Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945

Saul Friedlander

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061971402
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an abridged edition of Saul Friedländer's definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume history of the Holocaust: Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.

The book's first part, dealing with the National Socialist campaign of oppression, restores the voices of Jews who were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality following the Nazi accession to power. Friedländer also provides the accounts of the persecutors themselves—and, perhaps most telling of all, the testimonies of ordinary German citizens who, in general, stood silent and unmoved by the increasing waves of segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, and violence.

The second part covers the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews—an official program that depended upon the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, the passivity of the populations, and the willingness of the victims to submit in desperate hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise.

A monumental, multifaceted study now contained in a single volume, Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an essential study of a dark and complex history.

PART I

PERSECUTION

January 1933–August 1939

I would not wish to be a Jew in Germany.

—HERMANN GÖRING,
NOVEMBER 12, 1938

CHAPTER 1

Into the Third Reich

January 1933–December 1933

THE EXODUS FROM GERMANY of Jewish and left-wing artists and intellectuals began during the early months of 1933, almost immediately after Adolf Hitler’s accession to power on January 30. As among thousands, the conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter were compelled to flee, Hans Hinkel, the new Nazi president of the Prussian Theater Commission and the official in charge of the “de-Judaization” of cultural life in Prussia, explained in the Frankfurter Zeitung of April 6 that Klemperer and Walter had disappeared from the musical scene because there was no way to protect them from the “mood” of a German public long provoked by “Jewish artistic liquidators.”¹

Prominence and fame shielded no one. On January 30, 1933, Albert Einstein, on a visit to the United States, described what was happening in Germany as a “psychic illness of the masses.” He ended his return journey in Ostend (Belgium) and never again set foot on German soil. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society dismissed him from his position; the Prussian Academy of Sciences expelled him; his citizenship was rescinded. Einstein was no longer a German. Max Reinhardt was expelled from the directorship of the German Theater and fled the Reich. Max Liebermann, possibly the best-known German painter of the time, was too old to emigrate when Hitler came to power. Formerly president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, and in 1933 its honorary president, he held the highest German decoration, the Pour le Mérite. On May 7 Liebermann resigned from the academy; none of his colleagues deemed it necessary to express a word of recognition or sympathy. Isolated and ostracized, Liebermann died in 1935; only three “Aryan” artists attended his funeral.²

By and large there was no apparent sense of panic or even of urgency among the great majority of the approximately 525,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933. The board of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Zentralverein, or CV) announced, on January 30: “In general, today more than ever we must follow the directive: wait calmly.”³ An editorial in the association’s newspaper for January 30, written by the organization’s chairman, Ludwig Holländer, was slightly more worried in tone, but reflected basically the same stance: “The German Jews will not lose the calm they derive from their tie to all that is truly German. Less than ever will they allow external attacks to influence their inner attitude toward Germany.”⁴

As the weeks went by, Max Naumann’s Association of National German Jews and the Reich Association of Jewish War Veterans hoped for no less than integration into the new order of things. On April 4 the veterans’ association chairman, Leo Löwenstein, addressed a petition to Hitler including a list of nationalistically oriented suggestions regarding the Jews of Germany, as well as a copy of the memorial book containing the names of the twelve thousand German soldiers of Jewish origin who had died for Germany during World War I. Ministerial Councillor Wienstein answered on April 14 that the chancellor acknowledged receipt of the letter and the book with “sincerest feelings.”⁵ The head of the Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, received a delegation of the veterans on April 28, but with that the contacts ceased. Soon Hitler’s office stopped acknowledging petitions from the Jewish organization. Like the Central Association, the Zionists continued to believe that the initial upheavals could be overcome by a reassertion of Jewish identity or simply by patience; the Jews reasoned that the responsibilities of power, the influence of conservative members of the government, and a watchful outside world would exercise a moderating influence on any Nazi tendency to excess.

For some Jews the continuing presence of the aged, respected President Paul von Hindenburg as head of state was a source of confidence; they occasionally wrote to him about their distress. “I was engaged to be married in 1914,” Frieda Friedmann, a Berlin woman, wrote to Hindenburg on February 23: “My fiancé was killed in action in 1914. My brothers Max and Julius Cohn were killed in 1916 and 1918. My remaining brother, Willy, came back blind. . . . All three received the Iron Cross for their service to the country. But now it has gone so far that in our country pamphlets saying, ‘Jews, get out!’ are being distributed on the streets, and there are open calls for pogroms and acts of violence against Jews. . . . Is incitement against Jews a sign of courage or one of cowardice when Jews comprise only one percent of the German people?” Hindenburg’s office promptly acknowledged receipt of the letter, and the president let Frieda Friedmann know that he was decidedly opposed to excesses perpetrated against Jews. The letter was then transmitted to Hitler, who wrote in the margin: “This lady’s claims are a swindle! Obviously there has been no incitement to a pogrom!”⁶ The Jews finally, like a considerable part of German society, were not sure—particularly before the March 5, 1933, Reichstag elections—whether the Nazis were in power to stay or whether a conservative military coup against them was still possible.

