The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Goebbels was devastated. ‘One of the biggest disappointments of my life,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I don’t completely believe in Hitler any more. That’s the terrible thing: I’ve lost my inner conviction … I despair!’48 But Hitler, recognizing the value of Goebbels to the Nazi cause, moved swiftly to soothe his ego. He invited him to Munich, allowed him the use of his car and driver, spent time with him personally and praised him. Hitler also spoke in general terms about his own vision for Germany in a collection of feel-good terms that rekindled Goebbels’ enthusiasm. ‘I love him [Hitler],’ he subsequently wrote in his diary. ‘He has thought it all through … I bow to the greater – the political mastermind!’49

  Hitler had managed to manoeuvre Goebbels – a person he clearly valued – away from policies that he disagreed with and back to a position of unquestioning support. Moreover, he had achieved this without a personal confrontation. Hitler never berated Goebbels directly. He didn’t attempt to best him in debate. He manipulated Goebbels by first giving a speech critical of his beliefs and then repairing the damage with a charm offensive. It is not the conventional image that many people have of Hitler as a leader. Taking their impression primarily from the antagonistic tone of his speeches captured on old black and white newsreels, they believe that he must have been an angry, rude and aggressive boss. But he was capable, as this incident demonstrates, of subtle man-management. Not only that, his dealings with Goebbels illustrated how Hitler’s priority was always to ensure that his own ultimate authority was not challenged by his subordinates. He was much less concerned with the details of policy. By focusing on a broad ‘vision’ of the Germany he wanted to create, he could leave his followers to work out the specifics of how this vision could be crafted in practice, and then correct them later if he disagreed strongly with the methodology they had devised.

  There was another important part of Hitler’s leadership technique that Goebbels also encountered around this time. Hitler rarely defined an individual’s exact responsibilities within the party, and so conflict between ambitious Nazis was inevitable. For example, after Goebbels had been appointed head of Nazi propaganda he found that other people still exercised control over aspects of radio, film and the training of speakers. He had to scheme and fight to gather as many of these strands to himself as he could. All this created immense dynamism within the party, especially since Hitler rarely intervened in disputes about areas of responsibility between his subordinates. As we shall see, this style of leadership would have considerable impact on the way the Holocaust developed.

  In 1928, Hitler wrote a new volume of his thoughts. This time he focused almost exclusively on foreign affairs. The so-called Second Book was never published in his lifetime, but it nonetheless offers an insight into his developing political beliefs. What it tells us, in essence, is how Hitler used ‘race’ as a guide to foreign policy.

  Hitler asked why it was that America so thrived as a nation, while Russia remained relatively backward; and he saw the answer in the question of race. He argued that because the ‘best blood’ from Europe had emigrated to America, it was not surprising that the country had prospered. On the other hand, since ‘Jewish-Bolshevist’ Russia was filled with people of lesser racial value it could never rise high as a nation.

  Yet again, Hitler placed the Jews centre stage. ‘The ultimate goal of the Jewish struggle for survival is the enslavement of productively active peoples,’50 he wrote. ‘His ultimate aim is the denationalization and chaotic bastardization of the other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the highest, and domination over this racial mush … The Jewish international struggle will therefore always end in bloody Bolshevization …’51

  In his Second Book Hitler said once again that Germany needed more land in order to prosper, and that this new territory would have to be gained by force: ‘One does not obtain freedom through begging or cheating, or through labor and industriousness either, but exclusively through fighting – fighting one’s own battles.’52

  By the time he wrote his Second Book, Hitler had established himself as the dominant figure on the völkisch right. He had achieved this not just by producing works that demonstrated his ‘visionary’ credentials, and by exercising the kind of shrewd leadership that won over Joseph Goebbels, but by accepting into the Nazi party people he did not always wholeheartedly agree with. In 1927, for instance, Count Reventlow joined the Nazis. Reventlow had helped form the German Völkisch Freedom Party in 1924, but had now decided to ‘subordinate’ himself ‘without further ado to Herr Adolf Hitler’. Why had Reventlow taken this action? Because, he said, Hitler ‘has proven that he can lead; he has created his party on the basis of his views, his will, and his unified national socialist ideas, and leads it. He and the party are one, and represent the unity that is the essential prerequisite for success.’53 Reventlow called on members of his old party to join the Nazis, claiming that ‘the only possibility for making any advance is through the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – the only!’

