On receipt of the commandant’s letter, the Inspector of concentration camps, Gruppenführer Eicke, had to admit that he felt “powerless in this matter” and transmitted the request to the chief of the SS Personnel Office, Gruppenführer Heissmeyer,87 who passed it on to the Berlin area SS commander with a comment of his own: “In Berlin, of all places, everyone is in danger of unwittingly buying in Jewish stores, whereas in other cities, Frankfurt, for example, this danger is avoided by the use of a standard sign reading GERMAN ESTABLISHMENT.”88 The evolution of the shop-marking issue has already been noted, but what of the “Jewess Joel”? An absence of orders regarding her and the imminence of the Olympic Games suggest that, despite her “insolence,” she might not have been imprisoned.
The Joel incident, as minute as it was, points to an issue that was of central significance for the prewar anti-Jewish Nazi policy. Among the main obstacles faced by the regime in its attempt to eliminate the Jews from Germany was the fact that the victims had been part and parcel of every field of activity in German society. In consequence, if direct violence was not (yet) possible, the system had to elaborate ever new administrative or legal measures in order to undo, stage by stage and step by step, the existing ties between that society and the Jews. And, as we have seen, at each stage, any number of unforeseen exceptions demanded additional administrative solutions. In other words it was not yet easy merely to arrest the “Jewess Joel,” who was legally selling her wares and was still protected by the general instructions regarding the economic activity of the Jews: Marking Jewish shops, for example, entailed possible internal and external consequences the regime was not yet ready to face.
V
Although the total number of concentration camp inmates in 1936–37 (about 7,500) was at its lowest point89, compared to the first two years of the regime and mainly to what happened later, the categories of targeted prisoners were increasing considerably. Apart from political opponents, the inmates were mainly members of religious sects such as Jehovah’s Witnesses; homosexuals; and “habitual criminals” or “asocials,” a group the Ministry of the Interior defined as follows:
“Persons who through minor, but repeated, infractions of the law demonstrate that they will not adapt themselves to the natural discipline of the National Socialist state, e.g., beggars; tramps (Gypsies); alcoholics; whores with contagious diseases, particularly sexually transmitted diseases, who evade the measures taken by the health authorities.”
A further category of asocials was the “work-shy”: “Persons against whom it can be proven that on two occasions they have, without reasonable grounds, turned down jobs offered to them, or who, having taken a job, have given it up after a short while without a valid reason.” During the following years, asocials of these various kinds were increasingly picked up by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps.90
The entirely arbitrary nature of the arrests and incarcerations in camps, even by the Third Reich’s standards of justice, can be illustrated by two police orders. In September 1935 the Bavarian Political Police demanded that the release date of all prisoners “who had been sentenced by a People’s Court be communicated well in advance so that, upon their release, they could immediately be transferred to a concentration camp. In other words, the police were “correcting” the courts’ sentences.91 And on February 23, 1937, Himmler ordered the Criminal Police to rearrest about two thousand habitual criminal offenders and to incarcerate them in concentration camps.92 These were individuals who had not been sentenced anew; choosing the victims was entirely up to the Criminal Police’s judgment—whereby “the overall number of arrests ordered could only encourage the arbitrariness of the choice.”93
In the thirties the Nazi regime used two different but complementary methods to achieve the complete exclusion of racially dangerous groups from the Volksgemeinschaft. segregation and expulsion on the one hand, sterilization on the other. The first method was used in its various aspects against the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals; the second method was applied to the carriers of hereditary diseases (physical or mental) and to persons showing dangerous characteristics deemed hereditary, as well as to “racially contaminated individuals” who could not be expelled or put into camps. As for the struggle against the Jew as the world enemy, it took additional and different forms, both on the ideological level and in terms of its all-encompassing nature.
