Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution

by Saul Friedlander

  Hitler relentlessly repeated a story of perdition caused by the Jew, and of redemption by a total victory over the Jew. For the future Führer, the Jew’s ominous endeavors were an all-encompassing conspiratorial activity extending throughout the span of Western history. The structure of Hitler’s tale was not only inherent in its explicit content; it was also the essence of the implicit message the story conveyed. Despite the pretense of a historical analysis, the Jew, in Hitler’s description, was dehistoricized and transformed into an abstract principle of evil that confronted a no less metahistorical counterpart just as immutable in its nature and role throughout time—the Aryan race. Whereas Marxism stressed the conflict of changing historical forces, Nazism and particularly Hitler’s worldview, considered history as the confrontation of an immutable good and an immutable evil. The outcome could only be envisioned in religious terms: perdition or redemption.

  There was another level to Hitler’s vision of the Jewish enemy: The Jew was both a superhuman force driving the peoples of the world to perdition and a subhuman cause of infection, disintegration, and death. The first image, that of the superhuman force, raises a question left unanswered both in Mein Kampf and in Hitler’s speeches: Why did the people of the world offer no resistance, why for centuries had they been driven to ruin by the machinations of the Jew without offering any effective resistance? This question will arise strongly many years later, in connection with Hitler’s Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939, when he “prophesied” the extermination of the Jews if they were again to drive the European peoples into a war. How was it that the nations of the world were unable to withstand these machinations?

  Implicit in this vision is a stupefied, hypnotized mass of peoples completely at the mercy of the Jewish conspiracy. They are the hapless cattle killed by sneering Jewish ritual slaughterers in the final scenes of The Eternal Jew, the film whose production was initiated and overseen by Goebbels in 1939–40. But, as Hitler profusely showed in Mein Kampf, the image of superhuman control typically gives way to the second one, subhuman threats of contamination, microbial infection, spreading pestilence. These are the swarms of germ-carrying rats that will later appear in one of the most repellent scenes of The Eternal Jew. Images of superhuman power and subhuman pestilence are contrary representations, but Hitler attributed both to one and the same being, as if an endlessly changing and endlessly mimetic force had launched a constantly shifting offensive against humanity.

  Many of the images, not only in Hitler’s vision of the Jew but also in Nazi anti-Semitism generally, seem to converge in such constant transformations. These images are the undistorted echo of past representations of the Jew as endlessly changing and endlessly the same, a living dead, either a ghostly wanderer or a ghostly ghetto inhabitant. Thus the all-pervasive Jewish threat becomes in fact formless and unrepresentable; as such it leads to the most frightening phantasm of all: a threat that looms everywhere, that, although it penetrates everything, is an invisible carrier of death, like poison gas spreading over the battlefields of the Great War.

  The last major written expression of Hitler’s anti-Jewish obsession was the second volume of Mein Kampf, published in 1927. Another book by Hitler, completed in 1928, remained in manuscript form:113 It was politically safer not to disclose the violence of the Führer’s views, mainly on international affairs, as he was now donning the garb of a statesman. In his speeches, however, Hitler was less restrained.

  In an article of November 5, 1925, headlined HITLER IN BRAUNSCHWEIG, the Braunschweigische Landeszeitung reported a speech delivered by the Nazi leader at a party meeting in the city’s concert hall. After mentioning some of the themes of the speech, the story noted that “Hitler dealt with the Jews in well-known form and the usual fashion. One knows what the National Socialists have to say against these citizens, and therefore we may spare ourselves reporting how Hitler held forth on this theme.”114

