Kochanowski’s directives stemmed from the highest reaches of the Propaganda Ministry, possibly from Goebbels himself. Jews had been forbidden to perform for German audiences, and from the very beginnings of the regime Jewish composers and authors had been banned, due to their intrinsic absence of quality and mainly to their potentially dangerous impact on German hearts and minds. Later, Jews were forbidden to attend theater performances or concerts to spare the sensitivity of Aryan audiences to their presence. Thus the Kulturbund catered to the cultural needs of Jews, with works performed by Jews. Why, under these segregated circumstances, would Jews not be allowed to listen to German music or to perform German plays? Clearly the ban meant that a Jew listening to German music was desecrating it in some mysterious way, or, to put it differently, the music, the play, and the poem would be desecrated by Jewish performance or reading. In fact the threshold of magical thinking had been crossed: Any contact between the German spirit and a Jew, even if the Jew was merely a segregated and passive recipient, soiled and endangered the source itself.
Although the ubiquitous propaganda minister was probably the source of the changing directives given to the Kulturbund, throughout the first half of 1940 Goebbels’s attention seems to have been strongly focused, as it had been since October 1939, on the production of his three anti-Semitic films. As we saw in the previous chapter, Hitler was regularly consulted and regularly demanded changes, particularly in regard to Der Ewige Jude.
On April 4, 1940, the minister noted once again: “New version of the Jew film. Now it is good. As is, it can be shown to the Führer.”126 Something must have gone wrong nonetheless, as Goebbels’s June 9 entry indicated: “Reworked once more the text of the Jew film.”127 At least the minister could be pleased by Jud Süss: “An anti-Semitic film of the kind we could only wish for. I am happy about it,” he noted on August 18.128 In the meantime the premiere of Erich Waschneck’s Die Rothschilds had taken place in July. Within two weeks, however, it became clear that the film had to be reworked and better focused. When it reappeared a year later, it had finally received its full title: Die Rothschilds: Aktien auf Waterloo (The Rothschilds: Shares in Waterloo). It was a story of Jewish worldwide financial power and profiteering by the exploitation of misery and war: “We can make much money only with much blood.”129
Germany’s best actors, as well as 120 Jewish extras, participated in the most effective of all Nazi anti-Jewish productions, Jud Süss. In the film Süss (the character’s actual name was Joseph Ben Yssachar Suesskind Oppenheimer) befriended a Hapsburg military hero, Prince Karl Alexander, who became Duke of Württemberg in 1772; he appointed Süss as his financial adviser.130 Some of the most basic Nazi anti-Semitic themes were the leitmotifs of the brilliantly directed and performed “historical” fabrication. Süss, played by Ferdinand Marian—a highly successful lago on stage—opens the gates of Stuttgart to hordes of Jews, extorts money from Karl Alexander’s subjects by the most devious means, seduces any number of beautiful German maidens, particularly the exquisite Maria Dorothea Sturm, who gives in to save the life of her husband, the young notary Darius Faber, threatened by Süss. After submitting to the Jew, Maria Dorothea commits suicide. When Karl Alexander suddenly dies of a stroke, Süss is arrested, put on trial, sentenced to death, and hanged in a cage. The Jews are expelled from Württemberg. To make the Jews appear even more malevolent, Harlan introduced the figure of a mysterious kabbalist, Rabbi Loew, who hovers in the background as the occult and deadly force behind Süss’s criminal dealings.
According to excerpts from Harlan’s unpublished memoirs, in a notorious synagogue scene, “The Hassidic religious service had a demonic effect…. The alien [spectacle] performed with great vitality, was highly suggestive…like an exorcism.” For this scene and for the arrival of the Jews in Stuttgart and their later expulsion, the director chose “racially pure Jewish extras.” These Jews did not come from the Lublin ghetto (although that had been the initial intention) but rather from the Prague community.131 For the anti-Semitic Harlan and mainly for the enthusiastic viewers, the effect was ultimately the same.
