The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (18 page)

During the same weeks and months, most German state and party agencies were competing to make life ever harder for the Jews of the Reich. On July 7, 1940, the Reich minister of postal services and communications forbade Jews to keep telephones, “with the exception of ‘consultants’ (the title given to Jewish lawyers after 1938), ‘caretakers of the sick’ (the appellation of Jewish doctors from the same year), and persons belonging to privileged mixed marriages.”
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On October 4, the remaining rights of Jews as creditors in judicial proceedings were cancelled.
¹⁰⁸
On October 7 Göring, as commander of the Luftwaffe, ordered that in air raid shelters “the separation [of the Jews] from the other inhabitants be ensured either by setting aside a special area, or by a separation within the same area.”
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Actually the separation was already being enforced in many shelters, as William Shirer, the CBS correspondent in Berlin, noted in his diary on September 24, 1940: “If Hitler has the best air raid cellar in Berlin, the Jews have the worst. In many cases they have none at all. Where facilities permit, the Jews have their own special
Luftschutzkeller
, usually a small basement room next to the main part of the cellar, where the “Aryans” gather. But in many Berlin cellars, there is only one room. It is for the “Aryans.” The Jews must take refuge on the ground floor…. This is fairly safe if a bomb hits the roof…. But it is the most dangerous place in the entire building if a bomb lands in the street outside.”
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In the fall of 1940 English bombings were not yet a major problem in Berlin; later, when the Allied air attacks became a major threat to German cities, very few Jews were left to worry about shelters.

On November 13, 1940, Jewish shoemakers were allowed to work again in order to take some of the pressure off German shoemakers, but they could cater only to Jewish clients. As for German shoemakers who belonged to the party or affiliated organizations, they were not allowed to repair the shoes of Jews. Those who were not party members “were to decide according to their conscience.”
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In matters of clothing and shoes Jews of all ages, young and old, were actually compelled to engage in complex strategic planning. Thus, in Hamburg, a few months before the war, a Jewish mother received a winter coat for her adolescent son from the Jewish community. In May 1940 the community gave him a pair of shoes and bartered his coat for a used one; he was allowed to have his shoes repaired one last time in January 1941. “By 1942,” according to historian Marion Kaplan, “needy Jews sometimes received hand-me-downs of neighbors who had committed suicide or had been summoned for deportation. Receiving such clothing was patently illegal, since the government confiscated all Jewish property.”
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On November 15, 1940, Himmler instructed all members of the German police to see
Jud Süss
during the winter.
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On December 12 the minister of the interior ordered that all mentally ill Jewish patients should henceforth be confined to only one institution, Bendorf-Sayn, in the Koblenz district, which belonged to the Reichsvereinigung.
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This was becoming technically possible because since June of that year a great number of Jewish mental patients were being sent to their death.
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On July 4, 1940, the police president of Berlin issued an order limiting the shopping time for Jews to one hour per day, from four to five p.m. “In regard to this police order,” the decree indicated, “Jews are persons whose food cards are marked with a ‘J’ or with the word ‘Jew.’”
¹¹⁶
In Dresden the shopping hours for Jews were not yet restricted at the beginning of the summer of 1940, but the
J
card was a constant problem. On July 6 Klemperer noted: “But it is always horrible for me to show the J card. There are shops…that refuse to accept the cards. There are always people standing beside me who see the J. If possible I use Eva’s “Aryan” card…. We go for short walks after our evening meal and utilize every minute until exactly 9 p.m. [the summer curfew hour for Jews]. How anxious I was, in case we got home too late! Katz maintains that we should not eat at the station either. No one knows exactly what is allowed, one feels threatened everywhere. Every animal is more free and has more protection from the law.”
¹¹⁷

Of course all major decrees were uniformly applied throughout the Reich, but nonetheless local variations allowed for the expression of the bountiful production of all imaginable forms of anti-Jewish harassment. Thus, according to the diary of Willy Cohn, a Breslau high school history teacher, his city’s officials did not lack imagination. “January 30, 1940: Jews need travel permits; March 27, 1940: Barber service is only available until nine o’clock in the morning; June 14, 1940: Overseas mail must be taken to the post office personally; June 20, 1940: Jews are forbidden to sit on all public benches. [Only three months earlier, on April 1, Cohn had remarked that along the waterfront there were still some benches where Jews could rest.] July 29, 1940: No fruit available for Jews; November 2, 1940: A storekeeper is summoned by the police after being denounced for selling fruit to Cohn’s wife.”
¹¹⁸

