Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (7 page)

V

The city of Cologne forbade the use of municipal sports facilities to Jews in March 1933.
¹²³
Beginning April 3 requests by Jews in Prussia for name changes were to be submitted to the Justice Ministry, “to prevent the covering up of origins.”
¹²⁴
On April 4 the German Boxing Association excluded all Jewish boxers.
¹²⁵
On April 8 all Jewish teaching assistants at universities in the state of Baden were to be expelled immediately.
¹²⁶
On April 18 the party district chief (Gauleiter) of Westphalia decided that a Jew would be allowed to leave prison only if the two persons who had submitted the request for bail, or the doctor who had signed the medical certificate, were ready to take his place in prison.”
¹²⁷
On April 19 the use of Yiddish was forbidden in cattle markets in Baden.
¹²⁸
On April 24 the use of Jewish names for spelling purposes in telephone communications was forbidden.
¹²⁹
On May 8 the mayor of Zweibrücken prohibited Jews from leasing places in the next annual town market.
¹³⁰
On May 13 the change of Jewish to non-Jewish names was forbidden.
¹³¹
On May 24 the full Aryanization of the German gymnastics organization was ordered, with full Aryan descent of all four grandparents stipulated.
¹³²
Whereas in April Jewish doctors had been excluded from state-insured institutions, in May privately insured institutions were ordered to refund medical expenses for treatment by Jewish doctors only when the patients themselves were non-Aryan. Separate lists of Jewish and non-Jewish doctors would be ready by June.
¹³³

On April 10 the president of the state government and minister for religious affairs and education of Hesse had demanded of the mayor of Frankfurt that the Heinrich Heine monument be removed from its site. On May 18 the mayor replied that “the bronze statue was thrown off its pedestal on the night of April 26–27. The slightly damaged statue has been removed and stored in the cellar of the ethnological museum.”
¹³⁴

In fact, according to the Stuttgart city chronicle, in the spring of 1933 hardly a day went by without some aspect of the “Jewish question” coming up in one way or another. On the eve of the boycott, several well-known local Jewish physicians, lawyers, and industrialists left the country.
¹³⁵
On April 5 the athlete and businessman Fritz Rosenfelder committed suicide. His friend, the World War I ace Ernst Udet, flew over the cemetery to drop a wreath.
¹³⁶
On April 15 the Nazi Party demanded the exclusion of Berthold Heymann, a Socialist (and Jewish) former cabinet minister in Württemberg, from the electoral list.
¹³⁷
On April 20 the Magistrate’s Court of Stuttgart tried the chief physician of the Marienspital (Saint Mary’s Hospital), Caesar Hirsch, in absentia. Members of his staff testified that he had declared he would not return to Nazi Germany, “as he refused to live in such a homeland.”
¹³⁸
On April 27 three hundred people demonstrated on the Königsstrasse against the opening of a local branch of the Jewish-owned shoe company Etam.
¹³⁹
On April 29 a Jewish veterinarian who wanted to resume his service at the slaughterhouse was threatened by several butchers and taken “into custody.”
¹⁴⁰
And so it continued, day in and day out.

In his study of the Nazi seizure of power in the small city of Northeim (renamed Thalburg), near Hannover, William Sheridan Allen vividly describes the changing fate of the town’s 120 Jews. Mostly small businessmen and their families, they were well assimilated and for several generations had been an integral part of the community. In 1932 a Jewish haberdasher had celebrated the 230th anniversary of the establishment of his shop.
¹⁴¹
Allen tells of a banker named Braun, who tried hard to maintain his German nationalist stance and to disregard the increasingly insulting measures introduced by the Nazis: “To the solicitous advice that was given to him to leave Thalburg, he replied, ‘Where should I go? Here I am the Banker Braun; elsewhere I would be the Jew Braun.’”
¹⁴²

Other Jews in Thalburg were less confident. Within a few months the result was the same for all. Some withdrew from the various clubs and social organizations to which they had belonged; others received letters of dismissal under various pretexts. “Thus,” as Allen expresses it, “the position of the Jews in Thalburg was rapidly clarified, certainly by the end of the first half-year of Hitler’s regime…. The new state of affairs became a fact of life; it was accepted. Thalburg’s Jews were simply excluded from the community at large.”
¹⁴³

