The Holocaust (4 page)

In further national elections on 31 July 1932, the Nazi Party won 230 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler had now established enough power to form a government in coalition with others. But he declined to accept second place, refusing to agree to a coalition unless he were Chancellor. At further elections three months later, on 6 November 1932, Nazi votes and seats both fell. Hitler’s opponents declared that the Nazi movement was on the wane: that its chances of power were ended.

With 196 seats, a loss of 34, Hitler was outnumbered by the combined forces of the Socialists and Communists. But his opponents on the left lacked sufficient unity, or sense of danger, to combine. A prolonged political crisis led to negotiations, and negotiations led to a compromise. The parties of the centre and the right agreed to accept Hitler as Chancellor, at the head of the coalition in which they would share Cabinet seats and power. Hitler agreed, and on 30 January 1933 was appointed Chancellor. He was forty-three years old.

‘I had been skating that day,’ a ten-year-old Jewish boy, Leslie Frankel, who lived in the village of Biblis, near Worms, later recalled. ‘When I got home,’ Frankel added, ‘we heard that Hitler had become Chancellor. Everybody shook. As kids of ten we shook.’
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Hitler moved rapidly to establish his dictatorship. An Emergency Decree, passed by the Reichstag on 5 February 1933, expropriated all Communist Party buildings and printing presses, and closed down all pacifist organizations. In the following week, the Stormtroops, now buoyed up by the enthusiasm of the constitutional victory, attacked trade union buildings, and beat up political opponents in the streets.

Three weeks after the passing of the Emergency Decree, Hitler found the opportunity to take a second step towards dictatorship, when on February 27, fire broke out in the Reichstag building. Even before the blaze had been extinguished, and long before any guilt could be established, the Nazis had demanded new rules concerning ‘protective custody’, and these rules, legalizing arbitrary imprisonment without warrant or trial, came into effect on February 28, followed immediately by mass arrests, and a settling of accounts with political opponents. One of those arrested, a Berliner by the name of Bernstein, was given fifty lashes because he was a Communist, and then a further fifty lashes because he was ‘also a Jew’.
¹

On March 9 the Stormtroops were active throughout Berlin. Many Jews were beaten, the
Manchester Guardian
reported, ‘until the blood streamed down their heads and faces, and their backs and shoulders were bruised. Many fainted and were left lying on the streets….’ The Stormtroops worked in groups of between five and thirty men, ‘the whole gang often assaulting one person’.
²

The terror in the streets was witnessed by foreign diplomats and journalists from the world press. But from March 9, terror found a hidden base behind barbed wire. For, beginning on that day, the SS sent thousands of critics of the regime, including many Jews, to a so-called ‘concentration camp’, at Dachau, near Munich. The
camp, ‘empty huts in a gravel pit’, was run by the local Dachau SS, which had already become notorious as ‘one of the most savage and brutal SS platoons in Bavaria’.
³

During March 1933 Dachau was enlarged to enable five thousand prisoners to be kept there. Meanwhile, the terror in the streets continued. On March 11, Jewish-owned department stores in Braunschweig were looted. On March 13, all Jewish lawyers and judges were expelled from court in Breslau. On March 15, in Berlin, three Jews were arrested by Stormtroops in the Café New York, taken to a local Stormtroop headquarters, robbed of all their money, ‘beaten bloody with rubber truncheons, and then turned out in the streets in a semi-conscious state’.
⁴

All over Germany, Jews, as well as non-Jewish critics of the regime, were attacked and beaten. Against the Jews, these so-called
Einzeloperationen
, or ‘individual operations’, were carried out against shopkeepers, rabbis and communal leaders. ‘A considerable number of people were arrested without any reason at all,’ a Berlin lawyer, Benno Cohn, later recalled, ‘and among them were a considerable number of Jews.’
⁵
One of these Jews was a baker’s apprentice, Siegbert Kindermann. Before Hitler’s coming to power, Kindermann, a member of the Bar Kochba Jewish Sports Society, had been attacked by Nazi thugs. His attackers had been brought to court, and convicted. Now the thugs took their revenge. On March 18 Kindermann was taken to a Stormtroop barracks in Berlin and beaten to death. His body was then thrown out of a window into the street. Those who found his body discovered that a large swastika had been cut into his chest.
⁶

