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

by Saul Friedlander

  In 1935 the Jüdische Rundschau, which, one would have thought, should have aimed at showing how bad the situation was, quoted statistics published by the Frankfurter Zeitung indicating that half the ladies’ garment industry was still owned by Jews, the figure rising to 80 percent in Berlin.84 Whether or not these numbers are exact, the Jews of the Reich still thought they would be able to continue to make a living; they did not, for the most part, foresee any impending material catastrophe.

  Yet, even though emigration was slow, as already mentioned, and even though most German Jews still hoped to survive this dire period in Germany, the very idea of leaving the country, previously unthinkable for many, was now accepted by all German-Jewish organizations. Not an immediate emergency flight, but an orderly exodus was contemplated. Overseas (the American continent or Australia, for instance) was higher on the list of concrete possibilities than Palestine, but all German Jewish papers could wholeheartedly have adopted the headline of a Jüdische Rundschau lead article addressed to the League of Nations: “Open the Gates!”85

  For the many Jews who were considering the possibility of emigration but still hoped to stay in Germany, the gap between public and private behavior was widening: “We must avoid doing anything that will attract attention to us and possibly arouse hostility.” Jewish women’s organizations warned, “Adhere to the highest standards of taste and decorum in speaking manner and tone, dress and appearance.”86 Jewish pride was to be maintained, but without any public display. Within the enclosed space of the synagogue or the secular Jewish assemblies, this pride and of the pent-up anger against the regime and the surrounding society found occasional expression. Religious texts were chosen for symbolic meaning and obvious allusion. A selection of psalms entitled “Out of the Depths Have I Called Thee,” published by Martin Buber in 1936, included verses that could not be misunderstood:

  Be Thou my judge, O God, and plead my cause

  against an ungodly nation;

  O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.

  A new type of religious commentary, conveyed mainly in sermons—the “New Midrash,” as Ernst Simon called it—interwove religious themes with expressions of practical wisdom that were meant to have a soothing, therapeutic effect on the audience.87

  It seems that occasionally some Jews showed less public humility. William L. Shirer, the American journalist then based in Berlin and soon to become the CBS correspondent there, wrote in his diary on April 21, 1935, while staying at Bad Saarow, the well-known German spa: “Taking the Easter week-end off. The hotel mainly filled with Jews and we are a little surprised to see so many of them still prospering and apparently unafraid. I think they are unduly optimistic.”88

  Self-assertion remained sometimes astonishingly strong among Jews living in even the smallest communities. Thus, in 1936, in Weissenburg, the Jewish cattle dealer Guttmann was accused by the local Nazi peasant leader of stating that he had received official authorization to continue his trade. Although the Jew was arrested, he persisted in asserting his right to do business. The report on the incident concludes with the following words: “Guttmann requests permission to sign the document after the Sabbath is over.”89

  After the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws, the Zionist leadership in Palestine showed no greater sense of urgency regarding emigration than did the German Jewish community itself. Indeed, the Palestine leadership refused to extend any help to emigrants whose goal was not Eretz Israel. Its list of priorities was increasingly shifting: The economic situation of the Yishuv worsened from 1936 on, while the Arab Revolt of that year increased Britain’s resistance to any growth in Jewish immigration to Palestine. Some local Zionist leaders even considered the easier-to-integrare immigrants from Poland by and large preferable to those from Germany, with an exception for German Jews who could transfer substantial amounts of money or property within the framework of the 1933 Haavarah Agreement. Thus, after 1935, the number of immigration certificates demanded for German Jews out of the total number of certificates allocated by the British remained the same as before. This lack of major commitment on the part of the Zionist leadership to encourage Jewish emigration from Germany created a growing tension with some Jewish leaders in the Diaspora.90