Besides the asocials the main groups designated for segregation and diverse forms of imprisonment in existing camps or newly established camplike areas were the Gypsies and the homosexuals. Like the Jews the Gypsies dwelt in the phantasmic recess of the European mind, and like them they were branded as strangers on European soil. As was seen, the applicability of the Nuremberg Laws to the Gypsies was announced soon after their proclamation. As “carriers of alien blood,” the Gypsies were barred from marrying or having sexual contact with members of the German race.94 But although the decision was applied on the basis of general criteria of appearance and behavior, the task of actually defining the racial nature of “Gypsies” still lay ahead. From 1936 on it became the project of the University of Tübingen’s Robert Ritter.
With financing from the state-funded German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or DFG), the SS, and the Reich Health Ministry, Ritter took upon himself the classification of the thirty thousand Gypsies living in Germany. (Today identified as Sinti and Roma, these ethnic groups were generally called Gypsies [Zigeuner in German] long before and during the Third Reich, and most often to this day.) According to the Tübingen specialist, the Gypsies came from northern India and were originally Aryan, but in their migrations they had mingled with lesser races and were now nearly 90 percent racially impure.95 Ritter’s conclusions were to become the basis for the next step on the road to segregation, deportation, and extermination: Himmler’s order of December 8, 1938, regarding the measures to be taken against the Sinti and Roma.
The police were not passive while racial laws barring marriage and sexual intercourse between Gypsies and Germans were being promulagated and Ritter and his assistants were researching photographs and measurements. The Sinti and Roma had traditionally been subjected to harassment, mainly in Bavaria; after 1933, however, direct harassment became systematic, with the expulsion from the country of foreign Gypsies, and with others incarcerated as vagrants, habitual criminals, and various other kinds of asocials. Taking the Olympic Games as a pretext, the Berlin police in May 1936 arrested hundreds of Gypsies and transferred whole families, with their wagons, horses, and other belongings to the so-called Marzahn “rest place,” next to a garbage dump on one side and a cemetery on the other. Soon the rest place was enclosed with barbed wire. A de facto Gypsy concentration camp had been established in a suburb of Berlin. It was from Marzahn, and from other similar rest places soon set up near other German cities, that a few years later thousands of Sinti and Roma would be sent to the extermination sites in the East.96
The Leopold Obermayer case has already given some indication of the system’s particular hatred of homosexuals. A measure of liberalization of anti-homosexual laws and regulations had been achieved during the Weimar years, but once the Nazis came to power the prohibitions became harsher, especially after the liquidation of SA leadership in June 1934 (Ernst Röhm and some of the main SA leaders were notorious homosexuals). Homophobia was unusually shrill within the SS. A 1935 article in Das Schwarze Korps demanded the death penalty for homosexual activities, and the following year Himmler created a Reich Central Office for Combatting Homosexuality and Abortion.97 During the Nazi period, some ten to fifteen thousand homosexuals were incarcerated.98 How many died in the camps is unknown, but according to one Dachau inmate, “the prisoners with the pink triangle did not live very long; they were quickly and systematically exterminated by the SS.”99
In many ways Obermayer’s story remains exemplary.
By mid-October 1935, it will be remembered, Leopold Obermayer was back in Dachau. This time, however, using both the mo
st diverse legal and moral arguments and his status as a Swiss citizen, Obermayer fought back. Most of his letters and petitions were seized by the Dachau censors and passed on to his chief tormentor, the Würzburg Gestapo head Josef Gerum; his defense strategy was undermined by his new lawyer, a run-of-the-mill Nazi; the hopes he set on a decisive intervention by the Swiss authorities never materialized (as Broszat and Fröhlich have put it, the Swiss probably did not consider that the case of a Jewish homosexual was worth an entanglement with Germany).100 Nonetheless Obermayer’s relentless complaints, and the uncertainty of the Bavarian Political Police and the Justice Ministry in Berlin as to just how ready the Swiss would be to turn Obermayer’s case into an international scandal, profoundly unsettled Gerum and even some of his superiors in Munich and Berlin.101 Thus, throughout 1936, the determined resistance of a Jewish homosexual, albeit one benefiting from foreign citizenship, could still induce a measure of uncertainty in the operations of the system. Be that as it may, Obermayer’s trial could not be delayed indefinitely. The case was referred to the Würzburg Criminal Court; the trial was scheduled for December 9, 1936. The prosecution intended to concentrate on the accused’s homosexual activities, mainly his perversion of German youth (Obermayer himself never denied his homosexuality but steadfastly argued that the relations he had with younger men had never gone beyond the limits set by the law).102
In November it dawned on the Würzburg Gestapo and the state prosecution that, given his personality and defiance, Obermayer would be able to use the courtroom to argue that Hitler himself knew of the homosexual relations within the SA leadership and had accepted them until June 30, 1934.103 Thus the trial had to take place behind closed doors, and whereas Obermayer lost his last chance of embarrassing his persecutors, the propaganda machinery of the party and the Gestapo also lost the opportunity of staging a show trial. (As will be seen, a similar situation was to arise years later with regard to the planned show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the Jewish youth who in November 1938 shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath.)
