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

by Saul Friedlander

  The investigations probably stopped at the very highest party leadership. Rumors, however, knew no such bounds, and, as is well known, both Hitler and Heydrich, among others, were suspected of hiding non-Aryan ancestors. In both cases the rumors proved unfounded,35 but under the circumstances the insinuation was certainly meant to be damaging. Sometimes disgruntled party leaders used the accusation of non-Aryan origins against rivals. Thus, in April 1936, Wilhelm Kube, Gauleiter of the Kurmark (part of Prussia), sent an anonymous letter (signed “some Berlin Jews”) to the party chancellery stating that the wife of the head of the party tribunal, Walter Buch, and Bormann’s mother-in-law were of Jewish origin. An ancestry investigation proved that the accusations were baseless; Kube admitted having written the letter and was temporarily removed by Hitler from all his functions.36

  The new marriage laws in fact followed the memorandum, drafted in September 1933 by Hans Kerrl and Roland Freisler, that marriages and extramarital sexual relations between “those of German blood” and “members of racially alien communities” be considered “punishable offenses against the honor of the race.” During the first three years of the regime, the very strong reactions of a number of Asian and South American countries (including the boycotting of German goods) led, among other reasons, to the shelving of the initiative.37 There can be no doubt, however, that the early proposals, the third Nuremberg Law, and the marriage laws that followed could be considered the expression of a general racial-biological point of view, along with the policies directed against the specific Jewish peril.

  A series of exchanges in late 1934 and early 1935 among the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Party Racial Policy Office clearly displayed the intertwining and the distinctions between these issues. The Wilhelmstrasse, worried by the impact of the Aryan legislation on the Reich’s foreign relations, suggested that the new laws be clearly limited to Jews and that other non-Aryans (such as Japanese and Chinese) be excluded. For Walter Gross, any basic change in the party’s attitude to racial questions was impossible, as it lay at the core of the Nazi worldview, but Gross promised that the party would avoid burdening Germany’s foreign relations with any inappropriate internal decisions. The replacement of the concept “non-Aryan” by “Jewish” was not yet deemed timely for official use: There was no objection in principle to such a change, but it was feared that the change would be interpreted as “a retreat.” In any case exceptions could be made in instances where the Aryan legislation affected non-Aryan, non-Jewish foreigners.38 Less than two weeks before the opening of the Nuremberg party congress, on August 28, 1935, Hess had expressed the desire that, out of consideration for the Semitic nations, at the rally the term “anti-Semitic” be replaced by “anti-Jewish.”39 For him Lösener and Knost s formula seemed indeed to be of the essence: “In Germany, the Jewish question is simply the race question.”

  Lösener’s report on the final stages preceding the Nuremberg Laws clearly indicates that the September 14–15 discussions centered only on anti-Jewish legislation; this had been the object of party agitation during the preceding months, as it would be that of the discussions that followed (including those involving Hitler’s hesitations on September 29 and his decision on November 14). Thus, the separateness and the compatibility of both the specific anti-Jewish and the general racial and eugenic trends were at the very center of the Nazi system. The main impetus for the Nuremberg Laws and their application was anti-Jewish; but the third law could without difficulty be extended to cover other racial exclusions, and it logically led to the additional racial legislation of the fall of 1935. The two ideological trends reinforced each other.40

  III

  For the Mischling Karl Berthold, the Chemnitz social benefits employee whose story began to be told in chapter 1, the Nuremberg legislation did not solve the problem of his racial purity.41 On April 18, 1934, the specialist for racial research in the Ministry of the Interior restated his case for Berthold’s exclusion from the civil service, arguing that, even if the details about the presumed father, Carl Blumenfeld, were uncertain, Berthold was related to the Blumenfeld family, and his mother had declared that he was the son of a Carl Blumenfeld, a “Jewish artist.” His non-Aryan origins could not be doubted.42

  At this point Berthold’s aunt, his mother’s sister, briefly entered the scene and testified that his father was an Aryan who, in order to hide his identity, had taken the name Carl Blumenfeld. The main social benefits office in Dresden notified the minister of labor of this new development on June 30. At the end of July, the minister of labor was ready to allow Berthold to remain in public service and merely demanded confirmation by the minister of the interior. The specialist for “ancestry research” at the Ministry of the Interior, was not to be so easily fooled. A detailed report issued on September 14 indicated that the Jew Carl Blumenfeld, whose data had been referred to all along and whose age made it highly improbable that he was the father of Karl Berthold, was, in fact, a distant cousin of the circus artist Carl Blumenfeld, who by now was living in Amsterdam. On November 5 the main office in Dresden forwarded to the minister of labor one more request by Berthold for reexamination of the case, again including the testimony of Berthold’s aunt. A few weeks later, as no answer had been received, another petition was addressed to the minister of the interior, this time by Berthold’s wife, Frau Ada Berthold. Berthold would be dismissed from his position, she wrote, if a positive answer was not received by March 31, 1936.43 A new phase of his story was now beginning.

