Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (52 page)

The Rosenberg files contain similar lists. One document contains part 6 of a list of Jewish authors—those with names beginning with the letters
S
through
V
—including three Sacher-Masochs and six Salingers, followed by Salingré and Salkind, and ending with Malea Vyne, who, according to the compiler, is the same person as Malwine Mauthner.
⁶⁷

IV

In the fall of 1938, when Tannenhof, an institution for mentally ill patients (belonging to the Evangelical Kaiserswerth Association) was formulating its new statutes, the board decided that they “must take into account the changed attitude of the German Volk to the race question by excluding the admission of patients of Jewish origin…. The institution’s administration is instructed that from now on it should not admit patients of Jewish origin and…with the aim of freeing itself as soon as possible of such patients…it should give notice to private patients of Jewish origin at the earliest possible date and, in the case of regular patients [of Jewish origin], should ask the district administration to transfer them to another institution.”
⁶⁸

Other Evangelical institutions had already started practicing such selection several months earlier. Thus, on March 7, 1938, Dr. Oscar Epha, director of the Evangelical Inner Mission in Schleswig-Holstein, wrote to Pastor Lensch in Alsterdorf: “I have informed the Hamburg public welfare authorities that we can no longer take in any Jewish patients, and we have asked [them] to transfer to Hamburg the four Jewish patients we still have.”
⁶⁹
The Inner Mission’s initiative thus preceded the Interior Ministry decree of June 22, 1938, according to which “the accommodation of Jews in medical institutions is to be executed in such a way that the danger of race defilement is avoided. Jews must be accommodated in special rooms.”
⁷⁰
How this decree was to be carried out was not always clear: “We ask you to inform us,” the hospital administration in Offenburg wrote to its sister institution in Singen on December 29, 1938, “whether you accept Jews and, in case you do, whether you put them together with Aryan patients or whether special rooms are kept ready for them.” The Singen colleagues answered promptly: “As there is no Jewish hospital in this region, and as to this day we have not received any instructions in this matter, we cannot refuse to accept Jewish emergency patients. But, as there are only a few of them, we accommodate the Jewish patients separately.”
⁷¹
In the Hamburg area, on the other hand, the instructions from the Health Office were unambiguous: “Because of the danger of race defilement, special attention should be devoted to the accommodation of Jews in institutions for the sick. They must be separated spatially from patients of German or related blood. Insofar as Jews who are not bedridden have to remain in institutions for the sick, their accommodation and arrangements regarding their movements inside or on the grounds must make certain to exclude any danger of race defilement…. I therefore demand that this danger be prevented under all circumstances.”
⁷²
"

Dead Jews were no less troublesome than sick ones. On March 17, 1939, the Saxon office of the German Association of Municipalities wrote to the head office in Berlin that, since the Jews had their own cemetery nearby, the mayor of Plauen intended to forbid the burial or cremation of racial Jews in the municipal cemetery.
⁷³
The letter writer wanted to be assured of the legality of this decision, which was obviously directed against converted Jews or those who had simply left their religious community. In his answer two months later, Bernhard Lösener wrote that “the burial of Jews can be forbidden in a municipal cemetery when there is a Jewish cemetery in the same district. The definition of a Jew has been established by the Nuremberg Laws and is also applicable to converted Jews…. The owner of the Jewish cemetery is not allowed to forbid the burial of a converted Jew.” Lösener also informed the Association of Municipalities that a cemetery law was in preparation. Whether access to a municipal cemetery could be refused to Jews who had already acquired graves there or who wished to take care of the tombs of deceased relatives was, according to Lösener, still under consideration.
⁷⁴

V

The Polish crisis had unfolded throughout the spring and summer of 1939. This time, however, the German demands were met by an adamant Polish stand and, after the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, by new British resolve. On March 17, in Birmingham, Chamberlain publicly vowed that his government would not allow any further German conquests. On March 31 Great Britain guaranteed the borders of Poland, as well as those of a series of other European countries. On April 11 Hitler gave orders to the Wehrmacht to be ready for “Operation White,” the code name for the attack on Poland.

