Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (121 page)

For days Austrian Nazis and their sympathisers vented their pent-up anti-Semitic aggression on Viennese Jews, who were humiliated and abused in every way imaginable in front of salacious onlookers. “University professors were made to scrub the streets with their bare hands, and pious old men with white beards were forced into temples and compelled to perform leg squats and yell ‘Heil Hitler’ in unison,” the Viennese author Stefan Zweig recorded in his autobiography. “Innocent people were herded together on the street like rabbits and taken to sweep the grounds of SA barracks. All the hateful, sick, dirty fantasies that had been conceived in nocturnal orgies of the imagination were rampantly visible on the streets in broad daylight.”
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The uncontrolled terrorising of Jews reached such proportions that on 17 March Reinhard Heydrich threatened Gauleiter Josef Bürckel, who had been appointed Reich commissioner and made responsible for integrating Austria into the Reich, that he would arrest any Nazis who took part in “undisciplined” attacks.
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But it still took a while for the waves of violence to ebb. “On the streets today gangs of Jews, on their hands and knees scrubbing the Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalks, with jeering storm troopers standing over them and taunting crowds around them,” wrote William Shirer on 22 March.
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In late April, the Italian ambassador in Vienna, Ubaldo Rochira, still reported renewed anti-Jewish attacks. In one of the large streets of the second district, he wrote, “around a hundred Jews had been forced to walk on all fours or crawl in the dust.” The ambassador was surprised at the virulence of the anti-Semitism he encountered in all classes of the Viennese population, from intellectuals to ordinary workers.
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Panicked, many Viennese Jews immediately sought to leave Austria, and the number of suicides shot up dramatically.
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Within a short span of time, Germany’s special anti-Semitic laws were extended to the newly acquired part of the Reich. Within the space of a few months the process of Aryanisation, which had been in the hands of a so-called “Assets Office” in Vienna since May 1938, was also completed.
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To step up the pace with which Austrian Jews were driven from their home country, a “Central Office for Jewish Emigration” was set up in the former Rothschild Palace under the directorship of Adolf Eichmann, a member of the Jewish Office in the Reich Security Main Office (Division II 112). This committed anti-Semite and dutiful bureaucrat developed an efficient procedure for pushing through Jewish emigration. It allowed applicants to be processed quickly in the same building almost in the manner of a conveyor belt. Eichmann had the assets of wealthy members of Vienna’s Jewish community confiscated, using them to finance the emigration of poorer Jews. By May 1939, 100,000 Jews—more than half of Austria’s Jewish population—had left the country. The “Vienna model” was so successful that it served as the basis for similar initiatives in the “old Reich.”
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“Since the amalgamation of Austria, the fate of German Jews has entered a new stage,” an SPD-in-exile observer commented in July 1938.

The National Socialists have concluded from their experiences in Austria that rapidly pursuing anti-Jewish persecution does no harm to the system, and that unleashing the anti-Semitic instincts in the ranks of their members and tolerating open pogroms do not cause any economic difficulties or any loss of prestige in the world at large. Guided by this conception…the regime is ruthlessly applying the Viennese methods to the older parts of the Reich.
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Beginning in the spring of 1938, one discriminatory law followed another, all aimed at destroying the economic existence of Jews in the “Greater German Reich” and making their lives as difficult as possible. Jewish families were denied income tax deductions for children (1 February); Jewish business people were not allowed to compete for public contracts (1 March); and Jewish communities lost their legal status as public bodies (28 March). Especially pernicious was the decree of 26 April that required Jews to declare all of their assets in excess of 5,000 marks by 30 June. “What is the point of this ordinance?” asked Victor Klemperer, who filled out the form on 29 June. “We are used to living in this condition of having no rights and in expectation of the next outrage. It hardly ruffles our feathers.”
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On 6 July, a new addendum to the trade laws forbade Jews from engaging in various professions, including property, marriage-brokering and door-to-door sales. In late July, Jewish doctors had their licences revoked. An ordinance on 17 August required Jewish men and women to go by first names contained on a list or add “Israel” or “Sara” to their own names. “If the lists had been drawn up under other circumstances,” Saul Friedländer has remarked, “they could have served as evidence of the intellectual constitution of bureaucratic fools.”
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The lists had been compiled by the ministerial official at the Interior Ministry and legal commentator on the Nuremberg Laws, Hans Globke, who like so many other Nazis was allowed to continue his career after the war.
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Once again, administrative measures “from above” and violence “from below” combined to hasten radicalisation. Anti-Semitic rioting broke out in many parts of the “old Reich” in the spring of 1938 in the wake of the pogrom in Vienna.
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As he had in 1935, Goebbels seized the initiative. In late April, he conferred with Berlin Police President Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf about how to further ramp up anti-Jewish persecution. “Jewish businesses get combed out, and what happens? Jews open up a new swimming pool and a couple of new cinemas and cafés,” Goebbels wrote in his diaries. “We’re going to end the Jewish paradise in Berlin. Jewish businesses are going to be designated as such. In any case, we’re now going to proceed more radically.” Hitler declared himself in agreement with the idea but asked that concrete action only be undertaken after his trip to Italy in early May 1938.
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At Helldorf’s behest, the state police office in Berlin came up with a “Memorandum on the Treatment of Jews in the Reich Capital in all Areas of Public Life” on 17 May. It foresaw a host of discriminatory measures: from the introduction of special badges for Jews and the abolition of compulsory education for Jewish children to the visual identification of Jewish businesses and the establishment of segregated train carriages for Jews.
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The section of the Security Service responsible for Jewish affairs objected that “addressing the question of how to regulate the Jewish problem in Berlin independently of the Reich in its entirety is counter to our purposes.”
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But Goebbels insisted that the Reich capital had to lead the way. On 24 May, he once again conferred with Helldorf about the “Jewish question” in Berlin. “We want to force Jews out of economic and cultural life, indeed out of public life altogether,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “We have to start somewhere.” Five days later he reassured himself of Hitler’s support, and on 30 May he instructed the police president to “initiate the anti-Jewish programme.”
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On 31 May, Berlin police staged a large-scale raid on Kurfürstendamm and arrested 300 Jews, although most of them were released the following day. Goebbels was indignant, writing: “I’m going to kick up a storm as never before.” In a speech to police officers on 10 June, he tried to win them over to his line: “I’m rebelling. Against every form of sentimentality. The watchword is not the law, but harassment. The Jews leave Berlin. And the police are going to help me.”
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Beginning on 11 June, anti-Jewish activities were reported in most Berlin districts. “Starting late Saturday afternoon, groups of civilians, consisting usually of two or three men, were to be observed painting on the windows of Jewish shops the word ‘JUDE’ in large red letters, as well as the Star of David and caricatures of Jews,” relayed the U.S. ambassador in Berlin, Hugh R. Wilson, to his secretary of state. “The painters in each case were followed by large groups of spectators who seemed to enjoy the proceedings enormously.”
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Wilson understood this action as an organised attempt to identify all Jewish businesses, and he remarked that it went further than anything which had happened since 1933. The excesses reached their temporary zenith on 20 and 21 June. The journalist Bella Fromm, who would emigrate a few weeks later to the United States, wrote in her diary:

