Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (18 page)

In 1924, the bankruptcy of the brothers Heinrich and Julius Barmat, two Polish Jews who had settled in Germany in 1918, led to a full-scale right-wing anti-Semitic and anti-Republic onslaught. The Barmat brothers were accused of having received loans from the state-sponsored postal savings bank in return for various financial favors to Social Democratic politicians. Given the political ramifications of the affair, the right-wing parties succeeded in setting up an investigation committee that led to the resignation and indictment of several ministers and Reichstag members. But the main target of the right-wing campaign was President Friedrich Ebert, who was accused of having helped the Barmats to obtain a permanent residence permit and even of having dabbled in their food import transactions during the immediate postwar years.
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There was a similar situation, on a smaller scale, in 1929, with the bankruptcy of the Sklarek brothers.
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The main casualty this time was the mayor of Berlin, and the political consequence a contribution to the Nazi Party’s strong showing in that year’s local election.
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Political parties soon limited the number of their Jewish Reichstag members—with the exception of the Social Democrats, who retained approximately 10 percent Jewish membership on their Reichstag list to the very end. A telling illustration of the change of mood is to be found in the German Communist Party: In 1924 there were still six Jews among the party’s sixty-four Reichstag members; in 1932 not a single one remained.
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The Communists did not hesitate to use anti-Semitic slogans when such slogans were deemed effective among potential voters.
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The most significant political expression of the general climate of opinion was the transformation of the German Democratic Party (DDP), which had often been dubbed the “Jewish Party” because of the prominence of Jews among its founders, the large number of Jews among its voters, and, for a while at least, its espousal of themes identified with the positions of the “Jewish press.”
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In the January 1919 elections, the DDP obtained 18.5 percent of the vote, which made it the most successful of the middle-class liberal parties.
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That success did not last. Gustav Stresemann’s DVP kept attacking the competing DDP as “Jewish,” and, as a result, the DDP steadily declined. Within the party itself, personalities associated with the “liberal” right were openly critical of the party’s identification with Jewish voters and influence.
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In 1930 the DDP as such disappeared, to be replaced by the Deutsche Staatspartei (German State Party). This group’s leadership became mostly Protestant and some of its components, such as the youth movement Jungdeutscher Orden, did not admit Jews. The DDP’s voters had been the pro-Weimar liberal middle classes; the change in party name and policy reflect what were perceived, within these middle-class liberal circles, as electorally useful attitudes regarding the “Jewish problem.”

However, neither the “de-Judaization” represented by the Staatspartei nor the hostility of the DVP was of any avail to these parties. Whereas in the elections of 1928 the DDP obtained twenty-five seats and the DVP forty-five, and in those of 1930 the DDP still gained twenty seats and the DVP thirty, in the elections of July 1932, the DDP was reduced to four seats and the DVP to seven.
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The decline of the liberal parties during the Weimar Republic has been thoroughly analyzed, and the social transformation that underlay it starkly defined.
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In terms of the changing situation of the Jews of Germany, it meant that their main political basis (apart from the Social Democrats) had simply disappeared.

The “pernicious” influence of Jews on German culture was the most common theme of Weimar anti-Semitism. On this terrain, the conservative German bourgeoisie, the traditional academic world, the majority of opinion in the provinces—in short, all those who “felt German”—came together with the more radical anti-Semites.

The role of Jews in Weimar culture—in modern German culture in general—has been most extensively discussed, and, as we have seen, this theme was not only on the minds of anti-Semites, but often a source of preoccupation for Jews themselves, at least for some of them. In his first book on the subject, the historian Peter Gay showed what role the former “outsider” (mainly the Jew) played in the German culture of the 1920s;
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later he reversed his position, arguing that, objectively, there was nothing to distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish contributions to German culture and that, as far as cultural modernism in particular is concerned, the Jews were neither more nor less “modern” than their German environment.
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Such downplaying of the Jewish dimension may well miss part of the context that provided the anti-Semitic ranters of the twenties with their ammunition.
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The situation described, for example, in Istvan Deak’s study of “Weimar’s left-wing intellectuals” seems closer both to reality and to what the general perception was. After surveying the dominant influence of Jews in the press, book publishing, theater, and film, Deak turns to art and literature: “Many of Germany’s best composers, musicians, artists, sculptors and architects were Jews. Their participation in literary criticism and in literature was enormous: practically all the great critics and many novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists of Weimar Germany were Jews. A recent American study has shown that thirty-one of the sixty-five leading German ‘expressionists’ and ‘neo-objectivists’ were Jews.”
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Deak’s presentation in turn demands some nuancing, as, after all, the cultural scene in the twenties was dominated by such figures as Thomas Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Strauss, Walter Gropius; but undoubtedly, in the minds of the middle-class public, be it of the extreme or the moderate right, anything “daring,” “modern,” or “shocking” was identified with the Jews. Thus, when shortly after (the entirely non-Jewish) Frank Wedekind’s death, his “sexually explicit”
Schloss Wetterstein
was staged in Munich (December 1919), the political right did not hesitate to call it Jewish garbage. The police warned that performance of the play would lead to a pogrom,
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and, sure enough, during the last performance Jews and people who “looked Jewish” in the audience were beaten up.
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As a police report put it: “One can easily understand that a German who still feels German to some degree and who is not morally and ethically perverted looks with greatest disgust upon the public enjoyment of Wedekind plays.”
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Jewish writers and artists may not have been any more extreme modernists than their non-Jewish colleagues, but modernism as such flourished in a culture in which the Jews played a central role. For those who considered modernism the rejection of all hallowed values and norms, the Jews were the carriers of a massive threat.

