Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (7 page)

However, discussions about the introduction of an ‘Aryan clause’ were held in

German gymnastic associations (the German League of Gymnasts did not

accept Jewish members), in the German Academy, in the Association for

Germans Abroad, and other organizations where the anti-Semitic forces did

not prevail.
71

Scattered references to the exclusion of Jews from local associations can be

found throughout the literature on regional history, but the question of how far

this represented a consistent pattern is an important area that still requires further

research—and in the light of the importance of such associations in Germany and

their close connections with local politics this omission is all the more scandalous.

Students took a leading role in the spread of radical anti-Semitic ideas in

German society. At the beginning of the 1920s almost all the student bodies had

ceased to accept Jewish members. The Deutscher Hochschulring, an umbrella

organization of student associations (DHR), refounded in 1920, saw itself as

particularly völkisch and anti-Semitic and quickly became a powerful force in

most of the country’s universities, the general student councils, and within the

German National Student Union. This dominant role found expression above all

in the huge influence the DHR had on getting the student body to adopt radical

anti-Semitic positions.
72
This occurred for the first time in 1922 when the DHR

was able to push through a constitutional amendment according to which the

association sanctioned the practice of its members, the German and Austrian

student organizations, of not accepting any students of Jewish origin at all.
73

Five years later the University Circle caused another conflict linked to the

‘Jewish question’. It was sparked by the fact that the majority of state-

recognized and state-supported student associations accepted Jews into their

ranks provided they were German citizens, but did not accept Jews classed as

‘Germans from abroad’, such as those from Danzig or territories ceded to

Poland. When the Prussian Minister of Culture demanded that this practice

be changed, in a vote taken in 1927 the majority of the student representa-

tives voted against, which eventually led to the dissolution of the student

organizations.
74

22

Historical Background

At the end of the 1920s the leading political role amongst student organizations

was taken over by the National Socialist League of German Students. After 1929 it

ensured that the student associations in a number of universities decided to

demand that the number of Jewish students be limited to the proportion of Jewish

members of the population in the area of the Reich.
75
Violence against Jewish students and professors was a daily occurrence in German universities towards the

end of the Weimar Republic.
76

Radical anti-Semitic positions also spread within the two principal Christian

confessions where they reinforced what were already fairly strong anti-Semitic

prejudices that had been formed on confessional or religious grounds.

Within the Protestant Church a group known as the ‘German Christians’ had

formed from the early 1920s onwards, rejecting the Jewish roots of Christianity—

most notably the Old Testament and the Jewish ancestry of Jesus himself—and

attempting to reconcile Christian theology with Germanic mythology.
77

Whilst these groups only met with very limited success, from the early 1930s

onwards the National Socialists succeeded in mobilizing their supporters on the

occasion of church elections, working in particular with the ‘Faith Movement of

German Christians’ who were opposed to ‘racial miscegenation’ and the ‘Jewish

mission’. In the church elections of November 1932 the German Christians

gathered about a third of all the votes, which roughly corresponded to the

proportion of National Socialist supporters in the population at large.
78

The Church reacted to these forces—which after all challenged the fundamental

premises of Christian belief according to prevailing theology—with sympathy and

a willingness to dialogue rather than by clearly distancing itself from them. Under

the influence of this völkisch provocation the spectrum of opinion within the

Church moved decisively to the right in the direction of völkisch and racist ideas.
79

The indirect influence of the German Christians proved to be much more

important than any direct effects they could have by virtue of their position within

the Church.

The Königsberg Church Congress of 1927 marked a caesura in the attitude of

the Protestant Church to the völkisch movement. It witnessed the presentation of

the outline for a new political theology in the paradigmatic paper given by the

theologian Paul Althaus on ‘Church and Nation’. Decisively, his lecture paved the

way for recognizing the völkisch community as part of the divine order; with this

‘theological qualification of the people the principle of the völkisch movement

received Christian legitimacy’.
80

Such theological receptiveness for points of view that took account of the people,

‘das Volk’, meant that whilst in the Weimar Republic anti-Semitism within the

Protestant Church was condemned in its overtly violent form, its underlying racist

premises were not only not rejected but accepted and even to some extent welcomed.

The purely biological concept of race was rejected as irreconcilable with the Christian

image of humanity, but the Protestant mainstream’s views on race and the racial

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

23

basis of nationhood (seen as a muddy synthesis of ‘blood’ and ‘spirit’) had already

been influenced to a high degree by biologistic racial dogma.

