A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (44 page)

The same was true in other fields. When Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, he was attacked for introducing “Jewish physics” into “German science.” In 1929, Einstein, who had once lived in Switzerland, wrote:

When I came to Germany fifteen years ago I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew; and I owe this discovery more to Gentiles than to Jews…
.

I saw worthy Jews basely caricatured, and the sight made my heart bleed. I saw how schools, comic papers, and innumerable other forces of the Gentile majority undermined the confidence of even the best of my fellow Jews, and felt that this could not be allowed to continue.
⁴

Among the extreme nationalists who saw Jews as a threat to Germany was a drifter who had moved to Munich from Austria just before the war. His name was Adolf Hitler. In the early 1920s, he, like many other veterans, was angry and bitter about the way the war had ended. Like some of them, he joined an extremist political group later known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi Party, for short). He quickly became its leader.

Hitler believed that world history was a struggle to the death between Germans and other members of the so-called “Aryan race” and “the Jewish race,” with the world’s future dependent on the outcome of that struggle. His views were based on the virulent racism of his own time as well as the romantic nationalism that evolved in Germany in the early 1800s (see
Chapter 9
). It was a nationalism that idealized the
Volk
—the word literally means “people,” but it also came to mean a “race” with a distinct culture and soul. Jews were seen as the opposite of the
Volk
. Hitler viewed Jews as a dangerous force that drove other races to ruin, as well as a “subhuman” cause of disease, disintegration, and death.

The first step in “saving” Germany from the Jews and other inferior races, from this perspective, was the destruction of the Weimar Republic. Like other extremist groups, the Nazis hired thugs and organized a private army to kill supporters of the republic. Between 1919 and 1922, 376 political assassinations took place in Germany. German Communists were held responsible for 22 of the murders. The other assassinations were the work of extreme nationalists. Most of their victims were Jews, in part because German nationalists believed that all Jews were Communists regardless of their actual party affiliation.

Germany’s foreign minister, Walter Rathenau, was among those targeted by extremist groups. Rathenau was a wealthy Jewish businessman, writer, and thinker. During the war, the kaiser had asked him to reorganize the German economy to ensure that the military had the resources it needed. Without his efforts, Germany would probably have lost the
war sooner. Yet many Germans were outraged when he was appointed foreign minister in 1922. Never before (or since) had a Jew held such an important position in German government. Almost daily, mobs could be heard chanting, “Kill off Walter Rathenau, the greedy goddamn Jewish sow!”

On the morning of June 24, 1922, Rathenau was murdered on his way to work. The two gunmen and their co-conspirators were veterans who belonged to right-wing groups. In July, the police finally closed in on them and killed one assassin; the other committed suicide. The government then brought the 13 surviving conspirators to trial. The men justified the murder by arguing that they were defending the nation from Rathenau, whom they regarded as an “Elder of Zion.”

Despite such attitudes, many Germans observed a day of mourning. In Berlin, “hundreds of thousands” of workers streamed out of factories and marched “silently along the great thoroughfare lined by immense crowds.”
⁵

That day, Chancellor Josef Wirth told lawmakers: “The real enemies of our country are those who instill this poison into our people…. The enemy stands on the right.”
⁶

After Rathenau’s murder, the violence in Germany intensified as extreme inflation took hold. During a period of inflation, prices rise continuously as the purchasing power of money declines. By 1923, the value of a German mark, the country’s unit of currency, was dropping almost hourly; no matter how high wages rose, they could not keep up with soaring prices.

Even though Jews suffered from this inflation along with everyone else, they were increasingly blamed for the crisis. On November 5, 1923, at a time when the mark was almost worthless, a mob rushed into a section of Berlin that was home to many Jews from Russia and Poland. For two days, the rioters attacked those Jews and ransacked their shops.

In that tense atmosphere, Adolf Hitler saw an opportunity. On the night of November 8, he and his private army of storm troopers (
Sturmabteilung
, or SA) burst into a Munich beer hall. They were accompanied by General Ludendorff, a recent ally. Hitler fired two shots into the air and announced that a revolution had begun. But within days the uprising was over, and Hitler, Ludendorff, and their comrades were charged with treason.

Reporters from newspapers across the country covered the trial, which gave Hitler a chance to present himself as a “war hero” committed to “saving” Germany from the Weimar Republic, which he repeatedly
referred to as a “Jew government.” When the prosecution challenged such remarks, the judge ruled that Hitler and the other defendants had been “guided in their actions by a purely patriotic spirit and the noblest of selfless intentions.”

