The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (23 page)

Numerous additional decrees drastically narrowed any rights Jews still enjoyed. On 12 November the Reich Cultural Chamber prohibited Jews from attending the theatre, cinema, and concerts; on 15 November the Ministry
of Education banned Jewish students from the school system (on 8 December this was expanded to include the universities): a police order following the Reich Minister of the Interior's decree of 14 November gave a kind of 'ghettoization' power to local authorities, who could restrict Jews' appearance in public (in both time and place); the Reichsfiihrer SS Himmler decreed on 3 December that Jews' driving-licences were invalid, and they were in future to be denied the right to visit the sports facilities, ice-skating rinks, and public and private swimming pools of all kinds, and were not allowed in certain parts of the capital city. By early 1939 what was left of Jewish doctors, dentists, veterinarians, chemists, and so on-in so far as their careers endured until then-were one after another forbidden to practise, except with respect to other Jews.72
The SD concluded its report of the events across the country by stating that the Jews `have finally been shut out of German social life, so that only emigration remains as a means of securing their existence'.'
3

During the 'night of broken glass' the Gestapo emerged as head of local tactical operations, acting in the literal sense as an executive in charge of underlings. In Wurzburg it took a leading hand in storming Jews' apartments and in carrying out arrests.74
The power-relationships within the police network-SD, SS, Kripo, ordinary police-also came into sharp relief at that time. The SD, for example, was relegated to the role of sorting out the materials of an 'intellectual' kind-archives, documents, writings, and so on-which turned up during the wrecking of Jewish buildings such as the synagogues. Local SS bands were called in to reinforce the mobs and, in the event, to help keep order. The Kripo was responsible for dealing with criminal transgressions, although its role was more 'political' than was usually the case. Finally, the ordinary uniformed police were to make sure that plundering was kept to a minimum.

The Nazi Party leaders and some of its local members, just like Goebbels, attempted to use the pogrom to reassert dwindled power and prestige at the expense of the Jews. This had been one of the few opportunities since 1933 or so to rediscover its 'revolutionary' ethos, and to become more than a mere practitioner of rituals, collector of charity funds, and overseer of the daily lives of citizens. Typical of what happened in many places were the events in Munich. There, in direct response to Goebbels, the Party had already set fire to buildings and smashed windows of businesses by 10.00 or 11.00 p.m. on 9 November. Friedrich Karl von Eberstein, Police President of the city and Chief of the SS in the area, first heard of what was going on when he received a call from the chief magistrate to tell him that the Planegg Castle, owned by the Jewish Baron Hirsch, was on fire. Von Eberstein was summoned immedi
ately to a meeting with Himmler and higher SS and Gestapo officers at which it was decided what was and was not 'acceptable'. Following this meeting, word went to Berlin and orders were issued to the Gestapo for all of Germany.75
Where the local party Gauleiter was not keen on carrying out the pogrom, as was the case in Hamburg and several other areas, the events did not prove as disastrous."

The `night of broken glass' was the last large-scale public assault on the Jews inside Germany. The SA, like the Party, had been given a degree of autonomy, but both were quickly brought to heel. At the local level, in Wurzburg as elsewhere, from now on the Gestapo was not going to tolerate anything more than `cold pogroms', that is, persecution through administrative channels. If for a moment on the night of 9-io November there appeared any question that the Gestapo was not in charge, by the time of the meeting at Gestapo headquarters early in the morning of the loth the situation had returned to normal. In the last year or so of the war the Party once again came into prominence at the local level, but it was never a challenge to Gestapo dominance."

4. POPULAR REACTIONS TO NAZI ANTI-SEMITISM

Marlis Steinert, whose study of Nazi Germany touched briefly on the pogrom, suggested that the 'violence was almost unanimously rejected, although often because of the unnecessary destruction of goods'.7"
The Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka is in general agreement with that interpretation, but puts it in unambiguous terms by saying that 'the outstandingly characteristic aspect of most of these reactions ... is not so much denunciation of the anti-Jewish acts on moral grounds as criticism based on essentially pragmatic considerations. This comes out in the repeated statements denouncing the destruction of property and the economic damage being done to the German people and to the state's plans for the economy.' He suggests that it is against this background that there was 'a "gradual improvement" in the popular mood, especially after a fine of one billion marks was imposed on Jewish property'.79
Although Kershaw and Kulka differ on a number of points, Kulka would accept Kershaw's conclusions that 'a strong motive for the
condemnation of the pogrom in the eyes of many people was the futile destruction of property'; that such objections 'were wholly compatible with unreserved approval of the draconian but "legal" form of "punishment" which the State itself decreed in the immediate aftermath of the pogrom'; and that on the whole the picture that emerges 'seems for the most part, therefore, a rather dismal one in which material self-interest and legal rectitude prevailed over humanitarian considerations'.s0