  When a group of Jewish bankers met in London in November 1935 to discuss the financing of emigration from Germany, an open split occurred between Zionists and non-Zionists. The president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, was particularly bitter about Max Warburg’s scheme to negotiate a Haavarah-like agreement with the Nazis to pay for German Jewish emigration to countries other than Palestine.”91 Warburg nonetheless discussed his scheme with representatives of the Ministry of the Economy. The party archives indicate that the Germans made further discussions conditional upon the presentation of a detailed proposal.92 Nothing came of the project because of the publicity surrounding it and, ultimately, a lack of adequate funding.93

  VI

  “In Bad Gastein. Hitler leads me in animated conversation down an open stairway. We are visible from afar and at the bottom of the stairs a concert is taking place and there is a large crowd of people. I think proudly and happily: now everyone can see that our Führer does not mind being seen with me in public, despite my grandmother Recha.”94 Such was a dream reported by a young girl whom the Nuremberg Laws had just turned into a Mischling of the second degree.

  Here is a dream of a woman, who had become a Mischling of the first degree: “I am on a boat with Hitler. The first thing I tell him is: ‘In fact, I am not allowed to be here. I have some Jewish blood.’ He looks very nice, not at all as usual: a round pleasant kindly face. I whisper into his ear: ‘You [the familiar Du] could have become very great if you had acted like Mussolini, without this stupid Jewish business. It is true that among the Jews there are some really bad ones, but not all of them are criminals, that can’t honestly be said.’ Hitler listens to me quietly, listens to it all in a very friendly way. Then suddenly I am in another room of the ship, where there are a lot of black-clad SS men. They nudge each other, point at me and say to each other with the greatest respect: ‘Look there, it’s the lady who gave the chief a piece of her mind.’”95

  The dream world of full Jews was often quite different from that of the Mischlinge. A Berlin Jewish lawyer of about sixty dreamed that he was in the Tiergarten: “There are two benches, one painted green, the other yellow, and between the two there is a wastepaper basket. I sit on the wastepaper basket and around my neck fasten a sign like the ones blind beggars wear and also like the ones the authorities hang from the necks of race defilers. It reads: WHEN NECESSARY, I WILL MAKE ROOM FOR THE WASTEPAPER.”96

  Some of the daydreams of well-known Jewish intellectuals living beyond the borders of the Reich were at times no less fantastic than the nighttime fantasies of the trapped victims. “I don’t like to make political prophecies,” Lion Feuchtwanger wrote to Arnold Zweig on September 20, 1935, “but through the intensive study of history I have reached the, if I may say so, scientific conviction that, in the end, reason must triumph over madness and that we cannot consider an eruption of madness such as the one in Germany as something that can last more than a generation. Superstitious as I am, I hope in silence that this time too the German madness won’t last longer than the [1914–1918] war madness did. And we are already at the end of the third year.”97

  Other voices had a very different sound. Carl Gustav Jung tried to delve “deeper” in his search for the characteristics of the Germanic psyche—and for those of the Jewish one as well. Writing in 1934, his evaluation was different: “The Jew, who is something of a nomad, has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as host for their development…. The ‘Aryan’ consciousness has a higher potential than the Jewish; that is both the advantage and the disadvantage of a youthfulness not yet fully weaned from barbarism. In my opinion it has been a grave er
ror in medical psychology up to now to apply Jewish categories—which are not even binding to all Jews—indiscriminately to German and Slavic Christendom. Because of this the most precious secret of the Germanic peoples—their creative and intuitive depth of soul—has been explained as a morass of banal infantilism, while my own warning voice has for decades been suspected of anti-Semitism. This suspicion emanated from Freud. He did not understand the Germanic psyche any more than did his Germanic followers. Has the formidable phenomenon of National Socialism, on which the whole world gazes with astonished eyes, taught them better?”98

  The “formidable phenomenon of National Socialism” did not, apparently impress Sigmund Freud. On September 29, 1935, he wrote to Arnold Zweig: “We all thought it was the war and not the people, but other nations went through the war as well and nevertheless behaved differently. We did not want to believe it at the time, but it was true what the others said about the Boches.”99

