Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (40 page)

There were some other—equally unexpected—signs of independence. Such was to be the case at the 1938 Salzburg Festival. After the Anschluss, Arturo Toscanini, who had refused to conduct at Bayreuth in 1933, turned Salzburg down as well.

Salzburg was emblematic in more ways than one. From the very outset, in 1920, when Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt had organized the first festival around a production of Hofmannsthal’s
Jedermann (Everyman
; based on the medieval mystery play of the same name), the Austrian anti-Semitic press had raved against the Jewish cultural invasion and the exploitation by three Jews (the third was the actor Alexander Moissi) of Christianity’s loftiest heritage.
⁵⁵
Hofmannsthal’s
Jedermann
nonetheless opened the festival year in year out (except for performances of his
Welttkeater
in 1922 and 1924). In 1938
Jedermann
was of course removed from the repertory.
⁵⁶
The Jewish invasion had been stemmed.

Wilhelm Furtwängler agreed to take Toscanini’s place at Salzburg. Throughout his career in Nazi Germany, Furtwängler showed himself to be a political opportunist who had moments of courage. In Salzburg he agreed to conduct Wagner’s
Meisfersinger
on condition that the Jew Walter Grossmann be kept as the understudy in the role of Hans Sachs. As it happened, on opening night Karl Kammann, the scheduled Hans Sachs, fell ill, and Walter Grossmann sang: “A glittering crowd headed by Joseph Goebbels and his entourage sat dutifully enthralled through the Führer’s favorite opera, while Grossmann brought Nuremberg’s most German hero to life.”
⁵⁷
But neither the actions of the art historians’ association nor Walter Grossmann’s performance could stem the ever growing tide—and impact—of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda.

“The Eternal Jew” (
Der ewige Jude
), the largest anti-Jewish exhibition of the prewar years, opened on November 8, 1937, in Munich’s Deutsches Museum. Streicher and Goebbels gave speeches. On the same evening the director of the Bavarian State Theater organized a cultural event in the Residenz Theater, which, according to the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
, expressed “the basic themes of the exhibition.” The first part of the program offered a staged rendition of excerpts from Luther’s notorious pamphlet
Wider diejuden und ihre Lügen
(Against the Jews and their lies); the second part presented readings from other anti-Jewish texts, and the third, the Shylock scenes from Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice
.
⁵⁸

A SOPADE report written a few weeks after the opening stressed that the exhibition “did not remain without effect on the visitors.” In the first hall the viewer was faced with large models of Jewish body parts: “Jewish eyes…, the Jewish nose, the Jewish mouth, the lips,” and so on. Huge photographs of various “racially typical” Jewish faces and mannerisms followed—Trotsky gesticulating, Charlie Chaplin, and so on—” all of it displayed in the most repulsive way.” Material (extracts from the Book of Esther, for instance), and caricatures, slogans, and descriptions of “Jews in politics,” “Jews in culture,” “Jews in business”—and accounts of Jewish goals and methods in these various domains—filled room after room. According to the report, “Jews in film” was particularly effective: An unbearably kitschy commercial production was shown in that section; at the end Alfred Rosenberg appeared on the screen and declared: “You are horrified by this film. Yes, it is particularly bad, but it is precisely the one we wanted to show you.”

The author of the SOPADE report admits that he was deeply impressed on leaving the exhibition; so was his companion. She asked questions about what they had seen: “I couldn’t tell her the truth,” he admits. “I did not have sufficient knowledge for that.”
⁵⁹
Some SA units were so inspired by the exhibition that they started a boycott action of their own as an “educational follow-up” to what they had learned at the Deutsches Museum.
⁶⁰

An exhibition such as
The Eternal Jew
was merely the most extreme expression of the ongoing effort to assemble any kind of damning material about the Jews. Diverse forms of this endeavor were encountered during the first years of the regime. Now, at the end of 1937 and throughout 1938, the search went on with renewed inventiveness. On February 24, 1938, the minister of justice informed all prosecutors that it was no longer necessary to forward a copy of every indictment against a Jew to the ministry’s press division, as it had already acquired a sufficient perspective on the criminality of Jews. The kinds of criminal acts by Jews that still had to be included were “cases that raised new legal points; those in which the perpetrator had demonstrated a particularly evil intention or had used particularly objectionable methods; those in which the crime had been perpetrated on an especially large scale or had caused particularly great damage or aroused uncommon interest among the public; finally, cases of racial defilement in which the perpetrator was a recurrent offender or had abused a position of power.”
⁶¹
Such instances of Jews in Germany abusing their positions of power in order to commit
Rassenschande
must have been rather rare in the year of grace 1938….