With the help of her non-Jewish ex-husband, Hertha Feiner had succeeded in sending their two teenage daughters, Marion and Inge, to a boarding school in Switzerland, immediately after Kristallnacht. Her own chances of leaving were practically nil (registration number 77,454 for an American visa, sometime in the spring of 1940).
¹¹⁹
Her daily life and chores as a teacher in a Jewish school in Berlin were becoming increasingly difficult: The schoolrooms remained unheated during the bitter cold months of early 1940; soon her telephone would be taken away. In Hertha’s desolate condition, one essential lifeline remained: the regular exchange of letters with her daughters. It was to them that over the next two years she would, at times openly, but mostly in veiled allusions, describe her path to an as-yet-unimagined end.

“First I want to tell you,” she wrote on October 16, 1940, “that we are not in our beautiful school anymore. Yesterday we moved into an old house, which we have to leave again. Yes, yes, comments are superfluous. We do not know yet where we shall teach. I have 46 children in my class.”
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A few weeks later she wrote to her daughters that on the following day she was starting millinery courses (a milliner probably had a better chance of getting an American visa than did a schoolteacher): “Shall we open a fashion shop together?” she asked.
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Under the hail of new regulations, issued at all levels of the system, no Jew in the Reich knew exactly what was allowed and what was forbidden. Even the “Jewish Cultural Association,” the Kulturbund, now a section of the Reichsvereinigung, was often at a loss regarding what could be included in its programs. Thus, in mid-September 1939, after his first meeting with the immediate overseer of the Kulturbund’s activities, Erich Kochanowski from the Propaganda Ministry, the new artistic director of the association, Fritz Wisten, wrote in mock confusion about the contradictory and absurd instructions given him. The performance of Ferenc Molnar’s play
The Pastry Chef ’s Wife
was forbidden, as were all plays with an “assimilatory” tendency (“assimilatory” meaning encouragement for Jews to stay in Germany and assimilate to its society and culture). “I cannot see,” Wisten wrote, “any assimilatory aims in ‘The Pastry Chef ’s Wife.’”
¹²²

On January 5, 1940, Wisten received new instructions. All German composers were banned from the Kulturbund’s musical repertory, including Handel (who mostly lived in England), except for German Jews. All foreign composers were allowed. The same principle applied to theater except, it seems, for the contemporary English repertory: “There are no reservations about Shakespeare. All authors of German descent or those who belong to the Reich Theater Chamber are excluded from consideration.”
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Six months later Kochanowski authorized the performance of Liszt and Sibelius, which immediately encouraged Wisten to submit other Hungarian and Nordic composers.
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Some of Wilde’s plays were acceptable, but this demanded much explanation, as Wisten noted on January 3, 1941: “I ask for permission to submit Wilde’s ‘Bunburry’ [the German title of
The Importance of Being Earnest
]. At the same time, I stress that Wilde is Irish and belongs to a past epoch so removed from us that the English atmosphere should not be able to cause offense.”
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Kochanowski’s directives stemmed from the highest reaches of the Propaganda Ministry, possibly from Goebbels himself. Jews had been forbidden to perform for German audiences, and from the very beginnings of the regime Jewish composers and authors had been banned, due to their intrinsic absence of quality and mainly to their potentially dangerous impact on German hearts and minds. Later, Jews were forbidden to attend theater performances or concerts to spare the sensitivity of Aryan audiences to their presence. Thus the Kulturbund catered to the cultural needs of Jews, with works performed by Jews. Why, under these segregated circumstances, would Jews not be allowed to listen to German music or to perform German plays? Clearly the ban meant that a Jew listening to German music was desecrating it in some mysterious way, or, to put it differently, the music, the play, and the poem would be desecrated by Jewish performance or reading. In fact the threshold of magical thinking had been crossed: Any contact between the German spirit and a Jew, even if the Jew was merely a segregated and passive recipient, soiled and endangered the source itself.

