‘No end in sight’

A year after Hitler was appointed as chancellor, Victor Klemperer wondered, ‘Has Germany really become so completely and fundamentally different, has its soul changed so completely that this will endure?’ He was not alone in questioning whether Hitler would last. Joseph Roth advised Stefan Zweig that ‘Hitler’s situation was never so bad as now. The foreign powers are watching him like a hawk, and he’s almost lost his only friend, which is Italy.’ Leopold Schwarzschild concurred that the regime was surrounded by discontent on all sides although ‘the bayonet and systematic terror [are] an excellent basis … for remaining in power for a long while’.¹

The many Jews who doubted the viability of the regime were not engaging in wishful thinking. Their estimations were based on everyday experience and the intelligence they were able to gather about domestic politics, the economy, and international relations. Similar prognoses also abounded within the diplomatic community.

Sir Eric Phipps considered that Hitler faced ‘real difficulties with his own extremists, with the Catholic and Protestant Churches, with the economic and financial situation’. There was tension between radicals in the National Socialist movement, notably the SA, who wanted to resuscitate the ‘national revolution’, and the government. The army was particularly alarmed by SA pretensions to supplant the military. Within the government, ministers were at loggerheads over security and economic policy. Göring and Himmler were jousting for control of the police. Robert Ley, head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF, the German Labour Front), was contesting control of the economy with Hjalmar Schacht and the ailing Kurt Schmitt. The regime’s patronage of a Nazi Christian movement, not to mention anti-religious pronouncements by Walther Daré and Alfred Rosenberg, had generated conflict with the Church. Meddling in the affairs of Austria had alienated the government in Vienna, annoyed Mussolini, and incurred international disapproval. The continued weakness of the economy posed the most serious challenge to the regime. Despite investment in public works schemes unemployment stubbornly hovered around the three million mark. Those in work saw their purchasing power continue to fall and there were periodic shortages of staple foods. Poor exports led to a chronic balance of trade deficit and a foreign currency crisis. This meant that by late summer it was not possible to make up for a bad harvest with imports.²

Ambassador Dodd reported to Washington that ‘Evidences of dissatisfaction continue to reach me from various quarters.’ Ferdinand von Bredow, who had served in Schleicher’s cabinet, told Bella Fromm that ‘at Wilhelmstrasse they are hopeful for the speedy finish of the National Socialist government. The bosses of the party are continually knifing each other. When that has gone far enough, they think, the whole structure will topple.’ When Goebbels launched a campaign against ‘grumblers’, Klemperer reckoned it was a tacit admission of anti-government feeling. He commented witheringly, ‘There is desperation behind the whole speech, a last attempt at a diversion … The whole system is on its last legs.’³

The crisis came to a head in mid-June when the vice-chancellor, Papen, gave an address at Marburg University in which he criticized the national revolution. Having finally woken up to Hitler’s totalizing ambitions, Papen was attempting to rally the conservatives and all those who resented or feared the hegemony of the NSDAP. Dodd excitedly reported that after the speech Papen was ‘mobbed’. Although this belated turnaround was not connected with the simmering conflict that ranged the army and the state against the SA, Hitler and his inner circle resolved to settle matters with both the SA and the vice-chancellor at the same time.⁴

On 30 June 1934, the police and SS acting under the personal direction of Hitler, Göring and Himmler moved against the SA. Ernst Röhm was arrested on the pretext that he was planning a coup and shot a few days later in a Munich prison cell. Dozens of other SA leaders were executed or imprisoned. Hitler’s erstwhile rival for leadership of the Nazi movement, Gregor Strasser, was assassinated. In Berlin, SS men gunned down Kurt von Schleicher (and his wife) at his home and killed Edgar Junge, who had written Papen’s Marburg speech. Other conservatives, including several Catholic activists, against whom the Nazis harboured a grudge were murdered. Subsequently Hitler addressed the Reichstag and in a stunning gesture took personal responsibility for the massacre that became known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.⁵

International opinion was shocked as much by the admission as by the bloodletting. To Phipps the events confirmed his conviction that Hitler was ‘unbalanced’ and surrounded by dangerous men; it was a ‘mad regime’. All the same, he shrewdly divined that Hitler must have felt confident to ‘dismiss some of President von Hindenburg’s old comrades in arms in this offhand fashion’. Dodd wondered if he ought to resign the ambassadorship. He was convinced he could never achieve anything while Hitler, Göring and Goebbels were in power and refused to attend the Reichstag session to hear Hitler justify himself. ‘I have a sense of horror when I look at the man,’ he told Phipps. Like many Jewish onlookers, Joseph Roth predicted some months later that ‘Hitler won’t last more than another year and a half.’⁶

As it turned out, the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ strengthened Hitler and helped to entrench the police state. The army now felt indebted to Hitler for neutralizing the threat posed by the SA, while the public was relieved that a source of disorder had been eliminated. In preparation for the strike Göring placed Heinrich Himmler in charge of the Prussian political police, effectively giving him control of the Gestapo throughout Germany. Himmler, who was just thirty-four years old, was the son of a teacher who became a tutor to the Bavarian royal family. His family were strict Catholics and utterly respectable. He was just old enough to serve in the army in the First World War, but did not see action. While studying agronomy at university after the war he began to move in right-wing, völkisch circles and from notes he kept it is possible to see how (like Goebbels) he adopted an anti-Semitic world view from a purely cerebral standpoint. He was involved in the 1923 putsch as a member of a right-wing militia allied to the Nazis and joined the NSDAP soon afterwards. Initially he worked for Gregor Strasser, but in 1926 Hitler chose him to run the party’s national propaganda operation. For two years he was deputy head of Hitler’s paramilitary escort, the Schutzstaffel or SS, a role he combined with running a poultry farm. In January 1929 he was promoted to Reichsführer of the SS, at which time it was still a small and relatively unimportant organization with about 1,400 members. But Himmler was a workaholic with a genius for organization and a vision of what he wanted the SS to become. Within three years he had built it into an elite formation of 10,000 men selected for their ideological commitment to National Socialism and conformity to his ideal of ‘Aryan’ manhood. He was also a skilled political operator and soon withdrew the SS from subservience to the SA, establishing it as a virtually autonomous fiefdom. By the time of the showdown with the SA, he had expanded the SS to 100,000 and it was rewarded with independent status. Thanks to the roles he now held in the police, Himmler could set about making the SS the core of the Nazi police state. Himmler appointed Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo in Bavaria, to run the Berlin head office. Since Heydrich was also head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security service of the SS, this represented a decisive aggregation of power for both the SS and the SD.⁷

Luck also came to Hitler’s aid. A month after the purge, President Hindenburg died. Without waiting for any constitutional sanction Hitler combined the chancellorship with the functions of head of state. All members of the army were immediately required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Führer. Hitler’s assumption of the presidency was later given popular sanction by a plebiscite and retrospectively authorized by a law passed through the Reichstag. As Klemperer noted, it was a ‘complete coup d’état’. Phipps reported to London, that ‘no change of regime here must be expected for some time to come’. The people might face a hard winter, but the Nazis were firmly in the saddle. Moreover, ‘large numbers of Germans regard Hitler with a species of mystic adoration’. Dodd could only take comfort from expressions of discontent amongst ‘the more thinking classes’. Klemperer now reflected miserably, ‘there is no end in sight’.⁸

Until then German Jews could see how deeply the regime was preoccupied with its own entrails. They noted a dramatic falling off of anti-Jewish activity, at least at the summit of the state and the party. Between December 1933 and mid-1935, there was no major legislation on Jewish matters. Whereas in 1933 Berlin Jews had to cope with eighty ordinances, the number fell to fifteen in 1934 and just two for the first six months of 1935. Hitler made hardly any public reference to the ‘Jewish question’ over this period. Goebbels occasionally related the parlous state of Germany’s exports to the Jewish boycott, but he did not engineer a sustained campaign in the Nazi-controlled media. Only Streicher’s Der Stürmer maintained a barrage of anti-Semitic propaganda. The issue on 1 May 1934 was particularly striking because it disseminated the medieval myth that Jews were responsible for the murder of Christian children to use their blood for religious rituals. However, while Streicher’s incitement led to spikes in local violence there was no concerted, nationwide action. The ‘cold pogrom’ against the Jews was sustained by party members on their own initiative and to their bewilderment these activists often found themselves in conflict with the state authorities.⁹

Historians have consequently treated 1934 as a ‘relatively quiet year’ or a ‘brief respite’ in which Jews had the ‘illusion’ of stability. The reality was more complex, as Jews at the time appreciated. There was no uniform policy emanating from Berlin and no uniform picture across the country. Individual, unauthorized actions continued, although they frequently incurred censure from central government. The Jews seized on these inconsistencies and used them to their advantage. Meanwhile, Nazi activists were perplexed and increasingly resentful. The rest of the population, when they took notice, were bemused at the sometimes ludicrous contradictions. This shambles was the matrix for subsequent policy initiatives. Having allowed hurriedly conceived, partially thought-out policies to create a situation that satisfied no one and caused much restlessness amongst loyal party comrades, the Nazi leadership had to figure a way out. This was becoming a familiar pattern.¹⁰

Hjalmar Schacht and Judenpolitik

At the start of the year, the Reich Interior Ministry issued a decree forbidding unauthorized interference with Jewish businesses. The directive gave teeth to previous instructions intended to prevent boycotting or blacklisting. However, Kurt Schmitt was hardly a forceful personality and was increasingly enfeebled by ill health. When Schacht replaced him as acting minister for economics in July 1934, the protection of the economy gained a more powerful champion. Not that Schacht needed to work hard on Hitler; the foreign currency crisis was ample cause to demand that the party rein in the elements continuing to hinder Jews from going about their business. In the latter half of the year he again called on Frick and Göring, who controlled the police, to ensure that Jews were not molested.¹¹

Schacht’s appointment gave a fillip to the Jews who regarded him as their most plausible defender in the government. He had been a founder member of the Deutsche Demokratische Partei in 1919 alongside the Jewish politicians Walther Rathenau and Hugo Preuss, Albert Einstein, and the publisher Rudolf Mosse. During the 1920s, the DDP attracted over half of the Jewish vote in Reichstag elections. Even though Schacht had travelled to the right over the intervening years it was hard to believe that he could have abnegated his principles entirely. Unfortunately, the DDP was always in thrall to nationalism and its intellectual inspiration came from Friedrich Naumann, who championed a form of ‘völkisch liberalism’. By 1930, the party was ideologically hollowed out. To survive as an electoral force it allied with the anti-Semitic Jungdeutsche Orden to form the Deutsche Staatspartei. This new party avoided any expression of support for the Jews. Thus by the time he entered Hitler’s coalition, Schacht was a liberal and a democrat in memory only. He never fought for Jewish rights as such and never sought to frustrate Nazi policy on the Jews. He did nothing to stop the dismissals of Jews from their jobs in April 1933 and unhesitatingly implemented the Aryan paragraph in the Reichsbank. Nor was he averse to the transfer of Jewish enterprises into Aryan hands; he just wanted it to be conducted in a businesslike fashion. Even so, his insistence on the priority of economic goals, his sensitivity to Anglo-Saxon opinion, and his aversion to disorder, acted as a significant counterweight to the ideologues within the regime.¹²

External pressure or the perception of external pressure continued to ameliorate anti-Jewish policy, too. When James McDonald visited the Foreign Office in February 1934 to discuss ways to alleviate the Jewish refugee crisis, Hans Dieckhoff, an official specializing in US and British affairs, went out of his way to reassure him that ‘there would be a general moderation’. Dieckhoff ‘cited the announcement by interior minister William Frick to the heads of the states that they should not go beyond the letter of the law in anti-Jewish discrimination’. Neurath, whom he saw later, said he wanted to liquidate the refugee problem partly to avoid giving fodder to anti-German propagandists. McDonald ultimately emerged from these meetings empty handed and gloomier about the prospect for German Jews, but his interlocutors on the Wilhelmstrasse understood their encounters very differently. Significantly, so did some German Jews. Otto Hirsch, a member of the Reichsvertretung executive, told McDonald, that Hitler was trapped ‘by the beasts in his party’. If foreign pressure was maintained on the regime, the economic and military leadership would convey the appropriate message to him.¹³

Ambassador Dodd continued to signal his disdain for the regime’s anti-Jewish policies. In February his son and daughter organized an embassy ball and invited the Jewish-born violinist Fritz Kreisler to entertain the guests. Kreisler would not otherwise have been allowed to perform in front of a non-Jewish audience. He was invited back twice during 1934. Dodd also had the satisfaction of explaining to irate German diplomats the reasons behind the unceasing anti-Nazi protests and the boycott of German goods in the US. In March, the American Jewish Congress and the American Federation of Labor organized a mock trial of Nazi Germany. The witnesses for the prosecution included the former governor of New York Al Smith and mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, whose mother was Jewish. Dodd was summoned to Neurath’s office to hear an official complaint against the planned spectacle. The foreign minister demanded that he cable Washington to call the event off. Instead, the ambassador gave Neurath a lecture about freedom of expression and added that ‘the Jewish policy of Hitler would bring further trouble if not changed’. Shortly after this encounter, Dodd had an audience with Hitler himself. According to his diary, he cautioned the Führer about the effect of Nazi propaganda in the United States. When Hitler claimed that it was ‘all Jewish lies’ Dodd bluntly explained the state of play in New York. Hitler responded angrily that ‘if the agitation continued in the outside world he would make the end of all the Jews in Germany’.¹⁴

Dodd again met with American Jewish leaders while he was home on leave during the spring. When they impressed on him their determination to maintain the boycott of Germany he attempted to deflate their protests by claiming that the condition of Jews in Germany was somewhat eased; but he confirmed that the Nazi leadership did make a link between foreign opinion and the fate of German Jews. He left it up to them to decide how to proceed. Back in Berlin, though, he pointedly informed Dieckhoff of this latest round of talks with Jewish representatives and at his next meeting with Neurath, Dodd claimed credit for cooling Jewish tempers. Neurath reciprocated by confiding that he, Schacht and Schmitt had together prevailed upon Goebbels to hold anti-Jewish propaganda in check. When the drain on Germany’s gold reserves forced the government to announce a moratorium on debt repayments, Dodd did not hesitate to attribute the country’s abysmal trade performance to its standing in overseas opinion. He warned Göring himself that as long as the government persecuted the Jews it would be harder to remove barriers to German exports.¹⁵

Dodd was not taken in by blandishments from Wilhelmstrasse officials that the persecution was being fundamentally modified. He repeatedly noted the discrepancy between the assurances he was given and practical actions. Nevertheless, external considerations in combination with internal dilemmas did cause the German elite to think twice. In May, Phipps told London that ‘The party leaders realise that in this [relations between the army and the SA] and in other questions of foreign policy … and the Jews, the interests of the country and those of the Party tend to conflict.’ There was friction over ‘the policy to be adopted towards the Jews in view of the foreign trade slump’. Two months later, Raymond Geist informed the State Department that ‘it is the feeling here that the German government wishes for the time being to maintain an armistice with respect to the Jewish question owing to the pressure of other problems’.¹⁶

So, even if Nazi leaders reacted to outside pressure for the wrong reasons it did lead to some relief for Germany’s Jews. The sensitivity to foreign opinion and considerations of overseas trade help to explain the regime’s sporadic efforts to curb anti-Jewish boycotts and prevent unauthorized acts of discrimination. These exhortations were a psychological boost to German Jews and, more importantly, gave them tools to work with locally or when dealing with central agencies. The result was a strange situation in which some Jews suffered persecution while others prospered. Conversely, Nazi activists who wanted to carry out party policy found themselves hampered by the police and the Gestapo.

