Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution

by Saul Friedlander

  91. For a detailed reconstruction of the origins and spreading of the Protocols see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1967).

  92. The anti-Napoleon III pamphlet was entitled “Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel,” and composed in Brussels in 1864 by a French liberal, Maurice Joly; the novel Biarritz, written in 1868 by the German Hermann Gödsche, alias John Ratcliff, described the secret meeting of the heads of the Tribes of Israel in a Prague cemetery to plot Jewish domination of the world.

  93. See Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, p. 138. For new details and nuances regarding the historical context of the Protocols, see Richard S. Levy’s Introduction to Binjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, trans. and ed. Richard S. Levy (Lincoln, Neb., 1995). Segel’s study was originally pubished in Berlin in 1926.

  94. The Protocols and the World Revolution including a Translation and Analysis of the “Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdom” (Boston, 1920), p. 144.

  95. Ibid., pp. 144–48 (the passage quoted is on pp. 147–48).

  96. Quoted in Georg Franz-Willing, Die Hitler-Bewegung, vol. 1, Der Ursprung 1919–1922 (Hamburg, 1962), p. 150.

  97. Anything relating to the psychological, intellectual, and ideological development of “Hitler before Hitler” and, therefore, to the origins of his anti-Semitic obsession is entirely hypothetical. Were the ministrations—and particularly his morphine injections during the terminal illness of Hitler’s mother—of the Jewish physician Eduard Bloch at the source of the future dictator’s identification of the Jew with mortal penetration of the motherly body of the nation and the race? Did the theories of the pan-German history teacher, Leopold Pötsch, at the Realschule in Linz have any intellectual impact? Undoubtedly, early elements of Hitler’s worldview stem from his sojourn in Vienna from 1908 to 1913; there he must have been influenced by Georg von Schönerer’s and Karl Lüger’s political campaigns. But how much further can we rely on his own declarations about this period or on the so-called recollections of his companions at the time, August Kubizek and Reinhold Hanisch?

  For excellent accounts of Hitler’s life before 1918 see in particular Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London, 1952); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (New York, 1974); as well as useful corrections regarding this period in Anton Joachimsthaler, Korrektur einer Biographie: Adolf Hitler, 1908–1920 (Munich, 1989). For a systematic correlation between any indices of Hitler’s early anti-Semitism and his later anti-Jewish worldview and policies, see Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the “Final Solution” (Berkeley, Calif., 1984).

  98. Adolf Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, ed. Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 128.

  99. For the first complete publication of the text of the speech, with a detailed critical commentary, see Reginald H. Phelps, “Hitlers ‘Grundlegende’ Rede über den Antisemitismus,” VfZ 16, no. 4 (1968): 390ff.

  100. Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, p. 199.

  101. Ibid., p. 202.

  102. Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s Worldview: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 52ff.

  103. Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations 1941–1944, ed. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper (New York, 1972), p. 178.

  104. Shaul Esh, “Eine neue literarische Quelle Hitlers? Eine methodologische Überlegung,” Geschichte und Unterricht, 15 (1964), pp. 487ff.; Margarete Plewnia, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler: Der “völkische” Publizist Dietrich Eckart (Bremen, 1970), pp. 108–9.

  105. Ernst Nolte, “Eine frühe Quelle zu Hitlers Antisemitismus,” Historische Zeitschrift 192 (1961), particularly 604ff.

  106. Esh, “Eine neue literarische Quelle Hitlers?”

  107. Engelman, “Dietrich Eckart,” p. 236.

  108. Dietrich Eckart, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin. Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir (Munich, n.d. [1924]), p. 49.

  109. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 65.

  110. Ibid., p. 679.

  111. The most thorough presentation of Hitler’s ideology as a coherent intellectual system is to be found in Jäckel, Hitler’s Worldview, for the direct relation between the worldview and Nazi policy see in particular Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler in History (Hanover, N. H., 1984). This (“intentionalist”) position stands in opposition to the “functionalist” approach, which dismisses the systematic aspect of Hitler’s ideology and marginalizes or completely negates any direct causal relation between Hitler’s ideology and the policies of the Nazi regime. The most consistent exponent of the extreme functionalist position has been Hans Mommsen. With regard to Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies, see in particular Hans Mommsen, “The Realization of the Unthinkable.” For an excellent evaluation of these different approaches see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd ed. (London, 1993), mainly chaps. 4 and 5); specifically with regard to anti-Jewish policies see an evaluation of both positions in Friedländer, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination.”

