The Holocaust Page 4
‘When I hear the word culture, I get my Browning pistol ready’: hundreds of theatre audiences cheered at these lines, spoken by the hero in a play by Hans Johst. On May 10, in front of the Berlin Opera House, and opposite the main entrance to Berlin University, thousands of books were burned in a massive bonfire: books judged degenerate by the Nazis. Many of these were by Jewish authors.
The burning of books, and the killing of individuals, went on side by side. On the day before the book-burning, Dr Meyer, a Jewish dentist in Wuppertal, was mutilated by Stormtroops, and then drowned.26 In Dachau, in the last two weeks of May, four Jews were murdered: Dr Alfred Strauss, a lawyer, on May 15; Louis Schloss, a businessman, on May 25; Karl Lehburger, a businessman, on May 27; and Willi Aron, a lawyer, two days later.27
Jews reacted in different ways to the renewed violence. A few, in despair, committed suicide. Thousands left Germany as exiles, abandoning their possessions, friends and lifetime links and associations. More than five thousand emigrated to Palestine. Most German Jews waited, however, hoping that the storm would pass.
In Upper Silesia, the Jews found a legal means of protection. This pre-war region of Germany had been incorporated in post-war Germany as a result of a League of Nations plebiscite, and would remain under the legal protection of the League until 1937. A Jewish office worker there, Franz Bernheim, who had been dismissed as a result of the new German racial laws, appealed to the League for redress. His appeal was discussed by the League Council on May 30, and again five days later. ‘It was no easy matter’, the historian Nathan Feinberg has noted, ‘for a persecuted people without a country to compete against the might of such a major power as Germany.’28
Bernheim’s petition was upheld, and a Mixed Commission of the League, headed by a Swiss diplomat, Felix Calonder, ensured that the Jews of Upper Silesia could practise law and medicine, as well as receive official funds for education, at least until the expiry of the Geneva Convention four years later.
The Nazis did not like to defer to the League in Upper Silesia. But Nazi Germany, for all its internal anger, was still disarmed, still looking for international approval, still seeking to match dictatorship at home with respectability abroad. The Nazi press made no secret, however, of the national goal. ‘We must build up our state without Jews,’ the party newspaper declared on 26 June 1933. ‘They can never be anything but stateless aliens, and they can never have any legal or constitutional status. Only by this means can Ahasuerus be forced once again to take up his wanderer’s staff.’29
Jews outside Germany watched Nazi Germany’s words and actions with alarm. Most fearful were the three million Jews of Poland, Germany’s eastern neighbour, and themselves often the victims of popular anti-Semitic incidents. In Warsaw, a young Jewish historian, Emanuel Ringelblum, was so distressed by events in Germany that he decided, as he wrote on June 2, to begin ‘the intensive collection of materials relating to the Hitler decrees’—photographs, letters, documents, posters—as well as material on ‘Jewish countermeasures’.30 On July 14, in the Polish city of Vilna, on the day on which, in Berlin, the Nazi Party was declared the only legal party in Germany, Dr Jacob Wigodsky wrote in a Vilna newspaper: ‘We must continue to fight against the Hitler pogroms. We are fighting for the equal rights of all, everywhere in the world, but first and foremost, equal rights for us.’31 In Warsaw, during the summer of 1933, Polish Jews boycotted German-made goods, and Jewish students threw stink bombs in cinemas showing German films.32
On July 30 the editor of Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher, newly appointed Reich Commissar for Franconia, gave orders that 250 Jewish tradesmen in Nuremberg, Franconia’s capital, should be arrested, ‘and set to plucking the grass out of a field with their teeth’.33
By the end of July, more than twenty-six thousand Germans had been taken in to the ‘protective custody’ of concentration camps or Gestapo prisons. Many of those arrested were Jews who had been members of the Social Democratic and Communist parties. Others were lawyers who, in the days of the Weimar Republic, had defended individual workers or trade union organizations. Many Jewish businessmen and shopkeepers were also arrested. In a single town, Regensburg, where the Jewish community numbered 427 members, more than a hundred Jews had been taken into ‘protective custody’ by the beginning of August 1933, while others, endangered by street violence, ‘had requested to be arrested in order to assure their personal safety’.34
