Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (9 page)

advancement. Racism established the basis for a new order of financial relation-

ships; articulated, for example, in the ‘Aryanization’ programme it transformed

traditional social policy into notions of ‘nurturing the nation’.

Finally, imposing racial and anti-Semitic patterns of thinking onto inter-

national and foreign policy appeared to create considerable confusion on the

international stage which in part prevented the build-up of a widespread rejection

of the Nazi regime from outside Germany.

The First Anti-Semitic Wave during the

Nazi ‘Seizure of Power’

The very first steps towards the persecution of the Jews taken by the National

Socialists clearly demonstrate how National Socialist ‘anti-Jewish policy’ always

remained closely related to aims that had little or nothing to do with the ‘Jewish

question’. The first wave of anti-Semitism, the attacks on Jewish citizens in March

1933, the boycott that followed on 1 April, and the discriminatory legal measures

taken immediately afterwards are all of a piece with the tactics deployed by the

National Socialists for the ‘seizure of power’.

In the first phase of the National Socialists’ ‘seizure of power’, between

30 January and the Reichstag elections of 5 March 1933, the new government

concentrated on its opposition to the Left, the Communist Party (KPD) and the SPD.

But even if socialist functionaries of Jewish origin were persecuted with particular

intensity,
1
and attacks on Jewish or ‘Jewish-looking’ people in the street and raids on apartments inhabited by Jews were routine elements in the violence of the SA,
2

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33

this form of attack on Jews was still very much overshadowed by the National

Socialists’ strategies for the elimination of the workers’ movement.

In the second phase of the ‘seizure of power’, which began after the Reichstag

elections of 5 March and lasted until early May, the National Socialists were

principally concerned with bringing into line (Gleichsschaltung) the Länder and

local government. Alongside these measures, in March and April, the NSDAP

began to take control of the employers’ associations, and the organization of the

unions and the SPD were paralysed by direct interventions (by this time the KPD

had already been crushed). In this phase, and often in direct conjunction with the

tumultuous occupation of town halls, union headquarters, and Social Democrat

newspaper offices, the National Socialists intensified their attacks on Jewish

citizens and Jewish businesses across the whole Reich. Within a few days, two

principal targets emerged: lawyers of Jewish origin and businesses in Jewish

ownership. At the same time similar campaigns were initiated against department

stores, chain stores, and cooperative societies (or in other words against large

retailers who were branded by the NSDAP’s propaganda aimed at the lower

middle class as typical products of the ‘Jewish’ drive for profit), regardless of

whether they were actually owned by Jews or not. This wave of attacks on Jewish

businesses, amongst others, was not unexpected: it was the continuation and

culmination of the dogged low-level war that the NSDAP had waged against

undesirable entrepreneurs since the end of the 1920s. Driving Jewish lawyers

out of the judiciary was, as has already been demonstrated, an old keystone of

anti-Semitism.
3

Violence and ‘Boycott’

The spread of the first wave of anti-Semitism can be reconstructed precisely.
4
It was begun on 7 March 1933 in the Rhine-Ruhr district, reached central Germany

and Berlin on 9 March, hit Hamburg, Mecklenburg, and Frankfurt on 11 March

and a series of cities in the south-west on 13 March. Spreading to certain regions in

leaps and bounds like this indicates that the violence was organized at district

level, from within those Gaus where the functionaries of the Combat League of

Small Business (the militant organization of Nazi shopkeepers) and regional SA

leaders will have been prominent.

The violence always followed the same pattern: Nazi supporters demonstrated

outside the shops, stuck posters on the windows, and prevented customers from

entering. There were frequently scuffles, and in most cases the shops were forced

to close. These campaigns were often accompanied by violent attacks on Jews, but

these did not at this stage take on the shape of a pogrom.
5

In the very first days the National Socialist leadership had encouraged the

attacks on Jewish businesses—the Prussian Minister for the Interior, Goering,

for instance, declared on 10 March that he refused to allow ‘the police to act as a

34

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protection agency for Jewish department stores’.
6
However, the NS leadership very soon began to row against this trend: in a call made on 10 March Hitler

warned against any further unauthorized individual campaigns and a decree from

the Reich Minister for the Interior issued on 13 March also warned explicitly

against ‘the closure and intimidation of retail premises’.
7

In response to these warnings from on high, attacks made by grass-roots Party

members on Jewish shops had slackened off by 13 March.
8
In the second half of March, the SA concentrated mainly on measures against unions and the Social

Democrats and on preventing all forms of Communist activity. Two events will

have caused the NS leadership to present themselves as relatively moderate,

sanctioning the use of force only for the complete suppression of ‘Marxism’.