  The writer of the article could not have put it more concisely or more truthfully. A similar remark appeared in the Mecklenburger Nachrichten’s account, on May 5, 1926, of a Hitler speech in Schwerin two days earlier.115 The hail of insults and threats against the Jews was, if at all, even more massive than in the past. At this time hardly any of Hitler’s speeches lacks the kind of anti-Semitic rhetoric established in the early speeches and in Mein Kampf. It is as if the failure of the 1923 putsch, as if imprisonment and the temporary disbandment of the Nazi Party, had led to a heightened fury, or as if the needs of political agitation demanded the most aggressive and repetitive slogans that could possibly be mustered. The stock-market Jews and Jewish international capital were brandished side by side with bloodthirsty Jewish revolutionaries; the themes of Jewish race defilement and a Jewish conspiracy to control the world were fed to the delirious party faithful with the same instantaneous effect. In order to hammer home his attacks, Hitler used every rhetorical device, even the rather unusual method of telling well-known Jewish jokes in order to illustrate the perversity of the Jewish soul.116

  Yet, even in the aftermath of his imprisonment in Landsberg, whenever political expedience dictated caution in the use of gross anti-Jewish outbursts, Hitler knew how to avoid the topic. When, on February 28, 1926, he spoke to the Hamburg National Club of 1919, a conservativenationalist association whose generally upper-class membership included a number of former high-ranking officers, the Nazi leader simply avoided reference to the Jews.117 One is reminded of the “detachment” of his later speech to the Association of German Industrialists in Düsseldorf. But what drove Hitler was his anti-Jewish hatred, and it was the calculated restraint that demanded effort. For Hitler the struggle against the Jews was the immutable basis and obsessional core of his understanding of history, politics, and political action.

  Sometimes the anti-Jewish stance was rephrased in unexpected terms. Thus, according to a police report, Hitler declared in a speech in Munich on December 18, 1926, that “Christmas was significant precisely for National-Socialists, as Christ had been the greatest precursor in the struggle against the Jewish world enemy. Christ had not been the apostle of peace that the Church had afterward made of him, but rather was the greatest fighting personality that had ever lived. For millennia the teaching of Christ had been fundamental in the fight against the Jew as the enemy of humanity. The task that Christ had started, he [Hitler] would fulfill. National Socialism was nothing but a practical fulfillment of the teachings of Christ.”118

  Hitler’s speeches during the decisive year 1932 have not yet been published as this book goes to press, but most of the diatribes of the years 1927–31 are now available:119 In them anti-Semitic hatred remained prominent. Sometimes, as in Hitler’s ferocious polemic against the Bavarian People’s Party (Bayerische Volkspartei, or BVP) in the Munich speech of February 29, 1928, not very long before the May national elections, the agitator’s venom of the early twenties was back in full force, with the Jews as the central issue because the BVP had rejected anti-Semitism. The themes were the same; the rhetorical devices were the same; the delirious reactions of the crowd were the same: Speaker and audience were thirsting for violence—against the same people, the Jews.120

  In the 1928 Reichstag elections, the Nazis received only 2.6 percent of the vote (6.1 percent in Bavaria, 10.7 percent in Munich): The break-through was yet to come. Anti-Jewish agitation continued. “We see,” Hitler exclaimed in his speech of August 31, 1928, “that in Germany, Judaization progresses in literature, the theater, music, and film; that our medical world is Judaized, and the world of our lawyers too; that in our universities ever more Jews come to the fore. I am not astonished when a proletarian says: ‘What do I care?’ But it is astonishing that in the national bourgeois camp there are people who say: ‘This is of no interest to us, we don’t understand this anti-Semitism.’ They will understand it when their children toil under the whip of Jewish overseers.[italics in the original]”121

  After the stunning success of the NSDAP in the September 1930 elections, and during th
e almost two and a half years that followed until Hitler acceded to the chancellorship, the Jewish theme indeed became less frequent in his rhetoric, but it did not disappear. And when Hitler did refer to the Jews, as, for example, in a speech on June 25, 1931, the reference carried all the dire predictions of former years. In the first part of that speech, Hitler described how the Jews had destroyed the Germanic leadership in Russia and taken control of the country. In other nations the same process was developing under the cover of democracy. But the finale was more direct and more threatening: “The parties of the middle say: everything is collapsing; we declare: what you see as collapse is the beginning of a new era. There is but one question about this new era: will it come from the German people…or will this era sink toward another people? Will the Jew really become master of the world, will he organize its life, will he in the future dominate the nations? This is the great question that will be decided, one way or the other.”122