Rechtsschutz – Jewish self-defence

Having reeled in shock from successive blows over the previous year, the Jewish population rallied. The Centralverein adopted a policy of Rechtsschutz: using the law to defend the ability of Jews to earn a living. Through its network of branches, the CV collected evidence that official decrees were being violated and passed it on to the Reich Economics Ministry. East Prussia, under Gauleiter Erich Koch, was notorious in this respect. Hans Reichmann, based at the CV central office, replied to a plea from the East Prussia branch, ‘What you say about the contradiction between orders from government agencies and those from other functionaries who are not authorised to give them is correct. Ninety per cent of our current work is consumed with this problem.’ Reichmann redoubled his efforts to use every lever and loophole to secure the conditions in which Jews could make a living.¹⁷

The practice of Rechtsschutz, which as Reichmann indicated was always gruelling, became harder after Himmler assumed control of the Gestapo across Germany and stepped up its role in Jewish affairs. The Gestapo ordered the CV to cease monitoring and reporting anti-Jewish activity, but to confine itself to the collection of strictly economic data. In any case, the CV could not do much about legalized discrimination or invisible boycotts. When local authorities fell under Nazi control they routinely terminated business with Jewish suppliers of good and services. The Nazi women’s organization encouraged its members not to purchase from Jewish shops.¹⁸

Dauntless Jews acted on their own initiative. In Hamburg Max Eichholz successfully sued an SS man for calling him ‘a dirty Jew’. A decorated war veteran and a lawyer with a long record of public service, Eichholz also went to court to forestall the application of the Aryan paragraph to a civic association that he ran. Other efforts were more quixotic. Heinrich Herz, a plumber from Hamborn am Rhein, wrote to Hitler complaining that despite the numerous ordinances from the Ministry of the Interior he was losing customers due to a local boycott. ‘Just as you have battled for years to achieve your goals, Herr respected Reich Chancellor, so I would like to lead the battle of my coreligionists.’ Hertz got no reply and eventually Eichholz had to accept defeat.¹⁹

The CV took up the cases of Jews who were dismissed from their jobs. When there was proof that the law had been breached they went to the labour court and often succeeded in getting the victim reinstated. However, with each challenge, the courts set about closing the successfully exploited loophole. In March 1934, for example, a labour court ruled that if clients or customers did not want to interact with a Jewish employee, that constituted sufficient ‘economic’ grounds for dismissal. Nazi workers insisted that they were unable to operate alongside Jews, forcing employers to dismiss them. In a survey for the Paris office of the AJJDC, David Schweizer remarked that ‘Outwardly Berlin presented during my recent stay there a normal appearance.’ But on closer inspection, ‘while one can observe a Jewish department store crowded as usual with non-Jews and Jews alike, one can observe in the very next department store the total absence of a single Jewish employee’.²⁰

To cope with the mounting number of Jews thrown out of work, the RV labour exchange helped the Jewish unemployed to find jobs. Increasingly this meant encouraging Jewish enterprises to hire Jewish staff. A burgeoning Jewish economic sector emerged in which Jewish enterprises took on displaced Jewish workers to provide goods and services for an exclusively Jewish clientele. Vocational retraining grew ever more important to help the newly unemployed find a livelihood and also to compensate for the exclusion of Jews from state-run training establishments. Some were directed towards emigration, mainly to Palestine, but the CV and the RjF continued to treat emigration as a form of surrender.²¹

During 1934, the predominant view was that Jews could manage to live and even prosper in the main German cities. During a trip to the races in Hamburg, Sir Eric Phipps noticed ‘several prominent Jewish race-owners, such as Herr von Weinberg and Baron Oppenheim’ in the same enclosure as Nazi and government dignitaries. In Breslau, the Jewish community set about expensive renovations on the New Synagogue and planned to build a second old people’s home. The communities had ‘substantial resources’ at their disposal to care for those in need.²²

The emigration panic subsided so noticeably that the governmental partners and Jewish sponsors of the High Commission for Refugees began to wonder if it had any point. Wealthy British Jews who ran the Central British Fund for German Jewry debated whether an appeal would be necessary for the following year. Thousands of dispirited Jews were returning to the Reich and James McDonald was forced to admit that ‘even within Germany the Jews were better off than as refugees’. He now began to contemplate winding up the High Commission unless it got stronger backing from the League. However, at a meeting in July the League’s Secretary-General, Joseph Avenol, asserted that sympathy for the Jews had ‘substantially died down during the past twelve months’. Conversely, anti-Semitism had grown and it would be a mistake to seek more powers for the High Commission in case this aggravated things. When the governing body met in London in November, the British-appointed chairman Sir Robert Cecil declared that ‘We are accomplishing nothing.’ There was tepid consent that it should be dismantled.²³

McDonald did not share the confidence of Jewish leaders in London and New York. He observed at the start of the year that in small towns ‘the situation was again becoming critical’. He complained to James Rosenberg, ‘How, under these circumstances, Jews of intelligence dare plan as though the worst is over, is beyond my comprehension.’ Rural and small-town Jews were not emigrating: they were moving to the cities where they might become a burden on the Gemeinde but would not fall within the purview of the international Jewish aid agencies.²⁴

McDonald heard about the plight of rural Jews from Wilfred Israel, a German Jew living in England whose family owned one of the largest department stores in Berlin. ‘Israel sees signs of group evacuation by Jews from the smaller towns. This is a new development.’ The British consul general in Frankfurt, Robert Smallbones, made the same point to Phipps. ‘In some of the larger towns … even the SA and SS men in uniform do not hesitate to visit Jewish shops. Generally, it can be said that the smaller the town the greater the handicap under which they are. The village Jew is therefore in a particularly difficult position.’ Raymond Geist sent a similar message to Washington. The situation of the Jews in Germany, he wrote, ‘appears for the present in the larger cities to be fairly satisfactory. The business of Jewish merchants in Berlin and other large centres of Germany is in a satisfactory position. In the smaller towns, however, the anti-Jewish boycott is going on strongly.’ Franconia and Hesse were particularly bad. When Ambassador Dodd made a road trip through southern Germany in the autumn, he saw evidence of an unremitting ‘cold pogrom’. ‘All through this region, we have seen signs as we drove into the towns which read: “Keine Juden erwünscht” … “Juden sind unser Unglück”.’²⁵

Reports from regional officials and police offices to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin remarked on the returning self-confidence within large Jewish urban communities. Police offices recorded that significant numbers of Jews were re-entering the Reich. In October, the Gestapo for the Berlin region observed the reflux of Polish Jews who found more opportunities for work there than abroad. The Nazi chief of police in Berlin, Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, treated the strengthening of Jewish associational life as an affront and could not fathom why it was tolerated. ‘The aggressive behaviour of the Jews that has been in evidence for some time is becoming ever more pronounced.’ According to him, ‘very large segments of the population do not comprehend why the authorities are exercising such restraint in dealing with this aggressive behaviour’.²⁶

Letters addressed to Hitler reflected the bemusement of Nazi supporters. They also show how individuals cynically used anti-Semitic feeling and policy as instruments to obtain personal benefit. Richard Fichte, from Chemnitz, complained that bulk buyers of glassware got better deals from suppliers than small businessmen like him. This benefited the Jewish-owned department stores. ‘From this it seems that in the Third Reich Jews can still buy considerably more cheaply than businessmen of German blood.’ Jakob Falkenstein, a leader of the farmers’ association, wrote to the Führer to protest that Jewish cattle dealers in his hometown of Huttenfeld in Hesse still dominated the livestock market where ‘even the Storm Battalion Reserve does business with Jews’. Elizabeth Barth, a widow from Chemnitz, was indignant that she got a smaller pension than a Jewish woman who had married her ex-husband. ‘It is presumably not in accordance with the policy of National Socialism’, she railed, ‘that in our sacred Third Reich a Jewish woman is given such an advantage over an honest German woman.’²⁷

As the year went on, a crescendo of reports arrived at the Gestapo Head Office in Berlin (Gestapa) testifying to irritation amongst the rank and file of the party and, allegedly, amongst the populace when the practice of inflicting misery on Jews ran up against the protective mantle of the authorities. The Jewish affairs department of the Gestapo headquarters, Referat Judentum II 1 B 2, reported that ‘Broad segments of the population are bewildered by these decrees by state and local bodies. When they learn of such ordinances, their trust in the idea of National Socialism is shaken. The Gestapa has thus called the attention of the competent offices in the national government and the Party to these cases and requested that these deficiencies be eliminated.’ There was a danger of ill-feeling and violence if nothing was done to curb the ‘self-assurance, aplomb, and purposeful activity of the Jews’. This would have the effect of ‘placing the police in the unpleasant position of having to protect the Jews and their property against the incensed population’.²⁸

The Stapostelle (Gestapo office) in the Kassel government district was similarly perplexed at how to deal with a spasm of anti-Jewish propaganda incited by NSDAP branches, which led to vandalism and the hanging of signs across the streets. ‘To date, the Stapostelle has always taken action against such signs placed at the entrance to localities in order to prevent provision of potential material for use by foreign propaganda.’ But now it found itself in conflict with the party locally, a predicament that was complicated by the inconsistencies between one area and another. ‘The authority of the state is compromised and damaged if something is to be prohibited here that is permitted and tolerated in neighbouring districts.’ The police appealed for a steer from central government. ‘A clear and unmistakable statement by the competent central authorities on this question would appear to be necessary.’²⁹

In some places friction between the party and the state drifted into absurdity. On the night of 28–29 October 1934, the synagogue in Schöllkrippen, Lower Franconia, was plundered and silver items stolen along with Torah scrolls. The police investigated and quickly arrested two SA men. Although the Brownshirts were later released, there was much anger among the local division of the SA. In Hanau, a town in the Kassel government district, police stopped SA men from singing anti-Jewish songs in front of Jewish enterprises. Similar incidents occurred all over Germany as Christmas approached and ‘storm detachments’ resorted to the customary harassment of Jewish-owned shops. In Braunschweig, capital of the free state of Brunswick, a series of inflammatory speeches by Streicher led to confrontations between party members and the police. The Interior Ministry of Brunswick assured Berlin that it would implement the relevant ordinances, but continued that ‘it cannot be the will of the Reich government for these to be enforced in a form where a contingent of uniformed police resort to force against an angered German crowd whose point of view can be based on the fundamental principles of the NSDAP.’ Just before Christmas, a military police squad in Frankfurt-am-Main came dangerously close to an armed fracas with members of the Nazi traders’ association (Nationalsozialistische Handwerks-, Handels-, und Gewerbe-Organisation, NS-HAGO), SA and SS personnel, who were blocking access to Jewish businesses. The military police protested that ‘the attitude of the Gau leadership [in permitting the boycott action] remains incomprehensible’.³⁰

The Nazi authorities were keenly aware of the discrepancy between the city and the countryside. The Gestapo office for the Cologne government district informed Berlin that ‘In the small towns, the boycott against Jewish shops is more effective than in metropolitan areas, because it is easier to keep tabs on who is shopping at a Jew’s store.’ Yet even here the picture varied. Victor Klemperer impishly charted the ways that people evaded supervision in their own community. ‘In Falkenstein one is not allowed to buy from the “Jew”. And so people in Falkenstein travel to the Jew in Auerbach. And the Auerbachers buy from the Falkenstein Jew.’ It was a frequent refrain by police officials that the rural population, especially in Catholic areas, seemed impervious to the National Socialist message. The Gestapo office in the Koblenz government district regretted that ‘the rural population shows less understanding of the Jewish Question and continues, now as before, to have very active business dealings with Jewish traders. This holds true even for some members of the Party.’ Raymond Geist relayed intelligence reaching him that ‘the Catholic population in many of these places [in Franconia and Hesse] is openly making purchases from Jewish stores in a veritable spirit of bravado’.³¹

Thus, after two years the impact of National Socialist rule on the Jews was patchy, and responses to anti-Jewish measures varied across Germany as well as between town and country. According to a recent re-evaluation by the historians Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman, at the start of 1935 German Jews actually had ‘good reason’ to believe ‘that they were winning the fight and helping to eradicate disturbances from the streets’. Nazi officials sounded increasingly peevish as they confronted this resilience. The state minister for Hesse wrote in his summation of political affairs, ‘Jews who now believe that they have suffered economic damage report this directly to the Reich Economics Ministry in Berlin. In any event, unfortunately once again, the Jew is rather optimistic about his future in Germany.’ For Nazi true believers, the sight of Jews going about their daily business was a form of aggression. Worse still, Jewish protests were putting the authorities in the position of appearing to be ‘Jew-friendly’.³²

Throughout autumn 1934 and into 1935 the regime continued to act with diffidence. In addition to concern about the economy, the government was on its best behaviour in advance of a crucial vote in the Saarland. Since 1919, the Saar basin had been administered by France under a mandate from the League of Nations. The mandate was due to expire in January 1935 and the population given the opportunity to vote on whether to return to German sovereignty, join France, or remain under the League. The Saar was a mainly Catholic region with a large concentration of industry and mines. Catholics and workers were the two constituencies that had proven least susceptible to National Socialism before 1933 and which continued to manifest signs of resistance. Anti-fascists hoped that it would be possible to mobilize them against returning to Germany and converted the vote into a referendum on Nazism. This placed the Jewish leadership of the Centralverein in a quandary. League of Nations stewardship offered some protection for Jews in the Saar and there were rumours that the CV was warning of a Jewish exodus if the Third Reich took control. Fearful of appearing disloyal to Germany the CV felt it had to reject these charges, but it could hardly advocate a Yes vote. Finally, on a nearly immaculate turnout, over 90 per cent of Saarlanders who voted opted for union with the Third Reich. Victor Klemperer was staggered by the scale of both the turnout and the majority. Nazi celebrations plunged him into gloom: ‘Today the man seems ineradicable again.’³³

Hitler followed up the Saarland triumph by ordering the reintroduction of conscription. Expansion of the army and rearmament were a direct violation of the Versailles Treaty. Britain and France protested and held talks with Italy, supposedly to signify their determination to contain German ambitions. In reality the response was feeble. A few months later, Germany signed a naval agreement with Britain that allowed the German surface fleet to be enlarged. These accomplishments were wildly popular not just with the German armed forces but with the entire population. Klemperer lamented that Hitler’s foreign policy success ‘consolidates his position very greatly’.³⁴

Other German Jews grieved that they were not able to share them. Following the reintroduction of military service on 16 March, the Deutscher Vortrupp (German Vanguard), a right-wing association of German Jews led by Hans-Joachim Schoeps, publicized the willingness of its members to serve in the army. Their patriotism was allowed to froth until further provisions, added on 21 May, explicitly excluded non-Aryans. For mixed-race Jews like Freddy Solmitz, in Hamburg, this was another blow to his identity. In her journal his non-Jewish wife spelled out their distress: ‘The terrible thing for us is that they want to take away our claim to be part of the German volk and Fatherland and we have no ideal to put in that place.’³⁵

The inconsistencies of Judenpolitik

With the regime riding high on a wave of foreign policy triumphs, those within the Nazi leadership who wanted to pursue tougher measures against the Jews were given a freer hand. In April 1934, Himmler had been appointed head of the Gestapo in Prussia, effectively completing the unification of the political police under the mantle of the SS. He brought Heydrich, head of the SD, with him. It was a fundamental principle of the SS that the Jews were enemies of the German people. But Heydrich and the intellectuals like Werner Best whom he recruited to the SD translated this enmity into practical policy, steering the Gestapo towards the enforcement of racial doctrine and tackling the Jewish threat.³⁶

The Gestapo Head Office in Berlin began producing regular reports on the Jewish community. The first stated, ‘in keeping with his inner attitude, [the Jew] will always be an enemy of the National Socialist state. There can be no reconciliation between his liberalistic international world view and the conceptual world of National Socialism.’ The political police devoted more resources to monitoring Jewish organizations, compiling card-catalogues of Jewish institutions and personalities. Gestapo and police officials were encouraged to spy on Jewish activity in their districts.³⁷

