Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Hitler took the occasion of the outbreak of the Spanish civil war to remind the nation of the continuing threat of Soviet Bolshevism. Germany supported General Francisco Franco in Spain, while the Soviets took the side of Republicans. At the Nuremberg Party rally on September 9, 1936, Hitler spoke about the Soviet “wire-pullers” and said he was going to make Germany as secure against an attack from the outside as he had made it secure within.68

  He also announced a four-year plan to prepare for war. He derided the Soviets, who were at the time putting enormous efforts into building a subway system. He said that in the time it took them to build eleven kilometers of subway, Germany built seven thousand kilometers of the autobahn. He scoffed that the Communists could not feed the people, even though Soviet lands were blessed with vast natural resources. The anti-Communist majority in Germany liked to see Hitler running down Stalin.69

  Behind Hitler’s words there was the threat of action. Having evaluated the international situation, he began to press on with his plans. On March 12, 1938, he ordered troops into Austria and brought that country “home into the Reich.” Britain, France, and the League of Nations reacted as they had to all previous violations of the Versailles Treaty: they did nothing more than raise a timid protest. The German Socialist underground was doubly disappointed. “It is unfortunately true,” they wrote, “that the German people lean toward the use of force. It is also true that the victor-powers of the First World War do everything possible to strengthen their belief in the use of force.”70

  A plebiscite was held on April 10 to give Germans and Austrians an opportunity to express themselves. Ninety-nine percent of Germans and Austrians were in favor of the “reincorporation.” The Socialists conceded that the event had “raised and strengthened” Hitler’s regime. Even Hitler’s former left-wing enemies were pleased. The oppositional Socialist report added, “The national high mood that is registered from Germany is real [echt].”71 For many Hitler had become “the statesman who completed Bismarck’s work.”72 That was the highest compliment good citizens could bestow.

  This was not the last of Hitler’s bloodless conquests. By September 1938 his demands to “protect” Germans in the Sudetenland—that is, in western Czechoslovakia—had brought Europe to the brink of war. However, Britain and France carried their appeasement policies to the Munich conference held on September 29–30, where they agreed to Hitler’s demands and ceded the territory.

  The German people did not want war, and their joy was all the greater when Hitler pulled off the miracle. The Socialists reported that many of their comrades were depressed. With every victory, Hitler dampened worries and created the impression he could demand what he wanted and get it without war. With resignation and despair the Socialists observed that the people had begun to think he was infallible.73

  German nationalism, which had suffered one setback after another since 1918, underwent a renaissance. Hitler’s status rose into the stratosphere. His charisma was self-evident, and he basked in glory, even in parts of the country known to be reserved about him on his rise to power.

  The dreadful irony was that Britain and France, which had done next to nothing to help the democratic Weimar Republic, now made Hitler look like a genius. By the spring of 1939 the identification with him existed “over broad segments of society.”74

  20

  PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS IN THE PREWAR YEARS

  Long before Hitler came to power, Jewish leaders had worried that their community was fading away through conversion or intermarriage. On Hitler’s appointment, just over a half million “believing Jews” lived in Germany, less than 1 percent of the population. Hitler represented a much more immediate threat, because he had sworn for years that there was no place for Jews in the country.

  The new chancellor said relatively little in public about the Jews in 1933 and 1934. He would not, at least in the beginning, pursue ideology if it cost jobs and would lose support, so anti-Semitism was not emphasized.

  Nevertheless, after the March 1933 elections, the Party and SA boycotted or damaged some Jewish shops and businesses, and occasionally assaulted Jews openly.1 Hitler had fanned the flames for so long that he could hardly disavow the radicals, but the attacks did not sit well with most citizens. The American Jewish Congress threatened a worldwide boycott of German goods, and that warning gave Hitler even more pause. On March 26 he spoke with Goebbels, and they decided on a “nonviolent” boycott of Jewish businesses. The move would send a signal to the international Jewish community, and in Germany it would channel the illegal and unpopular “excesses” of the SA in a semi-legal direction.2

  BOYCOTT OF THE JEWS

  On March 30, the cabinet met and for the first time made decisions on the basis of the Enabling Law. Hitler talked about “defensive measures” to be introduced shortly against “Jewish atrocity propaganda abroad.” He said these steps had to be organized by the regime; if they came “from the people,” they might take on “undesired forms.” The ominous note came at the end of his brief statement: “The Jews have to recognize that a Jewish war against Germany will hit the Jews in Germany with all sharpness.”3

  The boycott on April 1 had ripple effects even in Berlin’s high court, the Kammergericht. Young Sebastian Haffner, training to become a lawyer, recalled the dignified setting, the black gowns and serious people going about their jobs. He was in the library, which “was full of extreme silence, a silence filled with the high tension of deeply concentrated work…. No breath came in from the outside world; here there was no revolution.”

