Hitler and the Holocaust (9 page)

In the economic sphere, Hitler proceeded slowly against the Jews in the early years of Nazi rule, following the expert advice of Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht.
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He was well aware of Germany’s financial vulnerability and the vital importance of overcoming mass unemployment. Hence, government legislation mainly targeted small Jewish traders and professional people rather than Jewish-owned banking houses, department stores, and companies that were important to the German economy. Nevertheless, by 1935 about one quarter of all Jewish businesses had been dismantled or “Aryanized” at knockdown prices. It was only after June 1938, when the German economic recovery had been fully achieved, that the systematic dispossession and expropriation of Jewish property was finally undertaken. This definitive elimination of the Jews from the German economy obliged about 120,000 Jews to leave the country, almost penniless, within just more than one year.

Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy in the early years of Nazi rule
had to be relatively cautious on account of his domestic and international situation. He could not initially afford to ignore President Hindenburg and the more conservative ministers in the Cabinet, such as Papen, Alfred Hugenberg, Foreign Minister Constantin von Neurath, and Schacht, who expected him to preserve law and order while keeping in check the plebeian antiSemitism of the more radical Nazis. The conservative nationalists were hardly “philo-Semites” or defenders of Jewish rights. They had no problem with the
numerus clausus
law, which had limited Jews to 1.5 percent of the places in high schools and universities, nor with the formal canceling of their citizenship on 23 March 1934. Strictly
legal
measures that aimed at isolating and excluding the Jews appeared acceptable to them, as they did to many Germans, including the leaders of the Protestant and Catholic churches.
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Violent anti-Jewish street actions were another matter. Leading Nazi Party officials themselves euphemistically referred to such gangsterism as
Einzelaktionen
—the kind of SA rowdiness and sadistic hooliganism that was giving Germany a bad name abroad. Hence, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, citing Hitler’s need to refute “allegations of atrocities and boycotts made by Jews abroad,” gave a confidential order in April 1935 to party militants not to engage in acts of terror against individual Jews.
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It was not easy, however, to pacify the Nazi rank and file, who could not understand why any Jewish banks, department stores, export houses, or industrial enterprises were permitted to function in a National-Socialist State that was reputedly at war with world Jewry.
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The “little Nazis” greedily anticipated the liquidation or “Aryanization” of Jewish property, which they believed had been promised to them by the party program and by their leaders’ anticapitalist demagogery. But while Hitler profoundly sympathized with the violent impulses of the more fanatical antiSemites, he knew that the time was not yet ripe to implement a truly radical approach.

The Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935 were a
kind of compromise between these countervailing pressures. The laws “for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour” formally stripped the Jews of their remaining rights as citizens.
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They also forbade marriages and extramarital sexual intercourse between Jews and subjects of the state “of German or related blood”; they prohibited Jews from employing female German servants under forty-five years of age (presumably out of fear that Jewish men might seduce younger German women); they forbade Jews from flying the national flag (the swastika) or Reich colors. The Reich Citizenship Law also provided a new definition of who was, and who was not, a Jew. It differentiated among three categories: (1) full-blooded Jews, who were designated as persons descended from at least three fully Jewish grandparents, as were those who belonged to or had later joined the Jewish religious community, had two Jewish grandparents, or had married a Jew; (2) the
Mischlinge
(part-Jews or persons of mixed descent) “first degree,” who had two Jewish grandparents but had not married a Jew or been a member of the local synagogue; (3) the
Mischlinge
“second degree,” who had only one Jewish grandparent. According to the somewhat inflated Nazi statistics, in 1935 there were no fewer than 750,000 Germans who fell into the category of first-or second-degree
Mischlinge
, in addition to the estimate of 475,000 “full Jews” who practiced their religion and another 300,000 who did not. Thus, there were more than 1.5 million Germans of “Jewish blood” in 1935, according to the peculiar Nazi categorizations. Time would show that differences among these labels could become life-and-death issues.

