By November 1933, the situation was so bad that Hitler ordered the existing guards to be discharged from duty.72 They were not happy at the news. They ‘bellowed outside the camp, “We shit on the fat-cat republic!” ’73 Shortly afterwards they decided to take an even more radical step – and said that they would mutiny. ‘The SS [guards] announced, “We won’t let the police replace us, even if we have to wade through blood up to our knees.” ’74
According to another account, by Walter Langhoff, an inmate in the camp, the SS got ‘carried away by an enormous warlike mood’. Langhoff recalled: ‘The guards at the gate were strengthened, machine-gun emplacements were set up around the camp, and commandant Fleitmann issued the order: “Everybody who approaches the camp in a police uniform and ignores the request to stop will be shot at.” In the camp, the SS men took us [prisoners] aside: “You know, when they arrive, we will give you weapons, and we will put down the attack together! And after that we will found the ‘Freikorps Fleitmann’ and then we will struggle along until we are in Austria and there we will start the revolution!” ’75
The idea that the SS guards ever offered to arm the prisoners and start a ‘revolution’ seems bizarre. But a clue to their behaviour lies in the reference to the ‘Freikorps Fleitmann’. Individual paramilitary Freikorps groups, formed in the aftermath of the First World War, often took their names from their leader and it was to this commander – known as their ‘Führer’ – that each man pledged absolute loyalty, rather than to any abstract constitution or higher official. Here, in a throwback to those anarchic, revolutionary days, the SS were saying that they wanted to follow their own leader – Fleitmann – rather than trust anyone else.
It is also possible that the SS guards were never entirely serious in their threat to mutiny. Alcohol certainly played a part in their behaviour. The night before the police were due to arrive to replace them, the SS got drunk and caused mayhem within the camp: they ‘shat in the lockers, mixed salt into the sugar, smashed the windows in the troop barracks and the canteen and all kinds of other things’.76 The following morning, 6 November 1933, no doubt hung-over after the enormous quantity of alcohol they had consumed the previous night, the SS trudged out through the gates without putting up a fight and left the camp to a detachment of police.
While the violent excesses in Emsland had been perpetrated by those on the ground, it was the lack of leadership at the top that had been a necessary precondition of the lawless way the camps had operated. Now, just as Himmler had made Dachau into a place of orderly – rather than chaotic – cruelty, he would be given the authority to reform the concentration camps in Göring’s Prussian realm. Himmler also became responsible for all of the German police, although he remained as yet nominally subordinate to Göring within Prussia.
The big leap forward for Himmler came with the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ – the murder of Stormtrooper leader Ernst Röhm and others thought antagonistic to the regime. By June 1934 Röhm was a problem for Hitler that he wanted to solve. Hitler was anxious to avoid potential conflict between Röhm’s Stormtroopers and the German Army, and the ailing President von Hindenburg and Vice-Chancellor von Papen were also concerned about the lawless behaviour of Röhm’s Stormtroopers. Papen warned, in a speech on 17 June 1934, that ‘no nation that would survive before history can afford a permanent uprising from below … Germany cannot be allowed to become a train hurtling into the blue with no one knowing where it will stop.’77
On 30 June 1934, Röhm was arrested at the spa resort of Bad Wiessee and taken to Stadelheim prison in Munich. The next day he was visited in his cell by two SS officers – one of them, chosen for this historic mission, was Theodor Eicke. In an action reminiscent of the old Dachau conceit where pressure was placed on selected prisoners to commit suicide, they gave Röhm a pistol loaded with one bullet and told him to kill himself. When he refused, Eicke and his SS colleague Michel Lippert murdered him by firing three shots into his body. They travelled back to Dachau where more than twenty other people were shot as part of the purge. Afterwards, the SS at Dachau held a celebration and allegedly drank more than a thousand litres of beer.78 Eicke supposedly later said that ‘I am proud that I shot this faggot swine [the homosexual Röhm] with my own hands.’79
Members of the SS – and most especially their leader, Heinrich Himmler – had proven their loyalty to Hitler during the Röhm affair. Hitler had wanted Röhm to disappear and Himmler – without a second thought – had made it happen. The motto of the SS was Meine Ehre heisst Treue (My honour is called loyalty) and Himmler had lived up to that promise. It was the first manifestation of an important truth within the Third Reich. Whenever Hitler wanted a ruthless task undertaken by people who could be guaranteed to carry out the action without question, he turned to the SS.
