Despite this allusion to pre-war decay, Hitler’s anti-Semitism seems to have grown markedly during and after the war; it was only retrospectively that he denounced Vienna as ‘the incarnation of the desecration of the blood’ (Blutschande), ‘with its repulsive racial mix of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croatians’ and ‘Jews and more Jews’. Here and in later statements, Hitler struck a pseudo-moralistic tone of revulsion at Jewish sexuality, portraying the individual Aryan ‘victim’ of Blutschande as essentially passive in the absence of an aggressive ‘folk-community’. The relatively open Weimar debates on questions such as abortion, homosexuality, prostitution and venereal disease struck Hitler as further proof of the ‘total capitulation’ of ‘those who guide the nation and the state’ to the ‘Jewification of the spiritual life and mammonization of the mating instinct’. These would ‘sooner or later destroy all our descendants’ if no remedial action was taken.
The key point is that when Hitler accused the Jews of aiming to ‘pollute the blood’ of the Aryan race, he had in mind precisely the upsurge in mixed marriages that had characterized the 1920s. Nor was he alone in thinking this way. One of the best-selling books of the decade was Arthur Dinter’s Sin Against the Blood (1918), which tells the story of a young woman whose ‘blood’ has been fatally polluted because her father, a press baron with a sinister interest in women’s magazines, is a Jew. Her German fiancé Hermann Kämpfer comes to realize the indelible nature of this ‘curse’ when their unmistakably Jewish sons are born. (The first is described as a ‘dark-skinned…scarcely human something…[with] deep, dark eyes… under long dark eyelashes… [and] a squashed flat nose like an ape’s’.) When Hermann later marries a more authentically Nordic Frau, the same thing happens – simply because his new wife had once slept with a Jew! These experiences are Hermann’s punishment for ‘sinning against the holy blood of his race’. But they awaken him to a shocking truth:
The German Volk was being systematically corrupted and poisoned!… If the German Volk does not succeed in shaking off and rendering harmless the Jewish vampire that it is unwittingly allowing to batten on the blood of its heart… it will come to grief in the foreseeable future.
Within a year of publication, Dinter’s book had gone through twenty-eight printings and sold 120,000 copies. By 1929 a quarter of a million copies had been printed.
Dinter was only one of many post-war writers to write in these terms. Otto Kernholt’s From the Ghetto to Power (1921) warned at length about mixed marriages as a strategy aimed at enfeebling the German race. The same preoccupation manifested itself in the nationalist press. In the hope of incriminating Jewish students, anti-Semitic agents provocateurs at Frankfurt University were alleged to have scrawled on the walls such graffiti as: ‘Yesterday this horny Jew raped a little blonde girl’. Another frequent accusation, dating back to the 1890s and beyond, was that Jews were involved in the white slave trade. Everything – even the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy – could be explained in terms of sexual relations between Jews and Gentiles. Debate raged as to the effects of intermarriage. Were such marriages more or less fruitful than endogamous marriages? What would be the effect on the ‘racial health’ of the German Volk if mixed marriages were not banned?
The attacks on mixed marriages need to be seen in the wider context of Weimar sexuality. Because of its identification with the campaign to relax the laws against homosexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science presented an obvious target for Nazi attacks on ‘Jewish morality’. As the newspaper Völkische Beobachter put it, ‘Jews are forever trying to propagandize sexual relations between siblings, men and animals, and men and men.’ It was also possible to draw tendentious political inferences from the crimes of Lustmörder (rapist-murderers) like Fritz Haarmann, Wilhelm Grossmann, Karl Denke and Peter Kürten, ‘the Düsseldorf vampire’. (It did not help matters that the serial killer in Fritz Lang’s M was played by a Jewish actor, Peter Lorre.) Interracial sex was in the news in the 1920s. There were bitter controversies about the role of Ostjuden as either pimps or prostitutes in what would now be called the sex industry. Following the deployment in the French-occupied Rhineland of colonial troops from Senegal, Morocco and elsewhere, there was a vehement press campaign against the so-called Black Disgrace (schwarze Schmach). Semi-pornographic postcards and cartoons were published showing grotesque Negroes menacing half-dressed white women. ‘Shall we silently accept’, demanded one Dr Rosenberger in a typical contribution to the campaign, ‘that in future instead of the beautiful songs of white, pretty, well-formed, intellectually developed, lively, healthy Germans, we will hear the raucous noise of horrific, broad skulled, flat nosed, ungainly, half-human, syphilitic half-castes on the banks of the Rhine?’ The fact that there genuinely were around 500 ‘Rhineland bastards’ confirms that miscegenation was no imaginary construct. That the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior could recommend as early as 1927 that these children be sterilized also illustrates that the desire to circumscribe the rights of ‘racial aliens’ (Volksfremde) predated Hitler’s accession to power. Hitler too complained about ‘the Negroes [in] the Rhineland’ and the ‘necessarily resulting bastardization’, but characteristically represented this as merely an aspect of a wider Jewish conspiracy to ‘poison the blood’ of the German Volk.