These reports show the emergence of a Gestapo line on how best to deal with the Jewish enemy. In the short term, the influence of Jews on society and the economy should be drastically curbed; in the long term, the Jews should be encouraged to leave Germany completely. Surveying the conflict between Zionists and German nationalists in the Reichsvertretung, the Gestapa noted that ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration.’ It concluded with satisfaction that the Zionists had gained the upper hand over the CV and Jewish veterans so that ‘In place of a rushed and poorly prepared emigration in 1933, we now have well-regulated emigration whose sole destination is Palestine.’³⁸

The lines between the state political police and the party’s political police became increasingly blurred. An early SD memorandum noted the division between religious Jews, assimilationists (or national-German Jews) and Zionists, and warned that if national-German Jews succeeded in fortifying the resolve of German Jews to hang on in Germany, ‘We will perhaps have to recognise the Jews as a minority, and then they will be on our hands for the rest of eternity.’ To avoid this the SD argued that it was necessary to make Jewish life in Germany so uncomfortable that the Jews would want to leave. The authorities had to weaken the national-German Jews and eliminate sources of support and sympathy for them in the surrounding population. Conversely, the SD favoured the Zionists and promoted their activity.³⁹

However, until 1935 the SD had only a minor interest in Jewish affairs and no specific department dealing with the Jews. Its main activity was collecting intelligence on political opponents at home and abroad. With Heydrich elevated to control over the Gestapo, he saw an opportunity for the SD to expand its influence by offering intelligence and guidance on Jewish affairs. He recruited Edler von Mildenstein to build up a Jewish department and develop a distinctive set of policies for combating the Jewish enemy. Mildenstein, a trained engineer and talented writer, had visited Palestine and written articles for the SS magazine, Das Schwarze Korps, about the Jewish settlements there. He believed that Jews were aliens in Germany but saw little point in just suppressing them. Instead, they should be assisted to emigrate to their own homeland. To this end, the agencies of the party and the state should work with Zionist organizations rather than frustrate their operation.⁴⁰

In the course of staffing his new bureau Mildenstein recruited Adolf Eichmann, a twenty-nine-year-old SS corporal who had recently transferred from a clerical job in an SS office at Dachau concentration camp to the SD Head Office in Berlin. Eichmann was German-born although he grew up in Austria. He joined the Austrian NSDAP and SS in April 1932, but when the party was suppressed two years later he crossed into Germany. He had applied to the Sicherheitsdienst, thinking it would offer exciting work, only to find it was an under-resourced organization collecting information on enemies of the party and the Reich. Mildenstein rescued him from a tedious job and taught him about Jewish history and Zionism. After Mildenstein departed, Eichmann became the SD’s specialist on Jewish emigration and the Zionist movement.⁴¹

To Heydrich and his experts on Jewish affairs, the Judenreferenten, it was obvious that Jews would not emigrate if they felt they had a future in Germany, if life was comfortable, and as long as Jewish organizations promoted the belief that Jews were Germans. SD surveillance revealed the need for stricter measures to exclude the Jews from the economy, undermine the basis for Jewish life, and make them feel as if they had no place in the country. With the encouragement of the SD, the Gestapo began to place obstacles in the way of the CV’s continued resistance to anti-Jewish measures aimed at driving Jews out of the economy.⁴²

With suspicious uniformity, reports by Gestapo officers on the state of public opinion now emphasized discontent at the sight of Jewish cultural life flourishing, Jews prospering, and émigrés returning. Police and state officials began to clamour for legislation to regulate relations between Jews and Aryans, to put the Jews in their place. Gestapo agents in the Berlin district decried Jewish behaviour: ‘They cannot and do not want to comprehend that they are only aliens in the Third Reich. Their intent is to steal slowly their way back once again into the Volksgemeinschaft.’ It was ‘simply incomprehensible to the people, who are thinking ever more along racial lines, that the state does not act to put an end to such actions by the introduction of draconian legislation’. The district governor of Koblenz noted that buoyant sales in Jewish shops suggested a ‘re-conquest of the economy’. Renewed picketing was causing clashes between the party and the police but ‘These could be avoided if there were a uniform approach in the Jewish Question by the movement and the state authorities.’ The county commissioner in the small town of Fritzlar-Humberg in Kassel stated that it ‘would be desirable if basic agreements could be worked out between the central government and the Party over how the Jewish Question should be dealt with’.⁴³

The stress created by these contradictions became ever more apparent. On 11 April 1935, the deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, sent a circular to party members prohibiting ‘individual actions’ while at the same time reiterating a 1934 ban on party members having contact with Jews. Foreign correspondents could not help noticing the incongruities. During an Easter break with his wife at Bad Saarow, William Shirer saw the spa town to the south-east of Berlin ‘mainly filled with Jews and we are a little surprised to find so many of them still prospering and apparently unafraid’. Shirer thought they were ‘unduly optimistic’. Out in the countryside, things looked different. When Virginia Woolf drove through Germany in the course of a summer holiday with her Jewish husband, Leonard, she was struck by the sight of ‘Banners stretched across the street’ proclaiming ‘“The Jew is our enemy” “there is no place for the Jews”’. In southern Germany she found the atmosphere more relaxed but even here ‘every village had a painted sign, “Die Juden sind hier unwunscht”’ [Jews not wanted here]. Diplomats who followed these erratic developments debated the wisdom of further intervention. When Dodd broached the matter to Phipps during one of their walks in the Tiergarten, his colleague advised him ‘it can do no good … Hitler is fanatical on the subject.’⁴⁴

Tension was ratcheted up by a campaign against Rassenschande, race defilement, in Der Stürmer. Streicher’s lurid tales of swarthy Jewish men seducing innocent Aryan maidens triggered a blast of vitriol and violence against Jews and their non-Jewish partners. In December 1934 a special issue on the alleged abuse of Christian children set off incidents across Germany. In Bad Neustadt, for example, the gendarmerie reported that the home of a Jewish cattle dealer was daubed with ‘Pig Jew defiler of young girls’. Streicher outdid himself with a special issue in April 1935 devoted to ‘ritual murder’, a toxic mixture of child abuse, torture and religion. The tempo of incidents accelerated and for the first time the police involved themselves in regulating sexual relations. The Gestapo in Berlin started collecting evidence on Aryan women who ‘give themselves to Jews and have intimate relations with them’. The absence of any legal basis for such intrusions was reflected in the tortured prose of one police report: ‘To the extent that there was a sufficient legal basis for action, the Jews involved were taken into protective custody.’ Gestapo officers in Königsberg registered the paradoxical situation in which action was taken without either legal sanction or public understanding of the issue. ‘In East Prussia the number of cases where Jews sexually abused Aryan girls is also on the rise, though it must be said that the girls surrender to this without much thought.’⁴⁵

The police were mendaciously generating a scandal that had not previously existed, creating the need for legal action to address it. After picking up seventy-two persons in one month, the Berlin force concluded, ‘Despite enlightenment in the National Socialist press, the race-defiling activity of the Jews has assumed proportions that necessitate giving greater attention to their activity.’ The authorities fostered the impression of broad public support, although their own evidence suggests that the publicity surrounding the apprehension of Jews for alleged race defilement was as much a part of educating the Volksgemeinschaft about racialized boundaries as it was a response to public abhorrence of race-mixing. In Breslau, in July 1935, twenty Jews and non-Jews were sent to concentration camps for alleged Rassenschande. The action was accompanied by cheers from thousands of citizens although only ‘after race defilement of Aryan women by Jews has finally been presented to the public in a very clear and unambiguous light’. The effect was contagious. By early September the police office in Minden was reporting that ‘large segments of the population have been seized by a certain kind of race-defilement psychosis. They seem to sense race-defilement everywhere …’⁴⁶

Boycotts and violence also surged. In one report after another, local and police officials posed as reluctant agents of law and order struggling to enforce unpopular edicts that ran counter to their National Socialist consciences and the people’s rage. The district governor of Wiesbaden boasted that he had kept ‘defensive measures’ by the people within the ‘confines of the law’. In Berlin the police blamed the ‘provocative behaviour of the Jews’ for ‘a strong anti-semitic wave’. Apparently, Berliners now regarded Jews as ‘fair game in every respect’ and there had been many ‘outrageous events’ leading to awkward clashes between demonstrators and police. The positive side of this was that the ‘population is clearly having its eyes opened ever wider’. Officials in Münster did not disguise the self-fulfilling nature of these practices. ‘As in most places in the Reich, locally here in the district in recent weeks the Jewish Problem has once again become a focus of general concern. Everywhere the propaganda against Jews and most especially against business persons, has been intensified.’⁴⁷

The calculated nature of the disturbances was transparent to outside observers. Samuel Honaker, the US consul-general in Stuttgart, reported that the riots and boycotting in his city had ‘come as no surprise … The way was carefully prepared by a series of developments which tended to direct the attention of the people towards the alleged harmful influence of the Jews. Newspaper propaganda against the Jews grew in volume and in variety, gradually undermining the resistance of various elements of the population.’ Honaker discerned that the young ‘seem especially to have been infected by the anti-semitic agitation’. Some people disapproved, but ‘there is much doubt as to whether the attitude of this element will prevail in the long run and as to whether the situation may not develop along dangerous lines’.⁴⁸

In rural areas incidents of physical abuse and vandalism multiplied. The county commissioner in Hünfeld, a small agricultural town in Hesse, explained that ‘the perpetrators think that they are protected from any sanctions under the law’. In Wiesbaden, parents demanded the removal of the remaining Jewish teachers and refused to let their children be taught by them. During the hot summer weeks when people repaired to the public swimming baths, Hitler Youth chased Jews out of any facilities from which they were not already banned. Yet none of this was legal. The contradictions of policy led to ever more insistent demands for a resolution of the gulf between activism and what the law permitted. The Cologne Gestapo complained that ‘The events of the past two months have shown that in future, it is necessary to have absolutely clear instructions from the central authorities regarding what is permissible in the framework of anti-Jewish propaganda and what is not permitted.’ If nothing was done, the Cologne political police warned, the authority of the state would be eroded.⁴⁹

The anti-Semitic wave culminated in a week of disturbances along the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin on 22–28 July 1935. Jewish shops and ice-cream vendors were attacked, while SA and SS men in civilian clothes manhandled passers-by. When police intervened they were barracked by mobs shouting ‘Jew lackeys’ until NSDAP and SA officials were called in to quell the uproar. Writing in America in 1940, Martin Gumpert recaptured the events over those sultry, terrifying days. He had been director of a dermatological hospital until he was dismissed in 1933, but stayed on because he thought of himself as totally German. That is, until he witnessed the Kurfürstendamm rampage. ‘I saw a man with a golden Nazi Party badge kicking an old Jewish woman. An old man was struck down and hauled away. A young man with a pince-nez on his nose ran panic-stricken across the street, a howling mob in pursuit.’ The reaction of onlookers was sobering. ‘A much larger crowd stood on the sidewalks and watched. They didn’t say a word. The expression on their faces alternated between curious amusement and revulsion.’ There was worse. ‘The most appalling sight was the police … [they] sat expressionless in their cars and did nothing when someone called for help or collapsed onto the pavement.’ The next day, Gumpert decided he could not allow his daughter to grow up in ‘this lunatic atmosphere’ and resolved to leave Germany.⁵⁰

Jews detected the changed mood. Protests against the ‘ritual murder’ issue of Der Stürmer were brushed aside. Instead, the graphic front page was displayed in the streets in the special cabinets for wall newspapers. Victor Klemperer observed anti-Jewish slogans appearing all over town. A few weeks later he was finally dismissed from his job. ‘The Jew-baiting and the pogrom atmosphere grow day by day,’ he wrote. By August the level of incitement had reached such a pitch that ‘we expect to be beaten to death at any moment’. More young people were participating in the outrages, often in organized groups of Hitler Youth wearing their uniforms. In Bad Kissingen, a spa town in northern Bavaria, James McDonald was shocked to see children as young as nine attacking Jews. Jewish families in the town were afraid to go out at night and shopkeepers would not serve them. The police were increasingly passive or held back. When perpetrators were apprehended and put on trial, they received derisory punishments.⁵¹

It was also evident that the state’s attitude was shifting. Since the early months of the regime, NSDAP branches and some marriage registrars had expressed concern about the legal obligation to perform ceremonies uniting Jews with non-Jews. However, no action had been taken. Then, in May 1935, the law that established the Wehrmacht forbade marriage between serving personnel and non-Aryans. At around the same time, the Interior Ministry issued advice to registrars not to carry out mixed marriages.⁵²

Zionists saw the pressure towards segregation as fulfilment of their assertion that Jews were a separate nation with no place in Germany, and that it was time for the Jews to leave. But the Centralverein continued to urge calm. ‘No one should be criticised for deciding to emigrate when conditions force them to do. But to argue that emigration and the liquidation of everything that pertains to German Jewry is the only solution would be out of line with the current situation.’ When hints emanating from the regime suggested that a dramatic move to curtail Jewish citizenship was in the offing the CV put on a brave face, suggesting that any legislation would only recognize the existing state of affairs. By August, the Reichsvertretung was almost pleading for a law: ‘Otherwise there will be no limit to the competition to be the most anti-semitic.’⁵³

The government eventually acted in mid-1935. Yet its decision was not the straightforward expression of a long-held desire by the Nazi elite (or the rank and file) to fulfil cherished ambitions derived from either a traditional obsession with Jews as sexual predators or the more recent pseudo-scientific dogmas about Jews polluting German blood. There were other, more short-term and pragmatic considerations. The Nazi leadership continued to face a difficult economic situation: unemployment remained high while the direction of funds into rearmament was beginning to cause inflation. The SA had lost a leader in July 1934 and had yet to find a role; its members were chafing at the bit for some kind of action. Above all, the inconsistencies of government policy and party doctrine were insupportable. The army required clarification of who was mixed race in order to work out how many conscripts it could expect and who would be excluded from military service. Heydrich and the SD were calling for a radical separation of Jews from Aryans. In a memorandum for the Reich Chancellery in July he argued that uncoordinated boycotts and scattered violence would not accomplish anything. It was imperative to pass laws making it clear that Jews stood outside the racial community and to police this divide. To drive home his point Heydrich attributed the recent unrest to ‘the previously inconsistent approach against Judaism’. The people demanded ‘more severe measures’. Finally, Schacht had been personally embarrassed by the chaos and was determined to end the free-for-all. In early August, the NSDAP in Arnswalde named a senior Reichsbank official seen shopping at a Jewish-owned establishment, accusing him of treason. Schacht was informed and ordered the removal of the placard listing his errant subordinate and its replacement by a declaration of his innocence. When the local party refused to comply, he petulantly shut down the Arnswalde branch of the state bank. Clearly, the muddle over Judenpolitik was becoming intolerable.⁵⁴

Race laws

On 20 August 1935, Schacht convened an inter-ministerial conference at the Reichsbank in an attempt to end the confusion and resolve the tension between the party and the state authorities. It was attended by Wilhelm Frick, the interior minister; Franz Gürtner, the justice minister, Bernhard von Bülow, the permanent secretary at the Foreign Ministry, and Adolph Wagner, the Bavarian interior minister and Gauleiter of Munich, who was also speaking for the Nazi Party. Schacht opened by reviewing the ‘serious damage to the German economy produced by the exaggeration and excesses of the anti-semitic propaganda’. He pointed out that the drift into lawlessness ‘was among other things putting the economic basis of rearmament at risk’. The DAF, which controlled the Nazi shop-floor cells (the NS-HAGO), and Streicher were particularly to blame for this state of affairs. The party programme had to be enacted, but legally. Frick concurred and cited a draft directive to the state governors to prevent disorder. Gürtner warned that no one would obey the law if some people thought it was possible to defy the state. Bülow adverted to the effect on Germany’s image abroad and cast a glance forward to the upcoming Olympics. However, while Wagner made obeisance to the need for law and order, he maintained that the turmoil stemmed from the divergence between party doctrine on the Jewish question and the way the state handled it. He insisted that the government had to take account of the ‘anti-semitic mood’ of the population and take steps urgently to eliminate Jews from the economy. The gathering ended with agreement that the situation could not be allowed to continue, but without any consensus on how this was to be achieved – other than a shared belief that there had to be a legal fix.⁵⁵