The benefits to Himmler and the SS of their involvement in the Night of the Long Knives were immediate. On 20 July 1934 the SS were given the status of an equivalent organization to the SA – previously Himmler’s direct boss had been Röhm, now it was Hitler. Eicke was subsequently appointed inspector of the concentration camps and brought his organizational zeal to the entire network of protective-custody camps. Himmler and his band of followers were now at the centre of the security apparatus of the Nazi state.
As for Hitler, his hold over Germany was about to be consolidated still further.
5. The Nuremberg Laws
(1934–1935)
On 2 August 1934 the ailing President von Hindenburg finally died and Hitler became German head of state as well as Chancellor. It was an appointment that encapsulated the enormous change that had taken place in the eighteen months since Hitler had first been appointed Chancellor at the head of a cabinet which contained a number of people who were supposed to restrain him. Now, all talk of ‘taming’ Hitler was in the distant past. He was the undisputed ruler of Germany.
Shortly after Hitler became head of state, every member of the armed forces and civil service swore an oath of allegiance to him personally. Many of those in the army, like the young officer Johann-Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg, were pleased that Hitler had destroyed the power of the Stormtroopers and committed himself to rebuilding the German Army. Moreover, Kielmansegg and his comrades did not find it strange that they had been asked to swear an oath to Hitler. ‘Prussian-German history is full of personal oaths of loyalty,’ he says. ‘Indeed we almost preferred that to swearing loyalty to a piece of paper. Before we had been sworn in on the Weimar constitution, which nobody knew.’1
In the months before this consolidation of power, Hitler had demonstrated that he did not want to increase the role of the concentration camps within the Nazi state. Quite the reverse. He sought to show the world that the initial phase of the revolution in which ‘scores were settled’ was now over. In the spring of 1934 he had ordered the release of several thousand prisoners in an action that Himmler later privately called ‘one of the worst political mistakes the National Socialist State could have made’.2 By the summer of 1935 fewer than 4,000 people were imprisoned within the concentration camp system – while more than twenty-five times as many were held in conventional prisons.
As for the German Jews, Nazi policy remained one of restricting their rights within Germany while simultaneously encouraging them to leave the country. But it wasn’t easy for Jews to emigrate. As we have seen, Jews who decided to leave faced two enormous obstacles. The first was the Nazis’ desire to steal their money before they went, and the second was the problem of finding a country that would take them. One attempted solution to this impasse was agreed just seven months after Hitler came to power in the shape of the Haavara Agreement, signed on 25 August 1933. The idea was that German Jews would use their money to purchase German equipment – mostly farm related – which would then be exported to Palestine. The Jews would then leave Germany – with virtually no money in their possession – and once they arrived in Palestine they would be reimbursed for the cost of the German equipment, which would by then have been
sold to companies in Palestine. German companies benefited because not only did they manage to sell equipment for export but foreign currency would have to be used to purchase spare parts for the machinery. And, obviously, the German Jews who emigrated to Palestine benefited because they were able to take some of their wealth with them.
The background to the scheme was the perceived threat of a Jewish-organized world boycott of German goods. In June 1933 the German consul to Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, stressed to his colleagues back in Germany the propaganda value of cooperating with Jewish groups to facilitate the agreement. He even said that Sam Cohen, one of the architects of the deal, would use his influence with the Hebrew newspaper Doar Hayom to show Germany in a positive light.3
Not surprisingly, the Haavara Agreement was controversial. The president of the American Jewish Congress, Stephen Wise, condemned the deal. He thought the agreement damaged the prospect of an international boycott of German goods and amounted to conniving with Hitler.4 Nonetheless, the advantages of the agreement were so beneficial to German Jews that the arrangement continued until the outbreak of war. While tens of thousands of German Jews were able to make use of this scheme and emigrate to Palestine, the significance of the Haavara Agreement in this history is much greater than just the number of Jews who were able to use it to protect their assets. What it illustrated was the ability of the Nazi authorities and Jewish agencies to work together. Indeed, it was this very notion of collaboration that so enraged many American Zionists at the time.
