Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  a uniform manner, encourage export, destroy the exemplary function of Paris, and

  Interim Conclusions

  85

  above all exclude Jewish fashion designers. 69 At the same time, however, it remained entirely unclear what was supposed to be specifically ‘German’ about

  the new style: in fact, ‘Aryan-style fashion’ was more or less exhausted in the

  struggle against the ‘Jewish ready-made’, which was represented as the gateway of

  international, above all French fashion. The complete Entjudung of the ready-

  made industry was depicted as the precondition for the realization of a ‘German’

  fashion, and the polemic against ‘alien’ fashion did not stop even after successful

  Aryanization. 70 The slogan of Entjudung became a substitute for the lack of creativity of ‘Aryan’ fashion designers—and in the end it gave National Socialist

  fashion functionaries crucial controlling functions in the fashion industry.

  Even in the design of functional objects and furniture, the regime’s attempts—

  we might think, for example, of the ‘Beauty of Work’ office of the German Labour

  Front—to attempt an autonomous design style remained substantially unsuccessful;

  official declarations distanced themselves from avant-garde visions such as those

  developed in the ‘Jewish’ Bauhaus, but design remained to a large extent trapped

  in the functionalistic design of the Weimar era. 71

  The various examples have demonstrated that the Entjudung and racial ‘cleans-

  ing’ of German society was a process that went far beyond the mere removal of the

  Jews and other unwanted ‘foreigners’ in the different areas of life. In fact it was a

  much more comprehensive process: as the homogeneous, entirely German Volks-

  gemeinschaft could not be brought about in a positive way, either conceptually or

  in practice, the National Socialists fell back on imposing it negatively, through

  permanent differentiation, distancing, and liberation from an apparently omni-

  present and omnipotent enemy.

  Rhetorical as this process of dissociation remained, the above examples have

  demonstrated that it affected practically all areas of life and by no means stopped

  with the actual exclusion of Jews, but remained a lasting theme during the Nazi

  period. Behind the phase of Entjudung there lay a very real claim in terms of

  political power: the imposition of the Nazis’ claim to total power.

  The Emergence of a Jewish Sector as a

  Consequence of the Politics of Repression

  The segregation policy promoted on a massive scale in 1935—as a consequence of

  that year’s anti-Semitic campaign—and then again after the end of the Olympic

  Games from the end of 1936 had profound consequences for the everyday life of

  the Jewish minority. In so far as such generalizations are possible at all, in the

  years 1935 and 1936 any private contact still existing between Jews and non-Jews

  seems largely to have been severed. Numerous reports and memoirs make it clear

  that the whole range of everyday relationships seems to have been affected by it:

  86

  Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

  children stopped playing together; the members of youth cliques dispersed; polite

  gestures such as everyday greetings ceased to be exchanged; neighbours stopped

  talking to each other; visits to each other’s houses and communal visits to pubs

  became a thing of the past; those friendships and love affairs that still existed fell

  apart; even the joint participation of Jews and non-Jews in funerals became rarer.

  Segregation was imposed through an interplay of government departments, the

  Party apparatus, police, and Gestapo, which was able to rely on the energetic

  support of the populace. 72 Of course, isolation tended to be more prevalent in smaller towns, where Jews had already become too frightened to go into the streets

  and had become completely isolated, than it was in the anonymity of the big cities.

  This strengthened the progress of migration from the countryside to the city and

  worsened still further the precarious life of those impoverished, isolated Jews in

  the countryside. 73

  The many consequences of persecution for the life of the Jews themselves

  cannot be pursued here in every last detail. The consequences for family life and

  the relations between the sexes, the increased focus upon Jewish culture and a

  more intense religious life as well as strategies of resistance and survival developed

  by the various Jewish organizations are themes that have been extensively dis-

  cussed in the literature. 74 Here we will merely attempt to provide an overview of Jewish self-organization under the immediate pressure of persecution and locate

  that self-organization within the history of Judenpolitik.

  The economic consequences of the increasing ‘creeping’ exclusion of many

  Jews from the economy, which set in at the end of 1936 after the ‘boycott’ had

  already considerably undermined their economic situation, were particularly

  grave. The considerable reduction of economic possibilities as a consequence of

  exclusion now led to characteristic relocations of Jewish economic activity, for

  example to their heightened activity as salespeople (until that profession came

  under greater pressure from the authorities late in 1937), or the relocation of

  businesses to homes and thus to typical poverty careers. 75

  Through the discriminatory measures in the economic field something like an

  autonomous Jewish business cycle came into being: Jews were increasingly forced

  to fall back on Jews as suppliers and customers, although that Jewish ‘internal

  economy’ did not offer sufficient opportunities to make a livelihood; most busi-

  nesses lived on their capital. 76 A closed Jewish labour market was supported by a Jewish labour exchange until it was closed down late in 1936. It was characteristic

  of the Jewish commercial sector that the amount of credit provided by loan offices

  increased steadily until 1936, while the activity of the agency that was supposed to

  help with the reconstruction of livelihoods declined, since fewer and fewer Jews

  wanted to engage in businesses. 77

  Under the increasing pressure of exclusion on the one hand, and impelled by

  Jewish attempts at self-assertion and self-organization on the other, an ‘autonomous

