Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (30 page)

If the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany, now dissolved, had been a

holding organization of independent Jewish organizations and communities, in

the new, hierarchical organization autonomy was as good as excluded. The

character of the Reich Association as a compulsory organization was also

expressed in the fact that it was also responsible for those people who did not

belong to the Jewish religious community, but were graded as Jews for ‘racial’

reasons. On the social level their task now no longer consisted of supporting needy

Jews alongside state care; falling back entirely on their own resources, they now

also had to undertake the care of the Jews who were completely excluded from the

state social system. In this way the regime had not only discharged responsibility

and expenses; it had also ensured that the Jewish minority was almost completely

isolated from the rest of the population and it had at its disposal a compulsory

organization that it made responsible for the execution of official orders.
24

This set-up, using a Jewish organization to control an isolated Jewish sector and

making it responsible for the implementation of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies,

marked the birth of a new and perfidious form of organization of Judenpolitik: the

Judenrat or Jewish council. After the beginning of the Second World War, the

regime was to create institutions with this title in the occupied territories, which

were to become the executive organs of German policy. This was despite the vain

and desperate hope of their members that they would receive a certain level of

autonomy.

At the same time the consequence of the total segregation of the Jewish minority

and the total withdrawal of their rights, which the Nazi state had carried out in

stages between 1933 and 1939, was that the individual spheres of life affected by

Entjudung, far beyond the exclusion of the Jews, were subjected to a new system of

norms dictated by the National Socialists, the hegemony of racism. As a result of

this complex process the engine of this policy, the NSDAP, was able to extend its

influence into the most diverse spheres and consolidate its pre-eminent position.

Thus the exclusion of Jews, but also of Gypsies, ‘social misfits’, and other groups

from the circle of those receiving state social services, went hand in hand with a

new definition of social policy in terms of Volksplege (care for the Volk), which

would only be available to gemeinschaftsfähige (those capable of being part of the

community), meaning racially ‘valuable’ compatriots, while health care was sub-

jected to the criteria of ‘racial hygiene’.

In parallel with the exclusion of Jews from the education system, racist para-

digms found their way into school education as well as into university teaching

The Politics of Organized Expulsion

129

and research. The extensive Entjudung of the whole of cultural life and journalism

was the starting point for the implementation of an aesthetic defined by the

National Socialists, which presented itself as uncompromisingly ‘German’, a

dictatorship of taste which also affected such important areas of everyday life as

advertising, fashion, and architecture. Anti-Semitic stereotypes were now part of

the basic stock of journalism.

The whole process of the exclusion of the Jews from the economy, which—

guided by the Four-Year Plan Office—served, on the one hand, to finance rearma-

ment, and, on the other, served the needs of a National Socialist clientele, proved

to be a wide gateway for state interventions in the economic sphere, the starting

point for the National Socialist command economy established during the war. By

excluding the Jews from qualified professions and using the same circle of people

for unskilled work in labour columns (like, for example, the detention of the

‘work-shy’ in concentration camps), the labour market was transformed into

‘labour deployment’ (Arbeitseinsatz), organized not least along racist lines; here

important foundations were laid for the slave labour of ‘those of alien race’ during

the war.

The strict prohibitions on everyday contact with Jews could only function with

the help of an extensive system of espionage which, in view of the relatively small

numbers in the Gestapo and the SD, depended upon the support of the population

and in fact functioned so effectively that it inevitably tended towards an abolition

of the private sphere. One other consequence of the gradual implementation of

anti-Jewish policies was that the open terror of the Party activists was finally

acknowledged and legitimized as an appropriate instrument for the implementa-

tion of a policy of exclusion.

In the wake of National Socialist Judenpolitik, between 1933 and 1939 a widely

ramified apparatus of persecution had been constructed. Apart from the special

departments of the Gestapo and the SD and the relevant Party offices (such as the

Office of Racial Policy or Rosenberg’s Institute for Research into the Jewish

Question), within the Reich ministries (as for example the Interior Ministry, the

Foreign Office or the Propaganda Ministry, special Jewish desks, for the purposes

of the ‘de-Judaization’ (Entjudung) of the economy) an extensive apparatus had

been set up, and local government had bureaucratically confirmed discrimination

against the Jews down to the bottom level of the administration.

The implementation of Judenpolitik occurred, as we have seen, in phases, with a

certain tension between the NS government, the state bureaucracy, police appar-

atus, and Party base, and frictions appeared concerning the pace and methods of

anti-Jewish policy: the leadership of the regime allowed a great deal of scope for

initiative on the part of the various institutions involved in Judenpolitik. If these

initiatives proved inadequate or if they went too far, the centre intervened

correctively. But concerning the bottom line of this policy, the gradual exclusion

of the Jews from German society, there was considerable consensus.

130

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

With the total exclusion of the Jewish minority from German society Juden-

politik had, by the start of the war, reached a certain end point. A further

intensification of discrimination, a continuation of Entjudung was now no longer

possible; after six years of active Judenpolitik it was hardly the time from a

propaganda point of view to treat those Jews who had remained in the country

as dangerous adversaries.

