The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Elaborate preparations were made to show Germany’s best face to the world. Goebbels’s Berlin paper, The Attack, told Berliners: ‘We must be more charming than the Parisians, more easygoing than the Viennese, more vivacious than the Romans, more cosmopolitan than London, and more practical than New York.’129 Just to ensure the right impression, people with criminal records were arrested and expelled or imprisoned for the duration. A massive new stadium was constructed, with seats for 110,000 spectators, at the centre of a vast sporting complex on the north-western side of Berlin. The Games were broadcast across the world on radio and, for the first time, they were also televised, although only on an experimental basis, since hardly anyone possessed a set. Leni Riefenstahl, employing the saturation camera coverage that had been so effective in filming the 1934 Nuremberg Rally for Triumph of the Will, directed what is still the classic Olympic film, a celebration of human physical prowess that sat easily with both the Olympic ideal and Nazi ideology. Nazi and Olympic flags were hung out everywhere in the capital city, and at the opening ceremony a choir of 3,000 was directed by Richard Strauss in a performance of his newly written Olympic Hymn, following a rendition of the Horst Wessel Song. The Olympic flame was lit, Hitler declared the Games open and 5,000 athletes began the competitions.130

  Hitler was only a guest at the Games, of course, which were staged by the International Olympic Committee, and when he began calling victorious German athletes to his box to receive his personal congratulations, he was sternly reminded by the Committee that he should not offend against the international spirit of the Games by discriminating between victors from different countries. Either he should congratulate them all without exception, or he should desist from congratulating anybody at all. Not surprisingly, he chose the latter course, though he continued to offer his felicitations to German victors in private; but this incident, and the fact that he left the stadium during the high-jump competition when the last German competitor had been eliminated, gave rise to the later legend that Hitler had snubbed the undoubted star of the Games, four-times gold medal winner Jesse Owens, by refusing to shake his hand because he was black, and walking out of the stadium when he came first in a race. Even Hitler, however, knew better than to ruin the impression the Games were making on international opinion by engaging in a petulant demonstration of this kind. As Albert Speer later reported, Hitler was indeed none too happy about Owens’s victories, which he put down to the superior physical strength of primitive man: in future, he said in private, such unfair competition should be eliminated, and non-whites barred from taking part. Taken with the success of the Games, Hitler ordered Speer to design a new stadium many times larger than the existing one. In 1940 the Games would take place in Japan as planned, he conceded, but after that they would be permanently located in Berlin. 131

  ‘I’m afraid the Nazis have succeeded with their propaganda,’ William L. Shirer wrote on 16 August 1936, as the Games ended. ‘First, they have run the games on a lavish scale never before experienced, and this has appealed to the athletes. Second, they have put up a very good front for the general visitors, especially the big businessmen,’ some of whom told the American correspondent that they had been ‘favourably impressed by the Nazi “set-up” ’. The story had been the same at the Winter Olympics earlier in the year, though Shirer had got into trouble with the Propaganda Ministry for filing a report that ‘Nazi officials had taken all the good hotels for themselves, and had put the press in inconvenient bed-and-breakfast accommodation, which was true’. Shirer had also reported to his American readers that the Nazis at Garmisch had ‘pulled down all the signs saying that Jews were unwanted (they’re all over Germany) and that the Olympic visitors would thus be spared any signs of the kind of treatment meted out to Jews in this country’.132 This was also true. Hitler explicitly distanced himself from The Stormer in June 1936 as a sop to international opinion, and copies of the paper were withdrawn from display in the Reich capital while the Games were on.133 His major speeches in 1936 barely mentioned the Jews at all.134 On 13 August 1936 Victor Klemperer noted that for the Nazi regime, the Olympics were a through-and-through political undertaking. ‘German Renaissance through Hitler’, I read recently. People at home and abroad are constantly being told that they are here witnessing the revival, the blossoming, the new mind, the unity, the steadfastness and glory, of course also the peacefulness of the spirit of the Third Reich, that lovingly embraces the entire world. The slogan-chanting mobs are banned (for the duration of the Olympics), campaigns against the Jews, warlike speeches, everything disreputable has vanished from the newspapers until 16 August, and still, day and night, the swastika flags are flying everywhere.135

  Nevertheless, despite all this, Hess’s deputy Martin Bormann had reminded Party officials in February 1936 that ‘the aim of the NSDAP, to shut out Jewry bit by bit from every sphere of life of the German people, remains irremoveably fixed’. That this aim had in no way been modified or abandoned became clear almost as soon as the Summer Olympics were over.136

  V

  Meanwhile, several thousand Jews who had left the country in 1933 had actually returned in the following years as the situation on the streets seemed to calm down in comparison to the mass violence of the seizure of power and the leading figures in the regime seemed to soft-pedal their antisemitic rhetoric. Restrictions placed by the French government on the employment of foreign workers as the Depression began to hit France severely in 1934 drove many German-Jewish exiles there back to their homeland. Noting the arrival of such ‘elements who are to be looked upon as undesirable’ in the early months of 1935, the Bavarian political police decreed: It can basically be taken that non-Aryans have emigrated for political reasons, even if they have said that they went abroad to start a new life for themselves. Returning male emigrants will be sent to the Dachau concentration camp; returning women will go to the concentration camp at Moringen.137