Among those Jews killed in August were Felix Fechenbach, a Jewish editor from Detmold, who was killed at Dachau on August 7, and Julius Rosemann, Area Secretary of the Miners’ Union in Hamm, shot dead on August 22. Throughout the month, Jews continued to be expelled from public and private organizations: in the third week of August the Central Association for German Deaf excluded all Jewish members. In Berlin, thirty-two deaf Jews were expelled from the local deaf relief organization, among them an old woman who had been a member of the organization for fifty-seven years, since 1876. At the same time, all elderly deaf members lost the monthly financial relief to which they were entitled as a result of payment of their subscriptions over many years.35
In October 1933, a new disciplinary and punishment code was introduced at Dachau, intended to make the camp a ‘Model Concentration Camp’, in which absolute compliance with orders would be assured by the strictest of penalties. ‘Agitators’, the new regulations stated, ‘are to be hanged by virtue of the Law of the Revolution.’36
News of individual Jewish deaths in Dachau continued to reach the West. On October 10 Dr Theo Katz who had worked in the camp hospital was killed. Also in October, Dr Albert Rosenfelder, a Jewish lawyer, disappeared while in his cell, and was never heard of again.37
By the end of October 1933, placards had appeared on thousands of cafés, sports stadiums, shops, and roads leading to towns and villages: ‘Jews not wanted’. In some villages, the names of the Jewish war dead were erased from the war memorials.
As 1933 came to an end, the half million Jews of Germany could look back over a year in which thirty-six Jews had been murdered, six killed in the course of ‘mob outrages’, and three others killed ‘while trying to escape’.38 It had also been a year of mass emigration. The Nazi aim was to eliminate Jewish influence from every facet of German life. They had no objection to emigration. In 1933, 5,392 German Jews sought entry, and were admitted, to Palestine.39 A further thirty thousand German Jews left for elsewhere in Western Europe, for Britain, and for the United States.
In the last week of October 1933, in reaction to the growth in Jewish immigrants to Palestine, Arab rioters attacked public buildings in Nablus, Jaffa and Jerusalem. The British drove back the rioters, leaving twenty-six Arabs dead. Nazi propaganda broadcasts, beamed to Palestine, Syria and Egypt, helped ensure Arab hostility towards the Jewish immigrants would be kept as high as possible. In its turn, this Arab hostility ensured that the British Mandate authorities would be forced to look again, in due course, at their immigration laws, and to restrict Jewish entry into the Jewish National Home proclaimed in 1917 at the very moment when such entry had become a matter of urgent need.
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Towards disinheritance
Early in 1934, the campaign to create ‘Jew-free’ villages gathered momentum. A typical episode took place that February, when Stormtroops entered the village of Arnswalde, in Pomerania, and at a given signal hurled stones at all Jewish houses, shops and meeting halls. Breaking into the synagogue, and into the house of the rabbi, the Stormtroops destroyed the furnishings, tore up and trampled on the Torah, and extinguished the Eternal Lamp. Throughout the night, Jewish homes were attacked, and Jews, if caught, beaten up in the street. On the following morning, most of the Jews left the village. That same morning, German children on their way to school helped themselves to toothpaste, soap and sponges lying in the wreckage of a Jewish chemist’s shop, ‘while parents and teachers looked on’.1
A month later, on Palm Sunday, a member of Julius Streicher’s personal bodyguard,
Kurt Baer, marched at the head of a squad of Stormtroops into Gunzenhausen, his parents’ home village, and also the home of nineteen Jewish families, small shopkeepers, craftsmen and innkeepers. Baer ordered these Jews to be dragged from their homes, and from the cellars in which they had hidden. He himself dragged one Jewish woman through the streets by her hair. Throughout the night, the Jews were beaten, whipped and cursed: and on the following morning two Jews were found dead, a seventy-five-year-old man, Rosenfelder, his chest torn open with knife wounds, and a thirty-year-old man, Rosenau, hung on a garden fence.2
The fanning of popular resentment and physical attack was not only against wealthy Jews, or those who had supported the democratic parties, or the Communists. It was an assault upon every Jew in Germany: an attempt to turn all German Jewry into an outcast, fit only for persecution, harassment and expulsion. The Jew would be driven from every profession, and then from the life of the nation. On 1 May 1934 Der Sturmer gave vent to this all-embracing hatred in a special fourteen-page issue by reviving the medieval ‘blood libel’ accusation against the Jews of using Christian blood in the baking of their Passover bread, and in other ‘Judaic’ rituals.