  As for Kurt Tucholsky, possibly the most brilliant anti-nationalist satirist of the Weimar period, now trapped in his Swedish exile, his anger was different from that of Freud, and his despair was total: “I left Judaism in 1911,” he wrote to Arnold Zweig on December 15, 1935, but he immediately added: “I know that this is in fact impossible.” In many ways Tucholsky’s helplessness and rage are turned against the Jews. The unavoidable fate could be faced with courage or with cowardice. For Tucholsky the Jews had always behaved like cowards, now more than ever before. Even the Jews in the medieval ghettos could have behaved differently: “But let us leave the medieval Jews—and let us turn to those of today, those of Germany. There you see that the same people who in many domains played first violin accept the ghetto—the idea of the ghetto and its realization…. They are being locked up; they are crammed into a theater for Jews [ein Judentheater—a reference to the activities of the Kulturbund] with four yellow badges on their front and back and they have…only one ambition: ‘Now for once we will show them that we have a better theater.’ For every ten German Jews, one has left, nine are staying; but after March 1933, one should have stayed and nine should have gone, ought to, should have…. The political emigration has changed nothing; it is business as usual: everything goes on as if nothing had happened. Forever on and on and on—they write the same books, hold the same speeches, make the same gestures….” Tucholsky knew that he and his generation would not see the new freedom: “What is needed…is a youthful strength that most emigrants do not have. New men will come, after us. As they are now, things cannot work anymore. The game is up.”100

  Six days later Tucholsky committed suicide.

  PART II

  The Entrapment

  CHAPTER 6

  Crusade and Card Index

  I

  In early 1937, during a meeting on church affairs, Hitler once more gave free rein to his world-historical vision: “The Führer,” Goebbels wrote in his diary, “explains Christianity and Christ. He [Christ] also wanted to act against the Jewish world domination. Jewry had him crucified. But Paul falsified his doctrine and undermined ancient Rome. The Jew in Christianity. Marx did the same with the German community spirit, with socialism.”1 On November 30 of the same year, the remarks Goebbels inscribed in his diary were much more ominous: “Long discussion [with Hitler] over the Jewish question…. The Jews must get out of Germany, in fact out of the whole of Europe. It will still take some time but it must happen, and it will happen. The Führer is absolutely determined about it.”2 Like his September 1935 declaration to Walter Gross, Hitler’s prophecy of 1937 meant the possibility of war: It could be fulfilled only in a situation of war.

  On March 7, 1936, the Wehrmacht had marched into the Rhineland, and a new phase in European history had begun. It would unfold under the sign of successive German treaty breaches and aggressions and, in three years, lead to the outbreak of a new conflagration.

  The demilitarization of the left bank of the Rhine had been guaranteed by the Versailles and Locarno Treaties. The guarantors of the status quo were Great Britain and Italy, whereas France was the country directly threatened by the German move. Now Italy positioned itself at Germany’s side, because the democracies had attempted to impose sanctions on it during the Abyssinian war. In principle, however, France still had the strongest army in Europe. It is now known that a French military reaction would have forced the German units to retreat behind the Rhine—a setback with unforeseeable consequences for the Hitler regime. But although the French government, led by the Radical Socialist Prime Minister Albert Sarrault, threatened to act, it did nothing. As for the British, they did not even threaten; after all, Hitler was merely taking possession of his own “backyard,” as the saying went. The French and British policy of appeasement was gaining momentum.

  In France the 1936 elections brought the center-left Popular Front to power, and for a large segment of French society the threat of revolution and a Communist takeover became an obsessive nightmare. A few months earlier the Spanish electorate had brought a left-wing government to power. That was a short-lived victory. In July 1936 units of the Spanish army in North Africa, led by Gen. Francisco Franco, rebelled against the new Republican government and crossed over into Spain. The Spanish Civil War—which was to become a murderous struggle of two political mystiques, backed on both sides by a massive supply of foreign weapons and regular troops as well as volunteers—had started. Between the summer of 1936 and the spring of 1939, the battle lines drawn in Spain were the explicit and tacit points of reference for the ideological confrontations of the time.

