Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (9 page)

There were a few mild petitions in favor of Jewish colleagues, such as the praise bestowed in May 1933 by the Heidelberg medical faculty on its Jewish members: “We cannot overlook the fact that German Jewry is contributing to great scientific achievements and that major medical personalities come from its midst. Precisely as physicians we feel the duty, keeping in mind the requirements of people and state, to represent the viewpoint of true humanity and to express our worries, as the danger threatens that all sense of responsibility is being pushed aside by emotional or impulsive violence….”
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This careful declaration was in fact atypical, as the medical schools of German universities showed a much higher percentage of party members than other disciplines.
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And in its attitude toward Jews, Heidelberg was not basically different from the other German universities.
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In April 1933 twelve professors from various fields expressed support for their Jewish colleague, the Munich University philosopher Richard Hönigswald; addressed to the Bavarian Ministry of Education, their letter was backed by the dean of the Munich philosophical faculty. The ministry solicited additional advice and received a set of negative answers, including one from Martin Heidegger, and Hönigswald was dismissed.
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Some individual interventions have become well known. There was, for example, Max Planck’s (unsuccessful) intervention with Hitler in favor of Fritz Haber’s reinstatement
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and, paradoxically, Heidegger’s intervention against the dismissal of Siegfried Thannhauser and Georg von Hevesy. The dismissal of such eminent scientists, Heidegger explained to the Baden authorities, would have negative consequences abroad and harm Germany’s foreign policy.
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Heidegger had become rector of Freiburg University in April 1933. He was already on record regarding the presence of Jews in German academic life. In a letter of October 20, 1929, to Victor Schwörer, acting president of the Emergency Fund, established to support needy scholars, the philosopher had stated that the only existing option was either the systematic strengthening of “our” German intellectual life or its definitive abandonment “to growing Judaization in the wider and narrower sense.”
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When Heidegger’s mathematics professor, Alfred Löwy, was compelled as a Jew to take early retirement in April 1933, the newly appointed rector wished him “the strength to overcome the hardships and difficulties carried by such times of change.”
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Elfride Heidegger used almost exactly the same words in her letter of April 29, 1933, to Malvine Husserl, the wife of her husband’s Jewish mentor, the philosopher Edmund Husserl; she added, however, that although the Civil Service Law was hard, it was reasonable from a German point of view.
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Shortly before her departure from Germany in the summer of 1933, Hannah Arendt had written in what was possibly her strongest letter to Heidegger, her teacher and lover, that rumors had reached her about his ever more distant, even hostile attitude toward Jewish colleagues and students. The tone of his answer, as paraphrased by Elzbieta Ettinger, in what would be his last letter to Arendt until after the war, is revealing enough: “To Jewish students…he generously gave of his time, disruptive though it was to his own work, getting them stipends and discussing their dissertations with them. Who comes to him in an emergency? A Jew. Who insists on urgently discussing his doctoral degree? A Jew. Who sends him voluminous work for urgent critique? A Jew. Who asks him for help in obtaining grants? Jews!!”
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On November 3, 1933, Heidegger announced that economic support would be denied to “Jewish or Marxist” students, or to anyone else defined as a “non-Aryan” according to the new laws.
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On December 13 he sought financial aid for a volume of pro-Hitler speeches by German professors to be distributed worldwide; he concluded his request with an assurance: “Needless to say, non-Aryans shall not appear on the title page.”
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On the sixteenth of that month, he wrote to the head of the Nazi Professors Association at Göttingen about Eduard Baumgarten, an ex-student and colleague of his: Baumgarten “frequented, very actively, the Jew Fränkel, who used to teach at Göttingen and was just recently fired from here.” Simultaneously Heidegger refused to continue the supervision of doctoral dissertations by Jewish students and referred them to Martin Honecker, a professor of church philosophy.
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Heidegger’s attitude toward Husserl remains unclear. Although, according to his biographer Rüdiger Safranski, it is untrue that Heidegger forbade Husserl access to the philosophy department, he actually broke all contact with him (as he did with all other Jewish colleagues and disciples) and did nothing to alleviate Husserl’s growing isolation. When Husserl died, Heidegger was ill. Would he otherwise have attended the funeral, along with the single “Aryan” faculty member who thought fit to do so, the historian Gerhard Ritter?
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The dedication of his magnum opus
Being and Time
to Husserl was omitted from the 1941 edition at the publisher’s demand, but Heidegger’s footnote expression of gratitude to his Jewish mentor was left in. Contradictions abound, with possibly the strangest of them all being Heidegger’s praise, in the mid-thirties, for Spinoza, and his declaration that “if Spinoza’s philosophy was Jewish, then all philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel was also Jewish.”
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On April 22, 1933, Heidegger sent an entreaty to Carl Schmitt, by far the most prestigious German political and legal theorist of the time, pleading with him not to turn his back on the new movement. The entreaty was superfluous, as Schmitt had already made his choice. Like Heidegger—and this seems to have been the first rule to follow—he had stopped answering letters from Jewish students, colleagues, and other scholars with whom he had previously been in close touch (in Schmitt’s case, one of the striking examples is the abrupt end he put to his correspondence with the Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss).
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And, to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about where he stood, Schmitt introduced some outright anti-Semitic remarks into the new (1933) edition of his
Concept of the Political
.
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In any event, Schmitt’s anti-Jewish positions were to be definitely more outspoken, extreme, and virulent than those of the Freiburg philosopher.

