Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (6 page)

success in September 1930 with renewed vigour. He was obviously perfectly well

aware that the number of those voting for him was greater than the total number

of radical anti-Semites in the German population,
42
and a few weeks after the election he gave an interview to The Times in which he spoke out against violent

anti-Semitism and pogroms, thereby establishing respectable credentials as one of

the leading German politicians.
43
‘The movement discountenanced violent antiSemitism’, he was reported as saying. ‘Herr Hitler would have nothing to do with

pogroms, and that was the first word that had always gone forth from him in

turbulent times. Their doctrine was “Germany for the Germans” and their attitude

towards Jews was governed by the attitude of Jews towards this doctrine. They had

nothing against decent Jews, but if Jews associated themselves with Bolshevism, as

many unfortunately did, they must be regarded as enemies. The Party was against

all violence, but if attacked was ready to defend itself.’ But a more precise analysis

of Hitler’s speeches shows that he had not altered his basic position. As the

NSDAP achieved unprecedented successes in elections in the years from 1930 to

1933, the fundamental elements of Hitler’s ideology, ‘space’ and ‘race’, were

consistently at the forefront of his addresses.
44
On many occasions Hitler stressed how he continued to see the ‘Jewish race’ as the principal enemy of the German

people.

On 29 August 1930, for example, shortly before the National Socialists’ huge

success in the Reichstag elections, Hitler referred to the Jews in a speech given in

Munich: ‘The head of another race is on top of the body of our nation, heart and head

are no longer one and the same in our people.’
45
In another speech held a few weeks later he depicted the struggle against the Jews—without naming them explicitly—as

a divinely appointed task: ‘if we appear today as Germans and try to resist the

poisonous effect of an alien people, what we are doing is attempting to return into the

hands of the almighty Creator the same creature as He has given us.
’46

There is much here to support the view that the reduction in anti-Jewish attacks

was a temporary tactical concession on the part of the National Socialist leader-

ship which, after its electoral success, was trying to enter into a coalition with the

18

Historical Background

Centre Party. When these plans collapsed, from late 1931 or early 1932 onwards, it

seems that more space was made for anti-Semitic tirades.
47

It is clear from a list of definitive statements compiled and published by the CV

that in 1931 and 1932 National Socialist speakers made demands that included

taking Jews as hostages to ensure that money allegedly taken out of the country be

brought back in or to fend off an attack by France. They demanded also that Jews

be removed from public office, from the field of journalism, or removed

altogether; they insisted that Jews be deprived of citizenship, called for the burning

of synagogues, or promised pogroms in the event of an attack on a member of the

National Socialist leadership.
48
Speakers indulged themselves in ever more extravagant comparisons of Jews with animals and fantasies of annihilation as they

demanded, for example, the ‘extirpation’ of Jews ‘like tapeworm’, or insisted that

they be made ‘harmless . . . like fleas’.
49
The National Socialist Party press seems to have had little occasion to rein in their anti-Semitic propaganda in these years: the

Völkische Beobachter, the Party’s main publication, revelled in violent anti-Semitic

tirades;
50
the same was true of Goebbels’s newspaper, Der Angriff—‘attack’—

which was tailored for the public of Berlin in particular.

Anti-Semitic activities and attacks by Party followers were just as evident in the

years 1930–2 when the Party was officially calling for moderation in the matter of

the ‘Jewish question’ and distanced itself from such actions. After 1930 there was

an increase in the number of attacks on cemeteries and desecrations of syn-

agogues, and in the cases where the perpetrators were identified a significant

proportion of these actions were committed by NSDAP followers.
51

NSDAP members repeatedly attacked Jews or ‘Jewish-looking’ people on the

streets,
52
and such activities reached an initial high in the violence organized by the Berlin SA on the Kurfürstendamm on 12 September 1930, the Jewish new year,

when more than a thousand SA followers, not in uniform, randomly attacked

Jewish passers-by.
53
Immediately after the Reichstag elections of 31 July 1932 NS

followers swamped East Prussia and various other regions of Germany with a

wave of violent attacks, a number including the use of hand grenades and

including the attempted murder of Jewish citizens; the windows of many Jewish

businesses were smashed, too.
54
The boycott of Jewish firms and other Jewish institutions, which we shall return to in more detail later, was driven forwards on

the authority of the NSDAP. National Socialists even went as far as making

accusations of ritual murder in order to fan the flames of anti-Semitism.
55

Women and men received threats because of their alleged ‘racial disgrace’.
56

During the election campaign for the poll on 6 November 1932 the Nazi Party

made use of massive anti-Semitic propaganda, coining the slogan ‘bigwigs and the

Lords’ Clu
b57
with the Jew’, including a correspondingly large range of examples from their repertoire of anti-Jewish caricatures.
58

During the period from 1930 to 1933, however, with an eye to a possible coalition

with other right-wing forces, the NSDAP officially rejected the rowdy anti-Semitic

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

19

tendency and stressed its intention of solving the ‘Jewish question’ in a ‘reason-

able’, or in other words legal, manner.