The primary political targets of the new regime, at least during the first months after the Nazi accession to power, were not Jews but Communists. On February 27, the Reichstag was set on fire. The Communists were accused of the arson, and the manhunt that followed led to the arrest of almost ten thousand party members and sympathizers and to their imprisonment in newly created concentration camps. Dachau had been established on March 20 and was officially inaugurated by SS chief Heinrich Himmler on April 1 (the Schutzstaffel, or SS, was the Nazi party’s elite force). In June SS Group Leader Theodor Eicke became the camp’s commander, and a year later he was appointed “inspector of concentration camps”: Under Himmler’s aegis he had become the architect of the life-and-death routine of the camp inmates in Hitler’s new Germany.

On February 28, the morning after the Reichstag fire, a presidential decree had already given Hitler emergency powers. Although the Nazis failed to gain an absolute majority in the March 5 elections, their coalition with the ultraconservative German National People’s Party obtained it. A few days later, on March 23, the Reichstag divested itself of its functions by passing the Enabling Act, which gave full legislative and executive powers to the chancellor. The rapidity of the changes that followed was stunning: The states were brought into line; in May the trade unions were abolished and replaced by the German Labor Front; in July all political parties formally ceased to exist with the sole exception of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Popular support for this surge of activity and constant demonstration of power snowballed. In the eyes of a rapidly growing number of Germans, a “national revival” was under way.

Anti-Jewish violence spread after the March elections. On March 9 Storm Troopers (the Sturmabteilung, or SA—the original paramilitary formation of the NSDAP) seized dozens of Eastern European Jews in the Scheunenviertel, one of Berlin’s Jewish quarters. Traditionally the first targets of German Jew-hatred, these Ostjuden were also the first Jews to be sent off to concentration camps. On March 13 forcible closing of Jewish shops was imposed by the local SA in Mannheim; in Breslau, Jewish lawyers and judges were assaulted in the court building; and in Gedern, in Hesse, the SA broke into Jewish homes and beat up the inhabitants “with the acclamation of a rapidly growing crowd.” The list of similar incidents is a long one.⁷

There were also killings. According to the late March report of the governing president of Bavaria, “On the 15th of this month, around 6 in the morning, several men in dark uniforms arrived by truck at the home of the Israelite businessman Otto Selz in Straubing. Selz was dragged from his house in his night-clothes and taken away. Around 9:30 Selz was shot to death in a forest near Wang, in the Landshut district. . . . Several people claim to have noticed that the truck’s occupants wore red armbands with a swastika.”⁸ On March 31 Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick wired all local police stations to warn them that communist agitators disguised in SA uniforms and using SA license plates would smash Jewish shopwindows and exploit the occasion to create disturbances. This could have been standard Nazi disinformation or some remaining belief in possible communist subversion. On April 1 the Göttingen police station investigating the damage to Jewish stores and the local synagogue on March 28 reported having caught two members of the Communist Party and one Social Democrat in possession of parts of Nazi uniforms; headquarters in Hildesheim was informed that the men arrested were the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish action.

Much of the foreign press gave wide coverage to the Nazi violence. American newspapers, in particular, did not mince words about the anti-Jewish persecution. Jewish and non-Jewish protests grew. These very protests became the Nazis’ pretext for the notorious April 1, 1933, boycott of Jewish businesses. In mid-March, Hitler had already allowed a committee headed by Julius Streicher, party chief of Franconia and editor of the party’s most vicious anti-Jewish newspaper, Der Stürmer, to proceed with preparatory work for it.

Among the Nazis much of the agitation for anti-Jewish economic measures was initiated by a motley coalition of “radicals.” Their common denominator was what former number two party leader Gregor Strasser once called an “anti-capitalist nostalgia”;⁹ their easiest way of expressing it: virulent anti-Semitism. Such party radicals will be encountered at each major stage of anti-Jewish policy up to and including the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. In April 1933 they can be identified as members of the party’s various economic interest groups. But specifically, as a pressure group, the radicals consisted mainly of “old fighters”—SA members and rankand-file party activists dissatisfied with the pace of the National Socialist revolution, with the meagerness of the spoils that had accrued to them, and with the often privileged status of comrades occupying key administrative positions in the state bureaucracy. Their influence should not be overrated, however. They never compelled Hitler to take steps he did not want to take. When their demands were deemed excessive, their initiatives were dismissed. But in the spring of 1933 the anti-Jewish agitation helped the regime channel SA violence into state-controlled measures; to the Nazis, of course, these measures were also welcome for their own sake.

