but only through legislation. He agreed with Wagner’s suggestion that such legislation should apply only to ‘full Jews’ (Volljuden) to avoid delay once more through the question of including Mischlinge. The meeting ended by agreeing that party and state should combine to bring suggestions to the Reich government ‘about desirable measures’.191
An account of th
e meeting prepared for the State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry commented:
It emerged from the discussion that the Party’s general programme in respect of the Jews was substantially adhered to but that the methods employed were subjected to criticism. The unbridled expansion of antisemitic activities in every conceivable sphere of life on the part of irresponsible organizations or private individuals should be stopped by legal measures. At the same time, the Jews should be subjected to special legislation in certain definite spheres, above all economic, but apart from this they should retain their freedom of movement.
An overall and uniform objective for Germany’s policy towards the Jews did not emerge from the discussion. The arguments put forward by the Ministers responsible for the various Departments merely went to show that the Jewish question represented an obstacle to the performance of their political duties… In the main, the departmental representatives drew attention to the practical disadvantages for their departmental work, whilst the Party justified the necessity for radical action against the Jews with politico-emotional and abstract ideological considerations… 192
For all the vehemence of his arguments, Schacht had not wanted to, or felt able to, challenge the principle of excluding the Jews. ‘Herr Schacht did not draw the logical conclusion,’ stated the Foreign Ministry’s report, ‘and demand a radical change in the Party’s Jewish programme, nor even in the methods of applying it, for instance a ban on Der Stürmer. On the contrary, he kept up the fiction of abiding a hundred per cent by the Jewish programme.’193 Schacht’s meeting had clearly highlighted the differences between party and state, between radicals and pragmatists, between fanatics and conservatives. There was no fundamental disagreement about aims; merely about methods. However, the matter could not be allowed to drag on indefinitely. A resolution had to be found in the near future.