Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  needed to initiate anti-Semitic legislation—the ‘atmospheric’ conditions for it—

  could be created. Under this pressure, the Jews could be removed from public

  life, and from state institutions in particular, and an appropriate platform could

  be created for the complete segregation of the Jewish minority that was to follow

  at a later date.

  The successful enforcement of these first anti-Jewish measures allowed the

  NSDAP to make the ‘Jewish question’ a dominant factor in domestic policy within

  only a few months of their coming to power. Problems as distinct as the economic

  situation of the lower middle class, the seething violence of the SA and the

  international isolation of the Reich were to be reduced to a single common

  point of origin, stamped with the slogan ‘the Jews are our misfortune’. By

  unleashing the anti-Jewish campaign the NSDAP succeeded above all in seizing

  the domestic policy initiative and in maximizing their room for manoeuvre

  vis-à-vis their conservative coalition partners.

  The practical preparations for boycott were begun on 26 March after a conver-

  sation between Hitler and Goebbels. They were entrusted to Julius Streicher,

  district chief or Gauleiter of the area around Nuremberg and one of the most

  radical anti-Semites in the whole Party, who was made the chair of a ‘Central

  Committee to Combat Jewish Lies about Atrocities and Boycott’. 16 On 28 March the Committee issued a call to prepare the boycott. 17 Responsibility for it was clearly claimed by Hitler in the cabinet meeting held on 28 March 1933, when he

  informed the cabinet that ‘he, the Reich Chancellor himself, had ensured that the

  appeal would be issued to the National Socialist Party’. 18

  Because acts of violence against Jews were becoming increasingly frequent in

  the days before the ‘boycott’ that was to begin on 1 April for an unlimited period, 19

  considerable effort was expended to ensure that the whole undertaking would run

  in a smooth and disciplined manner. To this end Goebbels declared on 31 March

  that the campaign would be ‘suspended on the evening of the first day (this was a

  Saturday) until the following Wednesday; it would only be relaunched if the ‘lies

  about atrocities’ from abroad had not ceased by that point. 20

  Following a tried and tested pattern, on 1 April SA and Hitler Youth guards

  carrying pre-printed placards were stationed outside Jewish shops and attempted

  to prevent potential customers from entering. The atmosphere on that day was

  characterized by crowds of people in the business quarters, gathered round the

  entrances of the shops being forcibly boycotted. Because their customers were

  Displacement from Public Life, 1933–4

  37

  being intimidated, most Jewish shop owners found themselves compelled to shut

  as the day wore on. 21

  Whilst in the main shopping streets of the cities the impression given was of a

  carefully regulated Party campaign, in the side streets and in smaller towns attacks

  on Jewish firms mounted steadily, often with display windows being daubed or

  smashed. In many towns Jewish citizens were threatened, mistreated, or driven

  through the streets by squads of SA troops. There were isolated instances of

  looting. In Kiel a Jewish lawyer who was supposed to have shot and seriously

  injured an SS man was lynched by the mob whilst in police custody. 22 On the evening of 1 April the boycott was ‘suspended’ for three days, as planned, and not

  relaunched thereafter, since the Central Committee announced that the supposed

  stories from abroad about atrocities in Germany had abated. 23

  The boycott did in fact enable the regime to achieve its intentions. Even if

  innumerable reports confirm that a proportion of the public deliberately shopped

  that day in Jewish-owned businesses, 24 the majority of the population evidently acted just as the regime had expected them to. On that day most people avoided

  going to Jewish shops. The boycott therefore largely achieved its aims.

  The regime could also claim as a further aspect of its success the fact that since

  the end of March, in anticipation of the imminent boycott, a whole series of voices

  usually heard in opposition to the government had taken a public stance against

  foreign claims of atrocities being perpetrated in Germany and had mobilized their

  contacts abroad in like manner.

  The National Socialists thus succeeded in presenting foreign responses pro-

  voked by their own anti-Jewish campaign as ‘anti-German’ attacks and in exploit-

  ing this skewed picture to send out messages of trustworthiness and images of

  inoffensiveness to the rest of the world. At this very early point it is apparent how

  the ‘Jewish question’, handled with the appropriate political and promotional skill,

  could be utilized to influence and confuse public opinion not only in Germany but

  in the rest of the world as well.

