Raul Hilberg
Page 26
their meat cards, so would Jewish children. Since Jewish children had
enjoyed equality also in milk distribution, it was thought proper to
change the milk ration too. Henceforth Jewish children were to receive not whole milk but skimmed milk. Aryan children up to the age of three were entitled to a daily ration of 3A liter, those from three to
six, Yi liter, and those aged six to fourteen, Zt liter of whole milk.
Jewish children were to receive milk only to their sixth birthday, and
the maximum quantity even for the smallest children was not to exceed
Yi liter of skimmed milk.
Next the bureaucrats scrutinized the rations of pregnant women,
nursing mothers, and sick persons. The representative of the Agriculture Ministry pointed out that Jewish mothers had already been taken care of by a directive in April 1942 and that the Staatssekretär for
Health in the Interior Ministry (Dr. Conti) had directed doctors not to
prescribe for Jewish patients and invalids any supplementary rations
whatever. It was agreed that the Conti order be reinforced by a directive to the food offices.
Finally, the conferees considered that it would be “correct" to
strike supplementary rations for long-hour workers, night workers, and
heavy
workers.
Until
now,
these
supplementary
rations
had
been
granted to Jews for reasons of efficiency, but, only lately, experience
had shown again that work done by Jews was in no sense as valuable as
work performed by Germans. The distribution of supplementary rations to Jewish laborers had provoked ill humor among large sections of German labor. Nevertheless, it might be necessary to give to Jews
exposed to poisons 'A liter of skimmed milk a day. This exception
would affect particularly the Jewish workers in powerhouses (in Berlin
alone,
approximately
6,000).
In
this
connection,
the
conferees were
reminded
that
Berlin
had
already stricken supplementary rations for
Jewish workers some time ago.
At the conclusion of the conference, it was noted that Staatssekretär for Health Dr. Conti was not represented and that, as a result, no one present could judge “expertly" whether the proposed ration cuts
did not go “too far” in weakening the Jews physically, thus promoting
epidemics and threatening the Aryan population as well. Consequently,
153
EXPROPRIATION
it was decided to seek the agreement of Staatssekretär Conti before
putting the ration cuts into effect. Second it was noted that Plenipotentiary for Labor Sauckel was not represented either, and therefore it was decided to seek his advice too, this time from the viewpoint of work
efficiency.
It
appears
that
neither
Staatssekretär
Dr.
Conti
nor
Labor
Plenipotentiary Sauckel had any special objections, for the instructions
to the regional food offices, dated September 18, 1942,'° did not alleviate the drastic decisions of the June 29 conference. In one respect the regulations of September 18 reached even further. There was a new
restriction in the matter of food parcels, something that must have
bothered the ministry very much. Heretofore, food parcels addressed
to Jews had been opened in order to charge the contents against the
rations of the recipient. Now there were so many prohibited items that
any package found to contain contraband, such as coffee or perhaps a
salami, was to be transferred by the customs administration to the food
offices for distribution to German hospitals or other big consumers."
Since 1942 was the year of mass deportations, ever smaller numbers of Jews remained within the frontiers of the Reich. By 1943 the rationing problem was so simplified that in Vienna the Jewish Council
handed out a single meal a day at its headquarters at Kleine Pfarrgasse
8. The food was available until 1 p.m. Jews working in forced labor
could get their meal until 7 p.m.I! And thus, with a few strokes of the
pen, the bureaucracy had reduced a once prosperous community, with
accumulated know-how and far-flung investments, to a band of starving forced laborers asking for their meager meal at the end of the day. 10 11 12
10. Instructions by Staatssekretär Riecke, September 18, 1942, NG-452.
11. In the Protektorat of Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech Ministry of Land and
Forestry of the "autonomous” Czech administration quickly followed suit. In two consecutive orders Jews were barred from the purchase of all meats, eggs, white bread and rolls, milk (except for V* liter for children under six), all fruits and vegetables (whether
fresh, dried, or canned), nuts, wines, fruit juices, syrups, marmalades, jams, cheeses,
candies, Osh, and poultry in any state of preparation. Circular order by Protektorat Land
Ministry (signed Oberembt), December I, 1942, Die Judenfrage
February 15, 1943, pp. 14-15. Announcement by Protektorat Land Ministry (signed
Hruby), December 2, 1942, Die Judenfrage (Vertrauliche Beilage), February 1, 1943,
p. 10.
