Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (13 page)

In the course of these racist measures, non-Europeans living in Germany were

also affected by policies aimed at the segregation of ‘alien peoples’. In 1933 and 1934

the Reich Ministry of the Interior and the Foreign Ministry both had to deal with

numerous complaints on the part of non-European states concerning discrimin-

ation against foreigners living in Germany and fears that they too might be

sterilized.
111
In order to minimize foreign-policy difficulties, as has already been shown, the Reich government was prepared to apply racial policy to foreigners

with a degree of flexibility.
112

Since the spring of 1933 the authorities had been concerned with the special

problem of children born of German women and coloured soldiers during the

French occupation of the Rhineland.
113
Initially they were identified by the authorities and as early as February 1935 one of the working parties of the Committee of

Experts on Population and Racial Policy was to consider the possibility of sterilizing

the ‘Rhineland bastards’. It was agreed that the decision about whether or not to

bring in legislation to deal with this matter should be left to Hitler himself, as will be discussed in Chapter 4.
114

chapter 2

SEGREGATION AND COMPREHENSIVE

DISCRIMINATION, 1935–1937

The second wave of anti-Semitism set in at the beginning of 1935 with renewed

violence that went on until late summer 1935. It was for the most part brought to a

close by the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September.
1
After Jews had been largely driven out of public and administrative life during 1933 and 1934, the

regime was concerned to take one further step towards the complete segregation

of the Jewish minority from the German population.

There were three core aims to be realized: the ban on ‘racial miscegenation’

between Jews and non-Jews; the introduction of a separate citizenship law for

Jews; and massive restrictions to the rights of Jews in the areas of finance and the

economy. The regime consistently saw segregation as a prerequisite for the

ultimate goal of Judenpolitik, already in view at this point, namely the complete

expulsion of the Jewish minority from Germany.

Realizing these aims meant more to the National Socialists than the intensifi-

cation of Jewish persecution. They had an important general domestic policy

function since they offered significant starting points for improving the Nazi

movement’s penetration of German society. Demands for a ban on ‘racial misce-

genation’, subjecting people’s choice of partner to the control of the National

Socialist state, represented a radical break with the concept of the ‘private sphere’

that had hitherto been a central constitutive element of bourgeois society. Attempts

Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7

53

to put these aims into practice questioned the notion that there existed behind a

public sphere controlled by the National Socialists an inviolable space into which

the individual might withdraw. The regime pursued the same goal of controlling

the private sphere whilst simultaneously attempting to prevent eugenically

undesirable marriages, and a Marriage Health Law was to follow on immediately

after the Nuremberg Laws. Yet again, there are close parallels between anti-Semitic

and other racist policies. With the introduction of elite Reich Citizenship Rights

(Reichsbürgerrecht), not only were Jews given their own special class of limited

rights but the very principle of equality of citizenship was abandoned. The Reich

Citizen’s enjoyment of full legal rights had to be earned—according to plans drawn

up and announced publicly—by demonstrating that he fulfilled criteria as yet

undefined but which were to be prescribed by the National Socialist state. The

measures against Jews planned in the economic sphere (exclusion from certain

trades, marking out Jewish businesses, complete expulsion from public office, etc.)

not only heralded direct economic advantages for owners of small businesses

under the aegis of the NSDAP; they also offered the Nazi movement as a whole

the potential to use increased intervention as a means of politicizing the entirety of

economic life in a manner that was essentially racially inspired.

The radicalization of the persecution of the Jews in 1935 was closely linked to an

intensified attack on the Catholic Church and on conservative circles labelled

reactionary by the regime. The main target was the German-nationalist veterans’

organization ‘Stahlhelm’ (Steel Helmet), which was eventually dissolved

altogether. After the SA was ‘decapitated’ in June 1934, the regime began to

consolidate its domestic political position on a broad front by eliminating all its

opponents. The intensification of anti-Jewish policy was thus only one aspect—if

clearly a central one—of the regime's increasing repressiveness.

Preparations for the National Socialists’ increasing penetration of the depths of

German society were made at the end of 1934 with a comprehensive restructuring

of the public sphere. The campaign against ‘the Jews’, which was conducted

alongside attacks against ‘the Priests’
2
and ‘reactionary forces’, was intended to divert Nazi-controlled ‘public opinion’ from the obvious inadequacies of the ‘Third

Reich’ and focus it instead on new topics, values, and models explaining reality.

This restructuring of the public sphere was no mere propaganda campaign; it was a

mixture of targeted media deployment, Party-instigated terror and state coercion.

Under the dictatorship, restructuring the public sphere did not just mean using

propaganda to lead public opinion in one direction or another, or influencing the

public ‘mood’ in a particular manner. The regime was not primarily concerned

with genuinely winning the hearts and minds of the German people. Instead the

restructuring of the public sphere was achieved first and foremost as the everyday

life of the population began to conform overtly to NS norms and thus give

external expression to their acceptance of the regime’s politics. The segregation of

the Jewish minority, for example, was not only achieved by a series of administrative

54

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

measures, but above all because the majority of the population demonstrated their

distance from the Jews in the conduct of their everyday lives and were thus seen to

be bowing to the instructions of the Party. Such behaviour had to occur in full public

view, so that the general population’s deliberate distancing from the Jewish minority

could be presented in the state propaganda as the popular confirmation of the

regime’s policies. In this way, the ‘boycott’ of Jewish businesses and the prevention

of contact between Jews and non-Jews (which was ensured in a variety of ways, from

the numerous residence bans to accusations of ‘racial defilement’) took on a

particular symbolic significance—not only encouraging further discrimination

against Jews but demonstrating the apparent endorsement of the regime’s racial

policies by the people at large.

