The Holocaust: A New History
Page 13
In practical terms the new laws to a large extent only reflected the reality that already existed in much of Germany, since even before the legislation local Nazis had put pressure on non-Jews to separate themselves from Jews, whether in personal or business life. But nonetheless, the Nuremberg Laws marked a watershed in the attitude of the Nazi state towards German Jews. Now the law of the Reich – not just Nazi party hotheads – called for the ruthless separation of the Jews from the rest of the community. It was not only that the Jews were legally no longer ‘true’ Germans, the new legislation also invaded the private sphere of every German citizen. The German state had proclaimed that it had the right to decide with whom you could have sexual intercourse. The Gestapo – the secret police – could now examine what went on in private in each house. Everyone was vulnerable to denunciation by a mean-spirited neighbour. Who was that stranger of the opposite sex who visited you last night? Didn’t they look ‘Jewish’? More than that, the state could demand to know exactly what sexual acts you took part in behind closed doors, since they applied an extraordinarily wide definition of ‘sexual intercourse’. The Reich Supreme Court declared the following year that ‘the concept of sexual intercourse’ did ‘not include every indecent act, but is not confined to actual intercourse, i.e. apart from intercourse itself, [it includes] 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’.16
Then there was the continuing problem, for the Nazis, of working out who was a Jew and who was not – information that was vital in order to enforce the new legislation. But despite the opening sentence of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour declaring that ‘purity of German blood’ was ‘essential’ for the ‘continued existence of the German people’, the Nazis could not tell by examining ‘blood’ just who was a Jew and who was not, and there was no other definition of ‘Jewishness’ anywhere in the Nuremberg legislation. As a consequence the laws as passed on 15 September 1935 were unenforceable. Only in the middle of November 1935 were regulations finally announced which defined who was a ‘Jew’. This document talked about ‘Jewish blood’ and ‘racially full Jews’, but it had to resort to a religious definition to describe who was Jewish and who was not. It stated: ‘A Jew is anyone who is descended from at least three grandparents who are racially full Jews.’ But then it said that a ‘grandparent shall be considered as full blooded if he or she belonged to the Jewish religious community’.17 So the Nazis determined your ‘race’ by the religious affiliation of your grandparents.
The question of what to do about those Germans who had mixed ancestry occupied a great deal of the drafters’ time. Some Germans who were ardent nationalists – and appeared to be living an ‘Aryan’ life – had two Jewish grandparents. Yet other people with two Jewish grandparents were, to Nazi eyes, obviously Jews. The solution the Nazi officials devised was complex. It relied, once again, on examining the religious affiliation of the individuals concerned. So if you had two grandparents who were Jewish – by the definition of the decree – but you yourself had not married a Jew and were living a non-Jewish religious life, then you were not Jewish. However, if you had two Jewish grandparents and had married a Jew, or were worshipping as a Jew, then you were Jewish.
It was a mess. What the decree exposed was the utter fallacy of a blood or racial definition of Jewishness. For if the Nazis were serious in their racial beliefs, how could one person who had two Jewish grandparents be considered not Jewish, whereas another who had two Jewish grandparents be considered Jewish? Their background ought to mean that the amount of ‘Jewish blood’ flowing within their veins was exactly the same.
Nonetheless, Hitler proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws a success and called for the nation not to ‘stray from the straight and narrow path of the law’.18 He clearly saw these anti-Semitic measures not only as an ideological statement of the values of the Third Reich, but also as a means of restraining the wilder elements in the party who sought to pursue their own attacks. The day after the laws were passed, he reminded the party faithful that they should ‘continue to refrain’ from taking ‘independent action’ against Jews.19
Emil Klein, who joined the Nazi Party in the early 1920s, saw nothing unusual in these discriminatory measures. ‘There wasn’t only apartheid in Germany alone,’ he says, ‘one heard about apartheid in America. It was nothing special that happened in Germany. It was actually only a part of what was taking place – here and there – the whole world over.’20 And while he is right – and it is important to remember – that racial discrimination was not confined to Germany at the time, these comments are also disingenuous. For something ‘special’ was happening in Germany, since the vehemence with which the Nazis embraced racial theory was astounding.
There were also, paradoxically, many German Jews who saw the Nuremberg Laws in an almost positive light. Yes, they were obviously discriminatory, but the new laws appeared to outline the limits of persecution. ‘These were the rules,’21 and German Jews should live within the rules. It was as if the new anti-Semitic legislation offered Jews protection from arbitrary persecution by local thugs.