During August, Himmler, Hess, Frick, and even Streicher put their names to directives intended to curb the tumult. The excesses were finally brought under control, but there were ominous signs of what lay ahead when the Interior Ministry banned the conduct of mixed marriages. Raymond Geist warned James McDonald that ‘The Jews were being fed to the lions to distract attention from the economic situation.’ New laws were ‘imminent’ and they would serve ‘further to differentiate the Jews from the mass of Germans and to disadvantage them in new ways’. Ambassador Dodd feared segregation. The British consul in Frankfurt-am-Main wrote to Sir Samuel Hoare, the foreign secretary, ‘The Jew, both as a private individual and as a businessman, is at present an outlaw, subject to any arbitrary treatment the local Nazi Boss may decree, and often even to the whim of the individual SA man. There are indications, however, that this state of lawlessness will not last much longer.’ However, he concluded, ‘even if the campaign against the Jews is to be legally regularised, it will only be systematised rather than abated’.⁵⁶

Hitler now made a personal intervention. As so often, the trigger was an event that seemed to show the world Jewish conspiracy at work against Germany, though by any objective appraisal it was a minor diplomatic incident. On 26 July, anti-fascist dockworkers in New York boarded the liner Bremen as it was about to set sail and ripped down the swastika flag that flew alongside the revived imperial colours. To Hitler this was a Jewish-inspired assault on the National Socialist movement. He resolved to use the forthcoming party rally at Nuremberg on 9–15 September to retaliate and at the same moment settle the direction of Judenpolitik. He ordered a special session of the Reichstag to convene in Nuremberg on the last day of the rally, to pass a law making the swastika the national flag and prohibiting Jews from using it. During the rally, possibly as a result of lobbying by hardliners, Hitler and the Nazi leadership decided that they would also use the session to enact laws to forbid marriages between Jews and Aryans and create a legal barrier against race defilement.⁵⁷

The new race laws were drafted in a hurry by a civil servant from the Ministry of the Interior, Bernhard Lösener, who was summoned at short notice from Berlin. However, laws to separate Jews from Aryans had been under consideration for some time and there was no shortage of suggestions for marking or segregating Jews. The problem was that Hitler wanted to give the party faithful something spectacular but, at the same time, did not want to do anything that would inspire an international boycott of the forthcoming Winter Olympics in Garmisch Partenkirchen in February 1936 or the summer Olympics in Berlin the following August. He therefore requested options offering legislation of varying degrees of harshness that spread the racial net more or less capaciously.⁵⁸

Hitler opened the party rally with an attack on Jewish Bolshevism that clearly presaged some concrete blow. On the last day, 15 September 1935, he delivered. A new law would forbid marriages between Jews and Aryans; prohibit sexual relations between Jews and Aryans; and prevent Jews from employing young Aryan women as domestic servants. Jews would be banned from displaying the German national flag although they could fly ‘the Jewish colours’. Hitler also unveiled a Reich Citizenship Law that he had solicited at midnight from weary Interior Ministry civil servants and which had only been typed up in the early hours of that morning. The law restricted citizenship to persons who were of ‘German or kindred blood’, who had proven that they merited such status. Jews were reduced to subjects of the Reich, with civic obligations and certain legal protection but no political rights. In his speech, Hitler explicitly related the passage of the laws to ‘international unrest’ and Jewish opposition to German interests. He asserted that the government was meeting this challenge head-on by legal means and warned that random acts of revenge by party zealots were no longer acceptable. On the contrary, he anticipated that with the new legislation in force ‘the German people may find a tolerable relation towards the Jewish people’. Yet he added a threat: ‘Should this hope not be fulfilled and the Jewish agitation both within Germany and in the international sphere should continue, then the position must be examined afresh.’ In a later address to party leaders, Hitler maintained that the Jews were being ‘offered opportunities of living in their own national life in all areas’ and reiterated his order to the party to avoid all individual actions against Jews.⁵⁹

In fact, the Nuremberg Laws actually created more dilemmas for the regime. The legislation did nothing to regulate the economic relations between Jews and Aryans that were a running sore with party activists, who fumed at the sight of Jewish-owned shops heaving with customers or farmers trading with Jewish cattle dealers. They did not tackle specific situations such as access to municipal swimming baths or the display of anti-Jewish banners at the entrance to villages. The laws were silent on the vexed question of whether Jews were entitled to welfare payments. Worse, they did not define who was a Jew, leaving those who were deemed mixed-race under the Aryan paragraph no more enlightened about their situation, even though much more was now at stake. The Nuremberg Laws were a typical Hitlerian attempt to get out of a mess by taking a radical step, in effect a gamble, without thinking through the consequences.

Months of meetings by civil servants ensued before a definition of Jewishness was finalized. The work was led by Dr Wilhelm Stuckart and Dr Hans Globke from the Interior Ministry. In the end, they had to settle for an amalgam of pseudo-scientific racial thinking and old-fashioned religion. On 15 November 1935 the first of several supplementary regulations defined a person as a ‘full Jew’ if they had three or four Jewish grandparents. It did not matter if the grandparents were converts to Christianity: Jewish blood was thicker than the water of the baptismal font. A person would also be regarded as a full Jew if they had only two Jewish grandparents, but married a Jew and joined a Jewish community. In such cases, known as Geltungsjuden, or ‘Jews by definition’, religious affiliation and choice was as much a factor as the inexorable influence of blood. Conversely, if a person with two Jewish grandparents was not a member of a Jewish community and married to an Aryan, they would be considered of mixed race, Mischlinge of the first degree; just one Jewish grandparent placed them in the category of Mischlinge of the second degree.⁶⁰

However, because of disagreement between party representatives and state agencies the precise rights and obligations of the Mischlinge remained unresolved. The Interior Ministry and the Wehrmacht wanted Mischlinge of the first and second degrees treated as citizens. Frick worried that otherwise a large number of Aryans married to Mischlinge would feel alienated from the state; the army feared that it would lose hundreds of thousands of potential conscripts. By contrast, racial warriors speaking for the party wanted to exclude all classes of Mischlinge from Aryan society and prevent them marrying other than their own kind. Their proposals for extensive discrimination against Mischlinge of all types were stymied, but the hardliners were able to limit a Mischling’s marriage choices. On the grounds that the ‘bad blood’ should be contained, Mischlinge of the first degree were permitted to marry only Jews or other Mischlinge, while the ‘good blood’ in the Mischlinge second degree was retained for the Volk by forbidding marriage to other than Aryans. There was little disagreement, though, on the second supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws. This enabled the dismissal of all Jews remaining in state employment. As a sop to sentimental feelings towards war veterans and disabled ex-servicemen, they were allowed to keep their pensions.⁶¹

The British Ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, found the discomfort the regime brought on itself as a result of the Nuremberg Laws faintly amusing. ‘The difficulty of giving effect to the Nuremberg resolutions regarding the status of the Jews continues to give Hitler sleepless nights’, he wryly observed. In a more serious vein Phipps accurately perceived that the Nazi leadership preferred to avoid endangering foreign trade or the Olympics rather than go to extremes in tying up loose ends.⁶²

But to the African American intellectual and civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois, the Nuremberg Laws were no joke. DuBois visited Germany between July and December 1935 and witnessed the first steps towards segregation. On his return to the USA the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier, an African American journal, that the ‘campaign of racial prejudice’ against Jews in Germany ‘surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen; and I have seen much’. It was the greatest tragedy of modern times, ‘an attack on civilisation’. As evidence, DuBois cited cases of ‘Jews jailed for sexual relations with German women; a marriage disallowed because a Jewish person witnessed it; Masons excluded from office, because Jews are Masons; advertisements excluding Jews; the total disenfranchisement of all Jews; deprivation of civil rights and inability to remain or become German citizens; limited rights of education, and narrowly limited right to work in trades and professions and the civil service; the threat of boycott, loss of work and even mob violence for any German who trades with a Jew; and, above all, the continued circulation of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, the most shameless, lying advocate of race hate in the world, not excluding Florida.’⁶³

Living under the race laws

Thanks to his own experience of racism, W. E. B. DuBois captured the painful new world of Jews in Germany. Paradoxically, though, their first response was one of relief. The Nuremberg Laws held out the promise of stability and an end to random abuse. While Jews lost their political rights, the economic rights of those still in trade and business were not affected. And as long as the majority of Jews were allowed to continue earning a living they could support those who were less fortunate. With help from Jews abroad they could maintain Jewish welfare services, schools and, crucially, assist the young to emigrate. On the other hand, the Jewish leadership of all stripes recognized that while the Jews in Germany could survive, there was no longer a normal or desirable future for the young.⁶⁴

In its formal response, published in the Jewish press, the Reichsvertretung described the race laws as ‘the heaviest blow for the Jews of Germany’. It seized on Hitler’s declaration that the laws ‘must create a basis on which a tolerable relationship becomes possible between the German and the Jewish people’ and averred that it too would work towards that end. This did not entail meekly accepting second-class status though: ‘a precondition for such a tolerable relationship is the hope that the Jews and Jewish communities of Germany will be enabled to keep a moral and economic means of existence by the halting of defamation and boycott’. However, the Reichsvertretung did not regard the new status quo as adamantine any more than Hitler did; both parties were wary of future developments. For the time being, then, the Jews had little choice but to make the best of what was offered. Consequently, the Reichsvertretung shouldered the task of organizing the community to function as a self-contained minority. It would provide educational services to the young, with the emphasis on equipping them for emigration. It would continue to offer a full cultural life for Jews in Germany, thereby also employing those who could no longer find work in the cultural sector. It would continue to care for the sick, the needy and the elderly. But the Jewish leadership stated bluntly that in order to fund this activity it would fight to protect every job and enterprise in the Jewish sector. It would also use its resources and the assets of the community to support large-scale emigration. For the first time, the heads of all the Jewish organizations agreed that they had to make emigration a communal priority. There was still no unanimity about where Jews should go, but the Reichsvertretung emphasized the role of Palestine and stated that education for the young would pay special attention to the prerequisites of life in the Jewish national home.⁶⁵

As the new emphasis on emigration and Palestine suggests, the Nuremberg Laws had a shattering effect on the self-image of Jews who had always considered themselves to be Germans first and only. By contrast, Zionist and Orthodox Jews like Willy Cohn applauded the recognition of Jews as a minority and the establishment of separate spheres along religious and racial lines. Cohn had sat by his radio at home in Breslau on the evening of 15 September listening to Hitler’s address. As a Zionist he welcomed ‘racial separation’, while ‘from a Jewish point of view’ he unhesitatingly approved the ban on mixed marriages. He was actually struck by the moderate tone the Führer adopted towards the Jews and seized on the phrase ‘tolerable relationship’ despite realizing that ‘much was left unclear’. When he went out to buy the Zionist newspaper the Jüdische Rundschau a few days later, Cohn sensed that the Nuremberg initiative had exerted ‘a certain calming effect on German–Jewish relations’.⁶⁶

To Jews at the other end of the spectrum of Jewish identity, the institutionalization of a racial definition was appalling. Luise Solmitz, married to a baptized Jew, had a totally opposite reaction. ‘Today our civil rights were cut to pieces’, she wailed in her journal. Her husband Freddy was deemed a full Jew and the regulations meant that their daughter Gisela was now a Mischling of the first degree. Gisela would not be permitted to marry a German, and who knew what other avenues of life would be closed to her? ‘Our child is an outcast, excluded, despised, decreed worthless … No career, no future, no marriage.’ The family had to dismiss their maid, which meant more housework for Luise. The prohibition on flying the national colours was a cruel restriction on Freddy, who had fought and bled for Germany. From this point he felt he was ‘Here only on sufferance … a foreigner in the Fatherland’. The couple clung to each other for support and consoled themselves that suicide was always an option. ‘On days like this’, Luise wrote, ‘you get an inkling of what comfort this final possibility offers.’ But for the moment the family redoubled their efforts to hold on. Indeed, once the supplementary decrees were published Luise and Freddy spotted openings they could exploit on Gisela’s behalf. A Mischling of her status could marry a German, with Hitler’s permission, they thought. And because Freddy was a wounded war veteran, he kept his pension and the family could retain their maid.⁶⁷

The distress suffered by the Solmitz family typified the experience of thousands of Jews in mixed marriages or of mixed parentage who now entered the world of Nazi racial bureaucrats to contest the identity ascribed to them and manipulate the tendentious Nuremberg categories. Freddy’s request that his daughter be exempted was turned down. But 4,000 out of 52,000 appeals to the Reichssippenamt (Reich Kinship Office) resulted in full or partial Jews gaining a more benign classification, usually by proving that their paternity was not what it appeared.⁶⁸

For Lilli Jahn, in Immenhausen, the race laws completed her isolation and transformed her into a dead weight on her husband’s career. Ernst was barred from the National Socialist medical association and most of his colleagues would only communicate with him by phone. As her sister Elsa wrote from England, after visiting her in Germany, ‘It seems to be the German government policy to gradually cut the ground from under the feet of all Jews, non-Aryans, and people related to Jews by marriage, thereby prompting them to the leave the country.’⁶⁹

After he was sacked, Victor Klemperer considered emigration and contacted a number of organizations offering to place academics abroad. Nothing came of this but Palestine offered little attraction as an alternative. In the wake of Nuremberg he asked himself, ‘Where do I belong? To the “Jewish nation” decrees Hitler. And I feel the Jewish nation … is a comedy and am nothing but a German or a European.’ The majority of Jews lay somewhere between these poles. Dr Leo Baeck, a member of the leadership group in the Reichsvertretung and in effect the Chief Rabbi of Jews in Germany, sought to comfort them with a special prayer he composed for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, in October 1935. He reminded Jews that they had brought the world monotheism, the Ten Commandments, and the prophets of social justice. ‘Our history is the history of spiritual greatness, spiritual dignity. We turn to it when attack and insult are directed against us.’⁷⁰

Jews could also console themselves that, as Klemperer observed, ‘the Jew baiting has subsided for a few weeks’. But the remission was short-lived and localized. Reports of individual actions continued to flow into the headquarters of the Centralverein (as a consequence of the Reich Citizenship Law now renamed the Central Association of Jews in Germany, rather than an association of German Jews). Worse, Germans were interpreting the race laws as giving them licence to refuse any contact with Jews. Signs began to appear in shops in East Prussia stating that Jews would not be served; inns and hotels refused accommodation to Jewish travellers. As one CV official noted, this was hardly an example of ‘tolerable relations’. The community in Bielefeld warned worshippers in advance of the Yom Kippur services that they should not hang around outside the synagogue or walk in conspicuous groups.⁷¹

Once the full implications of the Nuremberg Laws were digested, the Jewish leadership in Germany and outside accepted the need to evacuate young Jews and resettle them in countries that offered normal prospects for education, careers and marriage. The Centralverein broadened its internal educational programme beyond fortifying Jewish identity and, by implication, the resolve to stay in Germany, and started providing courses on how to prepare for emigration. It even held meetings explaining the practicalities of moving to Palestine. All the same, the antipathy between assimilation-minded Jews and Zionists did not evaporate. The Reichsvertretung set up a training farm on an estate at Gross-Breesen, near Breslau, to offer instruction in agronomy and domestic science to young men and women. Gross-Breesen was very similar to the training camps run by the Zionist organization but it was deliberately non-ideological and intended to make its graduates eligible for settlement anywhere in the world that workers were needed on the land.⁷²