The entire Kurfürstendamm was full of graffiti and posters…In the district [behind Alexanderplatz] where the small Jewish shops are located, the SA went on a particularly terrible rampage. Everywhere you could see repulsive, bloodthirsty drawings of Jews beheaded, hanged or hacked to bits, accompanied by disgusting slogans. Windows had been smashed, and “plunder” from poor little shops lay scattered on the pavements and in the gutters.
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The corresponding report of the responsible Security Service officer noted laconically: “The operation was carried out with permission from local Berlin police authorities.”
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But the Berlin police did not just sit on their hands. As part of a large-scale operation targeting so-called “antisocials,” they arrested some 1,500 Jews in mid-June 1938; most of them were taken to Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. Goebbels was satisfied, writing: “Helldorf is now proceeding radically on the Jewish question. The party is helping him. Many arrests…We will make Berlin Jew-free. I’m not going to let up.”
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But on 22 June, from the Obersalzberg, Hitler ordered an immediate stop to the operation. Goebbels, who gave a virulently anti-Semitic speech in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium to celebrate the summer solstice that evening,
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had to retreat. The anti-Semitic campaign in Berlin had created an enormously negative echo in the foreign press at a point where international tensions were rising daily because of the “Sudetenland crisis” provoked by the Nazi regime. Hitler thus decided for tactical reasons to temporarily put a lid on anti-Jewish activism.
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He had not given up his ultimate goal, of course, and Hitler and Goebbels reached a mutual understanding during the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth on 24 June 1938. Goebbels noted: “The main thing is that the Jews will be forced out. In ten years they must be completely removed from Germany. But in the short term we want to keep the rich ones as collateral.”
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In late June Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf issued to all Berlin police officers “Guidelines for the Treatment of Jews and Jewish Affairs,” in which he drew on the lessons from the operation in June. The goal, he wrote, was “to cause Jews to emigrate and not just to harass them randomly without any hope of achieving this end.”
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All Berlin police officers were called upon to “free Berlin from Jews and in particular the Jewish proletariat as much as possible.” A catalogue encompassing seventy-six points described in detail how officers could put pressure on the defamed minority in daily life without exceeding the limits of the discriminatory laws already in place. “Helldorf has given me a list of the measures taken against Jews in Berlin,” Goebbels noted, pleased with the work of the police president. “They are rigorous and comprehensive. In this way we’ll be able to drive the Jews from Berlin in the foreseeable future.”
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But there was an internal contradiction within the policy of forcibly driving away Jews. By doing everything in its power to rob Jews of the basis of their economic existence, the Nazi regime restricted their ability to emigrate. “While Jews are quickly being transformed into a proletarian community, which will soon be dependent on public welfare,” reported Argentina’s ambassador to Germany, Eduardo Labougle Carranza, in August 1938, “it is growing more difficult for them to emigrate, especially where money is concerned.”
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At Security Service headquarters, the dilemma was no secret either. One could no longer ignore, read a report for the months of April and May 1938, “that the chances for emigration have decreased just as much as the pressure to emigrate has grown.” The increasing exclusion of Jews from economic life, the report added, was causing a reduction in income to Jewish communities and aid organisations, which came up with most of the money used to pay for Jewish emigration.
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To make matters worse, the readiness of Western countries to take in Jews was by no means rising as quickly as the persecution of Jews in Germany was intensifying. At a conference called in the French spa town of Evian on the initiative of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1938, none of the thirty-two participating countries was willing to significantly raise its quotas for German-Jewish immigration. In this regard they played right into the hands of Nazi propaganda. “No one wants them,” jeered the
Völkischer Beobachter
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In his concluding speech at the Nuremberg rally in 1938, Hitler made fun of the hypocrisy of Western democracies that complained, on the one hand, about the “boundless cruelty” with which the Third Reich was trying to “rid itself of its Jewish element” while shrinking back, on the other, from the burdens connected with accepting such a large number of Jewish immigrants. “Plenty of morality,” Hitler scoffed, “but no help at all.”
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