The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  But who exactly was a Jew? Frick’s decree applied to people with at least three out of four grandparents who were Jewish and, naturally, to all those who practised the Judaic religion. According to contemporary estimates, which varied widely, there were in addition some 50,000 Jews in Germany in 1935 who had converted to Christianity or were the children of Jewish parents who had converted, and 2,000 three-quarter Jews who had converted. The high rate of intermarriage between Jews and Christians over the previous decades had produced between 70,000 and 75,000 people who had only two Jewish grandparents and 125,000 to 130,000 who had only one. In addition, many of these were married to non-Jews, as were anything up to about 20,000 people who fell into the Nazis’ category of full Jews, and many of these, again, had children. The Nazis themselves reckoned in 1939 that there were 20,454 racially mixed marriages in the Greater German Reich (including, by this time, Austria and the Sudetenland). The same census, the first to define Jews by racial criteria, also counted 52,005 half-Jews and 32,669 quarter-Jews living in the old German Reich. Over 90 per cent of people defined as mixed race belonged to a Christian Church. As with any racist legislation, the devil lay in the detail, and in these circumstances reaching a hard-and-fast definition of who was Jewish and who was not was nigh impossible. An insoluble ideological dilemma faced Nazi legislators: was the poison they thought Jewish blood carried with it into the bloodstream of the German race so virulent that only a small admixture would be enough to turn a person into a Jew, or was German blood so strong and healthy that it would overcome all but the most powerful admixture of Jewishness in a person’s hereditary constitution? To such questions there was no rational answer, because there was from the beginning no rational basis to the assumptions on which they rested. All solutions the Nazis arrived at in the question of mixed-race Germans and mixed marriages were thus in the end entirely arbitrary.79

  The niceties of racial classification kept civil servants busy in endless meetings and internal memoranda over the following weeks. The more cautiously inclined warned that defining half-Jews as fully Jewish would add a substantial number of previously loyal Germans to the tally of Nazism’s internal enemies. Their counsels prevailed, and such people were classified in a supplementary decree issued on 14 November 1935 as mixed-race of the first degree, unless they practised the Judaic faith, or were married to a full Jew, in which case they were counted as fully Jewish (Geltungsjuden, in official jargon), with all the consequences this entailed. People with only one fully Jewish grandparent counted as mixed-race of the second degree. There were further provisions dealing with anyone born out of wedlock, or born after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 (they were more likely to be classified as fully Jewish). The legislators recognized the arbitrariness of these measures by including a final provision for Hitler to grant exemptions whenever and to whomsoever he pleased. In due course, he did indeed do this, or others did it in his name through the application of a stamp bearing his signature to a document known as a Declaration of German Blood. Meanwhile, all the authorities had to go on in establishing Jewish ancestry was whether or not someone’s grandparents had practised the Judaic religion, a fact which rather made a nonsense of scientific claims about the importance of race and blood in determining Jewish or German identity. Genealogists suddenly became the most sought-after experts in the whole country, as Germans scrambled to find evidence in parish registers and other sources of their racial purity to include in their so-called Ancestry Proof (Ahnennachweis), a document that now formed the essential prerequsite for a career in the civil service or indeed virtually any other kind of job.80

  III

  The Nuremberg Laws were presented in the press as a stabilizing measure that would help the Jewish minority in Germany to settle down to living its own life. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry was careful to ban triumphant or gloating articles in the press, forbidding ‘leading articles in the tone “go to it!” ’81 Nevertheless, the Laws opened the way for further, massive discrimination against anyone who counted as a Jew. Two weeks after the decree of 14 November 1935, Hitler retroactively annulled its provision banning any extension of measures to ensure the purity of German blood beyond those contained in legislation. This effectively authorized non-governmental organizations to apply the Aryan paragraph to their members and employees, not only Jews but also those of mixed race as well. Further measures placed more restrictions on the admittance of Jews to state-regulated professions. People with two Jewish grandparents now had to get official permission from a Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood if they wanted to marry a non-Jew. But the Party representatives on the Committee voted down such applications with such regularity that it was wound up in 1936 and the applications passed to a single official to deal with. Mixed-race people could still study, they were not banned from sexual or other kinds of relationship with non-Jews, and in many respects they lived a relatively unrestricted life. This included, for men, the performance of military service. The army leadership was naturally exercised by the fact that banning men of mixed race from doing military service would deprive them of thousands of potential recruits. Writing to Hitler’s army adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, on 3 April 1935, an official in the Interior Ministry estimated that there were 150,000 male half-Jews and quarter-Jews of military age in the country - a considerable exaggeration that further fed the army’s concern.82

