The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (18 page)

Hitler's visit to Wiirzburg in early August 1930, as part of the election campaign, was prepared for by two weeks of fevered propagandizing. Some 5,000 people turned out on the evening of 5 August, and, even though tickets went for one mark (50 pfennigs for standing room), there was a sell-out days in advance. According to a police report, those at the event came from 'all groups in the population', and many loyal members were trucked in from the surrounding countryside. Hitler's entry at dusk was heralded by a band, and he spoke for a good two and a half hours. Attacking the Weimar system, and playing upon the nationalist theme, he spread the word of Mein Kampf on issues such as space in the east, bread, emigration, birth control, raising exports, pacificism, and so forth. For Germany, the crowd was told, there were three ways out of the morass: (i) the people had to be made conscious of their blood-bonds; (2) the best heads had to be placed in government; and (3) the will to live and to battle had to be acknowleged. After some thoughts on German history, he devoted special attention to portraying the Jews as 'parasites on the body politic [Schodlinge am Volkskorper]'. His speech was greeted with a 'loud applause' and there followed a robust singing of the Deutschlandlied, after which the meeting broke up without incident.Ei'
Hitler made no bones about his view of the Jews and his racism. Leaflets distributed by the Party in Wdrzburg subsequently made it clear what it had in mind for the Jews if and when it became the governing party.

The most spectacular local anti-Semitic action before 1933 was occasioned by a visit to the city on ig November 1930 of a Hebrew-speaking theatregroup Habima, from Moscow. Local Nazis, led by Hellmuth, could not resist the temptation to call for a public protest against what was termed the 'cultural Bolshevism' represented by Habima. On the evening of the performance a large number of young people, many of them Nazi Party members, gathered before the City Theatre to prevent the audience from entering. A small contingent of police could not prevent the demonstrators from beating on the doors and walls of the theatre with fists and sticks, and screaming repeatedly, 'Down with the Jews, out with the Hebrews! Knock them dead!'
By the time more police arrived, the crowd had grown to an estimated r,ooo, and was moved from the theatre only with difficulty. Many who had attended the performance were later accosted and accused of having sympathy for the Jews; some were assaulted and chased through the streets in fear for their lives. As one Jewish eyewitness put it, 'How I got home, I cannot really say, only that it was around one or two in the morning and the fear did not leave me for days.'"'

A few people were apprehended as having been responsible for the incidents, but their trial, which began in early February 1931, was quite a farce. Some of the accused turned up in dinner-jackets, and spectators arrived in court under the direction of Gauleiter Hellmuth. 'Laughably small punishments' were predictable when the offenders 'came up against a state attorney and a judge who made no bones about their anti-Semitic attitude'."

The anti-Semitism of the local Nazi Party in this area was made abundantly clear also in its press. Local scandal-sheets comparable in many ways to Streicher's Der Sturmer (which also circulated in the city) spread racial views tinged with pornography. Women who were accused of having sexual relations with Jews were named in the Nazi rag, and such accusations led to libel cases which simply fuelled the sensationalism and small-town gossip. The local Nazi paper, Die Freiheit (Freedom), reported the 'sinning women' to the local citizens in its edition of 2 z August 19 3 z

The young women of Wurzburg feel and think German. They have, even if for the most part unconsciously, their racial pride. And therefore it is no wonder if shabby exceptions are found all the more disgraceful. This is the new German era of 'freedom, beauty and honour', of moral degeneracy and shame. We know these Lowenstein, Rosenbusch, Stern, Oppenheimer, Strauss, and a good many more. We also know the names of the shameful women [Schandmddchen] who have no qualms about having relations with Jews. We warn Rita D., Grete M., Tilly Sch., Ilse, etc. Beginning with the next edition we shall publish the full names of these women and expose them to general condemnation."

As threatened, the paper gave out the names the very next week, a practice which was to become a commonplace in the Third Reich's smuttier papers.