  It is remarkable that even Jewish organizations and institutions such as the

  Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Organization

  of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith) and the Jewish Veterans’ Organization,

  the Boards of the Jewish community in Berlin and elsewhere, as well as many

  Jewish private individuals and entrepreneurs took part in the attempts to minim-

  ize the criticisms of the situation in Germany voiced by those abroad. 25 After a discussion with Goering on 25 March, the Organization of German Zionists and

  the Centralverein decided on a particularly spectacular course: they sent a joint

  delegation to London to argue against a boycott of German goods. 26 The fact that on the delegation’s return, the Centralverein publicly declared the mission a

  success, 27 underlines the precarious situation of the German-Jewish officials: the

  ‘success’ of their mission could also be seen as confirming the NS argument to the

  effect that ‘the Jews’ were responsible for behind-the-scenes propaganda and

  38

  Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

  boycott campaigns against Germany but had supposedly buckled under massive

  pressure and desisted from their shameful activities.

  First Anti-Jewish Laws

  In the meantime campaigns by Party activists against Jewish lawyers were being

  extended. The judicial authorities reacted to these illegal measures by transferring

  or suspending Jewish judges and public prosecutors, and by imposing quotas for

  Jewish barristers. 28 These steps were very soon legalized by the Hitler–Papen government, and the official regulation of members of the legal system agreed

  in cabinet at the beginning of April was quickly extended to the whole of the civil

  service.

  The ‘Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service’ passed on

  7 April made provision both for the possible dismissal of civil servants on political

  grounds and for the compulsory retirement of those civil servants ‘who are not of

  Aryan descent’. 29 In response to an intervention from President Hindenburg, Jewish civil servants who were already in service before 1 August 1914, who had

  fought at the front, or whose fathers or sons had been killed in the war, were

  exempted from these regulations. These requirements were also logically to be

  extended to all workers and employees in the public service. The first decree,

 
issued on 11 April, determined that anyone who had even one Jewish parent or

  grandparent was to be considered ‘non-Aryan’. 30

  The Professional Civil Service Law marked the point at which the legal

  equality of Jews across the Reich that had been in force since its foundation in

  1871 was finally shattered, and it heralded the step-by-step revision of their

  emancipation. The law also marked a significant infringement of the traditional

  rights and privileges of the civil service, which were constitutionally protected

  but, since the Enabling Act, liable to suspension. Whilst the political ‘cleansing’

  of the civil service represented a measure that was not out of line with the kind of

  personnel changes that usually accompany a change of regime, the dismissal of

  civil servants ‘of non-Aryan descent’ was something completely new: a racial

  criterion was being used to rob part of the civil service of the constitutionally

  guaranteed status that formed such an important element of the German

  tradition of the servant of the state. The fact that such a racially motivated

  political intervention in the existing legal system was accepted by the service

  meant a significant victory for the NSDAP in its attempt to subjugate the

  conservative state apparatus that was so wedded to the principle of the consti-

  tutional state founded on the rule of law.

  The imposition of the ‘Aryan principle’ in public administration during the

  next few weeks was perfected using further legal measures. In the months that

  followed some 50 per cent of a total of about 5,000 Jewish civil servants were

  deprived of their jobs by the new laws. 31

  Displacement from Public Life, 1933–4

  39

  The elimination of Jewish civil servants was undertaken by the new government

  simultaneously with the exclusion of Jewish members of the legal profession from

  the legal system. Yet more wide-reaching plans to prevent even Jewish doctors

  from exercising their profession failed initially because of resistance from the

  Chancellor, Hitler, who did not consider such plans as opportune at that point. 32

  Whilst the law concerning admission to the legal profession passed on 7 April33

  did indeed determine that lawyers ‘of non-Aryan descent’ should lose their right

  to practise their profession, there were the same exemptions made as in the

  professional civil service law. As a result of these regulations more than 40 per

  cent of the Jewish notaries and almost 60 per cent of the Jewish lawyers in the

  largest German state, Prussia, were initially able to continue to practise. They

  were, however, subject to innumerable obstacles put in place by the Party, which

  went as far as forcibly expelling them from court buildings, which happened

  several times in the spring of 1933. 34

  Jews in other professions regulated by the state, like patent lawyers and

  accountants, were soon hit by similar measures. Doctors and dentists were

  excluded from practising in the health insurance system. 35 The ‘Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities’ also imposed a quota on the

  numbers of Jewish pupils and students that could be accepted. 36 Jewish school and university students were subsequently discriminated against in many ways and

  were excluded from certain activities such as participation in sport. 37

  The National Socialists also took special measures to exclude Jews from the

  cultural life of the nation. As early as 30 January the former senior functionary of

  the National Socialist Campaign Group for German Culture, Hans Hinkel, was

  made ‘Commissar without portfolio’ in the Prussian Ministry of Culture and

  given the task of ‘removing Jews from cultural life’. In April, Goering directed

  his attentions to the theatre in particular by making him Head of the Prussian

  Theatrical Commission. 38 In March and April, as part of the familiar interplay of Party grass-roots ‘campaigns’ and administrative measures, National Socialist

  rallies led to theatrical performances and concerts by Jewish artists being dis-

  rupted and Jewish musicians and theatre directors being dismissed. 39

  On 6 April 1933 Hitler once more voiced his public support for this policy, at a

  reception for leading medical officials, where he explained that ‘the immediate

  eradication of the excess of Jewish intellectuals from the cultural and intellectual

  life of Germany is necessary if justice is to be done to Germany’s natural right to

  an intellectual leadership appropriate to its own kind’. 40

  The middle of April saw the beginning of the ‘campaign against un-German

  thinking’ in most universities, where members of the National Socialist Student

  League systematically combed through the holdings of private lending libraries.

