Legislating The Holocaust

The Bernhard Loesenor Memoirs And Supporting Documents

Karl Schleunes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367096533
• eBook ISBN: 9780429978876
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From April 1933 to early 1943, Bernard Loesener served as the official ?Jewish Expert? in the German Third Reich's Ministry of the Interior, the government body responsible for the Nazi's legislative assault on German Jewry. In that role, he personally drafted much of the legislation, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 preeminently, that gradually dispossessed, disenfranchised, and dehumanized the Jews of Nazi Germany. During the first six years of Nazi rule, the seminal period of government-sponsored anti-Semitism, Loesener kept the minutes of many crucial, high-level, inter-ministerial conferences concerned with the ?Jewish Question.? As observer and participant, his experiences were virtually unparalleled. In 1950, Loesener penned a memoir that sought to explain, and justify, his actions during the ten-year escalation of Nazi oppression that resulted, to Loesener's professed horror, in the Final Solution. It was published in 1961, in German, by the journal Vierteljahrshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte. It has never before appeared in English, until now - in Legislating the Holocaust.

1
The Enigma of Bernhard Loesener−Nazi Bureaucrat

KARL A. SCHLEUNES

For ten years, from April 1933 to March 1943, Bernhard Loesener was the Judenreferent (Jewish expert) in the Third Reich's Ministry of the Interior. His position gave him a critical role in shaping Nazi policy toward the Jews. He was charged with overseeing, coordinating, and often drafting the discriminatory legislation the Nazi regime directed against the Jews. He came to that position, he insists, by accident, although his legal training no doubt played a role. He entered the employ of the Interior Ministry thinking his appointment was to its Desk for Citizenship and Naturalization, an area in which he had some experience. Instead, he found himself assigned, temporarily he thought, to clear his superior's desk of the mountain of proposals and petitions for solving what the Nazis called the "Jewish question" (Judenfrage). These proposals, all of them unsolicited, had been pouring in from across Germany since Hitler had become German chancellor three months earlier, on January 30,1933. Loesener's new chief, Secretary of State Hans Pfundtner, instructed him to reply to these petitioners, but to do so evasively. Perhaps the new regime had not yet decided how to address what it called the "Jewish question." Perhaps it did not welcome advice from outsiders.

Loesener's "temporary" assignment proved to be permanent. Rather than returning him to the citizenship and naturalization section, his superior named him head of an entirely new department, one responsible for "Legislation in the Jewish Question." His charge was to oversee and coordinate the drafting of laws directed at removing Jews from what the Nazis believed to be their unduly influential positions in German life and culture. During the early years of his tenure, Loesener played a vital role in shaping Nazi policy toward the Jews. After 1935-1936, the importance of legislation receded in the face of more violent anti-Jewish measures. Nonetheless, Loesener remained, even from the sidelines, a witness at the very least to the roles of other important Nazi policymakers such as Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Goering, and Joseph Goebbels.

Loesener produced a memoir of his experiences as a "Jewish expert."¹ Written in 1950, it was published in a German scholarly journal in 1961, nine years after his death. The memoir has become a major, if controversial, source for scholars trying to understand Jewish policy in the Third Reich. Loesener's account of the drafting of the notorious Nuremberg Laws in 1935, for example, has shaped historical understanding of this milestone event in the Nazi persecution of the Jews. At the heart of the controversy, however, is his claim that he worked in numerous ways to mitigate the severity of these laws by, among other things, wording legislation in such a way as to limit the number of people affected. Memoirs are by definition self-serving, and Loesener's is no exception. Yet it is also true that for ten years, he was near the center of the legislative process and occasionally, as in 1935, at its very core. We gain insight from his account into the making of Jewish policy, into the tensions within the Nazi system, and into the process by which the persecutions grew steadily more extreme. For those reasons alone, Loesener's memoir remains one of the most important surviving documents we have on the inner workings of the National Socialist regime of terror.