These were the formal opening of the Reichstag due to take place on 21 March,

where the National Socialists wished to portray themselves as partners of the

Conservatives on the basis of Prussian traditionalism, and the passing of the

Enabling Act slated for two days later, for which the government required

the support of the non-socialist parties.

Nonetheless, it was not possible to put a complete end to anti-Jewish violence in

this phase. Members of the SA perpetrated what amounted to a pogrom in

Creglingen (in the southern German state of Württemberg) on 25 March. They

forced their way into the town’s synagogue, dragged the male worshippers into the

town hall where they humiliated and maltreated them, sometimes very seriously

indeed. Two Jewish inhabitants died as a result of their injuries.
9

During the month of March, alongside the attacks on Jewish shops and

businesses, there were many towns in which Jewish lawyers were forcibly

removed from the administration of justice. From 9 March on, SA and SS

troops occupied court buildings and ejected Jewish members of the legal

profession, including judges and public prosecutors.
10
The most famous incident was in Breslau, where the violence forced the regional court to declare a

three-day halt to judicial proceedings.
11
Such attacks on court buildings were hugely inflamed by various public declarations and continued throughout the

second half of March.
12
Interventions into the area of justice by ordinary members of the Party gave the judicial authorities the excuse to use administrative means to remove Jewish lawyers from their positions,
13
and created the basis on which the subsequent legal exclusion of Jews from the judiciary and the

public sector as a whole could quickly be established. For the National Social-

ists, however, these illegal interventions and their rapid subsequent legalization

were also an important step on the way towards control of the entire state

apparatus, a first litmus test to establish how resistant or compliant the pre-

dominantly conservative civil service actually was, and an opportunity for

assessing at the same time the extent to which German nationalist coalition

partners would be prepared to tolerate interference in the rule of law at this

early stage.

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35

If the Nazi leadership resolved at the end of March to call once more for a

boycott of Jewish shops and businesses—centrally coordinated this time—then it

did so for a mixture of tactical and fundamentally ideological reasons.
14
The decision to call for a boycott arose from the specific dynamics of the process

towards the seizure of power. When the Enabling Act was passed at the end of

March the NSDAP had completed an important stage in their plans to ensure a

monopoly of power. The next decisive step on the path to total power, the

definitive suppression of unions and the SPD and the dissolution of the non-

socialist parties, was to take place only after 1 May, the National Labour Day,

which they proposed to make into an official public holiday celebrated with great

pomp and circumstance. At the end of March, therefore, the NS Party leadership

was in a delicate transitional phase in the process towards the seizure of power:

grass-roots Party activism could not be allowed to wane, but the activists them-

selves had to be restrained from being overly brutal towards their political enemies

within the unions and the SPD and towards the competition represented by the

non-socialist parties. It was moreover important to regain control of the increas-

ingly forceful anti-capitalist drive arising from the Party activists, which was

leading to disruptive ‘interventions in the economic life of the country’ at precisely

this point, the second half of March.
15

Both aims were attainable by means of a controlled resumption of the anti-

Jewish boycott. The Party leadership was demonstrating that it was responding to

the anti-Semitic demands of the population, and by steering and controlling the

whole campaign from the centre, was able to re-establish its authority over the

Party membership. The fact that the leadership succeeded in gaining control over

the attacks emanating from the activists in certain districts by the middle of

March, and that it was to initiate a major propaganda campaign to stoke the

flames of the population’s anger by the end of March, shows that the leadership

was fully in control of the situation and was in no sense propelled into the boycott

by the grass-roots membership.