But what the Haavara Agreement most certainly did not demonstrate was that Hitler was somehow a ‘Zionist’ himself and in favour of the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He made his position on this matter clear in Mein Kampf: ‘It doesn’t even enter their [that is, Jews’] heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its sovereign right and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.’5 Thus, while an expedient mechanism to expel Jews from the country quickly – like the Haavara Agreement – was acceptable for Hitler, a Jewish-controlled state was perceived as a phenomenally dangerous development. He never wanted the Jews to be in a position to control their own destiny.
Hitler continued, however, to be sensitive to foreign criticism of Jewish persecution. Although there is no evidence that his personal hatred of the Jews had lessened, he was concerned about spontaneous attacks on Jews by ordinary Nazis. As the letter sent by the Reich Interior Ministry about the Palm Sunday pogrom in Gunzenhausen had stated, ‘The Jewish question is to be handled by the government of the Reich,’ not by local hotheads.6 The problem Hitler faced was that many of his supporters still felt that the measures taken so far to exclude the Jews from the mainstream of German life had not been strong enough. Local groups, for instance, fought to ban Jews from swimming pools and ice rinks – even from whole towns. Rudi Bamber remembers that by 1935 ‘one had to be more and more careful because many of the towns and villages had notices, “Jews not wanted”, so it was difficult to find where one could go and be accepted as a Jew.’7
Even before the adoption of formal laws preventing sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews, the Nazi propaganda claiming that Jews were ‘defiling’ German maidens was having an effect on young Jewish men like Arnon Tamir: ‘Speaking for myself, I can only say that at the time – I was just a young lad – the mere idea of becoming friendly, or more, with a German girl was poisoned right from the start by these horrible cartoons and headlines which claimed that the Jews were contaminating German girls. It was simply impossible for me … to approach a girl like any young person. We were afraid to give them the slightest justification for such claims. I don’t even want to talk about what happened to German men or women and Jewish men and women who were friendly with or married to each other. It must have been terrible for them.’8
In April 1935 the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, wrote to party members warning them not to ‘vent their feelings by acts of terror against individual Jews’. Such actions only made it harder for Hitler to ‘rebuke at any time allegations of atrocities and boycotts made by Jews abroad’.9 But the spontaneous attacks did not stop, and four months later Hjalmar Schacht, the Economics Minister, and the man charged by Hitler with generating enough money to finance a massive armaments programme, complained that illegal anti-Semitic actions were damaging the economy.10 Schacht did not protest about the harassment and persecution of Jews on moral grounds, he simply wanted the illegality to stop. By implication, if the Nazi state could pass laws that codified and limited the scope of the persecution and in the process ended arbitrary actions against the Jews, that would represent a helpful step forward.
Legislation was finally introduced to outlaw sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews in September 1935, when a new law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour was passed at the time of the Nuremberg rally. Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, had said at the end of July that legislation outlawing marriages between Jews and non-Jews was in preparation, but the speed with which this new legislation was finally adopted was extraordinary. The first hint that it was coming was in a speech given by Gerhard Wagner, Reich Doctors’ Leader, on 12 September. The following day Hitler said that he wanted the law passed in Nuremberg. The only difficulty was that there was currently no law to pass. So a team of civil servants, including Bernhard Lösener, a specialist in Jewish matters at the Interior Ministry, flew from Berlin to Nuremberg to draft the proposed legislation. On the 14th Hitler decided that he wanted to add another law to the mix – stripping Jews of German citizenship – so this too was created.
