Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (120 page)

On 1 July 1937, on Hitler’s orders, Martin Niemöller was arrested. Again and again he had condemned the Nazis’ totalitarian world view in his sermons and read out lists of names of affected pastors.
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“Pastor Niemöller finally arrested,” noted Goebbels. “Small mention of this in the press. The thing now is to break him so that he can’t believe his eyes or ears. We must never let up.”
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The propaganda minister and the Führer were in total agreement on this point. In December 1937, while the two were travelling together to attend Erich Ludendorff’s funeral in Munich, Hitler confirmed: “[Niemöller] will not be released until he has been broken. Opposition to the state will not be tolerated.”
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But Niemöller’s trial, which began on 7 February 1938 and was closed to the public, ended as a defeat for the regime. Niemöller and his defence emphasised his nationalist past. The defendant described not only his sacrifices as a submarine commander in the First World War, but also his activities as a Freikorps member after 1918 and his early sympathies for the post-war German nationalist movement. A series of respected character witnesses testified on his behalf, assuring the court of the pastor’s patriotic beliefs. In the end, Niemöller was sentenced to seven months in prison and fined 2,000 marks. But since he had already spent eight months in investigative custody in solitary confinement in a Berlin prison, he was considered to have served his sentence.
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Goebbels, who followed all phases of the trial with growing anger, was livid at the verdict, which was a de facto acquittal. He raged: “That takes the cake. I’m only going to give the press a brief announcement. The Führer will order Himmler to have this guy immediately taken to Oranienburg.” While foreign journalists waited outside the courtroom for Niemöller to appear, Gestapo agents hurried him out a side entrance and took him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near the town of Oranienburg. “There he’ll only be able to serve God by working and looking deep within himself,” Goebbels noted.
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The day after the verdict, Hitler expounded about “the case of Niemöller” over lunch in the Chancellery: “He’s in the right place in a concentration camp. It will be quite some time before he gets out. That’s how it is now for all enemies of the state. Anyone who thinks kindly old Hitler is a weakling will get acquainted with the hard-nosed Hitler.”
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And indeed Niemöller remained incarcerated, first in Sachsenhausen and as of 1941 in Dachau, as Hitler’s “personal prisoner” until the demise of the Third Reich.

Aside from the spectacular trial of Niemöller, however, the ceasefire that Hitler ordered on the Church front in late 1937 held throughout 1938 and the first half of 1939. While he was redirecting his foreign policy towards a war of expansion, Hitler had no use for a major conflict with Germany’s two main Churches. “The boss knows all too well that the Church issue is very touchy and could have very negative effects domestically in case of war,” Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder wrote in a letter to a friend.
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The Nazis’ final reckoning with the Churches was thus put off until after the war. The regime behaved quite differently concerning the “Jewish question.” On that issue, 1938 was the decisive milestone on a path towards removing Jews entirely from Germany. In early December, when Hanns Kerrl made a renewed attempt to subjugate the Protestant Church to state control, Hitler—as Goebbels noted—ordered him to “back off.” The propaganda minister added: “First things first, and now’s the time for us to solve the Jewish question.”
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20

Prelude to Genocide

“The final goal of our overall policy is clear to all of us,” Hitler explained to NSDAP regional directors at the Nazi educational camp Ordensburg Vogelsang on 29 April 1937 about how he intended to proceed against Jews.

With me the main thing is never to take a step that I may have to withdraw or that will damage us. You know, I always go to the extreme of what I feel I can risk but no further. You have to have a nose for what you can and cannot do. In a struggle against an enemy as well.
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The recording of this secret speech was interrupted at this point by cheers and applause. Hitler continued:

I do not intend to immediately challenge my enemy to a physical fight. I do not say “Fight!” because I believe in fighting for fighting’s sake. I say “I want to destroy you. And now, I’ll ask my wits to help me to manoeuvre you into such a corner that you cannot lash out at me because you would suffer a fatal blow to the heart.” That’s how it is done.
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Hitler had raised his voice to maximum volume so that the words “That’s how it is done” positively exploded from his lips in what Saul Friedländer called an “orgiastic spasm.” It earned him frenetic applause from his audience.