  Reventlow believed strongly in the socialist ideas favoured by Gregor Strasser that Hitler had dismissed at the Bamberg conference in 1926. But despite this, Hitler welcomed him into the Nazis. He knew that he needed to tolerate a wide variety of opinion if he was to gather all of the various völkisch parties under the Nazi banner and stand a chance of winning power.

  One policy Reventlow and Hitler could agree on was anti-Semitism. In March 1928, Reventlow said he wanted a law introduced that ‘would prohibit all further Jewish immigration, expel all Jews who had entered Germany since 1914, and place those remaining under Alien Law, whilst reserving the right to expel them subsequently, and exclude them from all the rights associated with German citizenship’.54

  That proposal came to nothing. But the fact that Reventlow felt he could voice such ideas demonstrated the confidence of Nazi anti-Semites. Despite the apparent prosperity and modernity of the Weimar state, anti-Semitism remained entrenched in certain areas of German life. Anti-Semitism was particularly rife, for example, among student and youth groups. So much so that many young Jews had to form their own hiking clubs in order to enjoy the countryside. Eugene Leviné was one of those who rambled in the German countryside during this period with an all-Jewish youth association. He recalls a surprising encounter with an anti-Semite when he and his friends were travelling back home from a hiking trip. ‘Don’t forget there were parts of Germany who’d never seen a Jew,’ he says, ‘so it was easy enough to hate the Jews. I remember in my hiking days being in a railway compartment going home to Berlin, with my rucksack and my brown shirt.’ Sharing the compartment with Eugene and his friends was a farmer, who started: ‘swearing about the Jews, and so we said, “Well look, we are all Jews.” And he roared with laughter, and he said, “You must think that we country people are daft. You are obviously nice clean-living, sporting German boys. You’re not going to tell me you’re Jews.” And he meant it. Because we weren’t dirty, we didn’t wear side locks, we didn’t have a caftan, we didn’t have a beard. We looked like any other German boys to his eye. I mean, there might be a longer nose or darker eyes, but lots of Germans have long noses and dark eyes. The comical thing is the racial idea of “the German” – most of the Nazis didn’t look like that [an idealized “Aryan”], for God’s sake!’55

  Hitler claimed anti-Semitism was more present than ever within Germany. At the annual general meeting of the Nazi party in September 1928, he said that ‘anti-Semitism grows as an idea. What was hardly there ten years ago is there today: the Jewish question has been brought to people’s notice, it will not disappear any more and we shall make sure that it becomes an international world question; we shall not let it rest until the question has been solved. We think we shall live to see that day.’56

  Nonetheless, despite Hitler’s boast, there is no evidence that the majority of Germans supported the Nazis and their virulent anti-Semitism. Quite the contrary. As he spoke those words, Hitler knew that four months before, at
the German general election in May 1928, the Nazis had polled just 2.6 per cent of the vote. It was a disastrous result for them. Yet within five years Hitler would be Chancellor of Germany, at the head of the largest political party in the country. What made this transformation possible was not Hitler’s bogus claim of widespread concern within Germany about ‘the Jewish question’ but a factor that was wholly out of his control – an economic catastrophe.

  The Weimar economy, reliant on American loans, was devastated by the Wall Street Crash in October 1929. In just one year – between September 1929 and September 1930 – German unemployment more than doubled from 1.3 million to 3 million. Democratic government effectively ended in Germany in March 1930 when the grand coalition that included the German People’s Party and the Social Democrats broke down. The new government, under Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, had to rely on Article 48 of the constitution which allowed government by Presidential decree.