The NS Monatshefte, the Nazi Monthly Journal published an article in its

October 1930 volume that explained, on the basis of the Party Programme, how

plans for anti-Jewish laws would be put into practice in the ‘Third Reich’ that was

to come. There was a plan, for example, to give Jews a special legal status which

would have as a consequence a ‘restriction in their simple rights as citizens’,

including the removal of both active and passive voting rights and of military

service. This general restriction imposed on German Jews would ‘not exclude

further interventions, if they prove necessary’. The author of the article then gave a

series of examples that read like a catalogue for the anti-Semitic laws that would be

introduced a few years later. In a similar vein, Ernst von Heydebrand von der Lasa,

the Deputy Director of the domestic policy office of the NSDAP, published a draft

law in 1931 that made provision for the exclusion of Jews from German citizen-

ship.
59

In contrast to fundamental draft plans such as these, it seems that there were

not so many requests for spectacular anti-Jewish laws made by the NSDAP’s

parliamentary group after 1930 as there had been previously. Nevertheless, in the

Prussian parliament there was a demand made that Jews be excluded from

theatres and the radio and for a numerus clausus to be imposed on Jewish

receivers.
60

Gregor Strasser, who was head of the Nazi Party’s national organization,

announced in October 1931 that a National Socialist government would ensure

that ‘the dominance of Jews in Germany would come to an end’ and that this

meant ‘the exclusion of Jews from all areas in which they are in a position to

hamper the German economy’.
61
In June 1932 Strasser declared in a radio address that the Party ‘did not want to persecute the Jews’, but that they did intend a

‘German leadership with no trace of Jewish or foreign spirit’.
62

Possible concerns were assuaged by an explanation given by Goering in May

1932 to an Italian newspaper. He noted the plans for far-reaching special laws to be

applied to Jews, but stressed ‘that any decent Israelite businessman who wishes to

live in Germany as a foreigner under the protection of the law to which all

foreigners are subject, will be allowed to pursue his business’.
63
Goebbels defended the anti-Semitic policies of his party again a few weeks before taking power, in an

interview with the Daily Express.
64

However, the facts that in Germany in 1933 radical anti-Semitism was elevated

to the status of official government policy and that with the help of initial anti-

Semitic laws the equality of citizenship of the Jews was destroyed are not

attributable solely to the rise of the NSDAP. It was above all crucial that the

thought of excluding the Jews from citizenship rights had been becoming an

increasingly popular notion in the socio-cultural milieu of the Conservatives, the

NSDAP’s future partners in government, since the 1920s. This was initially

20

Historical Background

because representatives of a radical anti-Semitic stance within conservative-

leaning organizations had used demands for expelling Jewish members to trigger

a long-lasting debate on the attitude of these organizations to the ‘Jewish

question’. These discussions often ended with the introduction of an ‘Aryan

clause’, which symbolically expressed the readiness of the whole organization

to adopt a radical stance on the ‘Jewish question’, distance themselves from

traditional conservative views, and fall into line behind the National Socialists.

There were two political organizations in particular that paved the way for their

move into the National Socialist camp with an ‘Aryan clause’, the German

National[ist] People’s Party (DNVP) and the ‘Stahlhelm’—the so-called Steel

Helmet Veterans’ Organization, which would join with the NSDAP in 1931 to

form the Harzburg Front and become partners in Hitler’s government in 1933.

The DNVP took the decision to exclude Jewish members in 1924 and (for

formal reasons) again in 1926.
65
This decision was in line with the ideas of the right wing of the Party that used the Party’s cooperation with democratic forces in

parliament and coalition governments (in 1925 and 1927) to accuse the leadership

of abandoning its fundamental opposition to the Weimar Republic and of bring-

ing it too close to the state that it disliked. With the election of Alfred Hugenberg

in 1928 the right wing of the Party prevailed and determined on an alliance with

the NSDAP.
66
Hugenberg was himself relatively restrained about making anti-Semitic statements, probably because of his interests as the head of a group of

press companies, but it is clear that the exclusion of Jewish members was a

precondition for the Nazi-friendly line of development that the Party took. In

the Steel Helmet Veterans’ Organization the völkisch wing under the Deputy

Leader, Theodor Duesterberg, gradually succeeded in taking over and bringing

about a political alliance with the DNVP and the NSDAP.
67
These forces managed to engineer the exclusion of Jewish members in 1924 and ensured that thereafter

the organization routinely took an anti-Semitic stance.

The strong influence of völkisch forces on attitudes to the ‘Jewish question’ was

also felt in the ‘Reichslandbund’ or National Rural League, the successor to the

strongly anti-Semitic pre-First World War Farmers’ League. The RLB’s propa-

ganda shifted in 1924–5 towards the extensive use of anti-Semitic stereotypes

under pressure from völkisch forces. These were attempting to depict the particu-

lar burdens on agriculture, following currency stabilization in 1924, as a conspir-

acy on the part of international Jewry to force it into subjugation. This way of

seeing things was adopted to a large extent by the RLB.
68

The German National Association of Commercial Employees (DHV) had

more than 300,000 members at the end of the 1920s and it undertook a lively

programme of anti-Semitic propaganda and education. Under the intellectual

leadership of the publicist Wilhelm Stapel, the Association propagated a völk-

isch-cultural brand of anti-Semitism and stressed the essential incompatibility of

being both German and Jewish.
69

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

21

Thus the Weimar Republic saw a large number of middle-class associations take

steps to exclude their Jewish members, and it is remarkable that the anti-Semitic

forces managed to implement this process of exclusion precisely during the most

stable period of the Republic, at a time, therefore, when such associations were

recovering from the years of inflation and consolidating themselves. For instance,

the ‘Jewish question’—the demand by völkisch members of the association that an

‘Aryan clause’ be inserted into the constitution—played a major role from the

early 1920s onwards at the annual general meetings of the German-Austrian

Alpine Club, which was probably the most important of all German leisure and

tourist organizations. Important branches such as Berlin and Breslau did in fact

succeed in banning Jewish members.
70