  On 10 May in many German cities works by left-wing, pacifist, and ‘morally

  corrosive’ authors were burned alongside the works of Jewish writers and

  scientists. 41

  40

  Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

  There was a temporary shift in the persecution of the Jews at the beginning

  of July 1933 when Hitler proclaimed the end of the ‘National Socialist Revo-

  lution’ in a speech to the Reichstatthalter, those established by the new regime

  as the governors of the individual German states. 42 For reasons of foreign, domestic, and economic policy the regime felt compelled to rein in the

  violence of the SA with the result that attacks on Jews and Jewish property

  were moderated once more. But the government’s intention to find a com-

  prehensive solution to the ‘Jewish question’ was interrupted after only a few

  months. Of the three major legislative programmes announced in early July

  by Hans Pfundtner, Permanent Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Inter-

  ior, 43 only one, the sterilization law, was to find its way into cabinet discussions, whilst the two anti-Jewish projects he had listed—a Citizenship Law

  and a law for the ‘Purification and Continuing Purity of German Blood’—

  were postponed. Nonetheless, the July 1933 law concerning the revocation of

  naturalization and deprivation of citizenship, did come into force. 44 It was especially important in that it created the legal foundations for removing

  from the Reich the ‘Ostjuden’ or Eastern European Jews who had entered

  since the end of the First World War, by depriving them of their German

  citizenship.

  Hitler explained what had originally been much more extensive planning in the

  area of racial legislation and the reasons for its temporary postponement in a

  speech to the Reichstatthalter conference on 29 September 1933:

  He, the Chancellor, would have preferred to move gradually towards stepping up the rigour with which the Jews in Germany were treated, by creating first of all a nationality law and using this as the basis for ever harsher approaches to the Jews. However, the boycott

  provoked by the Jews had necessitated immediate counter-measures of the severest kind.

  People abroad were complaining above all about the legalized treatment of the Jews as

  second-class citizens. 45

  Thus the regime restricted itself at first to a further series of discrimination

  measures against Jews in specific areas of life, but not against the Jews as a whole.

  On the one hand, therefore, various legal regulations debarred Jews from

  entering pr
ofessions that required academic qualifications, such as the law, medi-

  cine, dentistry, and pharmacy; those Jews already active in such professions were

  prevented from continuing to practise them. 46 The foundation of the Reich Chamber of Culture in September 1933 gave the regime the means to exclude

  Jews definitively from all the cultural professions. The first step was to declare

  them ineligible to join the new organizations that were compulsory regulators of

  all activity in the cultural sphere, on the grounds that they did not possess the

  ‘reliability’ and ‘suitability’ that the membership conditions prescribed. 47 The Editorial Law of October 1933 provided the same instrument to prevent Jews

  from becoming journalists in future. 48

  Displacement from Public Life, 1933–4

  41

  Legal exclusion conditions ensured that Jews could neither achieve the privil-

  eged status of ‘Hereditary Peasant’ introduced by Nazi agricultural legislation, 49

  nor gain access to the newly introduced marriage loans. 50 In July 1933 the army introduced a requirement that soldiers’ brides would have to prove their ‘Aryan’

  descent. 51 In February 1934, on their own intiative the Armed Forces introduced the requirements of the Professional Civil Service Act. As a consequence, some

  seventy soldiers had to leave the army for ‘racial’ reasons—which represented an

  important intrusion by the new government into the army’s personnel manage-

  ment, previously considered by the military top brass as their autonomous

  domain, and therefore a symbolically important act of submission by the army

  to the racist dogmas of the regime. 52

  Deceptive Calm

  Because there were no major new persecution measures taken during this period,

  the second half of 1933 and 1934 are often described as a period of ‘relative calm’

  for the German Jews. However, despite the official end of the ‘boycott’ the Party

  grass-roots campaigns against Jews and Jewish businesses were in many cases

  perpetuated, and Jewish citizens were the victims of petty policies on the part of

  the state administration that were aimed at displacing or ousting them. The longer

  this condition obtained, the more profoundly the financial basis of Jewish busi-