Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (39 page)

A second visit took place at the end of May; this time it included Theodor Eicke, the inspector of concentration camps, and Herbert Karl of the SS construction division.
²⁹
The first 300 inmates, Austrian and German criminals from Dachau, arrived on August 8, 1938. By September 1939 Mauthausen held 2,995 inmates, among them 958 criminals, 1,087 Gypsies (mainly from the Austrian province of Burgenland), and 739 German political prisoners:
³⁰
“The first Jewish inmate was a Vienneseborn man arrested as a homosexual, who was registered at Mauthausen in September 1939 and recorded as having died in March 1940. During 1940 an additional 90 Jews arrived; all but 10 of them were listed as dead by the year’s end.”
³¹

According to Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, it was in Austria that the Nazis inaugurated their “rational” economically motivated policy regarding the Jewish question, which from then on dictated all their initiatives in this domain, from the “model” established in Vienna to the “Final Solution.” The Viennese model (
Modell Wien
) was basically characterized by a drastic restructuring of the economy as a result of the liquidation of virtually all the unproductive Jewish businesses on the basis of a thorough assessment of their profitability prepared by the Reich Board for Economic Management (Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit);
³²
by a systematic effort to get rid of the newly created Jewish proletariat by way of accelerated emigration whereby, as we saw, wealthy Jews contributed to the emigration fund for the destitute part of the Jewish population; by establishing labor camps (the three camps planned by Walter Rafelsberger), where the upkeep of the Jews would be maintained at a minimum and financed by the labor of the inmates themselves.
³³
In essence those in charge of the Jewish question in annexed Austria were supposedly motivated by economic logic and not by any Nazi anti-Semitic ideology. The argument seems bolstered by the fact that not only was the entire Aryanization process in Austria master-minded by Göring’s Four-Year Plan administration and its technocrats, but the same technocrats (such as Rafelsberger) also planned the solution of the problem of impoverished Jewish masses by way of forced-labor concentration camps that appeared to be early models of the future ghettos and eventually of the future extermination camps.

In fact, as has been seen, the liquidation of Jewish economic life in Nazi Germany had started at an accelerated pace in 1936, and by late 1937, with the elimination of all conservative influence, the enforced Aryanization drive had become the main thrust of the anti-Jewish policies, mainly in order to compel the Jews to emigrate. Thus what happened in Austria after the Anschluss was simply the better organized part of a general policy adopted throughout the Reich. The link between economic expropriation and expulsion of the Jews from Germany and German-controlled territories did continue to characterize
that stage
of Nazi policies until the outbreak of the war. Then, after an interim period of almost two years, another “logic” appeared, one hardly dependent on economic rationality.

II

After the Anschluss the Jewish refugee problem became a major international issue. By convening a conference of thirty-two countries in the French resort town of Evian from July 6 to 14, 1938, President Roosevelt publicly demonstrated his hope of finding a solution to it. Roosevelt’s initiative was surprising, because “he chose to intrude into a situation in which he was virtually powerless to act, bound as he was by a highly restrictive immigration law.”
³⁴
Indeed, the outcome of Evian was decided before it even convened: The invitation to the conference clearly stated that “no country would be expected to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation.”
³⁵

The conference and its main theme, the fate of the Jews, found a wide and diverse echo in the world press. “There can be little prospect,” the London
Daily Telegraph
said on July 7, “that room will be found within any reasonable time.”
³⁶
According to the
Gazette de Lausanne
of July 11: “Some think that they [the Jews] have got too strong a position for such a small minority. Hence the opposition to them, which in certain places has turned into a general attack.” “Wasn’t it said before the first World War that one-tenth of the world’s gold belonged to the Jews?” queried the
Libre Belgique
on July 7.
³⁷

