"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (23 page)

The removal of “alien” persons was set forth in the infamous Aryan Paragraph of section 3, in which the term
non-Aryan
makes its first appearance and which read as follows:
²⁰

(1) Civil servants not of Aryan descent are to be pensioned off (secs. 8 ff.); honorary civil servants are to be dismissed from employment.

(2) Par. 1 does not apply to civil servants who were already civil servants on or before August 1, 1914, or who fought at the front in the World War for the German Reich or for its allies, or whose fathers or sons fell in the World War. Further exceptions may be permitted by the Reich minister of the interior in agreement with the responsible departmental ministers or by the supreme state authorities for civil servants abroad.

This law was officially acclaimed as the means of creating “a Civil Service suited to the nationalist government”; and it received high praise on account of its elimination of Jewish civil servants in implementation of the “
völkisch
racial philosophy” (“there can be no higher task than preserving the purity of and promoting one’s own ethnic comrades”).
²¹
Ministerial director Hans Seel of the Reich Ministry of the Interior deemed this “Aryan legislation” to be nothing less than a “blazing torch” that had “forever cauterized the heads of this hydra [of Jewry].” Yet its intent was “never to discriminate against or degrade other peoples.”
²²
Internally, however, the implementation of the law caused no little disquiet. As early as April 25, 1933, Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick was obliged to admit at a ministerial meeting that the law had “badly shaken” the legal security of the Civil Service,
²³
particularly since according to sections 2–6 of the law there was no legal recourse against dismissal or pensioning off—which was also why it was valid only until September 30, 1933.
²⁴
At this meeting the Prussian minister president, Göring, also emphasized the “particular difficulties” caused by the “weeding out of civil servants of non-Aryan descent,” insisting, however, on the “most whole-hearted implementation of sec. 3,” which was “absolutely necessary for the preservation of the purity of the blood of the German people.”
²⁵

The Aryan Paragraph was indeed implemented “wholeheartedly,” since section 3 was binding law, whereas dismissal for political reasons at least lay in the discretion of the administration (“civil servants … may be dismissed from service).
²⁶
Therefore, it is not immediately apparent why historical research has set forth the thesis that “great restraint” was used, particularly by the central administration, in the application of the Professional Civil Service Code.
²⁷
In such sweeping terms this thesis is certainly incorrect and must be revised in numerous respects.

Viewed objectively, the purges were carried out most extensively where the persons affected had the most contact with the public, where they were employed in administering examinations, and in the fields of education and instruction.
²⁸
Viewed laterally, the purges were carried out quite speedily and comprehensively in the lower and middle echelons, that is, in the lower and ancillary clerical ranks of the Civil Service, as well as in the area of local administration,
²⁹
whereas the ministerial bureaucracy and the high-ranking administrators at the level of the
Länder
remained virtually unchanged. There the endeavor was to satisfy the intent of the law more by means of transfer or retirement (secs. 5 and 6) than by direct dismissal with the attendant loss of all benefits, as indicated by the scattered materials available from the appellate court districts. For example, reports from Hamm show that disciplinary action taken against judges frequently took the form of promotions denied, involuntary retirement, or transfer to a lesser office.
³⁰
Some light is also provided by statistics available from Hamburg from the general and inner administration, according to which the number of dismissals under sections 2 to 4 of the Professional Civil Service Code were relatively low, whereas the incidence of transfers (secs. 5 and 6) was relatively high.
³¹
The same conclusion may be drawn from statistics available from the higher judicial service in Prussia (100 cases under sec. 4 and a total of 482 cases under secs. 5 and 6 of the Professional Civil Service Code).
³²

Procedurally speaking, a civil servant’s mere membership in a party from the Weimar period was insufficient justification for the assumption of “national unreliability” in the sense intended by section 4 of the Professional Civil Service Code, with the exception of membership in the German Communist Party (KPD) or in a “Communist support or front organization,” which automatically led to dismissal on grounds of “unsuitability” under section 2 of the Professional Civil Service Code (First Implementing Decree to Professional Civil Service Code dated April 11, 1933).
³³
Grounds for dismissal under section 4, paragraph 1, of the Professional Civil Service Code existed only in cases in which a civil servant, by means of his activities (in speech or writing or by other behavior), had “exhibited malice against the national movement, reviled its leaders, or misused his official position to persecute, discriminate against, or otherwise harm national-minded civil servants.”
³⁴
In practice, however, as shown by pertinent files in the appellate court districts
³⁵
and in the Reich ministerial administration, even civil servants who had belonged to the SPD were removed from service (KPD and SPD members were given almost the same treatment throughout). Civil servants who had belonged to the Zentrum or other parties were in some instances removed as well or, at best, denied promotion, unless they could demonstrate uncommonly distinguished performance.
³⁶
At least as far as the SPD was concerned, moreover, a decree circulated by the Reich Ministry of the Interior on July 14, 1933, announced that, “given the manifestly treasonous character of social democratic aims … any further membership in the SPD on the part of civil servants, employees, and laborers in the public sector” was “irreconcilable.” All members of the SPD were required to sign a declaration within three days’ time stating that they had dissolved all relations to the SPD and its support and/or affiliated organizations.
³⁷

To this extent, then, the thesis proposed above can be applied only to the
reshuffling
of the reasons for dismissal—away from dismissal on political grounds (sec. 4) and toward transfer or retirement—whereas, in the case of section 3, which provided for the
mandatory
pensioning-off
³⁸
of non-Aryan civil servants (with exceptions for frontline soldiers and those whose service was of long standing), there was no possibility of assisting those affected.