Jud Süss was launched at the Venice Film Festival, in September 1940, to extraordinary acclaim; it received the “Golden Lion” award and garnered rave reviews. “We have no hesitation in saying that if this is propaganda, then we welcome propaganda,” wrote Michelangelo Antonioni. “It is a powerful, incisive, extremely effective film…. There is not a single moment when the film slows, not one episode in disharmony with another: it is a film of complete unity and balance…. The episode in which Süss violates the young girl is done with astonishing skill.”132 On September 24 Goebbels attended the Berlin opening at the Ufa-Palast: “A very large public, almost the entire Reich Cabinet. The film is a wild success. One hears only enthusiastic comments. The audience is in a frenzy. That is what I had wished for.”133 And the next day, the propaganda minister was even prouder: “The Führer is very taken by the success of ‘Jud Süss.’” Everybody praises the film to the skies; it deserves it.”134
The film’s popular success was overwhelming: “Although last week the [attendance] of ‘Jud Süss’ could already be considered excellent,” the Bielefeld SD reported on October 15, 1940, “now it surpasses all expectations. No film has yet succeeded in having such an impact on wide segments of the public. Even people who to this day rarely went to the cinema or never went at all do not want to miss the film.”135 The effect of Harlan’s production can be judged from a previous report from Bielefeld: “The Jew is shown here as he really is,” a worker declared. “I would have loved to wring his neck.”136 On September 30, 1940, as mentioned, Himmler ordered all SS and police members to see the film during the coming winter.137 By 1943 the number of viewers had reached 20.3 million.138
Ten days after the Reichsführer SS had recognized the outstanding educational value of Harlan’s film, the third major screen production of the anti-Jewish campaign was completed: “‘The Eternal Jew’ finally ready. Now it can confidently be shown. We have worked on it for long enough,” Goebbels noted on October 11.139 On November 29 this ultimate anti-Jewish propaganda product opened throughout the Reich. Two different versions of the film had been prepared: an original version as well as another that deleted the gory scenes of ritual slaughtering. In Berlin alone the film started simultaneously in sixty-six theaters. The posters advertising the opening night in the capital carried the following warning: “As in the 6.30 p.m. presentation original images of Jewish animal slaughtering are shown, a shortened version presented at 4.00 p.m. is recommended to sensitive natures. Women are allowed only to the 4.00 p.m. presentation.”140
Each city had its own posters. In Betzdorf, in the Altenkirchen district, Der Ewige Jude was described as “a documentary film about world Jewry”: “It is unique,” the description continued, “because it is no fantasy, but undiluted interesting reality.” Then came the usual warning, but in its local version: “Only in the evening presentations, to which there is no entry for youngsters, not even when accompanied by adults, the film shows the original images of the slaughtering of animals by Polish Jews. It shows their true face—sadistic and horrible.”141 The singsong of Jewish prayers and a synagogue cantor’s modulations were contrasted with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue whenever scenes of Aryan Christian beauty appeared. The chiseled faces of princes, knights, and saints were juxtaposed with the most unattractive Jewish physiognomies caught by Nazi cameras in the ghettos.
In a particularly horrendous sequence, swarms of rats scurry through cellars and sewers, and, in rapid alternation, hordes of Jews move from Palestine to the most remote corners of the world. The text was on par: “Where rats turn up, they spread diseases and carry extermination into the land. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel; they mostly move in large packs, exactly as the Jews among the people.”142 Even worse was the ritual slaughter scene depicting the slow death throes of cattle and sheep, bathing in their own blood, heads partly severed, throats slit while the laughing faces of th
e Jewish ritual slaughterers were set in repeated contrast to the pitiful stares of the dying animals.
Although “racially ideal” Aryans became the ultimate counterpoint to the most revolting portrayals of Jews, no random scenes from the streets of Berlin filled the screen, but rather carefully chosen shots from Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 propaganda film about that year’s Nuremberg rally. The narrator stressed the first commandment: to maintain the purity of the race. The film closed on Hitler’s January 30, 1939, speech to the Reichstag, announcing that in the case of another world war, the European nations would not be destroyed, but the Jewish race would be exterminated.