Along with most of his most senior henchmen, Hitler seems genuinely to have believed that Jews posed an insidious biological threat to the German Volk. Yet it is impossible to overlook an element of self-repression in much Nazi propaganda on this issue; those most publicly averse to the idea of interracial sex often gave the unintended impression that this was precisely the direction of their own private fantasies. As a young man, Goebbels became engaged to Else Janke, an elementary school teacher who was half-Jewish. She helped him to find a job at the Dresder Bank during the 1923 hyperinflation, but was reluctant to marry him, possibly because of his club foot. Shortly after she told him that her mother was Jewish, Goebbels noted that ‘the original magic was gone’. ‘The discussion recently about the race question kept ringing in my ears,’ she wrote to him after a quarrel. ‘I could not get it out of my mind, and almost saw the problem as an obstacle to our further life together. I am firmly convinced, you see, that in this respect your thinking goes decidedly too far.’ It was at this time that the future Propaganda Minister first read Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, where he found ‘the root of the Jewish question … laid bare’. Goebbels’s first references in his diary to the Jews as ‘filthy pigs’, ‘traitors’ and ‘vampires’ date from the breakdown of his relationship with Janke. Even the young Heinrich Himmler could acknowledge the appeal of a Jewish woman. No one – not even Hitler – was more obsessed with the sexual aspects of race: in 1924, for example, he described in his diary his Nordic archetype’s ‘shining skin flushed with blood, blond hair, clear conquering eyes [and] the perfect movements of a perfect body’. This was ‘the ideal picture’ of racially pure womanhood ‘which we Germans dream of in youth and as men are prepared to die for’. But when he met a Jewish dancer named Inge Barco in a Munich café in July 1922, Himmler was evidently attracted, insisting she had ‘absolutely nothing of the Jew in her manner, at least so far as I can judge’. There are other examples too: for example, Ludwig Clauss, an expert on racial ‘psyches’ much in demand in the Third Reich, who had an affair with his Jewish assistant Margarethe Landé.
Once in power, the Nazis made miscegenation a recurrent theme of their propaganda. Press attacks on Jewish doctors were based on their allegedly lecherous ‘attitude’ towards ‘Germanwomen’. The theme that the Jews sought to ‘pollute’ Aryan blood through sexual contact recurs time and again in Nazi propaganda. It is there, for example, in Kurt Plischke’s The Jew as Racial Polluter, which called for the public naming and shaming of German women who ‘secretly or openly go with Jews’, and in Gerhard Kittel’s Historical Preconditions of Jewish Racial Mixing, which accused the Jews of having tried to turn Germany into a ‘r
acial mishmash’. The message was spelt out with a crudely pornographic undertone in a story entitled ‘What Happened to Inge at the Jewish Doctor’s’, published in Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer:
Inge sits in the Jew doctor’s reception room. She has to wait a long time. She looks through the magazines on the table. But she is much too nervous even to read a few sentences. Again and again she remembers her talk with her mother. And again and again her mind dwells on the warnings of her BDM [League of German Girls] leader: ‘A German must not consult a Jew doctor! And particularly not a German girl! Many a girl who has gone to a Jew doctor to be cured has found disease and disgrace!’…
The door opens. Inge looks up. There stands the Jew. She screams. She’s so frightened she drops the magazines. She jumps up in terror. Her eyes stare into the Jewish doctor’s face. His face is the face of a devil. In the middle of this devil’s face is a huge crooked nose. Behind the spectacles two criminal eyes. And the thick lips are grinning. A grin that says: ‘Now I’ve got you at last, little German girl!’
