responsible for Jewish affairs increased its involvement in anti-Semitic persecu-
tion. Previously this division—which, as a part of the Party organization, had no
claim to any official state executive functions—had concentrated mainly on the
collection and analysis of information, but this situation changed when Dieter
Wisliceny took over its running in April 1937. At this point a group of relatively
young, self-confident activists, including Herbert Hagen, Theodor Dannecker,
and Adolf Eichmann, set about reforming the activities of the division.
This group very quickly claimed to be a ‘brains trust’ endowed with exceptional
expertise, and its first task was to develop a consistent conception for future
‘Jewish policy’. The self-appointed ‘intellectuals’ of the Division responsible for
Jewish affairs designated the prime goal of ‘Jewish policy’ as the ‘removal’
(Entfernung) of the Jews from Germany and in this respect they were to all
appearances working in line with the various official authorities working on
‘Jewish policy’. However, the SD specialists were unusually consistent in their
stress on the priority of ‘Zionist emigration’ and all other main elements of future
‘Jewish policy’ were subordinated to this main aim, including the ‘crushing’ of
German-Jewish organizations that promoted assimilation, the ‘exclusion’ of Jews
from the economic life of the country, and limited support for (or rather manipu-
lation of) Zionist activities. 86
In order to assume the leading role they wanted to occupy in the area of ‘Jewish
policy’, this Division’s tactics included muscling in on the executive functions of
the Gestapo, via which, as Dannecker noted, ‘the struggle was being carried out on
an exclusively administrative level and [which] for the most part lacked high-level
understanding of the subject matter’. 87 These tactics were very much in the spirit Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7
69
of Himmler’s ‘operational order’ of 1 July 1937: all ‘matters in principle concerned
with the Jews’ were thenceforth to be dealt with by the SD, whereas all individual
cases or implementation measures were to be the province of the Gestapo. 88 By proceeding skilfully the SD could harness the state apparatus for its own measures
concerned with ‘principle’.
The Division made a first attempt to break into the direction of Jewish
persecution in May 1937 at the point when the international Upper Silesia Accord
signed in 1922 was due to expire and when, after a two-month transition period,
the German anti-Jewish laws were due to come into force; this had previously
been prevented by minority protection measures set out in the Accord. Eichmann,
who had been sent to Breslau, now set about seizing all the Jewish civil servants,
lawyers, doctors, artists, and others who were to be removed from their positions
so that measures against them could be set in train as soon as the transition period
had expired. 89
In the last months of 1937, the position taken by the SD, according to which an
increase in economic pressure on the German Jews and limited support for
Zionists would force the pace of emigration, in particular to Palestine, underwent
something of a crisis. Unrest in the Arab countries meant that emigration to
Palestine was decreasing, and at the same time many countries were tightening up
their immigration policies, not least because of the impression made abroad by the
rigour of German activity in Upper Silesia and because of a widespread fear of
mass exodus by German Jews that had been prompted by the intensification of
anti-Jewish policy. 90
The SD reacted to the developing crisis in its deportation policy by sending its
specialists Hagen and Eichmann on a—not particularly successful—fact-finding
mission to Egypt and Palestine, 91 and by setting up a conference in Berlin in November 1937 for the Jewish specialists of the higher echelons of the SD. 92 The essence of the papers given at this conference was that the persecution of the Jews
needed to be intensified and that further measures were needed to enforce Jewish
emigration. The SD felt it could resolve the dilemma that support for emigration
to Palestine produced—the wholly undesirable emergence of a Jewish state—by
calling a halt immediately after the conference to the limited support (or toler-
ance) it had hitherto shown for Zionist ambitions. This change of direction was
not to be declared to Jewish organizations, since, in the words of a working
directive issued by the Division, it was ‘wholly and exclusively’ a question of
‘convincing the Jewish population of Germany that its only way out is emigra-
tion’. 93 They were to be driven out at all costs, even if it was not certain where they were to go.
chapter 3
INTERIM CONCLUSIONS: THE REMOVAL OF
JEWS FROM GERMAN SOCIETY, THE
FORMATION OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST
‘PEOPLE’S COMMUNITY’, AND
ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR JEWISH
LIFE IN GERMANY
At this point I should like to pause to consider the concept of Judenpolitik or
anti-Jewish policy that is at the heart of this book and to attempt to set the
anti-Jewish measures described so far into the context of the policies of the
regime as a whole. My central thesis is that the overall effect of the individual
measures taken against Jews—but also the measures taken against other groups
who were being persecuted for racially motivated reasons—far exceeded the
mere exclusion of a group labelled as an enemy by the Nazis. Indeed Judenpolitik
and in a broader sense racial policy in general was an essential constitutive element
in the whole process of extending the National Socialists’ grasp on power.