Nazis were also active at Wurzburg's university. There was an anti-Semitic tradition among students in Germany, and before 1914 various forms of that prejudice 'conquered the majority' of them across the country, and this certainly spread during the Weimar years.64
After the First World War students bitterly fought elections to the national umbrella-organization, the
German Students' Union. By 1931 the National Socialist Students' Association had a majority in the Union, and one of its members was president."
The tenor of student debates on the Wurzburg campus is indicated in their discussion of a motion of February 1929, moved by the Nazis on the local student council. It demanded the introduction of a numerus clausus, that is, a restriction on the number of Jewish students permitted to study, so that their presence at the university would not rise above their percentage in the population. As 6.4 per cent (in 1928) of Wurzburg's registered students were Jews, such a demand entailed that many would have to be forced out."
The motion was passed, supported not only by Nazi representatives, but also by those from various fraternities, including a Catholic organization. Though the student council voted for the measure, it could not be implemented because the university Senate declared it a violation of the Weimar constitution. The proposal was made once again with great fanfare in December 1931, and, while it too came to nothing, it was a prelude to the complete exclusion of the Jews from universities in the Third Reich.57
Such campaigns attracted the educated elite and spilled over into the town as well. The 'public declaration' of thirty-six local professors in the autumn of 1932, that Germany should be 'liberated' from 'the domination of the parliaments' indicates that the students were not the only ones at the university in Wurzburg moving to the right.`'"

6. THE 'SEIZURE OF POWER' IN WURZBURG

In what was to be the last remotely free election, in March 1933, the vote for the NSDAP rose slightly in Wurzburg, where it reached 31.5 per cent of the total; in the district as a whole the figure stood at 3 3.9 per cent. Both were well below the figures for Bavaria (43.1 per cent) and Germany as a whole (43.9 per cent). In Wurzburg the BVP was ahead of the Nazis, with 36.1 per cent of the vote, and the SPD/KPD block received 22.3 per cent; both blocks were down only slightly from the previous election.69
People remained relatively cool towards Nazism. The Party's efforts to get elected to Wurzburg's city council were also rebuffed. At the turn of the year 1932/3
the BVP and SPD controlled a majority between them (twenty-six out of forty seats), while the NSDAP had only four representatives.70

In spite of the limited results, the NSDAP was a presence in the city during the last years of Weimar, and not infrequently carried protests and demonstrations to the point of violence. Particularly visible and vulnerable targets of hostility in the late Weimar days were Jews and Jewish department stores in town. Since their appearance in the days of Bismarck's Germany, these establishments had borne the brunt of anti-Semitic attack, and the Nazis merely accelerated the tradition.

After Hitler's appointment, and especially after the Reichstag fire, systematic police actions were undertaken against Communist functionaries. After the March election the net was widened to include other opponents, such as the leaders of the Socialists' paramilitary organization, the Reichsbanner. By the middle of March, fifty-one of them from Wurzburg were in 'protective custody', from a total of 261 for all of Lower Franconia. In Wurzburg alone 1o8 house-searches were conducted, and arms of all kinds confiscated."
Efforts of local leaders of the SPD and KPD to join forces to resist the Nazis came to nothing because no agreement could be worked out at the national level.72
Some leading Socialists were dreaming. For example, SPD executive member Hans Vogel, who came from Berlin to address a meeting in Wurzburg just before the elections, could think of nothing better to say than to remind the faithful that 'the spirit has always triumphed over the sword. And because we are a spiritual movement, we are permitted to have the certainty: we will come after Hitler'.71

The Nazi leadership in Wurzburg waited until the results of the last 'free' elections (5 March 1933) before 'seizing' power there. Not only could the Storm-troopers and SS intimidate their opponents as never before, in their capacity as members of the new auxiliary police, but they could now present themselves as the Chancellor's Party and set up loudspeakers in the main city squares to broadcast Hitler's messages. The Party was far from winning a majority in Wurzburg, but its 31.5 per cent of the vote showed that it was backed by as many as 19,237 citizens there. The Catholic Party managed to hold on to 22,046 and the SPD 10,184 votes.74

