Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
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considerable advantages to those carrying out anti-Jewish policy since removing
the Jews from German society, which was crucial to the idea of racial ‘cleansing’,
was for the National Socialists precisely the same as achieving their goal of total
domination. ‘Anti-Jewish policy’, or ‘racial policy’ in its broadest sense, was
intimately bound up with plans of the NS leadership that reached far beyond
the immediate anti-Semitic or racist goals.
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Racism and anti-Semitism were not only core components of the National
Socialists’ ideology but played a key role in the implementation and consolidation
of the NSDAP’s ambitions for power. By setting about translating their radical
aims into anti-Jewish and racial policies after 1933, the NSDAP was quickly
creating a new dimension to politics, and one that was wholly dominated by
them. At the centre was the intention to rid German society of all forms of ‘Jewish
influence’ and of everything that was in any sense ‘racially inferior’, and as part of
this comprehensive ‘cleansing’ process the sectors of German society that needed
‘cleansing’ were also to be subjugated as thoroughly as possible to National
Socialist hegemony. This new political dimension had top priority; it cut right
across the traditional political spheres such as foreign, economic, or social policy;
it dominated, saturated, and transformed them. Almost every conventional pol-
itical problem could be interpreted as a ‘racial problem’ or an aspect of the ‘Jewish
question’.
It was also true, of course, that the goals of foreign, economic, and social policy
had implications for the implementation of ‘racial’ or ‘anti-Jewish policy’. As in
every conventional sphere of politics, the practical implementation of racial or
anti-Semitic goals and the concomitant expansion of the National Socialists’
political power was a complicated process. Close attention had to be paid to
potentially competing aspirations, to overcoming opposition, making tactical
concessions, managing internal rivalries, and establishing a consensus on which
direction policy should take.
Within this complex process of implementing new racially dominated power
structures, four elements should be highlighted in order to demonstrate clearly
what far-reaching implications such a multi-layered transformation had for the
entire political system.
First, the ‘struggle against the Jews’, against racial ‘disintegration’ and ‘alien
races’ made an important contribution to integrating and mobilizing the National
Socialist movement. The Nazis’ programmatic approaches within the traditional
spheres of politics were contradictory and inadequately thought through, so
racism and anti-Semitism functioned as an indispensable surrogate for lack of
consistency in these areas.
Second, by implementing a racial model of argument, the means of steering
public opinion in the ‘Third Reich’ were restructured so as to permit the hegem-
ony of racism. What used to be defined as social, economic, domestic, or foreign
policy was now subsumed under an all-embracing ‘racial problem’ or ‘Jewish
question’. But implementing a racial discourse in a dictatorship was not restricted
to the manipulation of the media by the NS propaganda apparatus. In a broader
sense it encompassed all the ways in which the public sphere was influenced and
manoeuvred, including the day-to-day behaviour of the population, and in par-
ticular increases in the control of informal exchanges of information. The gradual
segregation of Jewish minorities from mainstream daily activities and the
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
suppression of any criticism of these measures appeared to offer proof that the
greater part of the German population was in full agreement with the regime’s
‘anti-Jewish policy’.
Third, reshaping the public domain was the most important prerequisite for the
NSDAP’s ability to use the ‘racial question’ or the ‘Jewish problem’ for the gradual
extension of its own power base, not least at the expense of its conservative
coalition partners. Since virtually every political question possessed a ‘racial’
element, and since every dimension of life was subject to Entjudung, the National
Socialists had almost unlimited possibilities for intervening in what had hitherto
been relatively autonomous areas of existence. In practice, racism made possible
the almost complete elimination of a private sphere. Questions such as the choice
of a partner and the conception and education of children were no longer
the responsibility of the individual but subordinated to racialized concepts of
the family. Racism undermined traditional ideas of the equality of the citizenry
and led to the creation of radically new criteria for judging personal capacities and
capabilities, and therefore also to a redistribution of opportunities for social
advancement. Racism established the basis for a new order of financial relation-
ships; articulated, for example, in the ‘Aryanization’ programme it transformed
traditional social policy into notions of ‘nurturing the nation’.
Finally, imposing racial and anti-Semitic patterns of thinking onto inter-
national and foreign policy appeared to create considerable confusion on the
international stage which in part prevented the build-up of a widespread rejection
of the Nazi regime from outside Germany.
