Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (18 page)

was cut.

This all happened not because of any intensification in legal measures for

persecution but because the welfare agencies in the local authorities devoted

considerable imagination and energy to the development of ever newer and

different ways to discriminate against Jews in receipt of support.
2
The German Council of Municipalities (Deutscher Gemeindetag) played an

important role in this process of cumulative exclusion; it was used to control

and standardize community policies in the 64,000 German municipalities. At

a meeting of the Council of Municipalities in June 1937 there was general

agreement that such practices be brought into line across the country and,

according to one suggestion, Jews should be equated with foreigners when it

came to welfare provision.
3
During the following year cities and the Council of Municipalities would come up with a series of new measures for further

discriminating against Jews who were in need of support.
4
After the November 1938 pogrom these initiatives were to culminate in an order from the Reich

Ministry of the Interior that provided for the complete exclusion of Jews from

public welfare provision.
5

Discrimination against Jews in need, as well as similar measures against

Gypsies and ‘asocials’,
6
contributed significantly to changing the character of social policy as a whole. It was transformed into ‘National Socialist Welfare

Provision’. Here, unlike in traditional social policy, it was no longer a

question of meeting individual needs and supporting the socially disadvan-

taged; at the centre was the idea that the support of individuals would be

made dependent on the assessment of their value for the racially defined

‘national community’. The exclusion of the racially ‘inferior’ was a key

constitutive element of this policy.
7

74

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

The Exclusion of Jews from the German Health System

and the Implementation of the Racial Hygiene

Paradigm in Medicine

During the period of National Socialist dictatorship ‘racial hygiene’ conceptions

that had been represented by a minority of members of the medical professions

since the Imperial age became definitive.
8
In close collaboration with jurists, educationalists, social scientists, and members of the social security network,

doctors collaborated under the Nazis with population policies that were aimed

at preventing the bearers of ‘negative’ hereditary characteristics from reproducing.

This was initially achieved via counselling on hereditary health issues, bans on

certain marriages and enforced sterilization; during the war it was pursued via the

systematic murder of those defined as ‘racially inferior’.
9
The ‘elimination’ of these

‘negative’ elements within the German population was regarded as a major

contribution towards the convalescence of the ‘body of the nation’.

According to the view of racial hygienists, it was important to slow down the

‘degeneration’ of the population but not only by preventing certain groups from

reproducing. The key difference between this and traditional notions of eugenics

was that racial hygiene attempted to put an end to ‘racial miscegenation’, which

was seen as particularly damaging, a flashpoint of the first importance for the

health of the nation.

In this vein, in a speech to the Reich Party Conference of 1935 the head of the

Reich Doctors’ Association, Gerhard Wagner, emphasized how ‘increasing mis-

cegenation with Jewish blood that is entirely alien to us’ would not only have ‘the

direst consequences, because it . . . is against the natural order’, but this ‘bastard-

ization’ with the Jews, ‘a people who are already bastardized’, might lead to the

unhindered spread amongst the German population ‘of the hereditary diseases

and negative dispositions that are already widespread amongst Jews’.
10

Racial hygiene not only proclaimed the struggle against ‘racial miscegenation’

but saw as a significant goal the complete exclusion of Jews from the health

system; indeed this was a fundamental condition for the implementation of its

ideas. This was not merely a question of excluding Jewish doctors and other

medical professionals,
11
or the gradual exclusion
12
of Jewish patients from public health organizations, but above all it was manifested in the battle against so-called

‘Jewish medicine’, which was a synonym for those tendencies in modern medicine

that resisted the triumphal progress of racial hygiene. Above all this meant

medicine that was ‘mechanical’ or ‘industrial’ or concerned with preventive

welfare, allegedly of Jewish origin, and which was concerned with the improve-

ment of the state of the nation’s health across the board, without respect to the

racial categories of patients. The link between Entjudung and the implementation

Interim Conclusions

75

of racial hygiene approaches was expressed programmatically in 1935 by a spokes-

man for National Socialist medicine: ‘All forms of eugenics, every attempt to

improve our race will be in vain if we cannot achieve the complete emancipation

of questions of medical politics from the influence of Judaism and its spirit.’
13

Just how closely the demand for the complete Entjudung of the health system

was linked to the idea of the wholesale improvement of the health of the German

nation can be shown particularly clearly in one area of health provision, in natural

medicine, which under the National Socialists improved its standing vis-à-vis

traditional academic medicine under the banner of ‘New German Medicine’.
14
In a 1938 issue of the periodical Heilpraktiker we can read that ‘the exclusion of Jews

from the medical professions’ would also ‘detoxify the relations between doctors

and the practitioners of natural medicine’ because ‘the Jew . . . has always been the

strongest opponent of natural medicine, which is down-to-earth and socially

aware’.
15

The double process of Entjudung and the transformation of medicine along

racial hygiene lines was part and parcel of the total occupation of the medical

professions and the health system by the National Socialists. Doctors were con-

trolled by Nazi organizations, new institutions were designed along ‘popular

health’ lines, institutes and professorial chairs dedicated to racial hygiene were

founded: this all contributed to a fundamental alteration of the structures of the

health system and the dominance of National Socialist medicine.

