Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (11 page)

1. Lixl-Purcell,
   Women of Exile
   , 92.
   
2. erich Rosenthal, “Trends of the Jewish Population in Germany, 1910–39,”
   Jewish Social Studies
   6 (1944): 248.
   
3. About 22 percent of women were widowed in 1939. Bruno Blau, “Die Juden in Deutschland von 1939 bis 1945, ”
   Judaica
   7 (1951): 271. of the total number of widows, l6,117 (56.8 percent) were 65 or over. See Blau, “The Jewish Population,” 165.
   
4. These figures include Austria (exclusive of Vienna) and the Sudetenland. Blau, “The Jewish Population,” 165. In Berlin alone, the number of old age homes grew from five in 1933 to thirteen in 1939 with l,683 occupants. In 1939, 3,000 people waited for accommodations in the community’s thirteen old age homes. By 1942, the number of such institutions had grown to 21. See wolf Gruner, “Die Reichshauptstadt und die Verfolgung der Berliner Juden 1933–1945,” in
   Jüdische Geschichte in Berlin
   , ed. Reinhard Rürup (Berlin: edition Hentrich, 1995), 242, 251.
   
5. “Alles alte Leute, alte Frauen,” elisabeth Freund, memoirs, LBI: 146.
   

Chapter Two

e
vadinG
P
erseCution

German-Jewish Behavior Patterns after 1933

Jürgen Matthäus

The Setting

After the Holocaust, the question of Jewish agency has been more the subject of public debate than of in-depth analysis.
¹
In the past, the extremes dominated this debate. After her idea of the “banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt is best known for her polemic against leaders of the German-Jewish community, especially Rabbi Leo Baeck, going so far as calling him “the Jewish
Führer
”—a charge she later withdrew.
²
Dozens of books have been written to refute the stereotypical yet persistent assumption that Jews had gone “like sheep to the slaughter.”
³
However, the more these works focus on one aspect, usually armed resistance, the less they explore other, more subtle and less visible, forms of Jewish reactions to persecution. For the assessment of Jewish history in Nazi Germany, this rigid frame of reference has an especially negative effect. Compared to the warsaw ghetto uprising or the revolt of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau, attempts at counteracting the effects of
Judenpolitik
by Ger-man Jews seem to pale into insignificance, irrespective of the fact that there is ample proof for a multitude of behavior patterns from private reactions via organized efforts to militant opposition thereafter, or as Mar-ion kaplan has written, when “social death” had set in.
⁴
The publications by konrad kwiet and Francis Nicosia as well as the other contributions to this volume attest to the broad range of this spectrum.
⁵

Raul Hilberg, the doyen of Holocaust studies, has presented the most systematic interpretation of collective Jewish behavior patterns during the Holocaust, based on his analysis of a long tradition of Jewish reactions to earlier forms of persecution. Hilberg’s schema stretches from resistance and alleviation via evasion and paralysis to compliance. of these categories, alleviation—defined as “activities to avert danger or, in the event that force has already been used, to diminish its effects”—and compliance are identified as the ones most frequently adopted by Jews in reaction to Nazi persecution; cases of armed resistance, on the other hand, were, in Hilberg’s view, “small and few” as well as “actions of last (never first) resort.”
⁶
other scholars have applied a similar interpretation. Marion kaplan notes that the “desire of Jews to find some workable agreement” increased their tendency to accommodate and go on with their lives despite the danger signals gradually building up around them.
⁷

Little attention has been paid so far to the subject of this chapter, the actions of those who tried to evade becoming targets of anti-Jewish policies. one reason for the relative neglect is that evasion is difficult to separate from other forms of Jewish reactions. Hilberg defines it as “flight, concealment, and hiding,” terms that denote the physical withdrawal of Jews from their places of residence in reaction to or in anticipation of persecution.
⁸
emigration and hiding during the Holocaust are—even if restricted to German Jews—indeed important phenom-ena. By May 1939, roughly a quarter million—half the Jewish population in Germany in 1933—had managed to leave the country; by the end of the war, an estimated 10,000 Jews in Germany and Austria had taken the illegal route, but most of them did not survive.
⁹

Yet there are other, so far largely neglected aspects of evasion that do not necessarily imply physical retreat. I cannot cover here the whole spectrum of evasive Jewish behavior stretching beyond emigration and hid-ing, from the private into the political sphere. The focus of this chapter will be on the question of how persons targeted by anti-Jewish measures applied legal means of undermining the cornerstone in the edifice of persecution—the definition of who a Jew was in the eyes of the regime. I define “evasion” here as active rejection of “out-group” definition, or more precisely: the attempt by those whom Nazi agencies labeled as Jews to escape this designation and be treated as members of either the “in-group” or a less contentious minority (in the eyes of the rulers), such as
Mischlinge
(mixed breeds) or otherwise “privileged” Jews.
¹⁰

The regulations enacted after 1933 on who was to be perceived and treated as a Jew reflected two different, though not necessarily opposing, tendencies: on the one hand, they expanded the definition of Jewishness by including persons who had never, no longer, or only partly, identified themselves as being Jewish, such as the roughly 40,000 Jews of Christian faith and the approximately 50,000
Mischlinge
.
¹¹
on the other hand, they restricted the range of those earmarked for persecution by providing exemptions. These exemptions reflected both the randomness of categorizing human beings along seemingly scientific, but in reality social, categories and the inherent problems of racial profiling. During the Third Reich, the discussions about how to define Jewishness were bizarre in the arguments made, yet potent in their consequences for the persons affected. “Clear segregation,” the catch-word of the Nazi racial revolution, required intricate methods of data gathering, evaluation, and decision-making, and involved deliberations within and between a multitude of agencies, often resulting in conflict or compromise.
¹²

