Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (16 page)

Despite its quite advanced state of assimilation, German Jewry was, in some respects, well equipped to react as an organized community to the events that occurred after 1933. Unlike in western european countries or the United States, membership in, and paying taxes for, the local Jewish community in Germany had been mandatory for ev-ery Jewish resident. Since the nineteenth century, this requirement had been based on specific “Jew-laws,” only slightly adjusted in the weimar period. The German Reich, founded in 1871, remained a federation of eighteen
Länder
(states) after world war I. These laws were somewhat different from one state to the other, but in all of them, individual membership in the community could be cancelled only by a personal declaration in court. even where community taxes were quite substantial, a surprisingly low percentage of assimilated or non-religious Jews took this legal step of separation both before and after world war I. As a result, most Jewish communities, especially those in mid-sized and large towns and cities, could rely on quite considerable means to finance their activities. Taxes and voluntary contributions enabled the Jewish communities to establish a remarkable network of welfare institutions for their needy members. In larger cities, this was the task of dedicated officials versed in advanced methods of social work. In 1917, all communal welfare departments were united in the Central welfare organization of German Jews (Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden), officially recognized by the authorities of the Reich and the individual states as a member of their welfare networks.
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This cooperation continued for some time even after the Nazis’ rise to power. we will return later in this chapter to some aspects of this cooperation, which appear problematic only in hindsight.

In this regard, therefore, German Jews were not unprepared when the Nazis came to power. The deterioration of the economic, social, and political situation of the Jews in Germany had in fact started earlier. The post-world war I inflation had hit middle-class trade especially

hard in the “traditionally Jewish” branches of clothing and other long-term consumer goods, and erased the savings of their owners. During the economic crisis that started in 1929, Jewish employees were hit harder than their gentile colleagues by unemployment. Accordingly, Jewish welfare organizations were forced to expand their activities. Initially, their main task had been to meet the needs of immigrants from eastern europe; but as the economic crisis affected more and more German Jews, they were compelled to join their often despised co-religionists from Galicia and Russian-Poland as applicants to Jewish welfare institutions.

on the political level, aggressive antiSemitism in the years of the weimar Republic had alerted German Jews to the dangers they faced. Individual Jews as well as their organizations financially supported the Democratic and Social Democratic parties in the center and on the left of the political spectrum, and a growing number of Jews were active in their ranks. Most outstanding on the political front was the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, or CV). Founded in 1893 to fight antiSemitism, it became the largest and most important Jewish political organization in the weimar Republic. Besides over twenty regional and 500 local chapters, hundreds of so-called “trust-persons” kept in contact with the CV in places with small numbers of Jewish residents. over 70,000 tax-paying members received weekly, and at least some of them even read, the organization’s newspaper, the
CV-Zeitung
. In comparison, the membership of its main ideological opponent, the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Federation for Germany, or ZVfD) never exceeded 10,000 to 15,000 members before 1933. Un-der the impact of the Shoah and the establishment of the state of Israel, the Centralverein has appeared in many memoirs and historical studies as the tragic victim of an alleged assimilationist utopia. In my book on the Centralverein,
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I have tried to prove that, in fact, it did not propagate assimilation, at least not in the extreme sense of shedding Judaism in order to be fully absorbed into German society. True, the term
Assimilation
often appeared in the discourse and publications of the CV, but what the organization meant by it was the symbiosis of Deutschtum and Judentum, the assimilation of German culture while keeping a Jewish religious or cultural identity intact. This is what today we call acculturation, a term that did not exist at the time, at least not in German.

There were, of course, some German Jews who did aim at total assimilation. They either converted or had their children baptized, or

tried to become what Isaac Deutscher has termed the freethinking “non-Jewish Jew.”
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But neither the totally assimilated nor the “non-Jewish Jew” belonged to the CV. To do the CV justice, we have to admit that eugen Fuchs, the outstanding thinker among its “founding fathers,” was justified when he stated at the end of his life: “our defense efforts led us to the knowledge of our tradition, and only in this way did we gain our most important weapon: our pride in our Jewishness, our Jewish self-confidence. [It is to the] merit of the Centralverein that German Jewry has regained its self-confidence, its self-respect and self-criticism, and that conversion returned to be considered as a breach of honor and as desertion.”
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Still, the political situation after world war I caused the CV to devote most of its activities and its financial means to fighting anti-Semitic propaganda and the rise of the Nazi party. one single effort to unite with other Jewish organizations in an ad hoc committee for the elections of September 1930 was aborted mainly because of the reluctant support and half-hearted participation of the Zionists.
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The Nazis’ sensational success in winning 107 seats in the Reichstag enabled the NSDAP (Nazi Party) to become the second largest party in parliament. But even this did not lead to a further attempt to close Jewish ranks, and the CV continued the fight virtually alone. we know today that these efforts were in vain. In historical hindsight, they had no chance to be effective. However, none of the statutory or voluntary Jewish organizations of the time exposed itself to the same extent as the CV in the struggle against the Nazis.

