The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (12 page)

None of this genuine hostility to National Socialism, however, excluded the continued existence of various shades of anti-Semitism. Thus, while, as mentioned, plans for a military coup that would bring down Hitler and his regime were swirling among top echelons of the Wehrmacht during the last months of 1939 and in early 1940, while Goerdeler and other opposition members discussed a constitution for post-Nazi Germany, the conservative enemies of the regime generally agreed that in this future Germany citizenship would be granted only to Jews who could claim a long-established ancestry in the country; the more recent arrivals would have to leave.
²⁰⁹
Goerdeler’s anti-Semitism did not change to the end of his life.
²¹⁰

The role of the Christian churches was of course decisive in the permanence and pervasiveness of anti-Jewish beliefs and attitudes in Germany and throughout the Western world. In Germany some 95 percent of the
Volksgenossen
remained churchgoers in the 1930s and 1940s.
²¹¹
Although the party elite was generally hostile to Christian beliefs and inimical to organized (political) church activities, religious anti-Judaism remained a useful background for Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and measures.

Among German Protestants, who generally shared the strong anti-Jewish slant of Lutheranism, the “German Christians,” who aimed at a synthesis between Nazism and their own brand of “Aryan (or Germanic) Christianity,” received two-thirds of the votes in the church elections of 1932.
²¹²
In the autumn of 1933 the grip of the German Christians was challenged by the establishment and growth of the oppositional “Confessing Church.” Yet, although the Confessing Church rejected the racial anti-Semitism of the German Christians, and fought to keep the Old Testament (which it often presented, however, as a source of anti-Jewish teaching), it was not exempt from the traditional Lutheran anti-Jewish hostility.

Many German Protestants did not belong to either of the opposing groups, and it is this “neutral” middle ground that came closest to some of the positions of “German Christianity,” also in regard to converted Jews.
²¹³
The Confessing Church did, at times, attempt to defend the rights of converts (but not those of Jews as such), except, as we shall see, for some prudent steps at the height of the extermination.

The omnipresence of anti-Semitism in most of the Evangelical Lutheran Church found a telling illustration in the notorious “Godesberg Declaration.” This declaration, intended to establish a common basis for German Christians and the “neutral” majority of the Evangelical Church was officially published on April 4, 1939, and greeted with widespread support by most of the regional churches (
Landeskirchen
) in the Reich. Point no. 3 (of 5) stated: “The National Socialist worldview has relentlessly fought against the political and spiritual influence of the Jewish race, on our national [
völkisch
] life. In full obedience to the divine rules of creation, the Evangelical Church affirms its responsibility for the purity of our people [
Volkstum
]. Over and above that, in the domain of faith there is no sharper opposition than the one existing between the message of Jesus Christ and that of the Jewish religion of laws and political messianic expectations.”
²¹⁴

The Confessing Church issued a response in May 1939, a telling example of its own equivocations: “In the realm of faith, there is a sharp opposition between the message of Jesus Christ and his apostles and the Jewish religion of legalism and political messianic hope, already emphatically criticized in the Old Testament. In the realm of [
völkisch
] life, the preservation of the purity of our people demands an earnest and responsible racial policy.”
²¹⁵

The Godesberg Declaration was followed in May of that year by the foundation of the “Institute for the Study and Elimination of the Jewish Influence on German Church Life” (
Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben
) and the appointment as its scientific director of the professor for New Testament and
Völkisch
Theology at the University of Jena, Walter Grundmann.
²¹⁶
The Institute attracted a wide membership of theologians and other scholars, and already during the first year of the war it published a de-Judaized New Testament,
Die Botschaft Gottes
(250,000 copies sold), a de-Judaized hymnal, and, in 1941, a de-Judaized catechism.
²¹⁷
We shall return to the positions taken by a majority of German Protestants and to the later productions of Grundmann’s institute.

