Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution
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On April 22, 1933, Heidegger sent an entreaty to Carl Schmitt, by far the most prestigious German political and legal theorist of the time, pleading with him not to turn his back on the new movement. The entreaty was superfluous, as Schmitt had already made his choice. Like Heidegger—and this seems to have been the first rule to follow—he had stopped answering letters from Jewish students, colleagues, and other scholars with whom he had previously been in close touch (in Schmitt’s case, one of the striking examples is the abrupt end he put to his correspondence with the Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss).60 And, to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about where he stood, Schmitt introduced some outright anti-Semitic remarks into the new (1933) edition of his Concept of the Political.61 In any event, Schmitt’s anti-Jewish positions were to be definitely more outspoken, extreme, and virulent than those of the Freiburg philosopher.
During the summer semester of 1933, both Schmitt and Heidegger took part in a lecture series organized by Heidelberg students. Heidegger spoke on “The University in the New Reich”; Schmitt’s theme was “The New Constitutional Law.” They were preceded in the same series by Dr. Walter Gross, head of the racial policy office of the Nazi Party, who spoke on “The Physician and the Racial Community.” On May 1, in Freiburg, Heidegger had become party member 3-125-894; on the same day, in Cologne, Schmitt joined the party as member 2-098-860.62
Hannah Arendt left the country and, by way of Prague and Geneva, reached Paris; there she soon started working for the Zionist Youth Emigration Organization. The main reason for her early emigration, she later said, was more than anything else the behavior of her Aryan friends, such as Benno von Wiese, who—subject to no outside pressure whatsoever—adhered enthusiastically to the new system’s ideals and norms.63 Yet, in general, her criticism of Heidegger remained muted.
The responses of Jewish academics to the new regime’s measures and to the new attitudes of colleagues and friends varied from one individual to another. Within that broad spectrum, a peculiar situation was that of Jews who had been long-standing militant German nationalists but, unlike Felix Jacoby, did not opt for total blindness to the regime’s actions. On April 20 Ernst Kantorowicz, a medieval historian at Frankfurt University, sent a letter to the minister of science and education of Hesse that tellingly expresses the great slowness, hesitancy, and regretfulness—despite the harsh new Nazi policies—of the retreat of such Jews from their former positions. “Although,” Kantorowicz wrote, “as a war volunteer from August 1914 on, as a frontline soldier throughout the war, as a postwar fighter against Poland, against the Spartacists, and against the Republic of the Councils [of workers and soldiers] in Posen, Berlin, and Munich, I am not obliged to expect dismissal because of my Jewish origins; although in view of my publications on the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II, I do not need any attestation from the day before yesterday, yesterday, or today regarding my attitude toward a nationally oriented Germany; although beyond all immediate trends and occurrences, my fundamentally positive attitude toward a nationally governed Reich has not been undermined even by the most recent events; and although I certainly need not expect student disturbances to interrupt my teaching—so that the issue of unhampered teaching at the level of the entire university need not be considered in my case—as a Jew, I see myself compelled nonetheless to draw the consequences of what has happened and give up my teaching for the coming summer semester.”64 Kantorowicz was not tendering his resignation; he was merely withdrawing from the next semester. The implication was that he would wait for the policies of the new national Germany to change.
Whereas the attitude of the majority of “Aryan” university professors could be defined as “cultured Judeophobia,”65 among the students a radical brand of Judeophobia had taken hold. At the end of the nineteenth century, some Austrian student corporations, followed by German ones, had already excluded Jews on a racial basis—that is, even baptized Jews were not accepted.66 Michael Kater attributes a portion of extreme student anti-Semitism to competition—mainly in the remunerative fields of law and medicine, in which the percentage of Jewish students was indeed high, as was the percentage of Jews in these professions. In any case, in the early years of the Weimar Republic the majority of German student fraternities joined the German University League (Deutscher Hochschulring), an organization with openly völkisch and anti-Semitic aims, which soon came to control student politics.67 Membership in the league was conditional on fully Aryan origin, with racial Germans from Austria or the Sudetenland accepted despite their not being German citizens. The league dominated the universities until the mid-1920s, when it was replaced by the National Socialist Students Association (Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund).68 And demonstrations and acts of physical aggression by right-wing students against their enemies became common on German campuses from the late twenties on.69
Soon professors who were too explicitly pacifist or anti-nationalist, such as Theodor Lessing, Günther Dehn, Emil Julius Gumbel, Hans Nawiasky, and Ernst Cohn, came under attack.70 Gumbel was driven out of Heidelberg even before the Nazis came to power. In 1931 Nazis gained a majority in the German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft); this was the first national association to come under their control. Within a short time a whole cohort of young intellectuals would put its energy and ability at the disposal of the party and its policies.71
After January 1933 student groups took matters into their own hands, not unlike the SA. The national leader of the Nazi student organization, Oskar Stabel, announced shortly before the April 1 boycott that student pickets would be posted that day at the entrances to Jewish professors’ lecture halls and seminar rooms in order to “dissuade” anyone from entering.72 Such was the case, for example, at the Technical University in Berlin. Later on Nazi students with cameras positioned themselves on the podiums of lecture halls so as to take pictures of students attending classes taught by Jews.73 This kind of student agitation was strongly encouraged by a violently anti-Jewish speech delivered on May 5 by Education Minister Rust in the Berlin university auditorium, and by such comments on the speech as these in the official Preussische Zeitung: “Science for a Jew does not mean a task, an obligation, a domain of creative organization, but a business and a way of destroying the culture of the host people. Thus the most important chairs of so-called German universities were filled with Jews. Positions were vacated to allow them to pursue their parasitic activities, which were then rewarded with Nobel Prizes.”74
In early April 1933, the National Socialist Student Association established a press and propaganda section. Its very first measure, decided on April 8, was to be “the public burning of destructive Jewish writing” by university students as a reaction to world Jewry’s “shameless incitement” against Germany. An “information” campaign was to be undertaken between April 12 and May 10; the public burnings were scheduled to start on university campuses at 6:00 P.M. on the last day of the campaign.