During the summer semester of 1933, both Schmitt and Heidegger took part in a lecture series organized by Heidelberg students. Heidegger spoke on “The University in the New Reich”; Schmitt’s theme was “The New Constitutional Law.” They were preceded in the same series by Dr. Walter Gross, head of the racial policy office of the Nazi Party, who spoke on “The Physician and the Racial Community.” On May 1, in Freiburg, Heidegger had become party member 3-125-894; on the same day, in Cologne, Schmitt joined the party as member 2-098-860.
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Hannah Arendt left the country and, by way of Prague and Geneva, reached Paris; there she soon started working for the Zionist Youth Emigration Organization. The main reason for her early emigration, she later said, was more than anything else the behavior of her Aryan friends, such as Benno von Wiese, who—subject to no outside pressure whatsoever—adhered enthusiastically to the new system’s ideals and norms.
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Yet, in general, her criticism of Heidegger remained muted.

The responses of Jewish academics to the new regime’s measures and to the new attitudes of colleagues and friends varied from one individual to another. Within that broad spectrum, a peculiar situation was that of Jews who had been long-standing militant German nationalists but, unlike Felix Jacoby, did not opt for total blindness to the regime’s actions. On April 20 Ernst Kantorowicz, a medieval historian at Frankfurt University, sent a letter to the minister of science and education of Hesse that tellingly expresses the great slowness, hesitancy, and regretfulness—despite the harsh new Nazi policies—of the retreat of such Jews from their former positions. “Although,” Kantorowicz wrote, “as a war volunteer from August 1914 on, as a frontline soldier throughout the war, as a postwar fighter against Poland, against the Spartacists, and against the Republic of the Councils [of workers and soldiers] in Posen, Berlin, and Munich, I am not obliged to expect dismissal because of my Jewish origins; although in view of my publications on the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II, I do not need any attestation from the day before yesterday, yesterday, or today regarding my attitude toward a nationally oriented Germany; although beyond all immediate trends and occurrences, my fundamentally positive attitude toward a nationally governed Reich has not been undermined even by the most recent events; and although I certainly need not expect student disturbances to interrupt my teaching—so that the issue of unhampered teaching at the level of the entire university need not be considered in my case—as a Jew, I see myself compelled nonetheless to draw the consequences of what has happened and give up my teaching for the coming summer semester.”
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Kantorowicz was not tendering his resignation; he was merely withdrawing from the next semester. The implication was that he would wait for the policies of the new national Germany to change.

Whereas the attitude of the majority of “Aryan” university professors could be defined as “cultured Judeophobia,”
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among the students a radical brand of Judeophobia had taken hold. At the end of the nineteenth century, some Austrian student corporations, followed by German ones, had already excluded Jews on a racial basis—that is, even baptized Jews were not accepted.
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Michael Kater attributes a portion of extreme student anti-Semitism to competition—mainly in the remunerative fields of law and medicine, in which the percentage of Jewish students was indeed high, as was the percentage of Jews in these professions. In any case, in the early years of the Weimar Republic the majority of German student fraternities joined the German University League (Deutscher Hochschulring), an organization with openly
völkisch
and anti-Semitic aims, which soon came to control student politics.
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Membership in the league was conditional on fully Aryan origin, with racial Germans from Austria or the Sudetenland accepted despite their not being German citizens. The league dominated the universities until the mid-1920s, when it was replaced by the National Socialist Students Association (
Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund
).
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And demonstrations and acts of physical aggression by right-wing students against their enemies became common on German campuses from the late twenties on.
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Soon professors who were too explicitly pacifist or anti-nationalist, such as Theodor Lessing, Günther Dehn, Emil Julius Gumbel, Hans Nawiasky, and Ernst Cohn, came under attack.
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Gumbel was driven out of Heidelberg even before the Nazis came to power. In 1931 Nazis gained a majority in the German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft); this was the first national association to come under their control. Within a short time a whole cohort of young intellectuals would put its energy and ability at the disposal of the party and its policies.
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After January 1933 student groups took matters into their own hands, not unlike the SA. The national leader of the Nazi student organization, Oskar Stabel, announced shortly before the April 1 boycott that student pickets would be posted that day at the entrances to Jewish professors’ lecture halls and seminar rooms in order to “dissuade” anyone from entering.
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Such was the case, for example, at the Technical University in Berlin. Later on Nazi students with cameras positioned themselves on the podiums of lecture halls so as to take pictures of students attending classes taught by Jews.
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This kind of student agitation was strongly encouraged by a violently anti-Jewish speech delivered on May 5 by Education Minister Rust in the Berlin university auditorium, and by such comments on the speech as these in the official
Preussische Zeitung
: “Science for a Jew does not mean a task, an obligation, a domain of creative organization, but a business and a way of destroying the culture of the host people. Thus the most important chairs of so-called German universities were filled with Jews. Positions were vacated to allow them to pursue their parasitic activities, which were then rewarded with Nobel Prizes.”
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In early April 1933, the National Socialist Student Association established a press and propaganda section. Its very first measure, decided on April 8, was to be “the public burning of destructive Jewish writing” by university students as a reaction to world Jewry’s “shameless incitement” against Germany. An “information” campaign was to be undertaken between April 12 and May 10; the public burnings were scheduled to start on university campuses at 6:00
P.M.
on the last day of the campaign.

The notorious twelve theses the students prepared for ritual declamation during the burnings were not exclusively directed against Jews and the “Jewish spirit”: Among the other targets were Marxism, pacifism, and the “overstressing of the instinctual life” (that is, “the Freudian School and its journal
Imago
”). It was a rebellion of the German against the “un-German spirit.” But the main thrust of the action remained essentially anti-Jewish; in the eyes of the organizers, it was meant to extend anti-Jewish action from the economic domain (the April 1 boycott) to the entire field of German culture.

On April 13 the theses were affixed to university buildings and billboards all over Germany. Thesis 7 read: “When the Jew writes in German, he lies. He should be compelled, from now on, to indicate on books he wishes to publish in German: ‘translated from the Hebrew.’”
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