war on ‘international Jewry’ supposedly hiding behind the mask of ‘Bolshevism’.
According to the introduction to the memorandum on the Four-Year Plan that
Hitler gave to Goering when he was appointed:
Since the outbreak of the French Revolution the world has been racing ever more quickly
towards a new conflict, whose most extreme solution is called Bolshevism but whose
content and aims are rather to remove the social strata who currently lead mankind and
replace them with a network of Jews spread across the whole world. 57
The fact that from the outset the Four-Year Plan was conceived as fulfilling an
important function in the context of a comprehensive anti-Jewish policy was
underlined by those responsible for the Four-Year Plan, at the beginning of
1942, when the ‘Final Solution’ was fully operational. 58
The attacks on Jewish wealth were, moreover, one of the original pillars of the
Four-Year Plan. Hitler himself had used his memorandum to demand a law
‘which would make all Jews liable for whatever damage was sustained by the
German economy and the German people as a result of individual instances of
such criminality’—an intention that was only to be put into practice after the
November 1938 pogroms. The memorandum also contained Hitler’s demand that
hoarding hard currency should incur the death penalty—something he called
‘economic sabotage’—and this too was a demand that future developments would
prove was aimed in the first instance at Jewish ‘economic saboteurs’. 59
On 7 July 1936 Goering, in his role as leader of the ‘raw materials and currency
team’ (the group that preceded the Four-Year Plan) had already given Heydrich the
task of setting up a ‘Currency Investigation Office’ (Devisenfahndungsamt), which
was to be an authority reporting to Goering ‘personally and directly’. This office was
principally designed to make sure that the customs search and currency investigation
authorities applied the complicated currency regulations against Jews with excessive
rigour so as to secure pretexts for the financial authorities to ‘secure’ Jewish money. In taking on his new responsibilities Heydrich thus assumed an important function in
the coordination of the efforts of the Security Police, the Four-Year Plan, and the
financial management of the expropriation of the German Jews. 60
64
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
It was therefore both an aim and one of the functions of the Four-Year Plan to
intensify the persecution of the Jews, which raises the question of whether this
does not suggest new grounds for reconsidering the role of Goering in NS anti-
Jewish policy development. The letter of appointment that Goering wrote for
Heydrich in July 1936 was the first link in a chain of authorizations issued to the
Head of the Security Police by the Reichsmarschall. It was followed by Heydrich’s
appointment as head of the ‘Central Office for Jewish Emigration’ in January 1939
and ended in the authorization given in July 1941 to make ‘preparations for the
final solution of the Jewish question’. It is not the case that Goering only took on a
central role in Jewish policy after 9 November 1938 in order to clean up the piles of
broken glass that resulted from the pogrom; the history of his active engagement
in the ‘Jewish question’ evidently begins more than two years previously.
The civil service resumed its attempts at excluding Jews from the economic
sphere immediately after the end of the Olympic Games at a conference of senior
government officials that took place on 29 September 1936. 61 Here the representatives of the Reich Ministries of the Interior and of Finance and of the Führer’s
Deputy initially came to an agreement that the common goal of the ‘complete and
total emigration’ of the Jews should mean the ‘emigration of Jews under all
possible circumstances’. According to the Permanent Secretary, Stuckart, ‘all
measures in the area of Jewish policy should be directed at the achievement of
this goal. Economic activity on the part of the Jews should only be permitted in so
far as it constitutes supporting themselves, but their economic and political
situation should not be permitted to suppress their desire to emigrate.’ Walter
Sommer, a senior official on the staff of the Führer’s Deputy, added that ‘rich Jews
will not generally be keen to emigrate. The Jews should therefore not be given very
much room for economic activity. But on the other hand, a Jewish proletariat
should also be prevented from forming.’
This premise—the restriction of Jewish economic activity and the prevention of
proletarianization—was used as the basis for a series of measures. However,
discussion revealed that, because of the general economic situation in Germany,
it was necessary to step back from implementing most of the suggested anti-
Jewish measures: there was no appetite either for imposing on the public purse a
general ban against dealing with Jews or for requiring the enforced dismissal of all
Jewish salesmen active in German firms.
On 1 December 1936 two laws were finally passed that put into practice Hitler’s
demands in the memorandum on the Four-Year Plan. One was a law against
economic sabotage assigning the death penalty to anyone transferring their wealth
abroad, 62 the other was a modification of the law on currency management that included so-called security measures against anyone suspected of transferring currency abroad. 63 Both laws were subsequently to provide the basis for the largely arbitrary confiscation of large sums of money, mainly from Jews, and for condemning
those who had such sums—‘economic saboteurs’—to long periods of detention.
Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7
65
In addition to this, as 1936 moved into 1937 the civil service produced three
more drafts for anti-Semitic laws. They responded to the plans articulated in the
memorandum on the Four-Year Plan for introducing a ‘special Jewish tax’, for
identifying and labelling Jewish businesses, and for formulating a Reich citizenship
law. 64 All three drafts were put on hold after further consultation in the spring and summer of 1937. In fact, the exclusion of Jews from the economy that began in
earnest at the end of 1936 was at first not achieved by spectacular acts of legislation
but via more subtle policies of exclusion and isolation that took many forms.
In the first of these, the boycott of Jewish retail trade took on such proportions
that the complete economic annihilation of the few Jews remaining in this sphere
could confidently be predicted in the near future. The records of the Centralverein
contain many examples of campaigns against Jewish business activity that were
implemented with renewed vigour during the Christmas period at the end of
1936.65 Above all it was on the rural population that pressure was applied to break off business contacts with Jewish cattle dealers. Gestapo reports for 1937 are
unanimous, however, in suggesting that despite intensive propaganda many
farmers were not prepared to take the initiative in breaking off contact with
Jews. In the face of this situation, the Gestapo undertook an operation across
the whole area of the Reich in the summer of 1937. With the support of the local
; authorities, the local police and the Reich Food Estate, farmers who continued to
trade with Jews were arrested. 66 Through the continuation and intensification of the ‘boycott’, conditions were achieved under which many Jews were forced to sell
their firms in haste and at less than their true value, only to lose the proceeds in
large part or even entirely in the maze of currency regulations.
A second element in the politics of exclusion can be seen in Heydrich’s nomin-
ation as the head of the Currency Investigation Office in summer 1936 and the
introduction of the law authorizing currency management alterations in December
of that year, which effectively completed the mechanisms for confiscating the assets
of Jews suspected of being about to emigrate (‘im Auswanderungsverdacht’). The
completely arbitrary nature of this process emerges clearly from the fact that
emigration, itself the very goal of NS anti-Jewish policies, was now being used as
a pretext to secure assets for the state. The financial authorities and the branches of
the Reichsbank had to cooperate actively in the compilation of the documentation
necessary to support a suspicion of emigration. 67 By June 1938, according to a communication from the Currency Investigation Office, the Customs Investigation Centres were ‘almost exclusively’ concerned with ‘securing’ the assets of Jews
who had raised suspicions that they were intending to leave the country. 68
Via a network of special submissions and regulations for the granting of
exemptions, the assets of Jewish businessmen were systematically appropriated
by the state. According to paragraph 1 of the Tax Adjustment Law of October 1934,
Inland Revenue offices were required to interpret all taxation regulations in
accordance with the ‘National Socialist world-view’, which was in effect equivalent
66
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
to a blanket instruction to apply the severest imaginable criteria in dealing with
Jewish taxpayers. 69 Eventually, as the regulations concerning the tax on leaving the Reich introduced in 1931 were tightened up, and as the premium to be paid on
capital transfers was raised ever higher—reaching the level of 90 per cent in June
1938—the assets of emigrating Jews were plundered almost entirely. 70
Another aspect is demonstrated by the various measures taken to force Jews to
hand their business over to ‘Aryan’ owners or to have them liquidated, often to the
advantage of ‘Aryan’ competitors. 71 The so-called ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish firms—
their transfer to a non-Jewish proprietor usually at a price far below their market-
value—was a process that had begun long before it received formal legal sanction
in 1938. To all appearances this ‘creeping Aryanization’ took the form of run-of-
the-mill business sales, but in reality such deals were often the enforced result of
the threats and obstructions to Jewish economic activity that have been described
above. As a direct result of the boycott, from 1933 onwards the number of Jewish
businesses being ‘Aryanized’ grew year on year and the sale prices dropped as
increasing pressure was applied to their owners. In addition to the direct sale of
some firms, others were ‘indirectly Aryanized’ as a result of liquidation proceed-
ings that allowed the competition to strip them of their plant and equipment and
eventually take over entirely what was left of each firm or the relevant sector of the
market. 72 Barkai estimates that by 1935 some 20–5 per cent of all Jewish businesses had been liquidated or transferred to non-Jewish ownership. 73
The process of ‘Aryanization’ was such that direct support from the police and the
judiciary meant that the buyer was often in a position to force the seller to ‘Aryanize’
and to tailor the terms of transfer to suit his own best interests. In the very earliest
years of the ‘Third Reich’ accusations of ‘racial defilement’, or arrests on suspicion of commercial irregularities, or arbitrary intervention on the part of the Gestapo all