The Anti-Jewish Bias of the German School

System and its Nazification

Since 1933, and even more so after the second wave of anti-Semitism in 1935,

Jewish pupils at state schools had been exposed to growing discrimination: the

goal of these measures was first the exclusion, and finally the expulsion of Jewish

pupils from general schools.
16
This occurred in various ways: Jewish pupils were progressively excluded from particular school activities, such as swimming lessons, visits to rural school halls of residence, outings, school parties, and so on.

The more everyday school life was made to express National Socialist ideology by

rituals (such as the flag ceremony), by symbols (such as the communal Hitler

salute at every lesson), and by festivities and memorials, the clearer it became that

Jewish pupils could not belong to the ‘community’ that was to be strengthened by

all these measures. On the other hand, they were denied certain benefits such as

reductions in school fees
17
or training grants.
18
The introduction of ‘Theory of Heredity and Racial Science’ as a compulsory, cross-disciplinary subject in all

types of
schools19
as early as 1933, the enforcement of political education as well as the increasing pervasion of the various subjects with National Socialist content,

76

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

particularly in the subjects of Biology, German, and History, but also in Geog-

raphy, Art, and Music,
20
stamped the Jewish pupils as ‘inferior’ outsiders. As a rule, Jewish pupils were forbidden to make the transition to higher education; they

could sit the school leaving certificate, but did not generally receive the higher

education entrance qualification required for enrolment in university studies.

To this was added the fact that the racist and anti-Semitic content was often

represented by teachers who victimized and humiliated their Jewish pupils in

class, reducing them to exhibits that could be used to ‘prove’ the correctness of the

racial theory that was being taught.

In turn, non-Jewish pupils increasingly kept their distance; the role played in

this by the growing presence of the Hitler Youth in schools should not be

underestimated. Jewish pupils were humiliated and tormented in a great variety

of ways; assaults on Jewish fellow pupils were part of everyday school life, and for

many Jewish pupils the daily journey to school became a torture.
21

The stigmatization, ostracism, and expulsion of Jewish pupils, in spite of the

small number of those affected—in 1933 the 45,000 Jewish pupils in public schools

constituted less than 1 per cent of the whole pupil body
22
—formed a significant element in the Nazification process of the German school system, and were almost

seen, from the NS point of view, as the precondition for it.
23

From the viewpoint of the National Socialist regime Jewish pupils, as expressed

in a statement by the Reich Education Minister published in the press in Septem-

ber 1935, were a ‘major obstacle’ to the ‘united stance of the class community and

the untrammelled implementation of the National Socialist education of the

young’.
24
Consequently, as the Reich Education Minister announced in the relevant decree from the same month, ‘clear separation according to race’ was

the precondition for the ‘creation of National Socialist class communities as the

basis for youth education based on the idea of German nationhood’.
25

A closer analysis of the new educational guidelines demonstrates above all the

great difficulties involved in communicating the desired harmonious image of a

homogeneous ‘Aryan’ race and culture in a convincing way. The constant refer-

ence to the negative effect of the Jews, who were said to have done their best to

prevent the emergence of the genuine German Volksgemeinschaft in the past,

hence became part of the indispensable repertoire of education as practised on

National Socialist terms. National Socialist teachers went so far as to demand the

exclusion of Jewish pupils from lessons, since their mere presence irritated them

and represented an insuperable obstacle to the communication of National

Socialist educational content.
26

The efforts of the regime to create an entirely ‘German’ school system were thus

essentially based on the propagation of anti-Semitic education content and an

educational practice directed against Jewish pupils. The anti-Jewish orientation of

school was thus an indispensable part of the implementation of National Social-

ism in schools.

Interim Conclusions

77

From the beginning of 1936 Reich Education Minister Rust expressly attempted

legally to expel Jewish schoolchildren from general schools; at this time about half

of the 45,000 or so Jewish pupils still living in Germany attended general schools.

But Rust’s plan was initially thwarted by the veto of Hitler, who plainly did not

wish to go ahead with this plan in the Olympic Year 1936.
27
In 1937 the Education Minister returned to the plan; once again, in 1937, he suggested the establishment

of ‘special schools or collective classes for Jewish primary school pupils’.
28

Accordingly, in 1937 the number of Jewish pupils in general schools fell to about

15,000; the majority of Jewish children now attended Jewish schools or the

‘collective classes’ mentioned above. But it would not be until 1939 that Jewish

pupils were legally forbidden to attend general schools; the process of everyday

discrimination and repression continued until that point.
29

Liberation ‘from the Jewish Spirit’ and the

Construction of a ‘German’ Science

In almost all academic disciplines after 1933 there is a discernible tendency to give

a certain völkisch, a genuinely ‘German’ bias to each subject, by means of a

comprehensive expulsion of the ‘Jewish spirit’—beginning with the dismissal of

Jewish university teachers—and by means of a fundamental removal of the

remnants of a superseded ‘liberal Jewish era’. The various disciplines were in

varying degrees transformed and even partially redefined, in terms of both

content and structure. This will be examined rather more closely with reference

to a number of examples.

It was not until the era of National Socialism that psychology and psychother-

apy first won acceptance as academic disciplines in Germany.
30
The distinction from ‘Jewish’ psychoanalysis and its destruction as a discipline played an important part in this professionalization process. In psychology this dissociation was