The Holocaust (6 page)

Success for the continuing Nazi broadcasts to the Arab world, through Radio-Berlin and Radio-Stuttgart, came on August 3, with the beginning of three days of anti-Jewish riots in the Algerian city of Constantine. In three days, twenty-three Jews were killed, and thirty-eight wounded.
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But Arab unrest could not staunch the flow of German refugees, either to Palestine or elsewhere. In 1934 a total of 6,941 German Jews were admitted to Palestine.
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By the end of 1934, more than fifty thousand German Jews had left Germany. About four hundred and fifty thousand remained. Ten years later, two Jewish historians, Arieh Tartakower and Kurt Grossman, experts on the refugee question, wrote, of 1933 and 1934: ‘During this first period, the refugee movement had a rather tentative character. To many it seemed that the anti-Jewish excesses would pass, to be followed by a new Jewish policy, embodying moderate restrictions and disabilities.’ It was hoped by many German Jews, the authors added, ‘that there would be only a limited exodus, and that the bulk of the Jewish population would remain in Germany’. There were even cases of Jews, who, ‘unable to adjust themselves abroad’, returned to Germany.
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The first months of 1935 seemed to bear out the hopes of those,
both inside and outside Germany, who felt that the extremes of Nazism would pass. In March 1935 a young German journalist, Bella Fromm, noted a much less violent incident in her diary. She was dining at a Berlin restaurant, when she saw a page boy go up to a young couple at the next table, and discreetly place a teacup, with a slip of paper in it, in front of them. The couple seemed about to rise from their seats. ‘May I take the liberty?’ Bella Fromm asked them, taking the slip of paper from the teacup. On it was written: ‘We do not serve Jews.’
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In Dachau, the number of prisoners had fallen sharply, and almost all the Jews interned there in 1933 had been released. After thirteen known Jewish deaths in the camp in 1933, only one Jew, Erich Gans, was known to have been killed there in 1934, on July 1. For ten months no further Jewish deaths were reported, until 22 May 1935, when Max Hans Kohn, a student, died in the camp.
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On 1 March 1935, following a result of a plebiscite held under the auspices of the League of Nations, the Saar had become an integral part of Hitler’s Germany. All five thousand Jews chose French or Belgian citizenship, and left for France and Belgium. Inside Germany, some twenty thousand Jews had left the towns and villages which did not want them, and sought sanctuary in Berlin.
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Riding out the storm seemed one possibility. Another possibility was emigration. But here the problem was not only that of severing the links of a lifetime and of generations. It was also financial. On June 14, while on a visit to New York, two leading German Jews, Otto Hirsch and Max Kreutzberger, pleaded for further financial help to be made available for future refugees, only to be told that no campaign for further fund-raising on German Jewry’s behalf was contemplated for 1936.
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Later that year, however, a special fund-raising effort was made.

On July 15, in further anti-Jewish riots in Berlin, several Jews were severely beaten. Twelve days later an article entitled ‘Finish up with the Jews’ urged ‘German’ girls to wake up and ‘not go with Jews any longer’. ‘German woman,’ the article declared, ‘if you buy from Jews, and German girl if you carry on with Jews, then both of you betray your German Volk and its Führer, Adolf Hitler, and commit a sin against your German Volk and its future!’
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A newspaper campaign now began, demanding legislation to prevent sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. On August 1 a Mannheim newspaper began a series of fourteen separate articles in eight weeks, devoted to this theme, which was promoted by newspapers throughout Germany. ‘A Heidelberg Jew as Race Defiler’ read the headline on the first article; ‘Race Defilers in Protective Custody’ read the headline on August 26, followed two days later, after the arrest of a Jew called Moch, by the headline: ‘Race Defiler Moch in Protective Custody’.
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Tens of thousands of German Jews were not Jews at all, in their own eyes. Some were the children of Jewish converts to Christianity. Others had grandparents who had converted. But Hitler had redefined ‘Jew’ as a question of race, of ‘purity’ of blood: declaring that the mere ‘taint’ of a Jewish ancestor made it impossible for a person ever to be a ‘true’ German, a member of the ‘Volk’. These primitive concepts had become the slogans of a nation, and the obsession of its rulers.

