The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  The events in Gunzenhausen were at the extreme end of the spectrum of anti-Semitic action against Jews during the first two years of Hitler’s Chancellorship. Nothing like this happened again in Bavaria until the attacks of Kristallnacht in 1938. But it remains instructive. It reveals, first of all, how spontaneous the attacks against the Jews could be. There is no evidence that this level of violence was pre-planned. If Kurt Bär had not lost his temper in a pub then it is hard to see how the attacks would have happened. But while Bär’s actions were the catalyst, the pogrom was only possible as a result of underlying tensions. The reason so many of the local population rose up in support of Bär was because they themselves were predisposed to hate Jews. It is also worth noting that Bär in his speech outside the pub focused on traditional Christian-based anti-Semitism. This part of Franconia was staunchly Protestant, and the content of Bär’s verbal attack on the Jews would have been familiar to Martin Luther.

  The disagreement between the local Nazis, who felt they could take whatever action they liked against the Jews, and the central government, with their response that ‘The Jewish question is to be handled by the government of the Reich, not by the SA of Gunzenhausen,’ is also revealing. As is the fact that Bär instinctively felt that Hitler would have supported his actions, when he said that spitting on an SA uniform was akin to spitting on Adolf Hitler. Finally, this unpleasant story also demonstrates the extent to which the German courts had already been tainted by the advent of the Nazi state. While it was the case that some of the Stormtroopers were initially put on trial and found guilty, the legal system subsequently failed the victims of the crime by releasing the Stormtroopers on appeal. Such a pattern would soon become commonplace, as the rule of law was corrupted by the Nazis.

  In May 1934, two months after the Palm Sunday attack in Gunzenhausen, Julius Streicher demonstrated once again where he stood on the question of the Jews by publishing the notorious ‘Jewish murder plot’ edition of Der Stürmer. A cartoon on the front page showed two grotesquely caricatured Jewish men, one of them holding a bloodstained knife, collecting the blood of children. The text underneath said that the Jews practised ‘superstitious magic’ and sought to collect Christian blood in order to mix it into unleavened bread. Other illustrations showed Jews sucking the blood of a prostrate child through straws, and a reproduction of a stone relief on an Oberwesel church which featured an alleged thirteenth-century ritual murder of a sixteen-year-old boy – a youth later canonized as St Werner of Oberwesel. Another article claimed that the history of the Jews was ‘an unbroken chain of mass murders and blood baths’.

  This special edition of Der Stürmer also emphasized the link between the Jews and Communism, alleging that after the 1917 Russian revolution ‘35 million’ people had been ‘shot, murdered, tortured and starved’, and that today in ‘Jewish Bolshevik Russia’ mass murders still continued, with the murderers ‘mostly Jewish’. Over 100,000 copies of this ‘Jewish murder plot’ edition were sold, while other copies were pinned on display boards in the streets.

  There was widespread protest about the lurid content of Der Stürmer’s special edition – not just from abroad, but from Christians within Germany. So much so that Hitler eventually ordered it banned. Significantly, he said that he had banned this edition not because of the lies it propagated about the Jews, but because it could also be construed as an attack on ‘Christ’s holy communion’.36 It is revealing that despite recognizing the political necessity of distancing himself from the extreme content of this edition of Der Stürmer, Hitler still couldn’t bring himself to criticize the paper for attacking the Jews.

  While there was no official policy of physically segregating German Jews from the rest of the population, immense pressure could nonetheless be placed on Jews, particularly in the countryside, to move away from areas in which they were no longer wanted. The Fränkische Tageszeitung, for instance, reported on 26 May 1934 that ‘on Thursday at 5 p.m. the swastika flag was hoisted on the property of the last Jew to leave Hersbruck [in Franconia]. The Hersbruck district is now definitely purged of Jews. With pride and satisfaction the population takes cognizance of this fact.’37 The paper went on to say that it was to be hoped that other areas ‘will soon follow suit and that the day is not now far off when the whole of Franconia will be rid of Jews, just as one day that day must dawn when throughout the whole of Germany there will no longer be one single Jew’.

