Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (11 page)

Economic agreement and some measure of cooperation in easing Jewish emigration from Germany (and in 1938 and 1939) from post-Anschluss Austria and German-occupied Bohemia-Moravia) to Palestine, were of course purely instrumental. The Zionists had no doubts about the Nazis’ evil designs on the Jews, and the Nazis considered the Zionists first and foremost Jews. About Zionism itself, moreover, Nazi ideology and Nazi policies were divided from the outset: while favoring, like all other European extreme anti-Semites, Zionism as a means of enticing the Jews to leave Europe, they also considered the Zionist Organization established in Basel in 1897 as a key element of the Jewish world conspiracy—a Jewish state in Palestine would be a kind of Vatican coordinating Jewish scheming all over the world. Such necessary but unholy contacts between Zionists and Nazis nonetheless continued up to the beginning (and into) the war.

One of the main benefits the new regime hoped to reap from the Haavarah was a breach in the foreign Jewish economic boycott of Germany. The Nazi fears of a significant Jewish boycott were, in fact, basically unreal, but Zionist policy responded to what the Germans hoped to achieve. The Zionist organizations and the leadership of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) distanced themselves from any form of mass protest or boycott to avoid creating obstacles to the new arrangements. Even before the conclusion of the Haavarah Agreement, such “cooperation” sometimes took bizarre forms. Thus, in early 1933, Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein, a man who a few years later was to become chief of the Jewish section of the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, or security service, the SS intelligence branch headed by Reinhard Heydrich), was invited along with his wife to tour Palestine and write a series of articles for Goebbels’s
Der Angriff
. And so it was that the Mildensteins, accompanied by Kurt Tuchler, a leading member of the Berlin Zionist Organization, and his wife, visited Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel. The highly positive articles, entitled “A Nazi Visits Palestine,” were duly published, and, to mark the occasion, a special medallion cast, with a swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other.
⁹⁷

Seen from the perspective of 1933 and in the light of Nazi interests at the time, the
Angriff
series may have looked less strange than they appear today. The same can be said about the memorandum sent to Hitler by the leaders of the Zionist Organization for Germany on June 22, 1933. In Francis Nicosia’s words, “It seemed to profess a degree of sympathy for the
völkisch
principles of the Hitler regime and argued that Zionism was compatible with these principles.”
⁹⁸
This compatibility was clearly defined: “Zionism believes that the rebirth of the national life of a people, which is now occurring in Germany through the emphasis on its Christian and national character, must also come about among the Jewish people. For the Jewish people, too, national origin, religion, common destiny and a sense of its uniqueness must be of decisive importance to its existence. This demands the elimination of the egotistical individualism of the liberal era, and its replacement with a sense of community and collective responsibility.”
⁹⁹
It further demanded for the Jews a place in the overall structure, based on the race principle, established by National Socialism, so that they too, in the sphere allocated to them, could make a fruitful contribution to the life of the fatherland.
¹⁰⁰

In the summer of 1933, one of the main Zionist leaders in Palestine, the German-born Arthur Ruppin, paid a visit to the Nazi race theoretician Hans F. K. Günther at the University of Jena. “The Jews,” Günther reassured him, “were not inferior to the Aryans, they were simply different. This meant that a ‘fair solution’ had to be found for the Jewish problem. The professor was extremely friendly, Ruppin recorded with satisfaction.”
¹⁰¹
Thus, despite rapid awareness of the Nazis’ unmitigated hatred of Jews, some Zionist leaders’ early responses to the new German situation were not negative. There was a widespread hope that the Nazi policy of furthering Jewish emigration from Germany offered great opportunities for the Yishuv. A stream of important visitors came from Palestine to observe conditions in Germany. The Labor Zionist leader Moshe Belinson reported to Berl Katznelson, the editor of the main Labor daily,
Davar
: “The streets are paved with more money than we have ever dreamed of in the history of our Zionist enterprise. Here is an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.”
¹⁰²

Zionist hopes were moderated by practical worries about excessive numbers of immigrants. “In order that the immigration not flood the existing settlement in Palestine like lava,” Ruppin declared at the Zionist Congress held in Prague in the summer of 1933, “it must be proportionate to a certain percentage of that settlement.”
¹⁰³
This remained the policy for several years to come, and well after the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws, both the German Zionists and the leaders of the Yishuv were still envisaging an annual rate of fifteen to twenty thousand German-Jewish emigrants, extending over a period of twenty to thirty years.
¹⁰⁴