Little is known about the trial itself, but even the reports in the local Nazi press indicate that Obermayer defended himself astutely. The sentence was a foregone conclusion: life imprisonment. Obermayer was kept in a regular prison until 1942, when he was transferred into the hands of the SS and sent to Mauthausen; there he died on February 22, 1943. After presenting his own version of the events to a de-Nazification court in 1948, Josef Gerum was set free.104
Throughout the thirties the sterilization drive inaugurated in July 1933 went steadily forward. When the health argument could not easily be used for racial purposes, other methods were found. Thus the new regime had barely been established when the attention of the authorities was directed to a group probably numbering no more than five to seven hundred, the young offspring of German women and colonial African soldiers serving in the French military occupation of the Rhineland during the early postwar years. In Nazi jargon these were the “Rhineland bastards.”105 Hitler had already described this “black pollution of German blood” in Mein Kampf as one more method used by the Jews to undermine the racial fiber of the Volk.
As early as April 1933, Göring as Prussian minister of the interior requested the registration of these “bastards,” and a few weeks later the ministry ordered that they undergo a racial-anthropological evaluation.106 In July a study of thirty-eight of these schoolchildren was undertaken by a certain Abel, one of racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer’s assistants at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. As could be expected, Abel found that his subjects, all of them living in the Rhineland, showed various defects in intellectual ability and behavior. The Prussian ministry reported the findings on March 28, 1934, warning of dire racial consequences if, despite their very small number, these “bastards” were allowed to reproduce. The upshot of the argument was that, since the presence in France of half a million mixed breeds would lead within four or five generations to the bastardization of half the French population, the similar presence of mixed breeds on the German side of the border would lead to local miscegenation and the consequent disappearance of any racial difference between the French and the population of the adjacent western parts of the Reich.107
That the matter was not taken lightly is shown by a meeting of the Advisory Committee for Population and Racial Policy of the Ministry of the Interior, which on March 11, 1935, convened representatives of the ministries of the Interior, Health, Justice, Labor, and Foreign affairs as well as eugenicists from the academic world. Walter Gross did not hide the difficulties in handling the problem of what he called the “Negro bastards” (Negerbastarde). Their rapid expulsion was impossible; thus, Gross left no doubt about the need for sterilization. But sterilization of a healthy population, if carried out openly, could cause serious internal and external reactions. As the reliability of ordinary practitioners was not to be depended on, Gross saw no other way but to demand the secret intervention of physicians who were also seasoned party members and would understand the imperatives of the higher good of the Volk.108 In the course of 1937, these hundreds of boys and girls were identified, picked up by the Gestapo, and sterilized.109
The convolutions of Nazi thinking remain, however, inscrutable. As the party agencies were plotting the sterilization of the “Negro bastards,” Bormann sent confidential instructions to all Gauleiters regarding “German colonial Negroes”: the fifty or so blacks from the former German colonies living in Germany could not find any employment, according to the Reichsleiter, “because when they found some work their employer encountered hostile reactions and had to dismiss the Negroes.” Bormann was ready to have employment authorizations issued to them in order to help them find steady work; any individual action against them was prohibited.110 The Reichsleiter did not even mention the question of progeny. Were these blacks married to German women? Did they have racially mixed children? Were these children to be sterilized? It seems that none of these questions even crossed the mind of the prime racial fanatic Martin Bormann.