Hitler informed the cabinet of the planned boycott of Jewish-owned businesses on March 29, telling the ministers that he himself had called for it. He described the alternative as spontaneous popular violence. An approved boycott, he added, would avoid dangerous unrest. The German National ministers objected, and President Hindenburg tried to intervene. Hitler, however, rejected any possible cancellation.

In the meantime Jewish leaders, mainly in the United States and Palestine, were in a quandary: Should they support mass protests and a counterboycott of German goods, or should confrontation be avoided for fear of further “reprisals” against the Jews of Germany? Hermann Göring, since January the number two man in the Nazi Party’s hierarchy, had summoned several leaders of German Jewry and sent them to London to intervene against planned anti-German demonstrations and initiatives. Simultaneously, on March 26, Kurt Blumenfeld, president of the Zionist Federation for Germany, and Julius Brodnitz, president of the Central Association, cabled the American Jewish Committee in New York, demanding that efforts be made TO OBTAIN AN END TO DEMONSTRATIONS HOSTILE TO GERMANY.¹⁰ By appeasing the Nazis the fearful German-Jewish leaders were hoping to avoid the boycott.

The leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine also opted for caution, whereas American Jewish leaders remained divided; most of the Jewish organizations in the United States were opposed to mass demonstrations and economic action, mainly for fear of embarrassing President Roosevelt and the State Department. Reluctantly, and under pressure from such groups as the Jewish War Veterans, the American Jewish Congress finally decided otherwise. In March protest meetings took place in several American cities, with the participation of church and labor leaders. As for the boycott of German goods, it spread as an emotional grass-roots movement that, over the months, received an increasing measure of institutional support, at least outside Palestine.

Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, was elated. In his diary entry for March 27 he wrote: “I’ve dictated a sharp article against the Jews’ atrocity propaganda. At its mere announcement the whole mischpoke [sic; Yiddish for “family”] broke down.”¹¹ And on April 1: “The boycott against the international atrocities propaganda broke out in the fullest intensity in Berlin and all over the Reich. The public,” Goebbels added, “has everywhere shown its solidarity.”¹²

In reality, however, the Nazi action ran into immediate problems. The population proved rather indifferent to the boycott and sometimes even intent on buying in “Jewish” stores. In Munich, for example, repeated announcements concerning the forthcoming boycott resulted in such brisk business in Jewish-owned stores during the last days of March (the public did not yet know how long the boycott would last) that the Völkischer Beobachter bemoaned “the lack of sense among that part of the population which forced its hard-earned money into the hands of enemies of the people and cunning slanderers.”¹³ On the day of the boycott many Jewish businesses remained shut or closed early. Vast throngs of onlookers blocked the streets in the commercial districts of major city centers to watch the unfolding event: They were passive but in no way showed the hostility to the “enemies of the people” the party agitators had expected.

The lack of popular enthusiasm was compounded by a host of unforeseen questions: How was a “Jewish” enterprise to be defined? By its name, by the Jewishness of its managers, or by Jewish control of all or part of its capital? If the enterprise was hurt, what, in a time of economic crisis, would happen to its Aryan employees? What would be the overall consequences, in terms of possible foreign retaliation, for the German economy?

Although impending for some time, the April boycott was clearly an improvised action. It may have aimed at channeling the anti-Jewish initiatives of the SA and of other radicals; at indicating that, in the long run, the basis of Jewish existence in Germany would be destroyed; or, more immediately, at responding in an appropriately Nazi way to foreign protests against the treatment of German Jews. Whatever the various motivations may have been, Hitler displayed a form of leadership that was to become characteristic of his anti-Jewish actions over the next several years: He usually set an apparent compromise course between the demands of the party radicals and the pragmatic reservations of the conservatives, giving the public the impression that he himself was above operational details. Such restraint was obviously tactical; in the case of the boycott, it was dictated by the state of the economy and wariness of international reactions.

The possibility of further boycotts remained open. Nonetheless it was becoming increasingly clear to Hitler that Jewish economic life was not to be openly interfered with, at least as long as the German economy was still in a precarious situation. A fear of foreign economic retaliation was shared by Nazis and their conservative allies alike and dictated temporary moderation. And, once the conservative Hjalmar Schacht moved from the presidency of the Reichsbank to become minister of the economy in the summer of 1934, noninterference with Jewish business was quasi-officially agreed upon.

The failed boycott was quickly overshadowed by the laws of April 1933. The first of them—the most fundamental one because of its definition of the Jew—was the April 7 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. In its most general intent, the law aimed at reshaping the entire government bureaucracy in order to ensure its loyalty to the new regime. Applying to more than two million state and municipal employees, its exclusionary measures were directed against the politically unreliable, mainly communists and other opponents of the Nazis, and against Jews. Par...