  The army leadership certainly had good cause for concern. By the end of 1935 it had cashiered virtually all remaining fully Jewish officers and men, and in the early summer of 1936 the army reached an agreement with Hitler that while male half- and quarter-Jews had to perform military service, they should no longer be allowed to hold positions of authority in the armed forces unless granted a specific, personal exemption on Hitler’s own authority. The Nazi Party’s Genealogy Office bombarded the military with information about officers who were ‘not purely Aryan’ and ought in its view to be removed from their posts. However, many senior officers in 1936-7 still resented political interference in military affairs and ignored these demands. In addition, checking up on the ancestry of tens of thousands of men was a well-nigh impossible task, and quite a few officers managed successfully to conceal their part-Jewish ancestry at least until the outbreak of the war and in some cases even longer. From the point of view of the military, of course, what mattered was whether or not they were good soldiers, or sailors, or airmen.83

  The army’s attitude mirrored precisely the debatable and uncertain status of Germany’s many part-Jewish inhabitants after 1935. Nevertheless, on the whole, mixed-race people, indeed even Jews, were to some extent relieved by the passage of the Nuremberg Laws because they seemed to remove the major elements of uncertainty in their position and promise an end to the violent antisemitic campaigns of the preceding months. Party activists were understandably enthusiastic about the Nuremberg Laws, and rightly saw them as a major step along the road to the complete removal of Jews from German society. However, both Gestapo and Social Democratic agents reported a critical, even hostile, attitude to the Nuremberg Laws even amongst groups in society that were normally far from favourably inclined towards the Jews. Four-fifths of the population in the Palatinate were said to disapprove of the Laws, the working class was almost unanimous in its rejection of Nazi antisemitism, and the petty-bourgeoisie disliked the Laws because small businessmen feared they would lead to renewed boycotts of German goods in other countries. Even the Social Democrats, however, admitted that most people were feeling so intimidated after the violence of the summer and the propaganda surrounding the Nuremberg Laws that they no longer patronized Jewish shops. Indifference and passivity characterized the reactions of the majority of the population.84

  Gradually, the never-ending violence, the incessant propaganda and the legal endorsement of Nazi policies by the state were having an effect. As one Social Democratic agent reported from Berlin in January 1936:The campaign against the Jews is not without influence on people’s op
inions either. Very slowly, views are being filtered into it that they used to reject. First people read the ‘Stormer’ out of curiosity, but then in the end something from it sticks. At the same time one has to admit: it says a lot for the German people that despite years of campaigns against the Jews it is still possible at all for Jews to live in Germany. If the German people were not naturally good-natured, this propaganda would have led to Jews simply being beaten to death on the streets . . . In general one can conclude that the National Socialists really have brought about a deeper gulf between the people and the Jews. The feeling that the Jews are another race is general nowadays.85

  The effect that the constant barrage of antisemitism had on a thoughtful young person can be gauged from the memoirs of Melita Maschmann. She had plenty of contact with Jews, who made up about a third of her class in the secondary school she attended in a well-to-do part of Berlin in the early 1930s. Here the non-Jewish girls instinctively dissociated their Jewish classmates from ‘the Jews’, who ‘were and remained something mysteriously menacing and anonymous’. ‘The anti-semitism of my parents’, Maschmann went on in the open letter she wrote to a former Jewish schoolmate after the war,was a part of their outlook which was taken for granted . . . One was friendly with individual Jews whom one liked, just as one was friendly as a Protestant with individual Catholics. But while it occurred to nobody to be ideologically hostile to the Catholics, one was, utterly, to the Jews . . . In preaching that all the misery of the nations was due to the Jews or that the Jewish spirit was seditious and Jewish blood compelled you to think of old Herr Lewy or Rosel Cohn: I thought only of the bogey-man, ‘the Jew’. And when I heard that the Jews were being driven from their professions and homes and imprisoned in ghettos, the points switched automatically in my mind to steer me round the thought that such a fate could also overtake you or old Lewy. It was only the Jew who was being persecuted and ‘made harmless’.86

