Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (22 page)

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

would only become ‘work-shy’ if other conspicuous ‘asocial’ qualities could be

established. The concept of the ‘asocial’ was, in its very vagueness, unambiguously

racist by nature, since it acted as a negative counter-selection to the striven-for

Aryan racial ideal (which also eluded any precise definition).

In January 1938, while the Kripo, who were actually responsible, were still

preparing their own measures against the ‘work-shy’, Himmler ordered an inde-

pendent Gestapo action against this group. The group in question—individuals

capable of gainful employment who had refused jobs offered to them twice

without justification, or had taken on the work but then abandoned it without

any sound reasons—were to report via the labour offices to the Gestapo stations

and be transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp. The operation began on 21

April 1938 and ended officially on 30 April, although it may possibly have

extended beyond that date. As a result of the arrests in the context of this

operation, by the beginning of June 1938 there were almost 2,000 prisoners in

Buchenwald.
7

The Reich-wide Kripo operation against ‘asocials’ (operation ‘Reich Work-

Shy’) began in the same month. The fact that this operation was to include all

Jews with previous convictions (however minor) clearly reveals the complemen-

tary function of racial hygiene and racist anti-Semitism within the National

Socialist project of a racially homogeneous social order. (The operation will be

examined more closely within the context of the depiction of the third wave of

anti-Semitism.)
8

While the persecution of the Gypsies had proceeded along more or less

conventional lines in the first years of the NS dictatorship, between 1936 and

1938 the essential foundations were laid for a systematic persecution of this

population group on a racist basis.

After the Reich Ministry of the Interior standardized the stipulations of the laws

regarding Gypsies in the Länder, in autumn 1936 the Prussian State Criminal

Police Office began to centralize the persecution of the Gypsies. In 1937 the office,

by now transformed into a Reich Criminal Police Office, took over the ‘Gypsy

Central Office’ that had existed within Munich Police Headquarters since 1899,

which now acted as ‘Reich Office to Combat the Gypsy Plague’.
9
From the end of 1938 until the middle of 1939, a criminal police apparatus extending all the way

down to local police authorities was set up to combat Gypsies.

Since autumn 1937, the Reich Criminal Police Office had worked closely with

the Racial Hygiene Research Centre within the Reich Health Authority which,

under the direction of Robert Ritter, focused upon the ‘Gypsy question’. Since

1937 the Research Centre had undertaken an anthropometrical and genealogical

investigation of all Sinti and Roma in the Reich. On the basis of these investiga-

tions the Research Centre produced racial hygiene reports in which distinctions

were made between ‘genuine’ Gypsies and ‘half-breed Gypsies’. The Criminal

Police were able to use this material as a database for the persecution of the

Persecution of Non-Jewish Groups by the Police, 1936–7

93

Gypsies. Towards the end of the war, with about 25,000 reports, Ritter’s institute

claimed to have recorded almost the whole Gypsy population of the Old Reich

territory.
10

After Himmler had taken over the whole of the police in summer 1936, the

persecution of homosexuals was also intensified.
11
Even before the end of the year a ‘Reich Central Office for Combatting Homosexuality and Abortion’ was set up

within the Prussian State Criminal Office, which centrally recorded particular

categories of male homosexuals. For a time the Gestapo was able to take over

control of the Reich Central Office, although with the start of the war this came

back within the sphere of responsibility of the Kripo.
12
Himmler indicated the priority given to the suppression of homosexuality with reference to the fact that

he had stated in March 1937, at a meeting of Kripo and Gestapo leaders, that he

would henceforth measure the effectiveness of the Kripo according to its successes

within the sphere of the battle against homosexuality and abortion. Accordingly

the number of those sentenced for offences against paragraph 175 of the Reich

Penal Code suddenly rose: from 766 (1934) to over 4,000 (1936) and over 8,000

(1938). After 1937, homosexuals with more than three relevant convictions behind

them, with sentences each of at least six months’ imprisonment, were sent to

concentration camps once they had served their regular sentences.
13

Finally the police apparatus took systematic action against the so-called

‘Rhineland Bastards’, those young people who were the product of relations

between German women and colonial soldiers from the time of the French

occupation of the Rhineland. As early as 1935 the Specialist Advisory Board for

Population and Race Policy agreed to ‘solve’ this ‘bastard question’ by means of

sterilization, although they were initially unable to reach agreement upon the

procedure.
14
Early in 1937 the decision was redrafted so that Afro-Germans were to be compulsorily sterilized outside the existing legal procedure; a relevant

‘special instruction’ from Hitler seems to have been produced.
15
Accordingly, in the spring of 1937 a special commission was set up which, over the coming

months and with the assistance of three sub-commissions, performed the

sterilization of some 600–800 young people.
16

The practice of German Racial Policy also raised the problem of how the

children of German and non-European foreigners, described in Nazi language

as ‘alien half-breeds’ (artfremde Mischlinge), were to be treated. For this group, the

race legislation was similar. In a document dated February 1937 the Foreign Office

indicated that over the previous two years about fifty cases at most had appeared,

in which ‘the German race legislation was to be applied to non-Jewish alien half-

breeds’. It had turned out that the ‘domestic political interest in an enforcement of

racial legislation was in most cases entirely insignificant, while on the other hand

the fear of foreign political disadvantages was always justified and decisive’.

