SS-UntersturmFührer Rudolf aus den Ruthen, one of the three young editors of Das Schwarze Korps, decided to marry Marga Feldtmann. The future bride’s appearance was perfectly Aryan, but her genealogical tree showed an Austrian ancestor named Fried, which, in the Austrian province where he had lived, was most often a Jewish name; Ruthen broke the engagement. In early 1937 he found another prospective wife, Isolina Böving-Burmeister. Born in Mexico of a Cuban mother and a Volksdeutsch father, Isolina was a naturalized German. Her appearance did not inspire the investigators’ full confidence, and the matter was referred to Himmler. The Reichsführer was soon made aware of a Philadelphia ancestor of Isolina’s called Sarah Warner, who might have been Jewish. Finally, there was also a suspicion of some Negro blood on the Cuban mother’s side. Himmler first demanded a “full solution” of the problem. When total clarification proved impossible, he at last gave a favorable answer.”61
Himmler was a stickler for racial purity within his SS. As he explained in a May 22, 1936, speech delivered on the Brockenberg in the Harz Mountains: “Until October 1 of this year, the goal [for the family tree] is set at 1850; by next April 1, it will be set at 1750, until we achieve, within the next three years, for the whole SS and for each new recruit, the goal of 1650.” Himmler explained why he did not plan to reach back further in time: Most of the church registers did not exist for the period prior to 1648, the end of the Thirty Years’ War.62 Finally, though, such ideal goals had to be abandoned, and 1800 became the accepted cutoff date for SS members.
The Reichsführer was not above dealing personally with any aspect of ancestry searches. On May 7, 1936, he wrote to Minister of Agriculture Walter Darré, who was also head of the Main Office for Race and Settlement of the SS, to inquire into the ancestry of General Ludendorff’s wife, Mathilde von Kemnitz. Himmler strongly suspected her of being of Jewish origin: Otherwise, her troublemaking, as well as her “totally abnormal personal and sexual life would be inexplicable.”63 Two years later Darré was asked by Himmler to deal with the suspected Jewish ancestry of an SS officer on Darré’s own staff.64
Needless to say, candidates for the SS, or SS members wishing to marry, as we saw in aus den Ruthen’s case, made extraordinary efforts to obtain a clean ancestral record, capable of withstanding investigation, for their prospective spouses regarding any Jewish parentage at least as far back as 1800. Thus, to give one more example, on April 27, 1937, SS Master Sgt. (Hauptscharführer) Friedrich Mennecke, a physician who was to become a notorious figure in the euthanasia program, asked for authorization to marry. To his letter he appended forty-one original certificates about his fiancée’s ancestors. As the set of necessary documents was not absolutely complete, Mennecke affirmed “with a degree of probability close to certainty that up to 1800 all her ancestors were pure Aryans.”65
Jewish ancestry was not Himmler’s only ideological worry. In March 1938 he wrote a formal letter of protest to Göring about a Luftwaffe court’s dismissal of the case against an officer who had sexual relations with a woman identified as Jewish. To Himmler’s outrage the case had been dismissed because the officer declared that the woman was not Jewish but a mixed breed of “Negroid” origin.66
At lower levels of the SS, racial dogma was set in precise and concrete terms. The educational bulletin (SS-Leitheff) of April 22, 1936, posed the question: “Why do we teach about the Jews?” The answer: “In the SS we teach about the Jews because the Jew is the most dangerous enemy of the German people.” The explanation insisted on the parasitic aspect of the Jew, who lived off the vital forces of the host people, destroying its racial potential, its thought, its feelings, its morals, its culture. In even more precise terms, the Leitheft presented the three symbolic figures of the Jew: “Ahasuerus, the rootless one, who—defiling the race and destroying peoples—driven by unsteady blood, wanders restlessly through the world; Shylock, devoid of soul, who enslaves the peoples economically and as money lender holds them by the throat; Judas Iscariot, the traitor.”67
