The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (16 page)

Lower Franconia can be distinguished from the rest of Franconia by religion. Predominantly Catholic, the area supported the Catholic political parties and, at the end of Weimar, was far more reluctant to vote Nazi than the other two districts of Franconia. It also retains a distinct dialect, Ostfrankisch, which contrasts greatly with the Bavarian tongue found to the south (Bayerisch), beginning in the Middle Franconian city of Nuremberg.5

The social and economic structure of Lower Franconia is predominantly rural and agricultural. The district is dotted with numerous small town communities, only one 'large' city, Wurzburg, and only two others even close to half that size-Aschaffenburg, and Schweinfurt. In 1933 Wurzburg had a population of 101,003, while Aschaffenburg and Schweinfurt had 36,260 and 40,1 76 respectively.'
All three are located in the valley of the River Main. One account estimates that no more than 70,000 people out of a total district population of 796,043 worked in any sort of industry in 1933; only six of the twenty-two administrative subprefectures could be described as 'relatively prosperous industrial areas', so industry was confined to a few isolated clusters.7
Bavaria was less developed in industrial employment than the country as a whole, but even within Bavaria Lower Franconia was slow to
develop and remained largely 'pre-industrial'. Whereas 46.4 per cent of Bavaria's employed population worked in agriculture and forestry, the figure was 54 per cent in Lower Franconia; 24.2 per cent of Lower Franconians worked in industry and crafts lagged a little compared with 2 7.8 per cent for all of Bavaria.'

In the Lower Franconian countryside there were major pockets of rural poverty with few social amenities, such as the romantic and 'mysterious' region of the Spessart, linked to the main highway system by unpaved road. After 1933 Nazi Gauleiter Otto Hellmuth sought to improve the Rhoen hills in the northern part of the district through road construction and clearing of forest lands, but the attempt to modernize misfired when it turned out that the land was virtually useless for farming or even rearing sheep. Deforestation and road projects, along with the activities of newly created military camps, drove deer and wild boars from the hills into otherwise productive farmland, and to rescue the crops these had then to be hunted down by foresters.9
The most sumptuous of the agricultural products of Lower Franconia was, and remains, the famous Franconian wine. The vineyards, reduced in their extent along the River Main over the centuries, gradually became concentrated in the so-called Main triangle formed by abrupt changes in the course of the river, with Wurzburg at the centre.

Christianization of the district was begun by the Irish Bishop Kilian in the late seventh century, and in 742 Wurzburg became the seat of the bishop because of its central location. It was fortified by 1030, became a kind of citystate, the location for many of the Church's monasteries and hospitals, and in 1582 a university was built. In Napoleonic times it lost its remaining independence and, at the end of the era, became part of the new kingdom of Bavaria.

2. THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN LOWER FRANCONIA

The earliest recorded presence of Jews in Lower Franconia is 1147, when, in an attempt to find refuge from persecutions at the hands of crusading armies in the Rhineland, some Jews settled in Wurzburg, while others moved to neighbouring Aschaffenburg and Nuremberg. There may have been some Jews in Wurzburg shortly after 1096 and the first crusade."'
The reception accorded Jewish refugees, settlers, and traders varied enormously, and could change abruptly with the introduction of a new temporal or religious ruler, new teachings, or with the sudden glow of old fears and new phobias.

Besides the occasional persecutions in Wurzburg, some of the bishops, who were the temporal as well as spiritual leaders of the city, from time to time thought of banning all the Jews. In 1562 Bishop Friedrich von Wirsberg, who had been disappointed in his hopes to have them converted, finally forced them out. Eleven years later Bishop Julius Echter broadened the ban to forbid Jews even temporary entry into his territory. Though a handful managed to hang on in the city until 1642, just before the end of the Thirty Years War (1648), the right to live in the city was denied for a further 15o years."

Some Jews were permitted to trade in the city, but were not allowed to remain overnight; they paid special tolls and body taxes, and had to wear a yellow ringlet on their clothing.'
Z In time the city tolerated a few petty traders in wares they carried with them each day (Sackjuden), and eventually some were allowed to rent storage space. Various stipulations were devised to assure that these 'house-Jews' (Kammerjuden) did not compete directly with the citizens of the city.'
3 For the most part Lower Franconia's Jews, down to the beginning of the nineteenth century, continued to live in medieval conditions with restrictions on their every move.