On May 22, Germany and Italy signed a defense treaty, the Steel Pact. Simultaneously, while Great Britain and France were conducting hesitant and noncommittal negotiations with the Soviet Union, Hitler made an astounding political move and opened negotiations of his own with Stalin. The Soviet dictator had subtly indicated his readiness for a deal with Nazi Germany in a speech in early March and by a symbolic act: on May 2, he dismissed Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov. Litvinov had been the apostle of collective security—that is, of a common front against Nazism. Moreover, he was a Jew.

The German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was signed on August 23; an attached secret protocol divided a great part of Eastern Europe into areas to be eventually occupied and controlled by the two countries in case of war. Hitler was now convinced that, as a result of this coup, Great Britain and France would be deterred from any military intervention. On September 1, the German attack on Poland started. After some hesitation the two democracies decided to stand by their ally, and on September 3, France and Great Britain were at war with Germany. World War II had begun.

In the meantime other events were occurring in Hitler’s Reich. Soon after the handicapped Knauer baby had been put to death in Leipzig, Hitler instructed his personal physician, Karl Brandt (who had performed the euthanasia), and the head of his personal chancellery, Philipp Bouhler, to see to the identification of infants born with a variety of physical and mental defects. These preparations were undertaken, in the strictest secrecy, during the spring of 1939. On August 18, doctors and midwives were ordered to report any infants born with the defects that had been listed by a committee of three medical experts from the Reich Committee for Hereditary Health Questions. These infants were to die.
⁷⁵

Another initiative was taken at the same time; it was, as we have seen, one about which religious authorities at first kept prudent silence. Sometime prior to July 1939, in the presence of Bormann and Lammers, Hitler instructed State Secretary Leonardo Conti to begin preparations for adult euthanasia. Brandt and Bouhler quickly succeeded in getting Conti out of the way and, with Hitler’s assent, took over the entire killing program. Both the mass murder of handicapped children and of mentally ill adults had been decided upon by Hitler, and both operations were directed under cover of the Führer’s Chancellery.
⁷⁶

None of this could yet have had any impact on the popular fervor surrounding Hitler or on the public’s ardent adherence to many of the regime’s goals. Hitler’s accession to power would be remembered by a majority of Germans as the beginning of a period of “good times.” The chronology of persecution, segregation, emigration, and expulsion, the sequence of humiliations and violence, of loss and bereavement that molded the memories of the Jews of Germany from 1933 to 1939 was not what impressed itself on the consciousness and memory of German society as a whole. “People experienced the breakneck speed of the economic and foreign resurgence of Germany as a sort of frenzy—as the common expression has it,” writes German historian Norbert Frei. “With astonishing rapidity, many identified themselves with the social will to construct a Volksgemeinschaft that kept any thoughtful or critical stance at arm’s length…. They were beguiled by the esthetics of the Nuremberg rallies and enraptured by the victories of German athletes at the Berlin Olympic Games. Hitler’s achievements in foreign affairs triggered storms of enthusiasm…. In the brief moments left between the demands of a profession and those of the ever-growing jungle of Nazi organizations, they enjoyed modest well-being and private happiness.”
⁷⁷

It was in this atmosphere of national elation and personal satisfaction that, on April 20, 1939, some four months before the war, eighty million Germans celebrated Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. During the following weeks hundreds of theaters showed avid audiences the pageantry and splendor of the event. Newsreel No. 451 was a huge success. Terse comments introduced the various sequences: “Preparations for the Führer’s fiftieth birthday/The entire nation expresses its gratitude and offers its wishes of happiness to the founder of the Greater German Reich/Gifts from all the Gaue of the Reich are continuously brought to the Reich Chancellery/Guests from all over the world arrive in Berlin/On the eve of the birthday, the Inspector General for the Construction of the Capital of the Reich, Albert Speer, presents to the Führer the completed East-West Axis/The great star of the newly erected victory column shines/Slovak Premier Dr. Josef Tiso, President of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia Emil Hacha, and the Reich Protector Freiherr von Neurath…/The troops prepare for the parade/The Third Reich’s greatest military spectacle begins/For four and a half hours, formations from all branches of the armed forces march by their Supreme Commander…!”
⁷⁸