An imminent boycott of Jewish shops, publicized outside Germany, led to considerable protest. On March 27 a mass rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden threatened a counter-boycott of all German-made goods, until the anti-Jewish boycott was called off.
⁷
The Nazi leaders therefore limited themselves to a one-day, Sabbath, boycott of all Jewish-owned shops, cafés and businesses. ‘The Jews of the whole world are trying to destroy Germany,’ posters declared in every German city. ‘German people, defend yourselves! Don’t buy from the Jews!’
⁸

The boycott began at ten in the morning of Saturday, April 1. Stormtroops, standing outside Jewish-owned shops, carried placards urging ‘Germans’ not to enter. The Star of David was painted
in yellow on black across the doors and windows of thousands of shops, and, in crude lettering, the single word
Jude
, ‘Jew’, the sign of the swastika, and the slogans, ‘Perish Judah!’, ‘Jews, Out!’, ‘Go to Palestine!’ and ‘Go to Jerusalem!’

GERMANY 1933

‘On every Jew shop’, wrote Lady Rumbold, the wife of the British Ambassador in Berlin, ‘was plastered a large notice warning people not to buy in Jewish shops. In many cases special notices were put up saying that sweated labour was employed in that particular shop, and often you saw caricatures of Jewish noses.’ It was, she
added, ‘utterly cruel and Hunnish the whole thing, just doing down a heap of defenceless people.’ ‘To see people pilloried in this fashion,’ she wrote three days later, ‘a very large number of them quite harmless, hardworking people, was altogether revolting, and left a very nasty taste in the mouth. I shall never forget it.’
⁹

German Jews were stunned by this organized, absurd, cruel display, which Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Dr Joseph Goebbels, described in his diary as ‘an imposing spectacle’.
¹⁰
During the course of the day of the boycott, one Jew was killed, a lawyer by the name of Schumm, who had been arrested at Kiel after an altercation with a Stormtrooper, taken to Stormtroop headquarters, and shot. This ‘lynching’, as it was described, was headline news in almost every British newspaper on the following Monday morning.
¹¹
‘As a matter of fact,’ Hitler declared in his first speech after the boycott, ‘the Jews in Germany had not had a hair of their heads rumpled.’
¹²

The Jews of Germany had been among Europe’s most assimilated, most cultured, most active contributors to the national life of the state in which they lived. Hundreds of thousands of them had become an integral part of German society. They had made significant contributions to German medicine, literature, science, music and industry. ‘They could not possibly believe’, Benno Cohn later recalled, ‘that this cultured German nation, the one which was the most cultured of the peoples of the world since time immemorial, would resort to such iniquitous things.’
¹³

The impact of the one-day boycott was considerable. ‘Many Jews on this Saturday were depressed,’ wrote the editor of the German-language
Judische Rundschau
, Robert Weltsch, in his editorial on April 4. They had been ‘forced to admit their Jewishness’, not for ‘an inner conviction, not for loyalty to their people, not for their pride in a magnificent history and in noblest human achievement’, but by ‘the affixing of a red placard or a yellow badge’, and by the sticking of placards to their windows, and the daubing of their window-panes.

During these boycott activities, the Stormtroops had painted the Star of David on the windows of Jewish-owned shops. ‘They meant to dishonour us,’ Weltsch noted, and went on to declare: ‘Jews, take it upon yourselves, that Star of David, and honour it anew.’