The Jewish question Loesener was assigned to address lay at the heart of the National Socialist worldview. The perception of a "Jewish question" was by no means a Nazi invention. The term itself had been coined early in the nineteenth century—as a shorthand reference to the search for the most effective ways of facilitating the assimilation of Jews into the larger European culture.² From that point forward, however, its meaning went through a series of transmutations. By the end of the century, the term was co-opted by anti-Semitic racists who raised the two-fold charge that Jews were both an unassimilable element in German society and dangerous to its well-being. During the 1920s, German anti-Semites, with the Nazis in the forefront, took to blaming all the evils besetting Germany on the machinations of an alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy.³ They blamed this conspiracy for Germany's defeat in the Great War of 1914-1918, a conflict the Nazis believed had been engineered by the Jews to topple the country from its rightful place in world leadership. They likewise blamed the Jews for inflicting upon Germany the humiliating Treaty of Versailles in 1919, for the hyperinflation of 1923, and then, later in the decade, for the Great Depression. Some of Germany's preexisting social problems were similarly laid at the feet of Jewish conspirators. Of these, the most serious to many Germans was the seeming alienation of the working classes from the larger German identity. This alienation was manifested in the large socialist party that emerged late in the nineteenth century and was then reinforced after the Great War by the formation of a German communist party. Undergirding both of these parties was an ideological commitment to revolutionary Marxism, a doctrine the Nazis were certain was Jewish-inspired and concocted to destroy German strength and unity.

The Nazis insisted that the essence of the problem lay in the Jews' racially inferior makeup. The idea that they (or other nationalities, for that matter) constituted a racial group was a product of late nineteenth-century pseudo-science.⁴ Racial theorists in Germany and elsewhere, heavily influenced by Social Darwinism, fabricated theories that divided ethnic groups into pseudo-biological entities they called races. The divisions of race, they claimed, determined human difference. For them, race was far more fundamental than the divisions of nationality, religion, or social class. In addition to biology, race theorists borrowed heavily from late eighteenth-century linguistic theories about language families. Racists combined biology and linguistic theory to construct pseudo-scientific explanations of human difference. The synthesis of their borrowings became the familiar racist categories used by the Nazis—"Aryan" (Germanic) and "Semitic" (Jewish), taken from terms initially used for language families.⁵

Central to all race theories was the proposition that the different races were by any measure unequal, be it physically, socially, intellectually, or morally. Some were innately superior, others innately inferior. German racial theorists ranked their own Aryan race above all others, although they also included the English, Dutch, and Scandinavian peoples in the Aryan category. Jews, on the other hand, were almost always placed at the bottom of the scale, deemed not only inferior but also innately evil. German racists almost universally saw them as an immoral and parasitic race that, through deceit arid superficial cleverness, managed to exercise a unique penchant to do evil. Thus, when evil deeds needed to be explained, as they did for many Germans in the aftermath of the Great War, the evildoers were already among them.

Because the Jews' inferiority supposedly resided in biological makeup (most racists called it inferior "blood"), the most evil of their machinations was their perverse desire for infusing that inferior blood into that of the superior Aryan race. By this means, every marriage and every act of sexual intercourse between Jew and Aryan served to defile Aryan purity. Thus did every such act dilute the purity of the superior Aryans and weaken them in the face of their racial enemies. So heinous was this act of race mixing that in Mein Kampf, Hitler had called it "the original sin"⁶ through which Aryan man had fallen from the original Eden of racial purity.

Paradoxically, these theories assigned extraordinary power to a very small number of people. The German census of 1925 showed less than 1 percent (568,000) of its population was Jewish, Moreover, during the course of the nineteenth century, German Jews had been emancipated from the castelike restrictions medieval traditions had imposed upon them and had become enthusiastic and patriotic citizens. By late in the century, their assimilation into German life and culture seemed virtually complete. Few would have thought it reversible. Law, medicine, journalism, the arts, the economy—all benefited from the contributions of Jews. So high were the rates of intermarriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans that by 1900 Jewish religious leaders expressed concern about the possible disappearance of Jews as a distinct people.⁷ It was a setting in which Jews, and many Germans, could dismiss the race theorists and their followers as remnants of an unenlightened past.

Germany's sacrifices in the Great War and its defeat in November 1918 transformed the national consciousness—a transformation whose impact can hardly be overestimated. Germans had believed in their country's innocence when the war broke out in 1914; they had expected a quick victory probably by Christmas. During the war, they had made extraordinary sacrifices on the battlefield and on the home front; they had been told for four years that they were winning the war. And then, seemingly overnight, they were told they had been defeated, this while German armies were still deep in enemy territory. The loss shattered the framework within which most Germans understood their world. An additional blow came in the form of the Treaty of Versailles, in which Germany was forced to admit responsibility for starting the war and was therefore commanded to pay for a major portion of its damages. Confusion and resentment fed upon each other in the popular mind, creating the venomous climate in which the likes of Hitler and the Nazis could flourish.