Near Worms, in the village of Biblis, a thirty-seven-year-old Jew, Richard Frankel, awaited arrest. Frankel was a former First World War soldier and invalid, a recipient of the Iron Cross, First Class. In 1932, before Hitler had come to power, he had openly challenged the local Nazis in their beer cellar. His son, then twelve years old, later recalled his father’s mood, as he awaited the Nazi revenge. ‘I remember him sharpening his knife and saying, “If they take me, six will go with me,” and then brandishing his knife in a circle.’ The Nazis came, and Frankel was taken to a nearby concentration camp at Osthofen. ‘We knew’, his son Leslie recalled, ‘that if one was taken there, he came back in a coffin—in a sealed coffin you were forbidden to open.’

Richard Frankel was fortunate to return from Osthofen alive. A year later, he and his son left for South Africa. None of their relatives who remained in Germany was to survive the war.
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Those German Jews who, like Richard Frankel, were under pressure, left Germany: more than seventy-five thousand German Jews had emigrated or fled by the end of August 1935. Of these, several thousand were Jewish only according to Nazi concepts, and were known, in Nazi terminology, as ‘Christian non-Aryans’. It was the definition ‘non-Aryan’ that condemned them. In their own
minds, and behaviour, they were Christians: baptized, Church-going, and believers in the divinity of Jesus.

Of the seventy-five thousand Jewish refugees of 1933, 1934 and 1935, the largest single group, thirty thousand in all, had gone to Palestine. Nine thousand had gone to the United States. Several thousand had gone to Britain, others to South Africa, Canada and Australia. Many thousands more had found a haven in France, Holland and Belgium, in Austria, and in Czechoslovakia.

Inside Germany, at least a quarter of the Jews who remained had been deprived of their professional livelihood by boycott, decree, or local pressure. More than ten thousand public health and social workers had been driven out of their posts, four thousand lawyers were without the right to practise, two thousand doctors had been expelled from hospitals and clinics, two thousand actors, singers and musicians had been driven from their orchestras, clubs and cafes. A further twelve hundred editors and journalists had been dismissed, as had eight hundred university professors and lecturers, and eight hundred elementary and secondary schoolteachers.
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The search for Jews, and for converted Jews, to be driven out of their jobs was continuous. On 5 September 1935 the SS newspaper published the names of eight half-Jews and converted Jews, all of the Evangelical-Lutheran faith, who had been ‘dismissed without notice’ and deprived of any further opportunity ‘of acting as organists in Christian churches’. From these dismissals, the newspaper commented, ‘It can be seen that the Reich Chamber of Music is taking steps to protect the church from pernicious influence.’
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For more than two and a half years, the Jews of Germany had faced terror, hostility and discrimination. Yet each act against them could be seen, by an optimist, if not as the last, then at least as the worst. Nasty, irrational and humiliating as it was, the dismissal of eight organists was not the end of the world. But ten days after this ‘minor’ episode, comprehensive new laws were announced which elevated random discrimination into a system: the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935.

Two laws, both signed by Hitler personally, defined ‘Reich Citizenship’ and set out the rules for ‘the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’. Under the first law, Citizenship could
only belong to ‘a national of German or kindred blood’.
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Under the second law, all Jews were defined as being not of German blood. Marriages between Jews and German ‘nationals’ were forbidden; all marriages conducted ‘in defiance of this law’ were invalid. Sexual relations outside marriage were forbidden between Jews and Germans. Jews were forbidden to fly the German flag.
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Under the headline ‘The Shame of Nuremberg’, the
New York Herald Tribune
described the two laws as ‘a signal victory for the violent anti-Jewish wing of the Nazi Party, led by Julius Streicher’ and as the realization ‘of nearly the whole anti-Semitic portion of the Nazi programme’.
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In London,
The Times
declared: ‘Nothing like the complete disinheritance and segregation of Jewish citizens, now announced, has been heard since medieval times.’
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The Nuremberg Laws made it clear that the Jews were to be allowed no further part in German life: no equality under the law; no further citizenship; no chance of slipping back into the mainstream of German life in which for several generations they had been an integral part, but from which, for two and a half years, they had been gradually cut off.

