Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (102 page)

Hitler’s claim that the Nuremberg Laws were an attempt to find a “tolerable relationship to the Jewish people” was a deliberate lie intended to lead the public astray. In his diary, Goebbels left no doubt that the laws of 15 September were aimed at segregating Jews from the majority of society and providing momentum for their further persecution. “Today was of secular significance,” he wrote. “Jewry has suffered a heavy blow. We have dared become the first people in many hundreds of years to take the bull by the horns.”
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Ten days after the Reichstag had unanimously ratified the Nuremberg Laws, Walter Gross, the Reich director of the NSDAP Office for Racial Politics, told his local officials how Hitler wished them to be interpreted: “The ultimate goal…of the Third Reich’s entire racial policy…is the displacement of everything Jewish in the sense of the excretion of an alien element.”
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“If you followed the National Socialist movement attentively, you had to see these things coming,” Willy Cohn commented after the ratification of the Nuremberg Laws. “In this respect they’re extremely consistent.”
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Victor Klemperer, who was married to a non-Jewish German, confined himself to a bitter diary entry: “The disgust is enough to make you ill.”
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The Nazi press enthusiastically welcomed the new legislation. On 16 September, the
Westdeutscher Beobachter
led with the headline: “We profess our loyalty to the purity of the race!” In a cynical commentary, the editor-in-chief wrote: “The Jewish race should feel lucky for the generosity of an Adolf Hitler. Every other people would have deemed its corrupters fair game. Instead of an emergency law, however, Germany provides state protection and legal order.”
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It seems that the reactions of the German populace to the Nuremberg Laws varied greatly. Gestapo reports initially asserted that the laws had been received with approval and satisfaction since they finally created “a situation of clarity” and would put an end to the “unsavoury individual actions” of previous months.
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On the other hand, from heavily Catholic areas like the region of Aachen came reports that “the laws had not been greeted with unanimous applause.”
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SPD-in-exile observers even wrote that the laws had “been met with vigorous rejection within the populace” and had been interpreted “not as a sign of the strength of the National Socialist movement but as evidence of weakness.”
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At the same time, the observers could not deny that constant anti-Semitic propaganda had left its mark on the German working classes. “In general, one can say that the National Socialists have in fact succeeded in deepening the gap between the people and the Jews,” one report from January 1936 read. “The sense that the Jews are a separate race is now very common.”
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Because Hitler had rejected the proviso that the Nuremberg Laws should only apply to “full Jews,” instructions on how the laws were to be enforced needed to answer the question of who was in fact affected. A bitter, extended quarrel arose between the Interior Ministry and representatives of the NSDAP. Whereas Wilhelm Stuckart and Bernhard Lösener felt that only people with more than two Jewish grandparents should be considered Jewish, party representatives led by the Reich Doctors’ leader, Gerhard Wagner, insisted that the definition be expanded to included “quarter-Jews,” defined as people with one Jewish grandparent.
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Hitler initially avoided making a decision. Goebbels noted on 1 October: “Jewish question still not decided. We’ve debated for a long while, but the Führer is still unsure.”
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The argument continued throughout October and was increasingly focused round the status of “half-Jews,” defined as people with two Jewish grandparents. At the last minute, Hitler cancelled a high-level meeting on 5 November intended to resolve the issue.
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But there came a point when further delays were impossible. “The Führer wants a decision now,” Goebbels noted on 7 November. “A compromise has to be reached anyway, and an absolutely satisfactory solution is impossible.”
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The First Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Law of 14 November ended the tug of war. The Interior Ministry had largely got its way on the question of who was to be defined as Jewish, as the ordinance stipulated: “A Jew is someone descended from at least three Jewish grandparents in the racial sense.” “Half-Jews” were only to be treated as Jews if they were members of the Jewish religious community or married to a Jewish spouse.
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Goebbels noted: “A compromise but the best one available. Quarter-Jews to us. Half-Jews only in exceptional cases. In God’s name, let’s have some peace. Announce it skilfully and discreetly in the press. Not too much hullaballoo.”
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The propaganda minister’s reticence was understandable. The ordinance revealed the utter absurdity of trying to classify the population according to racist criteria. For example, “half-Jews” were defined as people who had “two Jewish grandparents in the racial sense.” But since there was no way to determine legally the characteristics of the Jewish “race,” religion had to be enlisted. The ordinance stated: “A grandparent is automatically considered fully Jewish if he or she belonged to the Jewish religious community.” It would have been difficult to make the grotesque senselessness of Nazi racial legislation any more apparent.
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In the wake of the Nuremberg Laws, the petty, everyday war against Jews continued. But with the Olympics approaching, the Nazi regime had no interest in a repeat of the pogrom-like violence of the summer of 1935. A few days before the start of the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Hess ordered the removal of all “signs with extremist content” so as to avoid “making a bad impression on foreign tourists.”
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The German press was instructed on 27 January 1936 not to report on “violent confrontations with Jews”: “Such things should be scrupulously avoided, right on down to the local sections of newspapers, in order not to provide foreign propaganda with material it can use against the Winter Games.”
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When Wilhelm Gustloff, the leader of the Swiss branch of the NSDAP, was shot dead in Davos by a Jewish medical student two days before the start of the Games, the Nazi leadership’s reaction was muted. Goebbels’s spontaneous reaction was: “The Jews will pay for this. We’ll take major actions against this.”
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But Hitler restrained his propaganda minister. As would not be the case with Kristallnacht in November 1938, this time the regime made no attempt to use the assassination as an excuse to mobilise “popular anger” against the Jewish minority.
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At Gustloff’s funeral in the northern German city of Schwerin on 12 February, Hitler did launch some sharply worded attacks, however, claiming that the Davos killing was evidence of a “guiding hand” and the “hateful power of our Jewish enemies.” He added: “We understand and register this declaration of war!”
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The International Olympic Committee had awarded Berlin the 1936 Summer Games in 1931, but a year later, when the Nazis became the strongest party in Germany, the IOC began to have reservations. Via an intermediary, the Belgian IOC president, Henri de Baillet-Latour, enquired at the Brown House how the National Socialists intended to stage the Games should they come to power. Hitler answered that he was looking forward to the Games with “great interest.”
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On 16 March 1933, the newly appointed chancellor received the president of the German National Olympic Committee, Theodor Lewald, and promised him support for the preparation of the Games “in every respect.”
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Hitler refused the offer of an honorary post with the committee, but he did take over symbolic patronage for the event after Hindenburg’s death in November 1934.
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In the meantime, the IOC had also awarded the Winter Games to Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

