Protest and boycott

Hitler’s priority on taking office was to make good his promise to repair the economy and restore national unity. Terminating parliamentary democracy was both a means to this end and a fundamental Nazi objective. Hitler did little that appeared immediately relevant to Germany’s Jews as Jews. The drastic restrictions on individual rights and the extension of police powers seemed more to do with political warfare. In those first heady weeks there was nothing to suggest that the state posed a threat to innocent citizens who belonged to an innocuous religious minority.¹

At the inaugural meeting of the new cabinet Hitler obtained agreement to hold fresh elections on 5 March 1933. The coalition would seek an absolute majority in order to pass legislation suspending parliamentary government. The election campaign then got under way with the customary marches, rallies and raucous propaganda. As usual, ‘electioneering’ led to street violence. The SA and SS targeted communist and socialist bases; the leftists defended themselves. Now, however, the National Socialists were in government and the SPD was compelled to act with circumspection in case it provoked a crackdown. On 22 February, Göring enrolled 50,000 men of the SA, SS and Stahlhelm as ‘auxiliary policemen’ in Prussia. François-Poncet noted sardonically that the government had ‘entrusted the maintenance of order to the very forces that were disrupting order’.²

The odds in the one-sided electoral contest were tipped further when an arson attack on the Reichstag building gifted the government a pretext to take even more power into its hands. The fire was started on the night of 27 February by Marinus van der Lubbe, a demented Dutch ex-communist. It is not clear if the Nazis were implicated, but Göring didn’t hesitate to claim that the blaze presaged a communist putsch. He ordered the police to round up KPD leaders and thousands of rank and file. The next day President Hindenburg issued an emergency decree suspending civil rights, permitting the police to make arrests, search houses and confiscate property without a warrant. The security forces were empowered to take people into ‘protective custody’ in anticipation of a crime being committed by or against them. For good measure the Nazi interior minister William Frick slipped into the decree a clause extending the writ of central government throughout the individual states, laying the foundations for an unprecedented centralization of power in Germany.³

Terror gripped the left. Anyone who had once challenged the Nazis, particularly if they were Jewish, felt vulnerable. The SA set up makeshift detention centres in derelict factories, the basements of office blocks, and disused army barracks. These sites were dignified with the technical term ‘Konzentrationslager’ (concentration camp). Unsupervised by the regular police or the judicial authorities, they became a byword for brutality.⁴

The aspiring English novelist Christopher Isherwood captured the mood in the weeks before the March election. ‘Every evening, I sit in the big half-empty artists, café by the Memorial Church, where the Jews and left-wing intellectuals bend their heads together over the marble tables, speaking in low scared voices. Almost every evening, the SA men come into the café … Sometimes they have come to make an arrest. One evening a Jewish writer, who was present, ran into the telephonebox to ring up the Police. The Nazis dragged him out, and he was taken away. Nobody moved a finger. You could have heard a pin drop, till they were gone.’⁵

The decapitation of the KPD and harassment of SPD party workers created a distinctly uneven playing field. The Nazi campaign also benefited from an inrush of funds from industrialists and big business, keen to be on the winning side. Despite this massive effort the NSDAP only managed to push its share of the vote up to 43.9 per cent. To cross the 50 per cent threshold the National Socialists had to continue in coalition with Hugenberg’s DNVP. While frustrating, the continuation of a government with conservative ministers had the virtue of lending the Nazis an air of respectability. The leadership strove to reinforce this impression with the ceremony to mark the opening of the new Reichstag. It was held on 21 March at the garrison church in Potsdam, rich in imperial history. Newsreels showed Hitler, clad in a cutaway coat, alongside the president and members of the old royal family. It was a gloriously sunny spring day, but it marked the eclipse of democracy in Germany.⁶

At the first session of the parliament, held in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House, the Nazis bullied through an Enabling Act that allowed the government to make laws without the consent of the Reichstag or the president. The two-thirds majority to amend the constitution was attained by excluding the KPD delegates and twisting the arms of the Catholic Centre Party. Only the ninety-four socialist delegates bravely stood their ground. Leopold Schwarzschild marvelled at the speed and ease with which the National Socialists brushed aside the constitutional safeguards protecting individual rights. As a National Socialist tsunami toppled mayors, local government officials, police commissioners, and any office holder considered inimical to the ‘national revolution’ he reflected, ‘History is brutally unsentimental.’⁷

During the election campaign, SA violence had been directed towards political opponents. Afterwards, party activists turned on the Jews. From early March a rash of local boycotts spread across the country. Unauthorized picketing and marking of Jewish-owned stores and shops was often accompanied by thuggery, especially if the proprietors objected. These incidents were not centrally planned or coordinated, but they stemmed from the well-honed Nazi practice of using intimidation to drive a wedge between Jews and non-Jews, signifying who was a secure member of the Volksgemeinschaft and who was a vulnerable outsider. But whereas anti-Jewish violence and stigmatization before 1933 had represented an assault on the law and the republic, the fact that the law was now enforced in the name of Adolf Hitler created unforeseen complications. It was one thing to defy the state when it was the creature of the ‘November criminals’; it was quite another when it was the vehicle for the ‘national revolution’. To muddy the waters further, many state and municipal authorities, as well as private organizations, began taking measures against Jews. These were often justified as a response to ‘spontaneous’ and ‘popular’ anger directed at the Jewish population. SA men who triggered such ‘self-cleansing’ actions then felt empowered to seek fresh targets. Within days of enjoying electoral legitimacy and constitutional sanction, the Nazi leaders found themselves presiding over a spiral of discrimination and violence. It resulted in friction between party activists and the police, threatened to undermine the new regime’s authority as the guardian of law and order, compromised its image as responsible politicians and triggered an international backlash.⁸

In Berlin, the day after the election, SA men worked their way down the Kurfürstendamm picking on anyone who looked Jewish to them. The correspondent for the Manchester Guardian reported that ‘many Jews were beaten by the Brown Shirts until their heads and faces flowed with blood. Many collapsed helplessly and were left lying in the streets until they were picked up by friends or pedestrians and brought to the hospital’. On 7 March the old synagogue in central Königsberg was set on fire and, two days after that, Jewish-owned stores. East Prussia soon became notorious for persistent and widespread anti-Jewish activity. In Gollnow, near Stettin, the owner of a department store complained to the mayor when a storm unit demonstrated outside his establishment. The mayor at first advised him to close, but when the proprietor refused to oblige he sent the police to keep order. At night the SA returned and defaced the building anyway.⁹

On 11 March storm troopers invaded Jewish-owned department stores and shops in the centre of Breslau, forcing them to close. An SA detachment barged into the court buildings and compelled Jewish lawyers and judges to suspend business. The disturbances continued until the police intervened ‘forcefully’ to restore order. The siege of the courthouse went on for three days and only ended when a senior judge agreed to limit the number of Jewish lawyers to seventeen. In a country that prided itself on being a Rechtsstaat, a state of law, the violation of judicial premises and the harassment of the judiciary was tantamount to desecration, not to say contempt of court. But it was a deliberately symbolic act, indicating that the law applied to, and could only be administered by, Germans for Germans. The SA were inciting Germany’s new rulers to articulate this shift and to validate it. As the final settlement in Breslau indicates, the naturally conservative and rightward-leaning judiciary found it relatively easy to accommodate to Nazi conceptions.¹⁰

Over 27–29 March disturbances occurred in cities across the Ruhr. In Bochum Nazi rowdies smashed the display windows of thirteen shops while in Dortmund shots were fired into the establishment of a Jewish merchant. A hundred Jews were taken into ‘protective custody’ by the SA. The local rabbi and five other Jews were forced to parade through the street in Oberhausen. A Jewish court official and several Jewish men were later treated to ‘protective custody’ by Brownshirts.¹¹

Once they were transferred to the SA detention centres, Jewish men were in extreme danger and suffered disproportionately compared to internees from other backgrounds, mostly political prisoners. Rabbis and Orthodox Jews, who were distinctive because of their beards, were singled out for brutal treatment. In what would become a trademark practice, many had their beards crudely shorn. If they were held over Jewish holy days, the SA (who, like the SS, had a spiteful familiarity with the Jewish ritual calendar) made a practice of inflicting particular humiliations, displaying a hatred of Judaism as much as of Jews. KPD members with Jewish names were also selected for especially rough handling. SA men delighted in tormenting Jewish lawyers who were placed in their hands, relishing the fate of those like Hans Litten who had prosecuted Nazis or engaged in anti-defamation work. In Dachau, of approximately one hundred political prisoners who were dead by May 1933, a dozen were Jewish.¹²

Thanks to diplomatic dispatches, the coverage by foreign correspondents, and private communications (including stories told by returning visitors), foreign governments and the public in other countries were kept abreast of these grim developments. The plethora of information that reached the British Embassy in Berlin from consuls around Germany caused Sir Horace Rumbold to warn the Foreign Office that a ‘massacre’ of Jews was on the cards. In a private letter to her family in England, Lady Rumbold noted ‘All sorts of terrorising of Jews and socialists … It is hateful and uncivilised.’ Over this period the New York Times, the Chicago Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlanta Constitution and the Washington Post carried 455 articles and editorials on Hitler and the Jews (half in the New York Times alone). Two hundred local newspapers in the USA printed 2,600 pieces on events in Germany.¹³

The reaction was swift and sharp. In the USA and Britain the extensive coverage of events led to outrage in Jewish communities. Within days of Hitler taking power, 4,000 Jewish war veterans took to the streets in New York carrying banners decrying Nazi atrocities. Jews on both sides of the Atlantic demanded that their governments intervene or at least condemn what was happening. In the course of March Jewish leaders conferred repeatedly and a head of steam built up for a boycott of German goods and services.¹⁴

However, the American Jewish leadership was at odds over what steps to take. The differences of approach reflected deep rifts in the Jewish population. The assimilated and well-off section that stemmed largely from the German Jewish immigration of the mid-nineteenth century tended to favour quiet diplomacy with State Department officials and politicians. This tactic was routinely used by the ‘uptown’ American Jewish Committee (AJC). The more recent and more numerous immigrants from eastern Europe, who were predominantly lower-middle and working class, tended to respond viscerally and noisily to news of Jewish suffering. Many were enrolled in trade unions and socialist organizations; a significant portion were Zionists. The American Jewish Congress represented this section of the population and was consistently more activist and vocal. But the clamour alarmed the patricians of the AJC. On 20 March a deputation led by Cyrus Adler, AJC president, called on the US administration to ‘make proper representations’ to the German authorities. At the same time, it condemned ‘boycotts, parades, mass meetings and other similar demonstrations’. This injunction reflected their instinctive discretion and reluctance to legitimize the politics of the Jewish masses; it was also a calculated response to pleas from German Jews not to launch attacks on the Naziled coalition.¹⁵

Their discretion was of no avail. The American Jewish Congress, led by the charismatic Rabbi Stephen Wise, went ahead with a mass rally in Madison Square Gardens. When the doors opened on 27 March, 20,000 Jews filled the auditorium, leaving 35,000 milling around outside. They heard anti-Nazi speeches from Senator Robert Wagner, former presidential contender Al Smith, the president of the American Federation of Labor, the mayor of New York, and two bishops. On the same day 10,000 Jews marched through Brooklyn, with roughly the same number rallying in Chicago and Los Angeles. Six thousand Jews demonstrated in Baltimore, 3,000 in Newark and Washington, and 2,500 in Atlantic City. It was estimated that a million people had rallied against the Nazis, making it one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in US history.¹⁶

When the AJC asked Wise not to go ahead, he replied that if mainstream Jewish organizations refused to organize protest events their place would be taken by ‘Socialist Jewish meetings, Communist Jewish meetings’. His comment offers an insight into the triple bind in which American Jews found themselves. They were under pressure from German Jews not to act, while the Jewish street clamoured for action. Behind-the-scenes lobbying failed to meet these popular demands and left the way open for radicals who would confirm prejudices about Jews on both sides of the Atlantic. Whatever they did was liable to backfire on them or on the German Jews.