Generally, then, the emergency regulation intended for such cases had been

applied. The number of those cases in which, because of fundamental ‘racial

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

policy’ considerations, foreign policy concerns had been set aside and it had been

impossible to apply the emergency regulation ‘had numbered about 5 over the past

4 years’. In view of this practice, the Foreign Office suggested that the race

legislation be fundamentally restricted to Jews and that those race laws already

passed be altered, replacing terms such as artfremd (alien) or ‘non-Aryan’ with

‘Jewish’.

On 22 April 1937 the Reich Interior Ministry fundamentally adopted a position

on the relationship between ‘racial policy’ and Jewish policy. The Interior Ministry

established that the ‘final goal of the National Socialist movement . . . was to

eliminate all people of alien blood from the German national body’ (Volkskörper).

Besides, a change in the race laws was inopportune because it would be interpreted

abroad as a ‘sign of insecurity or even of weakness’.

First, however, ‘the most urgent racial problem for the nation, the Jewish

question, was to be legally regulated’, while the ‘question of the legal position of

people with other kinds of alien blood must receive consideration only in so far as

was unavoidably necessary to the movement’s fundamental attitude towards the

race question and in view of the basic significance of this question for the

continuing existence of the nation’.

If, as a consequence, ‘a general restriction of race legislation to the Jews proved

impossible in view of both National Socialist principles and general political

considerations, this would not rule out the possibility of individual exceptions

to stipulations of the race laws, if the foreign political interests of the Reich

urgently required it’.

In a response to the Foreign Office’s suggestion on 28 April, the director of the

Office of Racial Policy of the NSDAP, Walter Gross, also declared his opposition

to a change in the race laws ‘for educational reasons’. The dogmatism of ‘racial

policy’, these statements reveal, went far beyond the sphere of anti-Jewish policy.
17

However, there was a significant difference between the persecution of the Jews

and other groups considered racially inferior, because although the racial policy

measures directed against other groups before 1938 were to some extent more

radical than those of anti-Jewish policy (sterilization, compulsory abortion, cas-

tration, imprisonment in concentration camps), they were primarily directed, in a

‘racially hygienic’ sense, towards the elimination of ‘inferior’ individuals from the

‘Aryan race’, whereby this negative selection (with the exception of the small

group of Afro-Germans) was still preceded by a pseudo-scientific, and yet some-

what elaborate, analysis of individual cases. For National Socialist racial policy, on

the other hand, the Jews constituted a minority which, as a closed group, was seen

as the enemy.

chapter 5

COMPREHENSIVE DEPRIVATION OF RIGHTS

AND FORCED EMIGRATION, LATE 1937–1939

The Third Wave of Anti-Semitism: The Radicalization

of Persecution

The Political Context: Entjudung and Preparation for War

During 1938 the regime responded to the crisis in which the NS regime’s Judenpolitik

found itself at the end of 1937, when faced with dwindling opportunities for

emigration, with a series of radical steps which, taken together, can be described

as the third wave of anti-Semitism of the Nazi era.

The impending radicalization of persecution had already been indicated when,

after the end of the protection of minorities in the former Upper Silesian voting

area, the Reich’s anti-Semitic laws were ruthlessly introduced in the summer of

1937. They were accompanied by riots, boycotts, robberies, broken windows, and

the like.
1
The more radical course was introduced by Hitler’s strongly anti-Semitic speech at the Party rally in 1937, and by the anti-Semitic riots in Danzig (where,

because of its status as a ‘free city’, the German Jewish legislation did not yet

apply) in the second half of October 1937.
2
From the end of the year, anti-Semitic propaganda was massively intensified once again.

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

The clearly more radical course is directly connected with the regime’s expansion

policy, introduced late in 1937, which Hitler announced to the military leadership

and the Foreign Minister on 5 November, and which was then prepared by the

comprehensive reshuffle of staff in the armed forces (the dismissal of the War

Minister, Werner von Blomberg, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army,

Werner von Fritsch, in February 1938) and in the Reich government (the resignation

of Hjalmar Schacht as Reich Minister of Economics in November 1937 and of the

Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, in February 1938). Now all key positions

necessary for the waging of war were in the hands of reliable National Socialists.

With the transition to a policy of expansion, in the mid-term foreign-policy

considerations that had applied until then, and which had hitherto argued against

a further intensification of the persecution of the Jews, were dropped.

There was also no longer the fear that the definitive elimination of the Jews

from commerce would cause major negative economic repercussions. On the one

hand, the general economic situation of the ‘Third Reich’ had been consolidated,

and its dependency on exports had declined. On the other, the economic position

of the Jews had already been so undermined by the ‘boycott’ by Party activists, by

the numerous obstacles raised by state authorities, and the more or less compul-

sory ‘Aryanization’ or liquidation of businesses, that they no longer represented a

major factor in economic life. Finally, by now the network of controlling organ-

izations, taxes, and so on had been perfected to such an extent that the profits

achieved by the sale of Jewish businesses went to the state, the Party, and

individuals (often linked to the NSDAP) with an interest in Aryanization.

From the regime’s perspective there was a further reason to increase pressure on

the Jewish minority once again. Following the gradual general propaganda prepar-

ation of the population for a major state of emergency in Germany’s dealings with

foreign powers, the Jewish minority was to be assigned the function of an internal

enemy which formed the appropriate object for hatred and aggression.

The transition to the third phase of National Socialist Judenpolitik, which had

been introduced late in 1937, more intensely since spring 1938, and definitively

implemented with the November pogrom, the complete isolation, deprivation of