Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (30 page)

After a period of relative rhetorical prudence, the Nazi leaders were returning to the basic themes of the Jewish world conspiracy in their most extreme form. But how were these themes internalized at lower party levels? How were they translated into the language of the party bureaucracy, and of the police bureaucracy in particular?

On October 28, 1935, the Gestapo chief of the Hildesheim district informed the district presidents and mayors under his authority that butchers were complaining about sharp practice on the part of Jewish cattle dealers. The butchers accused the Jews of charging inflated sums for the cattle earmarked for slaughter, thereby driving up the price of meat and sausages: “The suspicion exists,” the Gestapo chief wrote, “that these machinations represent a planned attack by Jewry, with the aim of fostering unrest and dissatisfaction among the population.”
³⁶
A few days earlier the same Gestapo station had informed its usual addressees that Jewish shoe stores were refusing to buy from Aryan manufacturers. According to the police chief, given the considerable importance of the Jewish shoe business, some Aryan producers were trying to sell their wares to the Jews by declaring that they were not members of the Nazi Party or of any related organization. The Hildesheim Gestapo assumed that the same boycotting was taking place in other parts of the Reich and that it must therefore derive from centrally issued instructions; a report on each local situation was therefore required by November 10.
³⁷

In each case the existence of a Jewish conspiracy is revealed by the “discovery” of some perfectly mundane event that might be real enough—the price of food did indeed rise in 1935, though this was caused by entirely other factors—or that might be a purely imaginary construct inspired by general economic difficulties. The police turned such random events into elements of a deliberate plot, thus creating a paranoid notion of centrally planned Jewish initiatives aimed at spreading an atmosphere of subversion among the population or intimidating party stalwarts in the business community. The ultimate goal of these “dangerous” Jewish initiatives was obvious: the downfall of the Nazi regime. There is a striking similarity of structure between Hitler’s all-encompassing vision of Jewish subversion on a world scale and the dark suspicions of a Gestapo chief in a small German town.

III

In July 1936 a memorandum was submitted to Hitler by the Provisional Directorate of the Confessing Church. It was a forceful document mentioning the concentration camps, the Gestapo’s methods, and even the misuse of religious terms and images in worship of the Führer. In an unusually bold departure from previous practice, the memorandum prophesied disaster for Germany if “there were persistence in totalitarian presumption and might contrary to the will of God.” The document was leaked and received extraordinary coverage abroad. Such a courageous statement, one could assume, must have given pride of place to the Jewish issue—that is, to the persecution of the Jews. “Yet,” in the words of historian Richard Gutteridge, “all that was devoted to this subject was the rather awkward observation that, when in the framework of the National Socialist Weltanschauung a form of anti-Semitism was forced upon the Christian which imposed an obligation of hatred towards the Jews, he had to counter it by the Christian command of love towards one’s neighbor. Here was no disavowal of anti-Semitism as such, including the Christian type, but merely of the militant Nazi version without even an oblique reference to the plight of the Jews themselves. The emphasis was upon the severe conflict of conscience experienced by the devout German Church people.”
³⁸
When a declaration of the Confessing Church referring indirectly to the memorandum was read in church by many pastors on August 23, not a single word was directed toward anti-Semitism or hatred of the Jews.
³⁹
A few months later, in March 1937, Pius XI’s sharp critique of the Nazi regime, the encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge
, was read from all Catholic pulpits in Germany. Nazi pseudoreligion and the regime’s racial theories were strongly condemned in general terms, but no direct reference was made to the fate of the Jews.

For the converted “full Jew” Friedrich Weissler, the memorandum of the Confessing Church was to have fateful consequences. A lawyer by profession, Weissler was employed by the Confessing Church as a legal adviser and was secretly in charge of informing the outside world about its activities. It was probably he who leaked the memorandum to the foreign press. Pretending outrage, the leadership of the Confessing Church asked the Gestapo to find the culprit. Weissler and two Aryan assistants were arrested. Whereas the Aryans were ultimately released, Weissler, for whom the church did not intervene, succumbed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on February 19, 1937. Thus a “full Jew” became “the first martyr of the Confessing Church.”
⁴⁰