The same Leitheft had even more lurid details, for those who did not react adequately to Ahasuerus, Shylock, and Judas Iscariot: “The Jew systematically defiles the maidens and women of Aryan peoples. He is equally driven by cold calculation and uninhibited animal lust. The Jew is known to prefer blond women. He knows that the women and maidens whom he has defiled are forever lost to their people. Not because their blood has thereby deteriorated, but because the defiled maiden is spiritually destroyed. She is entrapped by the lust of the Jew and loses all sense of what is noble and pure.”68
The defiled Aryan maidens could eventually pursue a normal life if their ambitions weren’t set too high. But this could not be the case if they aspired to marry an SS officer. Anneliese Hüttemann was interrogated by the SD in August 1935 because of her relation with the Jew Kurt Stern. Both admitted to having had intercourse on several occasions (they were neighbors and had known each other since childhood). What happened to Kurt Stern we can only surmise. For Anneliese Hüttemann, the sin against the blood led to nerve-racking suspense when, nine years later, in May 1944, she was about to marry SS-Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel. The 1935 files were brought up by the SD. After a painstaking investigation and endless petitions, Himmler, because a child was expected, assented to the marriage. At this time Liebehenschel was the commandant of Auschwitz.69
At first sight there is an apparent contradiction between the ideological importance of the Jewish issue in Nazi Germany in the mid-thirties—and its even greater importance within the SS—and the seemingly subordinate status of the office dealing with Jewish matters within the SD, the SS security service. The SD itself was, in fact, just coming into its own in the years 1935–1936. Elevated as one of the three main offices of the SS at the beginning of 1935, under Heydrich’s command from its inception as the party’s intelligence arm in August 1931, the SD underwent a major reorganization in January 1936.70 Three bureaus were established. Amt I, Administration, was headed by Wilhelm Albert, and Amt III, Foreign Intelligence, was under Heinz Jost. Amt II, Internal Intelligence, under Hermann Behrends and later Franz Albert Six, was subdivided into two main sections: II 1, dealing with ideological evaluations (Erich Ehrlinger and later Six), and II 2, with the evaluation of social conditions/attitudes (Reinhard Höhn and later Otto Ohlendorf). Within II 1, under Dieter Wisliceny, subsection II 11 dealt with ideological opponents; it comprised subsubsections II 111 (Freemasons, also Wisliceny), II 113 (political churches [that is, their political activity], Albert Hartl), and II 112 (Jews). According to Wisliceny, it was only in June 1935 that systematic work regarding the “opponent Jewry” started: Previously surveillance of Jewish organizations had been part of the activities of a section dealing mainly with Freemasonry. Subsection II 112 was successively under the authority of Mildenstein, Kurt Schröder, Wisliceny, and finally, from the end of 1937, Herbert Hagen. It comprised the following “desks”: II 1121 (assimilationist Jewry), II 1122 (Orthodox Jewry), and II 1123 (Zionists), the latter headed by Adolf Eichmann.71
The Gestapo was organized along roughly the same lines. Its equivalent of the SD’s Amt II was Abteilung II, under Heinrich Muller; that of the SD’s II 11 was II/1B, under Karl Hasselbacher.72 The unification of these separate but coordinated lines of command into the Main Office for the Security of the Reich (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA), which was to be established under Heydrich’s command in September 1939, aimed, in principle at least, at the creation of an entirely integrated system of surveillance, reporting, and arrests.