There are similar themes in the two historical films made in 1940 to coincide with the release of the anti-Semitic documentary Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), a vicious caricature of East European Jews as insalubrious degenerates. In Jud-Süss, the ‘court Jew’ Süss-Oppenheimer rapes Dorothea Sturm (played by Kristine Söderbaum), who then commits suicide. Similarly, in Die Rothschilds, the Jewish banker Nathan Rothschild is portrayed as lusting after the heroine, the wife of Rothschild’s ‘Aryan’ rival Turner. In exhibitions, too, the sexual leitmotif was employed. The Frankfurt Anti-Jewish Exhibition of November 1940 illustrated ‘the rapacity, the uncontrolled sexuality, and the parasitic nature of the Jews’ with a newspaper cutting describing how the ‘Jew Klein from Vegesack near Bremen was seen to have sexual intercourse with [his] Aryan maidservant’. Another illuminating example is Friedrich Ekkehard’s novel Sturmgeschlecht [Storm Generation]: Zweimal 9. November (1941), which portrays a Freikorps troop falling into a trap laid for them by a ‘stunningly beautiful’ Jewish-Bolshevik femme fatale. Here, as in so much Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, the erotic if not pornographic undertone is unmistakable.
PROTECTING THE BLOOD
The first concrete measures against the Jews taken by the Nazis were concerned with economics rather than miscegenation. There was a brief boycott of Jewish businesses and shops – brief because of the domestic disorder and international outrage it threatened to unleash. In April 1933, under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, all Jewish civil servants, including judges, were removed from office, followed a month later by university lecturers. Victor Klemperer was to be among the victims of this later purge, an experience he pondered in his diary:
March 10, 1933… It is astounding how easily everything collapses… wild prohibitions and acts of violence. And with it, on streets and radio, never-ending propaganda. On Saturday… I heard a part of Hitler’s speech in Kö nigsberg… I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling, of a priest… How long will I retain my professorship?
In fact, Klemperer managed to hang on to his chair for another two years. On May 2, 1935, however, the blow fell:
On Tuesday morning, without any previous notification – two sheets delivered by post. ‘On the basis of para 6 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service I have… recommended your dismissal’… At first I felt alternately dumb and slightly romantic; now there is only bitterness and wretchedness.
Five months later, to add insult to injury, he was barred from the university library reading room ‘as a non-Aryan’. What followed was a kind of whittling away of his rights as a citizen. The authorities successively confiscated his sabre – a souvenir of his military service – his typewriter, his driving licence and finally his car. He was banned from public parks. He was banned from smoking. Segregation took myriad forms: Jews were barred from swimming baths and specified park benches. Much more problematic, however, was what to do about Klemperer’s marriage to an Aryan woman.
Although Alfred Rosenberg and the lawyer Roland Freisler had expressed support for a legal ban on sexual relations between Jews and Aryans, in July 1934 the Supreme Court had refused to annul the marriage of an Aryan petitioner who had married a Jew in 1930 and who now wanted a divorce on racial grounds. The following year, however, supposedly spontaneous actions by party activists – including the public humiliation of women accused of sleeping with Jews – as well as police reports about Jewish employers molesting their Aryan female employees provided the government with a cue for action. In July 1935 the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick issued a circular to registrars informing them that ‘the question of marriage between Aryans and Non-Aryans’ would soon be ‘regulated… through a general law’ and that until then all mixed marriages between ‘full Aryans’ and ‘full Jews’ should be postponed. In the same month, the head of the SS Sicherheitsdienst, Reinhard Heydrich, demanded ‘that in view of the disturbance among the population by the racial miscegenation of German women… the prevention of mixed marriages [should] be legally fixed but also extramarital sexual relations between Aryans and Jews should be punished’. At a rally in Berlin in August 1935 a giant banner proclaimed: ‘The Jews are our Misfortune. Women and Girls, the Jews are Your Ruin’. All this points to an orchestrated campaign instigated from above. The crucial legislation was duly drafted before or during the September 1935 Nuremberg party rally, following a call by the Reich Doctors’ leader Gerhard Wagner for action to prevent further ‘bastardization’ of the German people. In addition to laws stripping Jews of their citizenship and prohibiting them from raising the Nazi flag, a Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour was drafted which banned not only ‘marriages between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood’, but also extramarital sexual relations between them. Jews were also forbidden ‘to employ female citizens of German or kindred blood under 45 years of age as domestic servants’ – the implication being that Jewish masters habitually indulged in sexual abuse of their maids. The penalties for these new crimes of Rassenschande (racial defilement) included imprisonment and hard labour.