Friedrich Meinecke, possibly the most prestigious German historian of his time, had been replaced in 1935 at the editorial helm of the
Historische Zeitschrift
, the leading German historical journal. No doubts could be raised about the ideological orthodoxy of his successor, Karl Alexander von Müller. But from January 1933 on, the
HZ
had not been immune to the new trends, especially since, as has been seen, the academic world found no great difficulty in adapting to the new regime.
⁴¹
Contributors were examined as to Jewish origin, and at least one Jewish member of the editorial board, Hedwig Hintze, was ousted.
⁴²

As could be expected, Müller’s initial editorial was a clarion call. The new editor in chief described the fundamental changes the world was undergoing as a mighty context that demanded a renewal of historical insight. Müller’s closing words are memorable:

“We are buffeted like few other races by the stormy breath of a great historical epoch. Like few other races, we are granted an insight into the original demonic forces, both stupendous and terrible, that produce such turbulent times. Like few other races, we are filled with the consciousness that in the decisions of the present we shall determine the long-term future of our whole people. Out of what is becoming we seek and relive what has been, and we revive its shades with our blood; out of what is truly past, we recognize and reinforce the power of the living present.”
⁴³

The bombastic hollowness of these lines is in itself revealing. The ideological message of Nazism mobilized an apparently senseless set of images that nonetheless constantly evoked a longing for the sacred, the demonic, the primeval—in short, for the forces of myth. The intellectual and political content of the program was borne by the “stormy breath” of historical events of world-historical significance. Not even the readers of the
Historische Zeitschrift
could be entirely indifferent to the revival of an atmosphere rooted in a German romantic and necromantic tradition of which many of them partook.

Under the new stewardship the changes went beyond the editorial invocation of “demonic forces.” The periodical’s remaining Jewish board members, Gerhard Masur, for example, were replaced by Aryans; and, most important, a new permanent section, under the editorial supervision of Wilhelm Grau, was added to deal with the “History of the Jewish Question.”
⁴⁴
In his opening article, “The Jewish Question as the Task of Historical Research,” Grau explained that, since hitherto all books dealing with Jewish issues had been reviewed by Jews only, which had naturally led to uncritical praise, his new section would take a somewhat different approach.
⁴⁵
The first title discussed was a dissertation by a Lithuanian Jew, Abraham Heller (of whom more will be heard), entitled “The Situation of the Jews in Russia from the Revolution of March 1917 to the Present.” Grau’s immediate contribution to greater objectivity was to add a subtitle that, in his view, conveyed the book’s content more accurately: “The Jewish Contribution to Bolshevism.”
⁴⁶

Young Grau (barely twenty-seven in 1936) had already—in a way—been making a name for himself, having become director of the Jewish Section, the most important research section of the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany. Inaugurated on October 19, 1935, the institute was headed by Walter Frank, a protégé of Rudolf Hess and a. historian of modern German anti-Semitism, mainly of Adolf Stöcker’s “Berlin movement.” Grau seemed to be a worthy disciple: In 1935 he had already contributed a slim study on Humboldt and the Jews, berating the most famous nineteenth-century German humanist and liberal intellectual for his subservience to Jewish influence. Writing from beyond the borders of the Reich, the Jewish philosopher Herbert Marcuse could afford to be direct: He made mincemeat of Grau’s book and showed him as the fool and charlatan that he was. For Walter Frank and his institute, Grau was nonetheless a rising star who would establish a research empire on the Jewish question.
⁴⁷

The festive opening, on November 19, 1936, of the Jewish Section took place in Munich, where it was to be located, in the presence of a wide array of national and local celebrities from the party, the government, the army, and the academic world. The Munich chamber orchestra played a Bach suite, and Karl Alexander von Müller, formally Grau’s superior, spoke, followed by Walter Frank. According to the summary in the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
, Frank explained that research on the Jewish question was like “an expedition into an unknown country whose darkness is shrouded in a great silence. Until now, only the Jews had worked on the Jewish problem.”
⁴⁸
Tension soon built up between Frank and the ambitious Grau, and within two years the latter was out, though well on his way to establishing a competing research institute on the Jewish question in Frankfurt, this time under Alfred Rosenberg’s aegis.
⁴⁹

While Frank and Grau were launching their enterprise, Carl Schmitt was making his own display of anti-Semitic fervor. This luminary of German legal and political theory, whose enthusiastic adherence to National Socialism in 1933 has already been mentioned, apparently deemed it necessary to fortify his newly acquired ideological trustworthiness against the accusations both of exiled intellectuals, such as Waldemar Gurian, and of colleagues who were also members of the SS (such as Otto Köllreuter, Karl August Eckhardt, and Reinhard Höhn), who did not hesitate to allude to his many Jewish friends before 1933 and to his rather sudden political conversion that year.
⁵⁰