The First Anti-Semitic Wave during the
Nazi ‘Seizure of Power’
The very first steps towards the persecution of the Jews taken by the National
Socialists clearly demonstrate how National Socialist ‘anti-Jewish policy’ always
remained closely related to aims that had little or nothing to do with the ‘Jewish
question’. The first wave of anti-Semitism, the attacks on Jewish citizens in March
1933, the boycott that followed on 1 April, and the discriminatory legal measures
taken immediately afterwards are all of a piece with the tactics deployed by the
National Socialists for the ‘seizure of power’.
In the first phase of the National Socialists’ ‘seizure of power’, between
30 January and the Reichstag elections of 5 March 1933, the new government
concentrated on its opposition to the Left, the Communist Party (KPD) and the SPD.
But even if socialist functionaries of Jewish origin were persecuted with particular
intensity, 1 and attacks on Jewish or ‘Jewish-looking’ people in the street and raids on apartments inhabited by Jews were routine elements in the violence of the SA, 2
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this form of attack on Jews was still very much overshadowed by the National
Socialists’ strategies for the elimination of the workers’ movement.
In the second phase of the ‘seizure of power’, which began after the Reichstag
elections of 5 March and lasted until early May, the National Socialists were
principally concerned with bringing into line (Gleichsschaltung) the Länder and
local government. Alongside these measures, in March and April, the NSDAP
began to take control of the employe
rs’ associations, and the organization of the
unions and the SPD were paralysed by direct interventions (by this time the KPD
had already been crushed). In this phase, and often in direct conjunction with the
tumultuous occupation of town halls, union headquarters, and Social Democrat
newspaper offices, the National Socialists intensified their attacks on Jewish
citizens and Jewish businesses across the whole Reich. Within a few days, two
principal targets emerged: lawyers of Jewish origin and businesses in Jewish
ownership. At the same time similar campaigns were initiated against department
stores, chain stores, and cooperative societies (or in other words against large
retailers who were branded by the NSDAP’s propaganda aimed at the lower
middle class as typical products of the ‘Jewish’ drive for profit), regardless of
whether they were actually owned by Jews or not. This wave of attacks on Jewish
businesses, amongst others, was not unexpected: it was the continuation and
culmination of the dogged low-level war that the NSDAP had waged against
undesirable entrepreneurs since the end of the 1920s. Driving Jewish lawyers
out of the judiciary was, as has already been demonstrated, an old keystone of
anti-Semitism. 3
Violence and ‘Boycott’
The spread of the first wave of anti-Semitism can be reconstructed precisely. 4 It was begun on 7 March 1933 in the Rhine-Ruhr district, reached central Germany
and Berlin on 9 March, hit Hamburg, Mecklenburg, and Frankfurt on 11 March
and a series of cities in the south-west on 13 March. Spreading to certain regions in
leaps and bounds like this indicates that the violence was organized at district
level, from within those Gaus where the functionaries of the Combat League of
Small Business (the militant organization of Nazi shopkeepers) and regional SA
leaders will have been prominent.
The violence always followed the same pattern: Nazi supporters demonstrated
outside the shops, stuck posters on the windows, and prevented customers from
entering. There were frequently scuffles, and in most cases the shops were forced
to close. These campaigns were often accompanied by violent attacks on Jews, but
these did not at this stage take on the shape of a pogrom. 5
In the very first days the National Socialist leadership had encouraged the
attacks on Jewish businesses—the Prussian Minister for the Interior, Goering,
for instance, declared on 10 March that he refused to allow ‘the police to act as a
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
protection agency for Jewish department stores’. 6 However, the NS leadership very soon began to row against this trend: in a call made on 10 March Hitler
warned against any further unauthorized individual campaigns and a decree from
the Reich Minister for the Interior issued on 13 March also warned explicitly
against ‘the closure and intimidation of retail premises’. 7
In response to these warnings from on high, attacks made by grass-roots Party
members on Jewish shops had slackened off by 13 March. 8 In the second half of March, the SA concentrated mainly on measures against unions and the Social
Democrats and on preventing all forms of Communist activity. Two events will
have caused the NS leadership to present themselves as relatively moderate,
sanctioning the use of force only for the complete suppression of ‘Marxism’.
These were the formal opening of the Reichstag due to take place on 21 March,
where the National Socialists wished to portray themselves as partners of the
Conservatives on the basis of Prussian traditionalism, and the passing of the
Enabling Act slated for two days later, for which the government required
the support of the non-socialist parties.
