Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (51 page)

It is difficult to obtain a clear picture of the attitudes of ordinary Germans toward the increasingly more miserable Jews living in their midst in the spring of 1939. As we saw from the SOPADE report about the populace’s responses to the group of Jews being sent back and forth over the western border during those weeks, hatred and sympathy were mixed, possibly according to differences in age. One obtains the same mixed impression from memoirs, such as those of Valentin Senger, a Jew who survived the Nazi period in Frankfurt,
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or from Klemperer’s diaries. There is no doubt that, at least in smaller towns and villages, some people were still patronizing Jewish stores, although in principle no Jewish business (unless it was an exporter or belonged to foreign Jews) was allowed to function after January 1, 1939. How else to explain the confidential report addressed on February 6 by the Bernburg district party leadership to its counterpart in Rosenheim, regarding “lists of clients of Jewish stores in the Bernburg district”? The report not only gives the list of “verified customers of Jews” but also indicates the store owners’ names and the dates of the purchases and amounts paid.
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On May 5, 1939, the Fischbach police station informed the Labor Office in Augsburg of its attempt to send three men of a local Levi family (Manfred Israel, Sigbert Israel, and Leo Israel) to compulsory work at the Hartmann brick factory in Gebelbach. Whereas Manfred Levi was in Altona (a suburb of Hamburg) attending a Zionist professional training school to prepare for his emigration to Palestine, Sigbert and Leo’s German employers had come to the police station to request permission to retain the services of their Jewish carpenter and gardener.
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Gestapo surveillance of the churches reveals the same mixed attitudes. Thus, in January 1939, at a meeting of the Evangelical Church in Ansbach, one Knorr-Köslin, a physician, declared that in present-day Germany the sentence “all salvation comes from the Jews” should be deleted from the Bible; the report indicates that Knorr-Köslin’s outburst caused a protest from the audience; the protest might have been only on purely religious grounds.
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When, on the other hand, Pastor Schilffarth of Streitberg declared that “after baptism, Jews become Christians,” one of his young students retorted (“in a strong and well-deserved way,” says the report), “But Pastor, even if you pour six pails of water on a Jew’s head, he still remains a Jew.”
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In small towns some municipal officials avoided the mandatory forms of addressing Jews. When, in early 1939, the town officials of Goslar negotiated with the head of the local Jewish community for the acquisition of the synagogue building, their letters were addressed “Herrn Kaufmann W. Heilbrunn” (Mr. W. Heilbrunn, merchant), without using the obligatory “Israel.”
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And yet…In a December 1938 diary entry, Victor Klemperer told of a policeman who in the past had been friendly to him, even encouraging. When he encountered him that month, in the municipal office of the small town where the Klemperers owned a country house, the same policeman passed by him “looking fixedly ahead, as distant as could be. In his behavior,” Klemperer commented, “the man probably represents 79 million Germans.”
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Looking back over the first six years of the regime, this much can be said with a measure of certainty: German society as a whole did not oppose the regime’s anti-Jewish initiatives. Hitler’s identification with the anti-Jewish drive, along with the populace’s awareness that on this issue the Nazis were determined to push ahead, may have reinforced the inertia or perhaps the passive complicity of the vast majority about a matter that most, in any event, considered peripheral to their main interests. It has been seen that economic and religious interests triggered some measure of dissent, mainly among the peasantry and among Catholics and members of the Confessing Church. Such dissent did not, however, except in some individual instances, lead to open questioning of the policies. Yet, during the thirties, the German population, the great majority of which espoused traditional anti-Semitism in one form or another, did not demand anti-Jewish measures, nor did it clamor for their most extreme implementation. Among most “ordinary Germans” there was acquiescence regarding the segregation and dismissal from civil and public service of the Jews; there were individual initiatives to benefit from their expropriation; and there was some glee in witnessing their degradation. But outside party ranks, there was no massive popular agitation to expel them from Germany or to unleash violence against them. The majority of Germans accepted the steps taken by the regime and, like Klemperer’s policeman, looked the other way.
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From within the party ranks hatred flowed in an ever more brutal and open way. Sometimes, as with anonymous informers, it is not known whether it originated in the party or among unaffiliated citizens. In any case, denunciations reached such proportions on the eve of the war that Frick, on orders from Göring, had to intervene, addressing a January 10, 1939, letter to the whole array of civilian and police authorities.

