The Transfer Agreement (40 page)

The German Zionist memo to Hitler contained the obligatory appeals to Nazi prejudices about Jewish laziness and calculated comparisons between the two movements. This was the only way to converse with the Nazi regime. Nazis were philosophically trained to dismiss as standard Jewish trick-ery any logical, civil, and legal arguments by Jews laden with words of justice and compassion. On the other hand, Nazis weren't fooled by the obvious Zionist use of Aryan rhetoric. Rather, they viewed the Zionists not as partners, but as agents who would act not out of interest for the Reich but for their own Jewish national aspirations. And while the Zionists indeed spoke in the Aryan context, they recognized fully that they were speaking to an enemy of the Jews, an enemy who understood that Zionist approaches were not for the sake of the German state, but for the sake of the Jewish state. This mutual understanding was even set down in writing in the Zionists' June 21 memo to Hitler: "For its objectives, Zionism feels able to enlist the cooperation of a basically anti-Jewish government, because dealing with the Jewish problem does not involve sentimentality." The memo added that it was precisely that absence of Zionist sentimentality about the anti-Semitic regimes it worked with that committed the worldwide Zionist movement against the anti-Nazi boycott.
⁴⁶

Perhaps no more dramatic example of German Zionism versus German Jewry exists than a
luedische Rundschau
article entitled "Wear
It
with Pride, the Yellow Spot!," written by editor Robert Weltsch. This article appeared April 4, 1933, as one of the first German Jewish comments following the shock of the aborted April First anti-Jewish boycott action. Decades after the fact, Weltsch's article is held up as an act of courage comforting the Jewish community in a moment of anguish while the nation around them was reviving the medieval concept of Jews wearing an identifying yellow spot on their clothing.

In fact, Weltsch's article was a barbed chastisement of German Jewish assimilation in Germany at the very moment when Jews were struggling to preserve their legal status as citizens. Weltsch's words:

Apri 1
,
1933
will remain an important date in the annals ofthe German Jew and the entire Jewish people. The events of that day have not only a political and economic, but also moral side .... Our concern is the moral aspect. ... On April 1
,
the German Jews received a lesson which goes much deeper than even its embittered and today triumphant opponents can guess .... Our concern is how does Jewry react to all this.

Apri 1
,
1933
can be a day of Jewish awakening and Jewish rebirth.
If
the Jews want it to be.
If
the Jews are mature enough and possess sufficient inner greatness . . . . We must recommend that during these days the publication which stood at the cradle of Zionism, Theodor Herzl's
Judenstaat,
be distributed among Jews and non-Jews in hundreds of thousands of copies.

We Jews who have been brought up in the spirit of Theodor Herzl are not accusing today-we only seek to understand. And to ask ourselves where our own guilt lies, how we have sinned .... Jewry bears a heavy burden of guilt because not only did it not heed Theodor Herzl's call, it even partially ridiculed it .... It is not true that the Jews are traitors to the German nation.
If
they have committed treason, it was directed against themselves, against Jewry.

Because every Jew did not proudly bear his Jewishness, because he wanted nothing to do with the Jewish question, he shares the guilt for all Jewry's humiliation. Despite all the bitterness we feel reading the National Socialist calls for [an anti-Jewish] boycott ... we can still be grateful ... for one thing. The [boycott] guidelines state in paragraph 3: ... ''this concerns businesses which belong to members of the Jewish race. Religion is irrelevant. Businessmen who have been baptized Catholics or Protestants or dissidents of the Jewish race are, for the purposes of this decree, Jews."

This is a reminder for all traitors to Jewry. He who sneaks away from the community [by assimilating] in order to improve his own situation should not be rewarded for his treason. This attitude toward renegades contains the beginning of a clarification. . . . To be a renegade is shameful; but so long as the world put a premium on it, it appeared to be advantageous. Now it is an advantage no longer. A Jew is being identified as such. He is given the yellow spot.

The fact that the boycott leadership decreed that boycotted businesses be identified with "a yellow spot on a black background" is a tremendous symbol. This measure is meant to be a stigma, a show of contempt. We accept it, and we want to make it a badge of honor .... Among other symbols and inscriptions, many store windows were painted with a big Star of David. Jews, pick it up ... and carry it with pride!

... If
National Socialism recognizes this state of affairs, it would no doubt wish as its Jewish partner a Jewry which values its honor.
⁴⁷

Only a few of the dramatic catchphrases from Weltsch's article have been remembered, hence the myth that his words were an act of comfort. But for the 97 percent of German Jewry who rejected Zionism and accepted German assimilation,
⁴⁸
Weltsch's denigrations and dramatic calls for a bold abandonment of ten centuries of German existence were painful and foreboding. His words signaled the beginning of what Diaspora Jews had always feared about Zionism-the day it would be used as the legal and moral pretext for forcing Jews out of European society.

The broken-line triangle between German Jews, Zionism, and Nazism, now filled in by tears, blood, and hate, explains how a fringe minority of German Jews-numbering just a small percent of the community-assumed emergency custody of
550,000
men, women, and children. Based on that custodial privilege, the Zionist movement in Palestine, Germany, Great Britain, and America continued to debate how best to claim the Jewish nation waiting within the borders of the Third Reich.

M
OST
J
EWS
in America and Europe committed to political and economic battle with the Reich were also avid Zionists. But many of them possessed a Diaspora Zionist orientation; that is, they valued the right to live in the nations of the world as coequal to, not mutually exclusive with, the
right of return
.

