Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (8 page)

produce a counter-movement to offer resistance. Those who encouraged others to

boycott Jewish businesses, heads of personnel who refused to employ Jewish

applicants, guesthouse owners who did not accommodate Jews risked no general

social disapproval or fatal economic consequences.

It became clear, therefore, that radical anti-Semitism and its central demand for

the exclusion of Jews from the rights of citizenship was not limited to the agitation

of the NSDAP but gradually took root in the political and social life of the Weimar

Republic. The radical anti-Semitic forces had succeeded in forcing the Republic to

enter into a debate on the ‘Jewish question’.

It was against this backdrop that an informal compromise was worked out in

the early 1930s between the National Socialists and their political partners on the

right. Whilst the National Socialists indicated that they would give up the overly

violent forms of anti-Semitism if they were to take power, their partners in the

leadership of the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, and other right-wing organizations were

obviously more and more willing to accept the old demand that the Jews be legally

driven out of certain areas of public life. This increasing willingness was not

evident from public decrees but it was clearly detectable in the public statements

of leading right-wing intellectuals and it manifested itself in the policies of

organizations discussed above that were prepared to exclude Jews definitively

from their membership for fear of criticism from the National Socialist camp.
94

In 1933 the radical anti-Semites had triumphed in the matter of exclusion after a

struggle that had lasted more than fifty years. With the imposition of their radical

viewpoint towards the ‘Jewish question’ they had won a significant symbolic

victory that in turn emphasized their leading role amongst the political right.

However, it is not the gradual erosion of conservative reservations about taking

on radical anti-Semitic positions that explains how the National Socialists were so

easily able to introduce their anti-Semitic policies immediately upon taking

power. There is an additional important factor: in the last years of the Weimar

Republic there were no significant political or social groupings that might have

26

Historical Background

prevented the success of the radical anti-Semitic movement. The Liberals who had

inscribed the emancipation of the Jews on their banners in the nineteenth century

(even though they were mainly concerned with founding a German nation state in

which non-Christians could also thrive as citizens with equal rights) no longer

existed as a political force by the early 1930s.
95
Anti-Semitism was also rife amongst Catholics. For religious reasons, because of the Catholic view of mankind, Catholicism was in essence incompatible with radical racist anti-Semitism.

However, this did not cause the Catholic Church to stand up to that form of anti-

Semitism; instead it was by no means hostile to a certain weakening of the Jews’

position in society so that in the end both variants, religious and racist, were

mutually supportive. And the workers’ movement, which was relatively clear of

anti-Semitism, saw it principally as a diversion from the realities of the class

struggle and did not take the anti-Semitic demands of the National Socialists

especially seriously. They did not seriously fear their implementation, and in the

view of the Socialists these demands ultimately undermined the interests of

‘capital’ (including the stereotype of the ‘Jewish capitalist’ that was also prevalent

in the workers’ movement).
96
This, then, was the political scenario that faced the National Socialists in 1933 when they began to put their anti-Semitic policies into

practice.

Part I

RACIAL PERSECUTION, 1933–1939

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chapter 1

THE DISPLACEMENT OF THE JEWS FROM

PUBLIC LIFE, 1933–1934

Before the war German Jews were the victims of three waves of Nazi anti-

Semitism, each of which inaugurated a new stage in their persecution. The unrest

of March 1933 was followed by the boycott of 1 April and the first anti-Semitic

laws, which initiated the process of driving Jews out of the public sphere. The

second wave began in spring 1935 with renewed anti-Jewish attacks, which reached

their pinnacle in the summer of the same year. The regime responded by pro-

mulgating the Nuremberg Laws, which discriminated against the Jews by assign-

ing them a special status that was defined in increasingly narrow and restrictive

terms as time went on. Then, in 1938, after a relatively long preparatory phase that

seemed from the outside more like an easing of policy towards the Jews, there

followed the third wave of anti-Semitism. After the violent excesses of summer

and autumn 1938 had culminated in the November pogrom, the regime decreed

the complete disenfranchisement of the German Jews, statutory steps towards

their total economic depredation, and their enforced expulsion.

Each of these three waves is marked by a characteristic dialectic between

‘campaigns’ arising in the ‘grass roots’ of the Party and measures taken by the

Nazi leadership. The anti-Semitic rowdyism of the National Socialist mob was

always followed by decrees from the leadership, which in turn instituted a whole

series of legal and administrative measures aimed at persecuting the Jews and

30

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

thereby initiated a new step in the persecution process. These three anti-Semitic

waves from the pre-war period must be seen in the context of the racism that was

at the heart of National Socialism.

At the heart of National Socialist political thinking was the idea that all the

most pressing problems besetting Germany could be solved with the introduc-

tion of a fully comprehensive ‘new racial order’. What was to be created was a

racially homogeneous ‘national community’ consisting of biologically superior

‘Aryan’ or ‘Germanic’ Übermenschen. But this racial utopia was based on their

absurd and inconsistent concept of race: it was simply not possible to use

inherited biological criteria to reduce the populations of Central Europe to

their ‘racial’ components and at the same time maintain the view that the

majority of these people represented something approximating to a homoge-

neous blood-related community. Tellingly, contemporary ‘experts’ on race

solved this problem by qualifying the majority of the population of Central

Europe as a racial ‘mixture’ or blend. This meant that any policy that attempted

to define members of the ‘Aryan’ race according to clearly distinguishable

criteria, and to make a positive selection of ‘racially valuable’ individuals, was

doomed to failure from the outset. If the Nazis had actually attempted to

implement such policies across the board, either the inhabitants of Central

Europe would have been subjected to a form of racial hierarchy defined by the

proportion of ‘Aryan’ blood in their veins, or the definition of ‘Aryanism’ would

have had to be so broad as to apply to a very large proportion of those living on

the continent of Europe. In either case, a policy of ‘positive’ racial discrimination

such as this was not workable, and would inevitably founder on its own abstruse

premises.

