35. Helmut Heiber, Universität unterm Hakenkreuz, part 2, Die Kapitulation der Hohen Schulen: Das Jahr 1933 und seine Themen, vol. 1 (Munich, 1992), p. 26.
36. Uwe Dietrich Adam, Hochschule und Nationalsozialismus: Die Universität Tübingen im Dritten Reich (Tübingen, 1977), p. 36.
37. All the details of the Freiburg case are taken from Edward Seidler, “Die Medizinische Fakultät zwischen 1926 und 1948,” in Eckhard John, Bernd Martin, Marc Mück, and Hugo Ott, eds., Die Freiburger Universität in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Freiburg/Würzburg, 1991), pp. 76–77.
38. Arno Weckbecker, Die Judenverfolgung in Heidelberg 1933–1945 (Heidelberg, 1985), p. 150. During the same period five “Aryan” teachers had been dismissed on political grounds.
39. Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others, Germany 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1988), p. 24.
40. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, England, 1989), p. 495.
41. Chernow, The Warburgs, pp. 540–41.
42. Müller-Hill, Murderous Science, p. 27.
43. Karen Schönwälder, Historiker und Politik: Geschichtswissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), pp. 29ff., 33.
44. For a more detailed presentation and analysis of the indifference of German university professors regarding the fate of their Jewish colleagues, as well as for the outright expressions of hostility of some of them, see Friedländer, “The Demise of the German Mandarins,” mainly pp. 70ff. For the attitude of the famous economic historian Werner Sombart, see ibid., p. 73, as well as Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart 1863–1941: Eine Biographie (Munich, 1994), p. 359; for a good analysis of Sombart’s anti-Jewish intellectual position, see mainly Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, England, 1993), pp. 130ff.
45. Kurt Pätzold, Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Vernichtung: Dokumente des faschistischen Antisemitismus 1933 bis 1942 (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), p. 53.
46. Geoffrey J. Giles, “Professor und Partei: Der Hamburger Lehrkörper und der Nationalsozialismus,” in Eckart Krause, Ludwig Huber, Holger Fischer, eds., Hochschulalltag im Dritten Reich: Die Hamburger Universität 1933–1945 (Berlin, 1991), p. 115.
47. Christian Jansen, Professoren und Politik: Politisches Denken und Handeln der Heidelberger Hochschullehrer 1914–1935 (Göttingen, 1992), pp. 289ff.
48. Claudia Schorcht, Philosophie an den Bayerischen Universitäten 1933–1945 (Erlangen, 1990), pp. 159ff. It is possible that at that early stage some other collective declarations in favor of Jewish colleagues were planned that were never concretely made. According to Otto Hahn, Max Planck dissuaded him from organizing such a petition with the argument that it would only trigger a much stronger counterdeclaration. See J. L. Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), p. 150.
49. We know of this intervention from Max Planck’s own account after the war. According to Planck, Hitler declared that he had nothing against the Jews and was only anti-Communist; then he supposedly flew into a rage. See Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man, p. 153. Such postwar reports are hard to substantiate.
50. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), pp. 198–200.
51. Rüdiger Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich, 1994), p. 299.
52. Hugo Ott, Laubhüttenfest 1940: Warum Therese Löwy einsam sterben musste (Freiburg, 1994), p. 113.
53. Ibid.
54. Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (New Haven, Conn. 1995), pp. 35–36. Heidegger’s letters are paraphrased as Ettinger had not received permission to quote them directly.
55. Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” New York Review of Books, June 16, 1988, p. 40.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid. See also Ott, Laubhüttenfest 1940, p. 183.
58. Safranski, Ein Meister aus Deutschland, p. 302.
59. Ibid., p. 300.
60. Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und “Der Begriff des Politischen”: Dialog unter Abwesenden (Stuttgart, 1988), p. 137.
61. Ibid., pp. 14–15.
62. For all details in this section, see Bernd Rüthers, Carl Schmitt im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft als Zeitgeist-Bestärkung? (Munich, 1990), pp. 31–34.