A report sent on November 22, 1940, by the association of communal administrators to the Evangelical Church Board in Breslau addressed the burial of converted Jews: “During the burial of the urns of baptized Jews in the Johannes cemetery in Breslau, the indignation of visitors was unpleasantly expressed on several occasions. In two cases, due to the reactions of families of [“Aryans” buried in] neighboring graves, the urns of the non-Aryans had to be dug up and reburied in a distant corner…. A Jew from the Paulus congregation who had been baptized decades ago could not be buried in the Lohbrück congregation’s cemetery, due to the opposition of its Aryan members.”
²¹⁸

It is against such a background that individual support for Jews (even if expressed in an indirect way), usually among ordinary pastors and some members of theological faculties, takes on a particular significance. Thus Assistant Preacher Riedesel of Königsberg did not hesitate, in a sermon in October 1939, to tell the story of the Good Samaritan and to choose a Jew as the only passerby ready to offer help to a wounded person lying on the side of the road. The informant’s report added that “the State Police was notified.”
²¹⁹
On December 1, 1939, Pastor Eberle of the Confessing Church in Hundsbach declared in a sermon: “The God of our Church is the God of the Jews, the God of Jacob to whom I profess my faith.” According to the report, there were signs of unrest among soldiers who attended the service.
²²⁰
Indirectly pro-Jewish statements were also reported at the Theological Faculty of Kiel University, in March 1940, leading to sanctions being put in place by the rector.
²²¹

The Catholic Church in Germany was more immune to Nazi theories than its Evangelical counterpart. Nonetheless, like the Protestant churches, the German Catholic community and its clergy were in their vast majority open to traditional religious anti-Judaism.
²²²
Moreover, despite the increasingly hostile stand taken by Pope Pius XI against Hitler’s regime during the last years of his pontificate, the church in Germany remained wary of any major confrontation with the authorities, mindful as it was of its minority position and its political vulnerability since the days of the Kulturkampf, under Bismarck, and constantly on the alert as a result of frequent harassment by party and state.

Sometimes, however, German Catholics took daring initiatives, albeit in a paradoxical way. Throughout the 1930s and up to 1942, radical Nazi enemies of the Catholic Church (of the Rosenberg ilk) abundantly used a well-known nineteenth-century anti-Catholic pamphlet, Otto von Corvin’s
Der Pfaffenspiegel
. To counter this anticlerical propaganda a host of Catholic writers, theologians, priests, and even bishops argued strenuously over the years that Corvin was Jewish, or part Jewish, or a friend of Jews. As one of these Catholic writers put it, Corvin could well have been of Jewish descent, even if he was not. For the Nazis of course, Corvin was a Protestant Aryan of unimpeachable lineage.
²²³

The election of Pius XII on March 2, 1939, inaugurated a new phase of Catholic appeasement of Hitler’s regime. Thus, although in the Reich and in occupied Europe, the Catholic hierarchy attempted to offer assistance to converted Jews, it did not venture beyond this strict limit.
²²⁴
A Catholic organization established to help emigrants, Sankt Raphaelsverein, took care of the departures of some “Catholic non-aryans,” while the Paulus Bund, created in the 1930s, catered to their needs in the Reich.
²²⁵

Old cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau, who throughout the war stood at the helm of German Catholicism, displayed unwavering loyalty toward both Führer and fatherland and, as we shall see, kept cordial personal relations with Hitler to the very end. His political stand was that of the majority of the German hierarchy, and, in general terms, it received Pius XII’s approval. Facing Bertram, in increasingly starker opposition, stood Bishop Konrad Count Preysing and, depending on the issues, a small group of bishops and other influential members of the clergy. An internal confrontation about the Jewish question would come, very late; it did not change the passive attitude of the majority or lead to any public stand.
²²⁶

