Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (56 page)

125. Reichsstatthalterkonferenz, 28.9.1933,
Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler
, Part 1, vol. 2, p. 865.

126. Adolf Hitler, “Die deutsche Kunst als stolzeste Verteidigung des deutschen Volkes,”
Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte
4, no. 34 (Oct. 1933), p. 437.

127. Quoted in Wolfgang Michalka, ed.,
Das Dritte Reich
, vol. 1 (Munich, 1985), p. 137.

128. The “religious” dimension of Nazism, in terms both of its beliefs and its rituals, had already been noted by numerous contemporary observers; some blatant uses of Christian liturgy drew protests, mainly from the Catholic Church. The concept of “political religion” in its application to Nazism (and often to Communism as well), as a sacralization of politics and a politicization of religious themes and frameworks, was first systematically presented in Eric Voegelin,
Die politischen Religionen
(Stockholm, 1939). After the war the theme was taken up in Norman Cohn,
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements
, 2nd ed. (New York, 1961). The political-religious dimension of Nazi ideological themes and rituals was also analyzed in Klaus Vondung,
Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus
(Göttingen, 1971). During the seventies Uriel Tal further developed the analysis of Nazism as a political religion, mainly in his article “On Structures of Political Ideology and Myth in Germany Prior to the Holocaust,” in Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds.,
The Holocaust as Historical Experience
(New York, 1981). Tal’s interpretation appears as a guiding theme in Leni Yahil’s
The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry
(New York, 1990). See also the conclusion to Saul Friedländer, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historical Study of Nazi Policies Toward the Jews,”
Yad Vashem Studies
16 (1984).

129. Noakes and Pridham,
Nazism
, vol. 1, p.13.

Chapter 3 Redemptive Anti-Semitism

1. Lamar Cecil,
Albert Ballin: Business and Politics in Imperial Germany 1888–1918
(Princeton, N.J., 1967), p. 347. Cecil does not decide whether the overdose of sleeping pills was intentional or not. At the end of his novel
A Princess in Berlin
, Arthur R. G. Solmssen appends the (untitled) afterword: “On August 31, 1935, the Board of Directors of the Hamburg-Amerika Line announced that henceforth the SS
Albert Ballin
would carry the name SS
Hansa
.” Arthur R. G. Solmssen,
A Princess in Berlin
(Harmondsworth, England, 1980). I am grateful to Sue Llewellyn for this information.

2. Werner T. Angress, “The German Army’s ‘Judenzählung’ of 1916: Genesis—Consequences—Significance,”
LBIY
23 ([London] 1978): 117ff. See also Egmont Zechlin,
Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg
(Göttingen, 1969), pp. 528ff.

3. Angress, “The German Army’s Judenzählung,” p. 117.

4. Werner Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” in Werner E. Mosse, ed.,
Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916–1923
(Tübingen, 1971), p. 421.

5. Ibid., p. 423.

6. Saul Friedländer, “Political Transformations During the War and their Effect on the Jewish Question,” in Herbert A. Strauss, ed.,
Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Anti-Semitism 1870–1933/39: Germany—Great Britain—France
(Berlin, 1993), p. 152.

7. Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf
(London, 1974), p. 193.

8. Friedländer, “Political Transformations,” p. 152.

9. Zechlin,
Die deutsche Politik
, p. 525.

10. Ibid., in particular note 42.

11. Chernow,
The Warburgs
, p. 172.

12. Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” p. 427.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 426. Jochmann quotes the classic study by the Jewish statistician and demographer Franz Oppenheimer,
Die Judenstatistik des Preussischen Kriegsministeriums
(Munich, 1922).

15. Ernst Simon,
Unser Kriegserlebnis (1919)
, quoted in Zechlin,
Die deutsche Politik
, p. 533.

16. Rathenau to Schwaner, August 4, 1916, quoted in Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” p. 427.

17. See especially Werner T. Angress, “The Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912 on the Jewish Question: A Synthesis,”
LBIY
28 (1983):367ff.