Not all of the press was so hostile. “It is an outrage to the Christian conscience especially,” said the London
Spectator
on July 29, “that the modern world with all its immense wealth and resources cannot get these exiles a home and food and drink and a secure status.”
³⁸
For the future postwar French Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, writing in the left-wing Catholic paper
L’Aube
on July 7, “One thing is clearly understood: the enlightened nations must not let the refugees be driven to despair.”
³⁹
The mainstream French Catholic newspaper
La Croix
urged compassion: “We cannot stand aside,” it pleaded on July 14, “in view of the suffering of human beings and fail to respond to their cry for help…. We cannot be partners to a solution of the Jewish question by means of their extinction, by means of the complete extermination of a whole people.”
⁴⁰
But no doors opened at Evian, and no hope was offered to the refugees. An Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees was established under the chairmanship of the American George Rublee. Rublee’s activities, which ultimately achieved no result, will be discussed further on.

Nazi sarcasm had a field day. For the SD Evian’s net result was “to show the whole world that the Jewish problem was in no way provoked only by Germany, but was a question of the most immediate world political significance. Despite the general rejection by the Evian states of the way in which the Jewish question has been dealt with in Germany, no country, America not excepted, declared itself ready to accept unconditionally any number of Jews. It was remarkable that the Australian delegate even mentioned that Jewish emigration would endanger his own race.”
⁴¹
There was no fundamental difference between the German assessment and the biting summary of Evian by the
Newsweek
correspondent there: “Chairman Myron C. Taylor, former U.S. Steel head, opened the proceedings: ‘The time has come when governments…must act and act promptly.’ Most governments represented acted promptly by slamming their doors against Jewish refugees.”
⁴²
The
Völkischer Beobachter
headlined triumphantly: “Nobody wants them.”
⁴³

For Hitler too, this was an opportunity not to be missed. He chose to insert his comments into the closing speech of the party rally on September 12. Its main theme, the Sudeten crisis, riveted the attention of the world; never since 1918 had the danger of war seemed closer, but the Jews could not be left unmentioned: “They complain in these democracies about the unfathomable cruelty that Germany—and now also Italy—uses in trying to get rid of their Jews. In general, all these great democratic empires have only a few people per square kilometer, whereas Germany, for decades past, has admitted hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these Jews, without even batting an eye.

“But now, as the complaints have at last become too strong and as the nation is not willing any more to let itself be sucked dry by these parasites, cries of pain arise all over. But it does not mean that these democratic countries have now become ready to replace their hypocritical remarks with acts of help; on the contrary, they affirm with complete coolness that over there, evidently, there is no room! Thus, they expect that Germany with its 140 inhabitants per square kilometer will go on keeping its Jews without any problem, whereas the democratic world empires with only a few people per square kilometer can in no way take such a burden upon themselves. In short, no help, but preaching, certainly!”
⁴⁴

The Evian debacle acquires its full significance from its wider context. The growing strength of Nazi Germany impelled some of the countries that had aligned themselves with Hitler’s general policies to take steps that, whether demanded by Germany or not, were meant to be demonstrations of political and ideological solidarity with the Reich. The most notorious among such initiatives were the Italian racial laws, approved by the Fascist Grand Council on October 6, 1938, and taking effect on November 17.

In Italy the Jewish community numbered barely more than fifty thousand and was fully integrated into the general society. Anti-Semitism had become rare with the waning of the church’s influence, and even the army—and the Fascist Party—included prominent Jewish members. Finally Mussolini himself had not, in the past, expressed much regard for Nazi racial ideology. Devised on the Nuremberg pattern, the new anti-Jewish laws caused widespread consternation among Italian Jews and many non-Jews alike.
⁴⁵

