The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  Richard Frankel was fortunate to return from Osthofen alive. A year later, he and his son left for South Africa. None of their relatives who remained in Germany was to survive the war.17

  Those German Jews who, like Richard Frankel, were under pressure, left Germany: more than seventy-five thousand German Jews had emigrated or fled by the end of August 1935. Of these, several thousand were Jewish only according to Nazi concepts, and were known, in Nazi terminology, as ‘Christian non-Aryans’. It was the definition ‘non-Aryan’ that condemned them. In their own minds, and behaviour, they were Christians: baptized, Church-going, and believers in the divinity of Jesus.

  Of the seventy-five thousand Jewish refugees of 1933, 1934 and 1935, the largest single group, thirty thousand in all, had gone to Palestine. Nine thousand had gone to the United States. Several thousand had gone to Britain, others to South Africa, Canada and Australia. Many thousands more had found a haven in France, Holland and Belgium, in Austria, and in Czechoslovakia.

  Inside Germany, at least a quarter of the Jews who remained had been deprived of their professional livelihood by boycott, decree, or local pressure. More than ten thousand public health and social workers had been driven out of their posts, four thousand lawyers were without the right to practise, two thousand doctors had been expelled from hospitals and clinics, two thousand actors, singers and musicians had been driven from their orchestras, clubs and cafes. A further twelve hundred editors and journalists had been dismissed, as had eight hundred university professors and lecturers, and eight hundred elementary and secondary schoolteachers.18

  The search for Jews, and for converted Jews, to be driven out of their jobs was continuous. On 5 September 1935 the SS newspaper published the names of eight half-Jews and converted Jews, all of the Evangelical-Lutheran faith, who had been ‘dismissed without notice’ and deprived of any further opportunity ‘of acting as organists in Christian churches’. From these dismissals, the newspaper commented, ‘It can be seen that the Reich Chamber of Music is taking steps to protect the church from pernicious influence.’19

  For more than two and a half years, the Jews of Germany had faced terror, hostility and discrimination. Yet each act against them could be seen, by an optimist, if not as the last, then at least as the worst. Nasty, irrational and humiliating as it was, the dismissal of eight organists was not the end of the world. But ten days after this ‘minor’ episode, comprehensive new laws were announced which elevated random discrimination into a system: the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935.

  Two laws, both signed by Hitler personally, defined ‘Reich Citizenship’ and set out the rules for ‘the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’. Under the first law, Citizenship could only belong to ‘a national of German or kindred blood’.20 Under the second law, all Jews were defined as being not of German blood. Marriages between Jews and German ‘nationals’ were forbidden; all marriages conducted ‘in defiance of this law’ were invalid. Sexual relations outside marriage were forbidden between Jews and Germans. Jews were forbidden to fly the German flag.21

  Under the headline ‘The Shame of Nuremberg’, the New York Herald Tribune described the two laws as ‘a signal victory for the violent anti-Jewish wing of the Nazi Party, led by Julius Streicher’ and as the realization ‘of nearly the whole anti-Semitic portion of the Nazi programme’.22 In London, The Times declared: ‘Nothing like the complete disinheritance and segregation of Jewish citizens, now announced, has been heard since medieval times.’23

  The Nuremberg Laws made it clear that the Jews were to be allowed no further part in German life: no equality under the law; no further citizenship; no chance of slipping back into the mainstream of German life in which for several generations they had been an integral part, but from which, for two and a half years, they had been gradually cut off.

  Following Nuremberg, each move against the Jews could be made with the backing of legal segregation; and such moves began at once. Only a week after the Nuremberg Laws were announced, news reached the outside world that Jews had been forbidden access to any holiday resort in Bavaria.24

  On 6 October 1935 two Englishmen, Eric Mills, the Commissioner for Migration and Statistics in Palestine, and Frank Foley, Passport Control Officer in Berlin, met members of the German Economics Ministry in Berlin, to discuss the financial aspects of emigration of German Jews to Palestine. What they heard gave them an insight into the current mood and intentions. ‘German policy’, they wrote in their report to the Foreign Office in London, ‘is clearly to eliminate the Jew from German life, and the Nazis do not mind how this is accomplished. Mortality and emigration provide the means.’25