Calls for a boycott of Germany posed even more acute dilemmas. During March, a self-made millionaire and communal activist, Samuel Untermyer, put himself at the head of a spontaneous movement to persuade Jews and non-Jews to desist from purchasing goods originating from Germany. When both the AJC and Wise leaned on Untermyer he retorted that ‘The Hitlerite Party is bent on the extermination of the Jews in Germany, or upon driving them out of the country.’ By October 1933 the American Jewish Congress buckled to pressure from its constituents and declared support for the boycott. It was joined by Hadassah, the largest mass-membership Zionist organization in North America.¹⁷

A similar dynamic unfolded in Britain, where letters calling for a boycott poured into the London Jewish Chronicle. The editor, Jack Rich, took up the cause in a leading article on 24 March. ‘If, as seems evident … there is a strong longing to institute a boycott of German goods and services, by all means let it be done. Let Jews, here and in every land, borrow from the Germans their weapon of the boycott and turn it against them.’ The JC was influential at the best of times; this issue sold out completely.¹⁸

As in America, the established Jewish leadership presided over a socially stratified and ideologically fissured community. Neville Laski, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, was a lawyer from Manchester. He led a body that was elected mainly by synagogue members, but broadly articulated popular feeling amongst the Jews who had immigrated to England from Russia and Poland around the turn of the century. Leonard Montefiore, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA), was more of a patrician, who spoke for the wealthier and highly assimilated section of the Jewish population. Laski temperamentally sided with the more reticent Montefiore and tended to discount what his members were saying. At a meeting with Robert Hankey, permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, on 21 March, they deprecated noisy demonstrations, while Hankey warned strongly against giving any official sanction to a boycott.¹⁹

And as in the United States the caution of the official Jewish leadership did nothing to inhibit the wider expression of opinion. The boycott movement spread like a bush fire through the East End of London, where 100,000 Jews lived. Signs appeared in shop windows announcing that the owners did not deal with German suppliers. On Friday 24 March, after businesses closed early for the Sabbath, thousands of Jews marched from the East End to the German Embassy. The following Sunday there were angry exchanges at an emergency conference, called by the English Zionist Federation, when Laski refused to place the Board of Deputies at the head of the boycott movement or organize a protest rally. His admonition that it would antagonize the Germans and make life difficult for ‘moderates’ like Papen was met with derision. Delegates found it harder to dismiss the pleas of German Jews. Laski and Montefiore succeeded in winning time to arrange a decorous mass meeting to be addressed primarily by non-Jewish figures.²⁰

Diplomats in Washington and Whitehall felt the heat of Jewish indignation. In his private journal J. P. Moffat, chief of the Western Division in the US State Department, recorded the pressure. ‘The situation concerning the Jews in Germany is causing the utmost alarm to the race here. There have been a series of meetings held far and wide over the country and a huge one is scheduled for Monday next. The reports reaching the Jews here from their co-religionists who have left Germany are alarming to a degree.’ Importantly, though, Moffat went on to express his professional scepticism. ‘Thus far, nothing we have received from the Embassy tends to bear this out. We drew up a telegram, however, telling the Embassy it was important for us to have the exact facts and requesting them to telegraph a full report after consultation by telephone if necessary with the consulates in the principal cities.’²¹

The press coverage and Jewish lobbying propelled diplomats into formal interventions with German ambassadors and the German Foreign Office. In March 1933, Horace Rumbold alerted the German foreign minister, Neurath, to the adverse impact of persistent anti-Jewish attacks. Neurath reassured him that German Jews had nothing to fear; on the contrary, it was the Germans who felt put upon.²²

To the Nazis, the overseas campaign against them was proof that ‘the Jews’ were an international force. The diplomatic initiatives on their behalf in Washington and London, however mild, were taken as evidence that Jews controlled the governments there. The protest wave also played into the German people’s sense of being victims of international aggression. It enabled Hitler and the Nazis to whip up rage against ‘the Jews’ and at the same time pose as the defenders of vulnerable, wounded Germany. The Nazis then satisfied the feelings of rage by punishing world Jewry through inflicting suffering on their German brethren. They used the threat of further retribution to deter future interventions. German Jews thus became hostages, held against the good behaviour of ‘international Jewry’.

In fact, close scrutiny of the Jewish response in February and March 1933 would have revealed only division and dissonance. There was no chorus of ‘international Jewry’. However, the very multiplication of efforts to stage protests and organize boycotts, amplified by rivalry between competing Jewish organizations and leaders, created a cacophony that impressed Germans abroad and at home. Nazi believers in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion misread Jewish pluralism and weakness as a sign of unity and strength. If anything, these early weeks of turbulence in foreign opinion and diplomatic circles served to harden Nazi preconceptions.

A week after the March election, Hitler attempted to rein in the violence against political opponents and Jews, explicitly forbidding Einzelaktionen (unauthorized individual actions). Although the CV-Zeitung publicized his announcement it did nothing to assuage the din of foreign protest, not least because the prohibition did little to prevent states and municipalities from amending regulations to the detriment of Jews – for instance by banning ‘shechita’, the slaughter of livestock according to Jewish religious law. As adverse press coverage and diplomatic interventions continued, François-Poncet noted the effect with his usual sarcasm: ‘nothing exasperated the Nazis so much as to find themselves blamed abroad’.²³

The regime responded to what it perceived as a barrage from world Jewry by going onto the offensive. On 26 March, Göring summoned German Jewish leaders and instructed them to persuade the Jews in London and New York to call off the boycott and cut out the ‘atrocity propaganda’. Kurt Blumenfeld, president of the German Zionist Federation, and Julius Brodnitz, chairman of the Centralverein, duly cabled the American Jewish Committee: ‘We protest categorically against holding Monday meeting, radio and other demonstrations. We unequivocally demand energetic effort to obtain an end to demonstrations hostile to Germany.’ A delegation flew to London to convey the same message to Laski and his colleagues.²⁴

To add force to the message, Hitler gave his approval for an official nationwide boycott of Jewish shops, businesses and professionals unless ‘world Jewry’ backed off. After meeting the leader in Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s rural retreat in Bavaria, Goebbels confided to his diary, ‘He has pondered the whole matter fully and has come to a decision … We shall make headway against the foreign lies only if we get our hands on their originators or at least beneficiaries, those Jews living in Germany who have thus far remained unmolested. We must, therefore, proceed to a large-scale boycott of all Jewish businesses in Germany. Perhaps the foreign Jews will think better of the matter when their racial comrades in Germany begin to get it in the neck.’ Goebbels then sent out an order for party branches to carry it out. ‘We are going to take our revenge. The Jews in America and England are trying to injure us. We shall know how to deal with their brothers in Germany.’ ²⁵

When Hitler informed the cabinet that he had sanctioned the boycott, some ministers were uneasy. Neurath, in particular, was ‘perturbed about the Jewish boycott’ which he considered would be ‘disastrous for Germany’s foreign prestige’. At the last minute, with Hitler’s consent, the German Foreign Office offered to call off the boycott if foreign governments agreed to stop ‘atrocity propaganda’. In London, Lord Reading and Lord Samuel, two Jewish peers, received this proposal from the German Ambassador and passed it on to the Foreign Office, where it was considered a satisfactory outcome to the trial of strength. The US Secretary of State Cordell Hull likewise got the offer and responded in conciliatory terms. Drawing on Moffat’s research he averred that ‘many of the accusations of terror and atrocities which have reached this country have been exaggerated’. By the time these diplomatic exchanges had been concluded it was too late to cancel the boycott outright, but it was curtailed to one day, Saturday 1 April.²⁶

In Nazi thinking, the boycott was a rational response to an adversarial situation, the first foreign policy crisis they faced in office. But few diplomats or politicians at the time could grasp this. George Messersmith, consul at the American Embassy in Berlin and in most respects an incisive analyst, was convinced that the foreign protests were just an excuse for the boycott. He believed that the Nazis thereby showed their disdain for world opinion. In characteristically pungent language he reported to Washington that ‘reason is in reality absent from the majority of the leaders of the National Socialist movement. They have no comprehension of the outside world and its reactions. They have further than that a complete disregard of what the outside world thinks.’²⁷

Messersmith was wrong. It was precisely because the Nazis did care about overseas opinion that they mooted and then abbreviated the boycott. More recent analysis that depicts the boycott as a device to channel SA energies or a means to impose control over a chaotic situation is equally wide of the mark. The reality – as the Nazis saw it – was a showdown between them and international Jewry. The foreign boycott was proof of Jewish solidarity, proof that they manipulated governments, and proof that they were a dominant economic force. Because the boycott was an economic weapon it proved that the Jews were a financial world power. This meant that if the Jews could use the power of money to attack the Germans, they might also be forced to use it to save their own people. At a formative stage in Nazi policy-making the boycott verified, according to their world view, the association of Jews with international finance and indicated that if one section of world Jewry was squeezed painfully, another section could be forced to pay for its relief from pressure. Equally, if Jews were threatened in one place they could make a government somewhere else react. From this point onward these principles assumed an a priori status in Nazi thinking.28

In Dresden, Victor Klemperer, an academic with a distinguished war record, saw this all too clearly. Klemperer was born into a Jewish family but had converted to Protestantism and was a fervent nationalist. He paid scrupulous attention to the language of Nazi pronouncements so as to tease out their true meaning. On 27 March he wrote, ‘The government is in hot water. “Atrocity propaganda” from abroad because of its Jewish campaign. It is constantly issuing official denials, there are no pogroms, and has Jewish associations issue refutations. But it openly threatens to proceed against the German Jews if mischief-making by “World Jewry” does not stop.’ As the mood darkened and violence intensified he feared a pogrom. The day the boycott was announced he declared, ‘We are hostages.’²⁹