  Equally, though there was as yet no law prohibiting Jews from marrying or having sexual relationships outside marriage with non-Jews, there were a number of instances of local Nazi groups humiliating couples that were in a mixed relationship. The Jewish lawyer Kurt Rosenberg wrote in his diary in August 1933 how in Cuxhaven, in Lower Saxony, ‘an Aryan girl and a non-Aryan man are led through the city wearing signs around their necks, “I am a pig because I took up with a Jew,” etc. In other locales the names of Aryan girls who have been seen in the company of Jews are published. And elsewhere Jews are prohibited from entering streets and town squares.’38

  However, amid all of these instances of state sanctioned and locally inspired persecution, it is also important to notice what was not happening. The German Jews were not being sent en masse to concentration camps. The first makeshift camps were created to hold the Nazis’ political opponents, not the Jews. In Prussia, thousands of Stormtroopers hired by Hermann Göring as Auxiliary Police arrested their former political adversaries and took them to improvised jails in disused factories and warehouses, even to basements in the houses of the Stormtroopers themselves. Those captured were often beaten and humiliated in an orgy of celebratory revenge. In March 1933 Wilhelm Murr, the Nazi state president of Württemberg, said memorably: ‘We don’t say: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. No, if someone knocks out one of our eyes, we will chop off his head, and if someone knocks out one of our teeth, we will smash in his jaw.’39

  In March 1933 Heinrich Himmler became acting police chief in Bavaria. By now he was also head of a specialized protection unit called the Schutzstaffel, or SS, originally formed as a group of bodyguards to protect Nazi speakers at public meetings. Himmler was in the process of turning the organization into an elite group of Nazi believers, albeit one still within the overall structure of the Stormtroopers under SA leader Ernst Röhm. Many members of the SS had been sworn in as Auxiliary Police and in this capacity staffed the first concentration camps in Bavaria.

  Himmler justified the mass arrest of the Nazis’ political opponents in a speech in March 1933 with an early example of the kind of paternalistic double-speak for which he would later become infamous: ‘I have made quite extensive use of protective custody … I felt compelled to do this because in many parts of the city there has been so much agitation that it has been impossible for me to guarantee the safety of those particular individuals who have provoked it.’40

  Himmler thus claimed that those who had been thrown into concentration camps had been sent there for their own good, as their ‘safety’ could not be assured on the streets because the rest of the population might turn on them. It was similar to the reasoning Hitler would attempt to use later that same month for the Jewish boycott – the Nazi state had to act or else the Volk would take matters into their own hands.41 According to Himmler, ‘protective custody’ worked in two ways: the population were ‘protected’ from those the Nazis arrested, and those who were arrested were ‘protected’ from the rest of the population. This was the logic behind the otherwise bizarre statement which prisoners were required to sign on their release from concentration camps: ‘I am aware that I may at any time apply for a further period of protective custody if I consider my physical well being to be in jeopardy.’42

  Protective custody did not replace the existing system of justice in Germany but operated in parallel to it, as Hermann Göring explained at his trial in Nuremberg in 1946: ‘You must differentiate between the two categories; those who had committed some act of treason against the new state or those who might be proved t
o have committed such an act, were naturally turned over to the courts. The others, however, of whom one might expect such acts, but who had not yet committed them, were taken into protective custody, and these were the people who were taken to concentration camps.’43 It was an idea that went against all rules of natural justice. But it was consistent with the principles that Hitler had expressed in Mein Kampf. People should be judged for who they were, just as much as for what they did. It was all part of the same worldview that said that a Jew could never become a Christian by being baptized, because inherently that individual remained a Jew.