It was in this atmosphere that Schmitt organized his notorious academic conference, “Judaism in Legal Science,” held in Berlin on October 3 and 4, 1936. Schmitt opened and closed the proceedings with two major anti-Jewish speeches. He started his first speech and ended his closing address with Hitlers famous dictum from
Mein Kampf
. “In defending myself against the Jew…I am doing the work of the Lord.”
⁵¹

In the concrete resolutions Schmitt drafted for the conference, he demanded the establishment of a legal bibliography that would distinguish between Jewish and non-Jewish authors, and the “cleansing” of Jewish authors from the libraries.
⁵²
In the event a Jewish author had to be quoted, he or she was to be identified as such. As Schmitt himself put it on that occasion: “By the very mention of the word ‘Jewish,’ a healthy exorcism would be effected.”
⁵³
Within a few months the implementation of Schmitt’s recommendations began.

All this was of little avail to Carl Schmitt himself.
Das Schwarze Korps
attacked him in December 1936, reiterating once again the charges of his prior Jewish contacts. Despite such powerful protectors as Göring and Hans Frank, Schmitt could not withstand the SS pressure: His official/political functions and ambitions were over. His ideological production, however, went on. In his 1938 work on Thomas Hobbes (
Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes
), Schmitt described the deadly struggle between Leviathan, the great sea powers, and Behemoth, the great land powers; then, turning a Jewish legend about messianic times into an account of bloodshed and cannibalism, he added: “The Jews stand apart and watch as the peoples of the world kill one another; for them this mutual ‘slaughter and carnage’ (
Schlächten und Schlachten
) is lawful and ‘Kosher.’ Thus they eat flesh of the slaughtered people and live upon it.”
⁵⁴

While Schmitt was cleansing legal studies and political science of any remnants of the Jewish spirit, Philipp Lenard, Johannes Stark, and Bruno Thüring, among others, were waging the same purifying campaign in physics.
⁵⁵
In various ways similar purges were spreading throughout all other domains of intellectual life. Sometimes the thin line between belief and mere compliance was not clear as, for example, in the case of Mathias Göring, Hermann’s cousin, who, as director of the Institute for Psychotherapy in Berlin, banished any explicit reference to psychoanalysis and its theories, its Jewish founder, and its mainly Jewish theoreticians and practitioners, while apparently accepting the systematic use of therapeutic methods directly inspired by psychoanalysis.
⁵⁶

In some instances the party leadership itself intervened to curtail the initiatives of an ideological orthodoxy that could have significantly negative consequences. Thus, on June 15, 1937, Stark published a full-blown attack in
Das Schwarze Korps
on the famous physicist Werner Heisenberg, then teaching at Leipzig, accusing him of being a “white Jew” and the “Ossietzky of physics,”
^*
because the young theoretician of quantum physics had adopted various modern theories, in particular Einstein’s theory of relativity. At first Heisenberg’s protests were of no avail, especially as he had not signed the declaration of support for the new regime circulated by Stark in 1933. However, a highly regarded Göttingen aeronautical engineer, Ludwig Prandtl, intervened with Himmler on Heisenberg’s behalf. It took but a few months for Himmler to decide that Heisenberg should be protected from further attacks, on condition that he agreed to restrict himself to purely scientific issues. Orders to that effect were given to Heydrich, and, after the annexation of Austria, Heisenberg was named to the prestigious chair of theoretical physics at the University of Vienna. Heisenberg now acquiesced in all demands without further ado. Thus, although Stark and Lenard represented the most orthodox anti-Semitic line in science, and although Heisenberg had adopted “the Jewish dimension” of physics, Himmler understood the harm that Heisenberg’s marginalization or emigration could inflict on Germany’s scientific development and decided to shield him.
⁵⁷
But there were limits to this sort of compromise. Despite receiving the appointment in Vienna, the chair Heisenberg had initially wanted, at Munich, was refused him. Moreover—and this is the main point—Himmler would never have intervened to protect and keep any of the Jewish scientists who were being forced to leave Germany. In Heisenberg’s case the basic principle of racial purification had not been infringed.