After the end of the First World War Catholicism also increasingly came to see

‘Volk’ and ‘nationhood’ as components of the divine order of creation. The

Catholic concept of nationhood was not for the most part based on ideas of

race, however, and it did stress its distance from the völkisch camp. Catholic

authors did not rely on a material or biological concept of nationhood based one-

sidedly on ‘blood and soil’ ideas but strove to emphasize the ‘spiritual’ element

within their conception of nation. However, they were prepared at the same time

to acknowledge biological ‘facts’ and the Catholic conception of nation thus drew

nearer to the related concepts of race used within völkisch discourse.
81
The religious anti-Semitism that featured in Catholic circles could therefore be

stretched far enough to permit calls for refusing equality of citizenship to Jews

from this quarter, too.
82

The exclusion of Jews from German citizenship was publicly called for at the

end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s by a whole series of prominent right-wing

intellectuals. What is most remarkable is that a series of leading supporters of the

‘conservative revolution’—the intellectual scene that became part of the ‘new

right’ in the early 1930s—had intensified their anti-Jewish attitudes. Whilst they

had made unambiguously anti-Semitic comments in the 1920s but had not

supported the removal of citizenship from the Jews (indeed had sometimes

vociferously opposed it), now they formed part of the growing chorus of propon-

ents of this measure. This group included Wilhelm Stapel, Editor in Chief of

the newspaper German Nation and organizer of the educational sections of the

German National Association of Commercial Employees. Stapel was one of

the most influential original thinkers in the völkisch camp and represented a

‘cultural’ concept of nationhood rather than one based one-sidedly on racism.

Stapel’s close colleague Albrecht Günther similarly joined the group of those

proposing that Jews be deprived of citizenship.
83

Ernst Jünger, the successful author of popular war literature and one of the

leading figures in the intellectual right, wrote programmatically in 1930 that a Jew

living in Germany would soon ‘be faced with his final choice: being a Jew in

Germany or not being a Jew’, implying that he also believed in the need for a

special status for Jews.
84

The views quoted here were expressed in a series of anthologies or special

numbers of periodicals dedicated to the ‘Jewish question’ and published in the

early 1930s. For example, the September 1930 edition of the Süddeutsche Monat-

shefte was devoted to the ‘Jewish question’. They were the vehicles for anti-Semites

of various hues to give voice to their views, but they also published opponents of

anti-Semitism and leading Jewish commentators. These discussions show very

clearly how the radical anti-Semites had succeeded in putting the solution to the

‘Jewish question’ onto the political agenda, in one form or another.

24

Historical Background

An important stage in the onward march of radical anti-Semitism was the

spread of the anti-Jewish boycott movement from the mid-1920s onwards in a

variety of different fields of life. There were traces of a systematic boycott of

Jewish businesses organized by anti-Semitic circles evident even in Imperial

times, especially at Christmas, but it was very substantially intensified during

the Weimar Republic, not least in the ‘stable’ period. Although the Centralverein

succeeded in obtaining court judgements against the boycott in a large number

of cases, reports in its newspapers show that the boycott movement was

growing.
85

Local National Socialist papers had begun openly encouraging the boycott of

Jewish businesses since the end of the 1920s.
86
The boycott became a regular part of National Socialists’ local strategies for gaining power in many areas,
87
and from 1931–2 took on a violent form: customers were prevented from entering shops,

windows were smashed, and the owners of shops threatened.
88

The organized boycott of Jewish businesses reached a high point at Christmas

1932. In September of that year the Centralverein identified an office within the

National Socialist leadership that was centrally organizing the boycott.
89
The fact that it was already taking on the form of a violent blockade became very clear

when the Minister of the Interior from Hesse answered a parliamentary question

at the beginning of December by saying that ‘the current large-scale campaigns

against Jewish business people . . . had already led to serious disruptions to public

order’. The national government supported this view and in the same month

recommended that regional governments deploy the police to restore order ‘if for

example pickets are set up in front of a shop and grossly offend those attempting

to gain entry by making threats, insulting them or in any other way’. The method

the National Socialists used to organize the boycott of Jewish businesses in April

1933 thus corresponded to a model that had been tried and tested even before their

‘seizure of power’.
90

From the mid-1920s on, the Centralverein received more and more complaints

about discrimination against Jews applying for jobs in large firms. Such discrim-

ination, which the CV mainly attributed to the activities of former army officers

working in the personnel departments of these firms, was justified as an attempt to

avoid friction with völkisch-minded employees. It too grew to the extent of

becoming a boycott. According to the CV, the firms principally affected were

large banks, the domestic departments of large insurance firms, the chemical

industry, heavy industry, mining, shipbuilding, and the firm of Siemens.
91

As had happened in Imperial times, in the Weimar Republic a large number of

hotels, guesthouses, tourist, and spa resorts refused to accommodate Jewish guests

and exclusively targeted a völkisch-minded public. The most famous example of

this form of boycott is the holiday island of Borkum, which was positively proud

of banning Jewish visitors. The number of anti-Semitic restaurants and cafés also

increased during the 1920s. The CV published blacklists and in 1932 eventually

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

25

established a tourist office to advise Jewish travellers about the current status of

local anti-Semitic activity.
92

The Director of the CV made the following summary at the end of 1925: it was

depressing to note ‘that a form of social anti-Semitism that far exceeds what had

been the case before the war is now a dominant feature of the reactionary political

and social climate; that with many, too many fellow citizens, whilst the atmosphere

fostering aggressive anti-Semitic activity has waned, a “passive” anti-Semitism is

still present, a tendency to avoid all contact with Jews’.
93

The boycott movement that originated with the National Socialists and other

radical völkisch forces was only supported by a minority of the population at large;

it was not a truly popular movement, but the openness with which the boycott was

propagated proved to be decisive, as did the fact that the boycott, although it

was in many instances against current law, was generally tolerated and did not