18. For the shift of the Jewish vote, its dynamics and political significance, see ibid., p. 373ff., as well as Marjorie Lamberti,
Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: The Struggle for Civil Equality
(New Haven, Conn., 1978), and Jacob Toury’s classic study,
Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland: Von Jena bis Weimar
(Tübingen, 1966).

19. Angress, “Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912,” p. 381.

20. Ibid., p. 390.

21. Uwe Lohalm,
Völkischer Radikalismus: Die Geschichte des deutsch-völkischen Schutz-und-Trutz-Bundes 1919–1923
(Hamburg, 1970), p. 30.

22. Daniel Frymann,
Das Kaiserbuch: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten
, 7th ed. (Leipzig, 1925), pp. 69ff.

23. For the distinction between the traditional and the new trends in German nationalism after 1912, see Thomas Nipperdey,
Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918
, vol. 2,
Machtstaat vor der Demokratie
(Munich, 1992), pp. 606ff. For the Kaiser’s sometimes rabid anti-Jewish outbursts, see John C. G. Röhl’s “Das beste wäre Gas!”
Die Zeit
, Nov. 25, 1994.

24. Roger Chickering,
We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914
(Boston, 1984), p. 287.

25. Angress, “Impact of the Judenwhalen of 1912,” p. 396.

26. In 1925 66.8 percent of all German Jews lived in the major cities, with Frankfurt and Berlin first and second in Jewish population. In 1871 36,326 Jews lived in the Greater Berlin area, accounting for 3.9 percent of a population of 931,984. In 1925 the official census for the same area indicated 172,672 Jews, or 4.3 percent of a general population of 4,024,165 (in Frankfurt that year, the Jewish population represented 6.3 percent). The number of Jews in Berlin was, in fact, probably higher than indicated by the official census, since many Jews did not register with Jewish communal organizations (the basis for the census), and a number of East European Jews were not registered anywhere at all. According to some estimates, as many as 200,000 Jews, or approximately 5 percent of the general population, were living in Greater Berlin in the immediate postwar period. Gabriel Alexander, “Die Entwicklung der jüdischen Bevölkerung in Berlin zwischen 1871 und 1945,”
Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte
, vol. 20 (Tel Aviv, 1991), pp. 287ff., and particularly pp. 292ff. Such urban concentration was enhanced by the high visibility of East European Jews in the major German cities.
Jews from the East had long been present in Germany and Austria, arriving in particular after the late-eighteenth-century partitions of Poland and the annexations of Polish territory by both Prussia and Austria. A hundred years later, from 1881 on, a decisive change took place, with the beginning of a series of major pogroms against Jewish communities in the western provinces of czarist Russia. A mass exodus of Jews—most of them heading to the United States—from Russian-Polish territory began. Of the 2,750,000 Jews who left Eastern Europe for overseas between 1881 and 1914, a large proportion passed through Germany, mostly in the direction of the northern seaports Bremen and Hamburg, with a small number remaining in the country. For a detailed account see Shalom Adler-Rudel,
Ostjuden in Deutschland 1880–1940
(Tübingen, 1959). At the same time a more substantial number of Galician and Romanian Jews settled in Austria, especially in Vienna.
In 1900 7 percent of the Jews in Germany were
Ostjuden
, the percentage of East European Jews growing to 19.1 by 1925 and 19.8 by 1933. Ibid., p. 165. Moreover, their concentration in the large cities progressed at a rate faster than that of German Jewry’s overall urbanization. In 1925 Eastern Jews represented 25.4 percent of Berlin’s Jewish population, 27 percent of Munich’s, 60 percent of Dresden’s, and 80.7 percent of Leipzig’s. Ibid.

27. See mainly Werner E. Mosse, “Die Juden in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,” in Werner E. Mosse, ed.,
Juden im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890–1914
(Tübingen, 1976), pp. 69ff., 75ff.