Resuming its activities—briefly curtailed after the November 1938 pogrom—early in the year on orders from above, the Kulturbund in its Berlin theater that April staged
People at Sea
, a drama by English writer J. B. Priestley. An American correspondent, Louis P. Lochner of the Associated Press, covered the April 13 opening: “Because…the British playwright has renounced all claims to royalties from German Jews, the Jewish Kulturbund was able tonight to present a beautiful premiere rendition in German of
Men at Sea
[
sic
]. The translation was by Leo Hirsch, the stage setting by Fritz Wisten. Almost 500 attentive, art-loving Jews witnessed the performance and applauded generously. Outranking all others in the depth of her emotional acting was Jenny Bernstein as Diana Lissmore. Alfred Berliner, with his face made up to look much like Albert Einstein’s, also scored signally with his interpretation of the role of Professor Pawlet. The audience wistfully nodded when Fritz Grünne as Carlo Velburg complained again and again that he had no passport. Thirty-nine performances of the Priestley play are planned for the coming weeks.”
⁷⁹

The play tells of the terrors and hopes of twelve people on a ship in the Caribbean disabled by fire, adrift, and in danger of sinking. The characters depicted on the stage are saved at the end. Most of the Jews seated in the Kommandantenstrasse theater that night were doomed.

Notes

Introduction

1. Clearly sharing no common ground with us is the small group of historians of the same generation whose apologetic interpretations of Nazism and the Holocaust were sharply confronted during the “historians’ controversy” of the mid-1980s. For that specific debate see Charles S. Maier,
The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity
(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), and Richard J. Evans,
In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past
(New York, 1989); for a particularly perceptive discussion of the issues, see Steven E. Aschheim,
Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises
(New York, 1996). For this and other debates on the historical representation of the Holocaust, see the essays included in Peter Baldwin, ed.,
Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians
(Boston, 1990), and in Saul Friedländer, ed.,
Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution
” (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

2. One of the earliest examples of the first approach is Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews
(Chicago, 1961); the best illustration of the second is Lucy S. Dawidowicz,
The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945
(New York, 1975).

3. In representing the life of the victims and some attitudes of surrounding society I have drawn most of my illustrations from everyday life. In this respect, and with regard to some other issues brought forth in this book, I have accepted some of Martin Broszat’s insights that I criticized in my debate with him in the late 1980s. Yet, I have attempted to avoid some of the pitfalls of the historicization of National Socialism precisely by emphasizing the everyday life of the victims rather than that of the
Volksgemeinschaft
. For the debate, see Martin Broszat, “A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism” in Baldwin,
Reworking the Past
; Saul Friedländer, “Some Thoughts on the Historicization of National Socialism,” ibid.; Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism,” ibid.

4. For the importance of this wider context, see Omer Bartov,
Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation
, New York, 1996. For the impact of modernity as such on the genesis of the “Final Solution,” see, among many other studies, Detlev J. K. Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science,” in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds.,
Reevaluating the Third Reich
(New York, 1993); Zygmunt Bauman,
Modernity and the Holocaust
(New York, 1989); Götz Aly and Susanne Heim,
Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung
(Hamburg, 1991). For an excellent presentation of related issues in the history of Nazism see Michael Burleigh, ed.,
Confronting the Nazi Past: New Debates on Modern German History
(London, 1996).

5. For internal competition as the basis of Nazi radicalization, see mainly the works of Hans Mommsen, particularly “The Realization of the Unthinkable,” in
From Weimar to Auschwitz
(Princeton, N.J., 1991). For the cost-benefit calculations of technocrats as incentives for the “Final Solution,” see Aly and Heim,
Vordenker der Vernichtung
.

6. Redemptive anti-Semitism is different, as I shall indicate, from the “eliminationist anti-Semitism” referred to by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York, 1996). Moreover, it represented an ideological trend shared at the outset by a small minority only, and, in the Third Reich, by a segment of the party and its leaders, not by the majority of the population.

7. Because of my emphasis upon the interaction between Hitler, his ideological motivations, and the constraints of the system within which he acted, I hesitate to identify my approach as “intentionalist.” Moreover, whereas during the thirties Hitler decided on all major anti-Jewish steps and intervened in the details of their implementation, later his guidelines left much greater leeway to his subordinates in the implementation of the concrete aspects of the extermination. As for Hitler’s impact on the Germans, it has been the subject of countless studies and the basic theme of major biographies. For a complex approach both to Hitler’s charismatic effect and to his interaction with the populace, see in particular J. P. Stern,
Hitler, The Fuehrer and the People
(Glasgow, 1975), and Ian Kershaw,
Hitler
(London, 1991).