Many ordinary Germans did not overly concern themselves with the measures taken against the Jews. What mattered more to them was the massive reduction in unemployment that had occurred since Hitler came to power – from 6 million unemployed in 1933 to fewer than 2 million by 1936. Even though the Nazis massaged the figures – for instance women were no longer included in the data – it was an undoubted success. ‘It was in 1934 that you saw that something might be changing,’ says Erna Krantz, then growing up in Bavaria. It was ‘a glimmer of hope for everyone. Not just for the unemployed, but for, well, for everybody, because we all know that we were downtrodden, and in 1933 Germany had collapsed. We can’t hide the facts, can we? And that’s how it was, lots of things got better. The salaries for civil servants and white-collar workers got better. Everything was improving a little, I can’t remember exactly, I only know about that time from our personal situation as a household. You saw the unemployed disappearing from the streets. That was already a big plus. Of course you did notice that there was a certain line behind it, the youth were being drawn into sport, drawn into community service above all, which was something very significant. They started the construction of the motorways, and all that provided work and took people off the streets. Yes, it definitely was a positive time, otherwise why in the end did the masses follow this man? Why?’22
This economic success was obtained primarily by borrowing on a large scale, most notably for a massive expansion in military spending. Between 1933 and 1935 expenditure on the German military increased from less than 1 per cent of German national income to nearly 10 per cent – a bigger and quicker increase than ever seen before in peacetime in a capitalist state.23
Hitler’s primary focus during this period was not on the ‘Jewish question’, but on building up Germany’s armed forces. Almost everything else was subordinate to this aim. As for his foreign policy, he wanted to deal with foreign nations one by one, rather than through the League of Nations. To this end – and to pursue his policy of rearmament – he withdrew Germany from the League soon after he came to power in 1933. Two years later, in June 1935, Hitler’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in London, which laid down the permissible size of the German fleet as a proportion of the British navy. The agreement broke the Versailles treaty, but there were no adverse consequences for Germany. Hitler said the day the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was signed was the happiest of his life.24
None of this should have come as a surprise to anyone who had read Mein Kampf. Hitler considered Great Britain a possible ally, and he wanted strong armed forces so that he could gain new territory for Germany in the east. He had said all this back in the 1920s. However, he had also said how much he hated the Jews and that he saw them as a deadly th
reat. It would still be some years before he would act decisively on this issue – but that time was coming ever closer.
6. Education and Empire-Building
(1935–1938)
In pursuit of what he called the ‘völkische state’,1 Hitler sought to change the consciousness of the entire German nation. ‘The völkische state’, he wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘must perform the most gigantic educational task. And some day this will seem to be a greater deed than the most victorious wars.’2 A crucial part of this ‘educational task’ was awakening ‘Aryan’ Germans to the danger of the Jews. But while Hitler could legislate for persecution of the Jews via new laws, he could not so easily change the mentality of the nation. And in September 1935, the same month as the announcement of the Nuremberg Laws, it was clear that he was some way from achieving his self-appointed ‘gigantic educational task’.
That September one supporter of the Social Democratic Party in Saxony wrote: ‘the majority of the population, however, ignore the defamation of the Jews; they even openly choose to shop in Jewish department stores and adopt a rather unfriendly attitude to the Stormtrooper on duty there …’3 The situation had not changed nearly two years later, when the Gestapo in Bavaria reported that Jewish cattle dealers still controlled most of the market and large numbers of peasants remained content to do business with them.4
Hitler had always known that the ‘re-education’ of the nation would take time, and that it was vital, in particular, to target the young so that they would be prepared for the exacting tasks ahead. ‘In our eyes,’ he said to an audience of 54,000 Hitler Youth at Nuremberg in September 1935, ‘the German youth of the future must be slender and supple, swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must cultivate a new man in order to prevent the ruin of our Volk by the degeneration manifested in our age.’5
Many of the young were receptive to Nazi propaganda because life seemed to be getting better – both for them and for their parents. ‘When Hitler got to power, suddenly we had work,’ says Wilhelm Roes, who grew up in Germany during the 1930s. ‘The bad mood at home [changed], it was always a bad mood at home when I was a child, because my mother at eleven o’clock didn’t know what to put on the table at twelve. In ’34 my father got work. I think he earned 380 marks. Our situation greatly improved. And he said that’s what the Führer did. Well, what was I supposed to feel? You didn’t really have to brainwash me at all. I’d taken it up at my mother’s knee.’6
Teachers within the Nazi education system spent a great deal of time telling their ‘Aryan’ pupils that they were superior to the Jews, so that the overall context in which anti-Semitism was taught was one of positivity. Maria Mauth, for instance, remembers her teachers in north Germany in the 1930s telling her that ‘only Germans were valuable human beings – there was a little booklet called German Inventors, German Poets, German Musicians – nothing else existed. And we devoured it. We were absolutely convinced that we were the greatest.’7 Erna Krantz, a schoolgirl in Munich at the same time, thought that ‘A lot was done in the educational field, the young had many opportunities … everything was being organized. We weren’t living in affluence like today, but there was order and discipline. And we also had very many role models. That was encouraged. Good writers, they were being emphasized, philosophers too were emphasized … Well, I have to say it was somewhat contagious, you used to say that if you tell a young person every day, “You are something special,” then in the end they will believe you. Well, I mean they tried to breed the so-called German race. Again and again they were saying, we want this, and that, we want healthy people, we want strong, working people, fit people. Above all the Germanness came through, which had been drilled, strengthened, in those years, the Germanness.’8
Although it was relatively easy to tell children that they were better than others, it was harder to get across the message that Jews were dangerous, especially if the pupils knew Jews who were benevolent. Wilhelm Roes, for example, had trouble relating the anti-Semitism that he was taught to the real world around him. In the town where he lived there were Jewish shops, and he remembers how the Jewish owners donated ‘clothes for orphans’. As a result he ‘didn’t like those caricatures in Der Stürmer. I couldn’t understand them.’9
One way teachers countered this disconnect between the Jews of Nazi propaganda and the flesh-and-blood Jews that pupils encountered was to emphasize the alleged deceitful nature of the Jews.10 The most infamous example of this was the children’s book Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom), published by Julius Streicher’s own publishing company in Nuremberg in 1938.11 The title story in the collection tells how a child learns from his mother that just as it can be hard to distinguish good mushrooms in the forest from poisonous mushrooms, so it can be difficult to spot the evil nature of Jews, especially when they try to ‘disguise’ themselves. The advantages for the propagandist of this story are obvious. Jews are seen to be at their most treacherous when they are charming and helpful – just as, by implication, the poisonous mushroom in the forest appears to be the most attractive, but in reality is the most dangerous.