The only practical way to implement racial policy was therefore to use negative

criteria. National Socialist racial policy consisted above all in the exclusion of so-

called ‘alien races’ and in the ‘racially hygienic filtration’ of the weaker members of

the native ‘Germanic’ race. Nazi racial policy thus always consisted of the exclu-

sion or ‘eradication’ of minorities. For historical reasons, Judenpolitik was bound

to play a central role within racial policy that operated along ‘negative’ lines in this

manner. The Jewish minority was only superficially integrated into society. There

was a traditional image of the Jew as ‘enemy’, an age-old prejudice, and existing

anti-Semitic stereotypes assisted in constructing a scenario in which ‘the Jews’

represented a serious threat both as ‘enemies within’ and as the adherents of a

worldwide conspiracy. In addition, Entjudung or the removal of the Jews, offered

considerable advantages to those carrying out anti-Jewish policy since removing

the Jews from German society, which was crucial to the idea of racial ‘cleansing’,

was for the National Socialists precisely the same as achieving their goal of total

domination. ‘Anti-Jewish policy’, or ‘racial policy’ in its broadest sense, was

intimately bound up with plans of the NS leadership that reached far beyond

the immediate anti-Semitic or racist goals.

Displacement from Public Life, 1933–4

31

Racism and anti-Semitism were not only core components of the National

Socialists’ ideology but played a key role in the implementation and consolidation

of the NSDAP’s ambitions for power. By setting about translating their radical

aims into anti-Jewish and racial policies after 1933, the NSDAP was quickly

creating a new dimension to politics, and one that was wholly dominated by

them. At the centre was the intention to rid German society of all forms of ‘Jewish

influence’ and of everything that was in any sense ‘racially inferior’, and as part of

this comprehensive ‘cleansing’ process the sectors of German society that needed

‘cleansing’ were also to be subjugated as thoroughly as possible to National

Socialist hegemony. This new political dimension had top priority; it cut right

across the traditional political spheres such as foreign, economic, or social policy;

it dominated, saturated, and transformed them. Almost every conventional pol-

itical problem could be interpreted as a ‘racial problem’ or an aspect of the ‘Jewish

question’.

It was also true, of course, that the goals of foreign, economic, and social policy

had implications for the implementation of ‘racial’ or ‘anti-Jewish policy’. As in

every conventional sphere of politics, the practical implementation of racial or

anti-Semitic goals and the concomitant expansion of the National Socialists’

political power was a complicated process. Close attention had to be paid to

potentially competing aspirations, to overcoming opposition, making tactical

concessions, managing internal rivalries, and establishing a consensus on which

direction policy should take.

Within this complex process of implementing new racially dominated power

structures, four elements should be highlighted in order to demonstrate clearly

what far-reaching implications such a multi-layered transformation had for the

entire political system.

First, the ‘struggle against the Jews’, against racial ‘disintegration’ and ‘alien

races’ made an important contribution to integrating and mobilizing the National

Socialist movement. The Nazis’ programmatic approaches within the traditional

spheres of politics were contradictory and inadequately thought through, so

racism and anti-Semitism functioned as an indispensable surrogate for lack of

consistency in these areas.

Second, by implementing a racial model of argument, the means of steering

public opinion in the ‘Third Reich’ were restructured so as to permit the hegem-

ony of racism. What used to be defined as social, economic, domestic, or foreign

policy was now subsumed under an all-embracing ‘racial problem’ or ‘Jewish

question’. But implementing a racial discourse in a dictatorship was not restricted

to the manipulation of the media by the NS propaganda apparatus. In a broader

sense it encompassed all the ways in which the public sphere was influenced and

manoeuvred, including the day-to-day behaviour of the population, and in par-

ticular increases in the control of informal exchanges of information. The gradual

segregation of Jewish minorities from mainstream daily activities and the

32

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

suppression of any criticism of these measures appeared to offer proof that the

greater part of the German population was in full agreement with the regime’s

‘anti-Jewish policy’.

Third, reshaping the public domain was the most important prerequisite for the

NSDAP’s ability to use the ‘racial question’ or the ‘Jewish problem’ for the gradual

extension of its own power base, not least at the expense of its conservative

coalition partners. Since virtually every political question possessed a ‘racial’

element, and since every dimension of life was subject to Entjudung, the National

Socialists had almost unlimited possibilities for intervening in what had hitherto

been relatively autonomous areas of existence. In practice, racism made possible

the almost complete elimination of a private sphere. Questions such as the choice

of a partner and the conception and education of children were no longer

the responsibility of the individual but subordinated to racialized concepts of

the family. Racism undermined traditional ideas of the equality of the citizenry

and led to the creation of radically new criteria for judging personal capacities and

capabilities, and therefore also to a redistribution of opportunities for social