  ‘While before I went to Germany’, Mills wrote in a private letter after the meeting, ‘I knew that the Jewish situation was bad, I had not realized as I now do that the fate of German Jews is a tragedy, for which cold, intelligent planning by those in authority takes rank with that of those who are out of sympathy with the Bolshevik regime, in Russia; or with the elimination of Armenians from the Turkish Empire.’ Mills added: ‘The Jew is to be eliminated and the state has no regard for the manner of his elimination.’26

  4

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  After the Nuremberg Laws

  A month after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws on 15 September 1935, one German newspaper reported that the transfer of private Jewish businesses ‘into Aryan hands’ was proceeding ‘on a considerable scale’.1 As Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, explained in a speech at Saarbrucken on October 14, attention would also be given, in codifying the Laws, ‘to the imposition of legal restrictions on Jews taking part in trade and industry’.2

  The net of expropriation and punishment was cast more and more widely. In mid-October all Jewish cinema proprietors were ordered to sell their cinemas within two months, and all Jewish film producers lost their licences to operate. On October 20 several Western newspapers reported the case of a Jewish doctor, Hans Serelman, who had been sent to a concentration camp for seven months for having given a blood transfusion of his own blood to a non-Jew, in order to save the non-Jew’s life. The charge against him had been ‘race defilement’.3

  Not only in the press, but in every German school, these racial concepts were being taught from day to day. ‘It will be generations’, Bella Fromm wrote despondently in her diary on October 20, ‘before the Germans can find their way back to an ethical code of life. The evil Nazi doctrine, with its abject conceptions, is deeply planted in the minds of adults, youths, and children.’4

  Academic thesis writers promulgated the new doctrines. In 1936 Hans Puvogel, a twenty-five-year-old doctoral student in Saxony, successfully explained to his examiners that an individual’s worth to the community ‘is measured by his or her racial personality. Only a racially valuable person has a right to exist in the community. A racially inferior or harmful individual must be eliminated.’5

  The year 1936 saw outbreaks of anti-Jewish activity in several states beyond the borders of Germany. In Rumania, in the city of Timisoara, members of the Iron Guard organization attacked the audience at a Jewish theatre: a bomb was thrown, and two Jews were killed. Elsewhere in Rumania, anti-Jewish riots broke out, including in Kishinev, scene of one of the worst of the pogroms in Tsarist times, and in Bucharest, the Rumanian capital. In Lithuania, in an attempt to establish restrictions on the percentage of Jewish students, not a single Jewish medical student was given a place in the medical faculty of Kovno University.

  The Nazis had sent emissaries to several countries to explain the need for anti-Jewish legislation. On 4 February 1936, one of these emissaries, Wilhelm Gustloff, who was Hitler’s personal representative in Switzerland, was assassinated by a twenty-five-year-old Jewish medical student, David Frankfurter. Having shot Gustloff, Frankfurter went at once to the police, reported what he had done, and explained his motives. He wanted, he said, to draw world attention to the Nazi treatment of the Jews in Germany, which he had witnessed at first hand while a medical stu
dent there. Frankfurter, the son of a rabbi in a small community in Yugoslavia, was sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment.6

  Six days after Gustloff’s assassination, with the unification of the police and the SS, the Gestapo became the supreme police agency of Nazi Germany. Henceforth, the Gestapo could make arrests anywhere in Germany without reference to the courts of law.

  Several thousand German Jews had already fled to Poland. There, however, the Jewish community looked with alarm at growing anti-Jewish activity. One incident caused particular concern: the ‘Przytyk pogrom’. To the south of Warsaw, on Saturday, March 7 the Jews in the village of Przytyk learned that a group of peasants had gathered to attack them. ‘My mother gave me two bottles of benzine, and matches to throw,’ the nine-and-a-half-year-old Shalom Lindenbaum later recalled, ‘but nothing happened.’ Then, on Monday, March 9, market day, ‘with sticks and stones they came’.7

  The peasants who attacked the Jews that day broke into the village square, entering Jewish houses, smashing the windows, and breaking the furniture. Two Jews, a shoemaker Josef Minkowski and his wife Chaya, were tortured to death. Their children, who were discovered hiding under the bed, were savagely beaten.