The decision to sterilize carriers of hereditary diseases and the so-called feeble-minded was based on medical examinations and specially devised intelligence tests. The results were submitted to hereditary health courts, whose decisions were in turn forwarded for review to heredity health appellate courts; only their final verdicts were mandatory. Some three-quarters of the total of approximately four hundred thousand individuals sterilized in Nazi Germany underwent the operation before the beginning of the war.111 But only part of the sterilized population ultimately survived. For mental patients sterilization was often but a first stage: During the late thirties they were the group most at risk in Nazi Germany.
As early as the last years of the republic, patients at mental institutions were increasingly considered to be a burden on the community, “superfluous beings,” people whose lives were “unworthy of living.” The Nazi regime spared no effort to disseminate the right attitudes toward asylum inmates. Organized tours of mental institutions were meant to demonstrate both the freakish appearance of mental patients and the unnecessary costs that their upkeep entailed. Thus, for example, in 1936 the Munich asylum Eglfing-Haar was toured by members of the SA’s Reich Leadership School, by local SS race experts, by instructors of the SS regiment “Julius Schreck,” and by several groups from the Labor Front.”112 A crop of propaganda films aimed at indoctrinating the wider public were produced and shown during the same years,”113 and in schools, appropriate exercises in arithmetic demonstrated the financial toll such inmates imposed on the nation’s economy.114
Whether these educational measures indicated a systematic preparation of public opinion for the extermination of the inmates is unclear, but in this domain—more so than in many others—one can follow the direct impact of ideology on the regime’s policies from 1933 on. According to Lammers, Hitler had already mentioned the possibility of euthanasia in 1933, and according to his physician, Karl Brandt, Hitler had discussed the subject with the Reich physicians’ lead
er Wagner in 1935, indicating that such a project would be easier to carry out in wartime.115 Nonetheless, starting in 1936, mental patients were gradually being concentrated in large state-run institutions, and reliable SS personnel was placed on the staffs of some private institutions. Given this trend, it is not surprising that, in March 1937, Das Schwarze Korps had no compunction in praising a father who had killed his handicapped son.116
The privately run institutions were well aware of the ominous aspect of these developments. In fact, what is chilling about the documentation of the years 1936–38 is that “the associations established for the care of the handicapped [Protestant religious groups such as the Inner Mission] often…denounced those left to their care and thereby helped to bring about their persecution and extermination.”117 Many of the religious institutions that were losing some of their inmates as a result of the regrouping of patients into state institutions did complain—but only about the economic difficulties such transfers were causing them.118
The first concrete step toward a euthanasia policy was taken in the fall of 1938. The father of an infant born blind, retarded, and with no arms and legs petitioned Hitler for the right to a “mercy death” for his son. Karl Brandt, was sent to Leipzig, where the Knauer baby was hospitalized, to consult with the doctors in charge and perform the euthanasia, which he did.119
As will be seen further on, the planning of euthanasia was accelerated during the first months of 1939. Nonetheless Hitler acted with prudence. He was aware that the killing of mentally ill adults or of infants with grave defects could encounter staunch opposition from the churches, the Catholic Church in particular. This potential obstacle was all the more significant as the largely Catholic population and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Austria had just given their enthusiastic endorsement to the Anschluss. Thus, in late 1938, Hartl, head of SD desk II 113 (political churches), received (via Heydrich) an order from Viktor Brack, the deputy of Philipp Bouhler (head of the Führer’s Chancellery), to prepare an “opinion” about the church’s attitude toward euthanasia.120 Hartl did not feel competent to produce such an evaluation, but he contacted Father Joseph Mayer, professor of moral theology at the Philosophical-Theological Academy in Paderborn, who in 1927 had already written favorably about sterilization of the mentally ill. In the early fall of 1939, Hard received Mayer’s detailed memorandum, which summed up the pros and cons in Catholic pronouncements on the subject. The memorandum has not been found, and we do not know whether the Paderborn cleric expressed his own view on euthanasia, but it seems that even if his conclusion was indeterminate, it left the door open for exceptions.121
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution Page 27