More ominous, however, than cultural modernity was left-wing culture in all its aspects. Within months of the end of the war, Jewish revolutionaries were easy targets of the counterrevolution. After Rathenau’s murder no Jew (with the exception of the Socialist finance minister Rudolf Hilferding) played any significant role in Weimar politics. On the other hand, left-wing political, social, and cultural criticism and innovation were often “Jewish.” “If cultural contributions by Jews were far out of proportion to their numerical strength,” Deak writes, “their participation in left-wing intellectual activities was even more disproportionate. Apart from orthodox Communist literature where there were a majority of non-Jews, Jews were responsible for a great part of the leftist literature in Germany. [The periodical]
Die Weltbühne
was in this respect not unique; Jews published, edited, and to a great part wrote the other left-wing intellectual magazines. Jews played a decisive role in the pacifist and feminist movements, and in the campaigns for sexual enlightenment.”
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Polemics regarding the role of Jews on the cultural scene raged and became more virulent as the Nazi movement grew in strength and as the republic approached its end. One of the most extreme forums of the Right was the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Fighting League for German Culture), established in 1928; it achieved wide influence by opening its ranks to a variety of antirepublic, anti-Left, anti-Jewish elements—from members of the Bayreuth Circle to conservative Catholics like Othmar Spann, from fanatic anti-Semitic literary specialists like Adolf Bartels to Alfred Heuss, publisher of the
Zeitschrift für Musik
. But sometimes the debates took place in more neutral contexts or were even initiated by Jewish organizations. Thus, in 1930, Max Naumann’s Association of National German Jews invited the right-wing literary critic Paul Fechter to lecture on “The Art Scene and the Jewish Question.” Fechter did not mince words. He warned his listeners that the “anti-Germanism” of left-wing Jewish intellectuals was a major source of rising anti-Semitism and that the Germans would not tolerate for long the continuation of this state of things. National Jews and national Germans, Fechter suggested, should act in common to oppose such anti-national Jewish intellectual attacks. In a more roundabout way, he hinted at the excessive presence of Jews in German art, literature, and theater. This, too, although unsaid, could be understood as a source of growing anti-Jewish feelings: “I feel obliged to express,” declared Fechter, “that a great number of German authors, painters, playwrights go around today with the feeling that it is much more difficult to find a place in German theaters, on the German book market, in the German art business, for things German than for others.”
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Fechter’s lecture was published in the January 1931 issue of Rudolf Pechel’s
Deutsche Rundschau
, with the following editorial comment: “We reproduce [the lecture] as it indicates one of the sources of the dangerous growth of anti-Semitism clearly confirmed during the second half of 1930 and as it indicates some ways that still may allow us to counter this danger.”
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A bitter debate followed. It is in this context that the novelist Jakob Wassermann, whose autobiographical essay, “My Way as German and Jew,” was possibly the strongest expression of the anguish German Jews felt in the face of the growing tide of anti-Semitism, addressed his question to Rudolf Pechel: “Do the rules of good behavior help against ‘Perish, Jew!’?”
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One of the more remarkable Jewish contributions to the debate was that of Arthur Prinz, published in the periodical’s April 1931 issue under the title “Toward Eliminating the Poison from the Jewish Question.” After asking why radical Jewish journalists and literati could provoke such furious anti-Semitic rage in Germany, Prinz ventured an answer that probed deeply into the relations between Germans and Jews: “That sort of journalism and literature would be impossible without that deep and old insufficiency of a healthy state and national feeling in Germany, which threatens to become fatal since the sad outcome of the war and can certainly not be ‘compensated for’ by the excessive nationalism of the extreme right. The agitation of rootless Jews is poison in a body particularly receptive to it, and precisely this is the main reason for boundless anti-Jewish hatred.”
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When one turns to the wider reaches of German society as it approached the political turning point of 1933, there is no way of assessing clearly the strength of its anti-Jewish attitudes. For example, the League of Jewish Women (Jüdischer Frauenbund) found its allies in the much larger Federation of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF) in their common struggles on feminist issues, but any indication of Jewish identity was not more acceptable to the German women’s organization than it was to the surrounding society. In the words of a historian of the league, the attiudes in the BDF “ranged from liberal impatience with Jewish distinctiveness to covert or overt anti-Semitism.”
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As for the nature of this anti-Semitism, one of its most nuanced evaluations remains the most plausible: “More common and widespread than outright hatred or sympathy for the Jews was…moderate anti-Semitism, that vague sense of unease about Jews that stopped far short of wanting to harm them but that may have helped to neutralize whatever aversion Germans might otherwise have felt for the Nazis.”
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In early August 1932 Hitler was negotiating with the consummate schemer and not yet the short-lived last chancellor of the Weimar Republic (November 1932-January 30, 1933) Gen. Kurt von Schleicher, at the time still a close confidant of President Hindenburg, the conditions for his being named to the chancellorship. On the tenth of that month, five SA men forced their way into the home of Konrad Pieczuch, a pro-Communist worker in the small town of Potempa in Upper Silesia, and trampled him to death. “Such brutality once again put a serious obstacle on the path of the Nazi march to power.”
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Hitler had apparently believed that the top position would now be offered to him; what Hindenburg proposed when they finally met was a mere vice-chancellorship. The meeting had been cool, and the official communiqué dismissive of the Nazi leader. Hitler was utterly humiliated and furious. It was exactly then, on August 22, that the court in Beuthen sentenced the five SA men to death. The announcement of the verdict led to tumultuous scenes in the courtroom; outside, Jewish and “socialist” shops were attacked. Hitler reacted with an outburst of rage. He wired the convicted murderers: “My comrades! In view of this incredible criminal verdict I feel myself tied to you in unlimited fidelity. From this moment on, your freedom is our honor, the fight against a government under which such a thing was possible, our duty.”
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