Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (2 page)

1. The
   Hauswegweiser
   (office Directory) at the headquarters of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland and the Jewish Agency for Palestine at Meineckestrasse 10,
   

   Berlin.
   Courtesy
   : Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem. 93
   

2. An all-day seminar sponsored by the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland, Berlin, 1935.
   Courtesy
   :
   

   Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem. 98
   

3. Jewish Gymnasium graduates train as carpenters under the auspices of the Jewish community in Berlin. Photograph by Abraham Pisarek.
   Courtesy
   : Bildarchiv Preussischer
   

kulturbesitz, Berlin, and Art Resource, New York. 100

1. Jews from Hattingen, who were deported on 28 April 1942, lived for almost one year in an empty rifle factory that had served as a “Jewish House” (Judenhaus). To the right and above, one sees the Jewish star designating the building as a Judenhaus. Courtesy: Stadtarchiv
   

   kerpen. 130
   

2. Until their deportation in 1942, the Jews of kerpen were forced to live in a “Jewish House” (
   Judenhaus
   ) on Hindenburgstrasse. on 18 July 1942, the last thirty-one Jews in kerpen were deported from here.
   

Courtesy
: Stadtarchiv kerpen. 130

1. Paul eppstein, member of the board of the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, ca. 1935.
   Courtesy
   : Stadtarchiv
   

   Mannheim, Nachlass Paul eppstein. 156
   

2. Paul eppstein, elder of Jews in Theresienstadt, August/ September 1944.
   Courtesy
   : Stadtarchiv Mannheim,
   

Nachlass Paul eppstein. 161

1. Martin Buber speaking at the “Jüdisches Lehrhaus,”
   

   Berlin, 17 January 1935. Photograph by Abraham Pisarek.
   

   Courtesy
   : Bildarchiv Preussischer kulturbesitz,
   

   Berlin, and Art Resource, New York. 177
   

   ACJ Archiv Centrum Judaicum (Archives of the Judaica Center), Berlin
   

   AJC American Jewish Committee
   

   AJDC American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, New York BArch Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives), Berlin
   

   BJFB Blätter des jüdischen Frauenbundes
   

   BLHA Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv (Brandenburg Main State Archives), Potsdam
   

   CdSuSD Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst (Chief of the Security Police and Security Service)
   

   CV Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens/ Centralverein der Juden in Deutschland (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith/ Central Association of Jews in Germany)
   

   CVZ CV-Zeitung
   

   CZA Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem HA Haganah Archives, Tel Aviv
   

   HdJ Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (Aid Association of German Jews)
   

   IF Israelitisches Familienblatt
   

   IfZ Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History), Munich
   

   JVP Jüdische Volkspartei (Jewish Peoples Party)
   

   JwS Jüdische wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik
   

   kB kulturbund deutscher Juden (Cultural League of German Jews)
   

   LAB Landesarchiv (State Archives), Berlin
   

   LBI Leo Baeck Institute, New York and Jerusalem LBIJMB Leo Baeck Institute Jewish Museum, Berlin
   

   LG Landesgericht Berlin (State Court of Justice) Berlin MGwJ
   Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums
   Nbg.Doc. Nuremberg Documents
   

   NSV Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist Peoples welfare Agency)
   

   oRT obshchestvo Rasprostraneniia Truda (organization for the Distribution of Artisanal and Agricultural Skills for the Jews of Russia)
   

   osb osobyi Secret Archives, Moscow
   

   PA Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts (Political Archives of the Foreign Ministry), Berlin
   

   RjF Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (Reich League of Jewish war Veterans)
   

   RSHA Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main office)
   

   RVt Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden/Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of German Jews/Reich Representation of Jews in Germany)
   

   RVe Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany)
   

   SD Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service)
   

   Abbreviations
   

   USHMM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, washington, D.C.
   

