The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (36 page)

Anonymous denunciations alleging `criminal' activity abroad are not uncommon in the Gestapo files. On 31 March 1937 someone charged that while a soldier was in Spain he had been friendly with both Jews and Marxists. Since the man was still in Spain, no checks could be made and the matter was dropped.''
Another anonymous tip from 1937 arrived by letter from the United States; the charge was without foundation.'`'
While stationed in Cracow, Andreas Kaiser, an engineer from Hammelburg, permitted some of the Jews under his supervision to drive a truck and move about without a (Jewish) identification armband. This behaviour, reported in November 1940, was investigated by the Gestapo in Jaroslau (i.e. Jaroslaw) in the east, and the file was forwarded to the relevant domestic Gestapo back in Germany.''
In Wiirzburg too, anyone in charge of conscripted Jewish labour who was thought to be lenient was liable to be denounced.
1 With the outbreak of the war, and especially from the beginning of the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the spy-counter-spy atmosphere, deliberately played up by the Propaganda Ministry, led to an increase in the number of anonymous tips. The army command post in Bad Kissingen (responsible for Lower Franconia)
reported on 13 December 1941, for example, 'an extraordinary increase in anonymous reports. These were radically worked through. It turns out that most of the denunciations are without foundation.''
As the next chapter shows, the vast numbers of foreigners in the country added to the siege atmosphere.

3. THE CRACKDOWN ON 'DEGENERACY' IN THE GESTAPO FILES

The racist message was pressed home as part of other campaigns conducted by the Gestapo. Hans Peter Bleuel suggests that the regime was intent upon 'purifying' the country, cleaning up 'degeneracy' of all kinds. The legal principles of Weimar were thrown out in favour of the idea that 'no act should go unpunished' if it contravened the 'dictates of wholesome popular sentiment'.
3'

A number of groups who were subjected to special attention by the regime are registered in the Gestapo files-'anti-social' elements such as homosexuals, and gypsies. People who were branded as having 'loose morals' also turn up, especially when they could be linked to any of the other persecuted groups. Klaus Barbie's first Gestapo assignment was to the Berlin vice squad (in 1936), where, as one recent account put it, he formed a 'sense of his future' in that the 'job involved arresting Jews, homosexuals and prostitutes and gave him his first opportunity to physically attack the "enemy"'.;"
The regime was drawing up plans for the prosecution of all these people, and many more-from the work-shy to alcoholics-in a law which never actually came into being, on the 'enemies of the community' (Gemeinschaftsfremde).12
Even without such a law, however, they were persecuted, all the more so if an informant linked them with Jews. Those Jews who by chance were also habitual criminals, sexual 'deviants', or promiscuous individuals, or who led a boisterous social life, were particularly endangered.

One variety of Nazi anti-Semitism was fuelled by the suspicion that wealthy Jews somehow sexually exploited young women in their employ. It is no accident that the Nuremberg Laws (para. 2) not only explicitly prohibited extra-marital sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews, but (para. 3) forbade Jews from employing 'female citizens of German or kindred blood as domestic servants' (this last stipulation was not to come into force until
1 January 1936).33
Female employees in Jewish firms or those working for professionals such as doctors and lawyers were not expressly covered in the law. The door was opened to denouncers, however, because of the widespread prejudice that Jews misused their position of authority to obtain sexual favours. Nikolaus Herzl (born 1892), a Jewish merchant from Wurzburg, had been in trouble with the law, mainly for swindling, since the beginning of the Third Reich. Denounced in a letter from the DAF in early January 1936, Herz was arrested, placed in 'protective custody', and sent to a concentration camp, and only released in order to emigrate (to China, in July 1939). The impression conveyed by his dossier is that the DAF and the Gestapo capitalized on the chance that Herz, a married man, had had a non-Jewish servant-girl working in his home. That was banned by the Nuremberg Laws. No effort needed to be made to prove 'race defilement'; the mere accusation of employing the non-Jewish girl was enough.34

One of the earliest allegations of 'race defilement' to come to the attention of the Wurzburg Gestapo after the Nuremberg rally of 1935 (during which the race laws were announced) pertained to an affair in Schweinfurt. Already by 26 November 1935 a denunciation had led to the arrest of the 5o-year- old Jewish merchant Ludwig Abramsohn. He had hired Wilhelmina Kohrt as a clerk in 1926, and the interrogations indicated (whether or not correctly) that he had gradually forced his attention on the woman-as, it was alleged, he had done with others before that. Somebody told the police that Abramsohn and Kohrt lived as a married couple, and Abramsohn was initially given two years in jail; when the time came to release him, the Gestapo placed him in 'protective custody', and he only managed to get out of Buchenwald on 6 October 1938 in order to emigrate."
There was a firm resolve to 'clean up' relationships of this kind.

