The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (11 page)

Equally intricate were the issues raised by shopping restrictions or even by the curfew imposed upon the Jews. In regard to the latter, Heydrich also decided on July 1, 1940, that Jewish women whose husbands or sons were serving in the Wehrmacht were exempted from the curfew, “insofar as there were no negative indications against them, particularly no reasons to believe that they would use the exemption to provoke the German population.”
¹⁸¹

Jewish pediatric nurses who still kept an office had to indicate on their doorplates that they were nurses for Jewish infants and children.
¹⁸²
From mid-December 1939 to mid-January 1940, Jews were deprived of the special food allocations for the holidays, receiving less meat and butter and no cocoa or rice.
¹⁸³
On January 3 they were forbidden to buy any meat or vegetables at all until February 4.
¹⁸⁴
A few weeks beforehand, the Württemberg minister of food and agriculture, soon followed by the food and agriculture ministers of all the other regions, decreed that the Jews were not allowed to purchase any chocolate products or gingerbread.
¹⁸⁵

Some anti-Jewish measures (or rather safeguards) showed genuine creative thinking. Thus the Reich Ministry of Education and Science announced on October 20, 1939, that, “in doctoral dissertations, Jewish authors may be quoted only when such quoting is unavoidable on scientific grounds; in such a case, however, the fact that the author is Jewish must be mentioned. In the bibliographies, Jewish and German authors are to be listed separately.”
¹⁸⁶
Yet this major initiative for the cleansing of German science encountered serious obstacles. According to “university sources” alluded to in a SD report of April 10, 1940, students writing their dissertations often did not know whether the author quoted was Jewish or not, and racial identification was at times very difficult. “University sources” therefore suggested that the Ministry of Science should prepare “administrative identification criteria of Jewish scientists which would be used not only for dissertations, but for all other scientific work.”
¹⁸⁷
On February 17, 1940, a decree of the Ministry of the Interior authorized the training of Jewish female medical technicians or assistants, but only for Jewish institutions. However, they were not allowed to deal with [laboratory] cultures of living bacteria.
¹⁸⁸

On February 23, 1940, a supplementary decree to the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” reasserted a provision that actually was already implicit in the law of September 15, 1935: In cases of
Rassenschande
(“racial disgrace”—that is, sexual relations between an Aryan and a Jew) only the man was held responsible and would be punished. If the woman was Jewish and the man Aryan—which had happened in several prior instances—the woman received a short prison sentence or was sent to a “retraining camp”—that is, to a concentration camp. Thus the immunity was for Aryan women only.

In forwarding the text of the decree to Washington, the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin, Alexander Kirk, probably revealed a major purpose of the decree: “It has also been observed that the absolute immunity granted [German] women in this respect enhances the opportunities for denunciation and extortion which are known to have already been utilized in connection with this anti-Jewish law in particular.”
¹⁸⁹
For the Gestapo denunciations were of the essence. Otherwise, of course, the notion that, in most cases, Jewish men seduced guileless Aryan women provided the phantasmal basis of the decree.
¹⁹⁰

Full Jews according to the Nuremberg racial laws of September 1935 were the prime targets of the regime’s persecution policies. More complex was the situation of spouses and children in mixed marriages; as for the array of problems encountered in the case of mixed-breeds, it challenged Nazi ingenuity to the very end. In the “mixed” categories, in fact, the number of potential variations was practically endless. Consider the case of the German writer and pious Protestant, Jochen Klepper. Klepper’s Jewish wife, Johanna Stein, was previously married to a Jew; thus “Hanni’s” two daughters from her first marriage, Brigitte and Renate, were Jewish. The older daughter, Brigitte, had left for England before the war, but Renate (Renerle or Reni) was still living in Berlin with her parents. In principle, while the Aryan Klepper was personally protected from deportation or worse, nothing could ensure Hanni’s or Renerle’s safety.