This ‘ritual murder’ issue, of which 130,000 copies were printed and sold, and which was displayed on public noticeboards, reproduced an old engraving showing four rabbis sucking the blood of a Christian child through straws. There was also a photograph of a dead child, with the caption ‘Slaughtered on 17 March, 1929, near Manau, shortly before the Jewish Passover’. Eleven columns listed alleged ritual murders from 169 BC until 1929.
This issue of Der Sturmer also portrayed the Christian Holy Communion as yet another example of a Jew, Jesus, drinking Christian blood in the Communion ceremony. Two weeks after it was published, and following protests from the Christian churches about this particular portrayal, Hitler ordered the issue banned, ‘owing’, it was explained, ‘to an attack on Christ’s Holy Communion’. But copies of the issue were still widely available throughout that summer.3 Nor was there any lessening of the demand for ‘Jew-free’ villages. On May 26, a German newspaper described how, at Hersbruck in Franconia, Streicher’s province, ‘on Thursday at 5 p.m. the swastika flag was hoisted on the property of the last Jew to leave Hersbruck. The Hersbruck district is now definitely purged of Jews. With pride and satisfaction the population takes cognizance of this fact….’ The newspaper was convinced that other districts ‘will soon follow suit and that the day is not now far off when the whole of Franconia will be rid of Jews, just as one day that day must dawn when throughout the whole of Germany there will no longer be one single Jew.’4
On June 3 the Jewish community of Worms celebrated the nine hundredth anniversary of the foundation of its Old Synagogue. No single city official or non-Jew participated in the ceremony. According to legend, in Roman times the Jews of Worms had declined to participate in the Sanhedrin elections in Jerusalem, claiming to have built their own ‘new’ Jerusalem on the banks of the Rhine. Now, in common with every German Jewish community, the Jews of Worms had to decide whether to ride out a storm which would pass, or to leave. In 1933, sixty Jews had left Worms for France, forty-three for Palestine, and thirty-two for Poland. The idea that the storm might travel to France or Poland did not arise: no man could foresee the unforeseeable. In 1934 the exodus from Worms continued, twenty-nine Jews going to the United States and twenty-six to Palestine. By the end of 1934 a total of 264 Jews, nearly a quarter of the Worms community, had left Germany.5
The pressures to leave were continuous. On 14 June 1934 a special court at Nuremberg sentenced the non-Jewish wife of a Jew to four months in prison as a ‘race-defiling female’.6
In the Nazi perspective, the rule of law went parallel with the rule of fear and the rule of the gun. On 15 July 1934 Kurt Baer shot dead two Jews, Simon Straus and his son, who had given evidence against him after he had been accused of the killing of the two other Jews in Gunzenhausen in March. At the trial, the court had found that the two murdered Jews had ‘definitely committed suicide’, while Baer was found guilty only of ‘a breach of the peace’. Baer’s vengeance against Straus and his son, bringing the number of Jews whom he had murdered to four, went unpunished.7
Success for the continuing Nazi broadcasts to the Arab world, through Radio-Berlin and Radio-Stuttgart, came on August 3, with the beginning of three days of anti-Jewish riots in the Algerian city of Constantine. In three days, twenty-three Jews were killed, and thirty-eight wounded.8 But Arab unrest could not staunch the flow of German refugees, either to Palestine or elsewhere. In 1934 a total of 6,941 German Jews were admitted to Palestine.9
By the end of 1934, more than fifty thousand German Jews had left Germany. About four hundred and fifty thousand remained. Ten years later, two Jewish historians, Arieh Tartakower and Kurt Grossman, experts on the refugee question, wrote, of 1933 and 1934: ‘During this first period, the refugee movement had a rather tentative character. To many it seemed that the anti-Jewish excesses would pass, to be followed by a new Jewish policy, embodying moderate restrictions and disabilities.’ It was hoped by many German Jews, the authors added, ‘that there would be only a limited exodus, and that the bulk of the Jewish population would remain in Germany’. There were even cases of Jews, who, ‘unable to adjust themselves abroad’, returned to Germany.10
