Authors: Giles MacDonogh
The fact that so many Jews were emigrating to the capital of the Reich formed one theme for Goebbels’s summer solstice speech that year. An audience of 120,000 gathered in the Olympia Stadium. The last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth was played followed by fireworks. He reported that no fewer than 3,000 Jews had settled in Berlin in the past few months. Together with Helldorf he made plans to step up the persecution and later came up with the idea of creating a proper ghetto in a largely Jewish district of Berlin, to be funded by the richer Jews.
After the speech, Helldorf relayed the instructions to the Party. They were to daub slogans on Jewish shops. This upset Walter Funk, the minister of finance, who said it was illegal. When the
razzia
took place, various unwanted elements joined in the looting, including gypsies. Goebbels had them taken to a concentration camp but defended his fondness for “spontaneous demonstrations”: “For the rest this sort of popular justice has certainly done some good once more. The Jews are terrified and they will certainly think twice before they see Berlin as their el dorado.” He was to use these methods again on a grander scale in November.
On June 22 the German prizefighter Max Schmeling lost his bid to regain his title. He had beaten the black man Joe Louis in 1936, which had resulted in rioting in Harlem. This time Louis cracked two of Schmeling’s vertebrae two minutes into the fight, and when he screamed with pain, the German broadcasting authorities turned off the live link. Later Goebbels decided that the film of the fight would not be shown in Germany. Schmeling arrived back on a stretcher. Goebbels sent flowers to his wife, the Czech actress Anny Ondra. He had a weakness for Czech starlets.
The defeat was a return to the embarrassing theme that had haunted the Berlin Olympics, when German sprinters had proved no match for Americans. Not only was German defeat keenly felt in Nazi circles, but the Americans too saw it as an ideological victory. In the run up to the fight, Jewish lobbies had tried to prevent the match from taking place. The fastidious Reck-Malleczewen naturally objected to being told that Germany had been subjected to national defeat.
There was another anti-Jewish
razzia
on June 28 in Berlin. The Jewish hostess Bella Fromm, who was protected by her contacts in various embassies and legations, went out with a friend to survey the damage. Jews were being roughed up by SA men who had daubed various Jewish-owned shops in the Kurfürstendamm with slogans and cartoons. In the poorer Jewish areas, shops had been looted or trashed. Even pint-sized Hitler Youth boys had joined in the sport. The mob had also attacked the Israel department store, which was owned by the eponymous family who had joint German-British nationality.
The next day the municipality had to send people out to remove the graffiti. After Funk, it was Göring who tried to queer Goebbels’s pitch, but even if the action had been a failure this time, the latter would accept no criticism. “For the rest, the fight against the Jews will go on, legally. . . . They have to get out!” On the 29th Jews had to lay off their Jewish employees within two weeks. On the pretext of ascertaining the wealth of Vienna’s remaining Jews, searches for gold, silver, and jewels were carried out between June 29 and July 3. Confiscations yielded 600,000 RM.
W
ith the warmer weather, Hitler was spending much of his time at the Berghof. The Chancellery was in chaos; he had commissioned Speer to tear down the building and construct something worthy of the Führer of the German Reich in its place. A fire broke out at the site, causing fears that the Führer would not be able to move in on August 1 as desired. As it was, he did not have a chance to show it off to the press before the New Year.
In Vienna one of the Nazi authorities’ most valuable weapons blew up in their faces, when Hitler’s Austrian Legion mutinied. In other areas, however, the expropriation of the Jews was going to plan: Louis Rothschild remained under arrest, and all Rothschild property was placed under the control of a commissioner. Governor Bürckel gloated: “This is a revolution. The Jews may be glad that it is not of the French or Russian pattern.” The next day he returned to the theme. Vienna was “overfilled with Jews, who have obtained an overwhelming preponderance in industry and trade, the theatre and other branches of culture and in every branch of public life, a certain amount of time is necessary to clear them out, as we intend to do. . . . I seize hold of the big offenders and lock them up.” Bürckel warned the world’s press that the Jews would not be allowed to hang on to more than around 4 or 5 percent of their property after they had paid the
Reichsfluchtsteuer
and other taxes.