The leaders of Wiirzburg's Nazis decided to treat the results as a victory. Hannsheinz Bauer, a young Socialist at the time, remembered how word got around on the evening of 9 March that something was going to happen at the city hall. Shortly after Bauer got there Storm-troopers arrived, most of them students. Michael Meisner, a man from the town establishment,
remembered the response of a policeman whom he had asked what was up: 'It's a bunch of real young lads ... it's unbelievable, they're raising the swastika flag over our city hall!
171 It mattered not the least that mayor Hans Loficer was far from favouring the act. A table was brought out, on which Kreisleiter Theo Memmel stood to address the crowd, and at the end of the speech everyone sang the national anthem and the Party song, the Horst Wessel Lied. Bauer recalled that for him what was really symbolic about these theatrics happened during the singing. 'An old-age pensioner, who stood at the edge of the street, had neglected to remove his hat. All at once a strapping SA man jumped at him, clobbered him with a punch to the ground, so that blood ran from his nose, and then hurried back immediately to his troop.
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The removal of unsympathetic mayor Loffler took a few days, but in the mean time, in line with the standard operating procedures of other Nazi `seizures of power', political opponents were dealt with. On io March the headquarters of the trade unions was stormed, confiscated, and renamed after Nazi Gauleiter Otto Hellmuth. The offices of the two major opposition newspapers were also raided: the socialist Volksfreund was banned; while the moderate bourgeois organ, the Frankisches Volksblatt, though gagged, was allowed to appear again. At 7.30 in the evening a first burning of confiscated socialist books, placards, and such took place in front of the distinguished Residenz palace near the centre of town, with Weimar's black-red-gold flag thrown in on top."
According to the SPD's Hannsheinz Bauer, there was never really a question of stopping the local `seizure' by force of arms because the paramilitary branch of the SPD, even if combined with that of the KPD and with trade-unionists, would simply have been no match for the betterorganized and more numerous Nazi groups.71

In the meeting of the city council on 23 March Nazi councillor Wolz proposed that the street named after the first president of the Weimar Republic, the socialist Friedrich Ebert, be returned to its original name. Thirty-one councillors voted against the motion, while only five from the `bourgeois coalition' went along with the four Nazi representatives.7'
Because mayor Loffler added his weight to the majority decision, pressure was soon brought to bear on him to resign. An SA delegation successfully appealed to the district's chief administration officer, and he was removed from office. A short while later his deputy, Julius Zahn, followed. The new mayor was the young Nazi Party Kreisleiter Theo Memmel, who, among other things, now saw to it that numerous streets were renamed."

Wurzburgers offered a final show of defiance when municipal elections were held on 12 April. Out of a total of twenty-eight seats (reduced from the usual forty), the NSDAP wrested but ten; the Catholic BVP, with eleven, outdid the Nazis by one, and the SPD, against the odds, managed to get five. Assorted 'others' picked up the remainder. Curiously enough, this city council went along with a unanimous vote for Memmel as mayor, but even so it was only a matter of time before the Nazis forced their opponents out of the council; the SPD went on 20 June (nationally the Party was banned shortly after), and the BVP's turn came at the end of the month. To make the loss of power abundantly clear, many of the local representatives of both parties in Wurzburg (and elsewhere in the district) got a taste of 'protective custody'. By July the Nazis were the only ones left on the city council.'

According to long-time socialist Gerda Laufer, as well as the young lawyer Michael Meisner, notwithstanding the defiance shown in the council elections, things changed quickly. Laufer said she `was deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves'."
Meisner recalled that while there was a certain air of normality about town, trusted parts of the bourgeois social world were disappearing."
Word got out that the SA was carrying out brutal beatings in the old fortress above town, and Laufer remembered that too. By the summer of 1933 Dachau, barely in operation, was already a byword in Wurzburg for brutality and torture. Workers did not openly resist, but they were slow to embrace Nazism. The Nazis transformed 1 May, the day for workers in Europe to demonstrate their socialist leanings, into a general holiday and a day to celebrate work. The first of these occasions went off without a snag in 1933, when, in front of the Residenz, Gauleiter Hellmuth reviewed a two-and-a-half-hour parade of nearly 32,000 men.84