As for the main policy matters regarding the Jews, the recurring two issues—two facets of the same problem—reappeared once again: measures intended to further Jewish emigration, and those dealing with the Jews remaining in the Reich. In essence the life of the Jews of Germany was to be made so unpleasant that they would make every effort to leave by any means; however, those Jews still remaining in the Reich had to feel that they had something to lose, so that none of them would take it into their heads to make an attempt on the life of a Nazi leader—possibly the highest one of all.66
Forced emigration was to have top priority: “At the head of all our considerations and measures,” Göring declared, “there is the idea of transferring the Jews as rapidly and as effectively as possible to foreign countries, of accelerating the emigration with all possible pressure and of pushing aside anything that impedes this emigration.” Apparently Göring was even willing to refrain from stamping Jewish passports with a recognizable sign (the letter “J”) if a Jew had the means to emigrate but would be hindered from doing so by such identification.67 Göring informed the Gauleiters that the money needed to finance the emigration would be raised by an international loan (precisely the kind of loan that, as we shall see, Schacht was soon to be discussing with the American delegate of the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees); Hitler, Göring stated, was very much in favor of this idea. The guarantee for the loan, presumably to be raised by “world Jewry” and by the Western democracies, was to consist of the entire assets still belonging to the Jews in Germany—one reason why Jewish houses were not to be forcibly Aryanized at that stage,68 even though many party members were particularly tempted by that prospect.
From world Jewry Göring demanded the bulk not only of the loan but also the cessation of any economic boycott of Germany, so that the Reich could obtain the foreign currency needed to repay the principal and the interest on the international loan. In the midst of these practical explanations, Göring mentioned that he wanted the Jews to promise that the “international department store corporations, which in any case are all in Jewish hands, should commit themselves to take millions worth of German goods.”69 The myth of Jewish world power loomed again.
Regarding the Jews still remaining in Germany, Göring announced Hitler’s rejection of any special identifying signs, and of excessively drastic travel and shopping restrictions. Hitler’s reasons were unexpected: Given the state of mind of the populace in many Gaue, if Jews wore identifying signs they would be beaten up or refused any food. The other limitations would make their daily life so difficult that they would become a burden on the state.70 In other words, the Gauleiters were indirectly warned not to launch any new actions of their own against the Jews in their Gaue. Jewish-owned houses, as has been seen, were the last Jewish assets to be Aryanized.
While discussing the measures that would induce the Jews to leave Germany, Göring assured his listeners he would make sure that the rich Jews would not be allowed to depart first, leaving the mass of poor Jews behind. This remark probably explains what followed three days later.
In the Würzburg Gestapo files there is an order issued December 9, on Göring’s instructions, to the twenty-two Franconia district offices; that order must have been issued on a national scale. In it, the State Police demanded the “immediate forwarding of a list of ‘influential Jews’ living in each of the districts.” The criteria of influence were spelled out as follows: wealth and relations with foreign countries (of “economic, family, personal, or other kinds”). The regional officers were to give the reason for every influential Jew’s inclusion on the list. The matter was so urgent that the lists had to be sent in by express mail on the next day, the tenth, so as to reach Würzburg Gestapo headquarters by 9 A.M. on Saturday, December 11. Each regional office director was made “personally responsible for strict adherence to the deadline.”71
There is no explanation in the files regarding Göring’s intentions, nor any record of further action; it may have been a short-lived start at taking rich and influential Jews hostage to guarantee the departure of the poor ones.
A few days before the Würzburg Gestapo transmitted Göring’s orders, Frick informed the federal state presidents and interior ministers that “by expressly highest order”—a formula used only for orders from Hitler—no further anti-Jewish measures were to be taken without explicit instructions from the Reich government.72 The echo of Göring’s announcement to the Gauleiters is clearly perceptible. On December 13 it was the Propaganda Ministry’s turn to inform its agencies that “the Führer had ordered that all political broadcasts deal exclusively with the Jewish problem; political broadcasts on other topics were to be avoided so as not to diminish the effect of the anti-Jewish programs.”73 In short, German opinion had yet to be convinced that the November pogrom had been amply justified.