The right of Jews to live in Wurzburg for the first time since 1642, as well as the beginnings of their emancipation, began with the disintegration of the ancien regime that collapsed under the sword of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Wurzburg itself was removed from the rule of its bishops, secularized, and for a brief period given to the `enlightened' Grand Duke Ferdinand of Toscana (18o6-14), who made ii possible for Jews, at least `those who could demonstrate their integrity, cleverness and substantial wealth', to dwell in the city.14
Such measures kept out poor rural Jews from the numerous small communities near by, but at least the city gates were opened a little. After Ferdinand's brief rule, Wurzburg, along with the rest of Lower Franconia and other territories, became part of the Bavarian monarchy. The `Edict concerning the relations of the Jews in Bavaria', which had already been promulgated in 1813, was introduced to the new parts of the realm in 1816. Old Jewish corporations and institutions were ended and Jews attained a degree of equality before the law hitherto unheard

Full emancipation was not granted, however, and in Bavaria, as in many other German states, Jews would have to 'earn' legal equality through 'assimilation' into society." '
Those who could not assimilate had to pay the old
special taxes, were forbidden to vote, could not be elected, and could not serve in the civil service. There was a limit to the possibilities for integration, however, since the edict's 'register section' (Matrikelparagraphen) stipulated that the total number of Jewish families permitted to be resident in any locality was to be restricted to the number officially registered there on the date of the edict. This legislation (which among other things also insisted that Jews adopt family names) was more restrictive in Bavaria than in most other German states, and contributed to the numerical stagnation of the Bavarian Jewish community. Once the number of permitted Jews was fixed on the 'register lists' (Matrikellisten) in any given village or town, it could not be changed.
1 The city of Wurzburg, for example, officially had twenty-nine families for nearly fifty years after the edict had come into effect. A place among the select twenty, nine could only be acquired through death or when a father retired for the benefit of a son. A few exceptions to the normal number allowed a given community could be made for academics and those involved in large trading establishments.'8

The edict stipulated that Jews could enjoy full resident rights 'above the normal number' if they became farmers, artisans, or opened a factory. The intention was to encourage Jews to leave their occupations in trade and to take up more 'useful' work, thus contributing towards their assimilation. These were the aims espoused by proponents of Jewish emancipation in the German Enlightenment.19
A few others were tolerated ('second-class Jews'), but they could be told to leave at a moment's notice. By the mid-nineteenth century there were fifty Jewish 'citizen families' in Wurzburg, and an additional sixty-three 'second-class' families.")
Only in 1861 were the onerous requirements finally dropped in Bavaria.

Across Bavaria there were variations in the receptivity to Jewish migrants over the centuries, as can be deduced from the 1818 census data, when only five Jews lived in the rather large and well-endowed territory of Lower Bavaria-located to the east of Munich-and proportionately there were hardly many more (a total of just 489) in all of Upper Bavaria, a district which included the fairly large city of Munich. By contrast, Lower Franconia was the Bavarian district with the largest number of Jewish inhabitants, and offered residence to 16,637, or 38.9 per cent of the monarchy's total.21

Together, the three Franconian districts contained a Jewish population of 34,739 in 1818, 71.3 per cent of the Bavarian Jews, and while the figures in igoo had declined across all of Franconia (in part reflecting a movement
to Munich), at that time they still had 30,074, or 67.1 per cent of the total.22
Jewish settlement in Lower Franconia itself tended to be in small pockets scattered across the district. On the death of Chief Rabbi Abraham Bing in 1841, for example, the 17,000 Jews in his flock lived in 216 villages and towns
.21