Nonetheless, even when he seemed to be losing rhetorical self-control, Hitler knew exactly what he was saying. In fact, he was precisely describing his method for achieving all of his ends after he became chancellor. Just as he had always gone to the limit of what he could get away with in foreign policy, he gradually, step by step, worked his way towards radical measures of persecution in his anti-Jewish policies. In the spring of 1935, he gave the signal to start tightening the thumbscrews, whereas in the Olympic year of 1936, he ordered them relaxed somewhat. Even if his paladins fell over one another trying to “work towards the Führer” by suggesting their own initiatives to achieve his anti-Jewish aims,
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it was ultimately Hitler who made the final decisions and upon whom everything depended. He always made sure that he pulled the strings and determined when action would be taken. Yet despite showing tactical flexibility, he never lost sight of his “final goal”—the eradication of European Jews. In the beginning, however, “eradication” meant displacement and not mass murder. In later November 1937, after a long discussion with Hitler about the “Jewish question,” Goebbels noted: “Jews must leave Germany and all of Europe. That will take a while, but it will and must happen. The Führer is utterly decided on that.”
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In the first half of 1937, Nazi domestic policy focused on the Churches. In the second half of that year, Hitler’s concluding speech at the Nuremberg rally on 13 September introduced a new, radicalised phase of the persecution of the Jews. As he had the previous year, Hitler invoked the spectre of the “global peril” of “Jewish Bolshevism.” But in 1937, he combined his attacks with enraged rants against the “Jewish race,” which he tar-brushed as “inferior through and through.” Because this race was incapable of any sort of cultural or creative productivity, Hitler claimed, it had to pursue the “imminent extinction of the heretofore upper intellectual classes of other peoples” in order to establish a domination spanning the globe. “In the current Soviet Russia of the proletariat,” Hitler claimed, “more than 80 per cent of leading positions were occupied by Jews.” The fact that in his show trials of 1936 and 1937, Stalin also had Jewish Communists like Karl Radek killed, something which, a puzzled Goebbels noted in his diary,
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did not seem to have disturbed Hitler. He merely repeated, using nearly identical turns of phrase, what he had said in his speech “Why are we anti-Semites?” from 1920—a revealing example of the continuing of his paranoid hatred. It was no accident that he repeatedly referred to the German revolution of 1918 and 1919 as a purported Jewish grab for power: “Who were the leaders of our Bavarian Soviet republic? Who were the leaders of Spartacus? Who were the true money men and leaders of our Communist Party?…They were Jews and Jews only!”
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Hitler’s diatribe had the desired effect. In the free city of Danzig, where the Nazis, led by Gauleiter Albert Forster, had succeeded in bringing all institutions into line politically, there was major anti-Semitic violence in late October 1937.
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At the same time, a new wave of anti-Jewish boycotts began in many parts of the Third Reich. They were aimed at forcing Jews to stop doing business and thus increasing the pressure on them to emigrate. “The campaign of economic destruction against Jews in Germany is being pursued with extreme severity,” the Breslau teacher Willy Cohn wrote on 26 October. “The pressure to sell businesses is growing from day to day.”
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The removal of Hjalmar Schacht as economics minister in late November got rid of a further obstacle to economically plundering Jews.
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In an article in late January 1938, the German correspondent of the Swiss
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
remarked that the “elimination of the Jewish element in all branches of the economy…had been pursued for some time now with increasing virulence.” The policy of “Aryanisation,” he added, was “depriving Jews of every basis of existence.”
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Of the approximately 50,000 Jewish businesses in Germany before the Nazis came to power, only 9,000—including 3,600 in Berlin—still existed by the summer of 1939.
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Those forced to sell their business usually only received a fraction of the true value. And those who decided to emigrate had to pay a series of fees, including a “tax for fleeing the Reich,” which meant that not much remained of their former assets. A new economic start abroad was made that much more difficult. In a letter to his local chamber of commerce in April 1938, one Munich businessman who identified himself as a National Socialist and an admirer of Hitler was “so disgusted by the brutal measures and the way Jews were coerced” that he refused to serve as an adviser for further Aryanisation of Jewish businesses. “As an old-fashioned, upright and honest merchant,” he wrote, he could no longer stand back and watch “how shamelessly many ‘Aryan’ businessmen, entrepreneurs, etc….try to get their claws on Jewish businesses, factories, etc. for a pittance.” He added: “To me these people are like vultures, with runny eyes and tongues lolling out, swooping down upon the Jewish cadaver.”
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But voices like this one were the absolute exception. A good many Germans enriched themselves at Jews’ expense, unscrupulously exploiting the desperate situation into which a harassed and persecuted minority had been forced.

This wave of plunder was accompanied by a furious anti-Jewish smear campaign. On 8 November 1937, Julius Streicher and Goebbels opened an exhibition entitled “The Eternal Jew”—the German equivalent of the Wandering Jew—at Munich’s German Museum. It was intended to enlighten visitors about the “deleterious effect of Jewry all over the world.” An SPD-in-exile observer reported that “large yellow posters scream out announcements of the exhibition throughout the streets, and everywhere you can see the face of the Eternal Jew.” The exhibition, the observer predicted, would hardly fail to have the desired effect on ill-informed museum-goers since truth and lies had been “combined so cleverly” that the “lies will necessarily appear to be true.”
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As of the autumn of 1937, the ever more severe execution of anti-Jewish policies was directly connected with the regime’s transition to a foreign policy of aggressive expansionism. Hitler and his underlings largely ceased showing the sort of regard for foreign opinion that had previously encouraged them to maintain a degree of moderation. By then Jews’ economic position in Germany had been so undermined that there was little need to fear their final removal from commercial life would damage the German economy.
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On the contrary, the complete Aryanisation of Jewish assets promised relief for the Reich’s tight financial situation. The monies generated by plundering Jews could be used to finance armaments and preparations for war.

The amalgamation of Austria into the Reich in March 1938 noticeably radicalised the persecution of Jews. In 1933, over half a million Jews lived in Germany. By late 1937, 152,000 had emigrated, while 363,000 were still sticking it out in the country.
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All at once, 190,000 Austrian Jews were added to that number, and that rise, in the short term, seemed like a setback to German authorities’ efforts to get as many Jews as possible to leave the country. In fact, however, the
Anschluss
provided a new dynamic to the process of “de-Jewification.” It would reach a temporary zenith in the Kristallnacht pogrom on 9 and 10 November 1938. In the initial hours after German troops entered Austria, the violence against Jews on the streets of Vienna exceeded anything that had occurred in the “old Reich” after 1933. “That evening, all hell broke loose,” the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer recalled.

The underworld opened its gates and released its most base, most horrible and most filthy spirits. The city was transformed into a nightmare vision of Hieronymus Bosch. Lemurs and half-demons seemed to have hatched from squalid eggs and crawled from dank holes in the ground. The air was filled with a constant piercing, wild, hysterical screaming.
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