The Jewish world reacts to the race laws

In New York to meet Jewish leaders, James McDonald sought to dispel any hopes that the Nuremberg Laws were a harbinger of ‘stability’, warning instead that they supplied the ‘basis for the development of a wide range of anti-Jewish attacks’. He told Felix Warburg bluntly that there was ‘no future for the Jews in Germany’. Likewise, Bernard Kahn, reporting on the situation for the AJJDC, counselled its European executive that Nuremberg did not supply any credible foundation for Jewish continuity: ‘fear, insecurity, nervous unrest are characteristics that describe the conditions of the Jews in Germany today’. There was a danger that Jews would flee en masse into neighbouring countries. Raymond Geist alerted the State Department that ‘The new Jewish laws and the indications of the expropriation of Jews have resulted in a panic-like movement among these people who are seeking every possible means to leave the country.’⁷³

Unfortunately, just when it was most needed the High Commission for Refugees was rendered impotent. In February 1935, McDonald had decided it was achieving little except to create the illusion that the international community was doing something. He informed the League of Nations that he intended to resign at the end of the year and left it up to the secretariat to decide whether to wind up the office or appoint a successor. In the interim, he made a three-month-long tour through South America, meeting politicians and officials in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina in the hope of persuading them to permit the large-scale settlement of Jewish refugees. His terse summary of a meeting with President Vargas of Brazil was typical of these encounters: ‘The talk went on and on, but not much that was new was added.’⁷⁴

The final report of the High Commissioner estimated that 80,000 Germans, mainly Jews, had left the country between January 1933 and June 1935. Of these, 27,000 had gone to Palestine, 6,000 to the USA, and 3,000 to South America, and 18,000 had been ‘repatriated’ to countries in eastern and central Europe. The majority had found some degree of permanence. However, McDonald’s team calculated that about 27,000 refugees were still adrift in the world, dependent on handouts from aid agencies. Some $10 million had been raised and spent on assisting this migration, of which American Jews had contributed $3 million while the much smaller British Jewish population had provided $2.5 million. This was a huge drain on the resources of two communities in countries still gripped by the Depression, yet relatively few Jews had been helped.⁷⁵

Even as he was bidding farewell, McDonald had a sense of foreboding. In July 1935, he had written to Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘It is my conviction that the party leaders in the Reich have set themselves a programme of forcing gradually the Jews from Germany by creating conditions there which make life unbearable.’ The Nuremberg Laws fulfilled his prognostications but by then his course was set. He used his resignation statement to excoriate the League of Nations and the governments that had failed to intercede with Germany on behalf of the Jews. ‘Without such response, the problems caused by the persecution of the Jews and the “Non-Aryans” will not be solved by philanthropic action, but will continue to constitute a danger to international peace and a source of injury to the legitimate interests of other States.’⁷⁶

In private McDonald bemoaned the complacency of the Jewish diaspora, but at last that began to change. During January and February 1936, British and American Jewish leaders, in consultation with the Reichsvertretung, inaugurated a far-reaching programme for the systematic emigration and resettlement of Jews from Germany. The main aid agencies pooled their resources and expertise to form the Council for German Jewry (CGJ). The Council united Zionists and non-Zionists in a single, cross-community effort. It dedicated itself to settling Jews anywhere, but recognized the special role of Palestine. To this end it agreed to fund vocational training and the costs of migration for Jews in Germany as well as Jewish refugees in other countries. Fund-raising and the allocation of resources were intended to reflect these priorities. Zionist bodies suspended separate drives in return for a fixed percentage of the money raised by the Council; the allocations committee was divided 50:50 between Zionists and non-Zionists. This degree of cooperation was unprecedented and reflected a new sense of urgency. However, success would depend not only on exceptional levels of generosity from Jews around the British Commonwealth and across the North America; it needed the cooperation of German officials.⁷⁷

Germans and Jews under the race laws

Nazi monitoring agencies gleefully registered the decline of the assimilationist organizations, the surge of interest in Zionism, and the redoubling of efforts to emigrate. The Gestapo office in Cologne commented on the ‘disillusionment’ of Jewish war veterans who ‘did not expect that people would construct a ghetto for them’. Even these stalwarts of patriotism were now eager to learn more about emigration possibilities. Nevertheless, towards the end of the year the initial disorientation wore off and once again Jewish traders focused on the seasonal business opportunities. The Centralverein recorded optimism in Pomerania: ‘The outlook among retail shop owners has become more confident. Sales have increased … the atmosphere of panic and the urge to sell at any price have disappeared.’ By late autumn there was a familiar, tetchy ring to dispatches reaching the SD Head Office in Berlin. The county commissioner in Melsungen, a small town south of Kassel in Hesse, expressed gratitude for the clarification of relations between Jews and Aryans, but wondered what to do about the enthusiastic individual who wanted to strike a blow at the Jews by himself. Should such an activist be penalized for ‘unlawful’ acts? The Gestapo in Breslau once again demanded guidance concerning the sticking of signs on Jewish-owned premises and boycotting.⁷⁸

The population as a whole received the Nuremberg Laws with relief, if for very different reasons to the Jews. They too welcomed an end to bouts of violence, unseemly brawls between party members and police, and uncertainty over the correct relations with Jewish people in a commercial or business setting. According to the Gestapo, Berliners rejoiced that the laws ‘finally cleared the air and brought clarity … In future and for all time to come, no interference is possible in the Völkisch affairs and concerns of the German nation.’ The new laws were ‘a great source of satisfaction’. The police office in the Minden government district relayed the ‘particularly warm reception’. The Führer’s speech ‘finally made it crystal clear to all Party members and Volksgenossen [racial comrades] that the time for individual actions against Jews had passed’. Germans employed by Jews were especially relieved; their jobs and their consciences were now untroubled. By the onset of winter, Minden reported that ‘interest in the Jewish Question has declined’ and ‘a certain calm has set in with regard to the Jewish Question’. The Gestapo in the Magdeburg district actually admitted that workers resented boycott actions since they prevented them buying at the cheapest prices. Workers who were suffering from low wages and facing food shortages were frankly uninterested in the race laws.⁷⁹

The reaction of Catholics was modified by the heightened tension between the Church of Rome and the Third Reich. Several prominent Catholics had been killed during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, while the dismissal of Papen appeared to leave Catholics unrepresented in government. The anti-Semitic wave that prefigured the race laws also overlapped with a drive against the Church by leading Nazi figures. Catholic clergy and laity were anyway predisposed to look askance at an act of state that contradicted religious imperatives, in this case conversion and the sanctity of marriage. Friction between the regime and the Catholic hierarchy engendered a degree of empathy and even solidarity with Jews, especially in rural areas.⁸⁰

In May 1935, the NSDAP District Office in Eichstätt, a small town in Franconia, complained that ‘it is still not possible to say that all Volksgenossen have recognised the importance of the Jewish Question. But that is probably due to the fact that the Church acts as a brake on this, quietly engaging in opposition.’ On the eve of the 1935 Nazi Party rally, the state police office in Aachen observed that ‘the Roman Catholic population sees the Jew as a human being, and only secondarily thinks of evaluating the matter from the standpoint of race policy … When it comes to the Jews the Catholic population is extremely tolerant. It resolutely rejects, insofar as the individual Jew is concerned, any and all measures.’ Weeks after the race laws were passed, the population of the Catholic town Allenstein, in East Prussia, persisted in buying from Jews. The local Gestapo official protested that ‘a segment of the Catholic population maintains a friendly attitude towards Jews and shows little understanding when it comes to the racial laws’. He conceded, ‘one cannot see visible signs of success of the anti-semitic efforts’.⁸¹

A similar dynamic was behind the stance of Protestants affiliated to the breakaway Confessing Church. Beginning in April 1933, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, based in Berlin, rallied Protestant churchmen within the Evangelical Church who defended the principle and practice of conversion. The dissidents also objected to efforts by the self-declared German Christians, led by Nazi-appointed Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller, to deJudaise the Bible. Eventually dissenting Protestants coalesced into a rival ecclesiastical organization, the Confessing Church. In spite of sharing fundamental assumptions about the Jews with the German Christians and the regime, notably that Jews were alien and subversive, the Confessing Church would not renounce the redemptive quality of conversion or abandon existing non-Aryan Christians. Occasionally this position resulted in the arrest of a pastor. The county commissioner in Gelnhausen informed Berlin in July 1935 that the pastor from Aufengau was taken into protective custody, ‘since he had called on the Church congregation to pray for Jews in distress’. Robert Smallbones, the British consul general in Frankfurt-am-Main, believed that ‘there are great numbers of Germans of all classes to whom this persecution is abhorrent’. He thought that the Nazi campaign against the Old Testament and their attempts to deJudaise Christianity actually worked to create sympathy for Jews.⁸²

Towards the end of the year a querulous tone entered the surveillance reports more generally. In Magdeburg party activists received the Nuremberg Laws as ‘an act of liberation’ that left them wanting more, such as the registration and badging of Jewish-owned businesses. Once again, there was a state of ‘uncertainty’. Similar demands were heard from Breslau at the start of 1936. In truth, violence and boycotting never went away. Police officials in Trier admitted to the persistence of violence against Jews despite contrary instructions to party members. The Berlin police cast a jaundiced eye over Jews returning to bars and cafes. The NSDAP Head Office for Municipal Policy began to cry out for Jewish businesses to be marked officially. For this agency, at least, the Nuremberg Laws had exerted ‘a stimulating effect’. At the peak of the Christmas season police officials in Baden and Arnsberg reported disapprovingly that ‘customers are flocking to Jewish shops’.⁸³

The race laws had not had the anticipated educational effect on the German population. The County Commissioner’s District Office in Bad Kissingen complained that ‘there are still some persons who believe they have to protect the Jews’. Hamburg exporters continued to place their business interests above those of the Volksgemeinschaft. In September 1936, the Jewish desk at the head office of the SD concluded that the Nuremberg Laws had not been wholly effective: there were still relations between Jews and non-Jews, most especially in Catholic regions. Non-Aryan Christians, that is to say converts, often proved the porous element in the barrier between the populations.⁸⁴

In the shade of the Berlin Olympics

1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, has customarily been deemed another quiet period for Jews in Germany, a ‘period of outward calm and a certain degree of legal security’. Hitler wanted to avoid giving any excuse to the international community to boycott the games, so the Nazi leadership ‘soft-pedalled its anti-Jewish stance’. Obnoxious signs and banners were removed so as not to affront foreign visitors and Der Stürmer was not displayed in the streets. Richard Evans has described this phase as a sort of ‘charm offensive’. Jewish or part-Jewish athletes, like the fencer Helen Mayer, were even allowed to compete in the games to forestall demonstrations by competitors from other nations.⁸⁵

Yet 1936 was a decisive year in the development of Judenpolitik. Out of view, the tectonic plates of the Third Reich were shifting. A tussle commenced between the conservatives still in the government and the new Nazi elite that was elbowing its way into more powerful positions. Jews in Germany sensed these developments; in any case, the day-to-day experience of those in small towns and rural areas indicated that the restraints on the Nazi rank and file were mainly cosmetic. The ‘cold pogrom’ did not abate in the deep countryside and distant East Prussia, even if Jews in Berlin could once again stroll down the Kurfürstendamm, buy a copy of the Jüdische Rundschau, and drink coffee in a restaurant while observing foreign visitors bustle to and fro between the Hotel Adlon and the Olympic park.⁸⁶

Nor were foreign correspondents fooled by the air of normality. William Shirer was reprimanded by the Foreign Press Department of the Propaganda Ministry after he revealed that before the opening of the Winter Games Nazi officials in Garmisch ‘had pulled down all the signs saying that Jews were unwanted (they’re all over Germany) and that the Olympic visitors would thus be spared any signs of the kind of treatment meted out to Jews in this country’. Bella Fromm, who was now writing for an Austrian newspaper, commented sarcastically that ‘There’s been a notable improvement in our streets. They’ve taken away the Stürmer showcases so as not to shock the Olympic visitors with the pornographic weekly.’⁸⁷

Victor Klemperer was struck by the regime’s unnaturally restrained reaction to the shooting of a senior Nazi in Switzerland. Wilhelm Gustloff, the founder and leader of the Swiss Nazi Party, was assassinated by a young Jew, David Frankfurter, on 4 February 1936, just two days before the opening of the Winter Games. But instead of unleashing a wave of revenge, Nazi Party headquarters immediately ordered party bosses and SA leaders to prevent anti-Jewish demonstrations and individual actions. The Nazi elite contented themselves with giving Gustloff a state funeral in Schwerin, his birthplace, at which Hitler delivered a eulogy blaming ‘our Jewish foe’ for his death. The Führer incorporated Gustloff into a litany of murder and sacrifice, culminating in the civil strife of 1918–19, and declared that the ‘same power’ stood behind each and every instance. For the moment, though, rhetoric stood in for deeds. In Aachen there was some vandalism and in Berlin the Jewish Cultural Association was ordered to suspend its programme as a punishment. But that was the extent of the official riposte. Klemperer predicted that ‘They will turn on the hostages, on the German Jews later.’⁸⁸

Jewish life in rural areas continued to deteriorate. Mark Wischnitzer, who worked for the Hilfsverein, told James McDonald that ‘Jews in the smaller places are selling their businesses and property for what they can get, and some are fleeing to the larger cities, there anxiously searching for opportunities for emigration.’ Robert Smallbones informed the British Embassy in Berlin in November 1935 that ‘So far, the extremists have had it all their own way, and the position of the Jews is becoming quite unbearable.’ One trader after another was being pressurized into liquidation. In some villages in Hesse Jews could not even buy bread because bakers refused to serve them. ‘While “separate action” is officially discouraged it seems to be the intention to deprive Jews of the possibility of earning a living in a systematic manner.’ A report for the World Jewish Congress in January 1936 contrasted the superficial calm with the malevolence seething below the surface. It was true assaults had ‘all but ceased in recent weeks’ thanks to the influx of foreign visitors, yet ‘blackmail and threatening letters’ proliferated. The Nuremberg Laws, with their promise of stability, masked unceasing pressure on Jews to give up their businesses. Nazis were using all sorts of legal devices and chicanery to drive Jews out of the economy.⁸⁹

The rural Jewish population was in terminal crisis. Communities had shrunk by up to 40 per cent as young Jews left for the greater security and job prospects of the cities. Most had fallen below the critical mass necessary to survive. Half of those in Prussia numbered under fifty souls and they were often destitute. The dissolution of entire communities now figured more frequently in the reports that Nazi officials remitted to Berlin. The governor of the Koblenz district crowed that Jewish cattle dealers had been almost completely eliminated so rural Jews ‘no longer believe in the possibility of continuing to remain in Germany, and expect that within about ten years there will no longer be any Jews’. The state police in Hanover reported that because wealthy Jews had left the villages and small towns the communities could not afford welfare or pay for teachers in the Jewish schools. While Jewish cattle traders were clinging on around Wiesbaden, there was a steady flight of the Jewish population to large urban centres, mainly Stuttgart. In Butzbach, Hesse, ‘The Jews have been excluded almost completely from commerce, and most prefer to disappear gradually by going abroad.’⁹⁰

Nazi activists continued to educate the Volksgenossen, their racial comrades, about the correct way to see the Jews. The language used in their reports to the Gestapo and SD indicate not just how they thought but how they expected the population to think. The district governor in Kassel spoke apologetically of continued Einzelaktionen, only to excuse them as the result of ‘economic oppression at the hands of the Jews over the span of centuries’. The reports also give evidence of the dynamic between activists, party agencies, and the state. Kassel officials dutifully enforced order and banned ‘individual actions’, but complained that such actions derogated from the authority of the government and the image of the Führer. The county commissioner in Mayen, a small place west of Koblenz, moaned that Jews continued to have too much influence. ‘The people involved are still so used to the individual Jew and do not see the facts: namely that on the stage of world politics, it is only the Jew with his international ideas and money that brings so much disorder to the world.’ Local Nazi officials were building the Volksgemeinschaft through the relentless, daily targeting of the Jewish population. Even the dead could play a role in educating the living. The district governor of Lower Bavaria and Upper Palatinate reported that the Christian burial of a baptized Jew in the town of Weiden led to the decision in future to treat deceased converts as Jews. The gendarmerie in Gunzenhausen, the scene of a murderous incident in April 1934, bragged that it was unthinkable for Germans any longer to attend the funeral of a Jew. The district governor of the Palatinate reported a fuss because some Catholics had the temerity to attend the burial of a Jewish neighbour. In Haigerloch in Bavaria, officials of the farmers’ league photographed the funeral procession of a Jewish merchant so as to identify Aryans breaching the lines of the Volksgemeinschaft. It was feared they might pass them on to Der Stürmer for publication.⁹¹