The declared objective of the Nuremberg Race Laws, according to Hitler’s own Reichstag speech, was “to find a separate secular solution [
eine einmalige säkulare Lösung
] for building a basis upon which the German nation can adopt a better attitude towards the Jews [
ein erträgliches Verhältnis zum jüdischen Volk
].”
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The Nazi leader could simultaneously claim both that he was seeking to solve “the Jewish problem
by
legal
means” and that by disenfranchising the Jews, he was finally fulfilling a cardinal point in the NSDAP program of 1920—namely, that no Jew could ever be a
Volksgenosse
(racial comrade) or a
Reichsbürger
(citizen of the Reich). No less important, Hitler warned starkly that if workable arrangements with the Jews broke down, he might have to pass a law “handing the problem over to the National Socialist Party for final solution” (
zur endgültigen Lösung
).
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Yet top Nazi officials, such as Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, also made more reassuring remarks at this time. In December 1935, Frick declared that “the Jews will not be deprived of the possibility of living in Germany.”
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The director of the German Press Agency even suggested that “Germany is helping Judaism to strengthen its national character and is making a contribution towards improved relations between the two peoples.”
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The correspondent of
The Times
of London summarized the official commentary on the Nuremberg Race Laws as follows: “The members of the Jewish minority in Germany received through the new legislation the right to live their own cultural and national life. They can have their own schools, theatres and sports clubs … But the participation of Jews in the political or social affairs of the German people is now and for ever (says the commentary) prohibited.” The correspondent even noted that Hitler had informed party leaders that he was against arbitrary “individual actions.”
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Although German Jews had been reduced to second-class citizens, many had not yet given up hope that they might still find a niche within the Third Reich. They clutched at the straw that racial separation might indeed stabilize their position, as some official rhetoric seemed to imply, by offering them a “legally protected” framework.
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German Jews had been isolated from the rest of the population, but not all their means of livelihood had yet been destroyed. Some German Zionists also managed to find a few positive aspects to the race laws, though for different reasons. They particularly welcomed its contribution to the collapse of “assimilationist”
illusions. There were even those among them who misguidedly believed that the principle of racial separation offered good prospects for increased and more intense Jewish cultural activity.
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Ironically, this proved to be true for the brief period before the radicalization of Nazi policy in 1938 brought the curtain down on any illusions of a semiautonomous Jewish existence within the Third Reich.

The spectacular extravaganza of the 1936 Berlin Olympics encouraged the hopes and delusions of German Jewry for a little while longer, as the worldwide attention led to a toning down of the more vicious abuse and a halt to more blatant acts of anti-Semitic terror. The Nazis even permitted the token participation of a few Jewish athletes on their Olympic team to appease international criticism.
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Germans were ordered to be on their best behavior in order to radiate a positive image abroad of the new Reich as a law-abiding, peace-loving state. Significantly, Hitler postponed any act of vengeance against German Jewry for the assassination in February 1936 of the Swiss Nazi Party leader by David Frankfurter, a young Yugoslav Jew. But Hitler was only biding his time. As he told an assembly of regional Nazi leaders on 29 April 1937, he had long ago made himself an “expert” on the Jewish problem, and in the next two to three years it would of course “be settled one way or the other.”
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Indeed, in a secret 1936 memorandum on his Four-year Plan, he made it clear that German Jewry would be expropriated in the event of the Reich going to war, an eventuality for which he was already planning. Toward the end of 1937, with full employment achieved, the drive to completely eliminate Jews from the German economy was noticeably accelerated. Not by accident, this coincided with the resignation of Schacht from the Economics Ministry, followed in February 1938 by the removal of Neurath as foreign minister as well as the sacking of War Minister von Blomberg and the chief of the Army High Command, Werner Freiherr von Fritsch. At a stroke, the Chancellor had rid himself of the last remaining representatives
of aristocratic conservatism in high positions, thereby gaining full control over the armed forces and foreign policy.