The legal authority for the application of section 3 rested in the directive of the Reich Ministry of the Interior that every civil servant was required to prove his Aryan ancestry to his departmental superiors. This was accomplished by means of a comprehensive questionnaire, to which as a rule it was necessary to append the appropriate documents or, in case of doubt, a certificate from the “adviser on race research” at the Reich Ministry of the Interior.
³⁹
This was all the more true of candidates for Civil Service positions. In May 1933 the procedure for registering and “weeding out civil servants of non-Aryan descent” was simplified by the distribution of unified questionnaires for all departments; there were, nevertheless, still differences in the way these were used.
⁴⁰
Beginning in 1935, proof of descent could also be furnished by means of the so-called certificate of ancestry, which could be used at all offices where proof of ancestry was required.
⁴¹
Civil servants who knowingly falsified information on the relevant questionnaire were generally dismissed.
⁴²

The use made of such proofs of ancestry in deciding on the appointment and dismissal of members of the public service differed from department to department.
⁴³
Since the submission of the required documents (birth certificate, birth and marriage certificates of the parents, birth certificates of all grandparents) was a complicated and time-consuming undertaking, with court proceedings to adjudicate matters of descent further delaying the proceedings, a decree was finally issued by the Reich Ministry of the Interior on August 1, 1940, according to which proof of ancestry could be furnished through certification of the “German-bloodedness” of the applicant by either a Party office or a governmental agency.
⁴⁴
This decree resulted, on the one hand, in increased power for the Party, in that determination of ancestry (and thus the fate) of the person concerned was now in its hands; on the other hand, the administration now secured the possibility of emergency protection for its civil servants by means of such certification—for example, in cases where not all the required documents could be obtained for submission. In any case, such proofs were not insisted upon in each and every instance; many administrations took a great deal of time in proving the Aryan descent of their civil servants, especially when qualified people were involved. For example, it was not until August 3, 1942, that the Reich Ministry of Justice noted that the Aryan descent of some of its high-level civil servants was not shown on the records.
⁴⁵
Although there is no firm documentary evidence, some such cases, apparently, were handled by transfers to outstations (as long as those concerned were not “full Jews”); but retirement was frequently also the conclusion.
⁴⁶

The thesis that the Professional Civil Service Code was applied in any sense sparingly must be further qualified to the extent that, although the central administration may well have proceeded cautiously with dismissals and transfers, it still held in hand, as will be demonstrated in more detail, the most effective means of discriminating against civil servants on political or racial grounds—in the form of the disciplinary code.
⁴⁷

Precisely because the legality, scope, and application of the Professional Civil Service Code were controversial within the administration as well, no exact statistics on the number of civil servants dismissed and transferred were published; and numbers are even scarcer for Jewish civil servants dismissed under section 3.

Exact statistics were hardly possible, it seems, because the implementation of the Professional Civil Service Code was not completed until the German Civil Service Code of 1937 took effect. The submission of the proofs of descent was time-consuming and was also not treated as particularly urgent by some governmental agencies. What is in any case certain is that the number of dismissals from the universities (“whole-hearted enforcement of National Socialist personnel criteria”) was relatively high.
⁴⁸
In the area of general and inner administration, by contrast, the absolute number of those dismissed could be properly determined only according to the documents from the Reich and
Land
authorities that found their way to the Reich Ministry of the Interior; but these are either not accessible or else only partially preserved. An estimate of the number of Jewish civil servants involuntarily retired, expressed as a percentage, is just as difficult, since the information from the Reich Ministry of the Interior lumps together
all
cases of dismissal and retirement under the Professional Civil Service Code.

According to this, roughly 12.5 percent of the civil servants of the senior grade (211 civil servants out of a total of 1,663 permanent positions) retired under sections 2–4 of the Professional Civil Service Code; of these, local administration
Oberbürgermeister
(lord mayors) and other municipal councilors and the police service were the ones most affected. In the other
Länder
, it was 4.5 percent of the senior-grade civil servants (106 civil servants out of 2,339 permanent posts). In the ancillary and lower service in Prussia, the figure was 1.13 percent (with the police service being the most affected), and in the other
Länder
1.79 percent of all civil servants.
⁴⁹

For the ministerial level, too, I can give no precise statistics on the application of the Aryan Paragraph, because in the official statistics of the director of the personnel department (Department 2) in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Erwin Schütze, which mention 317 senior-grade civil servants dismissed, the cases dealt with under section 3 of the code are not indicated separately, but rather
all
cases dealt with under sections 2–4 of the code are lumped together (whereas precise breakdowns are available from the Reich finance administration).
⁵⁰
Moreover, there is reason to doubt whether these statistics are complete, that is, whether they cover the entire period during which the Professional Civil Service Code was implemented, from 1933 to 1937. In any case one can glean no information from them as to the implementation of the Aryan Paragraph. However, general experiential values permit the assumption that the number of non-Aryan civil servants retired under the code must have been quite low, not because of any sparing application of the law but because the circle of potentially affected persons at the ministerial level was presumably quite small.