The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  I V

  When, on 16 November 1938, Heydrich finally ordered the arrests of Jewish men in the wake of the pogrom to stop, he did not do so with the purpose of simply releasing them back into society to continue their life in the Third Reich, such as it was. All Jews over sixty, sick or handicapped Jews and Jews involved in Aryanization processes were to be freed immediately. The release of others was made conditional in many cases on their promise to leave the country. Moritz Mayer’s wife was told that he would not be released until his brothers and sisters, who had already emigrated, made over their share in his property to him; he was released on condition that he sell his house and business. Turning over the negotiations to a local non-Jewish businessman, Mayer left for Palestine with his brother Albert and their families in February 1939, never to return. 197 As his example makes clear, the pogrom can only be understood in the context of the regime’s drive to force Jews to emigrate and thereby bring Jewish life in Germany to an end. The SS Security Service reported shortly afterwards that Jewish emigration had considerably declined and . . . almost come to a standstill as a consequence of the defensive posture of foreign countries and the lack of sufficient currency reserves in their possession. A contributory factor was the absolute resignation of the Jews, whose organizations only carried on performing their task under increased pressure from the authorities. In this situation, the November-action brought about a fundamental change.

  The ‘radical procedure against the Jews in the November days’, continued the report, had ‘increased the Jewish community’s will to emigrate . . . in the highest degree’. In the following months, measures were taken to try and translate this will into action.198

  In January 1939, Heydrich took the further step of ordering police authorities all over Germany to release all Jewish concentration camp prisoners who had emigration papers in their possession, and to tell them that they would be returned to the camp for life if they ever came back to Germany. There were still many Jewish men in the camps at this point, following the mass arrests of 9-10 November the previous year, and they were given three weeks to leave the country after their release.199 Yet at the same time, Nazi policies within Germany were actually making it more difficult for Jews to leave. The bureaucratic formalities that accompanied the application process for emigration were so complicated that they made it impossible for all but a few of those arrested in November 1938 to meet the three-week deadline. Jewish agencies worked reasonably well with officials in the Reich Interior Ministry, often former Nationalists or Centre Party members, in organizing emigration up to 30 January 1939, but at this point Goring, as head of the Four-Year Plan, passed the task of arranging Jewish emigration over to the Reich Centre for Jewish Emigration, founded on 24 January 1939 under Heydrich’s control. Jews’ funds were blocked so that they could not pay their passage to America. One of the aims of the Centre was ‘to take care that the emigration of poorer Jews is given preferential treatment’ since, as a Foreign Ministry circular noted in January 1939, ‘it would increase antisemitism in the western countries, in which Jews have found refuge . . . It is emphasized that it is in the German interest to pursue the Jews as beggars over the borders, for the poorer the immigrant, the greater the burden on the receiving country.’200

  Despite all these obstacles there was a sharp rise in Jewish emigration from Germany after the pogrom and the arrests. Panic-stricken Jews crowded foreign embassies and consulates in their desperation to obtain entry visas. The numbers who succeeded in getting them are almost impossible to estimate, but according to Jewish organizations’ own statistics, there were about 324,000 Germans of Jewish faith still in the country at the end of 1937, and 269,000 at the end of 1938. By May 1939 this figure had fallen again to just under 188,000, and it fell again to 164,000 by the outbreak of war in September 1939. The official census taken at this time showed that there were 233,646 racially defined Jews left in Germany. Of them, 213,930 adhered to the Judaic faith, leaving around 20,000 Jewish members of the Christian Churches. Roughly 26,000 of the total were foreign Jews, however, so according to the official figures there were around 207,000 German Jews left in the ‘old Reich’ by this time, about 187,000 of whom practised the Judaic faith. In effect, therefore, the figures supplied by Jewish organizations were roughly correct, since Christian Jews and foreign Jews more or less cancelled each other’s numbers out.201

  According to one estimate, 115,000 Jews left Germany in the ten months or so between 10 November 1938 and 1 September 1939, making a total of around 400,000 who had fled the country since the Nazi seizure of power. Most were now fleeing to countries outside the mainland of Europe: in all, 132,000 to the USA, around 60,000 to Palestine, 40,000 to the United Kingdom 10,000 each to Brazil and Argentina, 7,000 to Australia, 5,000 to South Africa, and 9,000 to the free port of Shanghai, which was to prove an unexpectedly accommodating refuge well into the war. Many more Germans who were classified as Jewish even though they did not practise the Jewish faith joined the flood of emigrants. So many people fled in terror without even a passport or a visa that neighbouring states began to set up special camps for them. Before the pogrom, the question of whether or not to emigrate had been a topic of continual and impassioned debate among Germany’s Jews; afterwards, there was no doubt left. There was no pretence any more on the part of the regime that Jews would be protected by law; they were, in effect, fair game for any Nazi activist or official to exploit, beat, arrest or kill. For many Jews, the shock of the pogrom was profound, destroying any last illusion they might have had that their patriotism, their war service, their skills, their education, or even the fact that they were human beings would protect them from the Nazis.202