The first months of 1935 seemed to bear out the hopes of those, both inside and outside Germany, who felt that the extremes of Nazism would pass. In March 1935 a young German journalist, Bella Fromm, noted a much less violent incident in her diary. She was dining at a Berlin restaurant, when she saw a page boy go up to a young couple at the next table, and discreetly place a teacup, with a slip of paper in it, in front of them. The couple seemed about to rise from their seats. ‘May I take the liberty?’ Bella Fromm asked them, taking the slip of paper from the teacup. On it was written: ‘We do not serve Jews.’11
In Dachau, the number of prisoners had fallen sharply, and almost all the Jews interned there in 1933 had been released. After thirteen known Jewish deaths in the camp in 1933, only one Jew, Erich Gans, was known to have been killed there in 1934, on July 1. For ten months no further Jewish deaths were reported, until 22 May 1935, when Max Hans Kohn, a student, died in the camp.12
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On 1 March 1935, following a result of a plebiscite held under the auspices of the League of Nations, the Saar had become an integral part of Hitler’s Germany. All five thousand Jews chose French or Belgian citizenship, and left for France and Belgium. Inside Germany, some twenty thousand Jews had left the towns and villages which did not want them, and sought sanctuary in Berlin.13 Riding out the storm seemed one possibility. Another possibility was emigration. But here the problem was not only that of severing the links of a lifetime and of generations. It was also financial. On June 14, while on a visit to New York, two leading German Jews, Otto Hirsch and Max Kreutzberger, pleaded for further financial help to be made available for future refugees, only to be told that no campaign for further fund-raising on German Jewry’s behalf was contemplated for 1936.14 Later that year, however, a special fund-raising effort was made.
On July 15, in further anti-Jewish riots in Berlin, several Jews were severely beaten. Twelve days later an article entitled ‘Finish up with the Jews’ urged ‘German’ girls to wake up and ‘not go with Jews any longer’. ‘German woman,’ the article declared, ‘if you buy from Jews, and German girl if you carry on with Jews, then both of you betray your German Volk and its Führer, Adolf Hitler, and commit a sin against your German Volk and its future!’15
A newspaper campaign now began, demanding legislation to prevent sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. On August 1 a Mannheim newspaper began a series of fourteen separate articles in eight weeks, devoted to this theme, which was promoted by newspapers throughout Germany. ‘A Heidelberg Jew as Race Defiler’ read the headline on the first article; ‘Race Defilers in Protective Custody’ read the headline on August 26, followed two days later, after
the arrest of a Jew called Moch, by the headline: ‘Race Defiler Moch in Protective Custody’.16
Tens of thousands of German Jews were not Jews at all, in their own eyes. Some were the children of Jewish converts to Christianity. Others had grandparents who had converted. But Hitler had redefined ‘Jew’ as a question of race, of ‘purity’ of blood: declaring that the mere ‘taint’ of a Jewish ancestor made it impossible for a person ever to be a ‘true’ German, a member of the ‘Volk’. These primitive concepts had become the slogans of a nation, and the obsession of its rulers.
Near Worms, in the village of Biblis, a thirty-seven-year-old Jew, Richard Frankel, awaited arrest. Frankel was a former First World War soldier and invalid, a recipient of the Iron Cross, First Class. In 1932, before Hitler had come to power, he had openly challenged the local Nazis in their beer cellar. His son, then twelve years old, later recalled his father’s mood, as he awaited the Nazi revenge. ‘I remember him sharpening his knife and saying, “If they take me, six will go with me,” and then brandishing his knife in a circle.’ The Nazis came, and Frankel was taken to a nearby concentration camp at Osthofen. ‘We knew’, his son Leslie recalled, ‘that if one was taken there, he came back in a coffin—in a sealed coffin you were forbidden to open.’