It did no good when James McDonald, who had arrived from the USA on 29 March, tried to explain to Putzi Hanfstaengl that the agitation in the USA was not instigated by Jews and nor was there unanimity amongst them. ‘Indeed’, he told Hitler’s foreign press liaison man over dinner at Horcher’s restaurant, ‘powerful conservative Jews in New York, like Warburg and the American Jewish Committee, had opposed the Jewish agitation’. According to Hanfstaengl, though, Hitler had proclaimed ‘we are not afraid of international Jewry. The Jews must be crushed. Their fellows abroad played into our hands.’ After McDonald protested that most German Jews were patriots, Hanfstaengl retorted, ‘we cannot trust them. They are not, they cannot be Germans.’ McDonald got much the same response from Hjalmar Schacht, the former liberal and now president of the Reichsbank. ‘Yes, not all Jews are unpatriotic, but why should those … in the East End of London dictate to us. We do not attack Jews as we do socialists and communists. Anyhow, after a week or two, nothing more will be heard of it.’³⁰

The days running up to the boycott saw violence against Jews reach an unprecedented pitch. Bella Fromm noted ‘the baiting of Jews continues incessantly. It has become accepted practice for Jewish victims to be dragged from their beds before dawn and taken away.’ In Straubing, a small city in Lower Bavaria, a Jewish shop owner named Otto Selz was abducted from his home at dawn by men in ‘dark uniforms’ (probably SS), and driven away. His body was found later in a wood. In Bad Kissingen a rabbi and local councillor were taken into ‘protective custody’. In Düsseldorf the windows of Jewish-owned shops were smashed. In Cologne, sixty Jewish lawyers were obstructed while going about their work and detained for several hours.³¹

Messersmith cabled the State Department on the eve of the boycott: ‘The anti-Jewish movement … has reached an intensity and a diffusion of action which was not contemplated even by its most fantastic proponents, and there is real reason to believe now that the movement is beyond control and may have a bloody climax.’³²

The leading members of the Jewish community in Germany were in a quandary. On the one hand, it protested that German Jews could not be held accountable for foreign opinion and denounced the ‘atrocity’ stories. On the other, it informed its constituents that the fight against defamation had to continue – albeit as a domestic matter. When McDonald met with Siegmund Warburg and Carl Melchior they told him ‘their people were considering a public statement signed by a hundred prominent Jews pleading for the rest of the world to leave the problem to Germany’. In this spirit, Jewish war veterans addressed a public letter to President Hindenburg seeking the abatement of the boycott. But Victor Klemperer noted that the night before, the SA were already taking up position outside Jewish premises. Protests were ‘hopeless’.³³

When morning arrived on 1 April 1933 a peculiar atmosphere hung over the shopping precincts of German cities and village high streets. Large numbers of Jewish shopkeepers opted not to open up for business. For Orthodox Jews this was normal for the Sabbath in any case. A few displayed notices expressing solidarity with Germans against foreign ‘atrocity propaganda’. Klemperer went into Dresden and found storm troopers standing outside Jewish shops with placards reading ‘Whoever buys from the Jew supports the foreign boycott and destroys the German economy’. People walked down the streets, gawping. Willy Cohn, a history teacher in Breslau, got ‘the impression that decent Christian circles are increasingly keeping their distance from such events’. Yet an eve of boycott appeal by local Jewish leaders to Cardinal Bertram of Breslau was met by silence. While there was no Church protest, there was mercifully little violence; the Nazi police chief Edmund Heines had demanded ‘calm and order’.³⁴

The American consul in Leipzig, Ralph Busser, reported to the US Embassy that the local SA were straining at the leash prior to the boycott. On the day itself pickets and placards were accompanied by ‘numerous acts of violence’. Storm troopers ‘raided the Kaufhaus Brühl, one of the largest department stores in Leipzig, drove out the customers and expelled or arrested the Jewish shop assistants’. In the fur district Jews were forced to parade wearing insulting placards. Polish Jews were arrested and made to scrub slogans off walls. ‘In fairness to the German people’, he added, ‘it must be said that the boycott was unpopular with the working-class movement and the more intelligent section of the population.’³⁵

From exile a few years later, Edwin Landau vividly recalled that day in his home town of Deutsch-Krone in West Prussia. A decorated veteran of the Great War, he was the chairman of the Jewish community and proprietor of a plumbing business. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. I simply could not imagine that something like this was possible in the twentieth century. Things like this only happened in the middle ages.’ But there they were: two young Brownshirts outside the entrance to his shop. The sight collapsed his self-identity as a German. ‘And we young Jews had once stood in the trenches for this people in the cold and rain and spilled our blood to defend our nation.’ Boiling with rage and shame he went home, put on his medals, and walked back into town. Although some old customers passed by his premises with smirks on their faces, others, particularly Catholics, quite deliberately came in as a gesture of solidarity. One, an official of the DNVP, was later sacked for the handshake he gave Landau. After a while, Edwin shut up shop and went to the synagogue where he found an entire community in grief and shock.³⁶

In Hamburg, Henrietta Necheles-Magnus, a doctor, arrived at the entrance of her practice to find it patrolled by two SA men with a sign bearing a yellow circle. Once inside her first task was to console her non-Jewish receptionist. ‘We are so ashamed of our fellow countrymen,’ she wept. Necheles-Magnus noted that the Jewish war widow who ran the grocery across the road did brisker trade than usual. Then patients started to arrive bearing flowers and gifts to show what they thought about the boycott. It started to rain and the storm troopers looked increasingly despondent, taunted by burly dock workers who patronized the clinic. ‘All in all, the boycott was unpopular,’ she remembered from her new home in America seven years later. Luise Solmitz had the same impression. She felt ‘ashamed in front of shops with daubs of paint and before every Jew … The mood of the people appeared depressed, unhappy, most really cannot support this.’³⁷

James McDonald in Berlin derived a more chilling lesson. He walked to the Wertheim department store, where he found SA men lined up in front of the entrances. They had plastered the display windows with signs showing a yellow circle on a black background. The employment of a medieval symbol shocked him. ‘No doubt the boycott was effective,’ he wrote. ‘It showed that Jewish trade could be completely stifled. No hand was raised against the SA. But the boycott is only the outward sign of an equally destructive discrimination against all Jews.’ By chance, Lady Rumbold tried to enter Wertheim’s at roughly the same time. Her way was blocked and she gave up. She reported in the language typical of her class that all down the Kurfürstendamm ‘in front of each Jew shop were two or three Nazis standing blocking the door’. She was mortified when obstructive Brownshirts upset her small son. ‘It was utterly cruel and Hunnish and the whole thing, just doing down a heap of defenceless people.’³⁸

Summing up from his diplomatic perch, Messersmith considered the day had been a failure. ‘The heart of the SA men was no longer in the boycott as it had been so emasculated by restraining measures which had been issued the night before. It seems as though they felt that if the boycott was to last only a day and to be conducted in so orderly and restrained manner that it was not really worth-while at all.’ It was ‘not generally popular with the German people’. However, he added, ‘There is no indication that the feeling against the Jews has in any sense died down, but merely that popular opinion does not approve of a means which even the man in the street realises may be destructive of the internal economic life and seriously affect Germany’s foreign trade.’³⁹

Messersmith’s sanguine conclusion missed one point of the operation and its consequences. The mere fact that he, a US diplomat, was taking such an interest in German Jews chimed with Nazi anti-Semitism. It did not matter for the moment if ordinary Germans were ambivalent: the NSDAP was still drawing the lines between ‘them’ and ‘us’, demonstrating that ‘they’ were now fair game. If the population baulked at certain activities because they hindered economic recovery this only made the continuity of Jewish life conditional on economic necessity. Prudence offered Jews some leverage in the short term, but the converse was that it rendered them expendable at the point at which their utility was exhausted.⁴⁰

The ‘national revolution’

The boycott was only one thread of what the Nazis dubbed the ‘national revolution’. In a report to the State Department a month later, Messersmith observed that the NSDAP had already gained control over the levers of power in Germany. In his eyes the takeover was a genuine popular insurgency. ‘The masses are for the moment the dictator in Germany and the party leaders are merely their spokesman’, he told Washington. By contrast, his colleague in Munich, Consul General Charles Hathaway, noted the silence and obedience of the population: the ‘abundant arrests have done their work’. These divergent perceptions reflect the bewildering pace at which the National Socialists consolidated their grip, liquidating first opponents and then rivals until they had created a one-party state. They engineered the complete centralization of power and the regulation of culture until, almost in the blink of an eye, they presided triumphantly over a totalitarian state. Throughout the process they appealed to and seemed to evoke a genuine tide of popular feeling. The alacrity with which swathes of society voluntarily aligned with the Nazis, sometimes pre-empting administrative fiats, defied simple notions of the takeover being exclusively either a top-down coup or a bottom-up revolution.⁴¹

One of the most important measures to impose Nazi control was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, promulgated on 7 April 1933. It authorized the dismissal of officials deemed politically unreliable, especially those with a record of socialist political activity. Paragraph III stipulated the enforced retirement of ‘non-Aryan’ officials, with the exception of those who were combat veterans or who lost fathers or sons in the Great War. As well as facilitating the removal of many Jews (though far fewer than the Nazis anticipated), the law set in motion the Nazification of the most crucial instrument of state power alongside the security forces. A parallel process was set in train in the judiciary, rippled through local and municipal government and spread from the army into the private sector. As the ‘Aryan paragraph’ was voluntarily adopted across the spectrum of civil society Jews were asked to leave or were expelled from sports clubs, recreational associations, professional networks, and cultural organizations.⁴²

Jews were not, for the present, the chief concern of the regime. The government organized a spectacular show for the celebration of labour on 1 May, appropriating the mantle of the left, then the next day sent the police to arrest the trade unions’ leadership. The following week the SPD was struck; the party was finally banned on 21 June. By the summer, 100,000 political prisoners had been held, mostly for short periods, beaten and terrorized, in the concentration camps. Around 600 prisoners died. It was, in the words of historian Richard J. Evans, a ‘massive, brutal, murderous assault’ on political opposition. The message for Hitler’s coalition partners and the centrist parties was stark. Hugenberg was prevailed upon to merge the DNVP into the NSDAP, while the Stahlhelm was absorbed into the SA. The Catholic hierarchy agreed to dissolve the Centre Party, which defended the interests of Catholics, in return for a concordat between the Third Reich and the Vatican that guaranteed the rights of the Catholic community. By July 1933, Hitler was able to proclaim that the NSDAP was the only legal party in Germany; the party was the state.⁴³

There were few protests against this transformation but there was unease about the brutishness that accompanied it, especially the grisly stories emanating from the ‘wild’ concentration camps. Occasional assaults on foreigners further damaged Germany’s image abroad and provoked the question: who was in charge? On 6 July, Hitler used an address to newly installed Nazi state governors to announce an end to the ‘national revolution’. Next month, Göring terminated the auxiliary police role of the SA. The semi-official detention centres they had run were shut down and Himmler, police chief in Bavaria, moved to tighten SS control of the remaining authorized sites. He installed Theodor Eicke as commandant of Dachau concentration camp with instructions to draw up a disciplinary code covering both the guards and the remaining prisoners. Over half were released (although 37,000 political prisoners were incarcerated in state prisons). As a quid pro quo for this concession camp inmates were removed from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice.⁴⁴