From the beginning of the war the Kleppers’ main goal was to find a way for Renerle to leave the Reich. “For Hanni and for me,” Klepper wrote in his diary on November 28, 1939, “the recent emigration plan [for their daughters] no longer pains us in any meaningful way, as every single month we are in distress as a result of the government’s Poland project [after the deportations from Vienna in October 1939, rumors spread among Jews in the Reich that the entire Jewish population would be deported to Poland]; and at every distribution of food or
Bezugsschein
tickets, we worry that Renerle will no longer be included.”
¹⁹¹

Once the war started, the guidelines regarding mixed breeds (
Mischlinge
) of the first and second degrees (half and quarter Jews) became more confusing than ever: These
Mischlinge
were allowed to serve in the Wehrmacht and could even be decorated for bravery, but they were not allowed to fill positions of authority. As for the Jewish members of their families, they were spared none of the usual indignities, “My sons [three soldiers] are
Mischlinge
because of me,” Clara von Mettenheim, a converted Jewish woman married into the military aristocracy, wrote in December 1939 to the commander in chief of the army, General Brauchitsch. “During the war, when my sons were fighting in Poland, we were tortured here on the home front as if there were no more important tasks to be done during the war…. Please stop [this mistreatment of half-Jewish soldiers and their parents].” And she added: “I beg you to use your influence to make sure that the party leaves those [
Mischlinge
] alone…. These men already have it bad enough being treated as second-class soldiers, they shouldn’t also have to worry about their families at home while they are fighting a war.”
¹⁹²

Much less frequent, of course, but intrinsically not entirely different, were the decisions that confronted the already overtaxed SS Reichsführer regarding some of his men. Take the sad case of SS Untersturmführer Küchlin, for example. One of his maternal ancestors, sometime after the Thirty Years’ War, proved to be a Jew, Abraham Reinau. On April 3, 1940, Himmler had to inform Küchlin that such a racial blemish precluded him from staying in the SS.
¹⁹³
There was some hope, however, that further inquiry could allow Küchlin’s reintegration: Reinau’s daughter had married an innkeeper, one Johan Hermann, the owner of At the Wild Man’s (
Zum wilden Mann
). According to the Reichsführer the inn’s appellation pointed to membership in a secret pagan (old Germanic) and racially aware association. Maybe Reinau had not been a Jew after all.
¹⁹⁴

Hitler’s constant presence in the shadows of the harassment campaign was unmistakable. In a memorandum of December 6, 1939, one Dr. Hanssen conveyed to a
Parteigenosse
(party member) called Friedrichs (probably a member of the party chancellery) that regarding several new anti-Jewish steps planned by Goebbels and by the RSHA, “the SS Reichsführer would discuss all measures against the Jews directly with the Führer” (
dass der Reichsführer SS alle Massnahmen gegen die Juden direkt mit dem Führer besprechen würde
).
¹⁹⁵

XI

Did the majority of Germans pay much attention to the persecution of the Jews in the Reich and in Poland during the early months of the war? In Germany the anti-Jewish measures were public and “official”; the fate of the Jews in Poland was not kept secret either, and apart from the press reports or the newsreels watched in the home country, a stream of Germans, soldiers and civilians, visited the ghettos as mentioned and photographed any worthy sight or scene: begging children, emaciated Jews with beards and sidelocks, humble Jewish men doffing their caps to their German masters, and, in Warsaw at least, the Jewish graveyard and the shed in which corpses awaiting burial were piled up.
¹⁹⁶

Various confidential opinion reports (either from the SD or from local authorities) give the impression that, overall, the population was becoming increasingly more hostile toward the Jews, but they also mention occasional acts of kindness or, at times, popular fear of retribution. According to a report of September 6, 1939, from the region of Münster, people were demanding the jailing of Jews or even the shooting of ten Jews for every fallen German.
¹⁹⁷
In Worms a report from mid-September indicated that the population was upset that Jews had access to food stores on equal footing with Germans.
¹⁹⁸