  After joining the Nazi League of German Girls, however, she felt an ‘open breach’ with her Jewish schoolfriend ‘. . . to be my duty, because one could only do one or two things: either have Jewish friends or be a National Socialist’.87

  Constantly exposed to antisemitic propaganda, Maschmann later remembered that she and her upper-middle-class friends had considered it rather vulgar, and often laughed at attempts to convince them that the Jews performed ritual murders and similar crimes. As educated people they looked down on the antisemitic scandal-sheet The Stormer. Yet although she did not take part in violent actions or boycotts, Maschmann accepted that they were justified, and told herself: ‘The Jews are the enemies of the new Germany . . . If the Jews sow hatred against us all over the world, they must learn that we have hostages for them in our hands.’ Later on, she suppressed the memory of the violence she had seen on the streets, and ‘as the years went by I grew better and better at switching off quickly in this manner on similar occasions. It was the only way. Whatever the circumstances, to prevent the onset of doubts about the rightness of what had happened.’88 A similar process of rationalization and moral editing must have taken place with many others, too.

  IV

  From September 1935, antisemitism became a principle governing private life as well as public. Enshrined as the cornerstone of Nazi ideology since the beginning, it was now penetrating larger areas of German society more deeply than ever before. The whole of the civil service was now engaged in applying the Nuremberg Laws and others besides. Judges, prosecutors, policemen, Gestapo and other law enforcement agencies spent increasing amounts of their time on enforcing antisemitic legislation. Town councils and their employees in libraries, swimming pools and all other kinds of municipal establishments carried out antisemitic regulations. Innkeepers, shopkeepers (many of whom protected themselves by putting up signs advertising themselves as a ‘purely Aryan establishment’), traders, businessmen, people in every walk of life were aware of laws against the Jews and had little hesitation in complying with them. Of course, the Social Democrats’ secret reports were filled with examples of individual landlords and restaurant-owners who turned a blind eye to notices they were forced to put up banning Jewish customers. Nevertheless, all of this was having an effect. Together with the progressive economic marginalization of the Jews, the Nuremberg Laws marked a significant step in the direction of the removal of Jews from German society. Their isolation was considerably greater after September 1935 than before.89

  The third of the measures promulgated at the Nuremberg Party Rally of 1935, dubbed by the Nazis the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, was perhaps the most significant of all of them in bringing Nazism into the private sphere. It forbade marriages between Jews and Germans ‘or kindred blood’ and banned sexual relations outside marriage between the two categories as defined by the Citizenship Law as well. Jews were not allowed to employ female domestic servants under the age of forty-five if they were Germans, in an allusion to a sexual fantasy that often made its appearance in the pages of The Stormer. These laws were to be administered by the regular courts. Cases were brought under the loaded heading of ‘racial defilement’ (Rassenschande, literally ‘racial shame’ or ‘racial disgrace’). By their very nature such cases were difficult to identify, and prosecution depended heavily from the beginning on denunciation by neighbours, acquaintances and sometimes family members of those involved. From 1936 to 1939 the annual average of convictions for racial defilement under the Nuremberg Laws ran at about 420, two-thirds of them Jewish men. Under continuous pressure from the Gestapo and the Reich Justice Ministry, the courts became steadily harsher; in 1938, for example, a majority of racial defilement sentences passed by the Hamburg Regional Court involved lengthy periods of imprisonment in a penitentiary rather than an ordinary prison. The definition of illicit sexual relations was extended until it covered almost any kind of bodily contact between Jews and ‘Aryans’, including socially conventional embraces and kisses.90 Eleven sentences were passed for racial offences in the remaining months of 1935, then in the first full year of the law’s effect, 1936, the number jumped to 358, increasing to 512 in 1936 and falling back to 434 in 1938, 365 in 1939 and 231 in 1940. The increasing emigration of young and middle-aged Jews may have been a factor in the decline. It is possible, too, that the law’s deterrent effect had an influence, as sentences grew steadily harsher over time.91