  There was another consequence of this thinking. Prisoners in concentration camps did not serve a specific sentence – how could they when they had not necessarily committed any offence? Therefore no prisoner knew the date when they would be released. Maybe they would be released tomorrow – or maybe they would never be released. As one concentration camp commandant later said, ‘the uncertainty of the duration of their confinement was something with which they could never come to terms. It was this that wore them down and broke the strongest wills.’44

  Nor were these camps intended to be similar to normal prisons where the punishment was the incarceration itself. That was because, according to Nazi theory, the prisoners’ detention was not supposed to be an act of retribution but an opportunity for them to change. ‘We had to rescue these people,’ said Göring, ‘to bring them back to the German national community. We had to re-educate them.’45

  The first concentration camp in Bavaria opened on 22 March 1933 in a town just 10 miles from the centre of Munich. The name of this place would become infamous – Dachau. Himmler had personally inspected the site, on the outskirts of the town in a disused factory, and decided that this would be the location for the camp. The nature of the institution was clear from the outset. ‘Now we’ve got the power,’ said Johann-Erasmus von Malsen-Ponickau, an SS commander, to the new SS guards at Dachau. ‘If these swine had taken over, they’d have made sure our heads rolled in the dust. So we know no sentimentality. Any man in our ranks who can’t stand the sight of blood doesn’t belong here, he should get out.’46 They were words that demonstrated the hypocrisy of Göring’s claim that the role of the camps was to ‘rescue’ misguided Germans, or Himmler’s assertion that the SS sought to ensure the ‘safety’ of those they imprisoned.

  On Christmas Eve 1934, Josef Felder, the SPD (Social Democratic Party) politician, discovered personally what form this lack of ‘sentimentality’ could take. He had bravely voted against the Enabling Act in March the previous year, and – as one of the Nazis’ political opponents – was a prime candidate for ‘protective custody’. He was arrested and taken to Dachau where he was thrown into one of the cells in a building known as the ‘bunker’: ‘They took away the bag of straw which was lying there … on the wooden boards [of the bed]. They took it out and said, “You won’t be needing that, because you’ll only be leaving this bunker as a corpse!” ’47 Left alone in the dark cell, he could hear the guards becoming ‘raucous’ as they indulged in a drunken Christmas celebration. Around midnight one of the guards came back, opened the iron flap in the cell door and held out a plate with white sausages and pretzels on it in front of Josef Felder’s face. ‘That would make a nice meal before your execution,’ he said. ‘But you’re not even worth this, you bastard! We know a lot about you! We’ll take care of you!’ The guard slammed the flap shut and left. Later that night he returned, holding a rope, and demonstrated to Josef the ‘best way’ to hang himself. Josef replied that he had a family, and if they wanted him to die they would have to kill him themselves. ‘Yes,’ said the guard, ‘we’ll do that! But we’ve got [plenty of] time!’

  The psychological torture continued. After several days in the bunker Josef was told, ‘You’re getting out tomorrow,’ but the words were a sick joke. ‘They kept saying,’ he recalls, ‘ “You’re getting out tomorrow.” They were just messing around with me.’ For three days out of four he had only water to drink and a piece of bread to eat. Every fourth day he would be given tea and, if he was lucky, one hot meal. As he lay in a dark insanitary cell, deprived of proper sustenance, his mind tormented by anxiety, it was scarcely surprising that Josef found that his health started to break. A lung disease that he had first contracted several years before reappeared and then intensified. As a consequence, the guards locked him in a segregation area of the bunker along with ten other prisoners, all suffering from lung disease. ‘The Nazis were very afraid of pulmonary tuberculosis,’ he says, ‘which was a serious disease in those days.’

  Josef Felder recovered from his lung condition and was released after just over a year in Dachau. Most prisoners in the camp served a similar length of time, though some were freed after just a few months and others were never released. It depended on the whim of the Nazis. All the prisoners who were eventually freed were required to declare that they would never reveal what they had experienced inside the camp. If they did, they would be sent back.

  As for the relationship between the German Jews and the first concentration camps, it was not a straightforward one. In his speech in March 1933, Himmler went out of his way to stress that Jews would not be targeted simply for being Jews: ‘I must emphasize one point in particular: for us a citizen of the Jewish faith is just as much a citizen as someone who is not of the Jewish faith and his life and property are subject to the same protection. We make no distinction in this respect.’48 It was an odd statement for Himmler to make, especially when his own party’s programme denied that the Jews were ‘true’ Germans. He probably made these disingenuous remarks as much for a foreign audience – in order to counter the alleged ‘atrocity propaganda’ – as for a domestic one. In any case, his Stormtroopers did not follow his instruction. A proportion of the Communist and socialist politicians sent to the camps were Jewish, and these Jews were often singled out for harsher treatment than was imposed on the other prisoners. Max Abraham, for example, wrote Juda verrecke. Ein Rabbiner im Konzentrationslager (Death to Juda: A Rabbi in a Concentration Camp) after he managed to leave Germany. In the book, published in 1934, Abraham recorded his own treatment at the hands of the Nazis, just months after Hitler came to power.

