The Transfer Agreement (38 page)

Nazi mythology accused Jews of being an alien factor in German society.
But in truth, Jews had lived in Germany since the fourth century
A.D.
As elsewhere in Europe during the Middle Ages, what German Jews could do and say, even their physical dress and appearance, was oppressively regulated. Confiscation of property and expulsion were frequent. Worse, anti-Jewish mobs often organized hangings and immolations at the stake. Even when left alone, German Jews could exist only in segregated ghettos subject to a long list of prohibitions.

The pressure to escape Germany's medieval persecution created a very special kind of Jew, one who subordinated his Jewish identity to the larger Christian society around him. Assimilation became a desirable antidote, especially among intellectuals during the Age of Enlightenment. When Napoleon conquered parts of Germany in the early nineteenth century, he granted Jews emancipation. But after Napoleon was defeated, the harsh German
status quo ante
was restored. The taste of freedom, however, led affluent and intellectual Jewish classes to assimilate en masse. Philosophically, assimilationists no longer considered themselves Jews living in Germany. Instead, they saw themselves as Germans who, by accident of birth, were Jewish.

Many even succumbed to the German pressure to convert to Christianity. German Jewry lost to apostasy many of their commercial, political, and intellectual leaders. A far greater number were convinced that Jewish ethnic identity should be denied, but nonetheless saw quintessential value in the tenets of Moses. These German Jews developed Reform Judaism. But even many of Reform Judaism's pioneers ultimately converted to Christianity.
¹

Between
I869
and
I87I,
Germany granted Jews emancipation from civic, commercial, and political restrictions, although certain prohibitions against high governmental, academic, and military office remained in force. Emancipation allowed acknowledged Jews to assimilate comfortably into German society. Germany's Jewry seized the chance to become equals. They changed their surnames, adopted greater religious laxity through Reform Judaism, and frequently married non-Jews, raising the children as Christians. Outright conversion became common.

In fact, of approximately
550,000
Jews in Germany who were emancipated in
1871,
roughly
60,000
were by
1930
either apostates, children raised without Jewish identity by a mixed marriage, or Jews who had drifted totally away. Even those consciously remaining within organized Jewish "communities" neglected their remnant Jewish identity. The Jews of twentieth-century Germany, like their Christian neighbors, embraced national identity far more than religious identity. In the minds of German Jews, they were
"101
percent" German, first and foremost.
²

When political Zionism emerged shortly after emancipation, its principal leaders were Germanic, spoke German, and looked to Germany as the sponsor of a hoped-for Jewish home. Imperial Germany viewed Jewish notions of self-removal as a curiošity that appealed to basic anti-Semitic precepts. But German Jewry vehemently rejected Zionism as an enemy from within. Assimilated cosmopolitan Jews feared any assertion that they did not belong to Germany, any implication that Jewish loyalties were not to the Fatherland. The religious sector reacted with equal condemnation. Clinging to their communal existence, and unwilling to return to the Promised Land until beckoned by the Messiah, religious German Jews saw Zionism as sacrilege.
³

So in
I897,
when Herzl selected Munich as the site of the First Zionist Congress, Jewish leaders throughout Germany publicly protested until the convention was relocated to Basel. Anti-Zionism was one of the few Jewish topics Reform, Orthodox, cosmopolitan, and ghetto Jews could agree on.
⁴

In the years after Basel, the movement earnestly tried to find acceptance among Germany's Jews. From
I
905
to
I9II,
Zionism's world headquarters was seated in Cologne. But the overwhelming majority continued to revile it. In
The History of German Zionism,
Geiman Zionist chronicler Richard Lichtheim recalls that "nowhere was the opposition of Jews to the new movement so widespread, principled, and fierce as in Germany." In March
1913,
fed up with Zionist efforts to organize the withdrawal of Jews, the Central Verein, representing over half of German Jewry, expelled any member who advocated loyalty to any land other than the German Fatherland.
⁵

When World War I broke out, it was an opportunity German Jews had awaited to prove they were patriotic, fully integrated Germans. About 1 00,000
Jews fought,
80,000
in the trenches. Some
12,000
were killed. And yet the persistence of Zionism still brought German Jewish patriotism into question. After Britain's
1917
Balfour Declaration promised a Jewish national horne in Palestine, German Jews frantically avoided any identification with Zionist activities that might be interpreted as a link with Germany's enemy Britain.
⁶

Before
I933,
fewer than
1
percent of the
Yishuv,
or Jewish community in Palestine, had immigrated from Germany. In
1912,
only
8,400
out of roughly
550,000
German Jews elected to pay the token shekel of Zionist membership. In
1927,
German Zionist affiliation had grown to about 20,000.
But that figure included many so-called
non-Zionists,
who endorsed Jewish philanthropic settlements in Palestine but wholly rejected the concept of Jewish nationalism. Many of these non-Zionists became financially involved simply to create an economic dependence that would allow them to control the more militant wings of the movement.
⁷

Because the world headquarters of the Zionist Organization remained in Berlin during World War I, German Zionists were able to rise to an influential niche in the movement. Their connections with the kaiser's government were
used
to influence Thrkey, to cancel violent Ottoman measures against the
Yishuv
after negotiations for the Balfour Declaration commenced in early
1917.
⁸
Even though the international seat of the movement shifted to London when the Jewish National Home was established, German Zionists retained an important place in Zionism. Their influence within the movement was still intact when Hitler came to power in 1933.