The Reichsvertretung 1933–1938

The local Jewish communities had no adequate or effective instru-ments to fight the Nazis. Since they were officially recognized as ju-ridical institutions, their rules and governing bodies were confirmed and controlled by the local or regional authorities. In most of the
Län-der
, most importantly in Prussia where approximately two-thirds of the Jewish population of Germany lived, a similar legal standing was denied the regional or national associations (Landesverbände) of the Jewish communities. Attempts to create a nationwide, officially recognized Jewish representative body like, for example, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, had failed in Imperial Germany as well as in the weimar Republic. only under the pressure of Nazi rule did the first and only such body representing German Jews come to life. It was the

Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of Ger-man Jews), founded with almost general agreement among German Jews in September 1933.

we cannot deal here with the details of the internal Jewish debates that accompanied the establishment of the Reichsvertretung. Some earlier works have criticized the Reichsvertretung because of its cooperation with the Nazi government and bureaucracy. Some have even labeled it the “first Judenrat.” In fact, it was an authentic Jew-ish representative organization, established by democratically elected representatives, and it functioned through democratic decisions within the larger context of a dictatorship based on the
Führerprinzip
(leader principle)
.
Until 1938, the Reichsvertretung tried to cope with the economic, political, and personal persecution of the Jews in Germany, and it did so with impressive, though diminishing, success. The compulsory Reichsvereinigung, formally established by order of the Gestapo in July 1939 to replace the Reichsvertretung, was an entirely different body. while the Reichsvertretung was a voluntary umbrella organization that represented the major Jewish organizations in Germany, the Reichsvereinigung represented all Jews in Germany and membership was compulsory. It is true that, in the eyes of some contemporaries and some later historians, this replacement appeared more as a change of name than a change of function. work went on under the same leadership, headed by Rabbi Leo Baeck, in the same offices and with the same staff that had run the Reichsvertretung. However, the different terms of the Reichsvereinigung’s authority and functions indeed are clear and are expertly outlined in the contribution of Beate Meyer to this volume.

The Reichsvertretung was founded in a kind of peaceful coup d’état, by which the main Jewish political organizations took over the leadership role from the traditional heads of the Jewish communities. Some of those organizations, mainly in large towns and especially in Berlin, joined only under considerable public pressure and never completely abandoned their initial opposition. officially, however, only two small minority groups, the separatist orthodox organization and the rightwing German-nationalist Jews, the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (Association of National German Jews), led by Max Naumann, refused to acknowledge the authority of the Reichsvertretung. Never recognized
de jure
by the Nazi authorities, it stood de facto at the head of almost all organized Jewish activities, except in strictly religious affairs. Its success in supervising and coordinating

the institutions of Jewish self-help in welfare, education, and emigration depended solely on the general cooperation of the traditional establishment of German Jewry.

This is all the more impressive as the Reichsvertretung had no financial resources of its own. It was totally dependent on contributions from the Jewish communities throughout Germany, and increasingly dependent on the support of Jewish funds from abroad. Its annual budget never exceeded about 5 million Reichsmark, while the combined outlays of the Jewish communities gradually declined from 40 to 25 million Reichsmark per year. Jewish self-help was organized and coordinated by the Reichsvertretung, but it was essentially financed by the German Jews themselves, and it was run by the officials and unpaid volunteers of their communities and organizations who continued their former work under its guidelines. The communities kept up their religious institutions and cemeteries, educational institutions and activities, and their expanding welfare and health systems. The Zionists fostered and regulated Jewish emigration to Palestine as well as almost all of the occupational and educational training of the emigrants. They also negotiated (outside but not behind the back of the Reichsvertretung) the transfer of some Jewish capital, namely, the still controversial Haavara Transfer Agreement, to which we will return later. The Centralverein concentrated its efforts on providing legal advice and support to those Jews who wanted, or were compelled, to continue their lives in Germany, and to a large extent the CV also helped to finance them. In a silently agreed division of labor, each partner performed the work that most accorded to its ideological identity and goals. Previous differences did not disappear overnight; however, the Reichsvertretung did succeed in uniting these different parties and views under one roof, and in committing the communities to mobilize their still considerable financial resources for all of its activities, despite their ideological differences.

Welfare and Economic Self-Help

Let me turn first to the efforts of Jewish organizations to deal with the impact of Nazi rule on the material existence of the Jews in Germany. The welfare departments of the communities and the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle (Central welfare office) cooperated in April 1933 with other Jewish institutions in the establishment of the Zentralausschuss

für Hilfe und Aufbau (Central office for Help and Construction), which was to become the nucleus of the future Reichsvertretung. The Zentralausschuss was officially integrated into the Reichsvertretung in 1935. even after 1933, however, the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle remained recognized by the central and municipal welfare departments as representing and coordinating all Jewish welfare and charity. As long as Jews in need were entitled to public welfare, the subsidies from Jewish welfare agencies were an additional support mechanism. It did not take the Nazis long to discover this “advantage” and to find ways to eliminate it. Jewish welfare offices were consistently harassed to disclose the names of their applicants and the amounts of their payments, which were then deducted from their public welfare payments. what had previously been a reasonably friendly cooperation to care for the needy turned into a daily struggle over legal rights. Moreover, in this process, the Jewish welfare offices were forced to provide Nazi authorities with updated information about the changing addresses and situations of the people entrusted to their care. They were, of course, like the Nazis themselves, unaware of the purposes for which this information would be used in the future stages of exclusion and deportation. But even if they had had some foreboding, they were right to believe that their cooperation was in the interest of the people in their care. After 1938, of course, they lost all freedom of decision in these matters.