After the series of internal meetings of party and state officials that aimed at clarification of the goals and limits of post-pogrom anti-Jewish policies, one additional conference took place on December 16. Convened by Frick, that meeting was held in the presence of Funk, Lammers, Helldorf, Heydrich, Gauleiters and various other party and state representatives. In the main Frick and Funk took up Göring’s explanations, exhortations, and orders. Yet it also became apparent that throughout the Reich, party organizations such as the German Labor Front had put pressure on shopkeepers not to sell to Jews. And, mainly in the Ostmark, Mischlinge were being treated as Jews, both in terms of their employment and of their business activities. Such initiatives were unacceptable in Hitler’s eyes. Soon no Jewish businesses would be left, and the Jews would have to be allowed to buy in German stores. As for the Mischlinge, the policy, according to Frick, was to absorb them gradually into the nation (strangely enough Frick did not distinguish the half- from the quarter-Jews), and the current discrimination against them contravened the distinctions established by the Nuremberg Laws. On the whole, however, the main policy goal was emphasized over and over again: Everything had to coincide to expedite the emigration of the Jews.74
Yet another set of measures descended on the Jews toward the end of December. On the twenty-eighth Göring, again referring to orders explicitly given by Hitler, both at the beginning of the document and in its conclusion, established the rules for dealing with dwellings belonging to Jews (they should not be Aryanized at this stage, but Jewish occupants should gradually move to houses owned and inhabited only by Jews) and defined the distinction between two categories of “mixed marriages.” Marriages in which the husband was Aryan were to be treated more or less as regular German families, whether or not they had children. The fate of mixed marriages in which the husband was Jewish depended on whether there were children. The childless couples could eventually be transferred to houses occupied only by Jewish tenants, and in all other respects as well, they were to be treated as full Jewish couples. Couples with children—whereby the children were Mischlinge of the first degree—were temporarily shielded from persecution.75 “The government appears, if one is prepared to accept the government’s point of view, to treat correctly Aryan’ husbands of Jewish wives,” Jochen Klepper noted in his diary. “Many of them hold important positions in the army and the economy. They are not forced to divorce and are able to transfer their possessions. But much worse off are Aryan’ wives of Jewish men. They are expelled to Jewry; on their heads fall all the misfortunes that we others are spared according to the present regulations and conditions.”76 Klepper mentions that Aryan husbands of Jewish wives “are not forced to divorce.” Aryan wives of Jewish husbands were not forced to divorce either, but the law of July 6, 1938 (already mentioned in chapter 4), had made divorce on racial grounds possible, and Göring’s decree of December 28 clearly encouraged Aryan women to leave their Jewish husbands: “If the German wife of a Jew divorces him,” said the decree, “she again joins the community of German blood, and all the disadvantages [previously imposed on her] are eliminated.”77
Why did Hitler oppose the yellow ba
dge and outright ghettoization in December 1938? Why did he create a category of “privileged mixed marriages” and also decide to compensate Mischlinge who had suffered damages during the pogrom? In the first case, wariness about German and international opinion was probably the main factor. As for the mixed marriages and compensation decision for Mischlinge, it seems evident that Hitler wanted to circumscribe as tightly as possible the potential zones of discontent that the persecution of mixed marriages and of Mischlinge in general could create within the population.
Göring’s decree of December 28 aiming at the concentration of Jews in “Jews’ houses” became more easily applicable when, on April 30, 1939, further regulations allowed for the rescinding of leasing contracts with Jews.78 The Aryan lessor could not annul a contract of Jewish tenants prior to obtaining a certificate from the local authorities that alternative quarters in a Jewish-owned house had been secured. But, as noted by the American chargé d’affaires Alexander Kirk, these new regulations allowed municipal and communal authorities to “compel Jewish house-holders, or Jewish tenants in a Jewish owned house, to register with them vacant rooms, or space which they would not seem to require for their own needs. The latter may then be forced, even against their will, to lease these quarters to other Jews who are liable to eviction from ‘Aryan’ houses. The local authorities may draw up the terms of these involuntary contracts and collect a fee for this service.”79
On January 17, 1939, the eighth supplementary decree to the Reich Citizenship Law forbade Jews to exercise any paramedical and health-related activities, particularly pharmacy, dentistry, and veterinary medicine.80 On February 15 members of the Wehrmacht, the Labor Service, party functionaries, and members of the SD were forbidden to marry “Mischlinge of the second degree,”81 and on March 7, in answer to a query from the Justice Minister, Hess decided that Germans who were considered as such under the Nuremberg Laws but who had some Jewish blood were not to be hired as state employees.82
During the crucial weeks from November 1938 to January 1939, the measures decided upon by Hitler, Göring, and their associates entirely destroyed any remaining possibility for Jewish life in Germany or for the life of Jews in Germany. The demolition of the synagogues’ burned remains symbolized an end; the herding of the Jews into “Jewish houses” intimated a yet-unperceived beginning. Moreover, the ever-present ideological obsession that was to receive a paroxysmic expression in Hitler’s Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939, continued unabated: A stream of bloodthirsty statements flowed from the pages of Das Schwarze Korps, and an address by Himmler to the SS top-echelon leadership of the elite unit SS-Standarte “Deutschland,” on November 8, 1938, carried dire warnings.
Himmler made no mention of the Paris shooting the day before, and most of his speech dealt with the organization and tasks of the SS. But the Jewish question was ominously there. Himmler warned his audience that, within ten years, the Reich would face unprecedented confrontations “of a critical nature.” The Reichsführer referred not only to national confrontations but, in particular, to the clash of worldviews in which the Jews stood behind all other enemy forces and represented the “primal matter of all that was negative.” The Jews—and the forces they directed against the Reich—knew that “if Germany and Italy were not annihilated, they themselves would be annihilated.” “In Germany,” Himmler prophesied, “the Jew will not be able to maintain himself; it is only a matter of years.” How this would be achieved was obvious: “We will force them out with an unparalleled ruthlessness.” There followed a description of how anti-Semitism was intensifying in most European countries, as a result of the arrival of Jewish refugees and the efforts of Nazi propaganda.