The notorious twelve theses the students prepared for ritual declamation during the burnings were not exclusively directed against Jews and the “Jewish spirit”: Among the other targets were Marxism, pacifism, and the “overstressing of the instinctual life” (that is, “the Freudian School and its journal Imago”). It was a rebellion of the German against the “un-German spirit.” But the main thrust of the action remained essentially anti-Jewish; in the eyes of the organizers, it was meant to extend anti-Jewish action from the economic domain (the April 1 boycott) to the entire field of German culture.
On April 13 the theses were affixed to university buildings and billboards all over Germany. Thesis 7 read: “When the Jew writes in German, he lies. He should be compelled, from now on, to indicate on books he wishes to publish in German: ‘translated from the Hebrew.’”75
On the evening of May 10, rituals of exorcism took place in most of the university cities and towns of Germany. More than twenty thousand books were burned in Berlin, and from two to three thousand in every
other major German city.76 In Berlin a huge bonfire was lit in front of the Kroll Opera House, and Goebbels was one of the speakers. After the speeches, in the capital as in the other cities, slogans against the banned authors were chanted by the throng as the poisonous books (by Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Sigmund Freud, Maximilian Harden, and Kurt Tucholsky, among many others) were hurled, batch after batch, into the flames. “The great searchlights on the Opera Square,” wrote the Jüdische Rundschau, “also threw their light onto the swallowing up of our existence and our fate. Not only Jews have been accused, but also men of pure German blood. The latter are being judged only for their deeds. For Jews, however, there is no need for a specific reason; the old saying holds: ‘The Jew will be burnt.’”77
The Nazi students did not limit their activities to disrupting the lectures of Jewish professors and burning dangerous books. They attempted to impose their will at every level when it came to the hiring of teachers or their reinstatement as war veterans. On May 6 the leader of the Nazi student association of the Superior Professional School in Hildburghausen, Thuringia, sent an anything but subservient letter to the Thuringian education minister in Weimar. The students had been told that a Jewish teacher named Bermann was to be reinstated. After casting doubt on the validity of Bermann’s claim to frontline service during World War I, the student leader went on: “Agitation among the students is very strong, as some forty percent are members of the National Socialist Student Association, and to be taught by a racially alien teacher is incompatible with their convictions. The National Socialist Student Association addresses the urgent demand to the National Socialist government of Thuringia not to reinstate the Jewish teacher.”78 Whether Bermann was reinstated or not is not known, but even seasoned Nazis considered the student activism something of an embarrassment. “I have been informed by State Minister of the Interior, Party member Fritsch,” wrote one of the district leaders for central Germany to Manfred von Killinger, prime minister of Saxony, on August 12, “that the State Ministry is not pleased with the situation at the University of Leipzig…. Over the last three months I have fought rigorously and consistently against any radicalization of the university. According to your wishes, I have therefore forbidden the National Socialist students to boycott any professors.”79
Sometimes students themselves perceived that they had gone too far: They had even blacklisted H. G. Wells and Upton Sinclair. The Foreign Ministry was up in arms because among the authors whose works had been burned in front of the Kroll Opera House on May 10 was the then famous promoter of European union, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. The student leader Gerhard Gräfe confided to a correspondent that he was denying that Coudenhove’s writings were burned, but that precautions would have to be taken in the future.80 Such reservations also took other forms: In his diary entries for 1933, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of Romance literature at Dresden’s Technical University who had been exempted from dismissal owing to wartime combat service, several times mentioned that the most assiduous participant in his seminar was the female leader of the university’s Nazi student cell.81
A comparison between the attitudes of the churches and those of the universities toward the regime’s anti-Jewish measures of 1933 reveals basic similarities along with some (very) minor differences. Although outright supporters of National Socialism as a whole were a small minority both in the churches and in the universities, those in favor of the national revival heralded by the new regime were definitely a majority. That majority shared a conservative-nationalist credo that easily converged with the main ideals proclaimed by the regime at its beginning. But what distinguished the churches’ attitudes was the existence of certain specific interests involving the preservation of some basic tenets of Christian dogma. The Jews as Jews were abandoned to their fate, but both the Protestant and Catholic churches attempted to maintain the preeminence of such fundamental beliefs as the supersession of race by baptism and the sanctity of the Old Testament. (Later, at times, the private attitudes of Catholics and of members of the Confessing Church toward the persecution of the Jews would even be critical, mainly because of growing tension between them and the regime.) Nothing of the kind hampered acceptance by university professors of the regime’s anti-Jewish acts. In principle the German academic elite was committed to pursuit of learning unimpeded by state intervention, but, as has been seen, other values and beliefs weighed far more heavily with it in the twenties and early thirties. The enthusiastic “self-coordination” (Selbstgleichschaltung) of the universities demonstrated that there was no fundamental opposition but rather a substantial measure of convergence between the inner core of the mandarins’ faith and National Socialism’s public stance as it appeared at the outset. In such a context, motivation for taking a stand in favor of Jewish colleagues and students was minimal. The consequences of such an overall moral collapse are obvious. In many ways elite groups were a bridge between National Socialist extremism and the wider reaches of German society; thus, their ready abandonment of the Jews sets their attitudes and responses in a fateful historical light.