  Much worse was to come.138 Moreover, whatever the cosmetic adjustments the Nazis made to their antisemitic policies in the course of 1936, the Aryanization of Jewish businesses continued unabated throughout the year, and indeed the promulgation of the Four-Year Plan in the autumn, as we have seen, brought with it a sharp acceleration of the programme’s pace. It was accompanied by a fresh wave of intimidatory boycotts in many parts of the country, a fact that suggested strongly that many German shoppers were still patronizing Jewish businesses and that the Nazi leadership at every level was becoming increasingly frustrated at this situation. The Gestapo launched a concerted action to break the long-established custom of peasants in many parts of Germany using Jewish cattle-dealers to buy and sell their livestock. Peasant farmers who stubbornly kept up their links were threatened with the withdrawal of their hunting licences, the denial of Winter Aid and other measures, while Jewish cattle-dealers were arrested or physically expelled from markets and slaughterhouses, and their record-books confiscated and handed over to non-Jewish rivals. By the end of 1937, they had largely been driven out of business as a result. 139

  It was not until 1938, however, that violent action began again on a really large scale. Once again, the leadership of the Third Reich drove it on, Hitler to the fore. As the regime went over to a more aggressive military and foreign policy, it felt less need than previously to worry about possible foreign reactions to antisemitic violence. Carried out in a piecemeal way, the Aryanization of the economy was now within sight of its goal, and no economic disaster had occurred as a result of the removal of Jews from economic life. War was now looming, and it was essential from the regime’s point of view to reduce the number of Jews in Germany faster so as to minimize the possibility of a replay of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ that had cost Germany the First World War - not the last time this fantasy was to play a key role in guiding the policies of Hitler and his leading associates. In the shadow of the coming war, portraying Germany’s Jews once more as the enemy within would provide a significant means of preparing public opinion for the conflict. T
his new phase of antisemitic violence, the third following those of 1933 and 1935, was inaugurated by Hitler himself at the Party Rally on 13 September 1937, when he devoted a large part of his speech to attacking the Jews as ‘inferior through and through’, unscrupulous, subversive, bent upon undermining society from within, exterminating those cleverer than themselves and establishing a Bolshevik reign of terror. The speech was followed by antisemitic disturbances in Danzig, and then by a fresh wave of intimidatory boycotts of Jewish shops during the Christmas season. Recording a long private conversation with Hitler on 29 November 1937, Goebbels noted in his diary: ‘The Jews must get out of Germany, indeed out of Europe altogether. That will take some time yet, but it will and must happen. The Leader is firmly resolved on it.’140

  The new phase of persecution brought with it a whole new raft of laws and decrees that together significantly worsened the position of Germany’s Jews. On 25 July 1938 all but 709 of the remaining 3,152 Jewish doctors lost their licence to practise; the 709 were denied the right to call themselves doctors but could continue treating Jewish patients, who would otherwise be deprived of medical care altogether. A decree of 27 September applied the same principle to Jewish lawyers; 172 out of 1,753 were allowed to continue working, only with Jewish clients; Jewish dentists, vets and apothecaries followed on 17 January 1939. On 28 March 1938 a new law on Jewish cultural associations deprived them of their previous status as public corporations with effect from the previous first of January, thus removing an important legal protection and opening them up to increased taxation. Other measures accelerated the Aryanization of the economy by banning Jews from further professions, removing tax concessions for Jews with children, forcing the registration of Jewish assets and more besides. The Interior Ministry began working out a new law, promulgated on 17 August, which made it compulsory for all Jews to bear a Jewish name, or if they did not, to add the name ‘Israel’ or ‘Sara’ to their existing names from 1 January 1939. Thus Jews could now be automatically identified from the personal identity papers which every German, by long custom, had been obliged to carry on his or her person and show to the authorities on demand. To many Jews, this law also made it humiliatingly clear that they were now in every respect inferior, marked out as a race apart. Faced with the unavoidable prospect of seeing her Jewish husband Friedrich carry the name Israel, Luise Solmitz worried about his depressed state of mind, which must have been typical for many in his position: ‘The shame that is unavoidably coming with the 1. 1. 39 is gnawing at him, the dishonouring, depressing additional name.’141