The October laws had been preceded, in mid-July, by the Racial Manifesto, a declaration setting forth Mussolini’s concoction of racial anti-Semitism and intended as the theoretical foundation of the forthcoming legislation. Hitler could not but graciously acknowledge so much goodwill. He duly did so on September 6, in the first of his speeches to the Nuremberg party rally: “I think that I must at this point announce, on my own behalf and on that of all of you, our deep and heartfelt happiness in the fact that another European world power has, through its own experiences, by its own decision and along its own paths arrived at the same conception as ourselves and with a resolution worthy of admiration has drawn from this conception the most far-reaching consequences.”
⁴⁶
The first anti-Jewish law introduced in Hungary, in May 1938, was greeted with less fanfare than Mussolini’s decision, but it pointed to the same basic evidence: The shadow of Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy was lengthening over ever larger parts of Europe.
⁴⁷

While the Jews were becoming targets of legal discrimination in a growing number of European countries, and while international efforts to solve the problem of Jewish refugees came to naught, an unusual step was being taken in complete secrecy. In the early summer of 1938, Pope Pius XI, who over the years had become an increasingly staunch critic of the Nazi regime, requested the American Jesuit John LaFarge to prepare the text of an encyclical against Nazi racism and Nazi anti-Semitism in particular. LaFarge had probably been chosen because of his continuous antiracist activities in the United States and his book
Interracial Justice
, which Pius XI had read.
⁴⁸

With the help of two other Jesuit priests, the French Gustave Desbuquois and the German Gustav Gundlach, LaFarge completed the draft of
Humani Generis Unitas
(The unity of humankind) by the autumn of 1938 and delivered it to the general of the Jesuit order in Rome, the Pole Wladimir Ledochowski, for submission to the pope.
⁴⁹
In the meantime Pius XI had yet again criticized racism on several other occasions. On September 6, 1938, speaking in private to a group of Belgian pilgrims, he went further. With great emotion, apparently in tears, the pope, after commenting on the sacrifice of Abraham, declared: “It is impossible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. We recognize that everyone has the right to self-defense and may take the necessary means for protecting legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are all Semites.”
⁵⁰

In this declaration, made in private and thus not mentioned in the press, the pope’s condemnation of anti-Semitism remained on theological grounds: He did not criticize the ongoing persecution of the Jews, and he included a reference to the right of self-defense (against undue Jewish influence). Nonetheless his statement was clear: Christians could not condone anti-Semitism of the Nazi kind (or for that matter, as it was shaping up in Italy at the very same time).

The message of the encyclical was similar: a condemnation of racism in general and the condemnation of anti-Semitism on theological grounds, from the viewpoint of Christian revelation and the teachings of the church regarding the Jews.
⁵¹
Even so, the encyclical would have been the first solemn denunciation by the supreme Catholic authority of the anti-Semitic attitudes, teachings, and persecutions in Germany, in Fascist Italy, and in the entire Christian world.

Ledochowski was first and foremost a fanatical anti-Communist who moreover hoped that some political arrangement with Nazi Germany remained possible. He procrastinated. The draft of
Humani Generis Unitas
was sent by him for further comment to the editor in chief of the notoriously anti-Semitic organ of the Roman Jesuits,
Civiltà Cattolica
.” It was only after LaFarge had written directly to the Pope that, a few days before his death, Pius XI received the text. The pontiff died on February 9, 1939. His successor, Pius XII, was probably informed of the project and probably took the decision to shelve
Humani Generis Unitas
.
⁵³

III

Even in 1938, small islands of purely symbolic opposition to the anti-Jewish measures still existed inside Germany. Four years earlier, the Reich Ministry of Education had ordered the German Association for Art History to expel its Jewish members. The association did not comply but merely reshuffled its board of directors. Internal ministry memoranda indicate that Education Minister Rust repeated his demand in 1935, again apparently to no avail. In March 1938 State Secretary Werner Zschintsch sent a reminder to his chief: All funds for the association were to be eliminated, and, if the order was not obeyed, it would no longer be allowed to call itself “German.” “The Minister must be interested,” Zschintsch concluded, “to have the association finally comply with the principles of the National Socialist world-view.”
⁵⁴
We do not know what the association then decided to do; in any case its Jewish members were certainly not retained after the November 1938 pogrom.