Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (6 page)

The April laws and the supplementary decrees that followed compelled at least two million state employees and tens of thousands of lawyers, physicians, students, and many others to look for adequate proof of Aryan ancestry; the same process turned tens of thousands of priests, pastors, town clerks, and archivists into investigators and suppliers of vital attestations of impeccable blood purity; willingly or not these were becoming part of a racial bureaucratic machine that had begun to search, probe, and exclude.
¹⁰⁴

Often enough the most unlikely cases surfaced to be caught in the bizarre but unrelenting bureaucratic process triggered by the new legislation. Thus, for the six following years, the April 7 law would create havoc in the life of one Karl Berthold, an employee of the social benefits office (
Versorgungsamt
) in Chemnitz, Saxony.
¹⁰⁵
According to a June 17, 1933, letter sent from the Chemnitz office to the main social benefits office in Dresden, the “suspicion exists that he [Karl Berthold] is
possibly
of non-Aryan origin on his father’s side.”
¹⁰⁶
The letter indicated that Berthold was most probably the illegitimate son of a Jewish circus “artiste,” Carl Blumenfeld, and of an Aryan mother who had died sixteen years earlier. On June 23 the Dresden office submitted the case to the Ministry of Labor, with the comment that unequivocal documentary proof was unavailable, that Berthold’s outward appearance did not dispel the suspicion of a non-Aryan origin, but that, on the other hand, the fact that he was raised in the house of his maternal grandfather “in a Christian, strongly militaristic-national spirit, worked in his favor, so that the characteristics of the non-Aryan race, in case he was burdened on his father’s side, would be compensated for by his upbringing.”
¹⁰⁷

On July 21 the Ministry of Labor forwarded Berthold’s file (which by then included seventeen appended documents) to the Ministry of the Interior with a request for speedy evaluation. On September 8, the ministry’s specialist for racial research, Achim Gercke, gave his opinion: Carl Blumenfeld’s paternity was confirmed, but Gercke could not avoid mentioning that, according to all available dates, Blumenfeld must have been only thirteen years old when Karl Berthold was conceived: “The impossibility of such a fact cannot be taken for granted,” Gercke wrote, “as among Jews sexual maturity comes earlier, and similar cases are known.”
¹⁰⁸

It did not take long for the main office in Dresden to be informed of Gercke’s computations and to do some simple arithmetic of its own. On September 26 the Dresden office wrote to the Ministry of Labor pointing out that, as Berthold had been born on March 23, 1890—when Blumenfeld was still under thirteen—the baby had to have been conceived “when the artist Carl Blumenfeld was only eleven and a half. It is difficult to assume,” the Dresden letter continued, “that a boy of eleven and a half could have fathered a child with a woman of twenty-five.” The Dresden office demanded that the obvious be recognized: Karl Berthold was not Carl Blumenfeld’s child.
¹⁰⁹
Needless to say, that opinion was rejected.

Berthold’s story, which with its ups and downs would continue to unfold until 1939, is in many ways a parable; it will reappear sporadically until the paradoxical decision that settled Berthold’s fate.

As denunciations poured in, investigations came to be conducted at all levels of the civil service. It took Hitler’s personal intervention to put an end to an inquiry into the ancestry of Leo Killy, a member of the Reich Chancellery staff accused of being a full Jew. Killy’s family documents cleared him of any suspicion, at least in Hitler’s eyes.
¹¹⁰
The procedures varied: Fräulein M., who merely wished to marry a civil servant, wanted to be reassured about her Aryan ancestry, as her grandmother’s name, Goldmann, could raise some doubts. The examination was performed in Professor Otmar von Verschuer’s genetics department in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin. One of the questions Verschuer’s specialists had to solve was: “Can Fräulein M. be described as a non-Aryan in the sense that she can be recognized as such by a layman on the basis of her mental attitude, her environment, or her outward appearance?” The “genetic examination,” based on photographs of Fräulein M.’s relatives and on aspects of her own physical appearance, led to most positive results. The report excluded any signs of Jewishness. Although Fräulein M. had “a narrow, high and convexly projecting nose,” it concluded that she had inherited the nose from her father (not from the grandmother burdened with the name Goldmann) and thus was a pure Aryan.
¹¹¹