In March 1938 the issue of Jewish
Mischlinge
and persons related to Jews still in government employment came to the fore. The order for an investigation seems to have originated with Hitler himself, since it was a member of the Führer’s Chancellery, Hans Hefelmann, who on March 28, 1938, asked the SD, and specifically section II 112, to collect all the relevant documentation. The II 112 officials pointed out that the forthcoming population census would give an exact account of this particular group and that, in any case, such files as existed were most probably to be found in the higher reaches of each ministry, as any promotion had to take into consideration the candidate’s partly Jewish origin or Jewish family connections.
⁶²

By the beginning of 1938 all German Jews had had to turn in their passports (new ones were issued only to those Jews who were about to emigrate).
⁶³
But another identification document was soon decided upon. In July 1938 the Ministry of the Interior decreed that before the end of the year all Jews had to apply to the police for an identity card, which was to be carried at all times and shown on demand.
⁶⁴
On August 17 another decree, prepared by Hans Globke, announced that from January 1, 1939, Jews who did not bear the first names indicated on an appended list were to add the first name Israel or Sara to their names.
⁶⁵
The appended list of men’s names started with Abel, Abieser, Abimelech, Abner, Absalom, Ahab, Ahasja, Ahaser,
⁶⁶
and so on; the list of women’s names was of the same ilk. (Had these lists been compiled under other circumstances, they could stand as an appropriate illustration of the mind-set of bureaucratic half-wits.)

Some of the names on Globke’s lists were entirely fictitious and others were grotesque choices manifestly resulting from a compounded intention of identification and degradation. A surprising inclusion among the typically Jewish names was that of Isidor. As has been pointedly remarked, “Saint Isidor of Seville, the anti-Jewish church father, and Saint Isidor of Madrid, the patron saint of so many village churches in Southern Germany, would have been astonished.”
⁶⁷
But it may well be that Globke was merely following the current custom: In Germany at the time, Isidor was a name borne mainly by Jews.
⁶⁸

A few months after the Anschluss, Streicher demanded from Himmler that his researchers be granted access to the Rothschild archives in Vienna in order to collect material for a “monumental historical work about Jews, Jewish crimes and Jewish laws in Germany from past to present.” Himmler agreed but insisted on the presence of an SD representative during the perusal of the documents.
⁶⁹
The Rothschild archives exercised a widespread fascination. Rosenberg planned an official exhibition at the September 1938 party congress, whose theme was to be “Europe’s Fate in the East.” His office turned to SS-Hauptsturmführer Hard of the Vienna Gestapo, who had impounded the Rothschild archives, in the hope of finding documents illustrating that Jewry in the East maintained contacts with both industrialists and Marxist leaders: “We assume,” wrote Rosenberg’s delegate, “that among the confiscated material in the Rothschild House, some valuable original information on this subject will be found.” Hartl’s office answered a few weeks later: No material relevant to the exhibition theme could be found in the Rothschild papers.
⁷⁰
At approximately the same time, SS-Oberführer Albert indicated to his SD colleague, SS-Standartenführer Six, that he was particularly interested in access to the Rothschild archives for “research purposes”; Six assured Albert that the material was accessible, although it had now been moved to several different places; its curators, it should be noted, were not all ordinary archivists: the Frankfurt Rothschild material and the thirty-thousand-volume library that came with it were being kept secure in the SS main region Fulda-Werra.
⁷¹

