Estimates in the Polish press in 1935 and 1936 that hundreds of Jews died in the pogroms that erupted at the time in no fewer than 150 Polish cities were probably too low.17 A hidden quota in the universities brought the percentage of Jewish students down from 20.4 percent in 1928–29 to 9.9 percent in 1937–38.18 What happened in the universities took place more openly in the economic field, with a boycott of Jewish commerce leading to a sharp decrease in the number of Jewish businesses during the years immediately preceding the war.19 The pauperization of wide sectors of the Jewish population had begun long before the war, but in the post-Pilsudski era, the economic boycott was supported by the government itself. To be sure, anti-Jewish violence was officially condemned, but, as Prime Minister Felician Slawoj-Skladkowski put it in 1936, “at the same time, it is understandable that the country should possess the instinct compelling it to defend its culture, and it is natural that Polish society should seek economic self-sufficiency.” The prime minister explained what he meant by self-sufficiency: “economic struggle [against the Jews] by all means—but without force.”20 By 1937–38 Polish professional associations were accepting Gentile members only. As for the civil service, at the national or at the local level, by then it had entirely ceased employing Jews.21
One of the by-products of the “Jewish problem” in Poland was the reemergence in the mid-1930s of an idea that had first been concocted by the German anti-Semite Paul de Lagarde: transfer of part of the Jewish population to the French island colony of Madagascar.22 In January 1937 the positive attitude of Marius Moutet, the French Socialist colonial minister in Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, gave this plan a new lease on life, and soon negotiations between Poland and France regarding practical ways and means for implementing such a population transfer got under way. The Paris government agreed that a three-man Polish investigation commission, two of them Jews, be sent to the island. On their return the Jewish members submitted a report pessimistic about Madagascar’s absorptive capacities, but the Polish government adopted the favorable view of the commission’s Polish chairman, Mieczyslaw Lepecki. Thus, negotiations with the French continued and, at the beginning of 1938, Warsaw still seemed to be giving serious support to the project.
Whereas at the outset, the European Jewish press was reporting positively on the initiative, and official Nazi comment originating in the Paris and Warsaw embassies appeared only noncommittal, the Nazi press became highly sarcastic once it became clear, at the end of 1937, that the plan had little chance of implementation. “Madagascar could become a ‘promised land’ for the Jews Poland wants to get rid of,” said the Westdeutscher Beobachter on December 9, “only if they [the Jews] could lead a life of masters there, without effort of their own, and at the expense of others. It is therefore questionable whether the invitation for an exodus of the Children of Israel to Madagascar will soon free Poland of any great part of these parasites.”23 The plan nonetheless seems to have attracted Heydrich’s attention, and on March 5, 1938, a member of his staff sent the following order to Adolf Eichmann:
“Please put together in the near future material for a memorandum which should be prepared for C [Heydrich] in cooperation with II B4 [the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section]. It should be made clear in the memorandum that on its present basis (emigration), the Jewish question cannot be solved (financial difficulties, etc.) and that therefore we must start to look for a solution through foreign policy, as is already being negotiated between Poland and France.”24
II
There were 90,000 Jews in France at the beginning of the century; in 1935 their number had reached 260,000. On the eve of the war, the Jewish population had risen to approximately 300,000, two-thirds of it in Paris.25 The most detailed counts of Jews were conducted later by the Vichy government and by the Germans in the occupied zone, in accordance, of course, with their own definition of who was Jewish. The results nonetheless give a more or less precise image of the immediate prewar situation. In mid-1939 approximately half the Jewish population in Paris was French and half was foreign. But even among the French Jews, only half were French-born. In the Paris region 80 percent of the foreign Jews were of East European origin, half of them from Poland.26 Although there were three million foreigners living in France in the late thirties, of whom only about 5 percent at most were Jews,27 the Jews were more conspicuous than the others. In the eyes of both the authorities and the population, the foreign Jews were likely to create problems. This was the opinion of many French Jews as well. “As early as 1934,” writes Michael Marrus, “R. R. Lambert, editor of the Univers Israélite and one of the leading figures of the Franco-Jewish establishment, warned his coreligionists that other Frenchmen were losing their patience: in the current state of affairs, mass emigration [to France] is no longer possible. Foreign Jews should watch their step, should abandon their tendency to cling closely to one another and should accelerate their assimilation into French society.”28
Actually Lambert was relatively compassionate and did not advocate expelling the refugees; Jacques Helbronner, president of the Consistoire, the central representative body of French Jews, thought otherwise: “France, like every other nation,” Helbronner declared as early as June 1933, “has its unemployed, and not all the Jewish refugees from Germany are people worth keeping…. If there are 100 to 150 great intellectuals who are worthy of being kept in France since they are scientists or chemists who have secrets our own chemists don’t know…these we will keep, but the 7, 8, or perhaps 10,000 Jews who will come to France, is it really in our best interests to keep them?”29 Helbronner continued for years to hold this view; in 1936 he expressed regrets about the liberal French immigration policy of 1933. For him, the Jewish refugees were simply “riff-raff, the rejects of society, the elements who could not possibly have been of any use to their own country.”30 Even after the defeat of France, it should be added, Helbronner, still head of the Consistoire, kept his antipathy toward foreign Jews. His attitude changed only in the course of 1943. Soon after this change of heart had taken place, the Nazis caught up with him as well: In October of that year he was arrested, deported to Auschwitz with his wife, and murdered.