Although the political opposition was broken, there was no let-up to surveillance of ‘unreliable elements’. In September, Göring established an independent political police in Prussia, the Geheime Staatspolizei, better known as the Gestapo. It soon attained a scary reputation for assiduous investigation and merciless torture of suspects. In fact, the Gestapo was a relatively small organization and lacked sufficient personnel to initiate inquiries on a large scale. It relied more on informers and denunciations by letter. That it acquired a fearsome record for locating and eliminating dissidents was more a testimony to the support National Socialism enjoyed in the population than it was a tribute to the effectiveness of the police state. With little difficulty the entire police force was brought under the command of party men. The definition of crime and the nature of policing itself were transformed by the Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals. Criminality was now deemed a genetic disorder. Since lawbreaking was an inherited tendency there was no point in attempting to deter or re-educate ‘habitual’ criminals. The law mandated that after three convictions a felon would go to prison, no matter what the crimes happened to be.⁴⁵

Under Nazi guidance, the Ministry of Education quickly produced new textbooks that embodied National Socialist ideas. The teaching profession, which already had a large cadre of NSDAP members, was purged and the residue subjected to a mixture of re-education and blandishments. Within three years practically every teacher in the Reich was a Nazi Party member. Indoctrination was not confined to the schoolroom. The whole nation was put through a learning experience. Its chief instructor was Goebbels, who was appointed to run the new Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment on 13 March 1933. Goebbels set himself the task of convincing Germans that they were part of the Volksgemeinschaft, the racial-people’s community. His mission began by establishing control over the cultural sector and creative industries, purging them of political opponents and Jews. The keystone of his project was the Reich Chamber of Culture, established by law on 22 September. Every cultural organization was required to join and to police its membership. At the behest of Goebbels a succession of laws led to the dismissal of Jews from orchestras, opera companies, art galleries, theatres, radio and the film industry. In October, legislation was passed barring Jews from working as editors for newspapers.⁴⁶

The most dramatic and symbolic moment in the ‘cleansing’ of German culture was the burning of books by authors considered anti-German, Marxist or Jewish. The literary auto-da-fé was held on 10 May. Instigated by Nazi students, the pyres were constructed in squares outside universities, which was convenient for students carrying stacks of books from libraries to the bonfires. When Stefan Zweig complained that his works were blacklisted by mistake, possibly the result of confusion with the communist Arnold Zweig, his acerbic friend Joseph Roth put him right. ‘They confuse you not because your name is Zweig, but because you are a Jew …’ Ironically, while Roth urged Stefan Zweig to accept his fate as a Jewish author, Robert Weltsch in the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau contested the inclusion of books by assimilated authors such as Stefan Zweig with no ‘Jewish’ theme. ‘We refuse to designate literature as Jewish based on the negative criteria of being “not German”.’ At this stage the preservation of internal distinctions was more important to some Jews than the danger posed by the externally imposed myth of homogeneity.⁴⁷

Millions of Germans who disliked modernist culture found this vandalism deeply satisfying. They also applauded measures designed to bolster traditional sectors of the economy, improve the welfare of ordinary families, and strengthen the health of the people. In July 1933, Hugenberg realized that the conservatives had been sidelined, and resigned from the cabinet. He was replaced as minister of agriculture by Walther Daré, a Nazi thinker with a background in economics. Long a champion of the peasantry, a cause that lay close to Hitler’s heart, Daré passed a law to protect the tenure of farmers and prevent their holdings from undergoing fragmentation. The government also acted to prevent the growth of chain stores and department stores, restricting their ability to undercut small shopkeepers by offering hefty discounts. The regime paid careful attention to the morale of industrial workers, too, aware that they were essential to economic recovery and a potentially threatening source of discontent. In November 1933, the Kraft Durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) organization was set up to offer cheap foreign holidays, cruises, tours and recreation to deserving German workers. To further compound the impression of a nation in which every man and woman was valued, united by a common spirit of self-sacrifice, the Nazis passed legislation to expand their annual pre-Christmas collection in aid of the needy, Winterhilfe (winter relief), into a national drive. Contributions were effectively obligatory.⁴⁸

The most far-reaching measures to mould the German people into a racially aware, biologically robust and homogenous community, a true Volksgemeinschaft, were the eugenic laws. On 14 July 1933, the Reich interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, issued the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny. It established Hereditary Health Courts consisting of doctors, psychiatrists and social workers who were empowered to order the compulsory sterilization of individuals deemed mentally or physically disabled and liable to pass on their disability if they had children. It was the most radical expression of the Nazis’ utopian project to create a Volk that was biologically pure and perfect according to their racist vision. Subsequent legislation would deny state secondary schooling to the congenitally disabled, prohibit marriage to a person believed to carry a hereditary illness, and ease the divorce of one partner from a spouse unable to conceive. These negative eugenic measures were accompanied by pro-natalist social engineering. Laws were passed to prohibit contraception and abortion. Tax breaks and cheap loans were given to newly married couples. Childbirth was rewarded with grants and perks. While heterosexuality and marriage were vaunted, the police were encouraged to employ existing laws against homosexuality with greater vigour. Although relatively few men were sent to prison for homosexual acts, centres of gay life were repressed while thousands of gay men were arrested and cautioned.⁴⁹

The headline-grabbing policy initiatives to bring about the national renewal cascaded through society, proliferating into a multitude of individual choices. In each case a German had to decide whether to opt in or to opt out, with their previously held convictions and affiliations weighing against the powerful urge to share in a great idealistic project. Behind this emotional tug-of-war was knowledge that nonconformity could result in terrible punishment. Crucially, Germans were not being asked to hate Jews; they were being asked to love other Germans.⁵⁰

The choices in question were superficially tiny: whether to give the Adolf Hitler greeting or to persist with traditional salutations, whether to wear a party badge, whether to don a uniform, whether to participate in celebrations such as Adolf Hitler’s birthday or attend the rituals marking the anniversary of the November putsch. In addition to voluntary choices, Germans found themselves increasingly directed into activity that tacitly aligned them with the regime. Work could be interrupted by mandatory listening to a Hitler speech on the radio or attendance at a Nazi factory cell meeting. Every tenement had a ‘block leader’ and a discussion forum. Recreational activity was channelled through the Strength Through Joy organization. Shopping became an assertion of identity, not just because of the campaign to avoid Jewish shops. Products were increasingly labelled and advertised as ‘Germanic’, healthy for the Volk. Goebbels inveighed against the wearing of French-designed clothes for women and called for an authentically German style of couture. Life-cycle events turned into an affirmation of racial allegiance. It was necessary to prove one’s Aryan status and racial health to obtain a marriage certificate. The birth of a full-limbed healthy child was joyful in itself, but it also allowed the parents to anticipate financial benefits and free schooling.⁵¹

From childhood, young German boys and girls experienced the thrill of belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft and were impregnated with its values by teachers, youth leaders, labour service officers, university professors and military trainers. It began with the Deutsches Jungvolk for children aged 10–13 years; it was continued into the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) for boys up to 18 and the Bund deutscher Mädel (Association of German Girls). Then came Reich Labour Service for six months, followed by two years in the armed forces. Young people had a natural affinity to National Socialist ideals of equality, integration, participation and self-sacrifice. They instinctively shared the spirit of revolt against bourgeois norms and the restrictive life of the traditional family. To ensure they got the message, youths passed through a succession of camps where they were sequestered from their families and lived according to the new values. There were 2,000 summer camps for the Jungvolk, Hitler Youth and the BDM, sweeping up 600,000 youths each year. Nearly half a million teenagers went through labour service and army barracks. At each stage they received indoctrination in National Socialism. Equally important was the lifestyle and the values exemplified by each collective activity. There were, of course, no Jews.⁵²

Yet it would be a mistake to equate Nazi values with hatred. What gave them such force was their capacity to evoke feelings of love and belonging. Melita Maschmann recalled that ‘No catchword has ever fascinated me quite as much as that of the Volksgemeinschaft.’ It generated a ‘magical glow’. ‘What first drew young people to National Socialism was not hatred’, she later wrote, ‘but love of Germany. It was in the service of this love that they wished to make themselves tough, swift, and hard.’⁵³

For older members of the population the same effect was achieved by the constant atmosphere of struggle and emergency. Leopold Schwarzschild observed that ‘It is not the armaments that are the priority at the moment, but the nation’s psychology, whose pressure gauge is constantly kept at the level of an army camp about to march off to war.’ There was the battle for jobs and the battle for food production. Everyone was drawn into the campaigns to economize and to help the needy. Increasingly, adults who were too old for military service were obliged to participate in civil defence exercises. The measures for racial hygiene required the creation of a vast new bureaucracy and the assignment of manifold tasks to university professors, teachers, civil servants, municipal officials, doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and social workers. They were employed to determine the racial status of individuals and, having resolved who belonged to the Volk, to police its conduct and defend its boundaries. All these executors of racial-biological policies had to be selected and trained. Party membership was virtually obligatory for anyone who wanted advancement. So, 215,000 teachers out of 300,000 in the entire profession attended two-weekly ‘retreats’ at which they were familiarized with National Socialist ideology and policy, and how to apply it. A network of research institutes was created to provide intellectual and scientific underpinning for Nazi eugenic, racial and anti-Jewish policies, and to cloak them in respectability.⁵⁴

In the pithy formula of the historian Peter Fritzsche, ‘Race defined the new realities of the Third Reich.’ This reality was less questioned with each year that passed, more firmly entrenched with each generation graduating from the learning machine that the Third Reich became. The dictatorship was driven by young people; from the Nazi leadership, which was predominantly in its forties, downwards. As the number of young adults for whom National Socialism provided a basic value system increased, they filled more and more official positions at all levels of the state and in social organizations. Membership in the SA peaked at nearly three million in 1934. At its height, during the war, the SS embraced 800,000 men who, with their spouses, equated to over 1 per cent of the entire German population. Six million Germans passed through the Reich Labour Service and seven million served in the German armed forces. For these millions, ‘the Nazi conscience’ was the natural and normative reflex of moral choice. While the majority of the population remained formally unaffiliated, they too were enmeshed in a system that fostered the internalization of Nazi values. When the Nazi Party succeeded in delivering political stability, social order, and prosperity its values were accepted with sincerity and gratitude.⁵⁵

Judenpolitik was crucial to the construction of the Volksgemeinschaft. As historians now appreciate, anti-Jewish measures were not simply the fulfilment of goals long held by anti-Semites or even the expression of hatred towards Jews. While for Nazis like Streicher anti-Semitism was an end in itself, for others it was instrumental. Personal feelings hardly mattered. The exclusion of Jews defined the Aryans. Anti-Jewish propaganda and actions helped to control public opinion. What was permitted or prohibited helped to ‘reshape the public domain’. Racial policy gave the state licence to intrude into ever more private and personal realms. It ‘made possible the almost complete elimination of a private sphere’. Soon all policy was examined in the light of race and framed with the Jews in mind.⁵⁶