  In the elections of September 1930 the Nazis gained over 6 million votes and became the second-largest political party in the Reichstag. It was an astonishing result. Millions of Germans, who had previously rejected Hitler and the Nazis, suddenly turned to them in these desperate times. But despite in 1928 trumpeting the alleged growth of anti-Semitism in Germany, Hitler understood the reality – these new supporters had not come to him primarily because of any anti-Semitic beliefs. So he downplayed his obsession with the Jews. A study of his speeches between 1930 and 1933 demonstrates that he now placed much less emphasis on the role of the Jews than previously. He even said, in October 1930, that ‘we have nothing against decent Jews; however, as soon as they conspire with Bolshevism we look on them as an enemy.’57

  Instead of ranting about the Jews, Hitler focused more on the need for the regeneration of Germany through the creation of a National Socialist state. He called for a rejection of the punitive measures imposed on Germany by the Allies after the end of the First World War, and warned of the dangers of ‘Bolshevism’. ‘Today,’ he said to an audience of industrialists in Düsseldorf in January 1932, ‘we are at the turning point in German destiny.’ That was because Germany risked falling into ‘Bolshevist chaos’.58 Nowhere in his lengthy speech did he refer to the Jews.

  But it does not follow from this that his audiences were hoodwinked into thinking that the Nazis had suddenly rejected anti-Semitism. Nazi propaganda had stated over and over again that the Jews were responsible for ‘Bolshevism’, for the hated Treaty of Versailles and for the corruption of capitalism that had brought about the economic slump. So when Hitler mentioned any of these concepts in his speeches, many of his audience would have understood that the Jews were ultimately to be held accountable.

  When Jutta Rüdiger, then a twenty-one-year-old student, heard Hitler speak in 1932 she certainly understood that behind the word ‘Bolshevism’ lay the Jews. ‘Jews were associated with Communism, definitely,’ she says. ‘There was a vicious joke making the rounds … that it was just as well that there was one goy – a slightly derogatory term for a non-Jew – among the Communists in Russia, because at least he could sign the death warrants on a Saturday [the Jewish holy day]. That is a bit vicious, but there was a strong connection between Communism and the Jews, definitely.’59

  While Jutta Rüdiger says that she was chiefly attracted to Hitler and the Nazis in the early 1930s because she thought they offered a way out of the economic depression and a chance for Germans to be united in a common goal, she also believes that their anti-Jewish agenda was not a barrier to their success: ‘There was actually a general feeling among people, which had already been present in Imperial times and which may have been present in other nations at some time, too, that the Jews were perceived as an alien element.’60

  Johannes Zahn, in 1932 a banker in his mid-twenties, agrees with this assessment: ‘The general opinion was that the Jews had gone too far in Germany.’61 By ‘too far’ he meant that German Jews were present in disproportionate numbers in professions like the law, medicine and journalism. (It was hardly surprising that Jews had chosen jobs like these, since they had been banned from many other avenues for so long.) According to Johannes Zahn, ‘one day it was just too much, the general feeling was that the idea that the Jews should be driven back was not opposed; but that they should be killed in the end, nobody, or very few people, in Germany would have approved …’62

  However, the prime reason for the rise of the Nazi party remained Germany’s dire economic situation. For large numbers of people, in this time of economic catastrophe, what mattered was to find a job and support a family in an atmosphere of political uncertainty. There were 6 million unemployed by the start of 1933, and the Communists were gaining support at the same time as the Nazis. It was as if the country was splitting to the extremes – Communists on one side and Nazis on the other. ‘Six million unemployed means, with three people in one family, six times three equals eighteen million without food,’ says Johannes Zahn. ‘And when a man was unemployed at that time, then there was only one thing left: either he became a Communist or he became an SA man [Nazi Stormtrooper]. And so business thought that it was better for these people to become SA men, because there was discipline and order; and at the beginning – you really have to say this today – at the beginning you couldn’t tell whether National Socialism was something good with a few bad side-effects or something evil with a few good side-effects, you couldn’t tell.’63

  Such statements are largely self-serving. That is because while it is true that Hitler did not emphasize his hatred of the Jews during the Nazis’ rise to prominence between 1930 and 1933, many of his followers were not so restrained. Not only did Julius Streicher continue to publish anti-Semitic filth in Der Stürmer, he made these remarks in a speech in 1932: ‘We National Socialists believe that Adolf Hitler is an emissary for a new Germany. We believe that he has been sent by God to liberate the German people from the blood-sucker almighty Jewry.’64