The need to steer this complex internal Party dynamic during the process of the

seizure of power was only one of two main motives. By starting a campaign

against the German Jews, or in other words by seizing hostages, the NS leadership

hoped to be able to stem the rising tide of criticism from abroad. By labelling

criticism of this type ‘Jewish atrocity stories’, which emanated from a relatively

small section of foreign Jews, they defined international reaction against the

brutalities of the ‘seizure of power’ in anti-Semitic terms, and at the same time

created the pretext for the planned boycott.

Such tactical considerations should not obscure the fact that, only a few months

after taking over the reins of government the NSDAP was using the call for a

boycott to begin implementing a significant element in its political programme,

namely the disenfranchisement of the Jewish minority. This makes it clear that

Nazi Judenpolitik cannot be understood in merely functional terms, as an instrument

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designed to mobilize the NS movement; it was one of the central pillars of the

NSDAP’s ideology, and there was no difference of opinion on this point between

the Party leadership and the ordinary Party members.

The campaigns against Jewish businesses undertaken under centralized dir-

ection, and pre-empted by the violence of March 1933, were now linked with the

continuing attacks on Jewish lawyers to form a comprehensive anti-Jewish

crusade underpinned by the authority of the regime. In this way the pressure

needed to initiate anti-Semitic legislation—the ‘atmospheric’ conditions for it—

could be created. Under this pressure, the Jews could be removed from public

life, and from state institutions in particular, and an appropriate platform could

be created for the complete segregation of the Jewish minority that was to follow

at a later date.

The successful enforcement of these first anti-Jewish measures allowed the

NSDAP to make the ‘Jewish question’ a dominant factor in domestic policy within

only a few months of their coming to power. Problems as distinct as the economic

situation of the lower middle class, the seething violence of the SA and the

international isolation of the Reich were to be reduced to a single common

point of origin, stamped with the slogan ‘the Jews are our misfortune’. By

unleashing the anti-Jewish campaign the NSDAP succeeded above all in seizing

the domestic policy initiative and in maximizing their room for manoeuvre

vis-à-vis their conservative coalition partners.

The practical preparations for boycott were begun on 26 March after a conver-

sation between Hitler and Goebbels. They were entrusted to Julius Streicher,

district chief or Gauleiter of the area around Nuremberg and one of the most

radical anti-Semites in the whole Party, who was made the chair of a ‘Central

Committee to Combat Jewish Lies about Atrocities and Boycott’.
16
On 28 March the Committee issued a call to prepare the boycott.
17
Responsibility for it was clearly claimed by Hitler in the cabinet meeting held on 28 March 1933, when he

informed the cabinet that ‘he, the Reich Chancellor himself, had ensured that the

appeal would be issued to the National Socialist Party’.
18

Because acts of violence against Jews were becoming increasingly frequent in

the days before the ‘boycott’ that was to begin on 1 April for an unlimited period,
19

considerable effort was expended to ensure that the whole undertaking would run

in a smooth and disciplined manner. To this end Goebbels declared on 31 March

that the campaign would be ‘suspended on the evening of the first day (this was a

Saturday) until the following Wednesday; it would only be relaunched if the ‘lies

about atrocities’ from abroad had not ceased by that point.
20

Following a tried and tested pattern, on 1 April SA and Hitler Youth guards

carrying pre-printed placards were stationed outside Jewish shops and attempted

to prevent potential customers from entering. The atmosphere on that day was

characterized by crowds of people in the business quarters, gathered round the

entrances of the shops being forcibly boycotted. Because their customers were

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37

being intimidated, most Jewish shop owners found themselves compelled to shut

as the day wore on.
21

Whilst in the main shopping streets of the cities the impression given was of a

carefully regulated Party campaign, in the side streets and in smaller towns attacks

on Jewish firms mounted steadily, often with display windows being daubed or

smashed. In many towns Jewish citizens were threatened, mistreated, or driven

through the streets by squads of SA troops. There were isolated instances of

looting. In Kiel a Jewish lawyer who was supposed to have shot and seriously

injured an SS man was lynched by the mob whilst in police custody.
22
On the evening of 1 April the boycott was ‘suspended’ for three days, as planned, and not

relaunched thereafter, since the Central Committee announced that the supposed

stories from abroad about atrocities in Germany had abated.
23

The boycott did in fact enable the regime to achieve its intentions. Even if

innumerable reports confirm that a proportion of the public deliberately shopped

that day in Jewish-owned businesses,
24
the majority of the population evidently acted just as the regime had expected them to. On that day most people avoided

going to Jewish shops. The boycott therefore largely achieved its aims.

