The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (6 page)

In its 1934 British version,
The Eternal Jew
denounced the persecution of the Jews during the Inquisition. At approximately the same time, a first Nazi version of a film carrying the same title was put together by one Walter Böttcher for the Munich anti-Jewish exhibition (also titled
Der Ewige Jude
), which opened in the fall of 1937. Goebbels, who had nothing to do with this party production, disliked it and even mentioned, on November 5, 1937, that it had been done against his instructions.
⁵⁷
And yet
Juden ohne Maske
(Jews Unmasked), as the 1937 film was titled, already used the method that would be applied with much greater skill in the Goebbels production: images of Jews “as they outwardly appeared” juxtaposed with images of Jews “as they really were.”
⁵⁸

The second source of
Der Ewige Jude
was the material for an anti-Semitic documentary that was being shot in Poland, literally days after the end of the campaign. On October 6, Goebbels noted: “Discussed a ghetto film with Hippler and Taubert; the material for it is now being shot in Poland. It should become a first-rate propaganda film…. In 3–4 weeks it must be ready.”
⁵⁹
Little did Goebbels know that it would take another year before the release of this quintessential anti-Jewish production.

Throughout the end of 1939 and the beginning of 1940, the minister devoted constant attention to the
“Judenfilm”
—the “Jew film,” as he called
Der Ewige Jude
.
⁶⁰
On October 16 he mentioned it to Hitler, who “showed great interest.”
⁶¹
The next day he returned to the topic in his diary: “Film tests…. Pictures from the ghetto film. Never existed before. Descriptions so dreadful and brutal in their details that one’s blood freezes. One pulls back in horror at so much brutality. This Jewry must be exterminated.”
⁶²
October 24: “Further tests for our Jew film. Pictures of synagogue scenes of extraordinary significance. At this time we work on this, in order to make a propaganda masterpiece of all of it.”
⁶³
October 28: “Shot tests for our Jew film. Shocking. This film will be our big hit.”
⁶⁴

On November 2 Goebbels flew to Poland, first to Lodz: “We travel through the ghetto. We get out and observe everything in detail. It cannot be described. These are no longer human beings, these are animals. Therefore, it is no humanitarian task, but a surgical one. One must cut here, in a radical way. Otherwise Europe will perish of the Jewish disease.”
⁶⁵
November 19: “I tell the Führer about our Jew film. He makes a few suggestions.”
⁶⁶
And so it went through the end of 1939.

The “pictures of synagogue scenes” had been filmed at the Vilker shul in Lodz. The Germans assembled the congregation, ordered it to put on
taleysim
and
tefillin
and to stage a full-scale service. Shimon Huberband later recorded the details of the event for the underground historical archives kept in Warsaw (to which we will return). “A large number of high-ranking German officers came,” Huberband noted, “and filmed the entire course of the service, immortalizing it on film!!” Then the order was given to take out the Torah scroll and read from it: “The Torah scroll was filmed in various poses—with the mantle covering it, with its belt on and off, open and closed. The Torah reader, a clever Jew, called out in Hebrew before beginning to read the scroll: ‘Today is Tuesday.’ This was meant as a statement for posterity that they were forced to read the Torah, since the Torah is usually not read on Tuesday.”
⁶⁷

The Germans repeated the operation at the Jewish slaughterhouse: “The kosher meat slaughterers, dressed in
yarmulkes
[skullcaps] and
gartlekh
[sashes], were ordered to slaughter a number of cattle and recite the blessings, while squeezing their eyes shut and rocking with religious fervor. They were also required to examine the animals’ lungs and remove the adhesions to the lungs.”
⁶⁸
Incidentally, over the following days the Germans burned down one synagogue and then another, announcing that it was Polish revenge for the destruction by the Jews of the monument to the national hero and anti-Russian freedom fighter Kosciuszko.
⁶⁹

The delays in the completion of
Der Ewige Jude
did not mean that the German population was kept waiting for visual material about “the Jew.” From the outset of the Polish campaign, the Wehrmacht propaganda units (
Propagandakompanien
, or PK), under the jurisdiction of the OKW but often staffed by personnel chosen from the Propaganda Ministry, started filming Jews for the weekly UFA newsreels. On October 2, the PKs received urgent instructions from Goebbels’s ministry: “Of high priority is film footage showing all sorts of Jewish types. We need more than before, from Warsaw and all the occupied territories. What we want are portraits and images of Jews at work. This material is to be used to reinforce our anti-Semitic propaganda at home and abroad.”
⁷⁰
Footage about Jews was shown in newsreels as early as September 14, then on October 4 and 18.
⁷¹
Some of this material was later incorporated into
Der Ewige Jude
.