  112. Among the many attempts to explain Hitler’s personality and particularly his anti-Jewish obsession in terms of psychopathology, mainly by using psychoanalytic concepts, see in particular Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans (New York, 1976); Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: A Biography of Adolf Hitler (New York, 1977). See also the wartime analysis published some thirty years later: Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (New York, 1972). The problems raised by psychobiographical inquiries have been debated at length; for an evaluation of some of the issues see Saul Friedländer, History and Psychoanalysis: An Inquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory (New York, 1978).

  113. Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Book (New York, 1961).

  114. Adolf Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, vol. 1, Die Wiedergründung der NSDAP: Februar 1925–Juni 1926, ed. Clemens Vollnhals (Munich, 1992), p. 208.

  115. Ibid., p. 421.

  116. Ibid., p. 195. “Even when he [the Jew] writes the truth, the truth is only meant as a way of lying…. A Jewish joke is known on that account: Two Jews are sitting together on a train…. One asks the other: So, Stern, where are you going? Why do you want to know? Well, I would like to know it—I am going to Posemuckel! It is not true, you are not going to Posemuckel. Yes, I am going to Posemuckel. So you are really going to Posemuckel and are also saying that you are going to Posemuckel—what a liar you are!” Hitler seems to have liked this joke so much that two years later he used it in another speech. See Adolf Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, vol. 2, Vom Weimarer Parteitag bis zur Reichstagswahl Juli 1926–Mai 1927, ed. Bärbel Dusik (Munich, 1992), p. 584.

  117. Hitler, Reden, Schriften, vol. 1, p. 297.

  118. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 105–6.

  119. The still missing volumes will cover the period June 1931–January 1933.

  120. Hitler, Reden, Schriften, vol. 2, part 2, August 1927–May 1928, pp. 699ff.

  121. Ibid., vol. 3, Zwischen den Reichstagswahlen Juli 1928–September 1930, ed. Bärbel Dusik and Klaus A. Lankheit, part 1: Juli 1928–Februar 1929 (Munich, 1994), p. 43.

  122. Ibid., vol. 4, Von der Reichstagswahl bis zur Reichspräsidentenwahl, Oktober 1930–März 1932, part 1, Oktober 1930–Juni 1931, ed. Constantin Goschler (Munich, 1994), pp. 421–30.

  123. Ibid., pp. 22–23.

  124. Article of Jan. 11, 1930 (Illustrierter Beobachter). This article and previous texts in the same vein are quoted in Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 476ff.

  125. Martin Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany (New York, 1987), p. 25. In his private conversations Hitler showed no restraint in his anti-Jewish fury. A telling illustration is to be found in the notes covering the years 1929–1932 and written down in 1946 by Otto Wagener, interim chief of staff of the SA and then head of the economic divisi
on of the party. Wagener remained a true believer even after the war, and thus it would have been in his interest to tone down Hitler’s remarks about the “Jewish question.” As they are—toned down or not—Wagener’s recollections reflect the same themes and the same unbounded hatred that we know from Hitler’s earlier speeches and texts. For Wagener’s text see the critical edition of his notes published by Henry A. Turner, Otto Wagener, Hitler aus nächster Nähe: Aufzeichnungen eines Vertrauten 1929–1932 (Frankfurt am Main), 1978. For the anti-Jewish tirades see in particular pp. 144ff. and 172ff.