The Jewish leadership in Germany did not accept these developments passively, but their ability to resist was diminishing. Suspecting that a policy of Aryanization was being stealthily implemented with government knowledge and consent, in October 1935 the Centralverein challenged Schacht. ‘Since the Nuremberg Laws Jewish entrepreneurs have been urged very insistently to sell off their businesses … a great many rumours have promoted the idea that even the Reich Economic Ministry is reckoning on the complete exclusion of Jews from the German economy within a year’. The CV reminded Schacht of his earlier decrees against boycotts and the dismissal of Jewish staff, and asked for them to be reiterated. Otherwise the public would treat them as in abeyance. Its plea was ignored. Personal contacts were no more effective. In October 1935 the Israel family lost control of their department store and a Nazi official warned them that unless they sold it quickly they might not be able to sell it at all. Wilfred held out little hope for an intervention by the minister.⁹²

Schacht’s silence was deeply worrying. In mid-1935 he had contended with the racial hardliners and anti-Semites in the Nazi Party. After a speech criticizing unauthorized actions, the state police in Cologne reported ‘numerous voices saying that the President of the Reichsbank, with his stated views on the problem of the economy and the Jewish Question, has achieved a splendid victory over the movement’. The relative moderation of the Nuremberg Laws was partly down to his restraining influence, abetted by Frick and civil servants in the Interior Ministry. For a moment Schacht, like Papen in 1934, appeared to hold the banner of opposition aloft.⁹³

Foreign diplomats, like German Jews, regarded him as a beacon of reason within the regime. Thanks to his fluent English and his command of issues concerning reparations and foreign trade he was a main interlocutor for the British and the Americans. Dodd, Phipps and McDonald routinely believed that they could influence the regime’s Judenpolitik through him. That perception seemed to be confirmed by the contact that Schacht preserved with Jewish bankers and businessmen, notably Max Warburg. But after Nuremberg they detected a chill in his demeanour. It transpired that he was willing to accept the expulsion of Jews from society and, ultimately, their departure from Germany. To André François-Poncet, Schacht was a cynic and an opportunist. ‘He was perfectly aware of Hitler’s blunder in persecuting the Jews and rousing Anglo-Saxon opinion against the Nazi regime’ but he ‘never had enough courage or influence to prevent excesses’.⁹⁴

Even so, in late 1935 Ambassador Dodd thought that Schacht was almost single-handedly holding back the Nazis who wanted to expropriate all Jewish property. He told James McDonald that the minister for economics had enjoyed ‘a sort of victory’ over the extremists at Nuremberg. But ‘since the radicals’ pressure never relaxes, the net result is always to leave the Jews worse off than before’. The much-respected correspondent for The Times, Norman Ebbutt, shared this view. In his opinion, ‘whatever lull follows will be only temporary. Moreover, each new attack begins from where the last one left off. In this way, despite the efforts of Schacht, the radicals are able to register steady advances.’ Max Warburg gave the same message to Dodd. He told the ambassador ‘that he and Dr Schacht had not been able to do anything to relieve the Jewish situation’.⁹⁵

Following a wide-ranging conversation, Phipps briefed London that Schacht’s position was becoming increasingly anomalous. He told the minister that he ‘followed with sympathy and with interest his efforts on behalf of the Jews’. Schacht replied ‘with surprising frankness. He said that he had only a few days ago attacked the Führer on the subject, urging how essential it was that no special action or persecution of the Jews should be indulged in outside the recent legislation. Herr Hitler had given him assurances in this respect and he therefore hoped, though evidently without much conviction, that such action would cease.’ Schacht added that ‘anti-semitism was a cardinal principle of Herr Hitler’s policy … it was practically impossible for him to enforce moderation on all his subordinates’. In a fascinating anticipation of the notion that Nazis were ‘working towards the Führer’, Schacht recalled that one Gauleiter told his activists ‘they would be interpreting his [the Führer’s] true wishes if they continued their persecution of the Jews’. Phipps concluded waspishly that ‘I need hardly add that Dr Schacht’s solicitude for the Jews is inspired solely by financial and economic considerations in which humanitarianism plays no part.’96

Whatever his motives for preventing harsher action against the Jews, foreign diplomats correctly suspected that his power was waning and interpreted his slide as symptomatic of other less visible developments. Paradoxically, Schacht was a victim of the regime’s success and his own contribution to it. No sooner were the Winter Olympics brought to a splendid conclusion than Hitler carried off his most daring foreign policy coup. On 7 March 1936, he sent 22,000 German soldiers into the Rhineland, which had been declared a demilitarized zone under the Versailles Treaty and the 1925 Locarno Treaty. Hitler had timed the operation exquisitely. The French government was in crisis, both the British and the French economies were mired in the Depression, and they had lost the support of Mussolini after condemning the Italian invasion of Abyssinia the previous October. While the French and the British blamed each other for not resisting the move, Hitler organized a plebiscite that proved he enjoyed near-unanimous support for the final repudiation of Versailles. As the nation rejoiced, Victor Klemperer reflected morosely, ‘His position is secured for an indefinite period.’⁹⁷

Hitler quickly built on the regime’s soaring popularity and Germany’s enhanced geo-strategic position. In the aftermath of the Olympics he composed a memorandum arguing that Germany had to prepare for war within four years. However, the Four-Year Plan went far beyond a statement of economic priorities. It was a declaration of Hitler’s ideological goals and the clearest indication yet that he was determined to achieve them by force. It had profound implications for the Jews of Germany because it was the first policy directive that explicitly linked the Jews to Bolshevism in the context of a plan for waging war. The plan thereby tied the fate of the Jews to Germany’s geo-strategic exigencies. And by proposing an alternative to Schacht’s economic strategy it demoted his importance, diminishing whatever influence he cared to wield to soften anti-Jewish measures. Despite this, it has usually been treated as falling outside the history of Judenpolitik.⁹⁸

The Four-Year Plan was a confession of Germany’s economic weakness, in which the Jews were implicated. The economy was too small, unbalanced and weak to support an improved standard of living for the population and afford massive expenditure on rebuilding the armed forces. Ironically, recovery had aggravated the quandary. Unemployment had fallen to around one million and even though wages remained below pre-Depression levels, steady employment allowed workers to spend more. Consequently, imports had risen, leading to a balance of payments crisis. Germany was not exporting enough: demand in the world economy was feeble while productive resources were being diverted to manufacturing arms and munitions. To make matters worse, the armaments sector was sucking in expensive raw materials. Germany lacked the foreign currency reserves to pay for imported mineral oil and high-quality iron ore at the same time as importing foodstuffs such as animal fats, eggs and fodder. Efforts to improve agricultural productivity still left the country 15 per cent short of its food requirements. Thus the regime was faced with difficult choices. If it continued to rearm at breakneck speed, it would have to hold down living standards and restrict consumption. Yet the Nazis had come to power by promising better days. How could these goals be reconciled? Schacht had staved off the reckoning with a series of ingenious short-term measures. The government also promoted schemes to substitute synthetic foodstuffs and raw materials for imported varieties. However, by early 1936 Schacht had run out of tricks and Germany was running out of foreign currency. Shortages led to ‘grumbling’ in the population and armament factories had to slow or even stop production. But Schacht’s recommendations to relax the tempo of rearmament and boost exports only served to irritate Hitler.⁹⁹

On 4 September 1936, Göring read Hitler’s memorandum to the cabinet. It began with the Führer’s thoughts on politics and war. Politics was the struggle of nations for survival. The threat that Germany faced came from the east, from Bolshevism. Since the Russian Revolution, international Jewry had established itself in Russia and was poised to extend its conquest over other countries and ultimately the whole world. ‘Since the beginning of the French Revolution the world has been drifting with increasing speed towards a new conflict, whose most extreme solution is named Bolshevism, but whose content and aim is only the removal of those strata of society which gave leadership to humanity up to the present, and their replacement by international Jewry.’ The victory of Bolshevism would mean victory for the Jews and the destruction of civilization. By virtue of its geo-political situation and the ideology of National Socialism, Germany stood in the way of this catastrophe. ‘Germany will as always have to be regarded as the focus of the western world against the attacks of Bolshevism.’ It was impossible to predict when the showdown would occur, but it was Germany’s ‘destiny’ and failure would mean the ‘annihilation of the German people’. To prevent this it was essential to enhance Germany’s military: ‘The extent of the military development of our resources cannot be too large, nor the pace too swift.’ Unfortunately, Germany was unable to feed its population on its own and lacked sufficient raw materials for rearmament. The conundrum could only be solved in the long term by ‘extending our living space [Lebensraum]’. In the short term, steps had to be taken to prepare Germany for achieving Lebensraum. Since Germany could not export enough to finance the arms build-up and it could not be slowed down, it was necessary to mobilize the whole of society and the economy. The memorandum stipulated the achievement of self-sufficiency in food as far as possible, substituting synthetic products for imported items, and limiting imports to essentials. Hitler threatened that if private industry was not prepared to accomplish these objectives, the state would take the lead. Finally, he demanded two new laws. The first would make economic sabotage punishable by death. The second made ‘the whole of Jewry liable for all damages inflicted by individual specimens of this community of criminals upon the German economy and thus upon the German people’. His memorandum concluded, ‘(I) The German armed forces must be operational within four years (II) The German economy must be fit for war in four years’.¹⁰⁰

The memorandum gives a startling insight into Hitler’s thinking. He was above all a warrior. His years in the trenches were the formative experience in his life and his constant point of reference. His chief enemy was international Jewry. The Jews had caused Germany’s defeat in 1918 and had succeeded in conquering Russia, from where they planned to take over the whole world. Only Germany, National Socialism, and he himself barred their path. However, even as Germany girded itself for war it had to watch the enemy within. The war against international Jewry could not be fought without suppressing the Jews in Germany. While de-emancipation satisfied the demands of old-fashioned anti-Semites, and reducing or eliminating the influence of the Jews met the demands of conservatives, Hitler envisaged something very different. He was even thinking beyond the demands for segregation that emanated from racial anti-Semites, who saw the threat of Jews expressed in terms of blood and miscegenation. Hitler believed that Germany was at war with the Jews. The survival of Germany depended upon military preparedness and, as a prerequisite of that, territorial expansion. Lebensraum would necessitate war; war would necessitate the ruthless suppression of the Jews. His thinking was apocalyptic and his reasoning was circular; but it was entirely coherent.¹⁰²

Foreign diplomats detected the shift in gear. Ambassador Dodd noticed that the speeches by Hitler, Goebbels and Rosenberg at the 1936 Nuremberg party rally were even more belligerent than usual. They referred to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the election of a left-wing Popular Front government in France, led by a Jew, Léon Blum, as evidence of communist aggression and, behind it, the Jews. On 18 October 1936 a decree formally made Göring responsible for the achievement of the Four-Year Plan, establishing his role as economic supremo and sidelining Schacht. A few days later Phipps compared Schacht to ‘a skilled navigator who in a moment of pique joined a pirate vessel, confident that he would reform the pirate captain and his crew’ only to find that he was ‘compelled to engage in piracy’. He had ‘succeeded in warding off the worst attacks of the Nazi extremists. There has been no general confiscation of Jewish or other property.’ But, by implication, the weakening of Schacht’s position spelled trouble for the Jews.¹⁰²

The other, not unrelated, realignment of the power structure within the Third Reich during 1936 concerned the security apparatus. In June 1936, Himmler was appointed chief of the German police, uniting control of the Gestapo, the criminal police (Kriminalpolizei, Kripo), the uniformed police (Ordnungspolizei, Orpo), the SD, and the SS. While the uniformed police remained under the direction of Kurt Daluege, the Gestapo and Kripo were amalgamated into the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo, security police), under Heydrich. The result was a transformation of the way crime was regarded and the function of policing. Consolidation of the security apparatus and its reorientation were also tightly bound to the Four-Year Plan and preparations for war. German society had to be purged of racially weak and degenerate elements. This included ‘hereditary’ criminals and those who would not conform to National Socialist norms. Anyone with a criminal record was liable to be rounded up and sent to a concentration camp. Beggars, tramps, those who refused to work were also deemed ‘asocial’ and swept into the rapidly expanding concentration camp system. The Gypsies, too, fell victim to this blurring of policing, traditional prejudice and biological racism. Finally, Germans of mixed Black African and German parentage, the children of German colonial settlers, were subjected to compulsory sterilization along with the offspring of relationships between German woman and French colonial soldiers contracted during the French occupation of the Rhineland in 1922.¹⁰³

However, none of these groups was considered as menacing as the Jews. They alone represented an international, global threat to the German people. They were regarded as the hidden force behind the new socialist government of Léon Blum in France and the Soviet-backed republican government in Spain. In a speech in June 1936, marking his appointment as chief of the German police, Himmler laid bare the nexus between the existence of the Jewish enemy and the creation of a unified security apparatus to defend the Volk: ‘We must assume that this struggle will last for generations, for it is the age-old struggle between humans and sub-humans in its current new phase of the struggle between the Aryan peoples and Jewry and the organisational form Jewry has adopted of Bolshevism. I see my task as being to prepare the whole nation for this struggle by building up the police welded together with the order of the SS as the organisation to protect the Reich at home …’¹⁰⁴

Preparations for the battle against international Jewry required intensified measures against the Jews. At the start of 1936, the SD Head Office was reorganized and liaison with the Gestapo improved. A thrusting young intellectual, Kurt Schröder, was appointed to head the SD Jewish bureau, Department II/112. These Jewish experts held a number of conferences during the year at which they briefed SD field officers tasked with observing and reporting on Jewish affairs. As well as keeping an eye on the Centralverein and the RjF, Heydrich proposed to the Interior Ministry that their activities should be curtailed or banned. His sweeping programme was rejected, but the Gestapo stepped up the harassment of the non-Zionist Jewish organizations. It also began to take an active part in pressurizing Jews to abandon their businesses. The Gestapo used the role it had been given by Göring to prevent foreign currency violations to investigate and threaten Jewish businessmen.¹⁰⁵

Power over Jewish affairs was slipping away from the ministries that had formerly devised and implemented anti-Jewish measures. Perhaps sensing that they needed to wrest back their influence, on 29 September 1936, representatives of the Interior Ministry, the Finance Ministry and Rudolf Hess, the deputy Führer, met to discuss Judenpolitik. They agreed to the ‘complete and total emigration’ of the Jews and the use of law to limit Jewish economic activity to ‘sustaining life’. However, they did not feel that the moment for such drastic action was opportune in view of the delicate state of the economy. Unlike the Sipo-SD apparatus, for them the primacy of economics still trumped ideology. By pulling back, they inadvertently left the way open for Himmler and Heydrich to make the running.¹⁰⁶

The intensifying assault on German Jews

For most Germans the autumn of 1936 brought the year, framed by the reoccupation of the Rhineland and the Berlin Olympics, to a glorious conclusion. Despite periodic food shortages their living standards improved modestly thanks to sustained employment. The growth of the state bureaucracy in many sectors, including the security apparatus, offered opportunities for promotion and upward social mobility. But for Jews it was a time of growing anxiety. Kurt Rosenberg jotted in his diary, ‘For weeks the Jews have been whispering into each other’s ears that it will become even worse after the Olympics in August … long ago we lost the ability to take pleasure in small things and celebrations – because over everything hangs the eternal question, Is it still worth it?’ As the games neared their end Victor Klemperer worried that ‘an explosion is imminent, and naturally, they will first of all take things out on the Jews’.¹⁰⁷