The interests of the state added to the problem, as did popular perceptions according to which Jews at least to some extent “looked Jew-ish.” This helped those who came close to the “Aryan” ideal type, and made life more difficult for those who did not.
¹³
Public opinion mattered, if only in the minds of those in power; their key concern was to avoid discontent on the home front that could lead to the erosion of support for the regime. we know now that the persecution of the Jews never created enough unrest among German elites or the population at large to become politically dangerous for Nazi rulers; in fact, only the tacit compliance of, and active support by, important strata of German society can explain why the Holocaust happened. Yet, at the time, not only the victims, but also their persecutors lacked the ability to clearly foresee the “final solution” in its genocidal dimensions. It is here, in the murky area of racial definition and stigmatization within the Reich, that the prospective victims could become active, over time with increasing personal risk and decreasing chances of success, to attain reprieve from persecution, be it only a partial or temporary reprieve.

Rejecting the Yellow Badge

Concrete manifestations of how those targeted tried to evade being hit by anti-Jewish measures are anything but rare. The basis for evasion was built into the earliest regulations. The “Aryan paragraph” of the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” enacted on 7 April 1933, contained an exemption for civil servants who had joined the public service before the beginning of world war I. The Nuremberg Race Laws and their supplementary decrees enacted in November 1935 allowed so-called
Mischlinge
to apply to the Reich Ministry of the Interior and the office of the Deputy of the Führer for special permission for marriages with persons of “German and related blood.”
¹⁴
More importantly, both the Reich Citizenship Law and the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” contained provisions for the granting of exemptions by Hitler for anyone whom the Führer, for whatever reason, saw fit to exclude from discriminatory measures.
¹⁵

From the time of Hitler’s coming to power, those trying to escape Nazi policy argued—without necessarily denying either their Jewishness or the existence of a “Jewish question,” however defined—that anti-Jewish measures should not apply to them due to their convic-tions, achievements or status. examples abound, especially for the ear-ly phase after the Nazi takeover; they range from invoking privileges for Jewish war veterans to the claim that one was a staunch supporter of the “national revolution.”
¹⁶
In view of the preceding history, these calls for exemptions are not surprising. German Jewry at the time of Hitler’s takeover was—even if one leaves out
Mischlinge
and other fringe groups—a highly diverse minority lacking, beyond strong, but often diffuse ties to shared traditions, a collective mentality, and unified organizational infrastructure. while the latter would emerge over time, the former remained an abstraction more in tune with anti-Se- mitic stereotypes about “the Jews” than with the reality of Jewish life in Nazi Germany.

Historians still have not fully investigated the interrelationship between those who, using the powerful imagery introduced symbolically by Robert weltsch in the Zionist newspaper, the
Jüdische Rundschau
in April 1933, were willing to “wear the yellow badge with pride,” and those who rejected it as an unacceptable stigma. The prevailing perception, with its emphasis on collective victimhood, not only limits our understanding of Jewish fate and agency during the Nazi era; it also tends to exclude aspects of historical reality that contradict our current image of how Jews behaved.
¹⁷
To overcome the tendency of defining Jewish behavior in static, collective terms, we have to acknowledge the diversity of the target group of persecution in the context of the changes that took place over time. In the course of the nineteenth century, the relinquishing of community affiliations and the estrangement from traditional ties became a
fait accompli
, so much so that those representing the majority of German Jews became branded as “assimilationists.”
¹⁸
In the everyday life of Jews, this development could express itself in a number of ways, including conscious acts, such as conversion, as well as in a gradual blurring of ties to the surrounding majority with its cultural or political values, e.g., by embracing German nationalism or adaptations like the “Jewish Christmas tree.”
¹⁹
Simultaneously, German Jews developed an increasing awareness of their specific identity, which led them for the most part toward embracing more assertive means of defending their rights and status; a minority went farther in the direction of what kurt Blumenfeld called “post-assimilatory Zionism.”
²⁰
The escalating dynamics created by the Nazi onslaught had a centrip-etal as well as centrifugal effect: most Jews were, as the leading German Zionist Franz Meyer pointed out after the war, “forced back into their Jewishness.”
²¹
At the same time, mounting outside pressure increased the desire to escape the straitjacket of German
Judenpolitik
.

After 1933, for those who did not or could not emigrate, there were various ways to make use of the fuzziness of the Nazi definition of who was a Jew. In many cases, desperation led those affected to pursue more than one of the available options at the same time or consecutively. Renouncing one’s membership in the Jewish community was one alternative, although not one that many pursued.
²²
This is hardly surprising given the Nazi state’s insistence that what mattered was race, not religion, as well as the assertive tradition within German Jewry. even representatives of converted Jews who felt as Christians and staunch Ger-man nationalists reminded the members of their group that “nothing could be more dishonorable or contemptible than for one of us to dare deny the existence of our ancestors or to besmirch the homes of our parents.”
²³
For some, the way to sidestep the classification trap involved petitions to Hitler or the use of prominent helpers—an escape route that, over time, fewer and fewer victims of racial persecution could pursue with any realistic hope for success; in total, between 1,300 and 3,000 petitions achieved the desired goal.
²⁴