The Consistoire’s position had its effect, and from 1934 on, material help to the refugees almost totally ceased. “Clearly the French Jewish establishment was giving up all efforts to reconcile its competing loyalties and obligations to the refugees and to France. In this struggle, French interests…dominated. The refugees were quite simply abandoned.”31
The first official measures against foreigners (expulsion of those whose papers were not in order) were taken during the first half of the thirties, mainly in 1934 under the premiership of Pierre-Etienne Flandin.32 After a brief improvement under the Blum governments, anti-immigrant measures became ever more draconian, culminating in the highly restrictive law of November 1938, which facilitated the immediate expulsion of aliens and made their assigned residence in some remote corner of the country a matter of simple administrative decision. Stripping naturalized foreigners of their newly acquired French nationality also became possible, and a number of professional groups that considered recently arrived Jews to be dangerously competitive began to lobby for their exclusion from various domains such as medicine and the law.33
However, there was more to the rapid rise of French anti-Semitism in the mid-thirties than the problems of Jewish immigration.34 As the economic crisis was worsening, in late 1933 the Stavisky Affair, a scandal involving a series of shady financial deals in which the central role was played by a Russian Jew named Serge-Alexandre Stavisky and in whose mysterious ramifications major French political figures were implicated, came to a head. In the early days of 1934, Stavisky’s body was discovered near Chamonix in the French Alps. The Radical Socialist government of Camille Chautemps was brought down and replaced by the ephemeral premiership of Édouard Daladier, also a Radical Socialist, and the entire array of extreme right-wing organizations, from the Action Française of Maurras and Daudet to
the Croix de Feu, the war veterans’ organization headed by Fraçois de La Rocque, was in an uproar. A riot was quelled in Paris on February 6, 1934: Eighteen rightists were killed by the police on the Place de la Concorde and the rue Royale as they tried to storm the Chambre des Députés. The republic survived the crisis, but the internal rift that had divided French society since the Revolution and dominated the political life of the country from the time of the restoration to that of the Dreyfus affair was wide open again.
A turning point came with the confrontations that preceded and followed the 1936 elections, with the overwhelming victory of the Popular Front led by Léon Blum. When, on June 6, the new government was sworn in, Xavier Vallat, the future Vichy delegate general for Jewish Affairs, turned to Blum at the rostrum of the Chambre des Députés: “Your accession to power, Mr. Prime Minister, is an undeniably historic occasion. For the first time, this ancient Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew. I dare say aloud what the country thinks: that it would be preferable to put at the head of this country a man whose roots belong to its soil rather than a subtle Talmudist.”35
Much of what Blum did during his two brief tenures as prime minister of the Popular Front government seemed to play into the hands of the Right. Admirable as his social achievements—the forty-hour work week and the two-week paid annual vacation—were, they appeared manifestly to contradict his urge to speed up rearmament in the face of the Nazi menace. In any event, if it was somewhat incongruous to see traditional pacifists turn into the military guardians of France, it was certainly much worse to watch the shift of right-wing nationalists toward outright appeasement of Nazi Germany, among other reasons out of hatred for the enemy within. “Better Hitler than Blum” was just one of the slogans; worse were to come.