In Lahr, on the other hand, during heavily attended church services in early October 1939, older people often interpreted the war as [God’s] punishment for the persecution of the Jews.
¹⁹⁹
Near Marburg a farmer was arrested at the end of December 1939 for showing friendliness to a Jew who worked for him and for inviting him as well as Polish prisoners to share his meals.
²⁰⁰
The same happened in April 1940 to two Germans who expressed a friendly attitude regarding Jews in the region of Würzburg.
²⁰¹
In Potsdam, obversely again, a June 1940 court decision to allow a Jewish woman to be the sole inheritor of a deceased Aryan (according to that person’s will) caused outrage: It went against “healthy popular instinct.”
²⁰²

For many
Volksgenossen
, outright greed or the sense of some material injustice (mainly in regard to housing) was the fuel of ongoing anti-Jewish resentment, as shown for example by a vast trove of letters addressed by citizens of Eisenach, the town where Luther grew up, to the local district leader (
Kreisleiter
), Hermann Köhler. Thus in October 1939, when the Aryan Mrs. Fink was evicted from her apartment, while her neighbor, an eighty-two-year-old Jewish woman named Grünberger, was allowed to remain in hers for three more months [an apartment in which she had lived all her life and in which she was legally allowed to stay to the end of her days], all hell broke loose: “How is it possible,” Fink wrote to Köhler, “that in the Third Reich a Jewess is protected by law while I as a German enjoy no protection?…As a German in the German Reich I should at least be able to lay claim to the same rights as a Jewess!” The owner of the house, Paul Mies, who acquired it from its former Jewish owners in the 1930s, was also eager to evict Grünberger; his lawyer’s argument was “dominant public opinion” (
herrschende Volksmeinung
):

“Ever since the plaintiff [Mies] became a member of the NSDAP in May 1937, his obligation to get rid of the Jewess has become more urgent…. According to dominant public opinion, which forbids the living in the same house of Aryans and especially party members with Jews, the plaintiffs are no longer obliged to provide asylum to the Jewess. The age of the Jewess and the length of her residence cannot be factors of consideration. Such questions will not be resolved by feelings….”
²⁰³
It does not seem that Eisenach was an exceptionally anti-Semitic town.

Personal relations between ordinary Jews and Germans often appeared contradictory. In the spring of 1940 the Klemperers had to sell the house they had built in the village of Dölzschen for much less than its real value. “Berger, the shopkeeper who will get our house,” Klemperer wrote on May 8, 1940, “…is here at least once a day. An altogether good-natured man, helps us with ersatz honey, etc., is completely anti-Hitlerist, but is of course pleased at the good exchange.”
²⁰⁴

According to a report of the mayor of P., dated November 21, 1939, “Julius Israel Bernheim was the last Jew to own a house on the Adolf-Hitler-Platz. The inhabitants often went on about why the Jew did not leave. The street in front of the house was covered with inscriptions and, at night, the windows were smashed…. B. sold the house, and on October 2, 1939, he moved to a Jewish old people’s home.”
²⁰⁵

Details about the murderous violence against Poles and Jews came up frequently in diary entries of opposition members during the first months of the war. Information often stemmed from the highest levels of the Wehrmacht and also from military intelligence officers, some of whom were uncompromising enemies of the regime.
²⁰⁶
Plotting against Hitler was active, as several army commanders believed that an immediate attack in the West, as ordered by the Nazi leader on the morrow of the Polish campaign, would end in a military disaster. Thus details about the crimes committed in Poland fell on fertile ground and confirmed the moral abjection of Nazism. “The disastrous character of the regime, mainly in ethical terms, becomes increasingly clear,” Ulrich von Hassell, the former German ambassador to Italy, recorded in his diary on February 17, 1940, on hearing a report from Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig and a major opposition figure, about a trip to Poland. Goerdeler mentioned that “some 1,500 Jews, among them women and children, were moved to and fro in open freight cars [in January or February 1940] until they were all dead. Some two hundred peasants were ordered to dig a mass grave [for the Jews] and were themselves shot afterwards.”
²⁰⁷
Hassell mentioned in the same entry that a German widow, whose husband was an officer killed by the Poles, nevertheless protested to Göring about the atrocities against Jews and Poles; Hassell believed that Göring was duly impressed.
²⁰⁸