Following Nuremberg, each move against the Jews could be made with the backing of legal segregation; and such moves began at once. Only a week after the Nuremberg Laws were announced, news reached the outside world that Jews had been forbidden access to any holiday resort in Bavaria.
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On 6 October 1935 two Englishmen, Eric Mills, the Commissioner for Migration and Statistics in Palestine, and Frank Foley, Passport Control Officer in Berlin, met members of the German Economics Ministry in Berlin, to discuss the financial aspects of emigration of German Jews to Palestine. What they heard gave them an insight into the current mood and intentions. ‘German policy’, they wrote in their report to the Foreign Office in London, ‘is clearly to eliminate the Jew from German life, and the Nazis do not mind how this is accomplished. Mortality and emigration provide the means.’
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‘While before I went to Germany’, Mills wrote in a private letter after the meeting, ‘I knew that the Jewish situation was bad, I had not realized as I now do that the fate of German Jews is a tragedy, for which cold, intelligent planning by those in authority takes rank with that of those who are out of sympathy with the Bolshevik
regime, in Russia; or with the elimination of Armenians from the Turkish Empire.’ Mills added: ‘The Jew is to be eliminated and the state has no regard for the manner of his elimination.’
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A month after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws on 15 September 1935, one German newspaper reported that the transfer of private Jewish businesses ‘into Aryan hands’ was proceeding ‘on a considerable scale’.
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As Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, explained in a speech at Saarbrucken on October 14, attention would also be given, in codifying the Laws, ‘to the imposition of legal restrictions on Jews taking part in trade and industry’.
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The net of expropriation and punishment was cast more and more widely. In mid-October all Jewish cinema proprietors were ordered to sell their cinemas within two months, and all Jewish film producers lost their licences to operate. On October 20 several Western newspapers reported the case of a Jewish doctor, Hans Serelman, who had been sent to a concentration camp for seven months for having given a blood transfusion of his own blood to a non-Jew, in order to save the non-Jew’s life. The charge against him had been ‘race defilement’.
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Not only in the press, but in every German school, these racial concepts were being taught from day to day. ‘It will be generations’, Bella Fromm wrote despondently in her diary on October 20, ‘before the Germans can find their way back to an ethical code of life. The evil Nazi doctrine, with its abject conceptions, is deeply planted in the minds of adults, youths, and children.’
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Academic thesis writers promulgated the new doctrines. In 1936 Hans Puvogel, a twenty-five-year-old doctoral student in Saxony, successfully explained to his examiners that an individual’s worth to the community ‘is measured by his or her racial personality. Only a racially valuable person has a right to exist in the community. A racially inferior or harmful individual must be eliminated.’
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The year 1936 saw outbreaks of anti-Jewish activity in several states beyond the borders of Germany. In Rumania, in the city of Timisoara, members of the Iron Guard organization attacked the audience at a Jewish theatre: a bomb was thrown, and two Jews were killed. Elsewhere in Rumania, anti-Jewish riots broke out, including in Kishinev, scene of one of the worst of the pogroms in Tsarist times, and in Bucharest, the Rumanian capital. In Lithuania, in an attempt to establish restrictions on the percentage of Jewish students, not a single Jewish medical student was given a place in the medical faculty of Kovno University.

The Nazis had sent emissaries to several countries to explain the need for anti-Jewish legislation. On 4 February 1936, one of these emissaries, Wilhelm Gustloff, who was Hitler’s personal representative in Switzerland, was assassinated by a twenty-five-year-old Jewish medical student, David Frankfurter. Having shot Gustloff, Frankfurter went at once to the police, reported what he had done, and explained his motives. He wanted, he said, to draw world attention to the Nazi treatment of the Jews in Germany, which he had witnessed at first hand while a medical student there. Frankfurter, the son of a rabbi in a small community in Yugoslavia, was sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment.
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Six days after Gustloff’s assassination, with the unification of the police and the SS, the Gestapo became the supreme police agency of Nazi Germany. Henceforth, the Gestapo could make arrests anywhere in Germany without reference to the courts of law.