Yet the Third Reich was a dysfunctional regime; its fragmented leadership was constantly trying to accomplish a great deal in a short time with limited resources. Personalities and policies tugged in opposite directions, cut across one another or just ran out of steam. It is possible in retrospect to over-interpret the instrumentality and coherence of Judenpolitik. Ascribing a clear sense of purpose to Nazi policy-makers, in turn has the effect of making the German Jews look like misty-eyed fools. In fact, the ‘victims’ have something important to tell historians. At the time Judenpolitik didn’t appear coherent or purposeful because it wasn’t; it was improvised, unplanned and, hence, unpredictable. The Nazis may have been able to draw upon a history of anti-Semitic thinking and civil servants may even have had draft legislation for discriminatory measures in their filing cabinets, but what emerged was confused, contradictory, half-baked and usually temporary.⁵⁷

The first anti-Jewish laws

The government followed up the orchestrated indignation of 1 April 1933 with a succession of laws directed at the exclusion of Jews from areas of German life that the Nazis considered sensitive and where a Jewish presence had always been considered irksome. On 7 April, Jews were forbidden from entering the legal profession. Jews who were qualified and practising were untouched, but those still studying found the ground removed from under them. On 22 April, Jewish doctors and dentists were barred from practising within the state sector. Three days later, the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools imposed a 1.5 per cent quota on the admission of Jews to schools and universities and a 5 per cent limit to the total allowed. On 14 July, legislation was passed to denaturalize Jews who had entered Germany after November 1918. Despite the readiness of the Interior Ministry to nullify the citizenship of everyone Jewish, Hitler limited the blow to Ostjuden. The creation of the Reich Chamber of Culture and laws to exclude political opponents and Jews from work in the press or radio added to the roster of Jewish unemployed. However, these measures were comparatively mild, especially when the exemptions were taken into account. Sacked civil servants even enjoyed a reasonable pay-off and retained a proportion of their pension.⁵⁸

The relative temperance of anti-Jewish legislation contrasted with the unrestrained abuse, discrimination and violence emanating from the SA and the Nazi Party ranks. In April 1933, Annemarie Schwarzenbach wrote to her friend Klaus Mann, author and son of Thomas Mann, that ‘in spite of all Hitler’s appeals and admonitions, individual actions, of the worst sort, take place every day’. Disorder reached the point at which central government could no longer remain passive and the regime redoubled its efforts to end anti-Jewish activity that threatened to disrupt the economy. On 7 July, Rudolf Hess, the deputy Führer, prohibited actions against department stores. Three days later, Wilhelm Frick, the interior minister, issued a circular forbidding unauthorized individual actions. Three weeks after his previous communiqué, Hess issued a specific injunction against party members getting involved in such affairs. At the start of September, the Reich Economic Ministry circulated instructions that there were to be no blacklists of Jewish businesses or people doing business with Jews; that Jewish businesses were not to be denied the right to advertise; that signs and pickets outside Jewish shops or stores were to be removed.⁵⁹

Yet these edicts were more often honoured in the breach. The result was wide regional variations and further uncertainty. Franconia (northern Bavaria), where Julius Streicher wielded the greatest influence, was a particular hot spot. Here local NSDAP branches and SA detachments bridled against the restraints imposed by Berlin. In Neustadt an der Aisch, north-west of Nuremberg, a public meeting condemned the Economics Ministry for seeking to prevent boycotts and the ‘occasional excesses’. Municipalities dominated by Nazis used their local competence to exclude Jews from public amenities. An early ordinance forbade Jews access to public swimming baths, a spiteful gesture that reflected Streicher’s pathological aversion to Jews and the widespread desire to prevent any physical contact with Aryans. There was also intermittent violence. In Aschaffenburg, SS men went on the rampage, abducting and beating Jewish men, while the boycott was revived in Würzburg and a synagogue in Miltenberg was vandalized. The district head office of the National Socialist Company Cell Organization (Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation, NSBO) was then sharply admonished to rein in the boycotters. In October 1933, police clashed with SA and SS units that attacked Jewish bookshops with, they claimed, the authority of Julius Streicher.⁶⁰

The contrast between Berlin and Bavaria was graphically revealed to Martha Dodd, the daughter of the newly arrived American Ambassador, when she went on a road trip to the south in the company of the journalist Quentin Reynolds. As they approached one town after another they encountered banners strung across the main road proclaiming that Jews were not wanted there. The atmosphere was febrile. In Nuremberg they saw SA men force a woman to walk through the streets with a placard strung around her neck reading ‘I have offered myself to a Jew’. Reynolds decided not to report the incident because ‘there had been so many atrocity stories lately that people were no longer interested in them’.⁶¹

Such humiliations were not confined to Streicher’s realm. From the outset Nazi rule unleashed a wave of sexual abuse and gendered violence, usually masked by the pretence of interdicting physical contact between Jews and Aryans. At the same time as National Socialism denounced the libertinism attributed to the Weimar Republic and advocated a new form of puritanism, it fostered a prurient interest in sexual activity through the policing of personal relationships. The permission to pry, expose, and discuss sex was a welcome relief; it was also a legitimate way to indulge in salacious talk and misogynistic violence.

During that first long, hot summer of National Socialism Jewish men and non-Jewish women who defied the new line between Aryans and non-Aryans were subject to public pillory. The Gestapo office in the government district of Kassel reported that ‘a number of Jews who had intimate relations with German girls were brought in recent days to police headquarters by the population, assisted by the SS’. Before they were hauled in ‘the Jews in question were paraded publicly through the streets. This was accompanied by repeated spontaneous anti-semitic demonstrations by the agitated crowd.’ In Hamburg, Kurt Rosenberg, a lawyer who was sacked due to the Aryan paragraph, watched a German girl and a Jewish man paraded through Cuxhaven. He noted in his diary that she bore a cardboard notice inscribed ‘I am a pig because I took up with a Jew’.⁶²

Couples in mixed marriages also came under hostile scrutiny, especially in small places where they were denied the anonymity people enjoyed in the big city. Lilli Jahn was in her early thirties, a qualified doctor, married to a non-Jew who she had met while they were medical students. After her marriage to Ernst Jahn in 1926 they moved to Immenhausen, in Hesse, where he obtained a practice. When she was not having children and raising them Lilli assisted Ernst in the clinic. They prospered and lived happily until 1933. The town was under an SPD mayor and council until March when the SA evicted the left-wingers. Somehow the local Nazis knew that Lilli was Jewish and on 1 April organized a boycott of the practice. In anguish she wrote to friends, ‘We’ve had a shocking time of it! Can you imagine how I’m feeling? Can you understand how heavy hearted I am and how bitterly hurtful it all is … Just imagine, they also boycotted Amadé [her pet name for Ernst] because he has a Jewish wife! I can’t find the words to tell you how profoundly shocked I was. And, of course, we are now very fearful. Will there be other repercussions on us?’ Ernst Jahn stood by his wife, who was pregnant with their third child, but she stopped practising so as not to ‘give offence’.⁶³

When autumn arrived, relations between party yahoos and the state authorities grew more strained. The upturn in the economy, partly thanks to the pay packets of men employed on public works schemes, meant that the Christmas season got under way strongly. Jewish-owned shops and stores benefited along with suppliers and wholesalers. NSDAP members making their Yuletide purchases were offended to find the window displays in Jewish-owned businesses decorated with Christmas trees and religious symbols. Worse, the shops were full of customers. The result was another wave of actions aimed at Jewish-run retail outlets. Raymond Geist, in the American Embassy, reported that ‘The revival of anti-Jewish propaganda has intimidated Jews in many towns and it is reported that they avoid showing themselves in the streets during the day as much as possible and lock themselves in their houses at night.’ This was not what Schacht or Schmitt, the economics minister, wanted to hear. In mid-December, the Reich Economics Ministry sent around instructions that under no circumstances should shopping be disrupted.⁶⁴

Jewish responses

These contradictions and fluctuations help to explain the divergent Jewish responses to persecution during 1933. At the most extreme point on the spectrum, dozens of Jews took their own lives out of despair. Around 37,000 German Jews emigrated, most to adjacent countries. The vast majority stayed. Some remained because they believed, like lots of other Germans, that Hitler could not last long. Those who were less hopeful that the government would fall believed they could adapt to life under Hitler. These pessimists could reassure themselves that however bad it was in Germany, it was worse for Jews in Poland and far worse to be a refugee anywhere. Jewish perceptions also varied according to class, occupation, age, gender, and where they lived. In some regions, such as Streicher’s domain or East Prussia, there was constant anti-Jewish agitation. Elsewhere, Jews enjoyed relative calm. The Jewish population of the big cities was more lightly affected than Jews in small towns and villages. Individual Jews could pass unnoticed in the urban conurbations and the authorities were more capable of preventing violence or disorder. In rural communities the few Jews were well known, at the mercy of officials and local SA men who could do almost what they pleased.⁶⁵

The twilight period between Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the elections was particularly fluid. Left-wing Jews were naturally apprehensive. Jewish shopkeepers who were exposed to events on the street felt distinctly vulnerable. Wealthy, conservative, nationalistic Jews who moved in more decorous circles wondered whether they might not be able to share in the national revolution. On the same day that the Reichstag went up in flames Siegmund Warburg began a diary in which to record ‘the huge political upheavals of the last few weeks’. He found them ‘especially moving for a Jewish German and above all for one such as myself, who feels his entire being to be so inextricably rooted in Germandom’.⁶⁶

Listening to Hitler’s eve of poll speech on the radio, Warburg thought the oratory was ‘clearly idealistic, powerfully proactive, delivered with authentic inspiration’. Intimidation alone could not explain the seven and a half million votes cast for the NSDAP; the result was a tribute to the ‘idealistic forces which above all have brought it about’. National Socialism represented the struggle between dynamic youth and sluggish bureaucracy. The Nazis deployed a ‘decisive analysis’ and showed a ‘self-sacrificing will to fight’. Despite the anti-Semitism of the movement, he considered the ‘prospects are good’. The new regime offered opportunities for like-minded German Jews. ‘Perhaps the coming man is now precisely this type among both Aryan and Jewish Germans – a Jewish German of this type can therefore rightly say that he would be a Nazi if it weren’t for the Nazis’ anti-Semitism.’ He suspected that such Jew-hatred was symptomatic of the Nazis’ arriviste status; it would pass.⁶⁷

A week later, the new Nazi incumbents in Hamburg’s city hall obliged Siegmund’s older cousin, Max Warburg, to resign from his position with the finance department. Siegmund now felt more dubious about how the wind was blowing. ‘We have fascism, but the big question remains whether it will be a good German fascism, in other words a fascism that wants to be orderly and just, akin to the Italian, or a fascism closer to that of Moscow, a fascism which leads to arbitrariness, and communism, to brutality and ignorance.’⁶⁸