The court acquitted Ludendorff; most of the others, including Hitler received the minimum sentence, five years in prison. However, the judges offered Hitler the prospect of parole after serving only six months (with the remaining four and a half years considered a suspended sentence). As an Austrian citizen convicted of treason, Hitler should have been deported. But the judge refused to enforce the law, saying, “In the case of a man whose thoughts and feelings are as German as Hitler’s, the court is of the opinion that the intent and purpose of the law have no application.”
⁷

While in prison, Hitler and an associate wrote
Mein Kampf
(“My Struggle”), an autobiography that included Hitler’s beliefs and plans for Germany’s future. The book romanticized the
Volk
by comparing them to the evil and “soulless” Jews. Although many Germans shared these views, few were willing to go as far as Hitler did. Nevertheless, soon after he left prison in the summer of 1924 after having served only a year of his sentence, he and other Nazis decided to come to power legally and then turn Germany into a “racial state”—one that would guard the purity of the “Aryan race.” As Joseph Goebbels, a key Nazi official, later wrote, the plan was to act as “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

By the time Hitler and his associates had been released from prison in 1924, the hyperinflation had ended and Germany was prospering. As a result, the Nazis did poorly in the elections that year, and their popularity did not increase until October 1929, when a worldwide depression began. Germans felt the effects almost immediately. By December 1929, 1.5 million workers were unemployed. A month later, that number jumped to 2.5 million, and it kept climbing. Once again, the Nazis took advantage of a crisis by blaming everything on the Communists and the Jews.

In the September 1930 election, the Nazis were expected to win 50 seats in Germany’s parliament. To the surprise of many, they went from 12 seats to 107 seats. Hitler now led the nation’s second-largest political party. Nevertheless, in the November 1932 elections—the last free elections in the Weimar Republic—the Nazis lost three million votes and 34 seats in parliament. Even with those losses, however, they were now the nation’s largest party—and in January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. He was to head a coalition government.

Hitler and other Nazis were now poised to destroy the Weimar Republic and “restore” Germany and the “Aryan race” to greatness by ending so-called Jewish racial domination and eliminating the Communist threat. The resulting government would become know as the Third Reich. (
Reich
is the German word for “empire.”) For the Nazis, the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire (952–1806), and the Second Reich was the empire established as the result of unification of the German states in 1871. The Nazis were confident that the Third Reich would be the greatest of all.

To build the Third Reich, Hitler and his Nazi Party had to destroy the Weimar Republic. The first step took place not long after Hitler became chancellor. A fire broke out in the
Reichstag
(Germany’s parliament) on February 27, 1933. When the police arrived, they found Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist, at the scene of the crime. After they tortured him, he confessed to setting the fire but insisted that he had acted alone. The Nazis ignored the confession. Within days, they imprisoned 4,000 Communists and called for emergency measures to “combat treason.” Hitler soon had the right to censor mail, to search homes, and to confiscate property without a reason.

At about the same time, Hitler appointed Goebbels head of a new department in the government—the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Goebbels’s job was to make sure that every film, radio program, book, magazine, picture, and musical composition showed Hitler and the Nazis as heroic guardians of the German
Volk
. Goebbels’s job was also to ensure that Jews were portrayed as evildoers who threatened humanity.

In March, not long after the Nazis failed to win a solid majority in parliament, they proposed a new law that would grant Hitler legislative power as well as increase his executive powers for the next four years. Two-thirds of the nation’s lawmakers, present and voting, would have to approve the bill, because it would alter Germany’s constitution. It passed easily despite the opposition of the Social Democrats—mainly because many lawmakers who opposed the Nazis, particularly the Communists, were unable to vote, as they were now in prison or in exile. Known as the Enabling Act, the new law was later extended for an indefinite period of time.

The same day that the Enabling Act was passed, the government opened Dachau, its first concentration camp. People could be held there indefinitely, usually without being formally accused of a crime. The first inmates were Communists.

In preparation for the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, the Nazis hung signs that targeted Jews as “the enemy of the German people.”

With these measures in place, the Nazis focused on the “Jewish threat.” As part of a campaign to isolate Jews, Goebbels’s new department called for a one-day boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933. The government, which still included officials who did not belong to the Nazi Party, approved the boycott. Although it was not a total success, no Christian religious leaders publicly condemned it, and many openly supported it.

The morning of the boycott, Edwin Landau, a veteran of World War I, put on his military medals and walked through streets lined with posters that read, “Germans, defend yourselves—don’t buy from Jews!” After watching Nazis turn shoppers away from stores owned by Jews, he realized,

This land and this people that until now I had loved and treasured had suddenly become my enemy. So I was not a German anymore, or I was no longer supposed to be one. That, of course, cannot be settled in a few hours. But one thing I felt immediately: I was ashamed that I had once belonged to this people.
⁸

Landau and many other Jews now realized that they could not depend on the government for protection. It no longer protected their physical safety, their property, or their civil rights. As a Jew from Nuremberg explained, “Anybody could accuse you of anything—and you were lost.”
⁹

Marta Appel described what school was now like for her daughters:

[T]he teachers denounced all the Jews, without exception, as scoundrels and as the most destructive force in every country where they were living. My children were not permitted to leave the room during such a talk; they were compelled to stay and to listen; they had to feel all the other children’s eyes looking and staring at them, the examples of an outcast race.
¹⁰

Little by little, the Nazis separated Jews of all ages from their non-Jewish neighbors. New statutes legalized racial discrimination. On April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service went into effect. It removed “non-Aryans” from jobs in government to “restore” the civil service to “true Germans.” The only exceptions were Jewish veterans, their fathers, and their sons.