Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (24 page)

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

101

Bormann further announced: ‘Party Comrade Field Marshal Goering plans a

fundamental sorting out of the Jewish question. This sorting out will occur in a

way that does the greatest justice to the demands of the Party. The Party has

accordingly undertaken to avoid all individual actions.’

The intervention of the Party through its Gau and district economic advisers in

particular involved a personal and political assessment of interested purchasers

and led to massive patronage of Party comrades. In the completion of contracts,

‘donations’ to the Party were habitual. The Party economic advisers had appro-

priate channels to use different methods to make the Jewish owner ‘happy to sell’,

for example through repeated official screenings and the imposition of conditions,

through arrests or the intervention of the Chambers of Trade and Industry or local

authorities who ‘suggested the advisability’ of the sale.
19

Between July and October a series of legal regulations was passed, definitively

excluding the Jews from a series of further professions.
20
This included in particularly the prohibition on Jews working as real estate brokers or commercial

agents; in addition, approval was withdrawn from those Jewish doctors still

permitted to practise, and lawyers still working had to abandon their legal

practices.

As early as the beginning of 1938, the SD had reached the conclusion that the

increasing elimination of Jews from the economy would not necessarily lead to a

greater volume of emigration, unless possibilities of reception abroad were also

available. In fact, the number of emigrant Jews in the last quarter of 1937 had

dropped slightly; within the SD a crisis in ‘Jewish policy’ was anticipated:

But it must not be forgotten that the possibilities of emigration have declined just as the pressure to emigrate has risen. The mounting exclusion of Jews from German economic

life, which had taken a very strong upturn under the pressure of the conditions outlined, is at the same time causing a drop in the income of the Jewish community, and of the political and aid organizations from which to a large extent the emigration funds for less affluent Jews and Jews without means are drawn.

On the other hand, however, ‘excessive reliance on foreign aid for the Jews contains the risk that emigration is made dependent on the goodwill of international aid organizations’.
21

But with the Anschluss of Austria, which increased the number of Jews living

under the Nazi regime by 200,000, the emigration chances of the ‘Old Reich’ Jews

became even smaller, and from the perspective of the Jewish department of the SD

the balance between ‘pressure to emigrate’ and possibilities of emigration would

inevitably be lost. However, if emigration fell again, the massively advancing

‘exclusion of Jews from economic life’ would lead inevitably to the impoverish-

ment of Jews still living in Germany, and thus to a further decline in emigration.

Added to this threatening dilemma was the fact that in March 1938, immediately

after the Anschluss of Austria, the Jewish Department of the SD learned of a

decision by Himmler that called the existing emigration policy into question and

102

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

clearly made the ‘Jewish experts’ of the SD deeply insecure. Having received an

application to enter Germany from a German Jewish woman living abroad, the

Reichsführer SS had ruled that the woman in question had permission to enter the

country, ‘in so far as she undertook to stay in Germany, as Germany did not want

to let go of the Jews, its most valuable collateral’. As this instruction ‘fundamen-

tally altered previous “Jewish policy” ’, the Jewish Department asked, in a docu-

ment intended for Himmler, for agreement on the following principles of

emigration policy:
22

(a) Those who are to emigrate are

1. The anti-social Jewish proletariat without means . . .

2. other old and young Jews, frail and without means, to free up the

German welfare authorities for more worthwhile tasks and avoid

trouble spots

(b) Those who are not to emigrate are

1. all wealthy Jews

2. all Jews who are famous or otherwise suited to acting as collateral.

The draft, the suggestions of which contradicted existing emigration practice,

which had had the emigration of affluent Jews as its priority, was passed on to

Himmler on 31 March and returned to the SD Department II in early June, signed

by both Heydrich and Himmler, without a more detailed statement on the subject

from either of them. It was not until the beginning of July that the responsible

Gestapo specialist informed the Jewish department that Himmler had said the file

was now redundant.
23

In the spring and early summer of 1938, then, ‘Jewish policy’ faced a compli-

cated dilemma: in the medium term the forced emigration of the Austrian Jews

had to be to the detriment of the chances of emigration of the German Jews,

particularly since the mass exodus prompted strong resistance in the potential

countries of immigration. But that meant that because of the speedily advancing

process of eliminating the Jews from the economy a subproletarian class would

come into being, one which was barely capable of emigration and needed some-

how to be supported, and yet which was to be expelled as a matter of priority

according to the note sent by the Jewish Department in March. In the light of this,

a willingness grew within the Party not only to use economic measures, but

immediately to heighten ‘the pressure to emigrate’ through mass anti-Jewish

rioting.

The Riots of Spring 1938: Dry Run for the Pogrom

This new wave of riots began in Berlin in May 1938. The Berlin events deserve

particular attention, since it was here that the dialectic of agitation and subsequent

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

103

large-scale state intervention typical of Nazi Jewish persecution occurred in

exemplary fashion, and it is possible to observe patterns of action that are already

very close to those of the November pogrom.

In May 1938 the Berlin Commissioner of Police, Count Helldorf, in response to

a request from Goebbels, presented a ‘Memorandum on the treatment of the

Jews in the Reich capital in all areas of public life
’24
that contained suggestions for a programme of the almost complete segregation of the Berlin Jews. These

were predominantly suggestions that were to be realized over the coming years,

including labelling (by special ID cards), exclusion from public schools and cultural

and leisure institutions, the marking of Jewish businesses, the concentration of

Jews in particular areas of the city, and so on.

