Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  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.

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  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

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  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