  An uncustomary disturbance then intruded, doors were banged, jackboots heard in the hall, orders given. The silence in the library was broken when one of the lawyers whispered, “SA.” Another voice said, “They’re throwing out the Jews.” In response a few people giggled. “At that moment,” Haffner recalled, “this laughter alarmed me more than what was actually happening. With a start I realized that there were Nazis working in this room. How strange.” Someone from the court soon said it might be advisable for “the Jewish gentlemen to leave.”

  The dramatic moment came when the door of the library burst open and men in brown uniforms filled the room. They told “non-Aryans” to get out. Haffner wondered what to do, when one of the Nazis came to him and barked: “Are you Aryan?” Without thinking, Haffner blurted out immediately: “Yes!” His answer was correct, but he never forgave himself for saying it. As he wrote later: “I had failed my first test. I could have slapped myself.”4

  The boycott of the Jews reverberated through German society. The new regime was clearly intent on pursuing Hitler’s anti-Semitic aims.

  Nevertheless, the immediate priority was curing unemployment, and compromises had to be made. Thus, the department stores—almost all of them in Germany owned by Jewish merchants—were allowed to stay in business. Hitler had promised to get rid of them, but he could not do so if it would cost jobs. In mid-1933, he assented to a loan for the Tietz group, a large Jewish store chain. The government did not want to risk fourteen thousand jobs and helped to bail out the company. Behind the scenes, however, the pressure against the owners persisted, and within a year Georg and Martin Tietz were forced to sell. It was one of the first major cases of “Aryanization,” a process of taking over Jewish-owned firms introduced gradually until November 1938, when it became sweeping.5

  Germany did not have a pogrom on April 1, or anything approaching it, but there were reports of violence and arrests, and several Jews were murdered.

  The great majority of citizens were opposed or indifferent to the boycott. Some made a point of shopping at Jewish stores. The Nazis themselves considered the boycott a failure.6 Germans did not show the anti-Semitic zeal of their leaders, and the cabinet called it off.7

  Jews were not social outsiders when Hitler came to power. They had opportunities to be professors, judges, and politicians that would have been unthinkable at the time in many parts of the United States. German Jews were also patriotic and generally un
responsive to the early Zionist movement. The April boycott, though it failed, left even optimists in the Jewish community feeling under threat.

  On April 4, President Hindenburg made a plea to Hitler not to take any action against Jewish war veterans. Hitler’s response was the longest note he wrote on Jewish affairs. He said anti-Semitic policies were needed because “Germans” had been excluded from certain professions, like law and medicine, where Jews took up so many positions. He said the state was weakened by having a “foreign body”—the Jews—dominate the business world, and he reminded the president of the officer corps’ long-standing policies of not admitting Jews. Hitler agreed for the moment to hold off action against war veterans in the civil service and elsewhere.8

  The April 7 Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service contained an “Aryan paragraph” that excluded most Jews. Millions were affected by the questionnaires and investigations that were part of the law. Subsequent purges took their cue from this law. Jewish professors were forced out, and Jewish students subjected to a “numbers” clause restricting admission. They were soon excluded from the arts, press, and free professions.

  “INDIVIDUAL ACTIONS” AND THE NUREMBERG LAWS

  After the boycott the Jews suffered a steady stream of “individual actions,” a code word of the day for violence and destruction of property. The vigilante-style assaults resulted in several cases of murder. Contrary to what we might assume about Hitler’s dictatorship, violence was not ordered from Berlin, but took place on local initiative.9

  If forcing Jews from the economy was generally popular, most Germans were reserved about violence and these “individual actions.”10Jews were torn about staying.11 They were particularly demoralized that some neighbors and acquaintances took it upon themselves to inform the Gestapo, the police, or the Party about Jews’ “undesired” if not yet expressly “illegal” behavior. People thought to be “friends of the Jews” were open to attack as well, with defamations painted on their front door that they were a “Jew Servant” or “People’s Traitor.”12

  The population in some places showed disdain for these denouncers. Nonetheless, in Berlin in June 1935 “race defilers” were marched through the streets by Party activists in civilian clothes. The Berlin Gestapo noted in August 1935 that 208 persons were reported for “race defilement.”13

  This was the “popular” background Hitler was looking for to introduce race laws. In Mein Kampf and in countless speeches he had said that “blood mixing” led to the decline of a nation. In September 1935, having directly or indirectly fostered anti-Semitism during the previous months, he announced new laws at the Party rally.14

  The Nuremberg Laws, or Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, outlawed new marriages between Jews and non-Jews; forbade extramarital sexual relations between them; made it illegal for Jews to employ non-Jewish women under forty-five as servants; and made it a crime for Jews to raise the German flag. Hitler asked that laws be prepared for him to sign. The definition of who was a Jew was vague. At the last minute, he considered a broad version of the law to apply to those of “mixed race” but backtracked when he sensed that the German public thought that too sweeping.15 Jews were shocked, as their legal status reverted to what it had been long before.

  The response to the laws ran the gamut. They were welcomed by some people who hoped for an end to violence. Others began to feel sorry for Jews, but some felt the laws did not go far enough.