  Gathering in the village square, the Jews decided to resist. One of them, Shalom Lasko, aged twenty, a religious Jew, fired a revolver, killing one of the peasants in the attacking gang.8

  News of the Przytyk pogrom horrified Polish Jewry. The successful self-defence was forgotten in the spectre of the two deaths, and in the implications for the future of Polish Jewry.9 Tens of thousands of Polish Jews sought safety in emigration. By the end of 1936, a record annual influx of Polish Jews—11,596 men, women and children—had been admitted to Palestine.10 But even at the rate at which Britain was granting Palestine certificates, such emigration could never be anything but a minor amelioration for three million Polish Jews; and Arab hostility inside Palestine to Jewish immigration was already leading to violent Arab protests and to the decision by the British authorities to seek a drastic reduction in the number of future certificates.

  On 15 April 1936, just over five weeks after the Przytyk pogrom, the Palestinian Arabs began a General Strike in protest against Jewish immigration. Violent acts against Jewish property and against individuals culminated in the killing of two Jews in Tulkarm on the first day of the strike. On April 19 nine Jews were killed in Jaffa, and on April 20 a further five. Meeting in Jerusalem on May 7, the Arab leaders demanded an end to Jewish immigration.

  Within a month, twenty-one Jews had been killed in Arab attacks. Six Arabs had been killed by the British police. No Arabs had been killed by Jews.11

  The news of the killing of Jews in Palestine had a disturbing impact on the emigration from Germany. On June 12, two Berlin Jews, Wilfrid Israel and Lola Hahn Warburg, telegraphed to Jerusalem for funds to strengthen the defences of the children’s village of Ben Shemen, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, as many German Jewish parents were now worried about sending their children to Palestine, despite a comprehensive youth programme of training and settlement.12

  In Germany, Hitler moved steadily to consolidate his power. Secret rearmament, begun by his predecessors, increased in scale and speed. On 7 March 1936 Hitler sent German troops into those parts the Rhineland Province which, although within the borders of postwar Germany, had been demilitarized since 1918 under the Treaty of Versailles.

  Hitler’s action flouted a solemn Treaty. But it went unchallenged by Britain and France. Hitler had achieved his first success in breaching international law. Inside Germany, the creation of ‘Jew free’ villages continued. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, driven out of their professions, found themselves with no means of livelihood. Placards inscribed ‘Jews not wanted here’ appeared on more and more buildings. Jewish schoolchildren were forbidden to sit on the same benches as non-Jews, and were subjected to abuse from teachers and pupils alike. In every sphere of daily life, the segregation enjoined by the Nuremberg Laws was being enforced.

  In the summer of 1936 a German Jew, Stefan Lux, one of over two thousand Jewish film producers who had been forced to give up their professional work, decided to make a public protest against the continuing persecutions. The place he chose for his protest was the assembly room of the League of Nations building in Geneva. There, on 3 July 1936, surrounded by journalists in the Press Gallery, he committed suicide. He was forty-eight years old.

  Stefan Lux left a letter to Anthony Eden, the British Cabinet Minister responsible for League affairs. In this letter, Lux said that he had killed himself in order to draw attention to the persecutions in Germany. ‘I do not find any other way to reach the hearts of men,’ he wrote, adding that the persecutions had failed to pierce the ‘inhuman indifferences’ of the world.13

  ***

  In August 1936 the Polish Ministry of Commerce, in Warsaw, ordered all shops throughout Poland to include, as part of the shop sign, the name of the owner as it appeared on his birth certificate.14 This made the fact that the owner was Jewish obvious to every Pole, and provided instant incitement for the anti-Semite.

  Jews fled from Poland, as from Germany, and fled in vast numbers. Between 1921 and 1937, 395,223 Polish Jews emigrated.15 Yet this enormous figure was little more than ten per cent of Polish Jews. Half of Germany’s Jews were able to find refuge, and many of them safety, in emigration. Polish Jewry was so large as to be without prospect of safety through flight.