A month later, Hitler annexed his former Austrian homeland. Vienna, with its prosperous community of nearly two hundred thousand Jews, quickly became a model for the rapid forced emigration of Jewry from the Reich. After a particularly violent and brutal campaign of intimidation, Jews were forced by the SA to scrub the pavements of Vienna with small brushes, watched by crowds of jeering spectators. Jewish businesses were expropriated with electrifying speed, and Jewish homes shamelessly looted by Austrian Nazi thugs.
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The Austrian tradition of antiSemitism (which had molded the young Hitler thirty years earlier) flared up again with an intensity that caught even the invading Germans by surprise. The hysterical reception accorded Hitler on his triumphant return to Vienna in March 1938 provided the catalyst for this unprecedented outpouring of repressed hatred against the Jews.
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The Austrian model of radicalized anti-Jewish measures was immediately adopted in Germany itself. A full-scale “Aryanization” of the larger Jewish firms was initiated by Hermann Goering, the overseer of the Four-year Plan, as part of the broader policy of accelerated rearmament. A decree of 26 April 1938 obliged all Jews to report their total assets; in June 1938, drafts for the obligatory “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses were already in place. The mood in party circles and in the country was becoming more violently hostile to Jews.
The Times’s
correspondent noted that even in Berlin, hitherto “the most tolerant German city in its treatment of Jews,” slogans such as “Germans must not buy from Jews” or “Out with the Jews” were becoming visible.
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Storm troopers were seen picketing Jewish shops and roughly handling their owners. A campaign of arrests led to about one thousand Jews being taken off to concentration camps, originally established in 1933 for political opponents.

The flood of anti-Jewish legislation, the expropriations of businesses, and the general aggression of the regime had inevitably
produced a new wave of Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany that began to alarm the democratic countries. At the initiative of America’s president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, an international conference was convened in July 1938 in Evian, France, ostensibly to address the plight of the Jewish refugees being ousted from Germany and Austria.
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The organizers preferred, however, to emphasize that the talks covered political refugees from all countries. In attendance were representatives from twenty-nine governments, including Great Britain and its dominions, most of the Latin American republics, France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and three Scandinavian countries. The London
Daily Express
approvingly summarized some of the characteristic responses to the challenge of the hour made by individual delegates. The Australian minister for trade and customs explained that his country could do nothing more for Jewish refugees. Australia wanted only British immigrants, and they had no desire to import a “racial problem” by “encouraging any scheme of large-scale racial migration.” The Canadian representative, whose country’s record on Jewish immigration was abysmal, evoked economic uncertainties and unemployment problems. Argentina indicated that it was looking mainly for “experienced agriculturalists,” which seemed to rule out most Jews. Belgium would not assume any international obligations “whose consequences she cannot foresee.”
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Most disappointing of all was the refusal by the United States and Great Britain to contemplate taking in any substantial number of Jewish refugees. Indeed, once America, the sponsoring nation, made plain its unwillingness to open its own doors, it had virtually doomed the Evian Conference. In retrospect, the whole exercise seemed designed by the American State Department as a way to
divert
refugees from the United States and forestall any international pressure to liberalize its own immigration laws.
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The British attitude was no less hypocritical. The Foreign Office successfully managed to keep Palestine off the agenda and blocked any denunciation
of the Nazi government. The delegation pleaded lack of resources to explain its own refusal to take any more Jews, while vaguely promising to investigate whether a limited number of refugees could not be settled in its East African colonies.
The Times
of London in an editorial on 16 July 1938 praised this offer and commented: “The refugee problem can be solved only by a mixture of mercy and cool calculation, both of which were shown in excellent proportion at Evian.”
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Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel and an observer at the Evian Conference, took a very different view, writing in her autobiography, “I don’t think that anyone who didn’t live through it can understand what I felt at Evian—a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror.”
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