  Map 16. Jews in the Nazi Racial Census of 1939

  Already at the Evian conference it had been clear that nativists and xenophobes in a number of countries were pressuring their governments to halt Jewish immigration from Germany in case their native culture became ‘swamped’ - hardly a likely prospect when the overall numbers of German Jews were so small, even leaving aside other considerations. By the same token, however, Jewish children could be acculturated into their host nations relatively easily; and the shock that went round the world at the events of 9-10 November 1938 and the subsequent drastic deterioration of the situation of the remaining Jews in Germany prompted a range of schemes to provide Jewish children with new homes abroad. Seventeen hundred children were sent to Holland, and more than 9,000 to the United Kingdom. But an attempt by Protestant and Catholic clergy to obtain entry for 20,000 children into the United States foundered on the rock of public opinion. A bill to this effect was withdrawn by its sponsor, Senator Robert F. Wagner, when Congress insisted that the 20,000 places be accommodated in existing immigration quotas, which would have meant refusing entry to 20,000 adults.203 Emigration was becoming more difficult than ever as the war drew near: another example of the increasingly irrational and contradictory nature of the policies of the Nazi regime on a wider scale.

  Remaining in Germany was anything other than an easy option, however, as the experience of Victor Klemperer showed. As the antisemitic atmosphere became thicker in the spring and summer of 1938, Klemperer had to endure repeated harassment by the local authority over petty details of the construction and maintenance of his house and garden at Döltzschen, on the outskirts of Dresden. In May 1938 the Klemperers’ non-Jewish charlady resigned after the local authorities had threatened to dismiss her daughter from her job if she continued to work with them. Living outside town, the Klemperers escaped the violence of 9- 10 November 1938, but on 11 November two policemen subjected their house to a thorough search (allegedly for hidden weapons): Klemperer’s wartime sabre was discovered in the attic and he was taken into custody. Although he was treated courteously and released after a few hours without being charged, it was nevertheless a considerable shock. A more severe blow came when Klemperer, already banned from using the reading room of the local library the previous year, was officially barred from enter
ing the library at all. The librarian in charge of the lending section, Klemperer reported, wept as he issued the ban; he wanted to kill the Nazis, he said (‘not simply kill, - torture, torture, torture’).204 The sharp increase in the tempo of antisemitic legislation after the pogrom began to restrict Klemperer’s life in other ways too. On 6 December 1938 he noted Himmler’s new decree withdrawing driving licences from all Jews and the ban on Jews visiting public cinemas. Unable to continue his work on eighteenth-century French literature because he could no longer use the library, Klemperer was now deprived of his two main leisure activities as well. He was faced with a large tax bill as part of the aftermath of the pogrom and feared that his house would soon be confiscated. Further attempts to emigrate came to nothing, though his friends and acquaintances were leaving the country in ever-growing numbers. A compulsive writer, Klemperer now turned to composing his memoirs, and his diary entries became ever more voluminous. He remained convinced that German Jews were Germans first and Jews second and continued to think of Zionism as little better than Nazism. But life was becoming rapidly harder, and he looked forward with foreboding to the future.205

  A similar atmosphere of gloom spread through the household of Luise Solmitz and her Jewish husband. Immediately after the pogrom, the Gestapo called on them and were only dissuaded from arresting Friedrich Solmitz when he showed them his war medals. Nevertheless, he had to surrender his old war weapons (‘touched in honour, surrendered in shame’). The fine levied on German Jews came as a further shock. ‘Now Freddy admits it too: we are annihilated.’ Once again, however, Solmitz’s war service protected him. Asked by finance officials whether he wanted to emigrate he replied: ‘I am an old officer, born in Germany, and will die in Germany too.’ The officials allowed him to make over his property and assets to his wife so that they escaped confiscation. But the ban on Jews attending the theatre and other public events, and the looming threat of destitution, weighed heavily on their minds. ‘One doesn’t dare enjoy one’s possessions any more,’ wrote Luise Solmitz. ‘Today the house is no refuge, no protection any more.’206

  V

  By the summer of 1939, as these experiences indicated, the remaining Jews in Germany had been completely marginalized, isolated and deprived of their main means of earning a living. This was not enough for Heydrich, however. At the meeting of 12 November 1938, Heydrich had admitted that it would not be possible to force all of them to emigrate within a short space of time. He suggested that those Jews who stayed in Germany in the meantime should be made to wear a special badge. ‘But, my dear Heydrich,’ Goring had protested, ‘you won’t be able to avoid the creation of ghettoes on a very large scale in all the cities. They will have to be created.’207 For the moment, as Goring reported on 6 December 1938, Hitler himself vetoed the proposal to concentrate Jews in specific houses and to oblige them to wear a yellow badge in public, out of consideration for international opinion, which had reacted critically to the pogrom and the consequent legislation; and he also limited measures against mixed marriages and people of mixed race as defined by the Nuremberg Laws, in case harsh treatment would arouse discontent amongst their non-Jewish relatives. In practice, however, Jewish society in Germany was fast retreating into a ghetto anyway, almost completely cut off from mainstream everyday life, fast slipping beyond the consciousness of most Germans altogether.208