12. Jüdisches Nachrichtenblalt (Vienna), May 17, 1943.
154
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CONCENTRATION x
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T H E R E I C H — P R O T E K T O R A T
A R E A __________________________________________
The third step of the destruction process was the concentration of
the Jewish community. In Germany concentration comprised two
developments: the crowding of the Jews into large cities and the separation of the Jews from the German population. The urbanization process was a consequence of the anti-Jewish economic measures discussed in the previous chapter. The ghettoization process was deliberately planned, measure for measure.
Even before the Nazis came to power, the Jewish community in
Germany had already been highly urbanized, but after 1933 a further
crowding into the cities became noticeable. Isolated Jewish families
departed from villages to towns. From there the stream continued to
Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt, and other large population centers.1 Taking
the area of the Old Reich and Austria as a whole, the percentage of
Jews living in cities with populations of more than 100,000 rose from
74.2 in 1933 to 82.3 in 1939.2 The census of May 17, 1939, revealed a
Jewish population of 330,892. More than two-thirds of this number
lived in ten cities, as follows:’
1.
Georg Flatow, “Zur Lage der Juden in den Kleinstädten,” Jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik, 1934, pp. 237-45.
2.
“Die Juden und jüdischen Mischlinge," Wirtschaft und Statistik, vol. 20. p. 86.
3.
Ibid. 17
1S7
CONCENTRATION
Vienna.................................. 91,480
Berlin................................... 82,788
Frankfurt.............................. 14,461
Breslau................................. 11,172
Hamburg.........................
..... 10,131
Cologne ................................. 8,539
Munich................................... 5,050
Leipzig................................... 4,477
Mannheim.............................. 3,024
Nuremberg............................. 2,688
233,810
More than half the Jews lived in Vienna and Berlin.
To repeat: the Germans did not plan this movement. The migration
was caused mainly by the gradual impoverishment of the Jewish community, which gave rise to increasing intra-Jewish dependence, particularly the dependence of poor Jews on Jewish relief organizations.
At least one mayor, the Oberbürgermeister of Frankfurt, made inquiries of his police chief whether the influx of country Jews into his city could not somehow be stopped. The police chief replied that “unfortunately” he had no legal means of doing so.‘
Unlike the uncontrolled movement of the Jews into the cities, the
ghettoization of the Jewish community (i.e., its isolation from the surrounding German population) was directed, step by step, by the bureaucracy. Ghettoization does not mean that Jewish districts, complete with walls, were set up in the cities of the Reich and the Bohemian-Moravian Protektorat. Such districts were later established in Poland
and Russia to the east, but the Jewish community in Germany was
subjected to conditions that had many characteristics of the ghetto.
These characteristics are reflected in five steps of the ghettoization
process: (1) the severance of social contacts between Jews and Germans, (2) housing restrictions, (3) movement regulations, (4) identification measures,
and
(5)
the
institution
of
Jewish
administrative
machinery.
The severance of social contacts was the first step toward Jewish
isolation. In a country where members of a minority group enjoy close
personal relations with the dominant group, drastic segregation measures cannot be successful until these relations are dissolved and until a certain distance is established between the two groups. The dissolution of social relations began with the dismissals of Jews from the civil service and industry, and with the Aryanization or liquidation of Jewish 4
4.
Polizeipräsident, Frankfurt am Main, to Oberbürgermeister Staatsrat Dr. Krebs,
June 8, 1936,0-113.
158
THE REICH-PROTEKTORAT AREA
business establishments. These measures, however, were primarily economic. Their social consequences were incidental.
There were also calculated measures against Jewish-German mingling. These decrees fell into two categories, one based on the assumption that the Germans were too friendly with the Jews and that therefore such expressions of friendship had to be prohibited in the
interest
of
German
purity
and
National
Socialist
ideals,
the
other
founded on the opposite premise, that the Germans were so hostile to
the Jews that segregation was required for the maintenance of public
order. The apparent contradiction in this reasoning has a simple explanation. In the first case, measures were involved that, for their administrative effectiveness,
had
to
be
enforced
against
Germans,
whereas in the second type of ordinance the aim of separation could be
achieved with restrictions applied only to the Jews.
The earliest decree against mixing was the Law for the Protection
of German Blood and Honor.5 In one of its provisions, the employment
in Jewish households of German women under the age of forty-five
years was prohibited. The era of domestic servants had not passed by
1935, and the forced departure of German women by the thousands
from middle-class Jewish homes brought forth a flood of calls for replacements from the ranks of needy Jewish women.6 7 The household stipulation was instituted by analogy in hotels and guest houses at
health
resorts.
