Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination
Page 9
On February 23, 1940, a supplementary decree to the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” reasserted a provision that actually was already implicit in the law of September 15, 1935: In cases of Rassenschande (“racial disgrace”—that is, sexual relations between an Aryan and a Jew) only the man was held responsible and would be punished. If the woman was Jewish and the man Aryan—which had happened in several prior instances—the woman received a short prison sentence or was sent to a “retraining camp”—that is, to a concentration camp. Thus the immunity was for Aryan women only.
In forwarding the text of the decree to Washington, the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Alexander Kirk, probably revealed a major purpose of the decree: “It has also been observed that the absolute immunity granted [German] women in this respect enhances the opportunities for denunciation and extortion which are known to have already been utilized in connection with this anti-Jewish law in particular.”189 For the Gestapo denunciations were of the essence. Otherwise, of course, the notion that, in most cases, Jewish men seduced guileless Aryan women provided the phantasmal basis of the decree.190
Full Jews according to the Nuremberg racial laws of September 1935 were the prime targets of the regime’s persecution policies. More complex was the situation of spouses and children in mixed marriages; as for the array of problems encountered in the case of mixed-breeds, it challenged Nazi ingenuity to the very end. In the “mixed” categories, in fact, the number of potential variations was practically endless. Consider the case of the German writer and pious Protestant, Jochen Klepper. Klepper’s Jewish wife, Johanna Stein, was previously married to a Jew; thus “Hanni’s” two daughters from her first marriage, Brigitte and Renate, were Jewish. The older daughter, Brigitte, had left for England before the war, but Renate (Renerle or Reni) was still living in Berlin with her parents. In principle, while the Aryan Klepper was personally protected from deportation or worse, nothing could ensure Hanni’s or Renerle’s safety.
From the beginning of the war the Kleppers’ main goal was to find a way for Renerle to leave the Reich. “For Hanni and for me,” Klepper wrote in his diary on November 28, 1939, “the recent emigration plan [for their daughters] no longer pains us in any meaningful way, as every single month we are in distress as a result of the government’s Poland project [after the deportations from Vienna in October 1939, rumors spread among Jews in the Reich that the entire Jewish population would be deported to Poland]; and at every distribution of food or Bezugsschein tickets, we worry that Renerle will no longer be included.”191
Once the war started, the guidelines regarding mixed breeds (Mischlinge) of the first and second degrees (half and quarter Jews) became more confusing than ever: These Mischlinge were allowed to serve in the Wehrmacht and could even be decorated for bravery, but they were not allowed to fill positions of authority. As for the Jewish members of their families, they were spared none of the usual indignities, “My sons [three soldiers] are Mischlinge because of me,” Clara von Mettenheim, a converted Jewish woman married into the military aristocracy, wrote in December 1939 to the commander in chief of the army, General Brauchitsch. “During the war, when my sons were fighting in Poland, we were tortured here on the home front as if there were no more important tasks to be done during the war…. Please stop [this mistreatment of half-Jewish soldiers and their parents].” And she added: “I beg you to use your influence to make sure that the party leaves those [Mischlinge] alone…. These men already have it bad enough being treated as second-class soldiers, they shouldn’t also have to worry about their families at home while they are fighting a war.”192
Much less frequent, of course, but intrinsically not entirely different, were the decisions that confronted the already overtaxed SS Reichsführer regarding some of his men. Take the sad case of SS Untersturmführer Küchlin, for example. One of his maternal ancestors, sometime after the Thirty Years’ War, proved to be a Jew, Abraham Reinau. On April 3, 1940, Himmler had to inform Küchlin that such a racial blemish precluded him from staying in the SS.193 There was some hope, however, that further inquiry could allow Küchlin’s reintegration: Reinau’s daughter had married an innkeeper, one Johan Hermann, the owner of At the Wild Man’s (Zum wilden Mann). According to the Reichsführer the inn’s appellation pointed to membership in a secret pagan (old Germanic) and racially aware association. Maybe Reinau had not been a Jew after all.194
Hitler’s constant presence in the shadows of the harassment campaign was unmistakable. In a memorandum of December 6, 1939, one Dr. Hanssen conveyed to a Parteigenosse (party member) called Friedrichs (probably a member of the party chancellery) that regarding several new anti-Jewish steps planned by Goebbels and by the RSHA, “the SS Reichsführer would discuss all measures against the Jews directly with the Führer” (dass der Reichsführer SS alle Massnahmen gegen die Juden direkt mit dem Führer besprechen würde).195
XI
Did the majority of Germans pay much attention to the persecution of the Jews in the Reich and in Poland during the early months of the war? In Germany the anti-Jewish measures were public and “official”; the fate of the Jews in Poland was not kept secret either, and apart from the press reports or the newsreels watched in the home country, a stream of Germans, soldiers and civilians, visited the ghettos as mentioned and photographed any worthy sight or scene: begging children, emaciated Jews with beards and sidelocks, humble Jewish men doffing their caps to their German masters, and, in Warsaw at least, the Jewish graveyard and the shed in which corpses awaiting burial were piled up.196