  For external consumption Hitler sounded far less apocalyptic, far more moderate. In an interview given to the London Times in mid-October 1930, he assured the correspondent that he was not to be linked to any pogroms. He merely wanted “Germany for the Germans”; his party did not object to “decent Jews,” but if the Jews identified with Bolshevism—and many unfortunately were inclined to do so—he would consider them enemies.123 Incidentally, in articles published at the same time, Hitler expressed his conviction that recurring reports about the growth of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and interpretations of the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky as a struggle between an anti-Semite and a Jew were unfounded and farcical: “Stalin does not have to be circumcised, but ninetenths of his associates are authentic Hebrews. His actions only continue the complete uprooting of the Russian people with the aim of its total subjugation to the Jewish dictatorship.”124

  Whatever Hitler may have been writing about the Jewish dictatorship in the Soviet Union, in Germany some people were taken in by the apparent ideological change expressed in the Times interview. On October 18, 1930, Arthur Mahraun, himself no philo-Semite and the leader of the conservative Jungdeutscher Order, the youth movement of the newly formed Deutsche Staatspartei (German State Party), wrote in his organization’s periodical: “Adolf Hitler has abandoned anti-Semitism; this much one can now say with certainty. But officially [he has done so] for the moment only vis-à-vis foreign representatives and above all for the consumption of the jobbers in the City and Wall Street. At home, however, National Socialist supporters continue to be taken for a ride with anti-Semitic slogans.”125 Was Mahraun really fooled by Hitler’s tactical pronouncements?

  Hitler’s partial restraint at this time was more than made up for by his subordinates.126 The prime example was the new Berlin Gauleiter, Joseph Goebbels, and his weekly (later daily), Der Angriff (The attack), a paper certainly worthy of its name: it was ruthless and relentless against its main target, the Jews. As the symbol of the Jews’ evil machinations and misuse of power, Goebbels chose Dr. Bernhard Weiss, vice president of the Berlin police, whom the Gauleiter dubbed “Isidor.” Dozens of anti-Isidor articles appeared from May 1927 (when the police temporarily banned the Nazi Party in Berlin) to the eve of the seizure of power; the articles were given extra punch by Hans Schweitzer’s (pen name: “Mjölnir”) cartoons. A book of the earliest of these articles by Goebbels, along with the cartoons, was published in 1928 as Das Buch Isidor (The Isidor book).127

  On April 15, 1929, Der Angriff turned its attention to a young boy’s unexplained death in the vicinity of Bamberg. Goebbels’s paper stated that a conclusion could be reached if “one were to ask which existing ‘religious community in Germany has already been under suspicion for hundreds of years for containing fanatics who use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes.”128 A Berlin court dismissed the slander charge that was brought against Der Angriff by arguing that Goebbels’s paper had not stated that the Jewish community as such encouraged murder and that putting quotation marks around “religious community” meant merely that the author of the article was not certain that the Jews were a religious community.129 Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda continued without respite throughout the decisive months preceding Hitler’s accession to power.130

  VI

  On November 19, 1930, the Hebrew-language theater Habimah presented S. Anski’s The Dybbuk in the Würzburg municipal theater. A group of Nazis in the crowd tried, without success, to stop the performance. As it was leaving the theater, the predominantly Jewish audience was attacked by the Nazis and several Jews were seriously wounded. When the assailants were taken to court, the judge dismissed the charges, arguing that “the demonstrators did not act from base motives.”131 The Würzburg mayor explained that the police had not intervened because they were certain that the demonstration had “merely” aimed at preventing a show.132 Although physical assaults of this kind were infrequent during the Weimar years, a pogrom-like anti-Jewish rampage that started in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel district on November 5, 1923, went on for several days.133

  Although there is no straight line between these developments and the events that followed 1933, the trends described here are part of a historically relevant background. Nonetheless, this focus on anti-Semitism should not lead to a skewed perception of the German scene—and particularly of the situation of the Jews in Germany—before 1933. The Jewish influence perceived by the anti-Semites was mythical, but for the great majority of Jews in Germany the Weimar Republic opened the way to social advancement and, indeed, to a greater role in German life. The growth of anti-Semitism was real, but so—for a time at least—was a powerful renaissance of Jewish culture in Germany134 and, until the onset of the crisis in 1929–30, a wide acceptance of Jews among the liberal and left-wing sectors of German society. On the right, however, anti-Semitism spread unabated, and during the final phase of the republic, it caught on beyond the reaches of the radical, and even the traditional, Right.