Despite his bluff pronouncements to Helldorf and the rest, Goebbels claimed that he was not happy with the
physical
maltreatment of the Jews—at least for the time being. On July 4 he heard that some Jews had been picked on in Sachsenhausen, which was part of his fiefdom as gauleiter of Berlin. He sent word to stop it. On the 7th he dispatched Helldorf to investigate these obscenities: “I don’t want this.” Helldorf appeared to be doing his bidding, but a few days later Himmler—who had the means to find out—warned Goebbels of the police chief’s questionable loyalty. On July 11 Goebbels took the opportunity to dress Helldorf down. “He looked very small” when the gauleiter had finished with him.
The following day, July 5, Goebbels had a long chat with Ribbentrop in the Kaiserhof Hotel. Ribbentrop and Goebbels spoke about the imminent strike against the Czechs, better relations with Britain (Germany would honor Austria’s debts), and the Berlin-Rome Axis (they needed to forget about South Tyrol for the time being). The German foreign minister also had cold feet about the savage treatment of the Jews. “I promised him I would be a little gentler,” Goebbels confided to his diary. “The principle, however, remains unchanged and Berlin must be cleaned up. For the rest we want to launch a great propaganda campaign about the Jewish problem all over the world, soon.”
Himmler had no such reservations. Speaking to the boys of the NAPOLA schools (National Political Educational Institutes), Himmler outlined the ideological fuel that was generating the SS:
We as a nation of seventy-five million are, despite our great numbers, a minority in the world. We have very, very many against us, as you yourselves as National Socialists know very well. All capital, the whole of Jewry, the whole of freemasonry, all the democrats and philistines of the world, all the Bolsheviks of the world, all the Jesuits of the world, and not least, all the peoples who regret not having completely killed us off in 1918, and who make only one vow: if we once get Germany in our hands again it won’t be another 1918, it will be the end.
Der Stürmer
was naturally in agreement with Goebbels. The worry was that powerful American Jews might spoil their plans. In issue 30, the cartoonist Fips showed Jews defiling the Stars and Stripes. Another pair of cartoons presented a Jewish emigrant:
When I asked the wanderer
Where are you going to?
He said I’m off to exile
Because I am a Jew.
The flanking cartoon, however, showed the same Jew returned to Germany. He was laughing: Armed with a non-German passport he was now a foreigner and enjoyed protection from foreign powers. Germany needed to know its enemy. That July, Munich hosted a meeting of the Academic Society for Research into Jewry.
In July,
Stürmer
dedicated a special issue to Austria’s Jews. It mocked the lawyers Hecht and Winterstein, who were already in Dachau, and cited the fact that 85 percent of Vienna’s advocates were Jews, followed by 80 percent of cobblers and newspaper proprietors, 75 percent of bankers, 73.6 percent of the wine trade, 73.3 percent of the rag trade, 70 percent of dentists, and 70 percent of cinema proprietors. Of course none of this was true anymore.
There was more bad news for the Austrians. The regalia of the Holy Roman Empire were going to be moved to Nuremberg; in addition, increasing numbers of foreigners had cancelled their visits to the Salzburg Festival. In Vienna it was announced that the city was already one-third “Aryanized,” but the disadvantage of removing Jews from public life was plain in the hospitals, where there were already 147 positions vacant. Jews were now being cleared out of their more luxurious homes in Sievering and Hietzing, on the Ringstrasse and the less salubrious Taborstrasse.
On the 6th of July it was reported that there had been eight hundred Jewish suicide attempts over the past few days. They followed the final order removing Jews from their posts. Jews also had to leave flats with windows onto the streets and move into the courtyards, which were always of lesser value. “Jews are hardly ever seen in the streets of the city, except in queues at the special passport offices.” Gentiles could also justify not paying their rent if there were a Jew in the building. The British press reported that Viennese businesses had to place a card in the windows saying that the premises were for sale to an Aryan buyer. Streicher’s special Viennese issue of
Der Stürmer
pointed out—inter alia
—
that Jews still owned or controlled many Viennese papers. The official
Wiener Zeitung
published long lists every day of Jewish businesses going into liquidation. The
Reichspost
was culled in the second week of July; the
Neue Freie Presse
and the
Wiener Journal
remained.