The war, however, was to provide entirely new possibilities for a radicalizing

‘Jewish and racial policy’: in the context of the conquest and penetration of the

European continent, new functions within National Socialist policy fell to the

‘Jewish race in Europe’ and ‘world Jewry’ (so named by Hitler in his Reichstag

speech on 30 January 1939): the National Socialist idea of taking the Jews hostage

was now extended across the whole of the continent: the Jewish minorities in the

conquered countries became important objects of the German policy of occupa-

tion and alliance, and it was at their expense that the ‘new order’ of the ‘new

Lebensraum’ of the German Volk was primarily to be achieved. Where Juden-

politik had until 1939 been one of the most important instruments of the power-

political penetration of German society, the extension of persecution to the entire

European area and its gradual further radicalization performed in the eyes of the

NS regime a key function for the control of the ‘new Europe’.

PART II

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS,

1939–1941

The Politics of Annihilation and the War

The beginning of the Second World War saw the inauguration of the National

Socialist regime’s systematic politics of racial annihilation. The start of the war

also marked the start of the physical annihilation of ‘alien races’ and the ‘racially

inferior’ on a vast scale. In 1939 the National Socialist regime set in train two

extensive programmes of mass murder, the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme, or

the systematic murder of sick and disabled inmates of psychiatric institutions, and

the mass murder of members of the Polish elite, including many Jews. The

institution of a terrorist regime in Poland, organized on racist lines, established

a framework for further murder on a huge scale. This is the context, too, for the

extensive deportation programmes that were being developed from the autumn of

1939 onwards and which made provision for the ‘resettlement’ of all Jews under

German rule into a ‘reservation’ in Poland. In the long term, given the inadequate

conditions there, those transported to this ‘reservation’ were intended eventually

to die.

The radicalization of the politics of annihilation at the outset of the war is

linked to the key function that the war had within National Socialism: war was

synonymous with the opportunity to realize the National Socialist utopia of a

comprehensive new social order conceived on racial lines:

Attaining Lebensraum (living space) in the East would create the conditions for

a ‘biological revolution’, which could be achieved via a huge increase in the birth

rate amongst the ‘racially valuable’ sections of the population. It would also

comprise the permanent extirpation of racially undesirable elements within the

National Socialist sphere of influence.

Territorial expansion and the establishment of occupying regimes dominated

by the radical elements of the Party and the SS meant a further increase in

National Socialist power. By radicalizing policy on the fringes, German society

could be converted more rapidly into a racially homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft

(national community) and the principle of ‘selection’ (in the form of ‘extirpation’)

could be established as a permanent and all-embracing process.

From the point of view of the National Socialists war represented a means of

racial selection, a method for maintaining the ‘racially valuable’ and thus an

important instrument in the establishment of a social order that was able to

stand up for itself. The loss of ‘racially valuable’ individuals in the war also

legitimated the violent destruction of large numbers of ‘inferior specimens’ in

order to restore a ‘national biological balance’. Such a radical, dehumanizing

approach only had a chance of being put into practice in wartime, in a more

generally brutalizing atmosphere in which the existence of the individual was

already to an extent devalued.

chapter 7

THE PERSECUTION OF JEWS IN THE

TERRITORY OF THE REICH, 1939–1940

In the first months of the war there was a characteristic concentration of the

jurisdiction of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) with respect to the ‘Jewish

question’. The Gestapo and the Security Police were merged under the Reich

Security Head Office (RSHA) in October 1939 and from the beginning of 1940

responsibility for Jewish affairs was concentrated in a new Department, IV D 4

(Emigration and Evacuation), which was altered shortly afterwards to IV B 4

(Jewish Affairs and Evacuation Matters).
1

Amongst other things, this Department oversaw the Reich Association of Jews

in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland), founded in July 1939, in

respect of which the responsible officials performed their duties in the pettiest,

most intransigent, and least cooperative manner possible.
2
The Reich Association of Jews oversaw existing communities and administered them as branch or district

associations.
3
The Jewish institutions that still existed (associations, organizations, foundations) were gradually dissolved and their functions incorporated into the

responsibilities of the Reich Association.
4

In autumn 1939 the Jewish schools that were still in existence were also

assimilated into the remit of the Reich Association, which was by then heavily

overburdened. In October 1939 there were still 9,555 Jewish pupils in a total of 126

schools, including 5 secondary schools, 1 middle school, and a secondary modern.

134

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

Two years later, in the autumn of 1941, there were 74 schools remaining for some

7,000 Jewish children of school age, of which only one was a secondary school. By

the end of 1941 teaching was impossible in practical terms because of the deport-

ations and numerous other restrictions in the lives of the Jewish population.
5
In 1942 the whole network of Jewish schools was dissolved on the orders of the

Gestapo.
6
The existing centres for the education of the Jewish population in agricultural and technical professions, in preparation for their emigration, not

only survived but were positively encouraged by the RSHA. However, after the

summer of 1941 it pushed for a reduction in their number, and by the end of that

year it was aiming to shut them down altogether.
7

In the first months of the war Jews were almost wholly excluded from German

society.
8
The collection of documents edited by Joseph Walk reveals that between the November pogroms and the outbreak of war 229 anti-Jewish regulations were