The rabidly anti-communist and anti-Jewish oratory at the Nuremberg rally in September 1936 sounded more than usually ominous to Mally Dienemann, the wife of the rabbi in Offenbach. After hearing one of the speeches on the radio she predicted that things would ‘go downhill’. If there was to be a war ‘it will start with the extinction of the Jews’. Victor Klemperer heard the same broadcast with its ‘insane Jew baiting’. It ‘beggars all imagination,’ he wrote. Three weeks later, on his birthday, Klemperer was banned from the reading room of his local library. At the start of December the telephone in his home was removed in accordance with the latest anti-Jewish regulation. ‘An almost symbolic act’, he typed in his diary. Now they were ‘Completely impoverished and completely isolated’. For Zionists and religious Jews like the Dienemanns it was possible to retreat into Jewish life and derive sustenance from Judaism or visions of a Jewish national future in Palestine. But to totally assimilated German Jews and converts like Klemperer there was, quite literally, nowhere to go.¹⁰⁸

Until late 1936, sufficient Jews were in employment or in business, some doing quite well, to preserve the impression that German Jewry was holding its own. Sacked civil servants and other state employees, like Klemperer, still got their pensions. Jewish professionals, such as doctors, dentists and lawyers, could provide their services to other Jews. Lawyers could even appear in court. Thousands of Jewish children were still at state schools. However, towards the end of the year the Reichsvertretung found its resources strained to breaking point to alleviate the misery that enveloped the steadily increasing number deprived of jobs or the opportunity to make a living through trade. Had it not been for support from the Council for German Jewry during the winter of 1936–7, the local Jewish relief agencies would not have been able to cope.¹⁰⁹

The increasing pressure took its toll on Jewish unity. Georg Kareski, a right-wing Zionist, believed that he was in a better position to deal with the German government than the mainstream leadership. At the start of 1937, the Reichsvertretung had to fight off a bid by Kareski and members of his Staatszionistische Partei to take over the executive. The Gestapo was disappointed by the resilience of the traditional leaders, but to Jews in Britain and the USA their steadiness was admirable. David Glick, a field officer for the AJJDC, reported to the New York headquarters that ‘they are displaying a courage and a mentality that is absolutely magnificent … they refuse to go down as cowards or animals, but are maintaining to the last a spirit of brave and cultured men and women’.¹¹⁰

In January 1937, the SD Jewish office came up with proposals for a systematic campaign against the Jews in Germany intended to drive them out within the shortest time possible. The paper ‘On the Jewish Problem’, possibly authored by Adolf Eichmann, announced that ‘the Jew is one of the most dangerous of all enemies, because he is elusive and never completely within reach’. The guiding concept of SD strategy was to achieve the deJewification of Germany by eliminating the economic basis for Jewish existence. The Jews would then be obliged to emigrate, although they would be steered to regions that were undeveloped and poor, where they could not regroup and pose a threat to the Third Reich. In a departure from earlier Judenpolitik, the paper suggested that reliance on Zionism alone might not suffice. The Jews in Germany had not felt under sufficient pressure to reconcile themselves to Zionism, while riots by Palestinian Arabs against Jewish immigration had acted as a deterrent. It was therefore imperative to exclude Jews from the economy, apply greater pressure on them, and exploit all available opportunities for emigration. This campaign had to be accompanied by consciousness-raising amongst the population to cut off sources of sympathy and succour: ‘It is necessary to generate among the population a widespread attitude hostile to the Jews in order to create a basis for a sustained attack to effectively repel the enemy.’ The use of military metaphors reveals the mentality of the SD personnel and their fantasy vision of the Jews as a powerful, dangerous foe. The paper also reveals their capacity for brutality and cynicism: ‘The most effective way to deprive the Jews of a feeling of security is the wrath of the people, as manifested in violence.‘ Jews feared pogroms so violence was highly effective, even though it was illegal. Yet by virtue of recommending pogroms, the SD gave the lie to the existence of popular anger. Having intimated how Jews would thus be encouraged to emigrate, the paper sketched out technical means for speeding their departure. It proposed setting up a ‘central office’ to handle emigration and help Jews on their way.¹¹¹

Over the course of 1937, elements of this programme were put into effect at the prompting of Heydrich and SD officers liaising with the Gestapo. Partly through its interventions in Jewish affairs, the SD, which was ostensibly just an intelligence-gathering organization, inched nearer to obtaining executive powers. The fearsome implications of this development are evident from the ‘Guidelines on the Jewish Question’ for SD officers drawn up by the latest head of the Jewish bureau, Dieter Wisliceny, a corpulent ex-theology student. ‘The struggle against the Jews is from the outset a basic principle of National Socialism. The Jewish question is for National Socialism not only a religious or political question but a race question. Hence the possibility of any compromise is closed. The adversarial position of the NSDAP against the Jews runs through the whole Party programme. The Jew is for the National Socialist simply the enemy.’ The Guidelines recalled that since May 1935, the SD had been formulating a systematic, research-based strategy for dealing with them. ‘The solution of the Jewish question can only lie in the total deJewification of Germany’ but the attainment of this goal was ‘thinkable only through the Zionist emigration’.¹¹²

Reports compiled by the Jewish desk of the SD Head Office during 1937 showed discontent with the pace of Jewish emigration and frustration with the resilience of Jewish communities. In April 1937, the summary for the first quarter noted that ‘the social situation of the Jews in general is so favourable that most prefer staying on in the country to emigrating’. The Arab uprising against British rule in Palestine had taken the shine off the Zionist message. Instead, the Centralverein and the RjF were experiencing a revival. The JKB, the Jewish cultural association, was ‘slowly leading the Jews into an intellectual and cultural ghetto’, but that was an ambiguous development since it offered Jews consolation and distraction from their woes. The SD also complained that Jews were getting support from Catholics, especially ‘the rural population which opposes National Socialism’.¹¹³

Ever watchful for the machinations of international Jewry, the SD pounced on an anti-Nazi speech by New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in March 1937. As a reprisal the Gestapo dissolved the Jewish fraternal society B’nai Brith and imposed a two-month ban on all Centralverein and RjF meetings as well as any Jewish cultural activity. Only Zionist meetings were permitted. Ambassador Dodd made a formal protest to the German Foreign Ministry about the Nazi press attacks on LaGuardia, but ministry officials now seemed impervious to such démarches. In November, he noted wearily that in a speech Streicher had claimed ‘the Jews govern the US, LaGuardia being their chief’. By now Dodd was inured to such rhetoric and had practically given up meeting with Nazi officials.¹¹⁴

In May, the protected status of Jews in Upper Silesia expired. This anomaly stemmed from the struggle between Poland and Germany for control of the province after the Great War. Under the terms of the 1922 Geneva Convention on Silesia the territory was partitioned and the national minorities in each portion had their rights guaranteed for fifteen years; they were even entitled to appeal to the League of Nations in case of alleged violations. After the Nazis attained power Upper Silesia became a thorn in their side because the area was immune to discriminatory laws and because the Jewish population was permitted to make submissions to the League. During 1933, the American Jewish Congress used this device to send half a dozen petitions to Geneva protesting against German treatment of the Jews. Anticipating the restoration of full German sovereignty, the SD directors assigned Adolf Eichmann to draw up plans for bringing the local Jews to heel in quick time. In addition to the immediate extension into the province of all the race laws and anti-Jewish regulations, Eichmann recommended the prompt arrest of Jewish communal leaders, a ban on assimilation-orientated Jewish organizations, registration of all Jews and, especially, a rapid appraisal of their businesses to prevent Jews appointing Aryans to run them, a procedure known as ‘cloaking’. Heydrich and Franz Six, head of Department II of the SD Head Office and Eichmann’s line manager, approved the plan. Eichmann was duly dispatched to Breslau and as soon as the German security forces were relieved of international inhibitions he accompanied the Gestapo on their mission against the Jewish population. It was the first time that an SD officer had translated ideas into concrete policies and gone into the field to see them implemented. Eichmann’s mission provided a model for later actions.¹¹⁵

Throughout 1937, the SD Jewish experts maintained a critical eye on the exclusion of Jews from the economy and monitored the rate of Jewish emigration. In July a formal agreement with the Gestapo, the Funktionsbefehl, enhanced their influence on the conduct of Judenpolitik. And they were relentless. While noting with approval that county commissioners were refusing to renew permits for Jewish cattle dealers, one report cavilled ‘Even though the “Aryanization” efforts are continuing now as before throughout the entire territory of the Reich, to the keen satisfaction of the broad public, and have retained their intensity, there is nonetheless still substantial Jewish influence on economic life.’ It was not good enough that Orthodox Jews and Jewish veterans who once spurned the notion of leaving Germany were now discussing group emigration, ‘If numerous Jews from the assimilationist camp nonetheless remain resolute in their will to remain in Germany, that is due in significant measure to the partial preferential treatment being accorded them by the authorities … and the generally lackadaisical attitude shown by the general public towards the Jewish Question.’¹¹⁶

The SD’s other preoccupation was emigration. Since the conclusion of the Ha’avara agreement in 1933, the Nazis had favoured Zionism and assisted Jewish migration to Palestine. In the first year of Nazi rule, 7,600 Jews had emigrated to the Jewish national home, a quarter of the total who left Germany. During 1934 the number rose to 9,800, close to a third of all emigrants. The rate peaked at around 8,600–8,700 over the next two years, but never exceeded more than 30 per cent of total Jewish emigration. More might have gone, but the number was limited by the British Mandatory authorities. The British calculated the optimum rate of Jewish settlement according to the economic absorptive capacity of the country and, crucially, political considerations. Since the anti-Jewish riots of 1921, whenever there were violent Arab protests the British reduced the volume of immigration. With the renewed outbreak of communal disturbances in 1936, the government halved the number of immigration permits.¹¹⁷

The German Foreign Office and the SD had both watched anxiously while the British responded to the Palestinian Arab uprising. Although the rebellion was effectively suppressed, the authorities concluded that the mandate was unworkable. In July 1937, a Royal Commission led by Lord Peel recommended that Palestine should be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states. The Peel report sounded alarm bells along the Wilhelmstrasse and in SD headquarters. If the Jews gained a state it would be eligible for membership of the League of Nations. They would then have a platform from which to attack Germany and defend Jews in other countries.¹¹⁸

During 1936 the SD Jewish experts had established contact with a member of the Jewish underground army in Palestine, the Haganah, who seemed to offer the possibility of increasing Jewish emigration. In October 1937, Herbert Hagen, the senior officer on the Jewish desk, and Adolf Eichmann, the expert on Zionism, travelled to Palestine to follow up this lead. They were also supposed to investigate the alleged role of the Haganah in the assassination of Wilhelm Gustloff. Both aspects of the enterprise were a failure. Hagen and Eichmann were thrown out of Palestine by the British authorities only a few hours after they disembarked at Haifa. Their efforts to meet with Jewish informants who might shed light on Gustloff’s killing were fruitless. Nevertheless, the journey enhanced Eichmann’s reputation as the SD’s point man on Jewish questions. The report he penned subsequently with Hagen signified a serious policy shift. While Palestine would remain a major destination for Jewish emigration it would not be the only or most preferable one. Nor should the Third Reich do anything to strengthen the Jewish community of Palestine or assist the achievement of statehood.¹¹⁹

The fortunes of Zionists in Germany were thus closely tied to both British policy and Judenpolitik. Zionism had attracted only a small minority of German Jews before the 1930s, and during the first years of the Nazi regime those who were previously unconvinced retained the hope that they could live out their lives in their German homeland. Although Willy Cohn was suspended from his job as a schoolteacher in Breslau, he resisted his wife’s pleas to go abroad. In June 1933 he wrote in his diary, ‘Trudi is always pushing for us to emigrate; I don’t think that the prospects for leaving are very good for us, not with my background.’ His thinking reflected the attitude of many other German Jews; ‘for now one should wait to see how things develop’. At the age of forty-six, Cohn was reluctant to ‘start all over again’. In Breslau ‘I can do something, here I am someone, but whether I can make it down there remains to be seen.’ Notwithstanding some dreadful rows with his wife he insisted on staying put: ‘I have deep roots here.’¹²⁰

In the wake of the Nuremberg Laws interest in emigration generally, and more specifically to Palestine, grew. The Gestapo reported an intensification of Zionist activity across the country. In Bavaria more young people started training programmes while in Düsseldorf the community started running evening classes in Hebrew. Erich Sonnemann, head of a non-Zionist youth group, wrote bitterly to the head of the movement that ‘only two things remain: move towards Zionism where one does not stop being a human being at age 23 or buy oneself a rope!’ Yet the attractiveness of Zionism depended upon the opportunities for emigration to Palestine and the perception that the Zionists enjoyed the patronage of the regime. As soon as there was trouble in Palestine, Jews turned to agencies that could find them new homes somewhere else and the assimilation-oriented Jews, especially the RjF, took delight in exposing the drawbacks of the Zionist remedy.¹²¹

By early 1937, Cohn had changed his mind. He travelled to Palestine with Trudi to visit his son Ernst (who had settled there in 1934) and see the country for himself. They landed at Haifa on the eve of Passover and spent six weeks on Kibbutz Givat Brenner, where Ernst lived, and exploring the country. However, they remained ambivalent about making the move. In any case, it was becoming harder and harder for Jews in Germany to get a Palestine permit, especially if like Willy Cohn they were middle-aged. The Zionist movement, which controlled the distribution of permits, favoured those who were capable of manual labour or work on the land, or brought capital with them. It also preferred those who had shown a commitment to the Zionist idea by joining Zionist organizations or parties. In January 1934, Weizmann shocked James McDonald by expressing disdain for the mass of European Jews who did not fall into such categories. He ‘expressed his contempt for German Jews as a whole, his indifference to their fate, and for that matter, his indifference to the fate of millions of Jews elsewhere, just so long as a saving remnant could be preserved in Palestine’. The diminishing opportunities for emigration to Palestine and the bias towards the young had dramatic consequences. Jews like the Cohns who had bided their time now found it had run out. A wave of suicides swept through the ranks of elderly Zionists who realized their dream was thwarted.¹²²

It was not only getting harder to move to Palestine. One country after another erected barriers to the immigration of Jewish refugees. Consequently, Jews were now prepared to settle in places that they would formerly have scoffed at. The main emigration aid agency in Germany, the Hilfsverein, working with the JCA and HICEM, searched restlessly for havens, interceding with governments to increase numbers or prevent restrictions. In 1936, South Africa admitted about 2,500 German Jews, then slammed the door. Brazil accepted 1,000, then reneged on its agreement with HICEM. Even if it was possible to find a destination, it was becoming prohibitively costly to leave. Due to the drain on Germany’s foreign currency reserves, the Reichsbank lowered the threshold on personal wealth that was liable to the ‘flight tax’ from RM200 to RM50. Moreover, the valuation used 1933 as the benchmark. In order to cover the amount that the authorities insisted on receiving, prospective emigrants had to pay over such a large slice of what they realized in the sale of their assets that little remained with which to build a new life in another country. Furthermore, the exchange rate available to those seeking to leave the country permanently was skewed so that emigrants obtained half of what their Reichmarks were worth in 1933. By 1939, they could expect just 4 per cent of the foreign currency that their money would once have purchased. Unsurprisingly, those with substantial assets were inclined to hold on in the hope that they could survive in Germany with what they had rather than take a massive loss and have to start all over again with almost nothing.¹²³

Despite the election of the Popular Front government in May 1936, France maintained its restrictive immigration policy. However, the new administration made a serious effort to alleviate the conditions of the roughly 10,000 refugees still in the country and dependent on charity. Most importantly it allowed more of them to work. In a further attempt to liquidate the refugee problem, the colonial minister, Marius Moutet, proposed settling at least some on the French colonial island of Madagascar. This idea quickly attracted the enthusiastic attention of the Polish government, which was looking for places to send Jews considered surplus to the Polish economy. A joint Franco-Polish mission, largely comprising Jewish experts, went so far as to investigate the possibilities offered by the island. Finally, in May 1938, a new minister for the colonies, Georges Mandel (who was himself Jewish), definitively rejected the plan as unworkable and undesirable.¹²⁴