XII

The leadership chosen by the Jewish community in Germany in the fall of 1933 remained in place as the war started. The Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany), which in early 1939 came to replace the loosely federated Reichsvertretung, was a centralized body established on the initiative of the Jewish leadership itself for the sake of greater efficiency.
²²⁷
From the outset, though, the activities of the association were entirely controlled by the Gestapo, particularly by Eichmann’s Jewish section. For all intents and purposes it was a Jewish Council on a national scale. It was the Reichsvereinigung that had to inform Jewish communities of all Gestapo instructions, usually by way of the only authorized Jewish newspaper, the
Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt
.
²²⁸

In most parts of the Reich, except for Berlin, as the local Jewish community offices and services lost growing numbers of members, they were integrated into the local Reichsvereinigung branches; these branches followed instructions from the main office in Berlin, which in turn had to report every step to the RSHA. In the capital the “Jewish community” was allowed to keep its independent offices and activities, a situation that often created tense relations between the two Jewish organizations.
²²⁹

Until October 1941 the prime function of the association was to foster and organize the emigration of Jews from Germany. But from the outset it was no less involved in welfare and education. Its Berlin offices in Oranienburgstrasse and the board of the association, presided over (as he had the previous Reichsvertretung since 1933) by the elderly rabbi Leo Baeck, as well as the local offices in all major German cities, were the main lifeline for the remaining Jewish population.

Direct material assistance became a major concern. After the beginning of the war, state welfare allocations for needy Jews dropped sharply, and most of the assistance had to be raised by the Reichsvereinigung.
²³⁰
The pitiful “wages” paid to the tens of thousands of Jewish forced laborers could not alleviate the growing material distress. At times even the RSHA had to intervene in favor of the Reichsvereinigung against the ruthless exploitation of the laboring Jews by local authorities.
²³¹
Furthermore, because Jewish students had been definitively excluded from all German schools since November 1938, the Reichsvereinigung was solely in charge of the education of some 9,500 children and teenagers in the Old Reich.
²³²

While it was facing growing daily burdens, the Reichsvereinigung did not remain immune to bitter internal confrontations with Jewish individuals or groups, sometimes with potentially grievous consequences. In the fall of 1939, approximately 11,500 Polish Jews still lived in the Reich. Some of them had escaped the deportations of October 1938, others had been allowed to return temporarily to wrap up their businesses. On September 8, 1939, the Gestapo ordered their arrest as enemy aliens and their internment in Buchenwald, Oranienburg, and later Sachsenhausen. The Sachsenhausen inmates were soon dying at an alarming rate. It is in this context that an official of the Jewish Agency [the representation of the Jewish community in Palestine] in Berlin, Recha Freier, a woman in charge of youth emigration, tried to save some of the threatened Polish Jews by putting them on priority lists for transports to Palestine. The Reichsvereinigung officials—in particular Otto Hirsch, its administrative director—were determined to keep all emigration slots for German Jews only and insisted that the Polish Jews be sent to the General Government.
²³³
Apparently Hirsch even threatened Freier with the Gestapo. She escaped and managed to send one transport on its way to Palestine (using forged documents in the process) but never forgave the Berlin Jewish establishment. Leo Baeck was not spared Freier’s wrath: she longed for the day, she wrote after the war, “when this man celebrated as a hero has his halo removed.”
²³⁴

On December 9, 1939, Klemperer recorded: “I was in the Jewish Community House [the Dresden office of the Reichsvereinigung], 3 Zeughausstrasse, beside the burned down and leveled synagogue, to pay my tax and Winter Aid. Considerable activity: the coupons for gingerbread and chocolate were being cut from the food ration cards…. The clothing cards had to be surrendered as well: Jews receive clothing only on special application to the community. Those were the kind of small unpleasantnesses that no longer count. Then the Party official present wanted to talk to me:…You must leave your house by April 1; you can sell it, rent it out, leave it empty: that’s your business, only you have to be out; you are entitled to a room. Since your wife is Aryan, you will be allocated two rooms if possible. The man was not at all uncivil, he also completely appreciated the difficulties we shall face, without anyone at all benefiting as a result—the sadistic machine simply rolls over us.”
²³⁵