  126. For the inner core of the Nazi leadership, anti-Semitism was an essential part of their worldview from very early on. This early anti-Semitism was particularly extreme in the case of Rosenberg, Streicher, Ley, Hess, and Darré. Himmler and Goebbels also became anti-Semites before joining the Nazi Party. (The notable exceptions were Göring and the brothers Strasser.) On this issue I do not share Michael Marrus’s evaluation regarding the absence of anti-Semitism among party leaders before 1925. See Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, N.H., 1987), pp. 11–12. for a discussion of the apocalyptic dimension of the anti-Jewish creed among the Nazi elite, see Erich Goldhagen, “Weltanschauung und Endlösung: Zum Antisemitismus der nationalsozialistischen Führungsschicht,” VfZ 24, no 4 (1976): 379ff. The marginal importance of anti-Semitism among the SA has been well documented by Theodor Abel. See the reworking and reinterpretation of Abel’s questionnaires in Peter Merkl, Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (Princeton, N.J., 1975). The same cannot be said, however, of the middle-class future members of the SD, who often belonged to extreme-right-wing anti-Semitic organizations from the early postwar years onward. See Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien.

  127. Russel Lemmons, Goebbels and “Der Angriff,” (Lexington, Ky., 1994), particularly pp. 111ff.

  128. Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels (Munich, 1990), p. 200.

  129. Ibid.

  130. In 1932 the Nazis launched a vicious anti-Semitic attack against the DNVP candidate for the presidency, Theodor Duesterberg (one of the two leaders of the right-wing veterans’ organization, the Stahlhelm), harping on the Jewish origins of his grandfather, a physician who had converted to Protestantism in 1818. For this entire episode see Volker R. Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm: Bund der Frontsoldaten 1918–1935 (Düsseldorf, 1966), pp. 239ff.

  131. Roland Flade, Die Würzburger Juden: Ihre Geschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Würzburg, 1987), p. 149.

  132. Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Hamburg, 1986), p. 346.

  133. Ibid., p. 329 ff.

  134. Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn., 1996).

  135. Heinrich-August Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich, 1993), p. 180.

  136. Henri Béraud, “Ce que j’ai vu à Berlin,” Le Journal, Oct. 1926. Quoted in Frédéric Monier, “Les Obsessions d’Henri Béraud,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire (Oct.-Dec. 1993): 67.

  137. On this whole affair see Erich Eyck, Geschichte der Weimarer Republik, vol. 1 (Erlenbach, 1962), pp. 433ff. (For some reason Eyck refers only to Julius Barmat.)

  138. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 316ff. See also Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933, p. 356.

  139. Ibid. For the Barmat and Sklarek scandals see also Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, pp. 141ff.

  140. See Maurer, “Die Juden in der Weimarer Republik,” in Dirk Blasius and Dan Diner, eds., Zerbrochene Geschichte: Leben und Selbstverständnis der Juden in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), p. 110.

  141. Knütter, Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke, pp. 174ff.

  142. For an analysis of the “Jewish problem” in the DDP see Bruce B. Frye, “The German Democratic Party and the ‘Jewish Problem’ in the Weimar Republic,” LBIY 21 ([London] 1976), pp. 143ff.

  143. Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933, p. 69.

  144. Frye, “The German Democratic Party,” pp. 145–47.

  145. Berghahn, Modern Germany, p. 284.

  146. Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988).

  147. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968).

  148. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York, 1978).

  149. The same minimization of the Jewish factor appears in Carl Schorske’s otherwise magnificent study of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980). For criticism on this issue see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, pp. 5ff.

  150. Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley, Calif., 1968), p. 28.

  151. Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting and Performance, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 301ff.

  152. Ibid., p. 302.

  153. Ibid., p. 304.

  154. Deak, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals, p. 28.

  155. Quoted in Anton Kaes, ed., Weimarer Republik: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur, 1918–1933 (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 537–39.

  156. Ibid., p. 539.

  157. Jakob Wassermann, Deutscher und Jude: Reden und Schriften 1904–1933 (Heidelberg, 1984), p. 156.

  158. Kaes, Weimarer Republik, p. 539.

  159. Marion Kaplan, “Sisterhood Under Siege: Feminism and Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1904–1938, in Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds. When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984), pp. 186–87.

  160. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, p. 80.

  161. Fest, Hitler, p. 355. On the unfolding of these events, see also Winkler, Weimar 1918–1933, pp. 508ff.

  162. Ibid., p. 513.

  163. Ibid., pp. 513–14.

  164. Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany, p. 126.