For young Hilma Geffen-Ludomer, the only Jewish child in the Berlin suburb of Rangsdorf, the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools meant total change. The “nice, neighborly atmosphere” ended “abruptly…. Suddenly, I didn’t have any friends. I had no more girlfriends, and many neighbors were afraid to talk to us. Some of the neighbors that we visited told me: ‘Don’t come anymore because I’m scared. We should not have any contact with Jews.’” Lore Gang-Salheimer, eleven in 1933 and living in Nuremberg, could remain in her school as her father had fought at Verdun. Nonetheless “it began to happen that non-Jewish children would say, ‘No I can’t walk home from school with you anymore. I can’t be seen with you anymore.’”
¹⁴⁴
“With every passing day under Nazi rule,” wrote Martha Appel, “the chasm between us and our neighbors grew wider. Friends with whom we had had warm relations for years did not know us anymore. Suddenly we discovered that we were different.”
¹⁴⁵

On the occasion of the general census of June 1933, German Jews, like everyone else, were defined and counted in terms of their religious affiliation and nationality, but their registration cards included more details than those of other citizens. According to the official
Statistik des deutschen Reiches
, these special cards “allowed for an overview of the biological and social situation of Jewry in the German Reich, insofar as it could be recorded on the basis of religious affiliation.” A census “of Jewry living in the Reich on the basis of race” was not yet possible.
¹⁴⁶

VI

The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) was adopted on July 14, 1933, the day on which the laws against Eastern Jews (cancellation of citizenship, an end to immigration, and so on) came into effect. The new law allowed for the sterilization of anyone recognized as suffering from supposedly hereditary diseases, such as feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, genetic epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, genetic blindness, genetic deafness, and severe alcoholism.
¹⁴⁷

The evolution leading to the July 1933 law was already noticeable during the Weimar period. Among eugenicists, the promoters of “positive eugenics” were losing ground, and “negative eugenics”—with its emphasis on the exclusion, that is, mainly the sterilization, of carriers of incapacitating hereditary diseases—was gaining the upper hand even within official institutions: A trend that had appeared on a wide scale in the West before World War I was increasingly dominating the German scene.
¹⁴⁸
As in so many other domains, the war was of decisive importance: Weren’t the young and the physically fit being slaughtered on the battlefield while the incapacitated and the unfit were being shielded? Wasn’t the reestablishment of genetic equilibrium a major national-racial imperative? Economic thinking added its own logic: The social cost of maintaining mentally and physically handicapped individuals whose reproduction would only increase the burden was considered prohibitive.
¹⁴⁹
This way of thinking was widespread and by no means a preserve of the radical right. Although the draft of a sterilization law submitted to the Prussian government in July 1932 still emphasized
voluntary
sterilization in case of hereditary defects,
¹⁵⁰
the idea of
compulsory
sterilization seems to have been spreading.
¹⁵¹
It was nonetheless with the Nazi accession to power that the decisive change took place.

The new legislation was furthered by tireless activists such as Arthur Gütt, who, after January 1933 besieged the Nazi Party’s health department with detailed memoranda. Before long Leonardo Conti had Gütt nominated to a senior position at the Reich Ministry of the Interior.
¹⁵²
The cardinal difference between the measures proposed by Gütt and included in the law and any previous legislation on sterilization was indeed the element of compulsion. Paragraph 12, section 1, of the new law stated that once sterilization had been decided upon, it could be implemented “against the will of the person to be sterilized.”
¹⁵³
This distinction is true for most cases, and on the official level. It seems, though, that even before 1933, patients in some psychiatric institutions were being sterilized without their own or their families’ consent.
¹⁵⁴
About two hundred thousand people were sterilized between mid-1933 and the end of 1937.
¹⁵⁵
By the end of the war, the number had reached four hundred thousand.
¹⁵⁶

From the outset of the sterilization policies to the apparent ending of euthanasia in August 1941—and to the beginning of the “Final Solution” close to that same date—policies regarding the handicapped and the mentally ill on the one hand and those regarding the Jews on the other followed a simultaneous and parallel development. These two policies, however, had different origins and different aims. Whereas sterilization and euthanasia were exclusively aimed at enhancing the purity of the
Volksgemeinschaft
, and were bolstered by cost-benefit computations, the segregation and the extermination of the Jews—though also a racial purification process—was mainly a struggle against an active, formidable enemy that was perceived endangering the very survival of Germany and of the Aryan world. Thus, in addition to the goal of racial cleansing, identical to that pursued in the sterilization and euthanasia campaign and in contrast to it, the struggle against the Jews was seen as a confrontation of apocalyptic dimensions.