The regime could also claim as a further aspect of its success the fact that since

the end of March, in anticipation of the imminent boycott, a whole series of voices

usually heard in opposition to the government had taken a public stance against

foreign claims of atrocities being perpetrated in Germany and had mobilized their

contacts abroad in like manner.

The National Socialists thus succeeded in presenting foreign responses pro-

voked by their own anti-Jewish campaign as ‘anti-German’ attacks and in exploit-

ing this skewed picture to send out messages of trustworthiness and images of

inoffensiveness to the rest of the world. At this very early point it is apparent how

the ‘Jewish question’, handled with the appropriate political and promotional skill,

could be utilized to influence and confuse public opinion not only in Germany but

in the rest of the world as well.

It is remarkable that even Jewish organizations and institutions such as the

Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Organization

of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith) and the Jewish Veterans’ Organization,

the Boards of the Jewish community in Berlin and elsewhere, as well as many

Jewish private individuals and entrepreneurs took part in the attempts to minim-

ize the criticisms of the situation in Germany voiced by those abroad.
25
After a discussion with Goering on 25 March, the Organization of German Zionists and

the Centralverein decided on a particularly spectacular course: they sent a joint

delegation to London to argue against a boycott of German goods.
26
The fact that on the delegation’s return, the Centralverein publicly declared the mission a

success,
27
underlines the precarious situation of the German-Jewish officials: the

‘success’ of their mission could also be seen as confirming the NS argument to the

effect that ‘the Jews’ were responsible for behind-the-scenes propaganda and

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boycott campaigns against Germany but had supposedly buckled under massive

pressure and desisted from their shameful activities.

First Anti-Jewish Laws

In the meantime campaigns by Party activists against Jewish lawyers were being

extended. The judicial authorities reacted to these illegal measures by transferring

or suspending Jewish judges and public prosecutors, and by imposing quotas for

Jewish barristers.
28
These steps were very soon legalized by the Hitler–Papen government, and the official regulation of members of the legal system agreed

in cabinet at the beginning of April was quickly extended to the whole of the civil

service.

The ‘Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service’ passed on

7 April made provision both for the possible dismissal of civil servants on political

grounds and for the compulsory retirement of those civil servants ‘who are not of

Aryan descent’.
29
In response to an intervention from President Hindenburg, Jewish civil servants who were already in service before 1 August 1914, who had

fought at the front, or whose fathers or sons had been killed in the war, were

exempted from these regulations. These requirements were also logically to be

extended to all workers and employees in the public service. The first decree,

issued on 11 April, determined that anyone who had even one Jewish parent or

grandparent was to be considered ‘non-Aryan’.
30

The Professional Civil Service Law marked the point at which the legal

equality of Jews across the Reich that had been in force since its foundation in

1871 was finally shattered, and it heralded the step-by-step revision of their

emancipation. The law also marked a significant infringement of the traditional

rights and privileges of the civil service, which were constitutionally protected

but, since the Enabling Act, liable to suspension. Whilst the political ‘cleansing’

of the civil service represented a measure that was not out of line with the kind of

personnel changes that usually accompany a change of regime, the dismissal of

civil servants ‘of non-Aryan descent’ was something completely new: a racial

criterion was being used to rob part of the civil service of the constitutionally

guaranteed status that formed such an important element of the German

tradition of the servant of the state. The fact that such a racially motivated

political intervention in the existing legal system was accepted by the service

meant a significant victory for the NSDAP in its attempt to subjugate the

conservative state apparatus that was so wedded to the principle of the consti-

tutional state founded on the rule of law.

The imposition of the ‘Aryan principle’ in public administration during the

next few weeks was perfected using further legal measures. In the months that

followed some 50 per cent of a total of about 5,000 Jewish civil servants were

deprived of their jobs by the new laws.
31

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39

The elimination of Jewish civil servants was undertaken by the new government

simultaneously with the exclusion of Jewish members of the legal profession from