Jewish urban communities in Lower Franconia were affected by the processes which accompanied the transformation of Germany from a ruralagrarian to an urban-industrial society, especially after 18go. Bavaria's economic backwardness relative to other German states saw it lose a large number of its Jewish population to more `advanced' districts, particularly to the big German cities with 100,000 or more inhabitants, or else to emigration overseas. Wurzburg attracted some of those who left the countryside, with the result that its Jewish population gradually increased from nogg in 1867 (2.6 per cent of the city's inhabitants), to 1,518 in 1871; at the turn of the century the number rose to 2,567, but then the percentage of Jews in Wurzburg went into decline. By 1925 only 2,261 Jews lived there; not only had the percentage fallen as the city's population rose with the general movement from the countryside, but it had declined absolutely from its alltime high in 1goo24
The scope of the loss can be gathered from the three census-years 1910, 1925, and 1933, in which the number of Jews in Bavaria declined from 55,100 to 49,100, then to 42,000.25

The implications of similar developments across the country were obvious to the Jewish author Felix Theilhaber in 1911. In the book he published that year on The Decline of the German Jews he said that, unless such trends could be reversed, the end of centuries of life in Germany would come to a close. Germany's Jewish population declined as a percentage of the total population every census year from 188o, when the figure stood at 1.09 per cent, to 0.76 per cent in 1933.26
Bavaria's Jews already experienced natural population decline, with just one birth for every three deaths in 1933; the process was reinforced by conversions to other religions or renunciation of Judaism.27

3 THE SOCIAL-ECONOMIC POSITION OF THE JEWS

By 1933 46 per cent of the Jews in Germany belonged to the 'independents', in comparison with a figure of only 16 per cent for the population as a whole; and, while 18.4 per cent of all employed persons were occupied in 'trade and commerce', 61.3 per cent of the Jews came into this category, so that the occupational structure of the Jews was distinct.28
A similar structure existed for Bavaria. In 1925, for example, 12.6 per cent of its employed population was in trade and commerce, but 66.8 per cent of all Bavarian Jews were so occupied (in the cities the percentage was lower, on the land higher). In Wurzburg a relatively small number of the city's Jews (32.6 per cent) were occupied in trade and commerce, but they were especially visible in businesses such as department stores (six of ten in the city were Jewish, none of them representatives of the national chains), and well over half of all the wholesalers and roughly a third of all retailers in textiles were Jews; they dominated the wholesale trade in agricultural products (owning about -a quarter). In 1931, 89 of 138 firms in the wine and spirits trade were owned by Jews, and they had a monopolistic position in the wholesale trade in wine that year, as they owned 71 out of go establishments.21

Roland Flade insists that not all Jewish wine-dealers in the city were wealthy, for 'about a third' of them could be classified as belonging to the petty bourgeoisie or even the lower class. This observation, while important, is rather beside the point in a consideration of the question of visibility of the Jews. Helen Fein sees the disproportion of Jews in certain occupations as representing a 'middleman minority'; Jews were over-represented in Wiirzburg as doctors, chemists, and lawyers-comprising at the end of Weimar 11, 27, and 26 per cent of each group.
Y' Fein notes that such minorities 'are more liable to be ousted because they are from the start excluded from the universe of obligation and because the role they play motivates competitors to improve their own condition by getting rid of them'.
31

The Wurzburg and Lower Franconian Jewish community belonged overwhelmingly to the middle class. In the city, at least to judge by the amount of taxes paid to the Jewish religious community, there was a distinct upper class of industrialists, better-off merchants, and department-store owners; in 1920 they made up 4 per cent of all Jewish citizens. An 'upper middle class' of prospering merchants, smaller industrialists, and the most prominent representatives of the free professions made up just over the next 20 per cent.
After that, another 18 per cent were employed in the free professions and/or owned middle-sized businesses. These figures indicate that 43.5 per cent of the Jews in town could be classified as belonging to the middle and upper middle class. Next down the social scale, the largest single group (46.5 per cent) was made up of the lower middle class of clerks, white-collar workers, small retailers, simple civil servants, bookkeepers, and artisans.32
The remaining io per cent of all Jews, who either paid no church taxes at all or gave the minimum, were the only ones not in the middle class. Ten per cent of all Jews in town were from Eastern Europe ('Ostjuden') well received neither by the population in general nor by their co-religionists."
While all Jews were not doing as well as the owner of the large department store in town, and many small traders barely scraped by, Jews constituted a visible 'merchant minority' in Wurzburg, just as they did in the surrounding rural areas.