^*
The Nazis gave a peculiar ideological twist to a great many words, such as “German” (as opposed to “Jewish”), “healthy” (often meaning racially healthy or not spoiled by Jews), “modernity,” and so on. As the meanings are almost always recognizable, quotation marks will henceforth be avoided in most instances

CHAPTER
2

Consenting Elites, Threatened Elites

I

About thirty SA men from Heilbronn arrived in Niederstetten, a small town in southwest Germany, on Saturday, March 25, 1933. Breaking into the few Jewish homes in the area, they took the men to the town hall and savagely beat them while local policemen kept watch at the building entrance. The scene was repeated that morning in neighboring Creglingen, where the eighteen male Jews found in the synagogue were also herded into the town hall. There the beatings led to the deaths of sixty-seven-year-old Hermann Stern and, a few days later, fifty-three-year-old Arnold Rosenfeld.

At the Sunday service the next day, Hermann Umfried, pastor of Niederstetten’s Lutheran church, spoke up. His sermon was carefully phrased: It began with standard expressions of faith in the new regime and some negative remarks about Jews. But Umfried then turned to what had happened the previous day: “Only authorities are allowed to punish, and all authorities lie under divine authority. Punishment can be meted out only against those who are evil and only when a just sentence has been handed down. What happened yesterday in this town was unjust. I call on all of you to help see to it that the German people’s shield of honor may remain unsullied!” When the attacks against Pastor Umfried started, no local, regional, or national church institution dared to come to his support or to express even the mildest opposition to violence against Jews. In January 1934 the local district party leader (
Kreisleiter
) ordered Umfried to resign. Increasingly anguished by the possibility that not only he but also his wife and their four daughters would be shipped off to a concentration camp, the pastor committed suicide.

Seven years and eight months later, at 2:04
P.M.
on November 28, 1941, the first transport of Jews left the Niederstetten railroad station. A second batch boarded the train in April 1942, and the third and last in August of that year. Of the forty-two Jews deported from Niederstetten, only three survived.
¹

The boycott of Jewish businesses was the first major test on a national scale of the attitude of the Christian churches toward the situation of the Jews under the new government. In historian Klaus Scholder’s words, “during the decisive days around the first of April, no bishop, no church dignitaries, no synod made any open declaration against the persecution of the Jews in Germany.”
²
In a radio address broadcast to the United States on April 4, 1933, the most prominent German Protestant clergyman, Bishop Otto Dibelius, justified the new regime’s actions, denying that there was any brutality even in the concentration camps and asserting that the boycott—which he called a reasonable defensive measure—took its course amid “calm and order.”
³
His broadcast was no momentary aberration. A few days later Dibelius sent a confidential Easter message to all the pastors of his province: “My dear Brethren! We all not only understand but are fully sympathetic to the recent motivations out of which the
völkisch
movement has emerged. Notwithstanding the evil sound that the term has frequently acquired, I have always considered myself an anti-Semite. One cannot ignore that Jewry has played a leading role in all the destructive manifestations of modern civilization.”
⁴

The Catholic Church’s reaction to the boycott was not fundamentally different. On March 31, at the suggestion of the Berlin cleric Bernhard Lichtenberg, the director of the Deutsche Bank in Berlin and president of the Committee for Inter-Confessional Peace, Oskar Wassermann, asked Adolf Johannes Cardinal Bertram, chairman of the German Conference of Bishops, to intervene against the boycott. Himself reticent about intervening, Bertram set about asking other senior German prelates for their opinions by stressing that the boycott was part of an economic battle that had nothing to do with immediate church interests. From Munich, Michael Cardinal Faulhaber wired Bertram:
HOPELESS. WOULD MAKE THINGS WORSE. IN ANY CASE ALREADY DYING DOWN
. For Archbishop Conrad Gröber of Freiburg, the problem was merely that converted Jews among the boycotted merchants were also being damaged.
⁵
Nothing was done.