From the very beginning, Hitler recognised the opportunities that came with hosting the Olympics. They offered a unique chance to present the world with images of a reinvigorated but peaceful and cosmopolitan Germany. He and Goebbels saw absolutely eye to eye on this. The latter’s ministry formed a “propaganda committee for the Olympic Games” in January 1934 to coordinate large-scale publicity campaigns in Germany and abroad. “The 1936 Olympics are going to be huge,” Goebbels promised. “We’re really going to beat the drum!”
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The regime spared neither effort nor money to squeeze every last drop of prestige from the Games. On 5 October 1933, Hitler made an initial inspection of the site for the “Reich Sports Field” on Berlin’s western fringe to get a picture of the location and the progress made in the preparations. He brusquely cancelled the plans of sports functionaries to expand the existing stadium, ordering the construction of a new, modern arena with a capacity of 100,000 spectators. It was a “Reich task,” Hitler declared in notes taken by Lewald: “If you’ve invited the whole world as your guest, something grandiose and beautiful must be created…a few million more here or there make no difference.”
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The gigantic site was to be transformed into the largest sporting complex in the world, with numerous additional sites for competitions, an open-air stage, a “House of German Sports” and military marching grounds. The architect Werner March, who had constructed the models for Germany’s application to the IOC, was commissioned to plan the entire project.
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Hitler enthusiastically followed construction progress, suggesting changes and occasionally criticising the design of the stadium, with which he was never completely satisfied.
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It is pure legend, however, that he was so angry about March’s plans that he threatened to cancel the Olympics, as Albert Speer later contended in his memoirs and as Joachim Fest naively passed on.
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Speer, who was only at the beginning of his career as Hitler’s favourite architect in 1933 and 1934, was likely disappointed by someone else being commissioned to build the Olympic Stadium.

A more serious threat to the 1936 Olympics was the international movement calling for a boycott that had formed shortly after Hitler had assumed power. The early anti-Semitic excesses of the Nazi regime occasioned outrage—particularly in the United States. By April 1933, the
New York Times
was already reporting that the Games could be cancelled because of the German government’s campaign against the Jews.
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The president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, floated the idea of transferring the Games to Rome or Tokyo, or cancelling them altogether. The IOC was satisfied, however, when the German side declared that it would adhere to Olympic rules and Jewish Germans would not be excluded from any of the competitions. In June 1934, the German Olympic Committee nominated twenty-one Jewish athletes for the Olympic training camp, but in the end, only two token individuals—“half-Jews” under Nazi racial classification—were included in Germany’s Olympic team: the ice hockey player Rudi Ball, who plied his trade in Italy, and fencer Helene Mayer, who won gold for Germany in 1928 and had lived in California since 1932. She would win the silver medal in Berlin.
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A cancellation of the Games or a boycott by a great sporting nation like the United States would have meant a significant loss of prestige, and Hitler was at pains to take the wind out of his critics’ sails.
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He was assisted in this by Theodor Lewald who, despite being regularly assailed in the Nazi press for his Jewish background, did everything in his power to reassure the foreign public and the IOC about the National Socialists’ intentions. In the summer of 1934, when Brundage travelled to Germany to get a picture of the situation of Jewish athletes, his host adroitly threw dust in his eyes. Upon returning to the US, Brundage became a steadfast advocate of United States participation in both the Winter and Summer Games.
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Nonetheless, the anti-Semitic violence of the summer of 1935 and the Nuremberg Laws rekindled the debate about the Games in the United States. Advocates of a boycott seemed to gain the upper hand in the country’s largest athletics association, the Amateur Athletic Union, with AAU President Jeremiah Mahoney telling Lewald in October 1935 that participation in the Games would amount to a tacit acknowledgement of “everything the swastika symbolised.”
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But Avery Brundage and his supporters managed to secure a slight majority at the AAU convention that December. Germany’s sports functionaries and the leaders of the regime breathed a sigh of relief.
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