Marked
CONFIDENTIAL
, Frick’s letter tersely indicated his subject: “The Jewish Question and Denunciations.” It related that—on the occasion of a conference with Göring regarding the necessity of eliminating the Jews from the German economy and of using their assets for the goals of the Four-Year Plan—the Generalfeldmarschall had mentioned “that it had been recently noticed that German Volksgenossen were being denounced because they had once bought in Jewish shops, inhabited Jewish houses, or had some other business relations with Jews.” Göring considered that a very unpleasant development, which, in his opinion, could hurt the realization of the Four-Year Plan: “The GeneralFeldmarschall wishes therefore that everything be done to put an end to this nuisance.”
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Frick’s order probably did not reach party member Sagel of Frankfurt. On January 14, 1939, a grocer named Karl Schué complained to his local group leader that female party member Sagel had berated him for having sold butter to a Jew (the last one, wrote Schué, “who still buys his butter in my store”) and told him that she had informed the local [party] leader accordingly. Schué used the occasion to unfold the tale of his economic woes as a the owner of a small store and then returned to Sagel: “Maybe you could inform female Party Comrade Sagel that I do not wear any uniform, as she told me that I should take off my uniform. It is really sad,” he concluded, “that even today, in Greater Germany, such incidents could occur, instead of help being provided to a struggling businessman to allow him to get on his feet and spare his family serious worry.”
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It could be that denunciations were forbidden only when they concerned events in the distant past. Recent occurrences were another matter. On Sunday, June 25, 1939, Fridolin Billian, a local party cell leader and teacher in Theilheim, in the Schweinfurt district of Main-Franken, reported to the local police station that a sixteen-year-old Jew, Erich Israel Oberdorfer, a horse dealer’s son, had perpetrated indecent acts on Gunda Rottenberger, a workingman’s ten-year-old daughter. The story had been told to him by Gunda’s mother, supposedly because Gunda had admitted that Erich Oberdorfer had lured her to the stable and told her that she would get five
Pfennig
if she took off her underpants. Oberdorfer denied the accusation; Gunda herself said that he had made the offer, but that nothing happened when she refused, except that they had eaten cherries in the stable and, in order to explain their prolonged absence from home, decided to tell Gunda’s mother they had been counting the hens.
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After the Theilheim police proved unable to obtain confirmation of a sexual misdeed from Gunda Rottenberger herself, the Gestapo took over and produced one Maria Ums, who readily admitted that some years (she could not remember how many) earlier, Erich, who was her own age, had touched her genitals and even inserted his member into her “sexual parts.” Then a certain Josef Schäfner came forward. He remembered that Siegfried Oberdorfer, Erich’s father, had told him that during the war he had hit a lieutenant with his pistol butt (because the lieutenant had called him a dirty Jew) and killed him. Siegfried Oberdorfer denied it all; according to him, it was a tale invented by Schäfner, who spread it in the local inns when he was drunk.
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The hearings in young Erich Oberdorfer’s case were over by 1940: He was sentenced to one year in prison. In 1941, on his release from the Schweinfurt jail, he was sent to Buchenwald as a race defiler.
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His dossier was closed and his short life, too, possibly reached its end.

In April 1939 the Ministry of Religious Affairs reached an agreement with the Evangelical Church Leaders’ Conference on further relations between the Protestant churches and the state. The agreement was strongly influenced by German-Christian ideology, but nonetheless not opposed, at least not formally, by a majority of German pastors; the Godesberg Declaration of the same month gave its full weight to this new statement.