63. Wolfgang Heuer, Hannah Arendt (Reinbek/Hamburg, 1987), p. 29.
64. Kommission…, Dokumente zur Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden, pp. 99–100.
65. Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 67. Michael Kater’s evaluation is somewhat clearer-cut: “The number of converts to Nazism, among the professors, often motivated by antisemitism, was growing, especially in 1932, and even if most of them chose to remain outside the party, the evidence suggests that in their heart of hearts they had switched their allegiance to Hitler.” Michael Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders 1919–1945 (Oxford, 1983), p. 69. Academic Judeophobia during the empire and even more during the Weimar Republic is too well documented to need much further proof. Yet some notorious incidents can be read in contrary ways. In 1924 the Jewish Nobel laureate in chemistry and professor at the University of Munich, Richard Willstätter, resigned in protest against the decision of the dean and a majority of the facility not to appoint the geochemist Viktor Goldschmidt on obviously antisemitic grounds. Yet, conversely, a great number of faculty members and students attempted for weeks to persuade Willstätter to take back his resignation, to no avail. Regarding the issue as such and Willstätter’s resignation, see Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions (New York, 1987), pp. 46–47, and John V. H. Dippel, Bound upon a Wheel of Fire: Why So Many German Jews Made the Tragic Decision to Remain in Nazi Germany (New York, 1996), pp. 25–27.
66. Michael H. Kater, Studentenschaft und Rechtsradikalismus in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Hamburg, 1975), pp. 145–46.
67. Geoffrey J. Giles, Students and National Socialism in Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1985), p. 17.
68. Ulrich Herbert, “‘Generation der Sachlichkeit’: Die völkische Studenten-bewegung der frühen zwanziger Jahre in Deutschland,” in Frank Bajohr et al., eds., Zivilisation und Barbarei: Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne (Hamburg, 1991), pp. 115ff. For the establishment and the growth of the NSDSB until 1933 see also Michael Grüttner, Studenten im Dritten Reich (Paderborn, 1995), pp. 19–61.
69. On November 12, 1930, the Berliner Tageblatt reported that around five hundred Nazi students had launched attacks against prorepublic and Jewish students on the Berlin University campus: “During the assault, a Social Democratic student was wounded and had to get medical assistance…a Jewish female student was attacked by the Nazis, thrown to the ground and trampled upon…. The group yelled in turn ‘Germany awake!’ and ‘Out with Jews’!” Kater, Studentenschaft und Rechtsradikalismus, p. 155.
70. Ibid., p. 157.
71. Kater, The Nazi Party, p. 184.
72. Rudolf Schottlaender, “Antisemitische Hochschulpolitik: Zur Lage an der Technischen Hochschule Berlin 1933/34,” in Reinhard Rürup, ed., Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Technischen Universität Berlin 1878–1979, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1979), p. 447.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., p. 448.
75. Sauder, Die Bücherverbrennung, p. 89. In Berlin, the publication of these theses led to an immediate conflict between students and the rector of the university, Eduard Kohlrausch, who had ordered the removal of the notices and posters from university grounds; the students countered by announcing his resignation. Giles, Students and National Socialism, p. 131.
76. George L. Mosse, “Die Bildungsbürger verbrennen ihre eigenen Bücher” in Horst Denkler und Eberhard Lämmert, eds., “Das war ein Vorspiel nur…” Berliner Colloquium zur Literaturpolitik im “Dritten Reich” (Berlin, 1985), p. 35.
&n
bsp; 77. Ibid., p. 42.
78. Professional schools group leader Hildburghausen to Minister Wächtler, Thuringia Education Ministry, Weimar, 6.5.1933, Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (NSDStB), microfilm MA–228, IfZ.
79. District leader mid-Germany to Prime Minister Manfred von Killinger, Dresden, 12.8.1933, NSDStB, microfilm MA 228, IfZ.
80. Gerhard Gräfe to Georg Plötner, main office for political education, Berlin 16.5.1933, ibid. It seems that, on the other hand, Arthur Schnitzler’s famous “Jewish” novel, Der Weg ins Freie (The Road into the Open), was spared, probably because it was interpreted as carrying a Zionist message.
81. Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher 1933–1945, vol. 1, 1933–1941 (Berlin, 1995), pp. 31–43.
82. Jacob Boas, “German-Jewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933–1938,” LBIY 29 (1984): 3.
83. An earlier federative association of the organizations of Jewish communities (Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft der deutschen Landesverbände jüdischer Gemeinden) had been established as early as January 1932; it represented the Jews of Germany during the first months of the Nazi regime before being replaced by the Reichsvertretung.