Some of the clouds of what is often called the "poisoned politics" of the postwar era had begun to gather even before the war ended. As the demands for sacrifice upon the home front increased, anti-Semites raised questions about whether the burdens were being equitably shared. In 1916, the army leadership, suspicious that Jews might not be contributing their fair share to the war effort, ordered a secret census of their numbers in the military.⁸ When the census revealed that Jews were probably proportionally overrepresented in the ranks of the military, the results were hushed up. By the early 1920s, right-wing racist politicians were blaming Germany's Jews for having "stabbed" the army in the back by calling for peace when victory was, they claimed, just around the corner. Extremists, Hitler among them, went further, charging not merely that Jews had brought on the defeat but that a worldwide Jewish conspiracy had plotted the war itself. Thus, contrary to the dictates of the Versailles Treaty, the Nazis claimed that Jews, not Germans, had caused the war. And they had done so in order to enable the Jewish race to prevail over that of the superior Aryans. Suddenly the "Jewish question," long lurking in the wings of the German political stage, was thrust into its center.

Bernhard Loesener was among the hundreds of thousands of young men who fought for Germany during all four and a half years of the war. He had enlisted in the army in October 1913 as a "one-year volunteer," a privileged form of military service reserved for young men of social standing and educational achievement. These volunteers were expected to pay their own expenses but after a year were given a commission in the army reserves. In Loesener's case, however, the war broke out before his year was over, and he wound up serving to its end. Upon his demobilization, he returned to his legal studies and in 1920 passed his doctoral examinations in law at the ancient University of Tübingen. He began his formal career in the bureaucratic service soon thereafter by taking a position in the Berlin Revenue Office of the Prussian Customs Union. From there, he was eventually moved to several posts in Silesia, where, in 1931, by his account, he joined a local branch of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. He did so, he wrote, because "I wrongly assumed that only this party could succeed in rescuing Germany from the not-so-rosy-situation in which it found itself back then."⁹

He gave no indication in his memoir about whether the party's position on the "Jewish question" was a factor in his decision. Earlier, however, in 1947 (the memoir was written in 1950), he had testified under oath at Nuremberg that he had joined for two reasons. First, he said, "because I found National Socialist propaganda believable and, above all, because I hoped to see a reconciliation of the conflict between [German] nationalists and the communists [working class]";¹⁰ and second, because "conditions had developed in Germany wherein an overly large number of people had their positions not because of their abilities, but because of their connections to Jewry."¹¹ Widespread as these attitudes were among Germany's educated conservatives, they by no means required joining the Nazi Party. Nonetheless, the longing in conservative circles for reattaching the working classes to the nation's social fabric was often tinged with anti-Semitism, leaving many of them vulnerable to the promises of National Socialism. Whatever Loesener's underlying attitudes toward National Socialism and the Jews might have been, his membership in the party would have been officially frowned upon by the Weimar government. In Prussia, in fact, it should have led to his dismissal.¹²

All that changed on January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor. Suddenly, Nazi Party members with bureaucratic experience were in great demand. If there was to be a National Socialist "revolution," it would have to be carried out by civil servants committed to the goals of the new regime. Loesener recalls being summoned to the Reich Finance Ministry in April 1933 and being offered a position as chief staff aide to State Secretary Fritz Reinhardt. The nature of the position was not to his liking, especially after learning that the Interior Ministry was also interested in him. Here he was already acquainted with its state secretary, Hans Pfundtner. Loesener asked Reinhardt's permission to follow this lead and within days, on April 27, accepted the Interior Ministry position, presumably to work in its citizenship and naturalization section. The fact that Pfundtner assigned Loesener first to work through the pile of correspondence on Jewish matters proved fateful. But it was not the citizenship and naturalization division that Loesener was bound for; Pfundtner's assignment led to his being put in charge of the Interior Ministry's new desk for "Legislation in the Jewish Question."

Because Loesener had not joined the Interior Ministry staff until late April 1933, he was too late to pla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Enigma of Bernhard Loesener-Nazi Bureaucrat
• 2 At the Desk of Racial Affairs in the Reich Ministry of the Interior
• 3 Bernhard Loesener’s Testimony Before the Nuremberg Tribunal
• Appendix: Nazi Legislation
• Selected Bibliography
• Index