Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (10 page)

On the evening of May 10, rituals of exorcism took place in most of the university cities and towns of Germany. More than twenty thousand books were burned in Berlin, and from two to three thousand in every other major German city.
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In Berlin a huge bonfire was lit in front of the Kroll Opera House, and Goebbels was one of the speakers. After the speeches, in the capital as in the other cities, slogans against the banned authors were chanted by the throng as the poisonous books (by Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Sigmund Freud, Maximilian Harden, and Kurt Tucholsky, among many others) were hurled, batch after batch, into the flames. “The great searchlights on the Opera Square,” wrote the
Jüdische Rundschau
, “also threw their light onto the swallowing up of our existence and our fate. Not only Jews have been accused, but also men of pure German blood. The latter are being judged only for their deeds. For Jews, however, there is no need for a specific reason; the old saying holds: ‘The Jew will be burnt.’”
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The Nazi students did not limit their activities to disrupting the lectures of Jewish professors and burning dangerous books. They attempted to impose their will at every level when it came to the hiring of teachers or their reinstatement as war veterans. On May 6 the leader of the Nazi student association of the Superior Professional School in Hildburghausen, Thuringia, sent an anything but subservient letter to the Thuringian education minister in Weimar. The students had been told that a Jewish teacher named Bermann was to be reinstated. After casting doubt on the validity of Bermann’s claim to frontline service during World War I, the student leader went on: “Agitation among the students is very strong, as some forty percent are members of the National Socialist Student Association, and to be taught by a racially alien teacher is incompatible with their convictions. The National Socialist Student Association addresses the urgent demand to the National Socialist government of Thuringia not to reinstate the Jewish teacher.”
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Whether Bermann was reinstated or not is not known, but even seasoned Nazis considered the student activism something of an embarrassment. “I have been informed by State Minister of the Interior, Party member Fritsch,” wrote one of the district leaders for central Germany to Manfred von Killinger, prime minister of Saxony, on August 12, “that the State Ministry is not pleased with the situation at the University of Leipzig…. Over the last three months I have fought rigorously and consistently against any radicalization of the university. According to your wishes, I have therefore forbidden the National Socialist students to boycott any professors.”
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Sometimes students themselves perceived that they had gone too far: They had even blacklisted H. G. Wells and Upton Sinclair. The Foreign Ministry was up in arms because among the authors whose works had been burned in front of the Kroll Opera House on May 10 was the then famous promoter of European union, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. The student leader Gerhard Gräfe confided to a correspondent that he was denying that Coudenhove’s writings were burned, but that precautions would have to be taken in the future.
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Such reservations also took other forms: In his diary entries for 1933, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of Romance literature at Dresden’s Technical University who had been exempted from dismissal owing to wartime combat service, several times mentioned that the most assiduous participant in his seminar was the female leader of the university’s Nazi student cell.
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A comparison between the attitudes of the churches and those of the universities toward the regime’s anti-Jewish measures of 1933 reveals basic similarities along with some (very) minor differences. Although outright supporters of National Socialism as a whole were a small minority both in the churches and in the universities, those in favor of the national revival heralded by the new regime were definitely a majority. That majority shared a conservative-nationalist credo that easily converged with the main ideals proclaimed by the regime at its beginning. But what distinguished the churches’ attitudes was the existence of certain specific interests involving the preservation of some basic tenets of Christian dogma. The Jews as Jews were abandoned to their fate, but both the Protestant and Catholic churches attempted to maintain the preeminence of such fundamental beliefs as the supersession of race by baptism and the sanctity of the Old Testament. (Later, at times, the private attitudes of Catholics and of members of the Confessing Church toward the persecution of the Jews would even be critical, mainly because of growing tension between them and the regime.) Nothing of the kind hampered acceptance by university professors of the regime’s anti-Jewish acts. In principle the German academic elite was committed to pursuit of learning unimpeded by state intervention, but, as has been seen, other values and beliefs weighed far more heavily with it in the twenties and early thirties. The enthusiastic “self-coordination” (
Selbstgleichschaltung
) of the universities demonstrated that there was no fundamental opposition but rather a substantial measure of convergence between the inner core of the mandarins’ faith and National Socialism’s public stance as it appeared at the outset. In such a context, motivation for taking a stand in favor of Jewish colleagues and students was minimal. The consequences of such an overall moral collapse are obvious. In many ways elite groups were a bridge between National Socialist extremism and the wider reaches of German society; thus, their ready abandonment of the Jews sets their attitudes and responses in a fateful historical light.

When Pastor Umfried criticized the attack on the Jews of his town, no church authority supported him; when Jewish businesses were boycotted, no religious voice was heard; when Hitler launched his diatribe against the Jews, Bishop Berning did not respond. When Jewish colleagues were dismissed, no German professor publicly protested; when the number of Jewish students was drastically reduced, no university committee or faculty member expressed any opposition; when books were burned throughout the Reich, no intellectual in Germany, or for that matter anyone else within the country, openly expressed any shame. Such total collapse is more than unusual. As the first months of 1933 went by, Hitler must have seen that he could count on the genuine support of church and university; whatever opposition may have existed, it would not be expressed as long as direct institutional interests and basic dogmatic tenets were not threatened. The concrete situation of the Jews was a litmus test of how far any genuine moral principle could be silenced; although the situation was to become more complex later on, during this early period the result of the test was clear.