The only widening crack in the wall was opening into the USA. In US fiscal year 1935–6 the number of applicants receiving approval for an entry visa reached 25 per cent of the quota. In the following year, just under half of the available places were filled, a total of 10,815. This increase followed pressure on the State Department from the White House and lobbying by American Jewish organizations. However, the requirements for aspiring emigrants were so tough that only a fraction of applicants succeeded. Hopefuls had to pass a medical examination and show they possessed the means to support themselves or give proof that they had family in the States who would prevent them becoming a charge on the public purse. Consuls also insisted that emigrants had to buy their own ticket. This rule was intended to stop the importation of foreign labour, but took no account of the possibility that even respectable migrants would be so impoverished as to rely on relatives or contacts in the USA to pay their passage. Although consuls had a good deal of latitude in applying the rules, most stuck to the letter until they could no longer ignore the mayhem at their doorstep.¹²⁵

In December 1937, the Reichsvertretung opened a central office for Jewish emigration that brought together all the relevant agencies under one roof. The accelerating effort to get young people out of Germany testified eloquently to the sense that the community as a whole had no future. Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization, worked with the RV emigration section to send 12,000 unaccompanied children to Palestine between 1934 and 1939. Resources were poured into non-Zionist initiatives like the training farm at Gross-Breesen, although the scale of its achievements was pitifully small. In all, about 18,400 young people left Germany through such schemes. Jewish organizations also helped non-Aryan children to emigrate. The Paulusbund in Berlin, which looked after the interests of converts, joined with the British-based Inter-Aid Committee to provide education in Britain for 450 Christian children who had fallen foul of the Nuremberg Laws.¹²⁶

The pressure was unrelenting. Directives to exclude Jews from the economy empowered local Nazis, municipal officials, and the Gestapo to deny them the right to carry on trading or intimidate them into closing down their businesses. Under the policy of Aryanization, enterprises were transferred from Jewish ownership to Germans, often for a fraction of their true value. As the pace of Aryanization accelerated, even Germans who had looked askance at the violation of property rights felt compelled to join the gold rush or see rivals prosper. Jews who protested to the authorities against interference with their businesses were now more likely to be sent to a concentration camp than to get a sympathetic hearing from the Reich Economics Ministry. Yet Jews denied a licence to trade by the police continued to appeal to administrative courts and, to the annoyance of the SD, sometimes succeeded.¹²⁷

The result was the virtual collapse of Jewish economic activity outside a handful of large urban communities. The mayor of one small town in Hesse boasted that ‘There are now only just a few Jewish stores left in Bad Nauheim, but these will disappear as time passes.’ The county commissioner in Gelnhausen, also in Hesse, rejoiced that the economic influence of the Jews was ‘totally extinct’. Aside from a few exceptions, ‘commerce with Jews has ceased to exist’. Most of the Jews in the town were poor and miserable. ‘The Aryan population no longer gives them any attention and they live withdrawn from society.’ In other places, especially with a Catholic population, Jewish traders clung on. The gendarmerie officer in Cham, in eastern Bavaria, reported that the Jews were ‘still enjoying their sales to the rural population. The farmers here refuse to be enlightened, and they refuse to grasp the paramount aim.’ But the overall trend was all in one direction. As the SD office for the north-east of Germany reported at the start of 1938, Jews were leaving the countryside and moving to Berlin. The SD office for the south-east, based in Breslau, recorded the final dissolution of several small communities. The SD division for the north-west reported that over the previous year even wealthy Jews had left, ‘since in the rural countryside they have been stripped of almost any source of income’. Only in Munich was there a reverse pattern. The Munich Gestapo bragged that the anti-Jewish boycott was well enforced, accompanied by ‘compulsion to transfer businesses to Aryan hands’. Consequently, Jews were fleeing into rural areas where the recalcitrant Catholic population offered some degree of succour.¹²⁸

Schacht had resisted just such an onslaught but his ability to impose order on Aryanization and to prevent arbitrary or illegal acts had ebbed. Of rather more concern to Schacht personally, he was losing the battle against Göring for control of the economy. On 26 November 1937 he tendered his resignation as Reich minister for economics. Hitler, who now saw him as an obstruction, accepted his departure. Eight weeks later, he sacked Schacht from the presidency of the Reichsbank. To the French Ambassador, François-Poncet, the dismissal of Schacht was ‘a warning impossible to disregard’. Schacht’s departure sent a tremor of dread through the Jewish community. The Reichsvertretung warned that it would be impossible to maintain ‘orderly emigration’ unless Jews could continue to earn a living in Germany.¹²⁹

Around the time of Schacht’s resignation, Heydrich took stock. The SD Jewish desk estimated that there were 392,000 full Jews left in Germany, 412,000 if converts were included, plus 280,000 half and quarter Jews. Emigration was running at about 2,230 per month and some 107,000 Jews had already left. It was SD policy to achieve the ‘total elimination of assimilationism and promotion of emigration’. To do this it was necessary to overcome the resistance of Jews and destroy the support for them amongst Catholics and the Confessing Church. The report took note of the debate for and against the creation of a Jewish state and expressed the SD’s view that statehood would be regrettable ‘since the Jews could then pursue the boycott of National Socialism more intensively utilizing diplomatic means’.¹³⁰

Uncertainty over the future of Palestine did not cause the SD to falter for one moment in the application of pressure on the Jewish population. The Nazis were not Zionists in any conventional sense of the word: they did not care where Jews went when they left Germany, and treated Palestine as merely a dumping ground. If for any reason it ceased to be available they would force the Jews to go elsewhere. So the SD continued to up the tempo of anti-Jewish actions. Jews still able to practise in various professions, if only for Jewish clients, were now denied licences to work at all. Restaurants and inns were instructed no longer to serve Jews.¹³¹

The drift of policy was evident to foreign eyes. In April 1938, Pope Pius XI issued a papal encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, which condemned racism and race-based policies. The encyclical was chiefly intended to defend the prerogatives of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany and to register disquiet over policies of compulsory sterilization. It did not mention Jews explicitly, yet the restatement of Catholic principles in opposition to racial determinism threw a mantle of protection over converts. Jews took heart from the statement, while it emboldened Catholics.¹³²

Ambassador Dodd noted in his diary that ‘stricter observation and punishment of Jews is evident’. But he had virtually stopped trying to influence the policy-makers in Berlin. His isolation and powerlessness were increased when Sir Arthur Henderson replaced Phipps as British Ambassador. Henderson was an arch-appeaser and Dodd moaned to his diary that he ‘seemed not to be aware of British–American opposition to the ruthless Nazi treatment of Catholics, Protestant and Jews’. This was unfair to Henderson insofar as he knew only too well how much Jews were suffering; he just did not think it weighed very heavily against the more serious business of keeping Hitler off the war-path. On 29 December, Dodd left Germany for the last time. He returned to the United States with a sense of relief to be away from Berlin and a grim presentiment about what the future would bring. The passenger ship carrying him homeward also carried a large contingent of refugees setting off for new lives in America.¹³³

The Jews in Germany entered 1938 with a feeling of dread and growing helplessness. While the Vatican’s critique of National Socialism had provided a lift to morale, the departure of Schacht was devastating. This was not because of any false notion that he had been their champion or protector. Rather, it was because his displacement confirmed that the radicals were in the driving seat and that the trend to squeeze Jews out of any economic niches left to them was a centrally mandated and driven policy. Even so, Jews continued to resist. The World Jewish Congress took advantage of the fact that the Free City of Danzig was now the last part of Germany under League of Nations control to submit a petition to prevent the extension of the Nuremberg Laws into the province. The NSDAP had enjoyed an absolute majority in the Free State of Danzig’s legislature since June 1933, but final authority lay with a League-appointed commissioner and hundreds of Jews had moved from the Reich into the relative shelter of the port city. This precarious haven would survive a little longer.¹³⁴

Within the Reich itself, Jews abandoned any hope that National Socialism was ephemeral or vulnerable to domestic opposition. Victor Klemperer catalogued the growing acceptance of Nazism with a mixture of fascination, disbelief and horror. He observed how the traditional prejudices of ordinary Germans formed a bridge to the regime and eased their acquiescence. In October 1936, the local librarian, Fräulein Roth, visited him after he was banned from using the facility. She was ‘vehemently opposed to the Nazis’ but conceded that some of their anti-Jewish measures were fine. She told him ‘“If they had expelled the Eastern Jews or had excluded Jews from the bench, that at least would have been comprehensible.”’ To her their offence was not that they abrogated the civil and human rights of innocent citizens; they just went too far. A year later and Klemperer detected how the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft had become common sense, bringing with it the exclusion of certain groups without the need for conscious hatred. He noted the case of a man who was no ‘Jew-hater’ but articulated National Socialist ideas unthinkingly. ‘About the necessity of the community of the people, of distinct races; of the identity of the law and power, of the unquestionable superiority of the new German army … of the need to repel communism … the man is quite unaware of how much of a National Socialist he is … I said to myself once again, that Hitlerism is after all more deeply and firmly rooted in the nation and corresponds more to the German nature than I would like to admit.’¹³⁵

This did not mean that the security of the regime was assured against external shocks. Klemperer continued to hope that Hitler would launch a rash foreign policy adventure, stumble and fall. But even if Hitlerism passed, Klemperer felt irremediably alienated from the German nation: ‘my inner sense of belonging is gone’. He spoke for many others whose identity as German Jews had been smashed beyond repair.¹³⁶

Jews lived in ever greater isolation from the rest of the population. Looking back from exile, Heinemann Stern, the principal of a Jewish school in Berlin and a member of the executive of the Centralverein, saw his world shrinking by degrees. He was used to taking an annual holiday at Bad Reinerz, a mountain resort in Silesia that had once been patronized by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Stern liked to patronize a cafe that bore a plaque commemorating the composition of a much loved Mendelssohn song. But in 1937 he noticed that the plaque had gone. When he went to the toilet he found a sign saying ‘No Jews’. The innkeeper explained that he had put the sign there rather than deter Jewish customers from entering at all, although that did not make Stern feel any less uncomfortable. ‘Private relations – or, to be more precise, human relations in general – between us and our surroundings tore, loosened, vanished. The result was isolation, and in the end isolation is just another word for slow death.’¹³⁷

The indignities and loneliness were most acute in rural areas. Hans Winterfeldt was born in the small town of Lippehne in Brandenburg and was seven years old in 1933. The first attempt at a boycott of his father’s shop was ineffectual and business continued much as before. But by 1935 ‘it was impossible for us to spend much time in any public places’. For relief, each Christmas holiday Hans’ parents sent him to the capital with a group organized by the RjF. He noticed that ‘people didn’t take the Nazis seriously in Berlin’. People there told him ‘the Nazi regime would not be able to hold on much longer’. However, in 1937 his father saw no alternative to selling up and moving to Berlin, where he obtained a licence to work as a travelling salesman. In a tragi-comic footnote to this tale, some time after they arrived in Berlin his myopic grandmother got into trouble for sitting on a bench that was only for Aryans. She moved back to the village where she at least knew her way around.¹³⁸

A steady number of Jews responded to social death by taking their own lives. Each instance of suicide was regarded as a victory by National Socialists. In May 1937, the mayor of Amt Altenrüthen reported with evident satisfaction that ‘The Jew butcher Sally Pollack, resident here, committed suicide a few days ago by hanging himself.’¹³⁹

Jewish women experienced the mounting pressure differently to men. As the wider world contracted, the domestic environment became more important as a place of comfort and consolation. Domestic Jewish rituals, such as celebrating the Sabbath, offered a chance for parents to make their children feel that being Jewish was not merely a disadvantage or a burden. Mothers had to offer support and affirmation to make up for the cold, if not hostile, atmosphere experienced by children still getting an education in state schools. They inevitably took the lion’s share of this responsibility because their husbands were working or, increasingly, resided abroad.¹⁴⁰

For single women there were special dangers. A friendly or intimate relationship with a non-Jew could result in charges of Rassenschande. Gerta Pfeffer, a textile designer working in a weaving mill in southern Germany, dreaded overtures from ‘Aryan’ men. Paradoxically, the passage of the Nuremberg Laws made her feel even more vulnerable. ‘I was afraid to go home at night because I always feared encountering a group of unwanted admirers. By daylight they cursed me as a Jewess, and at night they wanted to kiss me. They were disgusting.’ The threat of punishment for making sexual overtures towards an Ayran could be used to coerce a Jewish woman into intimate relations. She could deny that she had acted voluntarily and accuse the male of initiating the encounter, but he could always claim he did not know the woman he was hitting on was a Jew and blame her for instigating the liaison. Rosy Geiger-Kullman remembered that ‘During the Hitler era I had the immense burden of rejecting brazen advances from SS and SA men. They often pestered me and asked for dates. Each time I answered: “I’m sorry that I can’t accept, I’m married.” If I had said I was a Jewess they would have turned the tables and insisted that I approached them.’ Since neither party to such a coercive relationship would want it known about, it is impossible to know how many Jewish women were cornered in this way. The situation was made harder for Jewish women because the shelters in public places, particularly railway stations, that were once run by the League of Jewish Women were shut down when the League’s activities were circumscribed.¹⁴¹

After the race laws were passed, the rate of denunciation for Rassenschande increased steadily. The annual number reported to the Würzburg Gestapo rose from three in 1934 to thirty-one in 1936, falling back to twenty-one in 1937 and twenty-eight in 1938. The dropping-off reflects the greater caution exercised by men and women and the effect of intimidation on relationships. Hans Kosterlitz, the managing director of a ‘fixed price shop’ in Uelzen, a small town in Lower Saxony, had to conduct his relationship with his girlfriend Trudi in secret. ‘We were truly playing with fire, but we were blind with passion. We were attempting something that in our situation amounted to challenging destiny itself.’ Hans passed up the chance to emigrate to Chile because of his love affair. Then, in 1935, a new employee in the shop began to pay attention to Trudi. He was in the SS and Hans found himself having to watch the courtship proceed under his nose without being able to do or say a thing. Finally Trudi ended his agony by taking up with the SS man. ‘Her weak character was broken by the atmosphere in which she was living. As for me, I had rescued my freedom, but at what a price! … I cursed Hitler and his bandits, who revelled in extortion, even when it touched on the most personal relations a man can ever know: love.’ Hans soon emigrated to Italy and from there to Shanghai.¹⁴²

The Nuremberg Laws empowered the authorities to inquire into what had once been the most private affairs of men and women and, by policing relationships, exert power. In October 1936, the District Office in Bad Brückenau, a spa town in northern Bavaria, became worried because of a large influx of Jews into two Jewish-owned hotels. Disturbed by the possibility that Jews might interfere with the young women employed in the two establishments, officials ordered the police to keep watch. Fortunately for the guests and the Jewish owners, ‘Despite very strict surveillance, it was not possible to confirm that there was race defilement in the Jewish hotels.’ The race laws made no distinction between business and pleasure. In Breslau four Jewish women of ‘ill repute’ were taken into custody and sent to a concentration camp. The Gestapo fumed that it was ‘absolutely intolerable that these women should engage in sexual intercourse with Aryan males in exchange for money’. The chief public prosecutor in Mannheim expressed concern over the case of a Jewish madam who was running a bordello even though the prostitutes were all Aryan. There was, however, a danger that the public might think that the prostitutes were giving their services to Jewish men. In the Third Reich, love did not vanquish everything. In Karls ruhe, in 1936, a shoe-maker was sentenced to several years in prison for having sexual relations with his Jewish girlfriend. Almost as soon as he was released he resumed the relationship. Somehow the authorities were informed that ‘he had sexual intercourse with her repeatedly’. He was re-arrested, tried, found guilty of Rassenschande a second time and sentenced to another lengthy prison term.¹⁴³