Let us remember that the key aim of the National Socialist movement was to
create a racially homogeneous ‘Aryan’ people’s community. This utopian goal was
impossible to achieve via ‘positive’ means, and was hardly even adequately
articulated: the concepts of race that underlay it were defined in a wholly arbitrary
Interim Conclusions
71
manner and were unfit for practical politics; it was in no manner clear what the
‘Aryan’ or ‘purely German’ character of the utopian ideal was to be.
In practical terms, therefore, the National Socialists approached the formation
of the ‘people’s community’ in a negative manner, via measures that discriminated
against, excluded, and ultimately ‘expunged’ those who were supposedly racially
inferior or alien. These negative measures were to a large extent substitutes for the
unrealizable positive, utopian goals the National Socialists envisaged. The process
that was set in train was appalling: the longer it took to fulfil positive promises, the
more the negative measures had to be intensified and augmented. Hans Momm-
sen’s description of the process as one of ‘cumulative radicalization’ is an appro-
priate description of it. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that anti-Jewish
policy occupied an absolutely central role within this process.
As we have seen, in the first years after coming to power the National Socialists
systematically segregated the Jewish minority in Germany in
pursuit above all of
the goal of reorienting the public sphere in Germany. Distancing the general
population from the Jews via massive propaganda, acts of terrorism on the part of
Party activists, and coercive measures applied by the state was aimed at winning
the assent of the population at large to a form of politics that was qualitatively
new, based on racist principles. Instituting the hegemony of racism was identical
with enforcing the NSDAP’s claims to power.
With the stabilization of the regime after 1934 the National Socialists were able to
use their racist policies to move beyond the reorientation of public life in order to
penetrate and fundamentally restructure individual spheres of people’s existences.
By the mid-1930s at the latest it is clearly evident that the various racist measures
implemented were coming to form a coherent independent field of politics at the
heart of the National Socialist dictatorship, a field that can be compared with other
more traditional areas such as social policy or economic policy. The emerging ‘racial
politics’ was concerned with excluding certain minorities from individual areas of
social life so as to effect a radical alteration of German society as a whole, and anti-
Jewish policy was a central part of this undertaking.
Since racial and anti-Jewish policy were key concepts in their aim for the
comprehensive and fundamental remodelling of society the Nazis gradually but
systematically set about reordering all areas of life. ‘Racial policy’ and ‘anti-Jewish
policy’ can therefore not only be seen as independent spheres of politics but as
their practical implementation progressed there also developed the potential to
affect, interfere with, and alter more traditional policy areas.
‘Clearing the Jews’ from individual areas of life, removing ‘Jewish influence’ on
Germany, meant that these areas themselves fell under the control of National
Socialism, the driving force behind the process of change, and were significantly
transformed and made more compatible with National Socialist aims and prin-
ciples. What is true of ‘anti-Jewish policy’ in the narrow sense is true in the wider
sense for ‘racial policy’ as a whole.
72
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
Implementing their anti-Jewish and broader racial policies was central for the
National Socialists’ exercise of power. This is not meant in a functionalist sense,
suggesting that the persecution of Jews and other racially defined groups was merely
instrumental or the side effect of a ‘pure’ form of power politics prioritized by the
National Socialists. On the contrary, it is important to understand that the imple-
mentation of anti-Jewish and racial policies was the fundamental prerequisite for
the National Socialists’ exercise of power, that the Nazis used it to put into practice
the core of their claims for a new order. ‘Racial cleansing’ or ‘removal of the Jews’
were inextricably intertwined with the Nazis’ ambitions for total domination.
In what follows I shall use a series of examples to show how anti-Jewish
measures went far beyond the persecution of the Jewish minority and transformed
whole areas of people’s lives by bringing them under the control of the National
Socialists. At the same time this provides an opportunity for looking in more
detail and more systematically at some aspects of the history of Jewish persecution
than has so far been attempted.