The Jews were thus presented as the antithesis of ‘Germanness’. True Germans had no need to hide their genuine nature, while the Jews felt compelled to conceal their duplicitousness. While the ‘Aryan’ pupils were ‘something special’, the Jews were something poisonous. In a pamphlet entitled The Jewish Question in Education, written in 1937 by Fritz Fink and publicized in Der Stürmer, teachers were told that they must ‘plant the knowledge of the Jew deep in the hearts of our youth from their childhood’ as it was vital that the young learnt about ‘the true depravity and danger of the Jew’. For Fink, a school inspector, the ‘racial and Jewish question’ was the ‘central’ issue of Nazism. The most powerful way to get the message across that contact with Jews was to be avoided, he argued, was via the teaching of ‘science’. For just as a ‘herd of wild horses’ is never led by a ‘wild boar’, so ‘each kind sticks with its own, and seeks a leader of the same species.’ Children should learn that animals naturally know what is best for them. It is only human beings who subvert nature by breeding with different races. ‘Only inferior members of various races mix with each other,’ wrote Fink, ‘the bad mixes with the bad. It is thus clear that the bastard always gets the worst of it, that is, he unites only the bad characteristics of the races he comes from. A teacher who presents his students with such ideas will have an easy time in explaining the meaning of the Nuremberg Laws to the youth. The children will see in the Nuremberg Laws nothing other than a return to the natural, to the divine, order.’12
Hitler understood that it was easier for Nazi propagandists to influence impressionable children than less pliable grown-ups. For adults it could prove harder – but not impossible – to reconcile their theoretical understanding of the Nazi case against the Jews with their personal encounters with Jewish Germans. Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, for instance, as a young Luftwaffe officer, had good reason to be grateful to a German Jew in 1935. Boehm-Tettelbach crash-landed his plane in a field and was rescued by a German Jew. Wanting to say thank-you, he took his rescuer to dinner and was surprised when the man ‘suddenly said he is a Jew’ and asked ‘if I was afraid of being with Jews’. Boehm-Tettelbach told the man that he wasn’t – after all, this man had saved his life. ‘That’s the first time I realized that something could happen with the Jews,’ says Boehm-Tettelbach. But this incident didn’t make him alter his desire to support the regime. ‘In Berlin especially,’ he says, ‘they [the Nazis] claimed that the lawyers were mostly Jews, so when they said they had too many lawyers, one understood that. To be anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that you kill the people. You might not get socially close together, you might not like them very much, but that doesn’t mean that you kill the people …’13 While feeling ‘sorry’ for the German Jews in the wake of the Nuremberg Laws, Boehm-Tettelbach admits that ‘it didn’t worry me much.’
In his relaxed attitude to the persecution of t
he German Jews during the 1930s, Boehm-Tettelbach captures the mood of many non-Jewish Germans. They were open to the suggestion that ‘something should be done’ about the alleged power and influence of the Jews, and if they subsequently felt uneasy about any excesses in anti-Semitic actions, they just looked the other way. As for the Jews they knew and liked, they were treated as a class apart.
Leading Nazis emphasized not just what they claimed were the practical aspects of the ‘Jewish problem’ – like the number of Jewish lawyers in Berlin – but also the underlying issue of race. To them, issues like the disproportionate number of Jews in the legal profession were the symptom of this ‘problem’ but race was always the cause. ‘We shall gather together the best blood,’ said Walther Darré, the Agriculture Minister. ‘Just as we are now breeding our Hanover horse from the few remaining pure-blooded male and female stock, so we shall see the same type of breeding over the next generation of the pure type of Nordic German.’14