  Total separation from the rest of society, indeed, was what Berlin’s Regional Party Leader, Joseph Goebbels, had in mind in the summer of 1938, as he reacted to complaints by visiting Regional Leaders from other parts of Germany about what they saw as the large number of Jews visible on the streets of the Third Reich’s capital city. Goebbels commissioned a report from the Berlin police chief, Count Helldorf, which recommended a special identifying mark for Jews and for their shops, a special identity card for Jews, their removal from a whole range of professions, special compartments for them in trains, their confinement in a special quarter of the city and more. These ideas were now clearly becoming common currency. Heydrich’s Security Service pointed out that it would be inadvisable for Berlin to go ahead on its own, even though fully a third of Germany’s Jewish population now lived there; and in any case these measures were not linked to any coherent scheme of Jewish emigration. So they was not acted upon. Nevertheless, these proposals did not go away, and in the meantime the Berlin police raided a large, well-known café on the Kurfürstendamm and arrested 300 Jewish customers, including numerous foreigners. They included, the police announced, many criminal elements. This did not go nearly far enough for Goebbels, who called Helldorf in for a discussion. ‘Aim - drive the Jews out of Berlin’, he wrote in his diary on 4 June 1938, ‘. . . and without any sentimentality’ - a purpose he also revealed to an audience of 300 senior police officers from Berlin on 10 June 1938. Goebbels was not acting on his own in this matter. A few days later, over 1,500 Jews were arrested on Hitler’s personal orders in the course of a large-scale police action against ‘asocials’, beggars, down-and-outs and the like. These Jews - who were known to the police because of their previous criminal convictions, including of course contraventions of the race laws - were not intended, as the much greater numbers of ‘asocials’ arrested in this action were, for conscription as labourers. Their arrest was meant, rather, to put pressure on them to emigrate. Indeed, they were only released when arrangements had been made, through Jewish agencies, for their emigration. Beyond this, the action was also intended to equate Jews with criminality in the mind of the general public, an impression sedulously reinforced by reports in the daily press.142

  All these speeches, laws, decrees and police raids signalled clearly to the Nazi Party rank and file that it was time to take violent action on the streets once more. The example of the mass scenes of violence in Vienna following the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938 was a further incentive.143 Berlin’s Nazis were encouraged by Goebbels and police chief Helldorf; they daubed the star of David on Jewish shops, doctors’ surgeries and lawyers’ chambers all over the city, looted a good number of them, and demolished three synagogues. The violence spread to other cities, including Frankfurt and Magdeburg. Hitler reined in this violence on 22 June, not least because it had affected many foreign Jews caught in the city at the time and relations with other countries were at a delicate point. This action was purely tactical, however. On 25 July 1938, Goebbels recorded a conversation in which Hitler had given his general approval to his actions in Berlin. ‘The main thing is that the Jews are driven out. In 10 years they must be out of Germany.’ How this was to be done was a matter of secondary importance. Foreign policy considerations currently forbade open violence, but it was not ruled out in principle.144 Changing their tactics, the Berlin police issued a confidential 76-point list of ways in which Jews could be harassed without the law being broken in the process - by summoning them to police stations on the Sabbath, by pedantically applying health and safety regulations to Jewish premises, by delaying the processing of legal documents (unless they concerned emigration), and so on. Nevertheless, violence continued, sometimes with a legal pretext, sometimes without. After the local authorities in Nuremberg and Munich ordered the demolition of the main synagogues in their respective cities, Nazis trashed synagogues in at least a dozen other towns. In parts of Württemberg there were renewed attacks on Jewish premises, and Jewish inhabitants were pulled out of their homes, beaten and spat upon, and driven out of the towns in which they lived. Thanks to the officially sponsored actions of the previous few months, all Jewish shops and premises had been clearly marked, Jewish men, women and children issued with special identity papers and their domiciles specially registered with the police. They were all easy enough, therefore, to locate.145 In the SS Security Service, plans began to be discussed for the arrest of all remaining Jews in the event of war breaking out. Finally, under ever-increasing pressure from Hitler to finance and deliver more armaments, the Four-Year Plan organization, with Hermann Goring in the lead, eyed the remaining Jewish property and assets in Germany with an increasing sense of urgency.146

  The situation was building up to a pogrom-like atmosphere once more, as in the summer of 1935. Meanwhile, the regime began to take steps to expel all non-German Jews from the Reich. Aryan employers were ordered to dismiss all such employees in the autumn of 1937, following which up to a thousand Russian Jews were expelled from the country, although the process took longer than planned because of the uncooperative attitude of the Soviet authorities.147 The following year, the SS Security Service turned its attention to the 50,000 Polish Jews resident in Germany. Forty per cent had actually been born in Germany, but from Heydrich’s point of view they were all an irritation, since none of them was subject to German anti-Jewish laws. Worried that they might be returned, the antisemitic military di
ctatorship that ruled Poland passed a new law on 31 March 1938 that allowed it to remove Polish citizenship from these unfortunate people, who would then became stateless. Negotiations between the Gestapo and the Polish Embassy in Berlin got nowhere, and on 27 October the German police began arresting Polish workers, sometimes together with their entire families, putting them on sealed trains under close guard and taking them to the Polish border. Eighteen thousand people were transported in this way, without any proper notice, without anything but the most minimal and basic luggage, and often without food or drink on the journey. Arriving at the border, they were driven out of the trains by the accompanying police and forced, often under blows, to the other side. Very quickly the Polish authorities sealed their side of the border so that the expellees were left to wander about aimlessly in no-man’s land until the Polish government eventually relented and set up refugee camps for them just inside the border. When the Polish authorities ordered the expulsion of German citizens across the border in the other direction, the German police brought the action to a close, on 29 October 1938. Negotiations between the two governments finally led to the deportees being allowed back to Germany to collect their belongings before returning to Poland for good.148

  THE NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS

  I