  Inside prison, offenders were frequently exposed to antisemitic abuse from warders; in some institutions they were routinely put on short commons, and even good behaviour was often regarded as ‘typical of the racial character which understands how to conform even in a position of powerlessness’, as one Bavarian prison official noted in 1939. ‘I suffer very much because of the hatred of Jews’, wrote a young Jewish inmate to his mother, in a letter confiscated by the prison authorities in June 1938: ‘One official calls me Moses, even though he knows exactly what I am called . . . Another one called me a damn Jewish swine this lunchtime.’ Their sufferings did not end there. Following an order issued by the Reich Minister of Justice on 8 March 1938, Jews who were sent to prison for race defilement were rearrested by the Gestapo when they completed their sentence and taken off to concentration camps.92 Here they were frequently singled out because of the nature of their alleged offence. In the Buchenwald concentration camp, the twenty-year-old Julius Meier, a well-educated, middle-class Jew, serving a two-year prison sentence after being denounced by a neighbour who had observed him being intimate with his family’s non-Jewish domestic servant, was marked down by the camp doctor for castration. Refusing to sign the consent form, on the grounds that his emigration papers were about to be completed, Meier was repeatedly punched in the face by an SS guard on the doctor’s orders, kicked, denied medical assistance for his injuries, and put in the camp’s punishment bunker for twelve days. Using what influence they had, Meier’s parents completed his emigration papers and obtained an order from Reich Security Head Office - not to release him, however, but to countermand the castration order.
The telegram thus went not to the commandant, who would have arranged his immediate release, but to the camp doctor, for whom breaking Meier’s will had by now become a matter of personal pride: on his orders, Meier was put back into the punishment bunker and murdered by an SS guard.93

  The law offered many new opportunities for the harassment and persecution of German Jews, especially men. In December 1935, a 43-year-old Jewish clerk was condemned to one year and three months in gaol for race defilement. He had lived together with his non-Jewish partner for a year and they had a nine-month-old baby. But prosecutions were often brought on the flimsiest of pretexts. In Bad Dürkheim, for example, a 66-year-old Jewish man, Hermann Baum, was condemned to a year in prison in November 1935 on the evidence of a fifteen-year-old girl who testified that he had tried to kiss her. The Gestapo called in domestic servants who worked in Jewish households to inform them that they had to leave, and plied them with leading questions (‘but he’s touched you sometimes on the shoulder hasn’t he?’) in the hope of making an arrest, threatening them with imprisonment themselves if they did not incriminate their masters.94 In November 1935, a fifty-year-old Jewish businessman, Ludwig Abrahamson, was denounced to the Gestapo for carrying on sexual relations with a non-Jewish employee, Wilhelmina Kohrt. Under interrogation he admitted that he had forced his attentions on her (whether in fact this was true may, in view of the methods used by the Gestapo to extract confessions, be doubted). He was sentenced to two years in prison and on his release was taken by the Gestapo to Buchenwald concentration camp, from which he only secured release on 6 October 1938 by providing proof that he would emigrate. An even more striking case was that of Hannelore Krieger, a worker in a factory producing alcoholic beverages, who was denounced anonymously in April 1938 for carrying on sexual relations with her boss, Julius Rosenheim. He had, she said, demanded sexual favours in return for money; but at her trial, she changed her testimony and said the relationship had ended in 1934, before the Law was passed. The court agreed to acquit both of them, but the Gestapo arrested Rosenheim at the end of the trial and took him off to a concentration camp anyway.95