  Chapter 4 The New Ghetto

  1. Martin Broszat and Elke Fröhlich, Alltag und Widerstand: Bayern im Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1987), p. 434. All the details about Obermayer are taken from Broszat and Fröhlich’s presentation of the case.

  2. Ibid., pp. 450–52, 456ff.

  3. Ibid., p. 437.

  4. Ibid., pp. 443ff.

  5. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), p. 71.

  6. Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and the Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (London, 1981), p. 349.

  7. Ibid., p. 350.

  8. Ian Kershaw, “‘Working Towards the Führer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History 2, no. 2 (1993): 116.

  9. Bankier, “Hitler and the Policy-Making Process,” p. 9.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Walk, Das Sonderrecht, p. 117.

  12. Ibid., p. 153.

  13. Lilli Zapf, Die Tübinger Juden, 3rd. ed. (Tübingen, 1981), p. 150.

  14. Paul Sauer, ed., Dokumente über die Verfolgung der jüdischen Bürger in Baden-Württemberg durch das Nationalsozialistische Regime 1933–1945, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 50.

  15. Walk, Das Sonderrecht, p. 72. The Association of Jewish Frontline Soldiers had unsuccessfully turned to Hindenburg to have this exclusion rescinded. For the full text of the March 23, 1934, petition, see Ulrich Dunker, Der Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten, 1919–1938, (Düsseldorf, 1977), pp. 200ff.

  16. See, for instance, the petition from the chairman of the Association of National German Jews, Max Naumann, addressed to Hitler on March 23, 1935, and the declaration of the Association of Jewish Frontline Soldiers of the same date in Michaelis and Schraepler, Ursachen, vol. 11, pp. 159–62.

  17. Walk, Das Sonderrecht, p. 115.

  18. Ibid., p. 122 (ordinance of July 25, 1935). On various spects of the problem of the Mischlinge see mainly Noakes, “Wohin gehören die ‘Judenmischlinge’?
,” pp. 69ff.

  19. Communication T3/Att. Group to Adjutant’s Office of Chief of the Army Command, 22.5.1934, Reichswehrministerium, Chef der Heeresleitung, microfilm MA–260, IfZ, Munich.

  20. Steinweis, Art, Ideology and Economics in Nazi Germany, pp. 108ff.

  21. Ibid., p. 111. In fact, a few Jews still remained members of the various chambers, and it was only in 1939 that the exclusion became total. Ibid.

  22. Ludwig Holländer, Deutsch-jüdische Probleme der Gegenwart: eine Auseinandersetzung über die Grundfragen des Zentralvereins deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, Berlin, 1929, p. 18. Quoted in R. L. Pierson, German Jewish Identity in the Weimar Republic (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1972), p. 63.

  23. Kurt Loewenstein, “Die innerjüdische Reaktion auf die Krise der deutschen Demokratie” in Mosse, Entscheidungsjahr 1932, p. 386.

  24. George L. Mosse, “The Influence of the Völkisch Idea on German Jewry,” in Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York, 1970), pp. 77ff.

  25. R. L. Pierson is quoting from an essay by Wilhelm Hanauer, “Die Mischehe,” Jüdisches Jahrbuch für Gross Berlin, 1929, p. 37.

  26. Noakes, “Wohin gehören die ‘Judenmischlinge’?,” p. 70.

  27. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p. 151.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid., pp. 78–79.

  30. Ibid., p. 79.

  31. Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 91.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Ibid., p. 92.

  34. Ibid., p. 93.

  35. Ibid., p. 94.

  36. Ibid., p. 95.

  37. Chronik der Stadt Stuttgart, p. 225.

  38. Robert Thévoz, Hans Branig, and Cécile Löwenthal-Hensel, eds., Pommern 1934/1935 im Spiegel von Gestapo-Lageberichten und Sachakten, vol. 2, Quellen (Cologne, 1974), p. 118.

  39. Werner T. Angress, “Die ‘Judenfrage’ im Spiegel amtlicher Berichte 1935,” in Ursula Büttner et al., Das Unrechtsregime, vol. 2, p. 34.

  40. For an excellent discussion of various anti-Semitic fantasies regarding the Jewish body, see Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York, 1991).