  Abraham was arrested in June 1933 for allegedly assaulting a Stormtrooper, but since he was a member of the Social Democratic Party and had been active in the small Jewish community in his hometown of Rathenow it is likely that the Nazis were already looking to pick him up. The Nazis also bore a personal grudge against him because a Stormtrooper had been sentenced to five months in jail back in 1930 for attacking him.

  After his arrest, Abraham was first hit with truncheons by the guards, and then a special sadistic element was added – he and three other Jews were forced to beat each other up as the Stormtroopers watched. ‘We four Jews had to take turns maltreating each other with the truncheon,’ said Abraham. ‘When we wouldn’t hit hard enough, the Stormtroopers threatened us with an even worse torture.’49

  Abraham was taken to a small camp at Papenburg, 35 miles west of Oldenburg in the north of Germany. The Jewish New Year was approaching, and the guards had been planning their own way of marking this Jewish festival. On the first day of the holiday, the SS guards forced Abraham and several other Jews into a manure pit. ‘SS Scharführer [Sergeant] Everling roared at me,’ wrote Abraham, ‘ “There, Rabbi, you can hold your service here!” Everything in me rebelled against literally having our faith sullied. I kept silent.’ Despite the SS man insisting he do as he was ordered, Abraham continued to resist, saying, ‘I do not hold services in a manure pit!’ As a consequence, he was dragged out of the pit and ‘truncheons and [rifle] butts rained down’ on him. When he passed out he was taken back to his bunk and ‘lay there without consciousness’ for two hours. In the afternoon, after he had recovered, Abraham was returned to the manure pit and ordered by Scharführer Everling to give a speech on Judaism to the other Jews and to the SS who were supervising them. ‘The Jewish religion is, like other
religions, based on the Ten Commandments,’ said Abraham, ‘and the most beautiful biblical sentence: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself!” ’ At this point Everling interrupted, saying, ‘Knock it off, you pig, we will teach you our understanding of the grace of charity!’ Abraham was now ‘maltreated so horribly’ that he ‘developed a high fever and lapsed into convulsions. My body was made sore by beating; I could neither sit nor lie. I spent a horrible night like this in a cloudy and dreadful delirium. The next morning, I was in an alarming state and they brought me to the ward. Here I was among non-Jewish comrades, Social Democrats and Communists, who devotedly looked after me. I will never forget their comradely help.’50

  Max Abraham was released after four months’ incarceration, and managed to leave Germany for Czechoslovakia in 1934. Eventually he settled in Britain where he died in 1977.51 His Juda verrecke. Ein Rabbiner im Konzentrationslager reminds us that Stormtroopers and SS treated Jews in sadistic ways in concentration camps long before the creation of the extermination centres of the Holocaust.

  The Nazis did not hide the concentration camps. Their existence was well known and newspapers across the world carried stories about them. On 1 January 1934, for instance, the Manchester Guardian accurately described the reality of life in the so-called bunker in Dachau: ‘The cells are of concrete, they have one barred window each (which can be darkened), they are damp, and without heating arrangements.’ The article also revealed the nature of the beatings that the guards administered: ‘This consists of flogging with an ox-hide thong that has a strip of steel, three or four millimetres wide, running along its whole length (these are made by the prisoners). The blows – the number varies from twenty-five to seventy-five according to the sentence – are counted out by an SS man. Two other SS men hold the prisoner down, one by the hands and the other by the head, round which a sack is wrapped so that the prisoner’s cries are stifled … Some prisoners have also been beaten with lengths of rubber hosepipe. Some have been burnt with cigarette ends and some have been put to what Americans call the “water torture”.’52