Even a number of leading Nazis who were known to be anything but sympathetic to the Jews were appalled at the course of the pogrom, especially the plundering, `but not the action as such'.81
A recently published autobiography of Michael Meisner, a non-Jewish lawyer from a renowned Wi rzburg family, described the `unimaginable cruelties' of the events in Wurzburg. What stuck in his mind, however, as he wrote about his experiences nearly fifty years after the event, was the destruction of property.82
In November 1938 he represented the legal interests of one of the Jewish department-store owners in town. Although Herr and Fran Zapff had managed to get out of town before the pogrom, their property was not spared. Meisner's task was to survey `the barbarism' along with the architect Gerhard Saalfrank.

I had never before seen such vandalism with my own eyes. That all the windows were destroyed was self-evident in the term 'night of broken glass'. But the upholstered furniture was cut up, the Persian rugs shredded, the valuable pictures torn from their frames, tables and chairs hacked into small pieces, and, in the basement, all the bottles smashed and all the provisions, such as preserves, marmalade, and so on, thrown in on top, so that the mass of destroyed food in the basement stood a good quarter of a metre deep. My friend Gerhard Saalfrank, who had not remained entirely untouched by Nazism, marched away, infuriated, from this crudity.''

Individuals from all over the country, as well as some foreign observers, have left records of the pogrom.s4
The impressions registered in some of these
accounts indicate that, though outraged at the destruction of property, they tolerated it even as they witnessed it at first hand. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a Berlin journalist, was appalled when, upon hearing a distant noise, she and her friend tracked it down until they came upon five men in civilian clothes who, in a very workmanlike fashion, were beating out the windows of a Jewish shop. A mob gathered, and stood silently by, nearly 'hypnotized', as one store after another was destroyed. Andreas-Friedrich desperately wanted to do something, and whispered to her friend that they should be ashamed of themselves for just standing there. Later on, she would do a good deal to help the Jews in Berlin. But on this day she followed the advice of her friend, who counselled silence and discretion: what good would martyrdom do anyone? Andreas-Friedrich reflected that there was too much obedience and too little civil courage.85
Not everyone in the capital was disgusted, and some expressed their delight (Schadenfreude) to a Jewish family on the morning following the pogrom there.8h

Also in Berlin, author Jochen Klepper, himself living in a mixed marriage with a Jew, was somewhat encouraged because the population in the city was appalled at the pogrom, and believed that nearly everyone except the young rejected it, even those known to be good Nazis. Klepper was led to feel that the German people 'could be counted on', and yet he was disquieted; the people were a comfort, their moral powerlessness a terrible worry'.87
(He and his wife and child committed suicide in 1942.) The worker Karl Durkefalden in Celle noted in his diary that for the most part' the German people did not agree with the pogrom but did nothing against it. On the morning following the destruction in that town, it was said, the police arrested a pedestrian who dared ask: 'What should the poor people do now?88
The underground Socialist movement, in its ceaseless effort to find support for its belief that the Nazis' hold on the country was about to slip, emphasized the extent to which some parts of the country rejected the pogrom. Their report of events in Bavaria, however, suggested that it was the method that many people found disquieting.89
No doubt many local villagers in rural areas, such as Lower Franconia, were outraged that the trouble-makers who arrived to wreck homes and burn buildings were frequently strangers and city people who had no business in their village in the first place.