Various confidential opinion reports (either from the SD or from local authorities) give the impression that, overall, the population was becoming increasingly more hostile toward the Jews, but they also mention occasional acts of kindness or, at times, popular fear of retribution. According to a report of September 6, 1939, from the region of Münster, people were demanding the jailing of Jews or even the shooting of ten Jews for every fallen German.197 In Worms a report from mid-September indicated that the population was upset that Jews had access to food stores on equal footing with Germans.198
In Lahr, on the other hand, during heavily attended church services in early October 1939, older people often interpreted the war as [God’s] punishment for the persecution of the Jews.199 Near Marburg a farmer was arrested at the end of December 1939 for showing friendliness to a Jew who worked for him and for inviting him as well as Polish prisoners to share his meals.200 The same happened in April 1940 to two Germans who expressed a friendly attitude regarding Jews in the region of Würzburg.201 In Potsdam, obversely again, a June 1940 court decision to allow a Jewish woman to be the sole inheritor of a deceased Aryan (according to that person’s will) caused outrage: It went against “healthy popular instinct.”202
For many Volksgenossen, outright greed or the sense of some material injustice (mainly in regard to housing) was the fuel of ongoing anti-Jewish resentment, as shown for example by a vast trove of letters addressed by citizens of Eisenach, the town where Luther grew up, to the local district leader (Kreisleiter), Hermann Köhler. Thus in October 1939, when the Aryan Mrs. Fink was evicted from her apartment, while her neighbor, an eighty-two-year-old Jewish woman named Grünberger, was allowed to remain in hers for three more months [an apartment in which she had lived all her life and in which she was legally allowed to stay to the end of her days], all hell broke loose: “How is it possible,” Fink wrote to Köhler, “that in the Third Reich a Jewess is protected by law while I as a German enjoy no protection?…As a German in the German Reich I should at least be able to lay claim to the same rights as a Jewess!” The owner of the house, Paul Mies, who acquired it from its former Jewish owners in the 1930s, was also eager to evict Grünberger; his lawyer’s argument was “dominant public opinion” (herrschende Volksmeinung):
“Ever since the plaintiff [Mies] became a member of the NSDAP in May 1937, his obligation to get rid of the Jewess has become more urgent…. According to dominant pub
lic opinion, which forbids the living in the same house of Aryans and especially party members with Jews, the plaintiffs are no longer obliged to provide asylum to the Jewess. The age of the Jewess and the length of her residence cannot be factors of consideration. Such questions will not be resolved by feelings….”203 It does not seem that Eisenach was an exceptionally anti-Semitic town.
Personal relations between ordinary Jews and Germans often appeared contradictory. In the spring of 1940 the Klemperers had to sell the house they had built in the village of Dölzschen for much less than its real value. “Berger, the shopkeeper who will get our house,” Klemperer wrote on May 8, 1940, “…is here at least once a day. An altogether good-natured man, helps us with ersatz honey, etc., is completely anti-Hitlerist, but is of course pleased at the good exchange.”204
According to a report of the mayor of P., dated November 21, 1939, “Julius Israel Bernheim was the last Jew to own a house on the Adolf-Hitler-Platz. The inhabitants often went on about why the Jew did not leave. The street in front of the house was covered with inscriptions and, at night, the windows were smashed…. B. sold the house, and on October 2, 1939, he moved to a Jewish old people’s home.”205
Details about the murderous violence against Poles and Jews came up frequently in diary entries of opposition members during the first months of the war. Information often stemmed from the highest levels of the Wehrmacht and also from military intelligence officers, some of whom were uncompromising enemies of the regime.206 Plotting against Hitler was active, as several army commanders believed that an immediate attack in the West, as ordered by the Nazi leader on the morrow of the Polish campaign, would end in a military disaster. Thus details about the crimes committed in Poland fell on fertile ground and confirmed the moral abjection of Nazism. “The disastrous character of the regime, mainly in ethical terms, becomes increasingly clear,” Ulrich von Hassell, the former German ambassador to Italy, recorded in his diary on February 17, 1940, on hearing a report from Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig and a major opposition figure, about a trip to Poland. Goerdeler mentioned that “some 1,500 Jews, among them women and children, were moved to and fro in open freight cars [in January or February 1940] until they were all dead. Some two hundred peasants were ordered to dig a mass grave [for the Jews] and were themselves shot afterwards.”207 Hassell mentioned in the same entry that a German widow, whose husband was an officer killed by the Poles, nevertheless protested to Göring about the atrocities against Jews and Poles; Hassell believed that Göring was duly impressed.208
None of this genuine hostility to National Socialism, however, excluded the continued existence of various shades of anti-Semitism. Thus, while, as mentioned, plans for a military coup that would bring down Hitler and his regime were swirling among top echelons of the Wehrmacht during the last months of 1939 and in early 1940, while Goerdeler and other opposition members discussed a constitution for post-Nazi Germany, the conservative enemies of the regime generally agreed that in this future Germany citizenship would be granted only to Jews who could claim a long-established ancestry in the country; the more recent arrivals would have to leave.209 Goerdeler’s anti-Semitism did not change to the end of his life.210
The role of the Christian churches was of course decisive in the permanence and pervasiveness of anti-Jewish beliefs and attitudes in Germany and throughout the Western world. In Germany some 95 percent of the Volksgenossen remained churchgoers in the 1930s and 1940s.211 Although the party elite was generally hostile to Christian beliefs and inimical to organized (political) church activities, religious anti-Judaism remained a useful background for Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and measures.