ON JULY 5 Weisl recorded that, contrary to pessimistic reports in the Jewish press, 381 illegal immigrants had arrived in Palestine. They were described as “Revisionists,” including nearly a hundred Agudist sports club members. “I learn that the Austrian authorities are ready to allow a new transport to leave Austria in July, under the same conditions,
i.e.
granting permits to £15 for transport fees per head of emigrant at the price of 12 RM per pound.” It transpired that the British would be prepared to turn a blind eye to 1,000 illegal migrants and that Eichmann had been brought around too.
The coup had been brought off by Willi Perl and his associates. Perl gathered around him the richer Jews who were ready to pay the costs of young Jews who wanted to go to Palestine because they were unable to get their money out. On July 9 the young Jews left for Greece via Yugoslavia, thanks to a Greek consul they’d convinced with a few banknotes. They were going to Palestine theoretically to attend a sports camp. The Yugoslavs had even granted transit visas. Eichmann voiced his pleasure at seeing the back of them; quoting the line of the Revisionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, he told them, “You need a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan.” At the South Station they sang the Zionist hymn “Hatikwah” in triumph.
On July 25 Mosche Schapira wrote to Eliahu Dobkin to tell him that Kendrick had been asked to give an account of illegal emigration to Palestine by the British Foreign Office. Kendrick had not been satisfied by the answer Schapira had sent him from Jerusalem “but required positive steps to be taken against the Revisionists,” else there would be disadvantages for legal emigrants. He showed understanding in a difficult situation, but “the law was the law.” As it was, British policy was more liberal than it might have appeared. Rich Jews were the most welcome in Palestine, but there were quotas for artisans and workers too. In 1937 214 Austrian Jews went to Palestine, representing 28.1 percent of legal immigrants. In 1938, that figure rose to 2,964, or 40.5 percent of legal immigrants. Given that PCO officials could not handle more than twenty-five applications a day, it shows that Kendrick’s office was working flat out to process the applications. Austrians and Germans were always preferred to Poles.
If one of Kendrick’s staff were more sympathetic to the activities of the Perl Bureau, it must have meant Miss Stamper. She suffered a breakdown later, possibly brought on by stress. Mary Ormerod lodged a complaint against Miss Stamper, claiming she had been rude to applicants, told them that there were quite enough Jews in Britain, made antisemitic remarks, and torn up a visa application in front of the petitioner. She resigned soon after but justified her conduct, saying she had gone out of her way to help Jews, which was undeniably true. A report at the time describes the Passport Office staff as being “so overwrought that they will burst into tears at the slightest provocation.” The consul general complained a few days later: “We should need a staff of forty people and a building the size of the Albert Hall.”
The Passport Office in Vienna had already been reinforced with extra staff from Sofia and Copenhagen; so that it could now handle between 150 and 175 applications a day. There were sometimes 600 waiting, all the while preyed upon by black marketeers trading in tickets. The mood was desperate. Some pregnant women tried to go into labor in the line, thereby having their babies on British territory; ushers were manhandled and occasionally struck by petitioners; and disappointed Jews hurled accusations at the officials. Kenneth Benton, Kendrick’s number two, admitted that the one and only time in his life when he had been reduced to tears was that summer. “It gets under your skin you see. In the end it just builds up.”
Kendrick, however, remained adamant that there were to be no more exceptions to the strict policy, and he put pressure on the Yugoslav government to that effect. Transit visas for crossing Yugoslavia were annulled, together with the entry visas for Greece. At the end of July the Greeks officially closed their borders to Jews. The visas were already in the hands of the agent, who kept quiet about it and tried to get the Jews to the Adriatic anyhow, without success. The Revisionists were stopped before they could reach the boat at Fiume. Some 850 despairing Jews went back to Vienna. Later that month the Royal Navy intercepted the
Attrato
with 100 Austrians on board. It was on its seventh journey to Palestine.
Kendrick’s forcing of the hands of both Yugoslavs and Greeks was a setback, closing two important escape routes simultaneously. At the Anglican Church in Vienna Grimes was just off on leave. His verger, Fred Richter, was without question bringing candidates for baptism from among the assimilated Jews of the city. They would have hoped to use one or the other land route to escape from Austria. Richter was also Kendrick’s office manager. It begs the question how much Kendrick knew about Grimes’s activities.