  It was at this time, following the unopposed mass violence of 9- 10 November and the imprisonment in concentration camps of 30,000 Jewish men, if only for a few weeks, without any serious opposition being offered, that Hitler began for the first time to threaten their complete physical annihilation. Over the course of the previous two years, he had held back with public statements of hostility towards the Jews, partly out of foreign policy considerations, partly out of a desire to distance himself personally from what he knew was one of his regime’s less popular aspects amongst the great majority of the German people. It was fully in line with this approach that he withdrew from the Party meeting on 9 November once he had taken the decision to launch the pogrom.209 But this relative abstention from public justification of antisemitic policy in rhetoric did not mean that Hitler had withdrawn from the implementation of antisemitic policy in practice. He discussed it on a number of occasions in private during 1936 and 1937, and there is little doubt that his Party Rally speech in September 1937 provided the deliberate stimulus for the intensification of antisemitism that began again at that point.210 In characteristic fashion, he presented the pogrom as the expression of a universal and fanatical hatred of the Jews amongst the German population, which he himself was doing his best to rein in. ‘What do you think, Mr Pirow,’ he asked the South African Defence Minister on 24 November, ‘would happen in Germany, if I took my protecting hand away from the Jews? The world could not imagine it.’211 The scarcely veiled threat here was palpable. Hitler was keen to pressure the Evian powers into accepting more refugees, and he did this not least by making it clear what would happen to Germany’s Jews if they were refused entry to other countries. On 21 January 1939 he told the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister: ‘The Jews among us will be annihilated. The Jews had not carried out 9th November 1938 in vain; this day will be avenged.’212

  On 30 January 1939, Hitler repeated these threats in public, and broadened them onto a European scale. Speaking to the Reichstag on the sixth anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor, he said:I have often been a prophet in my life and I was mostly laughed at. In the time of my struggle for power it was in the first place the Jewish people who received with nothing but laughter my prophecy that one day I would take over the leadership of the state and with it the whole people and then among many other things bring the Jewish problem to its solution. I believe that the roars of laughter of those days may well have suffocated in the throats of the Jews in the meantime.

  I want to be a prophet again today: if international finance Jewry in Europe and beyond should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.213

  This threat, broadcast on the weekly newsreel in its entirety, could not have been more public. It was to remembered and cited on numerous subsequent occasions. It deserves, therefore, the closest consideration.

  The pogrom of November 1938 reflected the regime’s radicalization in the final stages of preparation for war.214 Part of this preparation in Hitler’s mind had to consist of the neutralization of what he conceived of as the Jewish threat. With a disdain for reality characteristic of paranoid antisemites, he assumed that ‘international finance’ was working together with international Communism, both steered from behind the scenes by the Jews, to broaden out this European war, which they knew Germany would win, onto a world scale, which could only mean by bringing the United States into it. This would be the only way they would stand any chance of success. By the time it happened, Germany would be master of Europe and have the vast majority of the continent’s Jews in its grasp. Anticipating this moment, therefore, Hitler was announcing that he would hold Europe’s Jews hostage as a means of deterring America from entering the war. If the USA did come in on the side of Germany’s enemies, then the Jews, not just in Germany, but in all Europe, would be killed. Nazi terrorism had now acquired an additional dimension: the practice, on the largest possible scale, of hostage-taking.215

  V I

  The radicalization of antisemitism that took place in 1938 thus formed part of what everybody knew was the final run-up to the long-prepared war for the German domination and racial reordering of Europe. Expelling or, failing that, isolating Germany’s Jewish population was, in the Nazis’ paranoid racist ideology, an essential prerequisite for establishing internal security and warding off the threat from within - a threat that, in reality, existed only in their own imaginations. Radicalization occurred in 1938 not least because, indeed, this process of conquest and reorganization had already begun
, starting with the annexation of Austria. Germany’s Jewish population had been, by and large, prosperous, and its expropriation by the state, and by numerous private businesses, was accelerated at this time not least because of the increasingly desperate need for hard cash to pay Germany’s rapidly growing armaments bill. It is tempting to describe anti-Jewish violence in the Third Reich as a ‘regression into barbarism’, but this is fundamentally to misunderstand its dynamics. Boycotts and expropriations of Jewish shops and businesses were driven on in particular by lower-middle-class small businessmen who may have been disappointed by the regime’s failure to better their economic position by more conventional means. But the social and economic extinction of Germany’s Jewish community was also ordered from above, as part of a general preparation for war. It was justified by a radical nationalist ideology that was linked, not to a vague vision of Germany’s return to some quiet medieval backwater, but on the contrary to a technologically advanced war of European domination, predicated on what counted at the time as the most modern, scientific criteria of racial fitness and racial supremacy.