While the Churches as institutions remained silent, a handful of individual
clerics of Catholic and Protestant denominations in Bavaria, as elsewhere, dared to condemn the event from the pulpit. For all of Bavaria only rare examples of such dissent have been recorded. In the six-volume collection of documents on the 'church situation', the records sometimes convey ambiguous messages. In Upper Franconian Wunsiedel, for example, two Evangelical and four Catholic clerics, known locally as slaves of the Jews [Judenknechte], were attacked in the course of the action in November by 'the outraged mob'; they were brought to police headquarters, and some of their house windows were broken. There is nothing in the report to indicate whether these attacks resulted from any stand taken by the clerics concerning the pogrom, or whether local activists were merely taking advantage of the situation to settle old scores; only one Evangelical pastor from Mistelgau, near Bayreuth, was actually charged by the Gestapo for negative comments on the pogrom.""
Yet on the same page that mentions how the six clerics got into trouble for not being anti-Semitic enough, it is noted that 'numerous teachers' of the area, in reaction to 'the brazen challenge of world Jewry through the cowardly murder in Paris', refused to teach religion any further, presumably because they were dissatisfied with the less than enthusiastic response of the Churches to anti-Jewish actions.

The situation report for Lower Franconia does not mention clerics, but speaks instead of the `great general reservation' in evidence in the weeks that followed.91
The reports from the rest of Bavaria are similar, although one magistrate said that in his area of the Palatinate (Frankenthal) 'the largest part of the population regarded the action against the Jews as a just and necessary consequence of their provocative behaviour'; those who had no sympathy for the pogrom pointed to the destruction of property and food that would have been better given to the poor. One priest in the Palatinate thought that those who smashed windows were little better than Bolsheviks, and in Nuremberg on the Sunday after the events another priest apparently expressed similarly negative views.92

An opinion on the stance of the organized religions was offered in an SD report for neighbouring Wurttemberg (none survives for Bavaria). The SD said that the Catholics were worried that the terror aimed at the Jews might come their way next. Old liberals and democrats were especially sympathetic to the Jews, while one-time 'reactionaries' such as members of the PanGerman League agreed with the measures.93
In an effort to explain the absence of the Catholic hierarchy's condemnation, some historians have pointed out that some Catholics were themselves attacked as part of the
events.94
However, Gordon Zahn maintains that 'the position taken by the Catholic Church ... was one of mixed support and opposition'; all in all, 'a historical balance might well reveal that the support actually outweighed (in a purely quantitative sense...) the opposition represented by the famous leaders of the German Catholic resistance and the hundreds of priests and laymen who suffered and died in Dachau' and other such places.95
Protestantism was more positively disposed to the regime, and its leaders had 'welcomed the Third Reich'; while not everything after 1933 worked out as they would have wished, they found it possible to make adjustments."

5. CONCLUSION

A recent characterization of popular opinion concerning anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, by Kulka and Rodrique, states that the 'devout' Christian population, along with the Marxist Left, the liberal intelligentsia, and some in business, were 'openly' critical of Nazi anti-Semitic actions 'on ideological, religious, social or economic grounds'. The term 'open' is too strong in this context; the people in these groups said very little openly one way or the other. Perhaps the authors wanted to convey the impression that the people in this category had strong reservations, while a few of them were outspoken in their criticism. In any event, according to their analysis, a second group accepted the main thrust of Nazi teachings on race, while a third, mainly the Nazi radicals, criticized the policy as 'too moderate'. The largest segment of the population fell into a fourth division of opinion, marked by a 'lack of reaction on the issue usually going hand in hand with general ideological and political indifference'
.97

Such a division of opinion is consistent with Ian Kershaw's main conclusion, that in spite of the efforts since 1933 German popular opinion remained 'largely indifferent and infused with a latent anti-Jewish feeling', but that, `further bolstered by propaganda, [it] provided the climate within which spiralling Nazi aggression towards Jews could take place unchallenged'.98
One SD informant from Bad Kissingen in Lower Franconia reported that word about the possible removal of Polish, Czech, and Austrian Jews to the east after the successful Polish campaign in late 1939 was 'welcomed by
Party comrades and by a great proportion of the national comrades, and suggestions were heard that the Jews who still live in Germany should also set out on their march into this territory'.99
Even before the war broke out, as Kershaw remarked recently, 'attitudes towards the Jews had hardened even among the broad apathetic sector of the population'; by then there existed a broad 'feeling that there was a "Jewish Question", that the Jews were another race, and that they deserved whatever measures had been taken to counter their undue influence, and should be excluded from Germany altogether'.100