  On the global scene the anti-Comintern pact signed between Germany and Japan on November 25, 1936, and joined by Italy a year later, became, at least symbolically, an expression of the struggle that was to unfold between the anti-Communist regimes and Bolshevism. In the countries of East Central Europe (with the exception of Czechoslovakia) and the Balkans, right-wing governments had come to power. Their ideological commitments included three basic tenets: authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, and extreme anti-Communism. From the Atlantic to the Soviet border, they generally had one more element in common: anti-Semitism. For the European Right, anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism were often identical.

  The year 1936 also clearly marks the beginning of a new phase on the internal German scene. During the previous period (1933–36), the need to stabilize the regime, to ward off preemptive foreign initiatives, and to sustain economic growth and the return to full employment had demanded relative moderation in some domains. By 1936 full employment had been achieved and the weakness of the anti-German front sized up. Further political radicalization and the mobilization of internal resources were now possible: Himmler was named chief of all German police forces and Göring overlord of a new four-year economic plan, whose secret objective was to prepare the country for war. The impetus for and the timing of both external and internal radicalization also may have been linked to yet unresolved tensions within German society itself, or may have resulted from the fundamental needs of a regime that could only thrive on ever more hectic action and ever more spectacular success.

  It was in this atmosphere of accelerated mobilization that the Jewish issue took on a new dimension and fulfilled a new function in Nazi eyes. Now Jewry was again being presented as a worldwide threat, and anti-Jewish action could be used as justification for the confrontation that necessarily was about to come. In the regime’s terms, in a time of crisis the Jews had to be expelled, their assets impounded for the benefit of German rearmament, and—as long as some of them remained in German hands—their fate could be used to influence the attitude toward Nazi Germany of world Jewry and of the foreign powers under its control. Most immediately three main lines of action dominated the new phase of the anti-Jewish drive: accelerated Aryanization, increasingly coordinated efforts to compel the Jews to leave Germany, and furious propaganda activity to project on a world scale the theme of Jewish conspiracy and threat.

  Accelerated Aryanization resulted in part at least from the n
ew economic situation and the spreading confidence in German business and industrial circles that the risks of Jewish retaliation or its effects no longer had to be taken into account. Economic growth led to gradual coordination of the contradictory measures that, of necessity, had earlier hindered the course of anti-Jewish policy: By 1936 ideology and policy could increasingly progress along a single track. Himmler and Göring’s appointments to their new positions created two power bases essential for the effective implementation of the new anti-Jewish drive. And yet, although the framework of the new phase was clearly perceptible, the economic expropriation of the Jews of Germany could not be radically enforced before the beginning of 1938, after the conservative ministers had been expelled from the government in February 1938 and mainly after Schacht had been compelled to leave the Ministry of the Economy in late 1937. During 1938 worse than total expropriation was to follow: Economic harassment and even violence would henceforward be used to force the Jews to flee the Reich or the newly annexed Austria. Within the second phase, 1938 was the fateful turning point.

  The anti-Jewish rhetoric expressed in Hitler’s speeches and statements from 1936 on took several forms. Foremost, and most massively, was its relation to the general ideological confrontation with Bolshevism. But the world peril as presented by Hitler was not Bolshevism as such, with the Jews acting as its instruments. The Jews were the ultimate threat behind Bolshevism: The Bolshevik peril was being manipulated by the Jews.3 In his 1937 party congress speech, Hitler made sure, as will be seen, that there was no misunderstanding on this point. But Hitler’s anti-Jewish harangues were not only ideological (anti-Bolshevik) in a concrete sense; often the Jew was described as the world enemy per se, as the peril that had to be destroyed lest Germany (or Aryan humanity) be exterminated by it. In its most extreme form this apocalyptic vision appeared in the January 1939 speech to the Reichstag, but its main theme was already outlined in the summer of 1936, in the guidelines establishing the Four-Year Plan. The “redemptive” anti-Semitism that had dominated Hitler’s early ideological statements now resurfaced. With the conservative agenda crumbling, a new atmosphere of murderous brutality was spreading.