“What is the relation between Judaism and Christianity?” it asked. “Is Christianity derived from Judaism and has therefore become its continuation and completion, or does Christianity stand in opposition to Judaism? We answer: Christianity is in irreconcilable opposition to Judaism.”
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A few weeks later, the signatories of the Godesberg Declaration met at the Wartburg near Eisenach, a site sacred to the memory of Luther and hallowed by its connection with the German student fraternities, to inaugurate the Institute for Research on Jewish Influence on the Life of the German Church. According to a historian of the German churches, “a surprisingly large number of academics put themselves at the disposal of the institute, which issued numerous thick volumes of proceedings and prepared a revised version of the New Testament (published in an edition of 200,000 copies in early 1941). It omitted terms such as “Jehovah,” “Israel,” “Zion,” and “Jerusalem” which were considered to be Jewish.
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Cleansing Christianity of its Jewish elements was a Sisyphean task indeed. Just at the time of the Godesberg Declaration, when the Eisenach Institute was being set up, an urgent query was addressed to the SD by the party’s Education Office: could it be that Philipp Melanchthon, possibly the most important German figure of the Reformation after Martin Luther himself, was of non-Aryan origin? The Education Office had discovered this piece of unwelcome news in a book by one Hans Wolfgang Mager, in which, on, the author stated: “Luther’s closest collaborator and confidant, Philipp Melanchthon, was a Jew!” The SD answered that it could not deal with this kind of investigation; the Reich Office for Ancestry Research would possibly be the right address.
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Whether or not Melanchthon’s case underwent further scrutiny, it seems that the great reformer was not excluded from the fold. It was easier to eliminate lesser servants of the church, such as pastors and the faithful of Jewish origin. On February 10, 1939, the Evangelical Church of Thuringia forbade its own baptized Jews access to its temples. Twelve days later the Saxon Evangelical Church followed suit; the ban then spread to the churches of Anhalt, Mecklenburg, and Lübeck. In the early summer, all pastors of non-Aryan ancestry were dismissed. The letter sent on July 11, 1939, to Pastor Max Weber of Neckarsteinach in Hesse-Nassau by the president of the Land Church Office used a standard formula: “The mandate you received on January 10, 1936—No. 941—to administer the parish of Neckarsteinach, under condition of a possible cancellation at any time, is hereby revoked; you are dismissed from your position as of the end of July this year. The director of the German Evangelical Church Office has ordered on May 13, 1939—K.K. 420/39—that the provisions of the German Civil Service Law of January 26, 1937 [excluding all
Mischlinge
from the civil service], be administratively applied to all clergymen and employees of the Church. According to the provisions of the German Civil Service Law, only a person of German or related blood can be a civil servant (see para. 25). As you are a
Mischling
of the second degree [one Jewish grandparent], not of German or related blood and thereby according to the meaning of the German Civil Service Law cannot be a clergyman or remain one, your dismissal has had to be declared.”
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The Eisenach Institute dealt with Jews and traces of Judaism in Christianity; the project to establish a research institute on Jewish affairs in Frankfurt, on the other hand, was concerned with the comprehensive task of submitting all matters Jewish to scientific Nazi scrutiny. The existence of a large research library on Jewish affairs at the University of Frankfurt, along with the rift between Walter Frank and Wilhelm Grau—which led to Grau’s dismissal from his position as director of the Jewish section of the Institute for the History of the New Germany—enabled the mayor of Frankfurt, Fritz Krebs, to suggest, in the fall of 1938, that the new institute be set up, with Grau as its director.
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The minister of education and Hess approved the project and preparations began: The festive opening was to take place two years later, in 1941.

Goebbels was also active in this effort to identify non-Aryans in the various cultural areas—and in the purges that followed. Since 1936, the Propaganda Ministry had been compiling and publishing lists of Jewish, mixed, and Jewish-related figures active in cultural endeavors
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and prohibiting their membership in non-Jewish organizations and the exhibition, publication, and performance of their works. But Goebbels evidently felt that he had not yet achieved total control. Thus, throughout 1938 and early 1939, the propaganda minister harassed the heads of the various Reich chambers to obtain updated and complete lists of Jews who had been excluded from pursuing their professions.
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One list after another was sent to the Ministry of Propaganda with the admission that it was still incomplete. (A sample of one such, sent by the Reich Music Chamber on February 25, 1939: “Ziegler, Nora, piano teacher; Ziffer, Margarete, private music teacher; Zimbler, Ferdinand, conductor; Zimmermann, Artur, pianist; Zimmermann, Heinrich, clarinetist; Zinkower, Alfons, pianist; Zippert, Helene, music teacher;…Zwillenberg, Wilhelm, choir conductor.”)
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