I have shown elsewhere how racial politics was used by the National Socialist
state as a decisive instrument for penetrating the private spheres of individual
citizens and indeed of abolishing these altogether. By the time the Nuremberg
Laws had been introduced and ‘eugenic’ measures had been introduced for certain
sectors of the population such policies had become state-sanctioned. Suspending
the principle of political equality for all citizens and introducing the certification
of Aryan ancestry in various areas of public life makes it clear how far the social
status of every individual was affected by the influence of racial politics.
What I intend to explore here is the relationship between the exclusion of Jews
and other minorities and the implementation of National Socialist rule on the
basis of a number of examples: the transformation of ‘social politics’, which was
mutated into ‘National Socialist welfare provision’ via the exclusion of Jews and
others; the effects of removing Jews from German schools on education policy and
its National Socialist remodelling; the consequences of the dominance of racially
inspired approaches in the areas of science; and the National Socialists’ usurpation
of the cultural life of the country, including important areas of everyday culture.
The Exclusion of Jews in Need from Social Policy
and its Transformation into National Socialist
‘Welfare Provision’
Jewish community welfare services in National Socialist Germany were faced with
the problem of having to help an ever-increasing number of impoverished, ageing
people, who were progressively being neglected by the state’s social services
systems.
Interim Conclusions
73
In summer 1935, many local authorities were beginning to discriminate
against the members of the Jewish population who were in need of support
in favour of other clienteles. Jews were also excluded from the ‘Winter
Relief Organization of the German People’ that was essentially run on
voluntary lines. Here as in other areas of public life, however, the author-
ities could not proceed arbitrarily: even the Nuremberg Laws did not
fundamentally alter the claims of Jewish Germans for social contributions
from the state. 1
After the end of 1935 Jewish welfare agencies were compelled by numer-
ous municipalities to declare the sums they disbursed for support and the
public agencies began by deducting these from the state provision. From
the same period Jews were increasingly excluded from certain special
measures and donations that were not specifically stipulated by law.
After 1936 Jews were treated separately from others in need of welfare
support, with counters set aside for them in social security offices or
accommodation in segregated refuge homes. And social security support
was cut.
This all happened not because of any intensification in legal measures for
persecution but because the welfare agencies in the local authorities devoted
considerable imagination and energy to the development of ever newer and
different ways to discriminate against Jews in receipt of support. 2 The German Council of Municipalities (Deutscher Gemeindetag) played an
important role in this process of cumulative exclusion; it was used to control
and standardize community policies in the 64,000 German municipalities. At
a meeting of the Council of Municipalities in June 1937 there was general
agreement that such practices be brought into line across the country and,
according to one suggestion, Jews should be equated with foreigners when it
came to welfare provision. 3 During the following year cities and the Council of Municipalities would come up with a series of new measures
for further
discriminating against Jews who were in need of support. 4 After the November 1938 pogrom these initiatives were to culminate in an order from the Reich
Ministry of the Interior that provided for the complete exclusion of Jews from
public welfare provision. 5
Discrimination against Jews in need, as well as similar measures against
Gypsies and ‘asocials’, 6 contributed significantly to changing the character of social policy as a whole. It was transformed into ‘National Socialist Welfare
Provision’. Here, unlike in traditional social policy, it was no longer a
question of meeting individual needs and supporting the socially disadvan-
taged; at the centre was the idea that the support of individuals would be
made dependent on the assessment of their value for the racially defined
‘national community’. The exclusion of the racially ‘inferior’ was a key
constitutive element of this policy. 7
74
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
The Exclusion of Jews from the German Health System
and the Implementation of the Racial Hygiene
Paradigm in Medicine
During the period of National Socialist dictatorship ‘racial hygiene’ conceptions
that had been represented by a minority of members of the medical professions
since the Imperial age became definitive. 8 In close collaboration with jurists, educationalists, social scientists, and members of the social security network,
doctors collaborated under the Nazis with population policies that were aimed
at preventing the bearers of ‘negative’ hereditary characteristics from reproducing.
This was initially achieved via counselling on hereditary health issues, bans on
certain marriages and enforced sterilization; during the war it was pursued via the
systematic murder of those defined as ‘racially inferior’. 9 The ‘elimination’ of these
‘negative’ elements within the German population was regarded as a major
contribution towards the convalescence of the ‘body of the nation’.
According to the view of racial hygienists, it was important to slow down the
‘degeneration’ of the population but not only by preventing certain groups from
reproducing. The key difference between this and traditional notions of eugenics
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 14