   VnJ Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (Association of National German Jews)
   

   YVA Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem
   

   ZGJD Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland ZJHA Zentralausschuss der deutschen Juden für Hilfe und
   

   Aufbau (Central Committee of German Jews for Assistance and Construction)
   

   ZVf D Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Federation for Germany)
   

   Introduction
   

1. J
   ew ish
   L
   ife in
   n
   azi
   G
   ermany
   

   Dilemmas and Responses
   

   R
   

   Francis R. Nicosia
   

   During a visit to Berlin and Prague in February 1939, Georg Landauer, Director of the Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews in Palestine in Jerusalem, wrote a long letter to Arthur Ruppin, his colleague at the Central Bureau in Palestine. Landauer, a German Zionist leader before his own emigration from Germany to Palestine in 1933, was in Berlin and Prague to assess the Jewish emigration process. In his letter, dated 17 February from Berlin (but likely sent from Prague), Landauer describes the situation as bleak for Jews in Berlin and the rest of Germany.
   ¹
   The destruction of a viable economic existence for Germany’s Jews had left those remaining in Germany utterly impoverished. As a consequence, and with the increasing threat of war, the prospects for further Jewish emigration from Germany were not at all good. Landauer saw little hope of effectively moving substantially more Jews safely out of Germany. with words that were both somber and almost prophetic, he closed his 17 February letter with the following observation: “The mood of the Jews in Germany is one of indescribable dejection. They really know of no way out, and they wait to see what the government will do with them. work camps? other methods of liquidation?” In June of that year, with war looming and immigration opportunities to other countries likely to diminish as a result, Pino Ginzburg of the clandestine Jewish self-defense organization in Palestine, the Haganah, was in Germany working on the organization of “illegal” immigration of Jews from central europe to Palestine. Pessimistic about the chances of Jews escaping from Greater Germany, he wrote from
   

   Vienna to a colleague in Palestine on 5 June: “our work becomes more difficult every day. The pressure increases steadily . . . The opportunity to leave is very small. we are helpless.”
   ²
   

   The words of Landauer and Ginzburg convey a sense of despair that had come to pervade the lives of Jews in Greater Germany after six years (more than one year in Austria) of state-imposed economic deprivation, legal disenfranchisement, social and cultural segregation, intimidation, humiliation, and violence. Indeed, in the context of Marion kaplan’s description of Jewish life under National Socialism as a struggle to preserve individual and collective dignity in the face of growing despair,
   ³
   the latter seemed to have overtaken the former by the eve of world war II. In hindsight, the process during the 1930s appears to have been steady, almost unrelenting, despite a few lulls in the intensity of Nazi persecution. Nevertheless, and in spite of the intensifying cruelty of Nazi Jewish policy in Germany from 1933 to the “final solution,” German Jews went to extraordinary lengths to adapt to a steadily changing environment, one that afforded them limited and diminishing options. In the struggle to maintain their dignity and to resist the despair that would be a consequence of their disintegrating world, German Jews, individually and collectively, confronted dilemmas and fashioned responses to their changing circumstances as best they could.
   

   In introducing his study of Nazi Germany and the Jews during the 1930s, published in 1997, Saul Friedländer observes that, notwithstanding the central role of Nazi perpetrators and their policies after 1933, “the surrounding world and the victims’ attitudes, reactions, and fate are no less an integral part of this unfolding history.”
   ⁴
   with this in mind, this volume builds on Friedländer’s approach, with its focus on the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution in Germany. The seven essays in this book consider some of the tragic dilemmas with which deteriorating circumstances in Jewish life under the Nazis confronted German Jews each day, and the complex nature of some of their responses to those dilemmas. Primo Levi’s thoughts, albeit as a surviving victim of the Nazi extermination camp system, might be instructive in this regard. when describing the harsh realities of survival in the camps, he observes: “we believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.”
   ⁵
   of course, Jews in Germany before the “final solution” did not have to face the immediate life-threatening perils in their daily lives that Levi and countless others
   

   faced in the extermination camps; but beginning in 1941, many did. All had to adapt to new and, for their time and place, more dangerous circumstances, to think in terms of survival, and to face difficult dilemmas in the choices they were forced to make.
   