Nonetheless, it was not possible to put a complete end to anti-Jewish violence in
this phase. Members of the SA perpetrated what amounted to a pogrom in
Creglingen (in the southern German state of Württemberg) on 25 March. They
forced their way into the town’s synagogue, dragged the male worshippers into the
town hall where they humiliated and maltreated them, sometimes very seriously
indeed. Two Jewish inhabitants died as a result of their injuries. 9
During the month of March, alongside the attacks on Jewish shops and
businesses, there were many towns in which Jewish lawyers were forcibly
removed from the administration of justice. From 9 March on, SA and SS
troops occupied court buildings and ejected Jewish members of the legal
profession, including judges and public prosecutors. 10 The most famous incident was in Breslau, where the violence forced the regional court to declare a
three-day halt to judicial proceedings. 11 Such attacks on court buildings were hugely inflamed by various public declarations and continued throughout the
second half of March. 12 Interventions into the area of justice by ordinary members of the Party gave the judicial authorities the excuse to use administrative means to remove Jewish lawyers from their positions, 13 and created the basis on which the subsequent legal exclusion of Jews from the judiciary and the
public sector as a whole could quickly be established. For the National Social-
ists, however, these illegal interventions and their rapid subsequent legalization
were also an important step on the way towards control of the entire state
apparatus, a first litmus test to establish how resistant or compliant the pre-
dominantly conservative civil service actually was, and an opportunity for
assessing at the same time the extent to which German nationalist coalition
partners would be prepared to tolerate interference in the rule of law at this
early stage.
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If the Nazi leadership resolved at the end of March to call once more for a
boycott of Jewish shops and businesses—centrally coordinated this time—then it
did so for a mixture of tactical and fundamentally ideological reasons. 14 The decision to call for a boycott arose from the specific dynamics of the process
towards the seizure of power. When the Enabling Act was passed at the end of
March the NSDAP had completed an important stage in their plans to ensure a
monopoly of power. The next decisive step on the path to total power, the
definitive suppression of unions and the SPD and the dissolution of the non-
socialist parties, was to take place only after 1 May, the National Labour Day,
which they proposed to make into an official public holiday celebrated with great
pomp and circumstance. At the end of March, therefore, the NS Party leadership
was in a delicate transitional phase in the process towards the seizure of power:
grass-roots Party activism could not be allowed to wane, but the activists them-
selves had to be restrained from being overly brutal towards their political enemies
within the unions and the SPD and towards the competition represented by the
non-socialist parties. It was moreover important to regain control of the increas-
ingly forceful anti-capitalist drive arising from the Party activists, which was
leading to disruptive ‘interventions in the economic life of the country’ at precisely
this point, the second half of March. 15
Both aims were attainable by means of a controlled resumption of the anti-
Jewish boycott. The Part
y leadership was demonstrating that it was responding to
the anti-Semitic demands of the population, and by steering and controlling the
whole campaign from the centre, was able to re-establish its authority over the
Party membership. The fact that the leadership succeeded in gaining control over
the attacks emanating from the activists in certain districts by the middle of
March, and that it was to initiate a major propaganda campaign to stoke the
flames of the population’s anger by the end of March, shows that the leadership
was fully in control of the situation and was in no sense propelled into the boycott
by the grass-roots membership.
The need to steer this complex internal Party dynamic during the process of the
seizure of power was only one of two main motives. By starting a campaign
against the German Jews, or in other words by seizing hostages, the NS leadership
hoped to be able to stem the rising tide of criticism from abroad. By labelling
criticism of this type ‘Jewish atrocity stories’, which emanated from a relatively
small section of foreign Jews, they defined international reaction against the
brutalities of the ‘seizure of power’ in anti-Semitic terms, and at the same time
created the pretext for the planned boycott.
Such tactical considerations should not obscure the fact that, only a few months
after taking over the reins of government the NSDAP was using the call for a
boycott to begin implementing a significant element in its political programme,
namely the disenfranchisement of the Jewish minority. This makes it clear that
Nazi Judenpolitik cannot be understood in merely functional terms, as an instrument
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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
designed to mobilize the NS movement; it was one of the central pillars of the
NSDAP’s ideology, and there was no difference of opinion on this point between
the Party leadership and the ordinary Party members.
The campaigns against Jewish businesses undertaken under centralized dir-
ection, and pre-empted by the violence of March 1933, were now linked with the
continuing attacks on Jewish lawyers to form a comprehensive anti-Jewish
crusade underpinned by the authority of the regime. In this way the pressure