Nor was there a uniform reaction to the boycott. In a front-page article in Jüdische Rundschau, Robert Weltsch urged Jews to respond to discrimination by glorying in their heritage. Entitled ‘Wear the Yellow Star With Pride’ the piece was intended to evoke Jewish triumphs over past waves of discrimination rather than express meek acceptance of persecution. The RjF, led by the decorated ex-army captain Leo Löwenstein, believed in constructive engagement with the regime. When it won concessions for combat veterans the entire Jewish population saw this as an example of how best to reply to Nazi persecution. The Jüdischer Frauenbund, however, spurned engagement and withdrew from the League of German Women, expressing its alienation from Germany. Nationalist Jews formed the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (the Association of German National Jews) and sought to prove their loyalty to Germany by denouncing both Zionism and Ostjuden. These ultra-patriotic German Jews declared that ‘Anyone who leaves and goes abroad is a traitor.’ Orthodox Jews wrote to Hitler seeking reassurance that Germany did not wish for their destruction. They got no reply.69

There were reasons to be hopeful. The boycott had provoked moving gestures of solidarity. It was, in itself, a response to international protest, signifying that the Jews of Germany were not alone. Moreover, a succession of pronouncements from the Reich Chancellery, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Economics indicated that the regime put the maintenance of stable, calm trading conditions above the implementation of demands to expel Jews from economic life. Hence, Victor Klemperer interpreted the cancellation of the boycott as a ‘wild turnaround’ and a sign that the regime had capitulated to resistance at home and external pressure. ‘I have the impression of swiftly approaching catastrophe,’ he wrote excitedly. To many Jews it did not seem possible for the conservatives to remain in government with the Nazis or ‘put up with the National Socialist dictatorship much longer’. Edwin Landau and his friends agreed that Hitler would last a year at the most. ‘We believed that the outside world could not tolerate such behaviour in the twentieth century.’⁷⁰

It was no simple matter for Jews to evaluate the significance of the anti-Jewish measures. Nor was it easier to determine how non-Jews felt. History and previous experience offered little guidance to the unprecedented situation. The Jewish population was familiar with religious antagonism; there was nothing new about prejudice and discrimination. True, the German state had never sanctioned nationwide quotas or sought to restrict Jewish economic activity; but the boycott had lasted only one day, while there were anti-Jewish quotas in other countries where Jewish life continued without detriment. The inconsistent application of the Aryan paragraph gave hope that not all Jews would be excluded from society and the economy. Finally, the behaviour of the president, Hindenburg, provided substantial reassurance.

Out of loyalty and gratitude to the Jews who had served under him in the Great War, Hindenburg responded to protests by the association of Jewish ex-servicemen against the treatment meted out to its members. On 4 April, he wrote to the chancellor that ‘Recently, a whole series of cases has been reported to me in which judges, lawyers, and officials of the Judiciary who are disabled war veterans and whose record in office is flawless have been forcibly sent on leave, and are later to be dismissed for the sole reason that they are of Jewish descent.’ Hindenburg informed Hitler that ‘It is quite intolerable for me personally … that Jewish officials who were disabled in the war should suffer such treatment.’ He asked the chancellor to inquire into the matter and find ‘some uniform arrangement’ for all branches of the public service. Unless there was a specific case against them, ‘As far as my own feelings are concerned, officials, judges, teachers and lawyers who are war invalids, fought at the front, are sons of war dead, or themselves lost sons in the war, should remain in their positions.’ He concluded resoundingly, ‘If they were worthy of fighting for Germany and bleeding for Germany, then they must also be considered worthy of continuing to serve the Fatherland in their professions.’ Hitler replied the next day, sniffily pointing out that Jews had been conscripted like other Germans, but promising to accommodate the president’s reservations in forthcoming legislation to ‘remove the solution of these questions from arbitrary action’. The exemptions that Hindenburg specified were embodied in the 7 April legislation, greatly softening the blow. Furthermore, there were still many non-Nazi officials holding posts in ministries and town halls who were willing to interpret the new regulations helpfully and who behaved towards Jews with old-fashioned courtesy.⁷¹

When the government revoked the naturalization of Ostjuden who had settled in Germany since November 1918, it reinforced the impression that anti-Jewish measures were targeted rather than aimed universally at all Jews. It was hard to discern the distinction between expressions of a familiar nationalism and the construction of the Volksgemeinschaft on the basis of a racial identity. It took time to grasp that nation and race were now considered coterminous and that the Jews were aliens in Germany despite what their passports said or what their war record demonstrated.

Despite the boomerang effect of the foreign protests, continued overseas pressure began to tell on the regime. This was largely because of the linkage made between Germany’s image abroad and exports. Victor Klemperer, whose position at the university was saved by Hindenburg’s intervention on behalf of Jewish war veterans, even speculated that the reaction against the anti-Jewish measures would bring down the government. ‘The fate of the Hitler movement will undoubtedly be decided by the Jewish business,’ he wrote on 25 April. ‘I do not understand why they have made this point of their programme so central. It will sink them.’⁷²

Continuing foreign protests

Although he was not a diplomat James McDonald was chairman of the Foreign Policy Association and the Germans knew he was well connected, so when he spoke up for the Jews he was taken seriously. A week after the boycott, Hanfstaengl got him an interview with Hitler at which McDonald broached the Jewish issue. A few days later, Messersmith raised the question with Göring, telling him it was damaging Germany in the United States. Hitler got the same message from Sir Horace Rumbold. The British foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, instructed him to inform the chancellor that the ‘oppressive policy’ towards the Jews had cost Germany a great deal of sympathy in Britain. Hitler did not take this well and responded as he had to McDonald, insisting that at a time of national crisis Jews had to suffer like the rest. Rumbold concluded that ‘he is a fanatic on the subject’.73

A second wave of protests underscored the point made by diplomats. On 10 May 1933, 100,000 Jews marched through New York condemning National Socialism and demanding a popular boycott. Similar demonstrations were held in other cities: in Chicago the number was 50,000, in Philadephia it was 20,000, and in Cleveland 10,000. Letters and telegrams poured into the White House appealing for the administration to act. President Roosevelt remained silent, but the Germans noticed a drop-off in trade with the US that they could ill afford. In London the Board of Deputies of British Jews finally convened a protest rally on 27 June 1933. It was addressed by mainly non-Jewish figures, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. The following month East End Jewish organizations, including the left-wing Workers’ Circle, trade unions and Zionist groups operating under the umbrella United Jewish Protest Committee, organized an anti-Nazi rally in Hyde Park. It was attended by 50,000 Jews, many of whom had processed from the East End with banners proclaiming ‘Restore the Rights of Jews in Germany’. In September the boycott was institutionalized under the supervision of the Jewish Representative Council for the Boycott of German Goods and Services. The council, chaired by the industrialist Lord Melchett, embraced dozens of trade unions, friendly societies, synagogues and Zionist groups with an estimated 170,000 members.⁷⁴

The arrival of William E. Dodd, the new US Ambassador to Germany, was a further, forceful reminder that the persecution of the Jews was noted abroad. Dodd, a historian who had received his doctorate from Leipzig University in 1904, was a life-long Democrat, a devout Baptist, and a dyed-in-the-wool liberal on matters of religious liberty and personal freedom. Roosevelt selected him personally and briefed him in the White House before his departure. According to Dodd’s diary (which may have been embellished by his daughter after his death), the president told him that ‘The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited.’ It was not a governmental matter and the ambassador could not make an official intervention unless the anti-Jewish measures touched a US citizen; but ‘whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done’. Dodd also had a lengthy meeting with American Jewish leaders, including Stephen Wise. He had barely disembarked at Hamburg on 13 July 1933, when a journalist from the Israelitisches Familienblatt asked him if he was going to intercede on behalf of the Jews. Despite a suitably diplomatic reply, the paper carried the story that Dodd had come on a mission to rectify the wrongs done to the Jews. One of his first tasks on entering the US Embassy the next day was to correct the report. But it was true to the spirit of the man if not his official role.⁷⁵

Dodd raised the mistreatment of Jews at his first meeting with Bernhard von Bülow, undersecretary at the German Foreign Office. Bulow admitted that ‘the hostility of the Jews in the US did much harm’. The following month, Dodd tackled Neurath on the subject. He insisted that ‘You cannot expect world opinion of your conduct to moderate as long as eminent leaders like Hitler and Goebbels announce from platforms, as in Nuremberg, that all Jews must be wiped off the earth.’ According to Dodd, the foreign minister was ‘embarrassed as on one or two previous occasions. He did not promise any reform much as he seemed to lament the facts.’ However, Dodd refrained from embarrassing Hitler when he finally met the chancellor in October. There was hardly any need to; by this time he had gained a reputation in Berlin as a friend of the Jewish people. This did nothing to help them. By reminding the Germans that he cared about the Jews without actually being able to do anything positive, Dodd squandered his authority. More seriously, he added to the impression that Jews controlled the White House.⁷⁶

The new British Ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, did not make the same mistake. He barely mentioned the Jews in his exchanges with officials on the Wilhelmstrasse. This did not mean he was unaware of or unconcerned about anti-Semitism. Phipps made a careful study of Mein Kampf and concluded that Hitler was consistent in his attitude towards the Jews. However, he doubted that Hitler would adhere to positions ‘expressed with such incredible violence in a work written in a Bavarian prison ten years ago’. Like Dodd, Phipps was convinced from the moment he met Hitler that the chancellor was intent on rearming Germany and reversing the Versailles Treaty by force of arms if necessary. His chief objective during his years as ambassador in Berlin was to impress on the British Foreign Office the need to contain Hitler.⁷⁷

Jews in Germany and sympathetic foreign diplomats in Berlin hoped that the conservatives in the cabinet would persuade Hitler to wind down the anti-Jewish campaign. They believed that the economy would supply them with the necessary leverage and therefore pinned their hopes on the non-Nazi minister for economics, Kurt Schmitt, and the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht. They were not entirely disappointed. Schacht had met Jewish leaders when he visited New York in May 1933, shortly after his reappointment to the Reichsbank. At that time he intimated to McDonald his conviction that the persecution of the Jews was ‘a mistake’. When they met again in August, in Berlin, Schacht was less emollient. Nevertheless, in September the Reich Economics Ministry issued instructions to government officials, municipal officers, magistrates and members of the NSDAP to refrain from boycotts of Jewish-owned enterprises or any other interruption to the conduct of business, such as refusal to list Jews as suppliers, denying Jews the right to advertise goods or services, or intimidating customers. Defiance would be treated as ‘offences against the Führer principle’ and constitute ‘economic sabotage’. The instructions were published in the CV-Zeitung on 11 October 1933.⁷⁸