8. This point is made both in Michael Wildt,
Die Judenpolitik des SD 1935 bis 1938
(Munich, 1996) and in Ulrich Herbert,
Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989
(Bonn, 1996). For a discussion of this theme, see chapter 6.

9. The reference here is to the opposed theses of Christopher R. Browning,
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
(New York, 1992), and of Goldhagen,
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
. The issue will be discussed at length in volume 2. The impact of Nazi ideology on various Wehrmacht units and its relation to the extreme barbarization of warfare on the Eastern front must also be considered in that context. For this issue see mainly Omer Bartov,
Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich
(New York, 1991).

10. See Martin Broszat, “A Plea,” in Baldwin,
Reworking the Past
.

11. The issue is thoroughly discussed in Dominick LaCapra,
Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1994).

Chapter 1 Into the Third Reich

1. Walter Benjamin,
The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin
, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno (Chicago, 1994), p. 406.

2. Lion Feuchtwanger and Arnold Zweig,
Briefwechsel 1933–1958
, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), p. 22.

3. Erik Levi,
Music in the Third Reich
(New York, 1994), p. 42; Sam H. Shirakawa,
The Devil’s Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler
(New York, 1992), pp. 150–51.

4. Alan E. Steinweis, “Hans Hinkel and German Jewry, 1933–1941,”
Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
[hereafter
LBIY
] 38 (1993): 212.

5. Shirakawa,
The Devil’s Music Master
, p. 151.

6. Joseph Goebbels,
Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels
, ed. Elke Fröhlich, part 1,
1924–1941
, vol. 2,
1.1.1931–31.12.1936
(Munich, 1987), p. 430.

7. Fred K. Prieberg,
Musik im NS-Staat
(Frankfurt am Main, 1982), pp. 41–42. For a more thorough discussion of the dismissal of Jewish musicians, see Levi,
Music in the Third Reich
, pp. 41ff.

8. Ibid., p. 41.

9. Lawrence D. Stokes,
Kleinstadt und Nationalsozialismus: Ausgewählte Dokumente zur Geschichte von Eutin 1918–1945
, (Neumünster, 1984), p. 730. (Initials are used instead of full names as indicated in the source.)

10. Klaus Mann,
Mephisto
(New York, 1977), p. 157. (Klaus Mann was one of Thomas Mann’s sons. The original German edition was published in Amsterdam in 1936; Mann describes Höfgens’s happiness at not being Jewish as it found expression in 1933, soon after the
Machtergreifung
.)

11. On the details of this issue see Peter Stephan Jungk,
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood
(New York, 1990), p. 140.

12. Quoted and excerpted in Golo Mann,
Reminiscences and Reflections: A Youth in Germany
(New York, 1990), p. 144.

13. Jungk,
Franz Werfel
, pp. 141–44.

14. Ibid., p. 145.

15. Joseph Wulf, ed.,
Die bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation
(Gütersloh, 1963), pp. 36, 81ff.

16. Ibid., p. 36.

17. Thomas Mann,
The Letters of Thomas Mann 1889–1955
(London, 1985), p. 170.

18. Ibid., p. 191.

19. Ronald Hayman,
Thomas Mann: A Biography
(New York, 1995), pp. 407–8.

20. Thomas Mann,
Tagebücher 1933–1934
, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), p. 46.

21. Ibid., p. 473.

22. On Thomas Mann’s anti-Jewish stance see Alfred Hoelzel, “Thomas Mann’s Attitudes toward Jews and Judaism: An Investigation of Biography and Oeuvre,”
Studies in Contemporary Jewry
6 (1990): 229–54.