  Joseph Goebbels also continued to voice his anti-Semitic beliefs during this period. Ever since his appointment as Gauleiter (Nazi leader) of Berlin at the end of 1926 he had made the Jews of the capital his special target – in particular Dr Bernhard Weiss, the deputy police commissioner. Goebbels persistently referred to him as ‘Isidor’ Weiss in his propaganda magazine Der Angriff (The Attack), ‘Isidor’ being an archetypal Jewish first name in contrast to Dr Weiss’s given name of Bernhard. ‘Isidor’ Weiss was caricatured in a variety of ways in Der Angriff: as a hooked-nosed, untrustworthy Jew and even as a donkey. After Weiss complained, and a court confirmed that the donkey caricature was indeed supposed to represent him, Goebbels reprinted the cartoon with a caption announcing that judges had agreed that Dr Weiss looked like a donkey.65 Goebbels also supported action against Jews on the streets. At the Jewish New Year, in September 1931, Stormtroopers moved in force on to the main shopping street of the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and harassed anyone they thought was Jewish. By now Goebbels had banished his half-Jewish girlfriend Else from his life and was seeing the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Magda Quandt. They married in December 1931.

  During the early 1930s, Nazi propaganda also targeted economic interests that many believed were owned by Jews. For instance, a Nazi election pamphlet in northern Germany read: ‘A new blow aimed at your ruin is being prepared and carried out in Hanover! The present system enables the gigantic concern WOOLWORTH (America), supported by finance capital, to build a new vampire business in the centre of the city in the Georgstrasse to expose you to complete ruin.’66

  Many people would immediately understand this reference to ‘Woolworth’ as an attack on the Jews. That’s because the Nazis had said for years that large department stores were predominantly Jewish owned and a threat to the traditional shopkeeper. These stores – symbols of modernity – were considered ‘vampire’ businesses by the Nazis because they supposedly sucked the lifeblood out of the traditional high street. The Nazis were so angered by the presence of department stores that one of the twenty-five points
in the original Nazi programme had explicitly referred to them. Point sixteen called for department stores to be leased ‘at a cheap rate to small traders’.

  Once the Nazis came to power department stores were a particular target. The district president of Hanover reported that in December 1934 ‘riots against Jewish businesses reoccurred … On the Sunday before Christmas, canisters of tear gas were thrown one after the other into Jewish stores and into the store F. W. Woolworth. Because of serious symptoms of poisoning, ten shop assistants of the Woolworth Company had to be taken to a hospital by ambulances.’67 In fact, the founder of Woolworths was of Methodist, not Jewish, ancestry.

  Goebbels approved of this policy of guilt by association. When ordinary Germans heard the words ‘department stores’ many thought ‘Jewish ownership’, when they listened to a speech about the dangers of Marxism they thought ‘Marx was a Jew’ and so on. Goebbels believed that propaganda was at its most powerful when an audience could be manipulated into thinking that they had reached their own conclusions about a subject.68

  But even though support for Nazis was growing during this period, a majority of Germans still opposed them. In particular, many socialists found their anti-Semitism despicable. Communist supporters like Alois Pfaller felt that since non-Jewish and Jewish Germans ‘spoke the same language’ and ‘went to the same school’ then ‘why should you hate them?’ He and his friends understood that ‘someone can’t do anything about his birth, that was clear – nobody is responsible for his birth.’69 For Pfaller what was important was not ‘race’ but creating a more equal Germany by restraining the power of the ‘bosses’.

  There were also prophetic warnings in the German press about what was likely to happen if the Nazis ever came to power. For instance, the Jewish journalist Lion Feuchtwanger wrote in the newspaper Welt am Abend in January 1931: ‘National Socialism strives to depose reason and install in its place emotion and drive – to be precise, barbarity … What the intellectuals and artists have therefore to expect once the Third Reich is definitely established is clear: extermination.’70