The insistence that Jews should be allowed to carry on their business was seen as a vital breakthrough and buoyed up hopes that the Jewish population would get by. In fact, the pledge that Jews could carry on business unmolested was more than an economic life-line: it gave them legal traction. When unauthorized actions occurred, especially in small communities, Jews were able to fight back. The Centralverein collated information about breaches of the rules and prodded central government into asserting its prerogative, often to the annoyance of local authorities, Nazi organizations and SA men.⁷⁹

The primacy accorded to economic growth indicated that the regime was not united with regard to Judenpolitik, that there was tension between the party and the state. It was evident that opinion was divided even within the party, and it was not clear which faction was uppermost at any moment or which would win in the long run. No single minister or department was responsible for dealing with the Jews and there was no single party office with a brief to devise and implement Judenpolitik. In these confused circumstances, the Jews were able to play off one agency against the other; they rallied and bounced back.⁸⁰

The Jewish leadership realized that individual initiatives were no substitute for a unified front and could even be a liability. In September 1933 a constellation of prominent Jews joined together to form the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (RV, the Reich Representation of German Jews). It was the first centralized, representative body of German Jews including all sections of the community except the pro-Nazi Verband nationaldeutscher Juden (VndJ) and the Orthodox, who did not wish to rub shoulders with reform or liberal Jews and traditionally pursued their own interests in splendid isolation. The RV was intended first and foremost to mediate between the government and the Jewish population. But it also coordinated responses to the problems caused by the anti-Jewish laws and acted as the address for foreign aid. Its Education Committee promoted the development of Jewish schools. Most importantly, it worked with (and subsequently absorbed) the Zentralausschuss für Hilfe und Aufbau (Central Committee for Assistance and Reconstruction, ZAHA). Jews were still eligible for state assistance, but it was parsimonious and constantly squeezed by new regulations. ZAHA provided supplementary relief to Jewish families that were already hard-hit by the Depression. The Advice Service for Economic Assistance gave emergency aid to newly unemployed Jewish workers in the form of grants and loans. In the winter of 1933–4, some 30,000 Jews in Berlin were in receipt of welfare from Jewish sources. For those who gave up on Germany the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden advised about emigration. The Palestine Office of the RV handled enquiries specifically about the Jewish national home as a destination.⁸¹

Needless to say, it took a while for these agencies to get up and running. In the early months the situation was chaotic and precarious. Alexander Szanto, a Hungarian-born but naturalized German Jew, who became chairman of the Economic Assistance Service in Berlin, recalled that ‘thousands of Nazi victims turned to the gemeinde [Jewish community organizations] for help. Its offices were swamped by a flood of confused and desperate people.’ In the first months, ‘people virtually stormed the building from morning to night’. Szanto’s staff did not just provide help to tide over those dismissed from jobs. It was their motto that ‘no position in public, and particularly economic life, should be abandoned without a struggle. This tactic proved successful in numerous cases and saved the livelihood of many coreligionists.’ Where they could not keep a Jew in a job they insisted on a decent redundancy payment that would enable the former employee to set up independently. For the first few years, ‘many Jewish merchants and tradesmen really were prosperous enough to cover their financial obligations alongside the cost of living’. Jewish businesses absorbed a high proportion of the Jewish unemployed, partly thanks to the Jewish Labour Exchange. In Breslau, the career advice office helped 2,300 Jews.⁸²

Jewish children felt the impact of Nazi persecution no less than adults and in some respects even sooner. Around 117,000 attended state schools from primary level to gymnasia. The Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools made it impossible for many to find places at the start of the 1933 school year while thousands were withdrawn by parents unhappy at the abrasive effect of Nazi rituals and ideological teaching. Existing Jewish schools expanded to absorb the new intake and those moved out of the state system, but since there were hardly enough places a crash programme of school building was set in motion. Many of the new establishments were located in less than ideal premises and often the teachers were hastily retrained academics or men and women sacked from other jobs. But the Jewish schools provided a safe and sympathetic environment, while the educational experts working for the RV produced thoughtful teaching guidelines and curricula adapted to the new circumstances. They attempted to bolster the children’s sense of self-worth by extensively teaching about Judaism and Jewish history. A great deal of time was devoted to Palestine, which was increasingly seen as the most desirable place for young Jews to grow up.⁸³

The promise of a new life in Palestine brought the claims of the Zionist movement to the fore. Previously a marginal element in German Jewish life, Zionism now seemed a lot more interesting and relevant. Membership of the German Zionist Federation (Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland, ZvfD) leapt. Young Jews applied in large numbers to go on agricultural training courses, ‘hachshara’, that would qualify them for permits to settle in the Jewish national home. The attractions of Palestine were greatly enhanced in August 1933 when the German Zionist Federation concluded an agreement with the Reich Economics Ministry that enabled Jews moving there to take with them £1,000 in foreign currency and to sell German goods in Palestine to the value of RM50,000 that they had paid for prior to their departure. This unusual arrangement, known as the Ha’avara, or transfer, agreement, had grown out of the Hanotea scheme, devised by a private businessman, Sam Cohen, who imported agricultural machinery and other products from Germany into Palestine. The Economics Ministry and the Reichsbank were happy to cooperate because the scheme boosted exports, broke the boycott of German goods, and assisted the emigration of Jews while minimizing the drain on foreign currency reserves. Indeed, the device was so successful that Cohen was elbowed aside by the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the financial arm of the world Zionist movement. The Bank and the ZvfD, with the assistance of the Warburg banking house, concluded the Ha’avara agreement with the German government to set up trusts in Germany and Palestine to handle, respectively, the purchase and sale of the manufactured items.⁸⁴

With this agreement in hand, German Zionists took minimal interest in the defence of Jewish rights in the Third Reich. In their eyes, the success of National Socialism vindicated their prognostications about the illusion of emancipation. However, emigration in general was anathema to nationalistic German Jews and Zionism remained a heresy. No matter how vehemently the VndJ or the RjF denounced the rising interest in both, it was symptomatic of economic despair and the crisis of German Jewish identity.⁸⁵

This predicament was accentuated by the dismissal of Jews from the creative industries. Jews were told that they could not share in or even perform the classics of German drama, opera and music. They were to be confined to ‘Jewish culture’. In April 1933, Kurt Baumann, sacked from his position as an assistant theatre and opera director, realized that the 175,000 Jews in Berlin ought to be able to support theatre, opera and concert performances on their own. He gathered other Jews who had been made unemployed and formed a Jewish cultural association to perform specifically for Jewish audiences. Baumann persuaded Kurt Singer, former director of the Municipal Opera, to lead the venture. The CV agreed to support it, largely to provide work for Jewish artists who had not been able to find work abroad and partly to raise morale. From exile in America a few years later Baumann recalled, ‘For us in those days it was much more important to provide the Jewish public in Germany, which had once stood at the forefront of German cultural life, with a home for as long as possible.’ The CV obtained permission from the authorities and in October 1933, the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (German Jewish Cultural League, later the Jüdischer Kulturbund, JKB) was launched in Berlin. Baumann was uncertain how the Jewish population would respond to Jewish-only events, but the performances sold out. The Kulturbund rapidly spread to other Jewish centres. Its programmes attracted large audiences, giving work to hundreds of unemployed Jewish artists, performers and musicians. Inevitably, the repertoire fostered a keen sense of Jewish difference. The experience of attending a concert of music by a Jewish composer, performed by a Jewish orchestra with a Jewish conductor, to a Jewish audience was reassuring to some Jews and fortified their sense of identity. To others, it was a deplorable sign that Jews were slipping back into the ghetto.⁸⁶

After a law was passed annulling contracts between Jewish authors and Aryan publishers, Joseph Roth pleaded with Stefan Zweig to recognize that his career as a German writer was over: ‘Germany is dead. For us it is dead … It was a dream. Please see that, won’t you!’ But it was hard to accept the passing of a hard-won and long-cherished identity. Victor Klemperer was scathing about Jews who accepted that they were no longer entitled to think of themselves as Germans. ‘Especially repugnant to us’, he wrote, ‘is the behaviour of some Jews. They are beginning to submit inwardly and to regard the new ghetto situation atavistically as a legal condition which has to be accepted.’⁸⁷

After nearly a year of life under National Socialism the November 1933 plebiscite to approve Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations cruelly forced German Jews to confront their identity. The Nazi Party treated the plebiscite as if there were a genuine contest. Hitler’s speeches were broadcast in public; SA men put up posters and flags exhorting the population to vote. Jews were harassed in the traditional manner. But should the Jews vote and, if so, how? Dr Rudolf Löwenstein in Soest, Westphalia, was representative of many Jews when he wrote to the CV urging it to take a positive stand on the poll. ‘Come what may, we feel that we are bound to our German Fatherland. We feel most painfully all the exclusionary laws that the Reich government has issued against us and that the ruling party enforces with even greater rigour. All of that, however, has to take a backseat in the interest of the nation’s fight against foreign defamation and oppression.’ German Jews resented the humiliations Germany suffered at the hands of the international community just as much as Aryans. So, ‘in this moment we stand with pride, confidence and without qualification behind the leadership of the new German Reich, behind the chancellor Adolf Hitler’. The CV-Zeitung eventually published an article recommending that German Jews vote ‘Yes’ in the plebiscite even though it was in effect an endorsement of the Third Reich. Some Jews, like Willy Rosenfeld, were disgusted. ‘Is it your duty as representatives of German Jewry to support these hateful measures?’ Victor Klemperer voted ‘No’; his wife left her ballot paper blank.⁸⁸

By the end of 1933, the police reported that Jewish associational activity had picked up strongly and that Jews felt more secure economically. Jewish veterans’ groups were flourishing and so were branches of the Zionist federation. Jewish cultural and sports associations were booming. The police HQ in Nuremberg-Fürth was somewhat startled by the transition from anxiety to confidence, ‘in full awareness of the security they have been guaranteed’. To the indignation of the police, CV agents were amassing evidence of boycotting, newspapers that refused to take advertisements from Jews, the exclusion of Jews from markets, and signage announcing that Jews were not welcome or would not be served. They were optimistic that ‘there will soon be a return to normal conditions’.⁸⁹

The stabilization of Jewish life was reflected in the steep decline in the number of Jews leaving the country and the rising number of those returning. These fluctuations had a serious effect on foreign perceptions of the refugee crisis. Just as Jewish protests against Nazism peaked early, leaving behind an impression of Jewish power and unity that was increasingly at odds with reality, the effort to assist refugees was intense, frantic and expensive, only to peter out at the point at which it was really needed.