In September 1933 Jews were forbidden to own farms or engage in agriculture. That month the establishment, under the control of the Propaganda Ministry, of the Reich Chamber of Culture, enabled Goebbels to limit the participation of Jews in the new Germany’s cultural life. (Their systematic expulsion, which would include not only writers and artists but also owners of important businesses in the cultural domain, was for that reason delayed until 1935.)
¹¹²
Also under the aegis of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, Jews were barred from belonging to the Journalists’ Association and, on October 4, from being newspaper editors. The German press had been cleansed. (Exactly a year later, Goebbels recognized the right of Jewish editors and journalists to work, but only within the framework of the Jewish press.)
¹¹³

In Nazi racial thinking, the German national community drew its strength from the purity of its blood and from its rootedness in the sacred German earth. Such racial purity was a condition of superior cultural creation and of the construction of a powerful state, the guarantor of victory in the struggle for racial survival and domination. From the outset, therefore, the 1933 laws pointed to the exclusion of the Jews from all key areas of this utopian vision: the state structure itself (the Civil Service Law), the biological health of the national community (the physicians’ law), the social fabric of the community (the disbarring of Jewish lawyers), culture (the laws regarding schools, universities, the press, the cultural professions), and, finally, the sacred earth (the farm law). The Civil Service Law was the only one of these to be fully implemented at this early stage, but the symbolic statements they expressed and the ideological message they carried were unmistakable.

Very few German Jews sensed the implications of the Nazi laws in terms of sheer long-range terror. One who did was Georg Solmssen, spokesman for the board of directors of the Deutsche Bank and son of an Orthodox Jew. In an April 9, 1933, letter addressed to the bank’s board chairman, after pointing out that even the non-Nazi part of the population seemed to consider the new measures “self-evident,” Solmssen added: “I am afraid that we are merely at the beginning of a process aiming, purposefully and according to a well-prepared plan, at the economic and moral annihilation of all members, without any distinctions, of the Jewish race living in Germany. The total passivity not only of those classes of the population that belong to the National Socialist Party, the absence of all feelings of solidarity becoming apparent among those who until now worked shoulder to shoulder with Jewish colleagues, the increasingly more obvious desire to take personal advantage of vacated positions, the hushing up of the disgrace and the shame disastrously inflicted upon people who, although innocent, witness the destruction of their honor and their existence from one day to the next—all of this indicates a situation so hopeless that it would be wrong not to face it squarely without any attempt at prettification.”
¹¹⁴

There was some convergence between the expressions of the most extreme anti-Semitic agenda of German conservatives at the beginning of the century and the Nazi measures during the early years of the new regime. In his study of the German Civil Service, Hans Mommsen pointed to the similarity between the “Aryan paragraph” of the Civil Service Law of April 1933 and the Conservative Party’s so-called Tivoli program of 1892.
¹¹⁵
The program’s first paragraph declared: “We combat the widely obtrusive and subversive Jewish influence on our popular life. We demand a Christian authority for the Christian people and Christian teachers for Christian pupils.”
¹¹⁶

The Conservatives, in other words, demanded the exclusion of Jews from any government position and from any influence on German education and culture. As for the main thrust of the forthcoming 1935 Nuremberg laws—segregation of the Jews according to racial criteria and placing of the Jewish community as such under “alien status”—this had already been demanded by radical Conservative anti-Semites, particularly by Heinrich Class, president of the Pan-Germanic League, in a notorious pamphlet, entitled
Wenn ich der Kaiser wär
(
If I Were the Kaiser
), published in 1912. Thus, although what was to become the Nazi program of action was a Nazi creation, the overall evolution of the German right-wing parties during the Weimar years gave birth to a set of anti-Jewish slogans and demands that the extreme nationalist parties (the DNVP in particular) shared with the Nazis.

The conservative state bureaucracy had sometimes anticipated Nazi positions on Jewish matters. The Foreign Ministry, for instance, tried, well before the Nazis came to power, to defend Nazi anti-Semitism. After January 1933, with the blessings of State Secretary Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow and Foreign Minister Neurath, senior officials of the Ministry intensified these efforts.
¹¹⁷
In the spring of 1933, anti-Jewish propaganda work in the Foreign Ministry was bolstered by the establishment of a new Department Germany (Referat Deutschland), to which this task was specifically given.