In a letter addressed at approximately the same time to the Vatican’s secretary of state, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, Faulhaber wrote: “We bishops are being asked why the Catholic Church, as often in its history, does not intervene on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at this time because the struggle against the Jews would then, at the same time, become a struggle against the Catholics, and because the Jews can help themselves, as the sudden end of the boycott shows. It is especially unjust and painful that by this action the Jews, even those who have been baptized for ten and twenty years and are good Catholics, indeed even those whose parents were already Catholics, are legally still considered Jews, and as doctors or lawyers are to lose their positions.”
⁶

To the clergyman Alois Wurm, founder and editor of the periodical
Seele
(Soul), who asked why the church did not state openly that people could not be persecuted because of their race, the Munich cardinal answered in less guarded terms: “For the higher ecclesiastical authorities, there are immediate issues of much greater importance; schools, the maintaining of Catholic associations, sterilization are more important for Christianity in our homeland. One must assume that the Jews are capable of helping themselves.” There is no reason “to give a pretext to the government to turn the incitement against the Jews into incitement against the Jesuits.”
⁷

Archbishop Gröber was no more forthcoming when he stated to Robert Leiber, a Jesuit who was to become the confessor of Pius XII: “I immediately intervened on behalf of the converted Jews, but so far have had no response to my action…. I am afraid that the campaign against Judah will prove costly to us.”
⁸

The main issue for the churches was one of dogma, particularly with regard to the status of converted Jews and to the links between Judaism and Christianity. The debate had become particularly acute within Protestantism, when, in 1932, the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement published its “Guidelines.” “The relevant theme was a sort of race conscious belief in Christ; race, people and nation as part of a God-given ordering of life.”
⁹
Point 9 of “Guidelines,” for example, reads: “In the mission to the Jews we see a serious threat to our people [
Volkstum
]. That mission is the entry way for foreign blood into the body of our
Volk….
We reject missions to the Jews in Germany as long as Jews possess the right of citizenship and hence the danger of racial fraud and bastardization exists…. Marriage between Germans and Jews particularly is to be forbidden.”
¹⁰

The German Christian Movement had grown in nurturing soil, and it was not by chance that, in the 1932 church elections, it received a third of the vote. The traditional alliance between German Protestantism and German nationalist authoritarianism went too deep to allow a decisive and immediately countervailing force to arise against the zealots intent on purifying Christianity of its Jewish heritage. Even those Protestant theologians who, in the 1920s, had been ready to engage in dialogue with Jews—participating, for example, in meetings organized under the aegis of Martin Buber’s periodical,
Der Jude
—now expressed, more virulently than before, the standard accusations of “Pharisaic” and “legalistic” manifestations of the Jewish spirit. As Buber wrote in response to a particularly offensive article by Oskar A. H. Schmitz published in
Der Jude
in 1925 under the title “Desirable and Undesirable Jews”: “I have once again…noted that there is a boundary beyond which the possibility of encounter ceases and only the reporting of factual information remains. I cannot fight against an opponent who is thoroughly opposed to me, nor can I fight against an opponent who stands on a different plane than I.”
¹¹
As the years went by, such encounters became less frequent, and German Protestantism increasingly opened itself to the promise of national renewal and positive Christianity heralded by National Socialism.

The German Christian Movement’s ideological campaign seemed strongly bolstered by the election, on September 27, 1933, of Ludwig Müller, a fervent Nazi, as Reich bishop—that is, as some sort of Führer’s coordinator for all major issues pertaining to the Protestant churches. But precisely this election and a growing controversy regarding pastors and church members of Jewish origin caused a widening rift within the Evangelical Church.

In an implementation of the Civil Service Law, the synod governing the Prussian Evangelical Church demanded the forced retirement of pastors of Jewish origin or married to Jews. This initiative was quickly followed by the synods of Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Braunschweig, Lübeck, Hesse-Nassau, Tübingen, and Württemberg.
¹²
By the early fall of 1933, general adoption of the so-called Aryan paragraph throughout the Reich appeared to be a foregone conclusion. A contrary trend, however, simultaneously made its appearance, with a group of leading theologians issuing a statement on “The New Testament and the Race Question,” which clearly rejected any theological justification for adoption of the paragraph
¹³
and, on Christmas 1933, Pastors Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller (a widely admired World War I hero), founded an oppositional organization, the Pastors’ Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund), whose initial thirteen hundred adherents grew within a few months to six thousand. One of the league’s first initiatives was to issue a protest against the Aryan paragraph: “As a matter of duty, I bear witness that with the use of ‘Aryan laws’ within the Church of Christ an injury is done to our common confession of faith.”
¹⁴
The Confessing Church was born.