proved suitable means to ensure that Jewish proprietors became compliant. 74
According to an analysis of ‘Aryanization’ reports in the Jüdische Rundschau
undertaken by the German historian Helmut Genschel, after a temporary lull in
1936 and a reduction in the first half of 1937, there was a slow but significant rise in
the instances of ‘Aryanization’ in the third and fourth quartiles of 1937, which was
followed in 1938 by a much more rapid increase in takeovers. 75 Since 1936 the Gestapo had played a regular part in the processes of ‘Aryanization’. The Party’s
Gau economic advisers played a central role and their assent to the transfer of
Jewish assets gradually became a necessary part of the process. 76
Even without legal measures to restrict Jewish commercial activity, and without
large-scale anti-Jewish rallies, the process of commercially displacing the German
Jews continued ‘inexorably in the years 1936 and 1937’. 77 The so-called ‘creeping Aryanization’ took place according to a logic that was characterized in the 1937 report
of the North-Eastern Sector of the SD thus: ‘In some areas it has been possible to
eliminate Jewish influence immediately using laws and decrees passed by the state, but
in the commercial sector it has had to be undermined only gradually. ’78
Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7
67
Increases in Measures to Expel the Jews
With its efforts in the latter half of 1936 to expel the Jews from the economic
sphere, the National Socialist regime was pursuing two main goals: the financing
of rearmament and the expulsion of the Jewish minority from Germany. Eco-
nomic pressure was intended to increase the Jewish population’s willingness to
emigrate and to improve the incoming flow of capital for the state.
After the first wave of emigration in 1933, when some 37,000 people of Jewish
origin left Germany, 1934 saw approximately 23,000 leave; in 1935 there were
21,000 and in 1936 some 25,000.79 In the latter half of 1937 it became more and more difficult for German Jews to find a place that would take them. On the one
hand, after the announcement of British plans to divide Palestine and, after the
Arab revolts of April 1936–8, the number of Jews leaving for the British Mandate
went down; on the other, there were increasing signs that countries that had so far
been willing to accept Jews who wished to emigrate were becoming more restrict-
ive in their immigration policies, as South Africa and Brazil had already shown in
1937. Whilst it is true that some 23,000 Jews left Germany in 1937, the reports of the
Jewish Reich National Association indicate that the numbers emigrating began to
stagnate in the third quarter of 1937. 80
During the whole of 1937, representatives of the National Socialist regime were
occupied with the question of whether increased emigration to Palestine was
desirable from a German perspective if this were to improve chances for the
foundation of a Jewish state. The regime had to decide whether it wished to
continue its policies intended to drive out the Jews without taking account of the
international situation or of their consequences for German foreign policy.
At the beginning of the year the Reich government’s policy on the Palestine
question seemed clear: on 16 January
1937, the Reich Minister of the Interior
informed the German Foreign Office that it was planning to continue to support
the policy of Jewish emigration regardless of the destination countries. 81 But after it began to emerge in early 1937 that Britain’s Peel Commission might opt for a
Jewish state in Palestine, on 1 June the Foreign Minister, Neurath, sent guidelines
to the embassies in London and Baghdad and to the Consul General in Jerusalem
in which he made it crystal clear that he was against the formation of a Jewish state
or ‘anything resembling a state’. Such a state would not be sufficient, he said, to
receive all the Jews, and like the Vatican for the Catholic Church or Moscow for
the Komintern, it would serve as an internationally recognized power base for
world Jewry. 82 As formulated in a general order sent to all German consulates by the Foreign Office on 22 June, in contrast to the expected recommendations of the
Peel Commission, there was ‘significant German interest in making sure that the
fragmented condition of the Jews was preserved’. 83
68
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
However, at an inter-ministerial meeting on 29 July the representative from the
Reich Ministry of the Interior announced that Hitler was in favour of emigration
to Palestine and thus of ‘concentrating’ the Jews in that area—in direct contra-
diction of the idea of ‘fragmenting’ Jewish emigration put forward in the Foreign
Office order the previous month. On 21 September, however, this was modified by
a representative from the Reich Ministry of the Interior to clarify that the ‘Führer’
was clearly in favour of the emigration of the Jews, but that he had not made any
specific comments on Palestine. 84 Another declaration of principle on Hitler’s part has been preserved from January 1938, and from that it is clear that he was
positive about emigration to Palestine. 85 This established that the continued expulsion of German Jews, using all available means, took priority over any
foreign-policy reservations.
The Judenpolitik of the Security Service
In addition to the state administration, the Party, the Four-Year Plan, and
the Gestapo, in spring 1937 the division of the Party’s Security Service (SD)
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 13