In his editorial, Weltsch expressed his hope that the Nazi movement, ‘which took such pride, as a pioneer, in raising the pride of the
German nation, will not find work to be done in the degradation of others.’ But if it were to do so, ‘we, the Jewish people, will be able to defend our pride.’
¹⁴

On April 7 the concept of a racial difference between German Jews and all other Germans was given legal status when the German government ordered the dismissal—called in the Order ‘retirement’—of all civil servants ‘who are not of Aryan descent’.
¹⁵
By giving German non-Jews the status of ‘Aryan’, this imaginary concept, based upon nonsensical and discredited theories of ‘purity of race’, Hitler formally divided German citizens into two groups. ‘The greatest achievements in intellectual life’, Hitler told the German Doctors’ Union, ‘can never be produced by those of an alien race, but only by those who are inspired by the Aryan and German spirit.’
¹⁶

German cities competed in zealous pursuit of the new ‘Aryan’ ideal. In Frankfurt, on the day of this first ‘Aryan law’, German Jewish teachers were forbidden to teach in the universities, German Jewish actors to perform on the stage, and German Jewish musicians to play in concerts. The very concept of ‘German Jewish’ was being denied and denounced: one could either be a German, or one could be a Jew.

To terrorize political opponents, churchmen, Communists, homosexuals and Jews, the new government set up concentration camps at Esterwegen and Sachsenhausen, in addition to Dachau. In each of these camps, daily beatings and harsh treatment quickly became the rule. By the beginning of April 1933, at Dachau, there were less than a hundred Jews among the thousand German citizens being held without warrant, or trial. News of conditions in the concentration camps circulated both inside and outside Germany. ‘This Nazi revolution’, wrote the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, to a diplomatic colleague, ‘has brought out some of the worst characteristics in the German character, namely, a mean spirit of revenge, brutality amounting in many cases to bestiality, and complete ruthlessness.’
¹⁷

Rumbold’s letter was dated 11 April 1933. On the following day, in Dachau, four Jews died as a result of deliberate sadism. An eye-witness account of their deaths was smuggled to Britain by a prisoner who was later released. ‘A few days ago’, he wrote, ‘we were going out as usual to work. All of a sudden the Jewish
prisoners—Goldmann and Erwin Kahn, merchants, Benario, a lawyer from Nuremberg, and a medical student, Artur Kahn—were ordered to fall out of the ranks. Without even a word, some Stormtroop men shot at them; they had not made any attempt to escape. All were killed on the spot. All had bullet wounds in their foreheads.’ The four Jews were buried openly, the SS being present. ‘Then a meeting was called, and a Stormtroop leader made a speech in which he told us that it was a good thing these four Jewish sows were dead. They had been hostile elements who had no right to live in Germany; they had received their due punishment.’
¹⁸

German Jews acted as best they could to ameliorate their situation. On April 13 a group of Jewish bankers, community leaders and Zionists established in Berlin a Central Bureau for Relief and Rehabilitation. But on that same day, at Berlin University, notices appeared on the campus: ‘Against the un-German spirit’. ‘Our most dangerous opponent’, these notices declared, ‘is the Jew. The Jew can only think Jewish. If he writes German, he is lying. The German who writes German and thinks Jewish is a traitor.’

The first Jews had reached German soil in Roman times. Jews had lived in Germany for more than a thousand years. The Jewish contribution to Germany’s sacrifices in the Great War had been a source of pride to the German Jewish community. Jews had been among the leading rebuilders of Germany after the defeat of 1918, and among those who suffered most severely from the post-war economic turmoils. All this was now to be forgotten, or denied. ‘We mean to treat the Jew as a foreigner,’ the Berlin University placards stated.
¹⁹
Twelve days later, the German government passed an Act ‘against the excessive number of students of foreign race in German schools and universities’. Under the Act, German Jews were to be considered ‘of foreign race’.
²⁰

Throughout Germany, Jews were singled out for violent assault. On April 22 a press report from Wiesbaden stated blandly that a Jewish merchant, Salomon Rosenstrauch, was ‘shot in his flat’.
²¹
On the following day, at Worms, another Jewish merchant, Mathau Frank, was hanged, six days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
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