After the Berlin opening the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of November 29 commented: “When the film ends, the viewer can breathe again…. From the deepest submersion [Niederung], he comes back to the light again.”143 For the Illustrierte Film-Kurier, “In shining contrast to this [the swarming rats], the film ends after the most horrifying scenes [probably the scenes of ritual slaughter] with images of German people and German order, which fill the public with the deepest sense of gratitude for having the privilege of belonging to this people, whose leader is fundamentally solving the Jewish problem.”144
Despite such dutifully positive press reviews, in terms of public response Der Ewige Jude was a commercial failure. The SD reports from many regions of Germany and from Austria were unanimous: The horror scenes disgusted viewers; the documentary was considered nerve-racking; having seen Jud Süss shortly beforehand, most people were saturated with “Jewish filth,” and so on.145
Yet the commercial success of Jud Süss and the limited commercial appeal of Der Ewige Jude should not be viewed as contrary results in terms of Goebbels’s intentions. Images from both films were endlessly replicated in Nazi anti-Semitic posters or publications, all over the Reich and occupied Europe. The scurrying rats of Der Ewige Jude or its hideously twisted Jewish faces may have ultimately settled in the collective imaginary of European audiences at greater depth than the plot of Jud Süss. In both cases the goal was the same: to elicit fear, disgust, and hatred. At this straightforward level both films can be considered two different facets of an endlessly renewed stream of anti-Jewish horror stories, images, and arguments.
The campaign against “the Jew” raged on many fronts; on the home front, Goebbels and Rosenberg confronted each other more often than not. The ongoing feud between the two main architects of the anti-Jewish ideological war and the two guardians of Nazi ideological purity antedated the accession of Hitler to the chancellorship, ran wild throughout the 1930s and, as we saw, did not subside with the beginning of the war.146 While Goebbels held the political high ground and was vastly savvier than his adversary, Rosenberg managed nonetheless to impose the stricter ideological line in a host of issues. Thus, while in the early 1930s the propaganda minister opposed changing original choir texts to expurgate their Jewish content, particularly in the works of Handel, Rosenberg got his way: In 1939 Der Feldherr (military leader), a “cleansed” version of Judas Maccabeus reworked by Hermann Stephani (a Rosenberg protégé), premiered throughout Germany.147 In May 1940 Goebbels changed his initial stance and decided to establish his own organization for the reworking of libretti, choir texts, and the like, as an extension of the music division of his ministry. Obviously Handel’s oratorio got another, more radical, reworking and became Wilhelm von Nassauen; it opened in Hamburg in 1941.148 In the meantime, Stephani was busy with Mozart’s Requiem: “God of Zion” and “Sabaoth” disappeared. Handel’s Jephtha followed: The struggle went on.149
The Jews of Germany were powerless against the blows that hit them ever harder and the constant vilification to which they were subjected. Usually the attitude of the Reichsvereinigung was meek and submissive; in hindsight its compliance was sometimes excessive, even under the existing circumstances. Thus, during the discussions of the Madagascar plan, the RSHA ordered the German Jewish leadership to cooperate in planning the mass transfer of its communities. In compliance, executive director Otto Hirsch came up with a detailed memorandum—apparently discussed at length among the representatives of all the political and religious groups on the executive board—about the education to be given to the Jews deported to their island…. The last tenet of the program, as drafted by Hirsch, read: “The aim of this education is to prepare for life in the Jewish settlement. It is our wish that [this settlement] be realized in the Jewish land of Palestine. However, these principles are valid for educational preparation toward life in any Jewish settlement, wherever it may be.”150 There were exceptions to such subservience, however.