Then Himmler launched into his own vision of the final phase. Trapped, the Jews would fight the source of all their troubles, Nazi Germany, with all the means at their disposal. For the Jews the danger would be averted only if Germany were burned down and annihilated. There should be no illusions, said Himmler, and repeated his warning that in case of a Jewish victory, there would be total starvation and massacre; not even a reservation of Germans would remain: “Everybody will be included, the enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich and the others; speaking German and having had a German mother would suffice.”83 The implicit corollary was clear.
In October 1935, in the immediate wake of the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, Goebbels had issued a decree according to which the names of fallen Jewish soldiers would not be inscribed on any memorial erected in Germany from then on.84 It so happened, however, that when on June 14, 1936, a memorial was unveiled in the small town of Loge, in Eastern Friesland, the name of the Jewish soldier Benjamin was inscribed among those who had fallen in 1915. Loge’s Gruppenleiter took the initiative of having Benjamin’s name deleted and replaced (to fill the conspicuous void) by that of a local soldier who had died of his wounds soon after the war’s end. Local protests, including those of Dutch citizens living in this border town, such as the retired ambassador Count van Wedel, led to the removal of the new name. Was, then, the Jewish soldier Benjamin to be reinscribed? The Gauleiter of Weser-Ems decided that such a move would be “intolerable.”85
The overall problem remained unsolved until the pogrom of November 1938. On November 10 Paul Schmitthenner, rector of Heidelberg University, wrote to the Baden minister of education in Karlsruhe: “In view of the struggle of world Jewry against the Third Reich, it is intolerable that the names of members of the Jewish race remain on plaques of the war dead. The students,” Schmitthenner continued, “were demanding the removal of the plaque, but this was not done out of respect for the German dead.” The rector therefore asked the ministry to find an immediate solution to the problem in cooperation with the Reich student leader: “I consider removal of the Jewish names necessary,” Schmitthenner concluded. “It should take place in an orderly and dignified way in the spirit of the regulations I am asking for.”86
The minister of education of Baden forwarded Schmitthenner’s letter to the Reich minister of education with the following comment: “In my opinion, as the question is of fundamental significance, it should be submitted to the Führer for decision.”87 Rust did so, and on February 14 he was able to announce Hitler’s decision: Names of Jews on existing memorials would not be removed. Newly erected memorials would not include names of Jews.88
Schmitthenner’s resolve to eliminate the names of fallen Jewish soldiers from the halls of Heidelberg was echoed by the no less determined action of Friedrich Metz, the Freiburg University rector, who thereby preempted a decision that would be taken in Berlin on December 8. “I have been informed,” Metz wrote to the university library director on November 17, “that the library of the university and the academic reading room are still being visited by Jews. I have already instructed former members of the faculty Professor Jonas Cohn and Professor Michael, who are in question in this matter, to abstain from using any services of the Albert-Ludwig University in order to avoid unpleasantness. I authorize you herewith to act in the same spirit if the university library or the academic reading room are visited by other Jews.”89
III
“Regarding your request concerning a residence permit for your wife, I have to inform you of the following.” Thus started a letter that Party Comrade Seller, the Kreisleiter of Neustadt on the Aisch, near Nuremberg, addressed on November 21, 1938, to the German farmer and grocery store owner Fritz Kestler of Ühlfeld. Kesder’s wife, the mother of his four children and the family member in charge of the grocery store, had been expelled from Ühlfeld during the November pogrom and was temporarily staying with relatives in Nuremberg.
“Your wife, born Else Rindeberg,” the letter continued, “is a full-blooded Jewess. That is why she has repeatedly shown to all members of her race, through personal contact and all possible help, that she feels that she totally belongs to them. That is why, for instance, she took the reponsibility for the reimbursements of debts owed to Ühlfeld Jews. Moreover, she has given shelter to Jews who felt thre
atened. Further, she allowed Volksgenossen who have not learned a thing and who wished to buy at the Jew Schwab’s to walk through her store and enter Schwab’s premises from the back. Your wife has proved thereby that she considers herself a Jew and that she thinks she can make fools of the political leadership and the authorities.
“I am not astonished that you were not enough of a man to put an end to this, since someone who admits that he has been happily married to a Jewess for twenty-five years shows that he is badly contaminated by this evil Jewish spirit. If, at the time, you were oblivious enough of your race to marry a Jewess against the warnings of your parents, you cannot expect today to have the right to ask that an exception be made for your Jewish wife.” After warning Kestler that his wife should not try to return, Kreisleiter Seller ended his letter with the appropriate flourish: “Your question regarding what should now happen to your wife is of as little interest to me as twenty-five years ago it was of interest to you what would become of the German people if everybody entered a marriage that defiled the race.”90
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution Page 38