On the evening of 15 September, at a specially convened session of the Reichstag held at the Cultural Association in Nuremberg, Hitler announced that he had been compelled to bring in this new anti-Semitic legislation because ‘loud complaints of provocative actions by individual members of this race are coming in from all sides’. So it was necessary ‘to prevent this behavior from leading to quite determined defensive action on the part of the outraged population’. Hitler argued that his proposed legislation was an attempt to permit ‘tolerable relations’ between the Germans and the Jewish population. But he warned that if the ‘international Jewish agitation’ continued, he would conduct a ‘new evaluation’ of the situation.11
It was a classic Hitlerian performance – a mix of threat and falsehood. Just as he had at the time of the April 1933 boycott, he framed his actions as necessary to ensure that the outrage felt by the general population at the actions of the Jews did not turn violent. He also implied that the treatment that the German Jews received was determined in part by the conduct of the international Jewish community. The unspoken assumption underlying the speech was that if other countries let Hitler pursue the policies he wished, the German Jews would be spared even worse persecution.
After Hitler had spoken, Hermann Göring as Reichstag President gave a speech in which he slavishly supported his Führer. He focused in large part on what, at first sight, might appear to be the least significant part of the legislation that Hitler proposed that day – the Reich ‘flag’ act. This law, which called for the adoption of the swastika flag as the symbol of Germany, seemed relatively innocuous when compared with the overtly anti-Semitic nature of the other two pieces of legislation, but the origins of the flag act are revealing. Up until this point Germany had two legal flags – the swastika and the black, white and red flag of the German Empire. Hitler when he came to power had been careful not to offend traditionalists like President von Hindenburg and insist that the old flag of the Empire be dropped completely. So – bizarrely – German merchant ships had flown two national flags. This was the background to an incident in New York in July 1935 when protesters boarded the German liner the SS Bremen and threw the swastika flag into the water. Because the swastika flag was not the sole legal symbol of Germany
, it had been possible for the Americans to argue that Germany as a country had not been insulted. The Nazi government was particularly enraged when Louis Brodsky, a Jewish American magistrate, did not treat the case as seriously as they wished. Hans Frank, president of the Reich Academy of Law, said that Brodsky was part of a Jewish ‘menace’ and that it was ‘most deplorable and also a most dangerous precedent when a Jew in so highly cultured a nation as the United States is permitted to debase the robe of judge to the extent of venting [the] undying hatred of his race …’.12
This new act changed the status of the swastika flag, and now – as Göring put it – ‘he who offends this flag insults the nation.’13 Göring professed to ‘feel sorry’ for the Americans in the context of the Bremen incident, because they had been forced to witness the actions of a ‘brazen Jew’. But from now on the swastika flag symbolized that Germany would remain true to Nazism ‘for all eternity’. Tellingly, he added that it was ‘self-evident’ that ‘no Jew may be allowed to hoist this sacred insignia.’ Shortly after Göring’s speech all three elements of what became known to the world as the Nuremberg Laws were passed – the Reich Flag Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, and the Reich Citizenship Law which revoked the citizenship of German Jews.
Hitler never revealed publicly why he chose to move so suddenly in September 1935 to pass this anti-Semitic legislation, though the idea that Jews should not be considered German citizens nor be able to have sexual relations with non-Jews was certainly not new. But one suggested reason for this precise timing is persuasive: that Hitler had actually planned to make a broad statement about his foreign-policy demands at Nuremberg, but had been dissuaded at the last minute from doing so by Konstantin von Neurath, the Foreign Minister. Since Hitler had already called for a special sitting of members of the Reichstag and now had nothing but the Flag Law to put before them, he suddenly decided to push forward with the anti-Semitic legislation instead, motivated chiefly by a desire to bridge the gap in expectations between the activists in the party who were persecuting the Jews on the streets and the officials in government like Schacht who wanted greater clarity in the regime’s position on the Jews.14 In addition, it might also have been that Hitler thought the anti-Semitic legislation fitted well with the sentiments behind the Flag Law. He would surely have felt humiliated by the spectacle of the swastika flag floating in the water of New York harbour – a city the Nazis always associated with the Jews – torn from the SS Bremen, the pride of the German merchant fleet. There was certainly a pattern in Hitler’s behaviour, as we shall see later in the 1930s and again during the war, of lashing out against the German Jews in a reaction against foreign actions that angered him.15
The Holocaust: A New History Page 12