At the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, State Secretary Herbert von Bismarck of the DNVP participated in the anti-Jewish crusade with no less vehemence than Frick, the Nazi minister. Apparently stung by the recently published biography of his great-uncle Otto, the Iron Chancellor, by Emil Ludwig (his real name was Emil Ludwig Kohn), Bismarck demanded prohibition of the use of pseudonyms by Jewish authors. Moreover, as Bismarck put it, “national pride is deeply wounded by those cases in which Jews with Eastern Jewish names have adopted particularly nice German surnames, such as, for example, Harden, Olden, Hinrichsen, etc. I consider a review of name changes urgently necessary in order to revoke changes of that kind.”
¹¹⁸

On April 6, 1933, an ad hoc committee—following an initiative that probably originated in the Prussian Interior Ministry—started work on a draft for a Law Regulating the Position of the Jews. Again the German Nationals were heavily represented on the eight-member drafting committee. A copy of this draft proposal, sent in July 1933 to the head of Department Germany of the Foreign Ministry, remained in the archives of the Wilhelmstrasse. The draft suggests the appointment of a “national guardian” (
Volkswart
) for dealing with Jewish affairs and employs the term “Jewish council” (
Judenrat
) in defining the central organization that is to represent the Jews of Germany in their dealings with the authorities, particularly with the
Volkswart
. Already in the draft are many of the discriminatory measures that were to be taken later,
¹¹⁹
although at the time, nothing came of this initiative. Thus for part of the way at least, Nazi policies against the Jews were identical with the anti-Semitic agenda set by the German Conservatives several decades before Hitler’s accession to power.
¹²⁰

And yet the curtailment of the economic measures against the Jews was also a conservative demand, and whatever exceptions were introduced into the April laws were instigated by the most prominent conservative figure of all, President Hindenburg. Hitler understood perfectly how essentially different his own anti-Jewish drive was from the traditional anti-Semitism of the old field marshal, and in his answer to Hindenburg’s request of April 4, regarding exceptions to the exclusion of Jews from the civil service, limited himself to the regular middle-of-the-road anti-Jewish arguments of the moderate breed of conservatives to which Hindenburg belonged. It was in fact Hitler’s first lengthy statement on the Jews since he became chancellor.

In his April 5 letter, Hitler started by using the argument of a Jewish “inundation.” With regard to the civil service, the Nazi leader argued that the Jews, as a foreign element and as people with ability, had entered governmental positions and “were sowing the seed of corruption, the extent of which no one today has any adequate appreciation.” The international Jewish “atrocity and boycott agitation” precipitated measures that are intrinsically defensive. Hitler nonetheless promised that Hindenburg’s request regarding Jewish veterans would be implemented. Then he moved to a strangely premonitory finale: “In general, the first goal of this cleansing process is intended to be the restoration of a certain healthy and natural relationship; and second, to remove from specified positions important to the state those elements that cannot be entrusted with the life or death of the Reich. Because in the coming years we will inevitably have to take precautions to ensure that certain events that cannot be disclosed to the rest of the world for higher reasons of state really remain secret.”
¹²¹

Again, Hitler was utilizing some of the main tenets of conservative anti-Semitism to the full: the over-representation of Jews in some key areas of social and professional life, their constituting a nonassimilated and therefore foreign element in society, the nefarious influence of their activities (liberal or revolutionary), particularly after November 1918. Weimar, the conservatives used to clamor, was a “Jewish republic.” Hitler had not forgetten to mention, for the special benefit of a field marshal and Prussian landowner, that in the old Prussian state the Jews had had little access to the civil service and that the officer corps had been kept free of them. There was some irony in the fact that a few days after Hitler’s letter to Hindenburg, the old field marshal himself had to answer a query from Prince Carl of Sweden, president of the Swedish Red Cross, about the situation of the Jews in Germany. The text of Hindenburg’s letter to Sweden was in fact dictated by Hitler, with the early draft prepared by Hindenburg’s office significantly changed (any admission of acts of violence against Jews was omitted, and the standard theme of the invasion of the Reich by Jews from the East strongly underlined).
¹²²
Thus, over his own signature, the president of the Reich sent a letter not very different from the one Hitler had addressed to him on April 4. But soon Hindenburg would be gone, and this source of annoyance would disappear from Hitler’s path.