Although the ubiquitous propaganda minister was probably the source of the changing directives given to the Kulturbund, throughout the first half of 1940 Goebbels’s attention seems to have been strongly focused, as it had been since October 1939, on the production of his three anti-Semitic films. As we saw in the previous chapter, Hitler was regularly consulted and regularly demanded changes, particularly in regard to
Der Ewige Jude
.

On April 4, 1940, the minister noted once again: “New version of the Jew film. Now it is good. As is, it can be shown to the Führer.”
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Something must have gone wrong nonetheless, as Goebbels’s June 9 entry indicated: “Reworked once more the text of the Jew film.”
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At least the minister could be pleased by
Jud Süss
: “An anti-Semitic film of the kind we could only wish for. I am happy about it,” he noted on August 18.
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In the meantime the premiere of Erich Waschneck’s
Die Rothschilds
had taken place in July. Within two weeks, however, it became clear that the film had to be reworked and better focused. When it reappeared a year later, it had finally received its full title:
Die Rothschilds: Aktien auf Waterloo
(
The Rothschilds: Shares in Waterloo
). It was a story of Jewish worldwide financial power and profiteering by the exploitation of misery and war: “We can make much money only with much blood.”
¹²⁹

Germany’s best actors, as well as 120 Jewish extras, participated in the most effective of all Nazi anti-Jewish productions,
Jud Süss.
In the film Süss (the character’s actual name was Joseph Ben Yssachar Suesskind Oppenheimer) befriended a Hapsburg military hero, Prince Karl Alexander, who became Duke of Württemberg in 1772; he appointed Süss as his financial adviser.
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Some of the most basic Nazi anti-Semitic themes were the leitmotifs of the brilliantly directed and performed “historical” fabrication. Süss, played by Ferdinand Marian—a highly successful lago on stage—opens the gates of Stuttgart to hordes of Jews, extorts money from Karl Alexander’s subjects by the most devious means, seduces any number of beautiful German maidens, particularly the exquisite Maria Dorothea Sturm, who gives in to save the life of her husband, the young notary Darius Faber, threatened by Süss. After submitting to the Jew, Maria Dorothea commits suicide. When Karl Alexander suddenly dies of a stroke, Süss is arrested, put on trial, sentenced to death, and hanged in a cage. The Jews are expelled from Württemberg. To make the Jews appear even more malevolent, Harlan introduced the figure of a mysterious kabbalist, Rabbi Loew, who hovers in the background as the occult and deadly force behind Süss’s criminal dealings.

According to excerpts from Harlan’s unpublished memoirs, in a notorious synagogue scene, “The Hassidic religious service had a demonic effect…. The alien [spectacle] performed with great vitality, was highly suggestive…like an exorcism.” For this scene and for the arrival of the Jews in Stuttgart and their later expulsion, the director chose “racially pure Jewish extras.” These Jews did not come from the Lublin ghetto (although that had been the initial intention) but rather from the Prague community.
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For the anti-Semitic Harlan and mainly for the enthusiastic viewers, the effect was ultimately the same.

Jud Süss
was launched at the Venice Film Festival, in September 1940, to extraordinary acclaim; it received the “Golden Lion” award and garnered rave reviews. “We have no hesitation in saying that if this is propaganda, then we welcome propaganda,” wrote Michelangelo Antonioni. “It is a powerful, incisive, extremely effective film…. There is not a single moment when the film slows, not one episode in disharmony with another: it is a film of complete unity and balance…. The episode in which Süss violates the young girl is done with astonishing skill.”
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On September 24 Goebbels attended the Berlin opening at the Ufa-Palast: “A very large public, almost the entire Reich Cabinet. The film is a wild success. One hears only enthusiastic comments. The audience is in a frenzy. That is what I had wished for.”
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And the next day, the propaganda minister was even prouder: “The Führer is very taken by the success of ‘Jud Süss.’” Everybody praises the film to the skies; it deserves it.”
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