In early April 1938 an anonymous letter was sent to the head of the 'food and drink' section of the DAF in Wurzburg concerning Hanelore Krieger and her Jewish employers in the firm of M. Hanauer & Son, a liquor factory in Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld. Krieger (born 19o5), a worker whose apprenticeship had begun in the factory in 1918, had had little formal education, and from what she earned in 1938 (19o marks per month) helped support her elderly parents. In 1927 or 1928 Krieger's boyfriend, she said later, had got into financial difficulties, and she had gone to her boss, Julius Rosenheim, from whom she obtained 200 marks in return for a promise of sexual favours. She continued her visits to the old man for a fee (about 50 marks), and when that source of funds dried up Krieger made similar arrangements with Julius Rosenheim's son, Alfred. In her defence she told the Gestapo that she wanted the extra money to help her boyfriend, a student, who was also in financial need. Her liaison with Alfred Rosenheim continued until the end of 1936 or so, when, Krieger said, her anxieties led her to turn instead to the firm's bookkeeper, Georg Bohme, a non-Jewish married man. Her behaviour was brought to the attention of the Gestapo when, apparently, the bookkeeper's wife got wind of the affair and sent the anonymous letter mentioned above.

Alfred Rosenheim and Hanelore Krieger were arrested and brought to trial. In court she changed her testimony and said that sexual relations had ended in the summer of 1934; while the court accepted this, and set Rosenheim free, the Gestapo, maintaining that she had probably been bought off by a third party, placed Rosenheim in 'protective custody' anyway, as a corrective to what they saw as a failure of the justice system.;`

Prostitution was allowed to continue, though it was more stringently controlled, under the Nazi dictatorship. A decree of 9 September 1939 from the Reich Interior Ministry put local police (the Kripo) in charge of proper surveillance of brothels. Charges of anti-social behaviour were to be brought against pimps and others living off the profits of prostitution. Special brothels were created for the armed forces, and there were also such houses, inhabited by foreign women, for the foreign workers in Germany. But prostitutes could get into trouble with the Gestapo if they had Jewish clients; these relations were also subject to the Nuremberg Laws.17
The Gestapo (and the SD, for that matter) sometimes used prostitutes for the purposes of entrapment. However, no use of prostitutes is explicitly registered in the cases of the Wurzburg Gestapo, and the files have to be supplemented with other materials to show how unsuspecting Jews were lured into compromising situations and denounced.;"

To the extent that prostitutes are mentioned in the files, the point is made to expose the failings of certain men in various Nazi organizations. Otherwise the cases involving prostitution were processed by the regular police. But in Wurzburg and other cities there were instances when prostitutes-or people suspected of operating as prostitutes-got into trouble because the client turned out to be Jewish. For example, in March 1936 neighbours observed that a certain woman was receiving people who might be Jews while she was also receiving Party members, SS, and SA; the tip was given to the local Party boss, who, when relaying it to the Gestapo, mentioned that the estranged husband of the woman recently talked about her as now 'plying the trade' [seine Frau ginge auf den Strich].39
At almost the same time a Jewish woman, Friedel Scharf (born 1907), was denounced by the SA Standarte 9, Wurzburg.
Scharf had recently been discharged from a mental institution and was unable to come to grips with life on the outside, especially the anti-Semitic laws. It was alleged that she was out to sabotage the Nuremberg Laws by deliberately accosting SA men and trying, not unsuccessfully, to seduce them. The complaint was that this woman was living as a prostitute; as the SA leader wanted, the Gestapo put a stop to it.41