   Since this is a collection of essays about the victims and the ways in which they responded to Nazi persecution, this introduction will present a brief overview of some of the policies of the perpetrators, underlining the nature and scope of the relentless Nazi assault on Jewish life in the Third Reich. Initially, Jews were not the primary targets of Nazi policy. During his first two months in office, Hitler sought total power for himself and his party by moving to destroy all political opposition, especially that of the Communists and Social Democrats and their affiliated organizations. He used the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 to convince President Paul von Hindenburg temporarily to suspend civil liberties in Germany. The “Decree for the Protection of the People and the State” of 28 February empowered Hitler’s government to suspend basic civil liberties and to use the Nazi-controlled police to cripple the communist movement and to move swiftly against other political opponents, real and imagined.
   ⁶
   on 24 March, Hitler persuaded the Reichstag to adopt an emergency measure that suspended the German parliament for four years. The “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich,” also known as the “enabling Act,” empowered Hitler’s government to legislate without parliamentary consent. By a vote of 444 to 94, with the Communists out of the picture and only the Social Democrats opposing the measure, effective parliamentary government was abolished in Germany by an act of parliament. Hitler was now in a position to move against any remaining opposition to his dictatorship. on 14 July 1933, the National Socialist party was declared the only legal party in Germany. A year later, with the death of President von Hindenburg on 2 August 1934 and the support of the armed forces, Hitler combined his office as chancellor with that of the presidency into the single office of “Führer and Reich Chancellor.”
   

   Notwithstanding Nazi efforts to eliminate the physically and mentally handicapped and the Gypsies from German “living space,” their primary racial enemy remained the Jews. Initial Nazi intentions toward the Jews of Germany are apparent in the “Program of the National Socialist German workers Party (NSDAP)” of February 1920, and from the speeches and writings of Hitler and other Nazis before 1933. They included the reversal of Jewish emancipation and assimilation, and the removal of all Jews from the Reich. Between 1933 and 1941, the Nazi
   

   state pursued a Jewish policy based on a two-tiered approach of enact-ing legislation that abolished the civil rights and economic livelihood of German Jews, forced their total separation from the non-Jewish majority, and simultaneously promoted their emigration/deportation from Germany. Throughout this process, a state-imposed environment of increasing impoverishment, intimidation, and periodic violence served to heighten the pressure on Jews to leave.
   ⁷
   

   when Adolf Hitler assumed power on 30 January 1933, there were about 530,000 Jews in Germany, about 100,000 of whom were foreign Jews who had in recent decades immigrated to Germany, mostly from eastern europe. Germany’s Jewish community was comparatively small, comprising less than one percent of the total population. As a group, they were predominantly urban, with more than half liv-ing in Germany’s ten largest cities, and about one-third, or more than 160,000, living in Berlin alone. Significant numbers were involved in commerce and industry, in the professions, as well as in the arts and the media. Politically, most supported democratic traditions and institutions in Germany, and the German Democratic and Social Democratic parties during the weimar Republic. For the most part, Jews in Germany had enjoyed equal rights under the Imperial and weimar constitutions as well as economic freedom, and most had assimilated into Germany society.
   ⁸
   

   Between April 1933 and end of 1935, the regime enacted laws depriving Jews of their rights as equal citizens and removing them from every facet of German life except the economy.
   ⁹
   The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,”
   ¹⁰
   enacted on 7 April 1933, eliminated Jews, for the most part, from the civil service. on the same day, the “Law Concerning Admission to the Legal Profession” prohibited so-called Aryan Germans from retaining Jewish lawyers, and Aryan lawyers from representing Jewish clients. The “Decree Regarding Physicians’ Services with the National Health Service” of 22 April separated Jewish physicians from their non-Jewish patients by denying health insurance to Aryans who continued to see their Jewish doctors. In 1933, some 16 percent of independent lawyers in Germany were Jewish, as were about 10 percent of all practicing physicians; thus, restricting the relatively large number of Jewish lawyers and physicians to the relatively small Jewish community forced many out of their professions and eventually out of Germany. The “Law Against overcrowding of German Schools,” enacted on 25 April, was designed to drive Jewish students from German schools through the imposition
   