Heydrich’s men were young: In 1936–37 most of the top SD operatives were under thirty. They belonged to the cohort that came of age immediately after World War I. Most of them had been deeply influenced by the war atmosphere, the hardships, and the defeat. They were ruthless, practical, and strongly motivated by the ideological tenets of the extreme-right-wing organizations of the early twenties, in which many of them were active. Intense anti-Semitism (of the rational, not the emotional, kind—acco
rding to them) lay at the basis of their worldview.73
Although Heydrich’s own anti-Jewish initiatives and proposals had been increasingly influential, and while the Gestapo already played a central role in the implementation of anti-Jewish decisions, until 1938 the activities of subsection II 112 of the SD were mainly limited to three domains: gathering information on Jews, Jewish organizations, and on other Jewish activities; drafting policy recommendations; and increasingly active participation in surveillance operations and interrogations of Jews in coordination with the Gestapo. Moreover II 112 unabashedly considered itself the top group of “Jew experts” in Germany and, after March 1936, it systematically organized conferences in which, several times a year, the most updated information was imparted to delegates of other SD sections from the main office and from various parts of Germany. The largest of such conferences, convened on November 1, 1937, brought together sixty-six mostly middle-ranking members of the SD.74
One of II 112’s pet projects was the compilation of a card index of Jews (Judenkartei), intended to identify every Jew living in the Reich. Franz Six, moreover, ordered II 112 to start compiling another card index of the most important Jews in foreign countries and their mutual connections. As examples Six gave U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and the managements of the formerly German banking house Arnhold and the Dutch Unilever Trust.75
The Judenkartei was one of the topics on the agenda of the November 1 conference: As SS-Hauptsturmführer Ehrlinger summed up the matter, “for a successful internal struggle against Jewry, a listing in a card index of all Jews and people of Jewish origin living today in Germany is necessary. The aim of this listing is the following: (1) to establish the number of Jews and of people of Jewish origin according to the Nuremberg Laws living today in the Reich; (2) to establish the direct influence of Jewry and eventually the influence it exercises through its connections on the cultural life, the community life, and the material life of the German people.”76
The general population census of May 1939 was to provide the opportunity for the complete registration of all the Jews in Germany (including half- and quarter-Jews): In each town or village the local police made sure that the census cards of Jews and Mischlinge carried the letter “J” as a distinctive mark; copies of all local census registration lists were to be sent to the SD and passed on to II 112.77 The census took place as planned. The Jews were registered, as planned, and the card files fulfilled their function when the deportations began. (These files were kept in the building that now houses the department of philosophy of the Free University of Berlin.)78
A second information-gathering effort was aimed at every Jewish organization in Germany and throughout the world, from the ORT (an organization for vocational training and guidance) to the Agudath Yisrael (ultra-Orthodox Jewry). For the men of II 112 and the SD in general, no detail was too minute, no Jewish organization too insignificant. As the organized enemy they were fighting was nonexistent as such, their own enterprise had to create it ex nihilo. Jewish organizations were identified, analyzed, and studied as parts of an ever more complex system; the anti-German activities of that system had to be discovered, its internal workings decoded, its very essence unveiled.
The most astonishing aspect of this system was its concreteness. Very precise—and totally imaginary—Jewish plots were uncovered, names and addresses provided, countermeasures taken. Thus, in his lecture, “World Jewry,” at the November 1 conference, Eichmann listed a whole series of sinister Jewish endeavors. An attempt on the life of the Sudeten German Nazi leader Konrad Henlein had been planned at the Paris Asyle de Jour et de Nuit (a shelter for destitute Jews). It had failed only because Henlein had been warned and the murderer’s weapon had not functioned. Worse still, Nathan Landsmann, the president of the Paris-based Alliance Israelite Universelle (a Jewish educational organization), was in charge of planning attempts on the Fiihrer’s life—and also on Julius Streicher’s. To that effect, Landsmann was in touch with a Dutch Jewish organization, the Komitee voor Bizondere Joodsche Belange in Amsterdam, which in turn worked in close cooperation with the Dutch (Jewish) Unilever Trust, including its branches in Germany.79 This is a mere sample of Eichmann’s revelations.
For Heydrich and his men, it was probably inconceivable that connections among Jewish institutions were very loose and of very little importance in Jewish life.80 As described by him in a pamphlet published at the end of 1935, Wandlungen unseres Kampfes (The transformations of our struggle), the network of Jewish organizations acting against the Reich was a deadly threat.81 It appeared as such on the fictional charts growing apace in the SD offices at 102 Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin. This was the police face of redemptive anti-Semitism.
In its policy recommendations, II 112 backed any action to accelerate Jewish emigration, including the potentially positive effects of instigated violence.82 As early as May 1934, an SD memorandum addressed to Heydrich had opened with the unambiguous statement that “the aim of the Jewish policy must be the complete emigration of the Jews.” In the context of 1934 the lines that followed were unusual: “The life opportunities of the Jews have to be restricted, not only in economic terms. To them Germany must become a country without a future, in which the old generation may die off with what still remains for it, but in which the young generation should find it impossible to live, so that the incentive to emigrate is constantly in force. Violent mob anti-Semitism must be avoided. One does not fight rats with guns but with poison and gas….”83 Yet, as has been seen, in September 1935 Heydrich did not set emigration at the center of his policy proposals. It was within the overall shifting of Nazi goals in 1936 that the policy of the SD became an active element in a general drive of all Nazi agencies involved in Jewish matters: For all of them, emigration was the first priority.