Instructions to newspapers were mostly under Goebbels’s control, although there was some competition from Rosenberg, and from the Reich press chief Otto Dietrich. A state secretary in Goebbels’s ministry, Dietrich was also Hitler’s press officer and a
Reichsleiter
(party equivalent of “minister”); thus he was both Goebbels’s subordinate and his equal. In January 1940 Dietrich gave confidential instructions to his charges. “It is to be observed,” he complained, “that, with few exceptions, the press did not yet understand how to underscore in their daily journalistic work the propagandistic
‘Parole’
[theme] of the Führer’s New Year’s message, that addressed the battle against the Jewish and reactionary war mongers in the capitalist democracies. Anti-Semitic themes are a part of the daily press material as a clear exposition of the social backwardness of the moneybag democracies who wish to salvage their exploitation methods through this war…. Only with closest attention on the part of the editors to stressing Jewish-capitalist themes, will the necessary long-term propagandistic effect be achieved.”
⁷²

At times the Propaganda Ministry guidelines reprimanded newspapers for not respecting the most elementary rules of the profession: painstakingly checking all details to keep as close as possible to the truth. (Such admonishments turned, of course, into an unintended caricature of fact-finding, that would, in another context, be quite comical.) Thus, instruction number 53 of January 9, 1940, “deplored” the major space given by the
Völkischer Beobachter
to the Jewish origins of British statesmen: “The details provided are mostly false. The claim that after the dismissal of [the Jew] Hore-Belisha, [the Jew] Sir Philip Sassoun [
sic
] remained the head of war industries is false. Sassoun has died. Duff Cooper’s wife is not Jewish, contrarily to what the
VB
asserts. She is the most Aryan (
das arischste
) that can be found among Scottish aristocracy. Also the claim that Mrs. Daladier is Jewish is false. For a long time now Daladier is widowed. The Propaganda ministry will probably have to publish new material about the Jewish origins of some British statesmen.”
⁷³
Incidentally the
Völkischer Beobachter
’s chief editor was Goebbels’s archenemy, Alfred Rosenberg.

In fact, whatever the motives for Hitler’s own tactical restraint during this early phase of the war, “the Jew” was omnipresent in the flood of publications, speeches, orders and prohibitions that permeated everyday life in Germany. Any party leader of some standing had his own individual style in handling the “Jewish question,” and any such leader had a vast constituency that was the instant target and the willing or captive audience of these tirades. Take Robert Ley, for example; his speeches and publications reached millions of workers, as well as the future leadership of the party trained in the centers, which he established and controlled since 1934. Thus, in 1940, when Ley published
Unser Sozialismus: Der Hass der Welt
(
Our Socialism: The Hate of the World
), his voice echoed in many German minds. For him plutocracy was, in the words of his biographer, “one tentacle of the Jewish enemy,” and Jewish plutocracy was “the dominance of money and gold, the repression and enslavement of people, the reversal of all natural values and exclusion of reason and insight, the mystical darkness of superstition…. The meanness of human carnality and brutality.” No common ground existed between this evil and the good that was the National Socialist
Volksgemeinschaft
: Between the two worlds “there is no compromise and no settlement. Whoever wants one, must hate the other. Who gives himself to one, must destroy the other.”
⁷⁴

On occasion, however, it was necessary not to push the “logical” follow-up of anti-Jewish incitement beyond a given limit, as some measures could lead to negative reactions among the population. Thus, on March 6, 1940, Goebbels, Rosenberg, and their Führer reached the conclusion that some parts of church liturgy should not be forbidden, even if they praised the Jews: “We can’t push this matter now.”
⁷⁵
In Dresden, for example, the Church of Zion—which also gave its name to the surrounding area, “the Zion Colony”—was not renamed throughout the war.
⁷⁶