   of strict quotas and the incorporation of Nazi racial doctrine into the curriculum. with the “Denaturalization Law” of 14 July 1933, aimed primarily at the thousands of
   Ostjuden
   who had fled anti-Semitic violence in eastern europe after world war I, the regime could revoke the citizenship of those who had settled in Germany after November 1918. Additional legislation drove Jews out of the arts and media in Ger-man national life. It included the “Law Creating the Reich Chamber of Culture” of 29 September and the “National Press Law” of 4 october. The new Reich Chamber of Culture excluded Jewish artists, actors, and musicians, which meant that they could continue their professions only by performing the works of Jewish writers and composers in Jewish theaters and orchestras. The press law, in effect, limited Jewish writers and journalists to publishing their work only with Jewish newspapers and publishers. But the most notorious anti-Jewish legislation during the 1930s was the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Ger-man Honor,”
   ¹¹
   part of the so-called Nuremberg Race Laws adopted at the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg on 15 September 1935. Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Aryans were prohibited by law. Non-Jews who socialized with Jews were often publicly ostracized, while those who were caught in sexual relationships with Jews were subject to prosecution for the crime of
   Rassenschande
   (race defilement). Initially, the Nazis applied the law to “full-blooded” Jews, defined as those with at least three Jewish grandparents, and later adopted complex restrictions for half-Jews (
   Mischlinge
   , or “mixed breeds”) as well. An additional part of the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935, the “Reich Citizenship Law,”
   ¹²
   created a greatly reduced level of citizenship for Germany’s Jews. Realizing that simply revoking the citizenship of Germany’s Jews would render them stateless, and thus further limit their emigration opportunities, the regime declared Aryan Germans to be the sole bearers of full rights. This confirmed the loss of civil rights that the Jews had endured since 1933, and reduced them to second-class subjects of the Reich.
   

   By the end of 1935, Jews in Germany no longer received many of the social services that the state provided its citizens, nor were they permitted any longer to participate in the cultural and recreational life of German society, much of which was subsidized by the state.
   ¹³
   They were forced to rely increasingly on their own private cultural, educational, and social welfare institutions; those that already existed were overwhelmed and had to be greatly expanded with very limited resources available, while additional social services had to be created
   

   from scratch. Jews were also forced to depend increasingly on financial support from overseas Jewish organizations.
   

   Prior to 1938, the Nazi regime was reluctant to attack directly the Jewish position in the German economy. Fearful of compromising economic recovery and rearmament plans, Jewish businesses were generally permitted to function, albeit under the enormous pressures of organized anti-Jewish boycotts and concerted efforts to “Aryanize” Jewish businesses.
   ¹⁴
   Moreover, Hitler’s government always feared negative Jewish reactions abroad and their perceived impact on the governments of foreign powers, obsessed as the Nazis were with notions of Jewish control of foreign governments and an alleged international Jewish conspiracy.
   ¹⁵
   But by 1938, with the German economy out of crisis, plans afoot to annex Austria and dismember Czechoslovakia, along with the strong possibility of war that those moves entailed, Hit-ler could undertake measures against the Jews that were meant finally to remove the Jews from the economy and thereby increase dramatically the pressure on them to emigrate. on 26 April 1938, the “Decree Regarding Registration of Jewish Property” forced Jews to register all property in Germany and abroad with a value of more than RM 5,000. This was a preliminary step to the “Law for the elimination of Jews from the economic Life of Germany” of 12 November, which decreed that all Jewish businesses were to close by 1 January 1939.
   ¹⁶