  No political group shared the rabid anti-Jewish positions of the Nazis, but even during the years of stabilization, between 1924 and 1929, extreme anti-Semitic themes were not uncommon in the political propaganda of the nationalist camp, particularly in that of the German National People’s Party (DNVP), whose völkisch wing was particularly vehement. At the end of 1922, the most extreme of the anti-Semitic DNVP Reichstag members, Wilhelm Henning, Reinhold Wulle, and Albrecht von Gräfe, left the party to establish their own political organization. But during the debates surrounding this secession, Oskar Hergt, one of the leaders of the DNVP and the former finance minister of Prussia, nonetheless reaffirmed that anti-Semitism remained a fundamental political commitment of the party.135 For the French journalist Henri Béraud, who himself was to become an extreme anti-Semite in the 1930s, the German right’s Jew-hatred seemed completely out of control. “We have no idea in France,” Béraud wrote in a report from Berlin in 1926, “of what the anti-Semitism of German reactionaries can be. It is neither an opinion nor a feeling, nor even a physical reaction. It is a passion, a real obsession of addicts which can go as far as crime.”136

  In 1924, the bankruptcy of the brothers Heinrich and Julius Barmat, two Polish Jews who had settled in Germany in 1918, led to a full-scale right-wing anti-Semitic and anti-Republic onslaught. The Barmat brothers were accused of having received loans from the state-sponsored postal savings bank in return for various financial favors to Social Democratic politicians. Given the political ramifications of the affair, the right-wing parties succeeded in setting up an investigation committee that led to the resignation and indictment of several ministers and Reichstag members. But the main target of the right-wing campaign was President Friedrich Ebert, who was accused of having helped the Barmats to obtain a permanent residence permit and even of having dabbled in their food import transactions during the immediate postwar years.137 There was a similar situation, on a smaller scale, in 1929, with the bankruptcy of the Sklarek brothers.138 The main casualty this time was the mayor of Berlin, and the political conseque
nce a contribution to the Nazi Party’s strong showing in that year’s local election.139

  Political parties soon limited the number of their Jewish Reichstag members—with the exception of the Social Democrats, who retained approximately 10 percent Jewish membership on their Reichstag list to the very end. A telling illustration of the change of mood is to be found in the German Communist Party: In 1924 there were still six Jews among the party’s sixty-four Reichstag members; in 1932 not a single one remained.140 The Communists did not hesitate to use anti-Semitic slogans when such slogans were deemed effective among potential voters.141

  The most significant political expression of the general climate of opinion was the transformation of the German Democratic Party (DDP), which had often been dubbed the “Jewish Party” because of the prominence of Jews among its founders, the large number of Jews among its voters, and, for a while at least, its espousal of themes identified with the positions of the “Jewish press.”142 In the January 1919 elections, the DDP obtained 18.5 percent of the vote, which made it the most successful of the middle-class liberal parties.143 That success did not last. Gustav Stresemann’s DVP kept attacking the competing DDP as “Jewish,” and, as a result, the DDP steadily declined. Within the party itself, personalities associated with the “liberal” right were openly critical of the party’s identification with Jewish voters and influence.144 In 1930 the DDP as such disappeared, to be replaced by the Deutsche Staatspartei (German State Party). This group’s leadership became mostly Protestant and some of its components, such as the youth movement Jungdeutscher Orden, did not admit Jews. The DDP’s voters had been the pro-Weimar liberal middle classes; the change in party name and policy reflect what were perceived, within these middle-class liberal circles, as electorally useful attitudes regarding the “Jewish problem.”