The innumerable illegal operations undertaken by Party activists against the

Jews—boycotts, demonstrations, daubing buildings with paint, smashing win-

dows, and so forth—also played an important role in the process of restructuring

the public sphere. These were not merely instances of excessive activism on the

part of radical Party supporters but part of a targeted attempt to impose segrega-

tion by means of many small-scale trials of strength both against the police,

judiciary, and state administration and in the face of an indifferent majority

amongst the population. It was a trial run for what was eventually to be the legally

sanctioned isolation of the Jews, which would later be adopted by broader sections

of the population, with even a degree of relief. The function of the so-called

‘individual operations’ was as stages in the step-by-step imposition of racial

views onto society at large.

If the anti-Jewish campaign of spring and summer 1935 is seen in this broader

context, therefore, it is clear that from the point of view of the regime it consti-

tuted the key to subordinating the whole of German society to the Nazi regime via

the establishment of racial norms.

Anti-Jewish Violence

The hostility to Jewish businesses that had flared up again in the Christmas boycott

of 1934 was revived with renewed vigour from early February 1935 in various areas

of the Reich, fanned by appeals from regional NS leaders and the Party press.

Immediately after the National Socialist triumph in the Saar Plebiscite of 13

January, when 90 per cent of voters opted for reunion with Germany, the

foreign-policy considerations that had so far militated against the pursuit of radical

anti-Jewish persecution no longer seemed to Party activists to be relevant. As part

of the boycott Party activists organized demonstrations, smashing windows

and assaulting Jews. These operations were focused in Pomerania, Hesse, the

Rhineland, and Franconia. Alongside attacks on Jewish businesses and their

proprietors the activists also targeted so-called ‘race defilers’. Since the end of

Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7

55

1934 there had been increasing demands from within the Party for legal measures

to prevent marriages or sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews.
3

These unofficial steps were accompanied by measures sponsored by the state.

When the Gestapo banned the raising of the swastika by Jews in February 1935, the

Reich Minister of the Interior felt obliged to sanction this ruling by issuing a

decree, which he did on 27 April.
4
Jews were excluded from the call-up to military service, initiated in May of that year.
5
In addition all émigrés returning to Germany, whether Jews or non-Jews, were sent to internment camps from the

beginning of 1935
.6

At the end of April the instances of anti-Semitic violence began to diminish.

There were doubts expressed in various quarters about continuing operations that

had not led to changes in how the general public shopped and which had been met

with widespread criticism and opposition from the populace at large.
7

There were evidently also foreign-policy considerations in play. The government

was anxious to overcome what was by then its almost complete isolation on the

international scene after the formation of the ‘Stresa Front’, the joint diplomatic

reaction of France, Britain, and Italy to the German reintroduction of compulsory

military service. Germany was particularly concerned to improve its relations with

Great Britain. Hitler’s Reichstag speech of 21 May, in which he announced the

Reich’s wish for peaceful coexistence with other nations and its willingness to seal

non-aggression pacts, signalled a phase of détente in questions of foreign affairs. At

the same time, negotiations with the British government were taking place, the

source of much disquiet amongst the British public, which ended on 18 June with

the signing of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. In the period from the middle

of April to the middle of June, therefore, further anti-Jewish violence would have

put the foreign policy of the ‘Third Reich’ at some considerable risk.
8

Whilst the violence continued to recede in the main areas of unrest from the

end of April to the middle of May, by the end of May a second series of anti-Jewish

operations was beginning in other areas, intensifying in June and reaching a high

point in July 1935. The month of May presents a very uneven picture, therefore,

since the first phase of violence was receding in some areas whilst the second was

beginning in others.
9

This unrest came to a climax with serious anti-Semitic violence in Munich at

the end of May. There were open confrontations between members of the SA and

SS on the one side and the police on the other. The reactions of high-ranking

National Socialists demonstrate how inconvenient the government found these

spectacular anti-Jewish incidents at this point.
10
The Reichsführer of the SS

(Himmler), the Führer’s Deputy (Hess), the Gauleiters of Cologne (Grohé) and

Hessen-Nassau (Sprenger) all made public declarations of opposition to these

‘individual operations’.
11

In July the Party organization in Berlin made a renewed attempt to radicalize

anti-Semitic policies by means of a wave of terror ‘from below’.
12
Members of the 56

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

Hitler Youth had been organizing demonstrations outside Jewish businesses and

restaurants since the beginning of June, and they spread rapidly throughout the

city. The anti-Jewish mood had also been stoked up very significantly in a speech

by Goebbels, who was also Gauleiter of Berlin, at the 30 June Party rally.

The situation escalated when the Berlin newspaper edited by Goebbels, Der

Angriff, which was as rabidly aggressive as its name suggests, made an open appeal

on 15 July for people to take physical action to prevent disruptions to a Swedish

anti-Semitic film supposedly initiated by Jewish cinema-goers. On that evening