28. Werner E. Mosse,
Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820–1935
(Oxford, 1987), p. 396.

29. Ibid., pp. 398, 400.

30. Ibid., pp. 323ff. (particularly p. 329).

31. Moritz Goldstein, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass,”
Kunstwart
25, no. 11 (Mar. 1912): 283.

32. Ibid., pp. 291–92.

33. Ibid., p. 293.

34. Ibid., p. 294.

35. Ferdinand Avenarius, “Aussprachen mit Juden,”
Kunstwart
25, no. 22 (Aug. 1912): 225.

36. These details and the quotations are taken from Ralph Max Engelman’s Ph. D. dissertation, “Dietrich Eckart and the Genesis of Nazism” (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1971), pp. 31–32.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p.32.

39. Maximilian Harden’s
Die Zukunft
was “Jewish,” and so was Siegfried Jacobsohn’s
Schaubühne
(later
Weltbühne
). Otto Brahm’s
Freie Bühne für modernes Leben
, succeeded by the
Neue Rundschau
, was “Jewish,” as were the leading cultural critics of the major daily papers, Fritz Engel, Alfred Kehr, Max Osborn, and Oskar Bies. Engelman, ibid. Soon Kurt Tucholsky would become the most visible—and the most hated—journalist-author of Jewish origin of the Weimar years. Siegfried Breslauer would be associate editor of the
Berliner Lokalanzeiger
, Emil Faktor editor in chief of the
Berliner Börsen-Courier
, Norbert Falk cultural affairs editor of the
B. Z. am Mittag
, Joseph Wiener-Braunsberg editor of
Ulk
, the satirical supplement of the
Berliner Tageblatt
, and many more. Bernd Soesemann, “Liberaler Journalismus in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik,” in Julius H. Schoeps, ed.,
Juden als Träger bürgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland
(Bonn, 1989), p. 245.

40. Engelman, “Dietrich Eckart,” p. 33.

41. Ibid.

42. Bernard Michel,
Banques et banquiers en Autriche au début du XXe Siècle
(Paris, 1976), p. 312.

43. Robert S. Wistrich,
The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Josef
(Oxford, 1989), p. 170. The extraordinary role of the Jews in Viennese culture at the turn of the century has been systematically documented in Steven Beller,
Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History
(Cambridge, England, 1989).

44. For the historical background of emancipation, see Jacob Katz,
Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation 1770–1870
(New York, 1978).

45. Shulamit Volkov, “Die Verbürgerlichung der Juden in Deutschland als Paradigma,” in
Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert
(Munich, 1990), pp. 112ff.

46. See in particular George L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation: Between
Bildung
and Respectability,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds.,
The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War
(Hanover, N.H., 1985), pp. 1ff.

47. Michael A. Meyer,
The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany 1749–1824
(Detroit, 1967).

48. David Sorkin,
The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840
(New York, 1987).

49. Fritz Stern,
Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire
(New York, 1977), p. 461.

50. Nipperdey,
Machtstaat vor der Demokratie
, p. 289.

51. Ibid., p. 290.

52. Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951; reprint, New York, 1973), pp. 11ff.

53. For debates on these issues see in particular Israel Y. Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations,”
Zion
58, no. 1 (1993): 33ff., and
Zion
59, no. 2–3 (1994) (Hebrew).

54. Uriel Tal,
Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), pp. 96–98.

55. Ibid., pp. 209–10.

56. Jacob Katz,
From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism 1700–1933
(Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 319.

57. Amos Funkenstein, “Anti-Jewish Propaganda: Pagan, Christian and Modern,”
Jerusalem Quarterly
19 (1981): 67.

58. Richard Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays
(Chicago, 1979), p. 29.

59. Jacob Katz,
Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723–1939
, (Cambridge, England, 1970), particularly pp. 148ff.

60. Such distinctions have been implicit in some of the historical work published in the 1960s on the special course of German history during the nineteenth century; these theses have been recently reformulated and systematized by political sociologists. See in particular Pierre Birnbaum, “Nationalismes: Comparaison France-Allemagne,” in
La France aux Français: Histoire des haines nationalistes
(Paris, 1993), pp. 300ff.

61. For the comparative part of the argument, see mainly Reinhard Rürup,
Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur “Judenfrage” der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft
(Göttingen, 1975), pp. 17–18.