But the steadfastness of the Confessing Church regarding the Jewish issue was limited to support of the rights of non-Aryan Christians. And even on this point Martin Niemöller made it abundantly clear, for example in his “Propositions on the Aryan Question” (“Sätze zur Arierfrage”), published in November 1933, that only theological considerations prompted him to take his position. As he was to state at his 1937 trial for criticism of the regime, defending converted Jews “was uncongenial to him.”
¹⁵
“This perception [that the community of all Christians is a matter to be taken with utter seriousness],” wrote Niemöller in the “Propositions,” “requires of us, who as a people have had to carry a heavy burden as a result of the influence of the Jewish people, a high degree of self-denial, so that the desire to be freed from this demand [to maintain one single community with the converted Jews] is understandable…. The issue can only be dealt with…if we may expect from the officials [of the Church] who are of Jewish origin…that they impose upon themselves the restraint necessary in order to avoid any scandal. It would not be helpful if today a pastor of non-Aryan origin was to fill a position in the government of the church or had a conspicuous function in the mission to the people.”
¹⁶

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s attitude changed over the years, but even in him a deep ambivalence about the Jews as such would remain. “The state’s measures against the Jewish people are connected…in a very special way with the Church,” he declared with regard to the April boycott. “In the Church of Christ, we have never lost sight of the idea that the ‘Chosen People,’ who nailed the Saviour of the world to the cross, must bear the curse of the action through a long history of suffering.”
¹⁷
Thus it is precisely a theological view of the Jews that seems to have molded some of Bonhoeffer’s pronouncements. Even his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge could not escape the conclusion that in Bonhoeffer’s writings “a theological anti-Judaism is present.”
¹⁸
Theological anti-Judaism” was not uncommon within the Confessing Church, and some of its most respected personalities, such as Walter Künneth, did not hesitate to equate Nazi and Jewish interpretations of the “Jewish election,” as based on race, blood, and
Volk
, in opposition to the Christian view of election by God’s grace.
¹⁹
Such comparisons were to reappear in Christian anti-Nazi polemics in the mid-thirties and later.

The “Aryan paragraph” applied to only twenty-nine pastors out of eighteen thousand; among these, eleven were excluded from the list because they had fought in World War I. To the end of the 1930s the paragraph was not centrally enforced; its application depended on local church authorities and local Gestapo officials.
²⁰
From the churches’ viewpoint, the real debate was about principle and dogma, which excluded unconverted Jews. When, in May 1934, the first national meeting of the Confessing Church took place in Barmen, not a word was uttered about the persecutions: This time not even the converted Jews were mentioned.
²¹

On the face of it the Catholic Church’s attitude toward the new regime should have been firmer than that of the Protestants. The Catholic hierarchy had expressed a measure of hostility to Hitler’s movement during the last years of the republic, but this stance was uniquely determined by church interests and by the varying political fortunes of the Catholic Center Party. The position of many German Catholics toward Nazism before 1933 was fundamentally ambiguous: “Many Catholic publicists…pointed to the anti-Christian elements in the Nazi program and declared these incompatible with Catholic teaching. But they went on to speak of the healthy core of Nazism which ought to be appreciated—its reassertion of the values of religion and love of fatherland, its standing as a strong bulwark against atheistic Bolshevism.”
²²
The general attitude of the Catholic Church regarding the Jewish issue in Germany and elsewhere can be defined as a “moderate anti-Semitism” that supported the struggle against “undue Jewish influence” in the economy and in cultural life. As Vicar-General Mayer of Mainz expressed it, “Hitler in
Mein Kampf
had ‘appropriately described’ the bad influence of the Jews in press, theater and literature. Still, it was un-Christian to hate other races and to subject the Jews and foreigners to disabilities through discriminatory legislation that would merely bring about reprisals from other countries.”
²³