Whatever the practical steps that were envisioned, Zionist rhetoric was clear: Palestine was the only possible haven and solution. This was not obvious to some of the German Jews, who, on arrival in the land of Israel, were suddenly faced with a new and unexpected reality. The novelist Arnold Zweig, a left-wing Zionist of long standing who had arrived in the summer of 1933, summed up his feelings about his new homeland in a diary entry on December 31: “In Palestine. In foreign parts.”
¹⁰⁵

Some leaders of German Jewry still believed in 1933 that the Nazis would be duly impressed by an objective presentation of Jewish contributions to German culture. A few months after the change of regime, and with Max Warburg’s and Leo Baeck’s encouragement, Leopold Ullstein, a younger member of the publishing family, launched the preparation of a wide-ranging study to that effect. Within a year a hefty volume was ready, but in December 1934 its publication was prohibited. “The naïve reader of this study,” the Gestapo report pronounced, “would get the impression that the whole of German culture up to the National Socialist revolution was carried by Jews. The reader would receive an entirely false picture of the real activity, particularly of the decomposing action of the Jews on German culture. Moreover, well-known Jewish crooks and speculators are presented to the reader as victims of their time and their dirty dealings glossed over…. In addition, Jews generally known as enemies of the state…are presented as remarkable carriers of German culture.”
¹⁰⁶
Jewish culture for Jews, however, was another matter, and whereas Ullstein had set his sights on an untimely enterprise, another Berlin Jew, Kurt Singer, the former deputy director of the Berlin City Opera, came up with a different kind of idea: the establishment of a Jewish cultural association (Kulturbund deutscher Juden).

Singer’s Kulturbund fitted Nazi needs. When Singer’s project of autonomous cultural activities by Jews and for Jews (only) was submitted to the new Prussian authorities, it received Göring’s approval. For all practical purposes, it was controlled on the Nazi side by the same Hans Hinkel who was already in charge of the de-Judaization of cultural life in Prussia. On the face of it the Kulturbund appeared to be a perfectly functional initiative to solve the problems created both for the regime and for the Jews by the expulsion from German cultural life of approximately eight thousand Jewish writers, artists, musicians, and performers of all kinds, as well as their coworkers and agents.
¹⁰⁷
Apart from the work it provided and the soothing psychological function it filled for part of the Jewish community, the Kulturbund also offered to the surrounding society an easy way to dismiss any potential sense of embarrassment: “Aryans who found the regime’s anti-Semitic measures distasteful could reassure themselves that Jewish artists were at least permitted to remain active in their chosen professions.”
¹⁰⁸

The Kulturbund also played another role, unseen but no less real, which pointed to the future: As the first Jewish organization under the direct supervision of a Nazi overlord, it foreshadowed the Nazi ghetto, in which a pretense of internal autonomy camouflaged the total subordination of an appointed Jewish leadership to the dictates of its masters. The Kulturbund was hailed by an array of Jewish intellectuals as offering the opportunity for a new Jewish cultural and spiritual life to a community under siege.
¹⁰⁹
This ongoing misunderstanding of the true meaning of the situation was compounded by the ambition of some of its founders: to create a cultural life of such quality that it would teach the Germans a lesson. The literary critic Julius Bab summed it all up with extraordinary naïveté when he wrote in a letter of June 1933: “It remains a bitter fact—it is a ghetto enterprise, but one that we certainly want to accomplish so well that the Germans will have to be ashamed.”
¹¹⁰
Bab’s statement could also mean that the Germans would feel ashamed to be treating the carriers of such high culture so shabbily.

Sporadically Hinkel would inform his wards of works Jews were no longer allowed to perform. In the theater Germanic legends and performances of works from the German Middle Ages and German romanticism were prohibited. For a time the classical period was allowed, but Schiller was forbidden in 1934 and Goethe in 1936. Among foreign writers Shakespeare was allowed, but Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy was forbidden: In a Jewish theater in the Third Reich, “the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely” could have sounded subversive, hence that line led to the exclusion of the entire speech.
¹¹¹
Needless to say, despite the attachment of German Jews to the works of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, these composers were not to be performed by Jews. Beethoven was forbidden them in 1937, but Mozart had to wait until the next year, after the Anschluss.
¹¹²