  In Hitler’s phraseology and in the Nazi propaganda, the Jews were an evil disease, poisoning the blood of decent humanity, a conscious plague-bacillus infecting the pure, innocent ‘Aryan’. But it was the virus of anti-Semitism which was much in evidence in 1936, spreading across national borders as if those borders did not exist. ‘The virus spread’, a young Polish Jew, Ben Helfgott, later recalled, as he remembered—he was then seven years old—signs daubed on Jewish-owned shops in his home town of Piotrkow: ‘Don’t buy at Jewish shops’, ‘Jews out’, and the equally Nazi-echoing slogan: ‘Get out to Palestine’.16

  The power of Nazi Germany was still confined to the borders of the Reich, and it was in Germany that the dangers seemed greatest, the pressures most severe. On September 7, a twenty-five-per-cent tax was imposed on all Jewish wealth, substantially reducing the power of the Jewish community to help those who were now jobless. Denunciation of Jews and Jewish values continued: on November 29 the Minister of Agriculture, Walther Darre, declared that liberalism and democracy were ‘Jewish conceptions’, and that all democratic governments were ‘essentially Jewish’.17

  Throughout 1937 the German government increased its military and air strength. ‘We seem to be moving,’ Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on April 14, ‘drifting steadily, against our will, against the will of every race and every people and every class, towards some hideous catastrophe.’18 In Poland, on May 13, Polish anti-Semites attacked the Jews of Brest-Litovsk, under the slogan ‘We owe our troubles to the Jews’. In Germany, a young Jew of twenty, Helmut Hirsch, in despair at the unyielding pressures against his people, had been caught with a revolver and a suitcase of bombs. He was charged with intending to assassinate Streicher. Hirsch was then tried, and sentenced to death. As Hirsch was technically an American citizen, although he had never been to America, the American Ambassador, William Dodd, appealed to Hitler to commute the death sentence. But Hitler’s reply, Dodd told the American journalist William Shirer, ‘was a flat negative’. Dodd then sought a personal interview with Hitler to plead the case; he was ‘rebuffed’.19

  At dawn on June 4, Helmut Hirsch was executed with an axe. Eight days later, a number of Jews accused of ‘race defilement’ were sent to Dachau concentration camp, where some three hundred Jews were being held.

  The German government lost no opportunity to extend its racial laws. On July 15, the Geneva Convention in respect of Upper Silesia expired. German Jews in Upper Silesia now faced the full rigour of those laws: expulsion from their jobs, loss of the rights of citizenship, segregation from
the community around them. The application of the Nuremberg Laws to Upper Silesia had been promulgated two weeks before the expiry of the Geneva Convention.20

  The desperate search for safety continued: in 1937 a further 3,601 German Jews reached Palestine, as did 3,636 Jews from Poland.21 But these figures, so much lower than those for 1936, reflected new restrictions imposed by the British Mandate authorities as the Arab revolt against Jewish immigration continued.22 For the Jews of Germany, this was an ominous development, reflected in Palestine itself by the deaths, between April 1936 and the end of 1937, of 113 Jews, and by the first Arab deaths, fifteen in all, in Jewish reprisal raids, despite the condemnation of such reprisals by the Jewish National Council in Palestine.23

  In Germany, the Jews registered one small success in the late autumn of 1937. David Glick, a Pittsburgh lawyer, and the unofficial representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—the ‘Joint’—negotiated with the Gestapo the release of 120 of the three hundred Jews then being held in Dachau. The Gestapo agreed to release them on condition that the 120 Jews emigrated immediately to a country beyond Europe. At Glick’s urging, the British Consul General in Munich, Consul Carvell, agreed to issue Palestine visas on condition that £5,000 was paid into a bank outside Germany to assist the settlement of the released men in Palestine. The Joint agreed, and paid the money. The Jews were released.

  Glick’s experiment was later repeated on a larger scale. Its second success was when three thousand German Jews were sent with a similar payment to Bolivia, financed by Don Mauricio Hochschild, a Jewish tin-mine millionaire in Peru.24