VI

Only a small fraction of the approximately 2.2 million Polish Jews who fell into German hands by the end of September 1939 belonged to the bourgeoisie. The great majority, whether living in cities or in small towns, belonged to the lower middle class of shopkeepers and artisans; as mentioned, they were increasingly pauperized due to the persistent economic crisis and growing ambient hostility. In Lodz, for example, in the early 1930s, 70 percent of Jewish working-class families (comprising on average five to eight persons) lived in a single room; almost 20 percent of these rooms were either in attics or in cellars; part were both workshops and living quarters. The Jews of Warsaw, Vilna, and Bialystok were not much better off than those of Lodz.
⁷⁷
More than a quarter of the entire Jewish population of Poland was in need of assistance in 1934, and the trend was on the rise in the late thirties.
⁷⁸
In Ezra Mendelsohn’s words, Polish Jewry, on the eve of the war, “was an impoverished community with no hope of reversing its rapid economic decline.”
⁷⁹

An important—albeit decreasing—part of this population, let us recall, had been and remained self-consciously Jewish in terms of culture—including language (Yiddish or Hebrew)—and various degrees of religious practice.
⁸⁰
During the interwar period the cultural separatism of the Jews—not different from that of other minorities living in the new Polish state—exacerbated the already deep-rooted native anti-Semitism. This hostile attitude was nurtured by traditional Catholic anti-Judaism, by an increasingly fierce Polish economic drive to force the Jews out of their trades and professions, as well as by mythical stories of Jewish subversive activities against Polish national claims and rights.
⁸¹

In this fervently Catholic country, the role of the church was decisive. A study of the Catholic press between the wars opened with a resolutely unambiguous statement: “All Catholic journalists agreed…that there was indeed a ‘Jewish question’ and that the Jewish minority in Poland posed a threat to the identity of the Polish nation and the independence of the Polish state.” The general tenor of the articles published in the Catholic press was that all attempts to ease the conflict between Poles and Jews were unrealistic. There were even proposals to abandon the existing policy that recognized Jews as equal citizens, with the same rights as Poles. The Catholic press warned against treating the situation lightly: “There could not be two masters (
gospodarze
) on Polish soil, especially since the Jewish community contributed to the demoralization of the Poles, took jobs and income away from Poles, and was destroying the national culture.”
⁸²
Once such a premise was accepted, the only diverging views dealt with the methods to be used in the anti-Jewish struggle. While part of the Catholic press (and hierarchy) advocated fighting “Jewish ideas,” rather than the Jews as human beings, others went further and advocated “self-defense” even if it resulted in Jewish loss of life.
⁸³

The press incitement was but the reflection of the church hierarchy’s attitudes during the interwar period (and before). Even if one disregards the most extreme anti-Jewish attacks stemming from the Polish clergy, those of one Father Stanislaw Trzeciak, for example, the episcopate’s voice was threatening enough. Thus, in 1920, during the Polish-Soviet war, a group of Polish bishops issued the following statement in regard to the Jewish role in world events: “The race which has the leadership of Bolshevism in its hands has already in the past subjugated the whole world by means of gold and the banks, and now, driven by the everlasting imperialist greed that flows in its veins, is already aiming at the final subjugation of the nations under the yoke of its rule.”
⁸⁴

In a pastoral letter issued on February 29, 1936, Cardinal August Hlond, the highest authority in the Catholic Church in Poland, tried to restrain the growing wave of anti-Jewish violence: “It is a fact,” the cardinal stated, “that Jews are waging war against the Catholic Church, that they are steeped in free-thinking and constitute the vanguard of atheism, the Bolshevik movement and revolutionary activity. It is a fact that the Jews have a corrupting influence on morals, and that their publishing houses are spreading pornography. It is true that the Jews are perpetrating fraud, practicing usury, and dealing in prostitution…. But let us be fair. Not all Jews are this way…. One may love one’s nation more, but one may not hate anyone. Not even Jews…. One should stay away from the harmful moral influence of Jews, keep away from their anti-Christian culture, and especially boycott the Jewish press and demoralizing Jewish publications. But it is forbidden to assault, beat up, maim, or slander Jews.”
⁸⁵