Such growing constraints notwithstanding, the activity of the Kulturbund, both in Berlin and, soon after, in all major German cities, was remarkable. More than 180,000 Jews from all parts of Germany became active members of the association. In its first year the Kulturbund staged 69 opera performances and 117 concerts, and, from mid-1934 to mid-1935, 57 opera performances and 358 concerts.
¹¹³
The opera repertory included works by Mozart, Offenbach, Verdi, Johann Strauss, Donizetti, Rossini, Tchaikovsky, and Saint-Saëns, among others. Although, apart from the ideological and financial constraints, the choice of works performed was mainly traditional, in 1934 the Frankfurt Kulturbund organized a concert in honor of Arnold Schoenberg’s sixtieth birthday, and the Cologne branch organized a performance of Paul Hindemith’s children’s opera
Wir bauen eine Stadt
(We’re building a town)—locating it in Palestine.
¹¹⁴

In principle the Jews were increasingly to be fed on “Jewish works.” But even this principle did not always satisfy the Nazi mind. On October 26, 1933, Rainer Schlösser, the Reich director of theaters of the Ministry of Propaganda, recommended to Hinkel that performances of Emil Bernhard’s (Emil Cohn’s)
Die Jagd Gottes
(God’s hunt) be forbidden, as the play was “a kind of ‘consolation for the Jews,’ a kind of ‘heartening’ for the Jews.” Moreover, the action took place against a background of mistreatment of Jews by Cossacks: “It is easy to imagine with whom these Cossacks would be identified.”
¹¹⁵

Jewish audiences must have been partly aware that Kulturbund activities were intended to have a soothing effect on them. Nonetheless, Kulturbund theaters like the one on Berlin’s Charlottenstrasse (later Kommandantenstrasse became a spiritual lifeline. The tram conductors knew their public; “Charlottenstrasse,” they would call out. “Jewish culture—everybody off!”
¹¹⁶

“The goal of our stage,” declared the director of theater activities of the Rhine-Ruhr Kulturbund in the November/December 1933 issue of its periodical, “is to bring to all the joy and courage to face life by letting them participate in the eternal values of poetry or by discussing the problems of our time, but also by showing lighthearted pieces and not rejecting them. We intend to keep the connection with the German
Heimat
[homeland] and to form at the same time a connecting link with our great Jewish past and with a future that is worth living for.”
¹¹⁷

IV

By the end of 1933, tens of millions of people inside and outside Germany were aware of the systematic policy of segregation and persecution launched by the new German regime against its Jewish citizens. Yet, as already noted at the outset, it may have been impossible for most people, Jews and non-Jews alike, to have a clear idea of the goals and limits of this policy. There was anxiety among the Jews of Germany but no panic or any widespread sense of urgency. It is hard to evaluate how much importance German society at its various levels granted to an issue that was not on any priority list. Political stabilization, the dismantling of the Left, economic improvement, national revival, and international uncertainties were certainly more present in the minds of many than the hazy outlines of the Jewish issue; for most Germans the issues and challenges of daily life in times of political change and of economic turmoil were the paramount focus of interest, whatever their awareness of other problems may have been. It is against this background that Hitler’s own obsession with the Jewish issue must be considered.

In a remarkable dispatch sent to Foreign Minister Sir John Simon on May 11, 1933, the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, described the course taken by an interview with Hitler once he had alluded to the persecution of the Jews: “The allusion to the treatment of the Jews resulted in the Chancellor working himself up into a state of great excitement. ‘I will never agree,’ he shouted, as if he were addressing an open-air meeting, ‘to the existence of two kinds of law for German nationals. There is an immense amount of unemployment in Germany, and I have, for instance, to turn away youths of pure German stock from higher education. There are not enough posts for the pure-bred Germans, and the Jews must suffer with the rest. If the Jews engineer a boycott of German goods from abroad, I will take care that this hits the Jews in Germany.’ These remarks were delivered with great ferocity. Only his excitement, to which I did not wish to add, prevented me from pointing out that there were, in fact, two standards of treatment of German nationals, inasmuch as those of Jewish race were being discriminated against.” At the end of the dispatch, Rumbold returned to the issue: “My comment on the foregoing is that Herr Hitler is himself responsible for the anti-Jewish policy of the German government and that it would be a mistake to believe that it is the policy of his wilder men whom he has difficulty in controlling. Anybody who has had the opportunity of listening to his remarks on the subject of Jews could not have failed, like myself, to realize that he is a fanatic on the subject.”
¹¹⁸