Palestine was considered one of the more promising outlets for Jewish emigration, as it had been since 1933. Like the Foreign Ministry and the Rosenberg office (which was mainly in charge of ideological matters, including contacts with foreign Nazi sympathizers), the SD was confronted with the dilemma entailed by the need to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine on the one hand, and, on the other, the danger that such emigration could lead to the creation of a strategic center for the machinations of world Jewry: a Jewish state. It is in relation to such policy considerations that Heydrich allowed Hagen and Eichmann to visit Palestine in the fall of 1937 and to meet with their Haganah “contact,” Feivel Polkes.
For Eichmann at least the mission appears to have raised great expectations: “As during the trip negotiations with Arab princes are foreseen, among other things,” the ex-traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company in Upper Austria wrote to the head of II 1, Albert Six, “I will need one light and one dark suit as well as a light overcoat.” Eichmann’s dreams of Oriental elegance remained unfulfilled; instead both travelers were repeatedly warned about strict secrecy measures: no use of terms like “SS,” “SD,” “Gestapo”; no sending of postcards to friends in the service, and so on.84 The mission failed miserably: The British did not allow the two SD men to stay in Palestine more than a day, and their conversations with Polkes—who came to meet them in Cairo—produced no valuable information whatsoever. But the favorable SD view of Palestine as a destination for German Jews did not change. Later on it was with the SD that Zionist emissaries organized the departure of convoys of emigrants to Yugoslav and Romanian ports, from which they attempted to sail for Palestine in defiance of the British blockade.
Finally the SD Jewish subsubsection participated with increasing energy in the surveillance activities of the Gestapo, and in this domain its share of the common work grew throughout 1937. On September 18, for example, the SD main region Rhine submitted a report on a Jewish student named Ilse Hanoch. According to the report, Hanoch (“who supposedly is studying in London”) was traveling on the 6:25 train from Trier to Luxembourg, when, “shortly before arriving at the border-control station, Hanoch looked very uncertain and started tearing p
ieces of paper from her notebook, crumpled them, and threw them into the ashtray.” She underwent a thorough search at the border station, but without any result. The SD report assumed, on the basis of Hanoch’s travel schedule to and from Germany (as indicated on her passport) and, from the names of various Jewish families that were found on the pieces of paper she had torn and thrown away, that the so-called student was a messenger between Jews who had emigrated and those still living in Germany. Instructions were issued to all border control stations that she “be most thoroughly searched when reentering the country and that she be put under the strictest surveillance during her travels in Germany.”85 It is unknown whether Ilse Hanoch ever returned to Germany.
Strangely enough, however, when no clear instructions were given or when the framework for violence was not preestablished, the anti-Jewish actions of the SS had their built-in limitations, at least in the mid-thirties. Consider the case of SS-Sturmmann (SS Private) Anton Beckmann, of the headquarters staff of the Columbia SS detention center in Berlin. On January 25, 1936, he went into a shop on the Friesenstrasse and bought a pair of suspenders. As he left the shop, a passerby told Beckmann, who was wearing his SS uniform, that he had just been patronizing a Jewish store. He immediately tried to return the suspenders but to no avail: “The Jewess Joel [the store owner] insolently told him that she wouldn’t even think of taking back purchased goods, and furthermore, that she had a lot of SS customers, even some high-ranking ones.” SS-Obersturmführer Kern, summoned by Beckmann to help him return the suspenders, had no greater success. The commandant of the Columbia detention center sent a report on the matter demanding the arrest of “the Jewess Joel” for spreading false rumors about SS members, adding that “it would be a welcome step in the interest of all National Socialists, if finally, as in other regions, the Jewish shops in Berlin were to be marked.”86
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