23. Thomas Mann,
Tagebücher 1933–1934
, p. 473.

24. After the death of the publisher Samuel Fischer, his son-in-law, Gottfried Bermann, took steps to transfer at least part of the firm out of the Reich. S. Fischer Verlag would remain in Germany, in Aryan hands. The new Bermann Fischer publishing house—and with it some of the most prestigious names of contemporary German literature (Mann, Döblin, Hofmannsthal, Wassermann, Schnitzler)—was ready to start activities in Zurich. This, however, was a serious misjudgment of Swiss hospitality on Bermann’s part. The main Swiss publishers opposed the move, and the literary editor of the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
, Eduard Korrodi, did not mince words: The only German literature that had emigrated, he wrote in January 1936, was Jewish (“the hack-writers of the novel industry”). Bermann Fischer moved to Vienna. This time Thomas Mann reacted. His open letter to the newspaper was his first major public stand since January 1933: Mann drew Korrodi’s attention to the obvious: Both Jews and non-Jews were to be found among the exiled German writers. As for those who remained in Germany, “being völkisch is not being German. But the German or the German rulers’ hatred of the Jews is in the higher sense not directed against Europe and all loftier Germanism; it is directed, as becomes increasingly apparent, against the Christian and classical foundations of Western morality. It is the attempt…to shake off the ties of civilization. That attempt threatens to bring about a terrible alienation, fraught with evil potentialities, between the land of Goethe and the rest of the world…” Mann,
The Letters
, p. 209. Within a few months all members of the Mann family who had not yet been deprived of their German citizenship lost it, and on December 19, 1936, the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of Bonn University announced to Thomas Mann that his name had been “struck off the roll of honorary doctors.” Nigel Hamilton,
The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871–1950
(London, 1978), p. 298.

25. Frederic Spotts,
Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival
(New Haven, Conn., 1994), p. 168.

26. Quoted in Moshe Zimmermann, “Die aussichtslose Republik—Zukunftsperspektiven der deutschen Juden vor 1933,” in
Menora: Jahrbuch für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte 1990
(Munich, 1990), p. 164. This did not mean, however, that Jewish votes shifted to extremist parties. After the disappearance of the German Democratic Party (DDP), Jewish votes in the crucial elections of 1932 probably led to the election of two Social Democratic deputies and one deputy from the Catholic Center. Ernest Hamburger and Peter Pulzer, “Jews as Voters in the Weimar Republic,”
LBIY
30 (1985): 66.

27. Kurt Jakob Ball-Kaduri,
Das Leben der Juden in Deutschland im Jahre 1933: Ein Zeitbericht
(Frankfurt am Main, 1963), p. 34.

28. Quoted in Wolfgang Benz, ed.,
Das Exil der kleinen Leute: Alltagserfahrung deutscher Juden in der Emigration
(Munich, 1991), p. 16.

29. Ibid., p. 17.

30. According to the June 16, 1933, census, 499,682 persons of the “Mosaic faith” lived in Germany (the Saar territory not included) on that date, which amounts to 0.77 percent of the total German population. See Ino Arndt and Heinz Boberach, “Deutsches Reich” in Wolfgang Benz, ed.,
Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus
(Munich, 1991), p. 23. It is plausible that approximately 25,000 Jews had fled Germany between January and June 1933.

31. For the petition and the other details, see
Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler, 1933–1938
, part 1,
1933–1934
, ed. Karl-Heinz Minuth, vol. 1 (Boppard am Rhein, 1983), pp. 296–98, 298n.

32. Zimmermann, “Die aussichtslose Republik,” p. 160.

33. Rüdiger Safranski,
Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit
(Munich, 1994), p. 271.

34. Wolfgang Benz, ed.,
Die Juden in Deutschland 1933–1945: Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft
(Munich, 1988), p. 18.

35. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, eds.,
The Letters of Martin Buber
(New York, 1991), p. 395.

36. Jews were also shipped off to the new concentration camps: Four were killed in Dachau on April 12. Both in Dachau and in Oranienburg “Jewish units” were set up from the outset. See Klaus Drobisch, “Die Judenreferate des Geheimen Staatspolizeiamtes und des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1933 bis 1939,”
Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung
2 (1993): 231.

37. To this day the most thorough study of the Nazi takeover during the years 1933 and 1934 remains Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer, and Gerhard Schulz,
Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung
(Cologne, 1962).

38. Drobisch, “Die Judenreferate,” p. 231.

39. Martin Broszat, Elke Fröhlich, and Falk Wiesemann, eds.,
Bayern in der NS-Zeit: Soziale Lage und politisches Verhalten der Bevölkerung im Spiegel vertraulicher Berichte
(Munich, 1977), p. 432.

40. District President, Hildesheim, to Local Police Authorities of the District, 31.3.1933, Aktenstücke zur Judenverfolgung, Ortspolizeibehörde Göttingen, microfilm MA-172, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich (hereafter IfZ).