The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (21 page)

Ordinary Germans' reactions to the Nuremberg Laws are difficult to reconstruct-the few recorded statements in various kinds of contemporary documents are not particularly revealing. One set of sources that has survived consists of reports of the Gestapo, although for the most part the material pertains to the Prussian areas of Germany, from the Rhineland all the way to eastern Germany.34
There are also scattered accounts from Bavaria. Since some of the Gestapo material derives from Catholic and/or rural areas not unlike Lower Franconia and other parts of Bavaria, it can convey some impression of the range of probable responses to the Nuremberg Laws in Lower Franconia.

The Gestapo accounts that survive for the months leading up to the Nuremberg Laws are strewn with stories of the massive numbers of 'spontaneous excesses' which took place throughout the country, including Bavaria. Some idea of the scope they attained in some areas may be gathered, for example, from a report from Osnabruck in August 1935. In that city and surrounding area there were 'massive demonstrations' against Jewish businesses, which were publicly branded and surrounded by mobs; people who frequented Jewish businesses were photographed and the pictures were displayed in public. The streets were alive with action-parades and so on. In the countryside peasants found to be dealing with Jewish cattle-dealers were denounced by name to the Nazi rag, the Sturmer. The 'high point of the struggle against the Jews', as the report went, was a meeting on 20 August, which brought together 25,000 people to hear Kreisleiter Munzer on the theme of 'Osnabruck and the Jewish Question'. The situation was so inflamed, however, that the Gestapo and other state officials had to call on Munzer to put a stop to the 'individual actions', and he did so by publishing a warning in all the local newspapers; these actions were officially outlawed on 27 August.
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The vandalism and terroristic acts aimed at Jews cooled off after September 1935. As one Gestapo report from Catholic Munster put it, 'after the promulgation of the Jewish laws at the Party meetings in Nuremberg, a certain tranquillity set in with regard to the Jewish question. Excesses against Jews, as well as individual actions against Jewish businesses, have not taken place again in the past month.';'
The 'tranquillity' following the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, noted the report, suggests a kind of accommodation to the new circumstances and is in marked contrast to the repeated complaints in the Gestapo reports about the attitude of Catholics to the Jewish question. For example, the Aachen Gestapo regretted on 5 September that the 'mentality of the Catholic population judged the Jews in the first instance as human beings' and only secondarily 'from the racial-political point of view'.1
While this complaint finds an echo in several reports from the summer (but also into September), the Gestapo was beginning to note signs of adjustment, especially after the middle of September. A report for October from Munster noted the population's 'satisfaction', and that the actions against the Jews had 'settled down'; the word from nearby Dortmund said that 'almost all' non-Jewish citizens gave the laws their 'fullest recognition'; Magdeburg in
the east said in its November report that 'the population regards the regulation of the relationships of the Jews as an emancipatory act, which brings clarity and simultaneously greater firmness in the protection of the racial interests of the German people'; the people in Kassel were said to have an understanding for the legislation concerning the Jews, though part of the middleclass population felt that it was too radical.3"

For Bavaria the reports are equally terse. Thus, one from Augsburg, written early in 1936, said that the population `fully understood this clean-up effort', though it regarded the laws themselves as 'one-sided' in that they only punished the male. 'According to the general view, both parties ought to be taken to task.'39
In the Nuremberg area the laws were received with `great enthusiasm'. Lower Franconia's government President said that the measures `were approved of by the nationalistically inclined population, while the Jews were hit by consternation, expressed in an increasing desire to emigrate'. All in all, the celebrations at the Party meeting, he continued, `raised the trust in the Reich government, gave heart and confidence to the doubters, and made the job of the grumblers and agitators' more difficult."'
In Munich the Gestapo reported that 'little is said' about the new legislation, `although there was general agreement with it'.41

The Gestapo in Kassel-in Protestant Hesse, just to the north of Bavariaobserved in its report of December that

although the understanding for the Jewish question has grown among the people since the Jewish legislation, a part of the bourgeois population considers the Jewish policy of the government too radical. The usual phrases keep turning up about 'decent Jews' and the like. It is also believed that a moderation in Jewish policy would radically relieve our foreign-exchange situation.42