  The new laws could in principle introduce a Nazi kind of clarity into some cases where the question of racial belonging had previously received contradictory answers. Thus, an inquiry of October 26, 1934, by the welfare department of the city of Stettin, regarding the treatment of illegitimate children of Jewish fathers and Aryan mothers, had revealed widely different attitudes on the part of welfare departments in various major German cities: In Dortmund such children were considered Aryan and given all the usual assistance, whereas in Königsberg, Breslau, and Nuremberg, the welfare departments considered them “Semitized.” The director of the Breslau department volunteered the following comment: “In my view, there is no point in incorporating children of mixed race into the German nation, since, as is well known, they themselves cannot have racially pure children and regulations for the sterilization of racially mixed people do not yet exist. Thus, one should not prevent Mischlinge from joining the foreign nation to which they already half belong. In fact, one ought to encourage them to do so, e.g., by letting them attend Jewish kindergartens.”44 The reaction from Nuremberg, Streicher’s headquarters, should come as no surprise: “A mother who behaves in such a way,” wrote the local welfare director, “is so strongly influenced by Jewish ideas that presumably all attempts to enlighten her will be in vain and the attempt to educate her Jewish child ‘according to the principles of National-Socialist leadership’ must fail. For the National Socialist Weltanschauung which is determined by blood can only be taught to those who have German blood in their veins. In this case, one ought to put into practice Nietzsche’s dictum: ‘That which is on the point of collapse should be given the final push.’”45 After passage of the laws, these children must all have become Mischlinge of the first degree.

  The definition of the two degrees of Mischlinge in the Nuremberg Laws, and in the First Supplementary Decree of November 14, 1935, temporarily alleviated their situation both in terms of citizenship rights and with regard to access to professions closed to “full Jews.” In principle, at least, young Michlinge were accepted in schools and universities like any other Germans. Until 1940 they were allowed to study any subject (except medicine and dentistry).46 This was merely a reprieve, and, from 1937 on, various new forms of official persecution threatened the professional and economic existence of the Mischlinge, not to mention their growing social isolation and eventually the threat to their lives. But sometimes the status of Mischlinge was itself not devoid of ambiguities.

&
nbsp; Consider the case of Otto Citron, who in 1937 transferred from the University of Tübingen to that of Bonn. After his departure the Tübingen administration suddenly became suspicious about the student’s declaration that he had an Aryan grandmother. If the declaration was false, Citron’s status would change, and Tübingen wanted Bonn to start proceedings against the camouflaged Jew. Citrons answer to the charges was impeccable. He had declared before the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws that his half-Jewish grandmother was Aryan, at a time when the only existent distinction was the one that separated the Aryan from the Jew. That is, half Jewishness was a category that did not legally exist before September 1935. After the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, Citron correctly indicated that he was half Jewish according to the other set of grandparents. Since the half-Jewish grandmother on the other side of the family had married an Aryan, Citron again correctly indicated that according to the Nuremberg criteria he was one-eighth Jewish on her side. Thus, he stated, if one added up the two sides of the family, he was five-eighths Jewish. But “according to the supplementary decrees of the Nuremberg Laws,” Citron stated, “which I examined with the greatest care before making any written or oral statement, the 5/8 persons are identified with the half-Aryans and the same status is valid for them. The same situation pertains to the 3/8 persons who are considered as one-quarter persons. Thus any attempt at deception or at circumventing the law was entirely foreign to me.” Tübingen University had no choice but to accept Citron’s argument and close the proceedings it had started against him.47

  Citron’s case, in fact, was simple enough when compared with some of the potential (or actual) situations described in the form of questions and answers by the Information Bulletin of the Reich Association of Non-Aryan Christians (Mitteilungsblatt des Reichsverbandes der Nichtarischen Christen) of March 1936:

  “Question: What can be said about the marriage of a half-Aryan with a girl who has one Aryan parent, but whose Aryan mother converted to Judaism so that the girl was raised as a Jew? What can be said, further, about the children of this marriage?

  “Answer: The girl, actually half-Aryan, is not a Mischling, but is without any doubt regarded as Jewish in the sense of the law because she belonged to the Jewish religious community on the deadline date, i.e., 15th September 1935; subsequent conversion does not alter this status in any way. The husband—a first degree Mischling—is likewise regarded as a Jew since he married a statutory Jew. The children of this marriage are in any case regarded as Jews since they have three Jewish grandparents (two by race, one by religion). This would not have been different if the mother had left the Jewish community before the deadline. She herself would have been a Mischling, but the children would still have had three Jewish grandparents. In other words, it is quite possible that children who are regarded as Jews may result from a marriage in which both partners are half-Aryan.

  “Question: A man has two Jewish grandparents, one Aryan grandmother and a half-Aryan grandfather; the latter was born Jewish and became Christian only later. Is this 62 percent Jewish person a Mischling or a Jew?