As in Germany in previous decades, notwithstanding the visibility of some Jewish left-wing activism, the majority of the Jews in France were in fact anything but politically supportive of the Left. The Consistoire was an essentially conservative body that did not hesitate to welcome the presence of right-wing organizations, such as La Rocque’s Croix de Feu, at its commemorative occasions; it openly backed, at least until 1935, a Jewish patriotic and ultraconservative movement, Édouard Bloch’s Union Patriotique des Français Israelités.36 Even among the immigrants from Eastern Europe, support for the Left was not pervasive. In the 1935 Paris municipal elections and in the decisive 1936 elections for the legislature, official immigrant bodies were readier to give their support to right-wing than to Communist candidates.37
Blum himself often seemed impervious to the role played by anti-Semitism in the mobilization of right-wing opinion against his leadership. Or possibly his awareness was of the detached and fatalistic kind that characterized Rathenau’s acceptance of the hatred directed against him in the months preceding his assassination. In February 1936 Blum himself was slightly wounded by right-wing demonstrators as his car passed the funeral cortege of the Action Française historian Jacques Bainville.38 Blum’s imperviousness made it easy for the extreme right to point to the number of Jewish ministers in his cabinets.39
Anti-Semitism did not play a central role in the programs or the propaganda of the French parties closest to fascism, at least during the thirties. Although anti-Jewish slogans were part of the repertory of Solidarité Française and other leagues, Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français became anti-Semitic only after 1938 in order to attract voters from among the notoriously anti-Semitic French settlers in North Africa.40 But anti-Jewish themes were the major staple of a host of right-wing periodicals that carried the message to hundreds of thousands of French homes: L’Action Française, Je suis partout, and Gringoire were merely the most widely read among them. On April 15, 1938, Je suis partout published the first of its special issues on “the Jews.” The articles carried such titles as “The Jews and Germany,” “Austria and the Jews,” “The Jews and Anti-Semitism,” “The Jews and the Revolution,” “When Israel Is King: The Jewish Terror in Hungary,” and so on. Brasillach’s lead article demanded that the Jews in France be put under alien status.41 The continuing stream of anti-Semitic articles reached such proportions that, in April 1939, a law was passed to prohibit press attacks “against a group of persons belonging by their origin to a given race or religion, when these attacks aim at inciting hatred among citizens or inhabitants.” The perceived need for such a law was a sign of the times. Another such sign, also in April 1939, was that the newly elected pope, Pius XII, repealed the ban on Action Française. Neither the ban nor its repeal had anything to do with anti-Semitism, but nonetheless, as of 1939 Maurras’s doctrine of anti-Jewish hatred was no longer beyond the official Catholic pale.
Nazi Germany encouraged the spread of anti-Semitism all over Europe and beyond. Sometimes these initiatives were indirect: In France the France-Allemagne Committee, organized by Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Policy Office and guided by the future Nazi ambassador to occupied France, Otto Abetz, carefully supported various cultural activities, most of which carried a subtle pro-Nazi ideological slant.42 On the other hand, the function of Nazi organizations, such as the Stuttgart-based press agency Weltdienst, was worldwide anti-Jewish propaganda.43 Yet it was not the Nazi-like and sometimes Nazi-financed groups of French, Belgian, Polish, and Romanian Jew-haters who were of significance during the immediate prewar period. The really ominous aspect in these countries was the exacerbation of homegrown varieties of anti-Semitism; Nazism’s contribution was that of an indirect influence. At this time the upsurge of anti-Jewish passion, with or without Nazi incitement, had some immediate impact both on attitudes toward local Jewish communities and on immigration policies toward Jews trying to flee from Germany, Austria, and the Czech Protectorate. In more general terms, it prepared the ground for active collaboration by some, and passive acquiescence by many more, in the sealing of the fate of European Jewry only three or four years hence.
III
On September 29, 1936, the state secretary in the German Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, convened a conference of high officials from his own agency, from the Ministry of the Economy, and from the Office of the Deputy Führer in order to prepare recommendations for a meeting of ministers regarding the further steps to be taken in regard to the Jews at this post-Nuremberg stage. As the Office of the Deputy Führer represented the party line, the Ministry of the Interior (though headed by the Nazi Wilhelm Frick) often represented middle-of-the-road positions between the party and the conservative state bureaucracy, and the Ministry of the Economy (still headed by Schacht), was decidedly conservative, it is remarkable that, at this conference, the highest officials of the three agencies were entirely in agreement.
All those present recognized that the fundamental aim now was the “complete emigration” of the Jews and that all other measures had to be taken with this aim in mind. After restating this postulate, Stuckart added a sentence that was soon to find its dramatic implementation: “Ultimately one would have to consider carrying out compulsory emigration.”44
Most of the discussion was concentrated on dilemmas that were to bedevil German choices until the fall of 1938: First, what measure of social and economic activity should be left to Jews in the Reich so as to prevent their becoming a burden to the state and yet not diminish their incentive to emigrate? Second, toward which countries was Jewish emigration to be channeled without it leading to the creation of new centers of anti-German activity? The participants agreed that all emigration options should be left open, but that German means should be used only to help the emigration to Palestine. In answer to the question whether the press was not slowing down Jewish emigration to Palestine by reporting the Arab anti-Jewish unrest there, Ministerial Director Walther Sommer (from the Deputy Führer’s Office) indicated that “one could not reproach other nations for defending themselves against the Jews.” No measures regarding the press reports were to be taken.45 And no decision was made regarding the problem of the identification of Jewish businesses.46
> The September 1936 conference was the first high-level policy-planning meeting devoted to the regime’s future anti-Jewish measures in which the priority of total emigration (compulsory emigration: that is, expulsion if need be) was clearly formulated. Before the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, segregation had been the main goal, and it was only in September 1935 that Hitler, in his declaration to Walter Gross, mentioned “more vigorous emigration” of the Jews from Germany as one of his new objectives. Thus, some time at the end of 1935 or in 1936, Hitler’s still tentative formulations became a firm guideline for all related state and party agencies. The move to new objectives tallied, as has been seen, with the new radicalization in both the internal and the external domains.
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