The report from Potsdam for November drew a distinction between those who were 'educable' and those who were not; the latter 'did not understand ... racial thought, in particular as it has been actualized in the racial laws'. This 'misunderstanding' was 'in part deliberate'.41
It was said that the nonNazis in Aachen remained 'untouched' by the Nuremberg events; given the 'well-known mentality of the Catholic population [of the area] nothing more was to be expected'. To be sure, the legislation was greeted to the extent that it would put a stop to the excesses.44
'The non-National Socialist part of the
population' in nearby Trier `remained as before under the influence of clerical and reactionary circles', so that opinion was divided on the latest turn of events.45
Even so, by early in the new year the report from Trier was that people only rarely retained economic relations with the Jews, many of whom were emigrating.46

Regardless of whether the laws found an approving, disapproving, or indifferent audience, once in existence they became part of the structure of everyday life for all Jews or those who had anything to do with them, whether in business or in more personal matters. The laws also codified existing practice: avoid Jews socially, and in particular have no sexual relations with them. Even actions which might be construed as merely sympathetic to their plight were now given a new, more dangerous twist, because anyone friendly to the Jews could be denounced on suspicion of having illicit relationships. The promulgation of these measures marked an important point in the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and they certainly made it much easier for radicals to take up the struggle on a 'legal' basis. More will be said in later chapters about popular responses to these laws and other anti-Semitic policies as they were reflected in the Gestapo case-files.

The Nuremberg Laws facilitated the petty victimization that had been going on well before September 1935. One of the earliest denunciations of social relations between Jewish and non-Jewish persons recorded by the Gestapo in Wurzburg concerns a case in which a Dr Karl Wesen and his student Jurgen Ernst reported directly to the police that on the evening of 28 May 1933 two people in the Cafe Kies had behaved in an openly `provocative' fashion. One of these people was Jewish-a certain Alfons Golom-the other a young typist-clerk by the name of Helena Valentin (born 1912). On the May evening in 1933 she was `done up' in such a way, and was flirting with Golom so openly, that Wesen and Ernst took it upon themselves to follow them when they left the restaurant and to `tell her off because of the un-German way she acted. When she answered that it was none of their business, and that in any case, she would be ashamed to call herself German, she was slapped and the couple chased through the streets. The case is interesting because Wesen and Ernst may not have been Nazi Party members. (Valentin had been friends with Golom since November 1932, as it turned out from the story they gave later, when the Gestapo got hold of them.) The case also shows that more than two years before the first laws on `race defilement' were passed in September 1935, relationships between Jews and non-Jews were already policed.47

Nazi Party radicals could take advantage of the new laws to settle old scores, and they denounced Jews even for actions which had occurred before 1933. The Jewish merchant Max Oppenheim (born in Wurzburg in 1898) was reported by the NSDAP on 5 September 1935 for having had sexual relations with 'German' women up to the period in 193o. The grounds for his arrest were that his behaviour, 'which had only recently come to light', had caused a public outcry; 'wide circles of the population and especially the NSDAP have been set into such vehemence and upset that the worst is to be feared for his personal security'. For his 'own safety' he was placed in protective custody. He was released when he assured the local Gestapo that he was about to emigrate.41

Cases were initiated by members of the NSDAP against Jewish neighbours who did not show sufficient'respect'. Thus, 'Party comrade' Wolfgang Kreuzer sent a five-page typed letter to the local Party headquarters (whence it was forwarded to the Gestapo), in which he denounced Isay Ostrach (Jewish and a Polish citizen) on a large number of counts, including, in passing, the possibility that he might be involved in 'race defilement'. The police were asked to investigate 'the conditions in the house', and turned up virtually nothing except that Ostrach was not liked by his neighbours.49
The new laws constituted an important weapon for anyone who wished to take advantage of them, and precisely because they pertained to a matter of extreme importance to Nazism allegations easily found their way on to the Gestapo's desk.