After the annexation of the Sudetenland, Rosenberg turned to the leader of the Sudeten Germans, Konrad Henlein, with demands for any Marxist, Jewish, and also religious literature that “offers invaluable resources to the library and the scientific research work of the ‘Hohe Schule’ [institute] that is being established.”
⁷²

It stands to reason that in such a far-flung research drive, some borderline issues presented serious challenges to the Nazi sense of fine distinctions. Thus, on March 9, 1938, Otto Winter, the owner of the Carl Winter University Publishing House in Heidelberg, turned to Rosenberg for advice on a rather delicate matter. In the twenties Winter had published four volumes of a projected five-volume standard edition of Baruch Spinoza’s works; the type for the fifth volume had been set in 1932, but the book had not been printed. Winter felt that he could not decide on his own whether to publish the last volume (in his letter he emphasized his longtime party membership and extended involvement in Nazi publishing activities).
⁷³
On March 18 Rosenberg’s Main Office for Science (Amt Wissenschaft) authorized publication (probably on the recommendation of party philosopher Alfred Baumler).
⁷⁴
Winter, however, was not an old-time party member for nothing: On March 30 he thanked Rosenberg for the authorization and asked whether he could allude to it in the advertisement he was planning to place in the
Bulletin of the German Book Trade
: “I attach importance to it,” he added, “in order to protect myself from unjustified attacks.” The reaction to Winter’s request left immediate traces in the letter’s margin: two bold question marks and a “
Nein
” underlined four times.
⁷⁵
Winter was told the same in no uncertain terms a few days later. To make sure that Winter would not attempt any foul play, the Amt Wissenschaft letter was sent by registered mail.
⁷⁶

Sometimes no amount of formal identification helped, and some highly annoying situations arose. Thus, on August 20, 1938, in answer to an inquiry by the political division of the Hesse-Nassau Gauleitung, the woman principal (
Rektorin
) of the Fürstenberger Gymnasium for Girls in Frankfurt had to send a somewhat embarrassed explanation. What had happened could not be denied: A few days before, the two Jewish girls still enrolled at the school had attended the daily flag-raising. Rektorin Öchler tried to explain away the incident by arguing that there had been many changes among the teachers and that the girls had taken advantage of the situation with “a certain Jewish pushiness.” Adequate instructions had been given to the teachers and the principal wanted to use the occasion to expel the girls from the school.
⁷⁷
But the matter did not rest at that. On August 27 the Gauleitung forwarded the file to the Kreisleitung of Greater Frankfurt. Four days later, the Kreisleiter wrote to Mayor Kremmer that what had happened was incomprehensible and inexcusable, despite the principal’s explanations: “I ask you to follow up the matter,” the Kreisleiter concluded, “and to make sure that the Frankfurt schools are immediately cleansed of Jewish pupils.”
⁷⁸
On September 8 the mayor’s office transmitted the case to the city’s School Department with an urgent request to clarify the issue, to consider the possibility of cleansing the city schools of their Jewish students, and to prepare a draft answer to the Kreisleiter. The material had to be in by September 18. The School Department reacted to the emergency with calm: Its answer was sent to the mayor on September 26. Basically, it said, the incident had occurred because there had been many changes and replacements among the teachers. Moreover, the presence of Jewish schoolchildren in the city schools was subject to the law of April 25, 1933, against the overcrowding of German schools (that is, Jewish students could be registered up to the limit of 1.5 percent of the overall number, with exemption from the
numerus clausus
for children of front-line veterans and of
Mischling
couples of the first and second degrees).
⁷⁹

IV

The anti-Jewish economic campaign started at full throttle in early 1938; laws and decrees followed one another throughout the year, shattering all remaining Jewish economic existence in Germany. As the year began, some 360,000 Jews still lived in the Altreich, most of them in several large cities, mainly in Berlin. Jewish assets, estimated at some ten to twelve billion Reichsmarks in 1933, had been reduced to half that sum by the spring of 1938. This in itself indicates, as Barkai has pointed out, that Aryanization was a gradual process leading to the measures that were to descend on the Jews of Germany throughout 1938.
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