When Pastor Umfried criticized the attack on the Jews of his town, no church authority supported him; when Jewish businesses were boycotted, no religious voice was heard; when Hitler launched his diatribe against the Jews, Bishop Berning did not respond. When Jewish colleagues were dismissed, no German professor publicly protested; when the number of Jewish students was drastically reduced, no university committee or faculty member expressed any opposition; when books were burned throughout the Reich, no intellectual in Germany, or for that matter anyone else within the country, openly expressed any shame. Such total collapse is more than unusual. As the first months of 1933 went by, Hitler must have seen that he could count on the genuine support of church and university; whatever opposition may have existed, it would not be expressed as long as direct institutional interests and basic dogmatic tenets were not threatened. The concrete situation of the Jews was a litmus test of how far any genuine moral principle could be silenced; although the situation was to become more complex later on, during this early period the result of the test was clear.
III
While Germany’s intellectual and spiritual elites were granting their explicit or tacit support to the new regime, the leading figures of the Jewish community were trying to hide their distress behind a façade of confidence: Despite all difficulties, the future of Jewish life in Germany was not being irretrievably endangered. Ismar Elbogen, one of the most prominent Jewish historians of the time, expressed what was probably the most common attitude when he wrote: “They can condemn us to hunger but they cannot condemn us to starvation.”82 This was the spirit that presided over the establishment of the National Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden), formally launched in 1933, on the initiative of the president and the rabbi of the Essen community.83 It would remain the umbrella organization of local and national Jewish associations until 1938, headed throughout by the Berlin rabbi Leo Baeck, the respected chairman of the Association of German Rabbis and a scholar of repute,84 and by the lay leader Otto Hirsch. Despite opposition from “national German Jews,” ultra-Orthodox religious groups, and, sporadically, from the Zionist movement, the National Representation played a significant role in the affairs of German Jewry until its transformation, after a transition period in 1938–39, into the National Association of Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland), an organization very closely controlled by the Gestapo.
There was not any greater sense of urgency at the National Representation than there was among most individual Jews in Germany. In early 1934 Otto Hirsch would still be speaking out against “hasty” emigration: He believed in the possibility of maintaining a dignified Jewish life in the new Germany.85 That Alfred Hirschberg, the most prominent personality of the Central Association, denied “any need at all to enlarge upon the utopia of resettlement [in Palestine]” was true to type, but that a publication of the Zionist Pionee
r organization defined unprepared immigration to Eretz Israel as “a crime against Zionism” comes as a surprise, perhaps because of the vehemence of its tone.86
Not all German Jewish leaders displayed such nonchalance. One who insistently demanded immediate emigration was Georg Kareski, head of the right-wing [Revisionist] Zionist Organization. A vocal but marginal personality even within German Zionism, Kareski was ready to organize the exodus of the Jews from Germany by cooperating, if need be, with the Gestapo and the Propaganda Ministry. He may indeed have maneuvered to establish his own authority within German Jewry by exploiting his collaboration with the Nazis,87 but his sense of urgency was real and premonitory.
Even as the months went by, the leaders of German Jewry did not, in general, gain much insight into the uncompromisingly anti-Jewish stance of the Nazis. Thus, in August 1933, Werner Senator, who had returned to Germany from Palestine in order to become a director of the newly established Central Committee for Help and Reconstruction (Zentralausschuss für Hilfe und Aufbau), suggested, in a memorandum sent to the American Joint Distribution Committee, that a dialogue be established between the Jews and the Nazis. In his opinion, such a dialogue “should lead to a kind of Concordat, like the arrangements between the Roman Curia and European States.”88