3. 'REICHSKRISTALLNACHT', 9-I0 NOVEMBER 1938

All the official, semi-official, and personal hostility aimed at the Jews paled in comparison with the events of the 'night of broken glass' (Kristallnacht), the pogrom of November 1938 which hit the Jews and their property across Germany. As is well known by now, the pogrom began when a Polish Jew, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, shot Ernst Vom Rath, third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris. His parents, once resident in Germany, had just been deported to Poland, and on 7 November young Grynszpan decided to take his revenge. Vom Rath died of his wounds on 9 November at 4.30 P.M. His death could not have come at a worse time, for 9 November was already a day of special significance in Nazi lore: it was the anniversary of Hitler's attempt in 1923 to seize power in the abortive putsch in Munich. Customarily, out of remembrance for the few Nazis who died in the attempted coup, Hitler met with his old cronies and, among other things, passed out Party promotions, At the 1938 gathering in the old Munich city hall, word came
at 8.30 p.m., just as the evening meal was being served, that Vom Rath had died. Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, apparently regarded the assassination as a chance to regain a position of influence by putting back some dynamism into the struggle against the Jews, and leading it himself.50
Following a brief meeting alone with Hitler, the Fi hrer retired and Goebbels gave the assembled Party members what was by all accounts a masterful speech, in which he conveyed the general idea that direct actions against the Jews ought to begin at once. Telephone orders went out across Germany, in a more or less ad hoc fashion, to commence the `spontaneous actions' against Jews and their property.51

On 9 November, at a telegram was sent from Berlin (which had been notified in the meantime) to all Gestapo posts, announcing that 'at any moment in all of Germany actions will be taken against Jews, and particularly against their synagogues. These [demonstrations] are not to be disturbed, although, in agreement with the ordinary police, it is to be ensured that plundering and other particular excesses are to be prevented.' Important materials which turned up were to be confiscated, and the preliminary steps taken to arrest a total of between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews; those chosen should be of the wealthier class. It added that further orders would be sent later in the night. At 1.20 a.m. Berlin ordered the Gestapo to arrange meetings with the local NSDAP to work out details for carrying out the demonstration. The Gestapo was to make clear that it was under orders to keep matters in bounds; 'German' lives and property could not be endangered; Jewish businesses and homes could be destroyed, but plunderers would be arrested; the businesses of 'Germans' had to be protected from potential damage; and foreigners, even when they were Jews, were to be left alone. Better-off (and healthy male) Jews were to be arrested in numbers which could be handled in local facilities; they were not to be mishandled, and would be sent to concentration camps as soon as possible. The orders were not followed to the letter, for, as one of the many telegrams from Berlin in the subsequent weeks complained, some Jews sent to concentration camps were 'nearly 8o years old, obviously sick and mentally weak'."

These behind-the-scenes machinations are reconstructed on the basis of the materials from Wurzburg, so that there is little doubt that the instructions reached Lower Franconia, but there was much more chaos on the ground than might be deduced from such records. Most Lower Franconians would have had no idea about the plotting that went on at local Gestapo and Party
headquarters, but, once the pogrom began to unfold, they would have learnt about the events from local press coverage and by word of mouth. Though many Jews had already moved away from the district, tiny pockets continued to exist throughout Lower Franconia, unlike other areas in Bavaria and Germany, so that 'the population in this area was to a far greater extent witness to the devastation and many experienced at first hand the merciless fate of the

It was virtually impossible to avoid bearing witness in villages like Frankenwinheim in Lower Franconia. Just after the turn of the century the Jews had made up io per cent of the population of 588, and, as throughout the district, these numbers declined thereafter. On the morning of io November this village was the site of a forced public gathering of Jews from Frankenwinheim and neighbouring Liilsfeld. The SA stationed in Gerolzhofen and Volkach, who engineered this event, ordered Jewish women to dress in religious garb and carry all the furniture and holy materials into the street, set fire to them, and watch. Something like 200 other villagers looked on as well; the police, like the firemen, stood by, and at its conclusion put every Jewish man, woman, and child in gaol in Gerolzhofen. In their absence, property was plundered.54