A number of other cases in the Wurzburg files strongly suggest that the woman involved was at least a part-time prostitute or, as in the case of Hanelore Krieger (above), that she supplemented her income by providing sexual favours. Hans Robinsohn discusses another such case in his study of 'race defilement' in Hamburg; a Jewish man and his non-Jewish friend, simply out for a good time one evening, met up with a prostitute, and were denounced; the woman subsequently testified against her Jewish customer that he was not, as he claimed, drunk at the time (which might be used to moderate the seriousness of the 'crime') but merely a little in his cups."
Sarah Gordon found 'no cases of open prostitution' in the Dusseldorf files, though it is unclear what is meant by that term.42
In fact it would be surprising if prostitutes were entirely absent from the material, particularly because local police were so keen to follow up complaints in order to harass the Jews. In neighbouring Frankfurt there was a case involving a prostitute in the summer of 1938, and, though sexual intercourse did not take place, the accused was found guilty. The court decided that the law had still been broken, since the concept of forbidden 'sexual relations' (Geschlechtsverkehr) within the terms of the Nuremberg Laws involved the protection of German 'honour' as well as German 'blood'. The man was sentenced to two years and two months in gaol after which he was probably placed in 'preventative custody' in a concentration camp.43

Promiscuous sexual behaviour involving Jewish males or females and crossing the ethnic barriers was criminalized and, as far as possible, 'cleaned up' after 1933. Bernard Martin, a married truck-driver and 'ordinary citizen'. went to the DAF in Kitzingen in mid-December 1937 to hand in the names of five men who had had sexual relations with Anna Laska, a 44-year-old Jewish woman. Martin also suggested that Laska had probably had an abortion, forbidden under paragraph 218 of the criminal code. Under questioning by the Labour Front's local boss, Martin admitted that he too had had sexual relations with Laska, although only before the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, a statement that proved false under investigation, and which cost him a year in gaol (from April 1938).4``
Martin probably calculated that he might ward off attention to his own behaviour by turning in the five men.

On 4 November 1938 the welfare office of the Ochsenfurt Kreisleitung of the NSDAP wrote of a wayward husband who was not only neglecting his wife and child, but had for months on end paid no support to his family. He was playing the role of the 'cavalier' in the town and keeping company with a number of women of questionable moral standards-one of whom, Johanna Kemp (born 1906), was both married and Jewish. The man in question, Gerhard Neff (born 1913), had trained to be a tailor, and with his father's financial help opened his own business. Neff did well initially, married in 1934, and took on an apprentice, but within a few years grew bored and restless. In 1937 he bought a powerful motor cycle, had intimate relations with several women of dubious virtue (so his father attested), and made friends with a number of men, one of whom was Stefan Kemp, a German man living in a 'mixed marriage' with Johanna Kemp. Gerhard Neff began to drive her about on his motor cycle, and eventually they had an affair.

Brought to trial, Gerhard Neff seemed to fit the unflattering pictures painted of him by his wife and father; the latter said at one point that his son possessed neither 'any sense of duty nor consciousness of his responsibilities'. In his own defence Neff claimed that the whole affair should be blamed on Johanna Kemp, who seduced him 'in order to ruin my family'. Neff was tried and sentenced to one and a half years in gaol. Johanna Kemp fared much worse. The 32-year-old woman had to face accusations of sexual promiscuity when three of the men with whom she was accused of having had relations at one time or another were interrogated. There was some evidence that she had had a number of such relationships, going as far back as 1930. While Neff was given a gaol term, she was sent to Ravensbriick in 1939, even though she and her husband sought to leave the country. She died there in April 1942
45

After the first six or seven years of Nazi Germany, the laws and regulations on race could be stretched almost with impunity by the Gestapo. Proceedings could have been started against Bernard Martin under any number of pretexts, but the Gestapo went after him with particular vehemence because he disregarded the race laws.46
In another case from 1937, two married men from Aschaffenburg-a restaurant-owner (born 1908) and a market gardener (born 1905)-were accused of having sexual relations with a 20-year-old Jewish woman. They were brought to trial in Aschaffenburg, but the court found it impossible to convict because of the unreliable testimony of the woman, who kept changing and embellishing the story. But the point was
brought home that, while promiscuity was frowned upon, it had to cease completely between Jews and non-Jews.47