The new legislation was implemented with some zeal: altogether between 1935 and 1939 there were 1,670 prosecutions for alleged racial defilement. Roughly half of all cases arose in three cities: Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg. In Hamburg between 1936 and 1943 a total of 429 men were prosecuted, of whom 270 were Jews; altogether 391 of those accused were convicted and jailed. Overall, around 90 per cent of those charged were found guilty. At first (as the Gestapo complained), their sentences were relatively lenient, ranging from six weeks to one and a half years, but that soon changed. Half of all those sentenced in Hamburg received between two and four years, and some received six years. A typical case was that of a Jewish man who was found guilty of continuing a long-standing relationship with an Aryan woman. He was sentenced to two and a half years’ penal servitude. Elsewhere, the courts went well beyond the letter of the law. In Frankfurt a fifty-six-year-old Jewish teacher was sentenced to ten months in prison for ‘molesting’ two Aryan women in a department store; it is not clear from the record whether he so much as laid a finger on them. To encourage such broad interpretations, but also to avoid ‘confront[ing] the courts with almost insuperable difficulties of proof and… necessitating] the discussion of the most embarrassing questions’, the Reich Supreme Court ruled that with respect to the Nuremberg Laws ‘the concept of sexual intercourse… includes all natural and unnatural intercourse, i.e., a part from intercourse itself, all sexual activities with a member of the opposite sex which are intended in place of actual intercourse to satisfy the sexual urges of at least one of the partners’.
The significance of the ‘racial defilement’ trials is twofold. They reveal the way that German lawyers and judges were willing to transform the crude prejudices of the Nazi leadership into a sophisticated system of discrimination and humiliation. But they also reveal how
ordinary people instrumentalized anti-Semitic legislation for their own purposes. For the most important point to note about the prosecutions for ‘racial defilement’ is how most of them originated – not as the result of Gestapo investigations, but as the result of denunciations by members of the public.
Nazi Germany was a police state, increasingly under the control of Himmler and his henchman Heydrich,* but it was an understaffed one. The twenty-two Gestapo officials in Würzburg, for example, were responsible for the entire population of Lower Franconia, which numbered more than 840,000 in 1939. The town of Krefeld was more closely supervised; around 170,000 people lived there, under the watchful eye of between twelve and fourteen Gestapo officers. In both towns, the Gestapo had to rely heavily on local people for tip-offs about breaches of the law. The surviving police files reveal that these were not in short supply. Of the eighty-four cases of ‘racial defilement’ investigated in Würzburg between 1933 and 1945, forty-five – more than half – originated with a denunciation from a member of the public. The character of these denunciations sheds vital light on popular attitudes towards the ‘Jewish Question’. A Jewish man and an Aryan woman were arrested because the woman’s estranged husband alleged they were having a sexual relationship; their accuser’s main motive seems to have been to get rid of his wife, but her alleged lover committed suicide in custody. An apparently mixed couple having a drink together were reported to the Gestapo because the man was blond-haired (both parties were in fact Jewish, so no charge could be pressed). In Krefeld the Gestapo were able to be more active: the proportion of cases involving Jews rose sharply from less than 10 per cent before 1936 to around 30 thereafter. Of these cases, some 16 per cent were decided by the courts; in over two-fifths of cases, however, the Gestapo sent the individuals concerned to concentration camps or imposed ‘protective custody’. Yet even in Krefeld more than two-fifths of the cases brought against Jews before the war were initiated by denunciations, a much higher proportion than for other cases, suggesting that denunciation was disproportionately directed against Jews.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 34