The Reichsvereinigung had already protested against the deportations from Stettin and Schneidemühl. After the sudden deportation of the Jews of Baden and the Saar-Palatinate to Vichy France, the association sent a circular to all communities in the Reich, warning the Jews of the two provinces who had been absent from their homes at the time of the roundup not to return.151 In addresses at synagogues, the leading members of the Vereinigung raised their voices publicly against the new deportations. A fast day was declared, and all cultural events were canceled for a week. Otto Hirsch even lodged a complaint with the RSHA. The Nazi reaction was foreseeable: One of the leading members of the association, the lawyer Julius Seligsohn, was arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Shortly thereafter he was dead.152 As for Otto Hirsch, the Gestapo waited a few more months: He was arrested in February 1941 and transferred to Mauthausen in May. His death was registered as having occurred on June 19, 1941, due to “Colitis ulcerosa.”153
VI
On May 1, 1940, the Germans hermetically sealed the shabbiest area of Lodz, the Baluty district; the 163,000 Jewish inhabitants of the city who had been ordered to move there were cut off from the outside world.154 The no-man’s land that surrounded the ghetto made escape practically impossible. The city of Lodz as such, increasingly Germanized by a growing influx of Reich Germans and Volksdeutsche, most of whom were known to be enthusiastic Nazis, would certainly not have offered any hideout to a Jew. Thus, even more than in Warsaw, the Lodz ghetto would become a vast urban concentration and labor camp of sorts, without clandestine political or economic links to its surroundings, mostly deprived of information about the fate of Jews living and dying outside its own barbed-wire fence.155 As for the housing conditions in the ghetto, the numbers are telling: apartments with drains, 613; with water pipes and drains, 382; with a toilet, 294; with toilet, drain, and bath, 49; lacking these comforts, 30,624.156
In the General Government, Frank, as will be remembered, had stopped the building of ghetto walls in the summer of 1940 in the belief that the Madagascar plan would become concrete; by September he knew better. In a meeting with the heads of his administration on the twelfth, he announced his decision regarding Warsaw: “As far as our handling of the Jews is concerned, I have agreed to close the ghetto in Warsaw, mainly because…the danger represented by these 500,000 Jews is so great that we have to eliminate any possibility of their causing mischief.”157
On October 2, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the governor of the Warsaw district, Ludwig Fischer, ordered the establishment of an exclusively Jewish quarter in the city. “Today began the removal of Poles from certain streets in the south of Warsaw,” Ringelblum recorded. “The Jewish populace is terribly uneasy; no one knows whether he will be sleeping in his own bed tomorrow. People in the south of town sit at home all day waiting for the hour when they will come and drive the Jews out.”158 The next day the Jews were optimistic again: “The fear of the ghetto has passed…a rumor is widespread that the matter has been postponed,” Kaplan noted; but he also added “The very thought of a ghetto has left an impression on our nerves. It is hard to live in a time when you are not sure of tomorrow, and there is no greater torture than waiting. It is the torture of those condemned to die.”159
On October 12, Yom Kippur, Czerniaków was informed of the final decision. The chairman was ushered into the presence of several German officia
ls: “It was thereupon proclaimed that in the name of humanity and at the behest of the Governor [the governor-general] and in conformity with higher authority, a ghetto is to be established. I was given a map of the ghetto. It turns out that the ghetto border streets have been allocated to the Poles…. Until October 31, the resettlement will be voluntary, after that compulsory. All furniture must remain where it is.”160
The ghetto was officially sealed on November 16. The wall that surrounded it was built over a period of several months and paid for by the Jewish Council. The Poles who had lived in the area left; the Jews moved in. Some 380,000 Jews were now cut off from the world (their number, inflated by further arrivals from smaller towns or from the Warthegau, would peak at 445,000 in May 1941, even with a catastrophic mortality rate).161 The ghetto area was divided into a larger section and a smaller one, linked by a wooden bridge built over the “Aryan” Chlodna Street. The entire area comprised only 4.5 percent of the city; even this area was later reduced. According to Trunk, “In March 1941, the population density of the Warsaw ghetto reached 1,309 persons per hundred square meters, with an average of 7.2 persons sharing one room, compared to 3.2 persons sharing one room in the “Aryan” sections of the city. These were average figures, for as many as 25 or even 30 people sometimes shared one room 6 by 4 meters.”162
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