84. Leo Baeck has remained to this day a target of sharp criticism for what has appeared to some as subservience to and even cooperation with the Nazis. Hannah Arendt referred to him as the “Führer” of German Jewry. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963), p. 105. Raul Hilberg has kept to his initially harsh evaluation; for him Baeck was both pompous and pathetic all along. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (New York, 1992), p. 108.
85. Paul Sauer, “Otto Hirsch (1885–1941), Director of the Reichsvertretung,” LBIY 32 (1987): 357.
86. For these quotations see Abraham Margalioth, “The Problem of the Rescue of German Jewry During the Years 1933–1939: The Reasons for the Delay in Their Emigration from the Third Reich,” in Yisrael Guttman and Ephraim Zuroff, eds., Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 249ff.
87. Abraham Margalioth, Between Rescue and Annihilation: Studies in the History of German Jewry 1932–1938 (Jerusalem, 1990), p. 5 (in Hebrew). See also Francis R. Nicosia, “Revisionist Zionism in Germany (II): Georg Kareski and the Staatszionistische Organization, 1933–1938,” LBIY 32 ([London] 1987) 231ff.
88. Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper: A History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1929–1939 (Philadelphia, 1974), p. 111.
89. The Free Association for the Interests of Orthodox Jewry to the Reich Chancellor, Frankfurt, October 4, 1933, Akten der Reichskanzlei, vol. 2, 12/9/33–27/8/34, pp. 884ff.
90. See Werner Rosenstock, “Exodus 1933–1939: A Survey of Jewish Emigration from Germany,” LBIY 1 ([London] 1956): 377, and particularly Herbert A. Strauss, “Jewish Emigration from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses (I),” LBIY 25: ([London] 1980): 326.
91. Ibid., p. 379.
92. Klaus Mann, The Turning Point: Thirty-five Years in This Century (1942; reprint, New York, 1985), p. 270.
93. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, pp. 99ff.
94. Hans Mommsen, “Der nationalsozialistische Staat und die Judenverfolgung vor 1938,” VfZ 1 (1962): 71–72.
95. For a detailed account of the Haavarah negotiations and agreement, see Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (London, 1985), pp. 29ff., and in particular p. 46. See also Nicosia’s updated article on the major themes of his book: “Ein nützlicher Feind: Zionismus im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1939,” VfZ 37, no. 3 (1989): 367ff.
96. Nicosia, “Ein nützlicher Feind,” p. 383.
97. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York, 1993), p. 30.
98. Nicosia, The Third Reich, p. 42.
99. Ibid.
100. Nicosia, “Ein nützlicher Feind,” p. 378. It is in the same spirit that Robert Weltsch, editor of the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau and possibly the best-known German Jewish journalist after 1933, wrote one of his most famous columns on April 4, 1933: “Trägt ihn mit Stolz, den gelben Fleck” (Wear the yellow badge with pride). In this memorably titled article, Weltsch argued that Nazism was offering a historic opportunity to reassert Jewish national identity. The Jews would regain the respect they had lost in assimilating, and they would launch their own national revival, as the Germans had. The Jews owed a debt of gratitude to the Nazis: Hitler had shown them the path to the recovery of their own identity. The column aroused immense enthusiasm among German Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists alike.
101. Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 19.
102. Ibid., p. 18.
103. Margalioth, “The Problem of the Rescue,” p. 94.
104. Ibid., p. 95.
105. Quoted in Jost Hermand, “‘Bürger zweier Welten?’ Arnold Zweigs Einstellung zur deutschen Kultur,” in Julius Schoeps, ed., Juden als Träger bürgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland (Bonn, 1989), p. 81.
106. Quoted in Robert Weltsch, “Vorbemerkung zur zweiten Ausgabe” (1959) in Siegmund Kaznelson, ed., Juden im Deutschen Kulturbereich: Ein Sammelwerk (Berlin, 1962), pp. xvff.
107. The number is taken from Eike Geisel’s essay on the history of the Kulturbund, “Premiere und Pogrom,” in Eike Geisel and Heinrich M. Broder, eds., Premiere und Pogrom: Der Jüdische Kulturbund 1933–1941 (Berlin, 1992), p. 9.