When the Jewish Department of the SD was briefly given access to the memo-

randum, it responded with alarm.
25
It raised the criticism that the memorandum did not embed the planned measures in a Reich-wide concept, and that it contained no references to emigration. Goebbels reacted to these objections, which

had been presented to him along with the memorandum,
26
by recommending that the points particularly characteristic of Berlin be turned into general Reich-wide

statutory regulations.
27
But he had by no means abandoned the idea of developing, in Berlin, a model for a future ‘Jewish policy’ throughout the Reich.

During the discussions about the memorandum, early in May 1938 individual

local groups of Gau Berlin had begun daubing Jewish shops at night and sticking

posters on them.
28
On 31 May, when the Gestapo arrested more than 300 Jews in a major raid on a café on the Kurfürstendamm, presumably in response to the

growing ‘popular anger’, Goebbels criticized this action as ‘a complete waste of an

opportunity’ and demanded more radical measures from the Police Commis-

sioner.
29
On 10 June, a day before he was presented with the memorandum, Goebbels invited the heads of the Berlin police to the Ministry of Propaganda,

where he took the opportunity to call for a more radical approach in the ‘Jewish

question’:
30
‘I am really going all the way. Without any sentimentality. The watchword is not law, but harassment. The Jews must leave Berlin. The police

will help me to achieve it.’

Over the next few days Goebbels ensured that the anti-Jewish atmosphere that

he had systematically stirred up in Berlin was combined with the Reich-wide

major action by the criminal police against ‘social misfits’ to form a campaign

against ‘Jewish criminals’.

The ‘Asocial Operation’
31
was intended to send thousands of tramps, beggars, pimps, and others to concentration camps for the purposes of the ‘labour mobilization programme’. In addition, all Jews who had been sentenced to previous

convictions of at least one month were to be drawn into this operation. This

extension of the operation, as a private remark of Heydrich reveals, goes back to a

direct decision by Hitler, to arrest ‘anti-social’ and criminal Jews across the Reich

to carry out important earth-moving works.
32

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

In Berlin alone, within the context of the ‘Asocial Operation’ the police arrested

between 1,000 and 2,000 Jews for minor misdemeanours, traffic offences, ‘pro-

vocative behaviour’, and the like. In Buchenwald concentration camp alone there

were already more than 1,200 Jewish prisoners in the summer of 1938
.33

In parallel with this, the anti-Jewish riots that had continued since May in

various districts of Berlin were now systematically extended by the Berlin NSDAP

to the whole of the city. Not only were Jewish shops and Jewish legal practices

‘labelled’ with daubings, but many windows were smashed and in the night of

18 June three synagogues and two prayer houses were demolished.
34

The fierce riots and the mass arrests happening at the same time systematically

created a bloodthirsty atmosphere throughout the capital, which Goebbels now

plainly wanted to use to enforce the special measures he had demanded against

the Jews. On 21 June, however, it was decided at a meeting of the Party and police

leadership that the operation should be terminated.
35

Goebbels noted in his diary entry for 22 June concerning the previous day’s

events:

Helldorf got my orders completely the wrong way round: I had said, the police acts with a legal face, the Party looks on. The reverse is now the case. I get all the Party agencies together and issue new orders. All illegal actions have to stop. The Jews are to clean their shops up themselves. Funk must get a move on with his measures. And incidentally there is something good about this kind of popular justice. The Jews have been given a shock, and

will know better than to see Berlin as their Eldorado.
36

In fact, however, the operation, as an internal note from the SD reveals, had

been terminated after a personal intervention on Hitler’s part.
37
In the case of the Berlin June Operation—unlike all other anti-Jewish actions in which the role of

the ‘Führer’ was carefully concealed by the Party—it is possible to reconstruct in

detail the central role played by Hitler: not only had the ‘Führer’ personally

authorized the inclusion of Jews in the ‘Asocial Operation’, and involved himself

in details of the propaganda justification of the deployment of police against the

Berlin Jews,
38
but now he had personally also declared the end of the operation.

Major riots and broken windows, damage to synagogues, a close collaboration

between vandals and police, and finally the attempt to mobilize a supposed

popular movement for the enforcement of drastic state measures aimed at the

expulsion of the Jews—the essential elements of the Berlin June Operation

suggested that this was the dry run, staged to a large extent by Goebbels, for the

pogrom that was organized in November. The cause for the termination of the

Operation may have been that, in the spring of 1938, the ‘Third Reich’, in view of

the unfolding Sudeten crisis, wanted to avoid anything that might intensify anti-

German feeling in the West, and which might increase the chances of a military

intervention against the ‘Third Reich’—unlike the situation in November, when

such foreign policy considerations were no longer relevant.

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

105

The SD saw the Berlin Operation as the confirmation of its attitude that the

primary goal, the emigration of the Jews, could only be achieved by a systematic

policy of expulsion that excluded uncontrolled acts of violence. According to the

leader of Division II of the SD, Professor Franz Six, in his message to Higher

Command South (Oberabschnitt Süd), the operation in Berlin had shown that in

future ‘no Party operation’ might occur ‘without previous authorization from the

local police authority’, and such operations had to be most keenly overseen by the

SD, to channel violent measures against the German Jews.
39
On 5 July SD

Headquarters informed the Higher Commands (Oberabschnitte) that the head

of the Security Police, Heydrich, had ‘because of the events in Berlin, reserved to