III

While Germany’s intellectual and spiritual elites were granting their explicit or tacit support to the new regime, the leading figures of the Jewish community were trying to hide their distress behind a façade of confidence: Despite all difficulties, the future of Jewish life in Germany was not being irretrievably endangered. Ismar Elbogen, one of the most prominent Jewish historians of the time, expressed what was probably the most common attitude when he wrote: “They can condemn us to hunger but they cannot condemn us to starvation.”
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This was the spirit that presided over the establishment of the National Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden), formally launched in 1933, on the initiative of the president and the rabbi of the Essen community.
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It would remain the umbrella organization of local and national Jewish associations until 1938, headed throughout by the Berlin rabbi Leo Baeck, the respected chairman of the Association of German Rabbis and a scholar of repute,
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and by the lay leader Otto Hirsch. Despite opposition from “national German Jews,” ultra-Orthodox religious groups, and, sporadically, from the Zionist movement, the National Representation played a significant role in the affairs of German Jewry until its transformation, after a transition period in 1938–39, into the National Association of Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland), an organization very closely controlled by the Gestapo.

There was not any greater sense of urgency at the National Representation than there was among most individual Jews in Germany. In early 1934 Otto Hirsch would still be speaking out against “hasty” emigration: He believed in the possibility of maintaining a dignified Jewish life in the new Germany.
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That Alfred Hirschberg, the most prominent personality of the Central Association, denied “any need at all to enlarge upon the utopia of resettlement [in Palestine]” was true to type, but that a publication of the Zionist Pioneer organization defined unprepared immigration to Eretz Israel as “a crime against Zionism” comes as a surprise, perhaps because of the vehemence of its tone.
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Not all German Jewish leaders displayed such nonchalance. One who insistently demanded immediate emigration was Georg Kareski, head of the right-wing [Revisionist] Zionist Organization. A vocal but marginal personality even within German Zionism, Kareski was ready to organize the exodus of the Jews from Germany by cooperating, if need be, with the Gestapo and the Propaganda Ministry. He may indeed have maneuvered to establish his own authority within German Jewry by exploiting his collaboration with the Nazis,
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but his sense of urgency was real and premonitory.

Even as the months went by, the leaders of German Jewry did not, in general, gain much insight into the uncompromisingly anti-Jewish stance of the Nazis. Thus, in August 1933, Werner Senator, who had returned to Germany from Palestine in order to become a director of the newly established Central Committee for Help and Reconstruction (Zentralausschuss für Hilfe und Aufbau), suggested, in a memorandum sent to the American Joint Distribution Committee, that a dialogue be established between the Jews and the Nazis. In his opinion, such a dialogue “should lead to a kind of Concordat, like the arrangements between the Roman Curia and European States.”
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No Roman Curia and no Concordat were mentioned as examples in the “Memorandum on the Jewish Question” that the representatives of Orthodox Jewry sent to Hitler on October 4. The signatories brought to the Reich chancellor’s attention the injustice of the identification of Jewry with Marxist materialism, the unfairness of the attribution to an entire community of the mistakes of some of its members, and the tenuousness of the connection between the ancient Jewish race and the modern, uprooted, ultrarationalistic Jewish writers and journalists. Orthodox Jewry disavowed the atrocity propaganda being directed against Germany, and its delegates reminded Hitler of the Jewish sacrifices during World War I. The authors of the letter were convinced that the new government did not have in mind the annihilation of German Jewry, but in case they were wrong on this point, they demanded to be told so. Again, on the assumption that such was not the aim of the regime, the representatives of Orthodox Jewry demanded that the Jews of Germany be granted a living space within the living space of the German people, where they could practice their religion and follow their professions “without being endangered and insulted.” The memorandum was filed before it even reached Hitler’s desk.
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Thirty-seven thousand of the approximately 525,000 Jews in Germany left the country in 1933; during the four following years, the annual number of emigrants remained much lower than that (23,000 in 1934, 21,000 in 1935, 25,000 in 1936, 23,000 in 1937).
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In 1933 about 73 percent of the emigrants left for countries in Western Europe, 19 percent for Palestine, and 8 percent chose to go overseas.
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Such seeming lack of enthusiasm for leaving a country where segregation, humiliation, and a whole array of persecutory measures were becoming steadily worse was due, first of all, to the inability of most of the Jewish leadership and mainly of ordinary German Jews to grasp an essentially unpredictable course of events. “I do not believe,” Klaus Mann wrote in his autobiography, “that the insights of shopkeeper Moritz Cohn differ basically from those of his neighbor, the shopkeeper Friedrich Müller.”
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Most of the Jews expected to weather the storm in Germany. In addition, the material difficulty of emigrating was considerable, especially in a period of economic uncertainty; it entailed an immediate and heavy material loss: Jewish-owned property was sold at ever lower prices, and the emigration tax (the Brüning government’s 1931 “tax on capital flight,” which was levied on assets of two hundred thousand Reichsmarks and up, was raised by the Nazis to a levy on assets of fifty thousand Reichsmarks and up) was prohibitive. The Reichsbank’s purely arbitrary exchange rate for the purchase of foreign currency by emigrants further depleted steadily shrinking assets: Thus, until 1935, Jewish emigrants exchanged their marks at 50 percent of their value, then at 30 percent, and finally, on the eve of the war, at 4 percent.
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Although the Nazis wanted to get rid of the Jews of Germany, they were intent on dispossessing them first by increasingly harsh methods.

In one instance only were the economic conditions of emigration somewhat facilitated. Not only did the regime encourage Zionist activities on the territory of the Reich
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, but concrete economic measures were taken to ease the departure of Jews for Palestine. The so-called Haavarah (Hebrew: Transfer) Agreement, concluded on August 27, 1933, between the German Ministry of the Economy and Zionist representatives from Germany and Palestine, allowed Jewish emigrants indirect transfer of part of their assets and facilitated exports of goods from Nazi Germany to Palestine.
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As a result, some one hundred million Reichsmarks were transferred to Palestine, and most of the sixty thousand German Jews who arrived in that country during 1933–39 could thereby ensure a minimal basis for their material existence.
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