The first refugees

The wave of terror and anti-Jewish violence of spring 1933, followed by the boycott and the sacking of Jewish employees, produced the first great wave of Jewish emigration from the Third Reich. That year, about 37,000 Jews sought temporary refuge or new homes outside Germany. Many of these fugitives were politically active and as fearful of political repression as much as anti-Semitism. A large proportion were young men who had not fought in the Great War and who were made unemployed in the wave of dismissals from the state sector. The majority moved no further than neighbouring countries – France, Netherlands, Austria, Czechoslovakia – in the hope that conditions would soon change, allowing them to return. Approximately 8,900–9,500 Jews entered France, nearly 4,000 went to the Netherlands, about 5,000 crossed into Switzerland, and some 300–400 arrived each month in Britain. They were only one tributary feeding the river of émigrés, numbering 60,000–65,000, that flowed out of the Third Reich, including communists, socialists, artists and intellectuals. To citizens in the receiving countries it was not easy to distinguish fleeing Marxist intellectuals like Berthold Brecht from sacked Jewish doctors; consequently, the number of Jews seemed larger than it really was. Although the volume of emigrants fell to 23,000 in 1934 and hundreds returned (1,200–1,500 from the Netherlands alone), the initial impact had severe consequences.⁹⁰

Few had sufficient resources to live independently and most had to look for work in countries already burdened with high unemployment. Initially, the refugees were greeted with sympathy. The newspapers were full of atrocity stories and many of the émigrés were distinguished figures from the arts and sciences who had been dismissed from university posts or purged from the cultural scene. Jewish communities outside Germany rallied to their aid. In France the Jewish community pledged to the government that it would not allow the new arrivals to become a burden on the public purse. Although this had no effect on the administration of the immigration rules, the French government signalled that it would uphold traditions of asylum and made it relatively easy for German Jews to obtain entry visas or cross the border pleading sanctuary. France had long welcomed foreign workers to bolster its depleted population and anti-German feeling made the refugees’ cause temporarily popular. It did not take long for the mood to change.⁹¹

Foreign workers were less needed when unemployment was climbing. Professional groups, such as doctors and dentists, lobbied hard to exclude German competitors. French consuls warned the Foreign Ministry of a danger that France would be flooded with communists and disreputable elements fleeing Nazi justice. In December 1933, Senator Henry Bérenger, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Senate, announced that France would act as ‘a way station for refugees, but not as a dumping ground’. The new year saw a tightening of immigration controls: now applicants would have to obtain visas and, once in France, would only be allowed to work if they had a work permit. The French police were ordered to hunt down illegal immigrants and deport them. Over 1934–5, the spectacle of police raiding bars and cafes frequented by foreigners or entering workshops demanding to see employment papers became a common sight. It became official French policy to prevent foreigners from settling in France and to encourage the emigration of those already arrived.⁹²

As hostility to the inundation mounted along with the cost of supporting the newcomers, the French Jews became less accommodating. HICEM, the Paris-based aid organization that brought together the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of New York with the Jewish Colonisation Association, actually started assisting the repatriation of German Jews. The Zentralausschuss für Hilfe und Aufbau in Berlin warned that Jews should not leave unless they had arranged a means of subsistence.⁹³

The reaction was felt most strongly in France, which bore the brunt of the initial wave. Just as the anti-German boycott movement divided American and British Jews, the treatment of refugees became a bone of contention between different sections of the French Jewish population. Jacques Helbronner, a vice president of the Consistoire, the central representative body of the French Jews, lobbied against unrestricted entry. Despite being a member of the executive of the National Committee to Aid German Refugees, he hated Germans and believed that as a French Jew he could best demonstrate his patriotism by casting aspersions on his German co-religionists. Helbronner was abetted by Robert de Rothschild, a key figure in fund-raising efforts who also chaired the National Committee to assist refugees, and Louis Oungre, the director of the Jewish Colonisation Association, which historically played a leading role in helping Jewish refugees settle in new lands. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, a war veteran and former civil servant, championed the refugees within the national committee, but made little headway. Polish Jews in France who were usually sensitive to immigration issues failed to mobilize on behalf of German Jews, who, they recalled, had been so snobbish towards Ostjuden. Lambert was even unable to prevent the committee that supposedly existed to succour refugees closing a makeshift camp in a disused army barracks at the Porte d’Orleans.⁹⁴

The situation of most German and German Jewish refugees in France was miserable. Unable to work legally, they lived off whatever cash they had been able to bring with them, until it ran out. Some 2,000, mainly Polish or stateless Jews, ended up living in the old barracks donated by the French authorities. Conditions were rudimentary and the food was poor. James McDonald, who visited the site, described them as ‘pitiful’. In mid-1933, nearly 6,000 Jews relied on payments from the Jewish community, which were costing it $225,000 per month. If the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC), the main American Jewish overseas aid organization, had not come to its rescue, the French committee would have gone broke.⁹⁵

Joseph Roth had always lived out of a suitcase. However, his Austrian nationality and modest fame gave him a degree of security that the refugees lacked. In 1935 he joined the Paris Hilfskomitee, which doled out aid to German exiles. In a letter to Stefan Zweig he described their miserable existence: ‘valuable people, queuing every day for a work card, a piece of paper, a free meal, a paltry sum to appease the hotelkeeper – only for a short time’.⁹⁶

Conditions in Britain were much better, thanks in part to the unified efforts of the Jewish community, and in part to the stringent restrictions on the number of Jews admitted permanently. On 5 April 1933, the British home secretary, Sir John Gilmour, met a delegation from the Anglo-Jewish community who asked for the lifting of immigration controls to enable Jews seeking escape from Germany to find refuge quickly. The delegation promised that the community would use its own resources to guarantee that German Jews who reached the UK would not become a burden on the public purse. When the cabinet met the following day it discussed the danger of a mass influx and set up a special committee to consider the options. The Cabinet Committee on Refugees met once and resolved that controls on the entry of aliens would not be changed. The only concession it made was to relax the rules in the case of distinguished individuals seeking asylum. It did however accept the pledge by the Jewish community to guarantee that Jewish immigrants from Germany would be financially supported. This arrangement placed the onus of screening potential refugees on the Jewish Refugees Committee (later renamed the German Jewish Aid Committee, which sounded less alarming) and restricted the number that could be helped according to the funds at their disposal.⁹⁷

Around the same time, President Roosevelt proposed relaxing visa controls on Jews hoping to emigrate to the USA. The suggestion was promptly squashed by the State Department, which pointed to high levels of domestic unemployment, and Congressional hostility to any amendment of the immigration rules. Although the quota for immigrants from Germany was 25,557, only 1,919 Germans arrived in 1933, mostly Jews. In early September 1933, Wilbur J. Carr, director of the Consular Service, transmitted instructions to US consuls in Germany stating that no preference was to be given to Jews who applied for an entry visa: ‘the admission of such aliens into the United States is governed by the existing laws in the same manner as in the case of aliens of other classes’. Carr stipulated that the word ‘refugee’ was not to be used lest it be construed as interference in the internal affairs of another country.⁹⁸

Jews in the United States hoped that the League of Nations could alleviate the plight of the refugees. Partly at the suggestion of New York Jews, in September 1933 James McDonald travelled to Europe to collect information for the Foreign Policy Association and lobby the League to extend assistance to Jewish refugees through the establishment of a High Commission for Refugees. While he was in Europe he met Jewish leaders to canvass support for the idea. He found their attitude disappointing. Few saw any need for a concerted international effort and fewer still were prepared to donate significant sums to fund it. The British Jewish leaders, he reported to Felix Warburg, were ‘not yet … willing to face the realities of the situation’. In Paris, Robert de Rothschild told him that ‘even French Jews think of the German refugee Jews as Germans rather than Jews, as Boches, former hated enemies and possible enemies of the future … the French Jews are French first and Jews second’. McDonald also encountered the bitter divisions between Zionists and non-Zionists. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, mocked the ‘well to do Jews in the West [who] completely failed to sense the realities of the situation’. He disparaged the German Jewish leadership as ‘the worst form of assimilationists, as persons who cringed and whimpered when the test came’. Weizmann condemned spending money to maintain Jews in Germany or European countries of refuge. He insisted that there could be only one permanent solution to the Jewish refugee problem: Palestine. Neville Laski, president of the Board of Deputies and a non-Zionist, sneered that ‘Weizmann [who was born in Russia] was not really an Englishman.’⁹⁹

McDonald was successful in persuading the member states of the League to establish a High Commission for Refugees, but it was gravely weakened by German insistence that the office should be semi-detached from the League and work only with refugees outside Germany. It was not to receive any League funding. Nevertheless, leading American Jews, including Felix Warburg, Samuel Untermyer and Stephen Wise, thought it was worth running with the scheme and proposed that McDonald should become the first High Commissioner. In November 1933 he travelled to Geneva to accept the post. He soon discovered he had been handed a poisoned chalice. British cooperation was vital, but the Foreign Office, which was responsible for maintaining tranquillity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, insisted on playing down the role of Palestine in any solution to the refugee crisis lest an influx of Jews trigger Arab unrest. Because the new organization would be separate from the League, McDonald had to set up a governing body and advisory council that would give it international standing. This made it prey to the whim of governments who appointed representatives guaranteed not to accept any burden on their own country. The French cynically placed Senator Bérenger on the governing body and arranged the secondment of Jacques Helbronner to the advisory council. Because it had no budget from the League, McDonald had to raise money, which placed him at the mercy of the refugee aid organizations, each of which had its own agenda, and wealthy members of various Jewish communities. He found himself sucked into Jewish communal politics and personal feuds, while his efforts to meet with the German government were consistently rebuffed. Modest proposals to provide emigrating Jews with simple documentation were waved aside by junior Foreign Ministry officials. McDonald could not get near Schacht to ask for a relaxation of the foreign currency controls that prevented Jews leaving with more than a small proportion of their wealth. But his greatest frustration was the inability of Jewish organizations and personalities to agree on a plan of action or provide sufficient funds even to run his office. After a stormy meeting of the High Commission’s governing body in December 1933, McDonald raged to his diary, ‘I almost feel as if I wished each half of the Jews would destroy the other half. They are impossible.’¹⁰⁰

At the start of 1934, J. P. Moffat, at the State Department, noted in his journal that ‘McDonald, the High Commissioner, has had immense difficulty in steering a course between the rival Jewish factions … has not succeeded in making contact with the German Government either on the question of travel documents or the question of Jewish property in Germany.’ Indeed, McDonald spent more time with President Roosevelt than with the president of the Reichsbank. Not that this did much good either. Roosevelt took a strong interest in McDonald’s work and welcomed the High Commissioner at the White House whenever he was back in the United States; but when McDonald requested modest funding for his office, Roosevelt was unable to get the State Department to make a grant of just $10,000. McDonald was under no illusions about the increasing futility of his work. When the governing body of the High Commission met there was no consensus on where Jewish refugees could be settled or how they could be helped. The bodies represented on the advisory council disagreed over whether to fund schemes in Germany for the vocational retraining of potential émigrés and quarrelled over whether to use funds to maintain Jews where they were or move them on. McDonald’s grand plan for a corporation to negotiate with the German government to liquidate the entire refugee problem in one go, using funds from world Jewry and the proceeds from selling Jewish assets in Germany, was regarded as wildly overambitious by some and by others as a reckless invitation to the Nazis to expel the German Jews. Like many potential emigrants, it got nowhere.¹⁰¹