  A Gestapo report for Berlin said Jews were now shut out of the “community of the people.” The new laws created a kind of invisible ghetto and opened the door to the denouncers to lay ever more charges, often for personal gain. The participation of ordinary citizens made the enforcement of the Nuremberg Laws possible.16

  FROM OLYMPIC BROTHERHOOD TO NEW ASSAULTS

  For 1936 Germany was awarded the Winter Olympics, held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (February 6–16), and the Summer Olympics, hosted by Berlin (August 1–16). The discriminatory measures, concentration camps, and secret police were all well known. American and British members of the International Olympic Committee tried to pressure German colleagues into letting Jewish athletes compete for their team. Led by the American Avery Brundage, however, the IOC rejected the boycott proposed by some of his countrymen against the 1936 Olympics. Late in 1935 the United States signed on, and other countries quickly followed suit.17

  Merely holding the games was a great victory for Hitler because they gave him a chance to show that things were not as bad in Germany as some said. (The IOC awarded the Winter Olympics to Germany for 1940 and to Italy for 1944. They were not held.) In 1936 the German government had the more obvious aspects of its racism cleaned up. Signs like “Jews Are Forbidden” posted at city or village gates were removed.

  One bewildered Jewish citizen of Berlin was asked by visitors from England and France, “What do you really want; why are you so against the regime? We were treated wonderfully here.”18 But the Olympics were hardly over when the inexorable pressure on the Jews began again, including violence against persons and property.

  On the fourth anniversary of his appointment, Hitler addressed the Reichstag. He spoke about what had happened since the “revolution of all revolutions” and was proud to report that surely “the greatest transformation in our nation was carried through with a minimum of victims and losses.” The Nazis struck only where “Bolshevik lust for murder still believed in victory or to be able to hinder the realization of National Socialism.”

  He alluded to the Four-Year Plan (announced in September 1936), to say how important it was to stop the “poison” of Communism. He claimed that if Germany had lost to that “barbarism,” the West would have been threatened. With satisfaction he noted that all cultural activities of the Jews had been ended and they had been removed from the press, theater, film, science, and other areas. Far from the ruination that had been predicted, he insisted that cultural life was blossoming as never before.19

  The verbal assault on Jews and Communists coincided with a new wave of anti-Semitism at the grass roots. One district official in Bavaria reported in February 1937: “Jews and Bolshevism are two inseparable concepts, and for that reason I do not want to see another Jew in my town.”20 The emphasis was on cajoling Jews into emigrating, but most accounts concluded that the process was going too slowly.

  In his closing speech to the Nuremberg Party rally on September 13, 1937, Hitler hurled virulent anti-Semitic charges. He saw the world in the midst of a great and all-encompassing insurrection “whose spiritual and technical preparation and leadership, without any doubt, comes from Jewish Bolshevism in Moscow.” This was no ordinary attack, for the world had seen nothing like it “since the rise of Christianity, the crusade of the Mohammedans or since the Reformation.” The aim was at the entire social order, including its culture, traditions, and very substance of the people. Hitler repeated his theory that the small Russian ruling class had been overthrown by Jews, who had created a “brutal dictatorship.” He purported to have statistics revealing that “over 80 percent of the leading positions” in the Soviet Union were held by Jews.

  “That means, therefore, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but the dictatorship of the [Jewish] race.” Once they had secured power there, they wanted to expand to the West: “The final aim is then a complete Bolshevik revolution.”

  He recounted seeing this struggle during the Munich republic in 1919. “They were all Jews!” he asserted. The same was true for Hungary at that time, and it was currently happening, he said, in Spain. That was why Germany was there to help General Franco. “We see in principle every further spread of Bolshevism in Europe as tipping the balance of power.” He was willing to deal with other European “cultural nations” like Britain or France, but when it came to the Soviet Union, that was the “Bolshevik plague,” “Jewish World-Bolshevism,” and “an absolute foreign body that makes not the smallest contribution to our economy or culture.”

  Hitler’s att
ack on the “Jewish-dominated” Soviet Union thirsted for blood. “The time,” he said with reference to Germany, “in which one could do whatever one pleased with a defenseless people” was over. Anyone hearing this several-hour-long tirade, which included threatening the USSR militarily, would have concluded that war was in the cards. That conflict would clearly also be against the Jews, as the two were so closely identified in Hitler’s mind.21

  The themes of anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism were played up in the press, but anti-Semitism was also linked to anti-Americanism. The Nazis highlighted the decay and degeneracy of American lifestyles, and Hitler grew convinced of the racial and social problems in the United States.22 Just before and into the war years, the anti-American speeches of leading Nazis played up anti-Jewish themes.23

  Not all German citizens accepted the anti-Semitism. There were numerous reports from many parts of the country, particularly in rural Catholic areas, where both spiritual and material assistance was offered Jews. On the other hand, it was also true that many religious leaders, and not just those in Germany, who had reservations about some aspects of the new regime, agreed with Hitler’s stance against atheistic Bolshevism.24