Zionism could have been expected to appeal to Nazis because the prospect of sending Jews back to Palestine appealed to the intellectual ancestor of Nazism, Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation.

In the early 1520S, the rebel monk Luther looked to the Jews as a potential following free from what he termed "papal paganism." So protective of Jews was Martin Luther that church superiors branded him
semi-Judaeus
or half-Jew. But in the late 1520S, Luther began showing irritation with German Jewry's refusal to abandon Judaism.
⁹

In the early 1540s, Luther underwent a startling philosophical transformation, from archdefender to archassailant. In 1543, Luther published a vitriolic anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled "On The Jews and Their Lies" that virtually specified, down to the phrasing, the height and breadth of Nazi-style political anti-Semitism.

Luther's words: "They have been bloodthirsty bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom for more than fourteen hundred years in their intentions .... Thus they have been accused of poisoning water and wells, of kidnapping children, of piercing them through with an awl, of hacking them in pieces, and in that way secretly cooling their wrath with the blood of Christians." There was no doubt in Luther's writings. He employed endless repetition to avoid any mistake. And in this pamphlet his point was clear: "The sun has never shone on a more bloodthirsty and vengeful people."
¹⁰

Luther insisted that the Jews had enslaved Germans. Luther's words: "In fact, they hold us Christians captive in our own country. They let us work in the sweat of our brow to earn money and property while they sit behind the stove, idle away the time, fart and roast pears. They stuff themselves, guzzle and live in luxury and ease from our hard-earned goods .... Thus they are our masters and we are their servants."
¹¹

Luther suggested a solution to the Jewish problem in Germany: force them to return to Jerusalem. Luther's words: "[The Jews] should as we said, be expelled from the country and be told to return to their land and their possessions in Jerusalem, where they may ... murder, steal, rob, practice usury, mock and indulge in all those infamous abominations which they practice among us, and leave us our government, our country, our life and our property ... undefiled and uncontaminated."
¹²

He vehemently rejected the notion that ghettoized Jews were held captive in medieval Germany. Luther's words: "We surely did not bring them from Jerusalem ... No one is holding them here now. The country and the roads are open for them to proceed to their land whenever they wish.
If
they did so, we would be glad to present gifts to them on the occasion; it would be good riddance .... They must be driven from our country. Let them think of their fatherland [Jerusalem] .... This is ... the best course of action, which will safeguard the interest of both parties."
¹³

Luther knew Germany's Jews would be "loath to quit the country, they will boldly deny everything and will also offer the government money enough for permission to remain here." And so he explained a seven-point program for wiping out German Jewry. Luther's words: "I shall give you my sincere advice: First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them .... Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed .... Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn. . . . This will bring home to them . . . that they are living in exile and captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us.
¹⁴

"Third, I advise that all their prayer books . . . be taken from them. Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb .... Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews .... Sixth, I advise ... that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them .... Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow."
¹⁵

Luther's program called for the abolition of Jewish rights, the seizure of their assets, the destruction of their homes and synagogues, concentration in misery, and forced labor. However, Luther suggested that his final step, forced labor, would be so impossible for the lazy, untrustworthy Jews that it would by itself lead to negotiation over their assets, and then expulsion: "Then let us ... compute with them how much their usury has extorted from us, divide this amicably, but then eject them forever from the country."
¹⁶

Luther asserted that any Christian who showed mercy toward a Jew would himself burn in the fires of Hell. His treatise's parting instruction were as follows: ''Act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in, proceeds without mercy to cut, saw and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow .... Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them .... Therefore it would be wrong to be merciful. ... We must drive them out like mad dogs .... I have done my duty. Now let everyone see to his. I am exonerated."
¹⁷

Luther's advice about Jewish persecutions and expulsions was espoused in 1543, after the principles of the Lutheran movement had already been formalized in the Augsburg Confession of 1530.
¹⁸
Consequently,the Luther Solution was at first not widely taught in the church schools that Luther had so profound an influence over. But it was kept alive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by renegade churchmen. The Luther Solution was revived as a national issue in the second half of the nineteenth century. The German Jews had been emancipated in 1871, thus becoming visible in
all
sectors of German life. Visibility had always been a fear of the Jews. The fear was vindicated this time as well.

Adolf Stoecker, the Court and Cathedral Preacher of Berlin, led the reaction in 1874. He used his church position to organize an anti-Semitic political party that included many clerics dedicated to expunging the Jewish presence from German society. Stoecker was in fact dubbed "the Second Luther." His relentless Judophobic preaching included the now familiar slogan "The Jews are Germany's misfortune." The words were taken from Luther's original treatise.
¹⁹

Stoecker and other anti-Semitic German nationalists were the impetus behind the Union of German Students, an anti-Jewish society organized in 1881. The Union, represented at every major university, included a large number of theological students who became the carriers of church-disseminated anti-Semitic dogma at the tum of the twentieth century.
²⁰