  Jewish sector’ came into being, and not only in the commercial world, which

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  87

  facilitated survival for those Jews who had remained in Germany and gave them one

  last means of support before complete impoverishment. As a result of segregation

  something like a Jewish ‘public service’ came into being: Jewish health and educa-

  tion, Jewish welfare, and social security78 reached a considerable size; a considerable administrative apparatus was maintained in the Jewish communities and in organizations such as the Central Committee and the Reich Board. The establishment of

  Jewish institutions and the exclusion of Jews from the institutions accessible to the

  general population occurred as a complementary process.

  In 1935–6 the Reich Board of Deputies of the Jews in Germany (originally

  founded, as an umbrella organization, as the Reich Board of Deputies of German

  Jews, it had been obliged to assume this new name after the introduction of the

  Nuremberg Laws in 1935) began to de
velop more collective places of education. 79

  While it transpired that the redistribution of adults did not increase chances of

  emigration to any significant extent, after 1935–6 these institutions undertook

  above all the initial training of young Jewish people who were unable find an

  apprenticeship, or whose training in the commercial professions preferred by Jews

  seemed pointless.

  By 1938 some 30,000 people had been trained in training farms and training

  centres, two-thirds of them younger than 20. These included a considerable

  number of young people who were able to train in agricultural professions outside

  Germany. About 15 per cent of young people between 14 and 25 had thus been

  covered by the educational measures by 1938.80

  Finally, the construction of an autonomous Jewish cultural life made further

  progress. 81 Alongside a sizeable Jewish press82 this found expression above all in the establishment of Jewish cultural organizations. March 1935 saw the foundation

  of the Reich Association of Jewish Cultural Societies in Germany, under the

  supervision of the Propaganda Ministry. With the appointment of Hans Hinkel,

  the Commissar in the Prussian Ministry of Culture originally commissioned to

  undertake the ‘Entjudung of cultural life’, as ‘Special Agent for the Cultural

  Activity of all Non-Aryans’ in this ministry in July 1935, and through its simul-

  taneous function as one of the managers of the Reich Chamber of Culture, a close

  connection was established between the Entjudung of the general cultural indus-

  try, and the construction of an autonomous Jewish culture was produced. From

  August 1935 cultural associations had to become members of the Reich Associ-

  ation, which thus became something resembling a Jewish Chamber of Culture. All

  programmes of cultural events now needed—after being presented to the Reich

  Association—permission from the Hinkel Office; organizers, performing artists,

  and audiences had to be members of the Reich Association. In 1938 there were a

  total of 76 cultural associations, involving about 50,000 people. The creation of an

  efficient Jewish cultural organization was—and this connection should not be

  overlooked—one of the preconditions for the exclusion of the Jews from the

  general cultural life.

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  Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

  The Jewish school system was considerably expanded under the pressure of

  persecution. At the start of the Nazi era only around 25 per cent of Jewish primary

  schoolchildren attended Jewish schools, about half each in private and public

  schools. During the 1930s the following developments can be observed: the

  number of Jewish primary schoolchildren declined overall, due to emigration

  and the falling birth rate, while an ever greater proportion of Jewish schoolchil-

  dren left general primary schools. The result of these movements in the Jewish

  student body for the Jewish public schools was a steady loss of pupils; the number

  of these establishments, most of which had been barely sustainable one-room

  schools even before 1933, thus declined from 148 in 1932–3 to 76 in 1937. 83

  The private Jewish primary schools, on the other hand, registered a constant

  increase in pupil numbers, at least until 1938; later the figures fell again. The

  number of these schools rose between 1933 and 1937 from twenty-seven to seventy-

  two. 84 The number of pupils at the public secondary schools—ten schools in all—

  increased slightly until 1937, while the role of the private Jewish secondary schools

  remained insignifant. 85

  In 1934 the Reich Board drew up guidelines for education in Jewish primary

  schools, which were understood as a complement to the state curricula which were

  also valid for the Jewish schools, and which effectively represented a compromise

  between German-Jewish, Orthodox, and Zionist educational goals. 86 In 1937 the Reich Board issued new guidelines which took into account the altered outlook for

  those Jews still living in Germany: unlike 1934, the emphasis was no longer on the

  rootedness of Jewish culture in the German environment; instead the pupils’

  orientation towards Jewish tradition and preparation for emigration, especially

  to Palestine, 87 found expression, for example, in a larger amount of Hebrew education, a greater emphasis on sport and handicraft, as well as in increased

  efforts to teach ‘Palestinian studies’.