Among German Protestants, who generally shared the strong anti-Jewish slant of Lutheranism, the “German Christians,” who aimed at a synthesis between Nazism and their own brand of “Aryan (or Germanic) Christianity,” received two-thirds of the votes in the church elections of 1932.212 In the autumn of 1933 the grip of the German Christians was challenged by the establishment and growth of the oppositional “Confessing Church.” Yet, although the Confessing Church rejected the racial anti-Semitism of the German Christians, and fought to keep the Old Testament (which it often presented, however, as a source of anti-Jewish teaching), it was not exempt from the traditional Lutheran anti-Jewish hostility.
Many German Protestants did not belong to either of the opposing groups, and it is this “neutral” middle ground that came closest to some of the positions of “German Christianity,” also in regard to converted Jews.213 The Confessing Church did, at times, attempt to defend the rights of converts (but not those of Jews as such), except, as we shall see, for some prudent steps at the height of the extermination.
The omnipresence of anti-Semitism in most of the Evangelical Lutheran Church found a telling illustration in the notorious “Godesberg Declaration.” This declaration, intended to establish a common basis for German Christians and the “neutral” majority of the Evangelical Church was officially published on April 4, 1939, and greeted with widespread support by most of the regional churches (Landeskirchen) in the Reich. Point no. 3 (of 5) stated: “The National Socialist worldview has relentlessly fought against the political and spiritual influence of the Jewish race, on our national [völkisch] life. In full obedience to the divine rules of creation, the Evangelical Church affirms its responsibility for the purity of our people [Volkstum]. Over and above that, in the domain of faith there is no sharper opposition than the one existing between the message of Jesus Christ and that of the Jewish religion of laws and political messianic expectations.”214
The Confessing Church issued a response in May 1939, a telling example of its own equivocations: “In the realm of faith, there is a sharp opposition between the message of Jesus Christ and his apostles and the Jewish religion of legalism and political messianic hope, already emphatically criticized in the Old Testament. In the realm of [völkisch] life, the preservation of the purity of our people demands an earnest and responsible racial policy.”215
The Godesberg Declaration was followed in May of that year by the foundation of the “Institute for the Study and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life” (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben) and the appointment as its scientific director of the professor for New Testament and Völkisch Theology at the University of Jena, Walter Grundmann.216 The Institute attracted a wide membership of theologians and other scholars, and already during the first year of the war it published a de-Judaized New Testament, Die Botschaft Gottes (250,000 copies sold), a de-Judaized hymnal, and, in 1941, a de-Judaized catechism.217 We shall return to the positions taken by a majority of German Protestants and to the later productions of Grundmann’s institute.
A report sent on November 22, 1940, by the association of communal administrators to the Evangelical Church Board in Breslau addressed the burial of converted Jews: “During the burial of the urns of baptized Jews in the Johannes cemetery in Breslau, the indignation of visitors was unpleasantly expressed on several occasions. In two cases, due to the reactions of families of [“Aryans” buried in] neighboring graves, the urns of the non-Aryans had to be dug up and reburied in a distant corner…. A Jew from the Paulus congregation who had been baptized decades ago could not be buried in the Lohbrück congregation’s cemetery, due to the opposition of its Aryan members.”218
It is against such a background that individual support for Jews (even if expressed in an indirect way), usually among ordinary pastors and some members of theological faculties, takes on a particular significance. Thus Assistant Preacher Riedesel of Königsberg did not hesitate, in a sermon in October 1939, to tell the story of the Good Samaritan and to choose a Jew as the only passerby ready to offer help to a wounded person lying on the side of the road. The informant’s report added that “the State Police was notified.”219 On December 1, 1939, Pastor Eberle of the Confessing Church in Hundsbach declared in a sermon: “The G
od of our Church is the God of the Jews, the God of Jacob to whom I profess my faith.” According to the report, there were signs of unrest among soldiers who attended the service.220 Indirectly pro-Jewish statements were also reported at the Theological Faculty of Kiel University, in March 1940, leading to sanctions being put in place by the rector.221
The Catholic Church in Germany was more immune to Nazi theories than its Evangelical counterpart. Nonetheless, like the Protestant churches, the German Catholic community and its clergy were in their vast majority open to traditional religious anti-Judaism.222 Moreover, despite the increasingly hostile stand taken by Pope Pius XI against Hitler’s regime during the last years of his pontificate, the church in Germany remained wary of any major confrontation with the authorities, mindful as it was of its minority position and its political vulnerability since the days of the Kulturkampf, under Bismarck, and constantly on the alert as a result of frequent harassment by party and state.