To most Diaspora Jews, the tug of Palestine and the right of assimilated citizenship elsewhere represented a
choice
rather than a
conflict.
With the ascent of Hitler, these Jews would not tolerate one right to be subordinated to the other. While their political agitation often included demands to open the gates of Palestine to German Jews, care was taken not to abandon the struggle to defeat Nazi persecution of those Jews who wanted to stay. In fact, as Hitler became a progressively deadlier menace, most Jews felt the work for Palestine should be prioritized
second.
First and foremost was the battle to save German Jews in the context of their right to live freely in Europe.

That meant boycott and protest. It was emotionally impossible for Jewish circles to do otherwise. The daily reports of outrageous atrocities and persecution cried out for a punitive reaction.

Examples: In mid-May
I933,
The Manchester Guardian
and
The London Jewish Chronicle
reported that a Berlin Jew picked up by Storm Troopers was not seen again until his body was discovered two weeks later amid sewage outside the city. The victim had been "horribly mutilated, his face had been smashed in and his lips had been cut open."
¹

On June 9,
The Jewish Chronicle
reported how a squad of four Brownshirts broke into a Berlin dressmaker's apartment at
2:30 A.M.
The Nazis decided to "squeeze the Jewish blood" out ofthe eighteen-year-old son. "In front of the parents they ... started beating him with whips. One sat on his head, another on his feet, and the other two beat him for ten minutes. All the time, the parents were ordered to keep their eyes wide open and watch the scene .... [Then] they decided ... to cut out a swastika on his forehead so that he should remember 'the good times of Nazi rule.' But, not with a knife was the ... work done, but with their revolvers. Each of the four Nazis kept hitting the boy on the head, so as to form the wound into a swastika. The boy's face was a mass of raw flesh, and so was most of his body." The Brownshirts left the house with a warning not to "tell stories about Nazis."
²

In late June,
The Jewish Chronicle
reported the invasion of a Jewish clothes merchant's home in the fashionable section of Berlin. SA hooligans "broke down the doors of Herr Friedenberg's flat and attacked him savagely, beating him for an hour on end with their rubber truncheons, chairs, or anything that came to hand. His groans and cries could be heard out in the street."
³

German Jews knew that it was better to endure silently. To complain was to be marked as a purveyor of
Greuelpropaganda,
which would only bring more hooligan punishment upon a victim's family and business-not to mention actual prosecution, which generally meant shipment to the Dachau concentration camp. Family and friends frequently did not even know the grisly The local NSDAP unit would often order the body to be either cremated or buried before the family was notified. And the Jewish Burial Society was under explicit instructions to not reveal information about the physical condition of any corpses.
⁴

Nonetheless, a fraction of the sadistic tales did leak out, mainly via the scores of refugees who streamed out daily. Relief sources estimated that
90
percent of the Jews reaching Poland by June
I933
had suffered physical violence. About
25
percent of the refugees, including women and young girls, still bore the wounds of torture.
⁵
And travelers—businessmen, diplomats, and academics—regularly brought back stories of uncontrolled street violence.
⁶

Of course, the Third Reich tried to deny that
any
anti-Jewish violence was occurring in Germany. In an interview in mid-June
I933,
Hitler tried to assure a
Colliers Weeekly
correspondent: "Perfect calm reigns in Germany. Not a street has been destroyed. Not a house....
If only all Americans could come over here! They would look about and ask themselves where is this revolution, where is this terror, where is all this destruction and chaos I've heard about?"
⁷

Such calming statements were not convincing in the face of repeated public promises by prominent Nazis to kill every Jew in Germany. Just a few weeks before Hitler's statement to
Colliers Weekly,
Nazi boycott leader Julius Streicher told a meeting in Nuremberg that if Germany went to war, every Jew in Germany would be killed. At the same time, Nazi leaders in Danzig issued a secret memorandum, a copy of which was obtained and published by
The London Daily Herald.
The memo claimed, "Final punishment of the enemies of the German nation, in the first rank of whom are the Jews, will be ordered by Hitler at the right moment.... That which tomorrow may be a holy duty must today be left undone."
⁸
At the same time, a prominent German physician published in a German medical journal his solution to the Jewish problem: sterilization.
⁹

Even the American Jewish Committee, which had tried to pretend the atrocities did not exist, was compelled by mid-June
I937
to admit that anti-Jewish violence in Germany was rampant.
In a booklet entitled "The Jews in Nazi Germany," which they released to the media, the Committee detailed count after count of Nazi brutality.
The New York Times
endorsed the Committee booklet as a believable bill of particulars of the Reich's anti-Jewish campaign and advised the public to reject all
German denials.
¹⁰

The question before the world now was whether the Hitler regime could be smitten down quickly—certainly before it pauperized German Jewry, but more important, before it could carry out the recurring Nazi promise of destruction to
550,000
Jewish men, women and children. Protest and boycott were the only weapons at the disposal of those who opposed the Reich.

So the protests and boycotts continued. City after city hosted Madison Square-style rallies throughout the month of May. Melbourne, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Marseilles. The protest movement in England was especially contagious. Raucous mass demonstrations started in Manchester and swept through Newcastle, Leeds, Birmingham, and Glasgow. The protests culminated in an overflow rally May
I6
at London's Queen Hall.
¹¹

During May, the boycott movement continued to spread, especially where there were Jews to fire the issue.
Cairo:
The League Against German Anti-Semitism demanded that all Egyptian Jews lead a national boycott of German goods and services.
Gibraltar:
One thousand Jewish merchants vowed to boycott all German merchandise.
Paris:
Filmgoers cheered a band of Jewish youths who disrupted a German film; more disruptions were promised for any future German screenings.
¹²
London:
The extensive boycott against German ocean liners was in large part due to Jewish passengers switching to British and Italian vessels; prior to the boycott, half of all Anglo-Jewish ocean travelers sailed on German ships.
¹³