  Jewish welfare organizations attempted to support the Jews, who were increas-

  ingly excluded from official services, in a great variety of ways, through food

  agencies, services of goods and money, through measures in the field of open social

  work, health care, and care for the elderly, etc. 88 In 1937 there were only twenty-one Jewish hospitals, fifteen sanatoria, forty-nine children’s homes and orphanages, and

  seventy-six old people’s homes and hospices. 89 One of the most successful projects was a Jewish Winter Aid scheme. Once Jews were excluded from the official Winter

  Aid scheme by the Nuremberg Laws, the Reich Board set up a Winter Aid scheme

  of its own, under the control of the Reich Commissioner for Winter Aid. It was

  financed, on the model of the official Winter Aid scheme, by tax-like donations

  drawn directly from wages or other income, and levied throughout the whole six

  months of winter. 90 The proportion of the Jewish population who received support from Jewish Winter Aid rose from 20.5 per cent (1935–6) to 24.3 per cent (1938–9). 91

  The creation of autonomous Jewish organizations designed to rescue the Jews

  excluded from the various social spheres and give them the support they needed

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  89

  to survive also led to the further intensification of the segregation and isolation

  of the Jewish minority that had been set in motion by the regime. Further to

  this, the formation of purely Jewish organizations in a later phase of Juden-

  politik, in which they were turned into the organs of a state-controlled enforced

  community, in many ways made it easier for the NS state to record and control

  the Jews. It was to prove fatal that Nazi Judenpolitik was able to use the

  extensive attempts to achieve Jewish self-organization for the further intensifi-

  cation of persecution.

  chapter 4

  THE INTENSIFICATION OF THE RACIAL

  PERSECUTION OF NON-JEWISH GROUPS BY

  THE POLICE APPARATUS, 1936–1937

  In the first years of the ‘Third Reich’, National Socialist ‘Racial policy’ was defined

  above all by two strategies. By the exclusion and segregation of the Jewish minority,

  and by the attempt to prevent the reproduction of the so-called erbkrank, or

  hereditarily ill. After the mid-1930s further racial policy measures were added, mainly

  by the police apparatus and directed specifically against particular groups.

  After Himmler took over and reorganized the entire German police force in

  1936, over the course of 1937 the Sicherheitspolizei, or ‘security police’, formed by

  the merger of the Gestapo and the criminal police (Kripo), intensified the perse-

  cution and systematic elimination of marginal groups which were seen as a public

  danger because of their supposedly ‘inferior’ hereditary predispositions. In this

  way the security police acted as an instrument of ‘racial general prevention
’. 1 This policy, which was closely connected to the continuing segregation of the Jews

  occurring at the same time, affected four groups in particular: people of non-

  European origin or children of Germans and non-Europeans, Gypsies, ‘asocials’,

  and homosexuals. The exclusion and persecution of groups stigmatized by their

  different ‘racial affiliation’ or supposed ‘hereditary predispositions’ granted the

  police extensive opportunities for access and control with regard to the population

  Persecution of Non-Jewish Groups by the Police, 1936–7

  91

  as a whole, whose everyday and social relations were subjected to a dense network

  of prohibitions and prescriptions.

  During the first few years of the ‘Third Reich’, the criminal police had, under

  the watchword of ‘preventive crime-fighting’, attempted through the use of

  preventive detention, preventive custody, and surveillance measures, systematic-

  ally to eliminate so-called ‘professional criminals’. After the formation of the

  Reich Criminal Police Office in July 1937 and the centralization of the Kripo as a

  whole, there was an increasingly apparent tendency to organize crime-fighting on

  the basis of the findings of ‘Criminal Biology’. To this end, after autumn 1937 the

  Reich Criminal Police Office worked closely with the ‘Racial Hygiene Research

  Institute’ in the Reich Health Office, and at the same time the Reich Minister of

  Justice set up a special ‘Criminal Biology Service’, 2 and from the beginning of 1938

  there was also a ‘Headquarters of Criminal Genealogy’3 within the Reich Criminal Police Office. The findings of ‘Criminal Biology’ provided the Kripo, within the

  context of ‘preventive crime-fighting’, with the strategy of eliminating ‘social

  misfits’ as the class actually responsible for criminality. The legal basis for this

  lay in the unpublished ‘Fundamental Decree Concerning Preventive Crime-

  Fighting by the Police of 14 December 1937’ signed by the Reich Interior Minister.

  This document particularly regulated which group could be taken into the

  preventive custody of the Criminal Police: ‘professional and habitual criminals’,

  people who gave inadequate information about their personal details, as well as