Insofar
as
German
female personnel
under
forty-five
were employed there, Jewish guests were to be barred.’
More complicated effects of the Blood and Honor Law were to
flow from its prohibition of marriages and extramarital relationships
between
Jews
and
citizens
of
German
or
kindred
blood.
These
ramifications
became
manifest
in
the
interpretations
and
enforcement
of the law. If an intermarriage was contracted after the decree’s entry
into force, it was considered null and void, and the parties to such a
marriage were automatically guilty of extramarital intercourse as well.
Under the penalty provisions, both man and woman could be punished
5. Signed by Hitler. Frick, Gürtner, and Hess, dated September 15, 1935, RGBl !,
1146.
6. During 1936,3.861 Jewish women were referred to Jewish homes in Berlin alone.
S. Adler-Rudel, Jüdische Selbsthilfe unter dem Naziregime, ¡933-1939 (Tübingen, 1974)
p. 131. Much of this labor was probably part-time.
7. Pfundtner (Interior Ministry) to regional offices of the ministry, July 24, 1937, T
175, roll 409. In 1938 the Party Chancellery proposed an amendment to the law with a
view to extending the prohibition to receptionists, models, etc. The Interior Ministry
replied that it was already overwhelmed with work in anti-Jewish legislation and that the
proposal was not important enough to warrant the necessary drafting. Pfundtner to Hess,
May 25, 1938, NG-347. By November of that year the party proposal was obsolete.
Hering to Justice Ministry, December 12, 1938, NG-347.
IS9
CONCENTRATION
by penitentiary sentences for entering into an intermarriage, but only
the man (whether he was Jew or German) could be sent to jail for
extramarital intercourse. It was Hitler’s wish that the woman (Jewish
or German) be immune from prosecution.
We do not know the reason for Hitler’s insistence upon this exemption. It may have been a sense of chivalry or, more likely, the belief that women
(even German
women)
were very
weak individuals without
wills of their own. At any rate, neither the judiciary nor the Security
Police were happy with the exemption. During a judicial conference, it
was therefore decided to heed Hitler's wish in the literal sense only. No
German woman would be punished for intercourse with a Jew (or for
Rassenschande [race defilement], as that crime became known), but if
she was trapped into telling a lie during the proceedings against the
man, she could be sent to jail for peijury.“ Gruppenführer Heydrich of
the Security Police on his part decided that a Jewish woman could not
remain free if her German partner went to jail. Such an arrangement
went against his grain, Hitler order or no Hitler order. Accordingly, he
issued secret instructions to his State Police and Criminal Police offices
to follow up
the lawful conviction of a German man for Rassenschande
with the immediate arrest of his Jewish woman partner, who was to be
spirited away to a concentration camp.’
Other modifications in the direction of more severity were proposed in connection with the Mischlinge. Just what was the status of Mischlinge under the Law for the Protection of German Blood and
Honor? The law obviously mentioned only Jews and Germans. To the
creators of this “third race” it was evident that the Mischlinge—as
persons who were neither Jews nor citizens of “German or related
blood”—were actually a bridge between the Jewish and German communities.
Without
an
additional
concurrent
regulation,
a
Mischling
would have been in a position to marry anyone or to have extramarital
relations with anyone. The prospect of such a situation was awkward
enough to require some action. So far as marriages were concerned,
several prohibitions were therefore put into effect immediately. (The
rules are listed in Table 6-1. To understand the regulation of Mischling
marriages, it may be useful to recall that a Mischling of the first degree
was a person with two Jewish grandparents, who did not belong to the
Jewish religion, and who was not married to a Jewish person on the
target date of September 15, 1935. A Mischling of the second degree
had only one Jewish grandparent.)
These regulatory impediments tended to isolate the Mischling of 8 9
8. Summary of judicial conference, February I, 1939, NG-629.
9. Heydrich to Gestapo and Kripo offices, June 12, 1937, NG-326.
160
THE REICH-PROTEKTORAT AREA
T A B L E 6 - 1
REGULATION OF MISCHLING MARRIAGES
Permiaed Marriages
German-German
Mischling of the second degree-German
Mischling of the first degree-Mischling of the first degree
Mischling of the first degree-Jew
Jew-Jew
ProhibUed Except by Special Consent
Mischling of the first degree-German
Mischling of the first degree-Mischling of the second degree
ProhibUed
German-Jew
Mischling of the second degree-Jew
Mischling of the second degree-Mischling of the second degree
note: 1st Ordinance for Implementation of the Blood and Honor Law (signed