108. Steinweis, “Hans Hinkel,” p. 215.
109. Geisel, “Premiere und Pogrom,” pp. 10ff.
110. Ibid., p. 12.
111. Dahm, “Anfänge und Ideologie,” p. 114.
112. Ibid., p. 115. For details about the forbidding of Schiller and Goethe, see Jacob Boas, “Germany or Diaspora? German Jewry’s Shifting Perceptions in the Nazi Era (1933–1938)” LBIY 27 (1982): 115 n 32. In his personal memoir about the epoch, Jakob Ball-Kaduri suggests that at the outset Hinkel was keen on developing the Kulturbund because of his ambivalent relation to Jewish matters and because the growth of the Kulturbund meant the growth of the domain that he was in charge of. Ball-Kaduri, Das Leben der Juden in Deutschland im Jahre 1933, p. 151. Such “ambivalence” appears rather as mere ambition on the part of a dedicated anti-Semitic activist.
113. Levi, Music in the Third Reich, pp. 51–52.
114. Ibid., pp. 33, 247.
115. Wulf, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich, p. 102.
116. Dahm, “Anfänge und Ideologie,” p. 104.
117. Kurt Duwell, “Jewish Cultural Centers in Nazi Germany: Expectations and Accomplishments,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, N.H., 1985), p. 298.
118. Sir Horace Rumbold to Sir John Simon, May 11, 1933, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Second Series, vol. 5:1933, London, 1956, pp. 233–5.
119. The Consul General at Berlin to the Secretary of State, November 1, 1933, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1933, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1948), p. 362. (italics added.)
120. Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler, part 1, vol. 1, p. 631.
121. Schacht’s position was solely motivated by immediate economic goals. Otherwise he favored the “limitation of Jewish influence” in German economic life, and on several occasions he did not hesitate to make blatantly anti-Semitic speeches. In other words, Schacht fully expressed the conservative brand of anti-Semitism, and when faced with the regime’s ever more radical anti-Jewish measures, he toed the line like all the Nazis’ conservative allies. See in particular Albert Fischer, Hjalmar Schacht und Deutschlands “Judenfrage,” (Bonn, 1995), mainly pp. 126ff. One of Schacht’s most outspoken anti-Semitic speeches was his “Luther speech” of November 8, 1933. The journalist and socialite Bella Fromm, who was Jewish, was in the audience and commented in her diary: “The intimate friend of Berlin Jewish society [Schacht] did not skip a single one of Martin Luther’s manifold anti-Semitic remarks…
. Certainly Jew-baiting is a legal affair since February 1, 1933. But there is no excuse for Schacht’s infamy. Schacht has not always been prosperous. Everything he has he owes to friends who are no National Socialists. Bella Fromm, Blood and Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary (London, 1943; reprint, New York, 1990), p. 136.
122. Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler, part 1, vol. 1, p. 675.
123. Ibid., p. 677.
124. Noakes, “The Development of Nazi Policy Towards the German-Jewish ‘Mischlinge,’” p. 303.
125. Reichsstatthalterkonferenz, 28.9.1933, Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler, Part 1, vol. 2, p. 865.
126. Adolf Hitler, “Die deutsche Kunst als stolzeste Verteidigung des deutschen Volkes,” Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 4, no. 34 (Oct. 1933), p. 437.
127. Quoted in Wolfgang Michalka, ed., Das Dritte Reich, vol. 1 (Munich, 1985), p. 137.
128. The “religious” dimension of Nazism, in terms both of its beliefs and its rituals, had already been noted by numerous contemporary observers; some blatant uses of Christian liturgy drew protests, mainly from the Catholic Church. The concept of “political religion” in its application to Nazism (and often to Communism as well), as a sacralization of politics and a politicization of religious themes and frameworks, was first systematically presented in Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (Stockholm, 1939). After the war the theme was taken up in Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements, 2nd ed. (New York, 1961). The political-religious dimension of Nazi ideological themes and rituals was also analyzed in Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen, 1971). During the seventies Uriel Tal further developed the analysis of Nazism as a political religion, mainly in his article “On Structures of Political Ideology and Myth in Germany Prior to the Holocaust,” in Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds., The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York, 1981). Tal’s interpretation appears as a guiding theme in Leni Yahil’s The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (New York, 1990). See also the conclusion to Saul Friedländer, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historical Study of Nazi Policies Toward the Jews,” Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984).
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