  “Answer: The man is a Jew according to the Nuremberg Laws because of the one grandparent who was of the Jewish religion; this grandparent is assumed to have been a full Jew and this assumption cannot be contested. So this 62 percent Jew has three full Jewish grandparents. On the other hand, if the half-Aryan grandfather had been Christian by birth, he would not then have been a full Jew and would not have counted at all for this calculation; his grandson would have been a Mischling of the First Degree.”48

  One of the major hurdles encountered by the legal experts in the interpretation of the Nuremberg Laws was the definition of “intercourse.” The basic forms of sexual intercourse were but a starting point, and Stuckart and Globke, for instance, sensed the manifold vistas offered by “acts similar to intercourse such as mutual masturbation.” Soon even this extended interpretation of intercourse became insufficient in the eyes of some courts. A district court in Augsburg defined the applicability of the laws in a way that practically eliminated all restrictions on the definition: “Since the law aims at protecting the purity of German blood,” the court stated, “the will of the lawmakers must be seen as also making illegal all perverse forms of sexual intercourse between Jews and citizens of German or related kinds of blood. It is furthermore the intention of the relevant law to protect German Honor, in particular the sexual honor of the citizens of German blood.”49

  Litigation on this point reached the Supreme Court, which pronounced its decision on December 9, 1935: “The term ‘sexual intercourse’ as meant by the Law for the Protection of German Blood does not include every obscene act, but it is also not limited to coition. It includes all forms of natural and unnatural sexual intercourse—that is, coition as well as those sexual activities with the person of the opposite sex which are designed, in the manner in which they are performed, to serve in place of coition to satisfy the sex drive of at least one of the partners.”50

  The Supreme Court encouraged the local courts to understand the intention of the lawmaker beyond the mere letter of the law, thereby opening the floodgate. Couples were found guilty even if no mutual sexual activity had been performed. Masturbation in the presence of the partner, for instance, became punishable behavior: “It would run counter both to healthy popular feeling and to the clear goals of German racial policy if such surrogate acts were to go completely unpunished, thereby creating, with regard to perverse conduct between the sexes, a new stimulus for violating the racial honor of the German people.”51

  The search for ever more precise details about all possible aspects of racial defilement (Rassenschande) can be seen not only as one more illustration of Nazi bureaucratic and police thinking, but also as a huge screen for the projection of various “male fantasies.”52 In the Nazi imagination, moreover, Jews were perceived as embodiments of sexual potency and lust, somewhat like blacks for white racists, or witches (and women more generally) in the eyes of the Inquisition or some Puritan elders. Details of the offenses thus became a source of (dangerous) knowledge and of hidden tit-illation. And, more often than not, the details were graphic indeed. Thus, on January 28, 1937, the district court in Frankfurt sentenced Alfred Rapp, a thirty-four-year-old “full Jew,” to two years in prison and the “full-blooded German” Margarete Lehmann to nine months, on the following grounds:

  Rapp was an employee in a men’s clothing store, and Lehmann was a seamstress there. They were known to be friends and visited each other frequently. According to their testimony, they had had no prior sexual relations. At about 8:30 P.M. on November 1, 1936, Rapp came to Lehmann’s apartment, where he also found a Jewish woman named Rosenstock. The three went out for drinks and then went to Rosenstock’s apartment. Rosenstock was sent out to buy wine. According to the accused, they then engaged in oral sex. The court report gave some graphic details and added: “This presentation of the facts does not, on its face, appear credible; at least it is incomplete, since common life experience rules out the possibility of a girl having gotten as sexually close to a man without there having been some intimate acts in between, even if—as Lehmann admits—she had two glasses of wine during the preceding two hours. One must add to this that the two accused were also observed in Rosenstock’s room by the two witnesses W. and U.” The scene as observed by the witnesses follows in the report, again in the greatest detail, as successively confirmed by each of them: “The same observation was made by witness U., whom witness W…. then let look through the keyhole. [Then] W. opened the unlocked door and entered the room. Both accused quickly tried to straighten their clothes and hair.”53

  For a Hamburg court the kisses of an impotent man “took the place of normal sexual intercourse” and led to a two-year sentence. Therapeutic massage, needless to say, soon came under suspicion, as in the notorious case of the Jewish merchant Leon Abel. Although the “German-blooded” woman therapist steadfastly denied that Abel had shown any sign of sexual excitation during
the one and only massage session, and although, during his trial, Abel himself retracted the confession he had made to the Gestapo, the court sentenced him to two years for “having attained sexual gratification with Miss. M. and thereby ‘effecting’ the crime of dishonor of the race, whether or not the witness had knowledge of it.”54

  The law regarding female household employees in Jewish families shows that potential situations of race defilement had been taken into consideration. But how could all such potential situations be foreseen? Constant watchfulness was the only possible answer. In November 1937, after asking the minister of the interior to pay attention to the possibilities still existing in the law for the adoption of “full-blooded” German Volksgenossen by Jews, Hess brought up a more immediately threatening problem. In those cases in which a German girl grows up in a Jewish family, “some measure should be taken to protect the German side. Away must be found to afford them the same protection…as that granted to German female house employees.”55