Hitler and the Holocaust (8 page)

On the other hand, throughout the 1920s the Nazi vote remained modest. Even in the 1928 Reichstag elections, they obtained only eight hundred thousand votes and a mere twelve seats in parliament. National Socialist success in using antiSemitism seemed limited outside of regions where there was a preexisting historical tradition or local factors favoring it. Thus, antiSemitism resonated in Franconia, Hesse, Westphalia, and some areas of Bavaria but was relatively muted in the Rhineland, Baden, Württemberg, and Schleswig-Holstein. Even among ordinary Nazi Party members, only a hard-core minority (though a very vocal one) regarded antiSemitism as the critical issue. It was evidently less important than anti-Communism, nationalism, or the woes of unemployment in attracting new adherents to the movement. Nevertheless, in Nazi agitation among high-school and university students, antiSemitism was undoubtedly a crucial weapon in recruitment, helping the Nazis to “capture” a commanding position at German universities by 1930.
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Similarly, they had achieved some success among professional associations of physicians and teachers in spreading the anti-Jewish message. Since Jews in the Weimar Republic were well represented in the free professions, the universities, and cultural life, it was relatively easy to ignite competitive envy against them in these sectors.

Nazi penetration of the countryside and of urban middle-class groups just as the Great Depression began to bite in Germany after 1929 helps to explain the remarkable increase in their vote in the September 1930 elections. The movement leaped dramatically from 12 to 107 seats (18.3 percent of the total) in the Reichstag, making it the second largest party. In July 1932, the Nazis definitively emerged as the biggest party in the Reichstag, with 37.3 percent of the vote (230 seats),
which was their peak performance under strictly democratic conditions. The staggering shift in their fortunes had coincided with their emergence as a catchall party appealing to the unifying ideal of
Volksgemeinschaft
(national community). They appeared to be a movement that, unlike all its rivals, was able to transcend regional, class, religious, and party barriers. Though the Nazis made little impact on the solid electoral base of the Catholic and socialist parties, it did win over much of the youth vote, the disaffected
Mittelstand
, disillusioned supporters of the weakened middle-class parties, some sections of the unemployed, unskilled workers, and much of the farming constituency.
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To achieve such a broad appeal, Hitler focused his message more intensely around integral nationalism. Between 1930 and 1933, he temporarily toned down the full-blooded antiSemitism that lay at the core of his worldview.

Hitler had no difficulty in tailoring Nazi propaganda in order to attain power by legal means, once he recognized that antiSemitism was not his most effective issue or central to the electorate. Instead, he underlined his unswerving rejection of a parliamentary democracy that had palpably failed. He acknowledged the urgent need to regenerate economic life in the face of mass unemployment and adapted his message to the longing for stability, law, and order felt by so many ordinary Germans. Hitler knew how to play with uncanny skill on the chord of wounded German pride and national humiliation while holding out the promise of a redemptive reawakening that would lift Germans from their despair. AntiSemitism in this political context was a crucial policy adjunct, but it was not decisive. Nonetheless, it was employed with great effectiveness to exacerbate local grievances, to satisfy the radical anticapitalist urges of the SA (storm troopers) rank and file, and to reinforce street campaigns against the Marxist parties. Hitler was far too shrewd to allow it, though, to interfere in the complex political game that would bring him power in January 1933.

For a brief moment after the Nazi vote declined in the November 1932 elections, reducing their representation to 196 seats in the Reichstag, it seemed that they might have passed their peak. It was the backstage maneuverings of authoritarian conservative politicians, wealthy industrialists, and army leaders that unexpectedly opened the door to Hitler.
⁴⁵
This conservative camarilla hoped to manipulate the Nazis for their own narrow purposes and dreamed of dealing the deathblow to the Weimar parliamentary system and finally smashing the left-wing parties. They unwisely gambled on their ability to control events. These reactionary elites who had always despised the republic thought they could tame Hitler and convince him to do their bidding. Especially naïve in this respect was the former chancellor and Catholic Center Party politician Franz von Papen. He desperately needed Hitler’s electoral appeal to further his ambitions, since he lacked any popular support himself. Determined to take revenge on his hated rival, General Kurt von Schleicher, and to remove him from the chancellorship, Papen was eager to promote a coalition of nationalists and Nazis. He persuaded the aging President Paul von Hindenburg to accept this coalition.

On 30 January 1933, Hitler became chancellor and Papen his deputy in a cabinet that contained eight conservatives and only two Nazi ministers. But in the new age of mass politics, such cabinet arithmetic counted for relatively little. During this realignment, the Nazi “war against the Jews”—not for the first or the last time—was temporarily suspended. The “Jewish question,” so central to Hitler’s own concerns, was quietly subordinated to the immediate task of seizing power. But any illusions that the assumption of office might moderate Nazi policy toward the Jews were to be swiftly and cruelly dashed.

Hitler’s accession to power marked the end of Jewish emancipation in Germany. In the next six years, a whole century of Jewish integration into German society and culture would be comprehensively and brutally reversed. From the outset, the Nazis instituted terroristic policies directed
against political opponents and Jews, who were subjected to random violence by marauding gangs of SA thugs. On 1 April 1933, the German government officially proclaimed a one-day economic boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, organized by the fanatical Julius Streicher. It was ostensibly designed as a form of “self-defense” and a response to anti-German “atrocity stories” allegedly inspired by Jews abroad. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels asserted that the boycott was a “spontaneous,” grassroots action, but this was belied by the public response of Germans, which was decidedly mixed. For German Jews, it was, however, a tremendous shock to suddenly become the targeted victims of government-inspired hate and to be turned into hostages whose safety would henceforth be conditioned on the “good behavior” of their coreligionists in the outside world. Within less than a week, the new Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service pensioned off civil servants of “non-Aryan” origin. In deference to President Hindenburg’s sensitivities as a field marshal and war hero, Jewish war veterans (whose relatively large number appears to have surprised the Nazis) were temporarily exempted from this legislation. Separate laws disbarred 1,400 lawyers as well as 381 Jewish judges and state prosecutors. By the end of 1934, 70 percent of all Jewish lawyers and 60 percent of all Jewish notaries had been dismissed. By mid-1935, more than half the Jewish doctors in Germany had been removed from their profession. Within less than five years, the medical purge became total.
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Goebbels moved rapidly against thousands of Jewish academics, artists, journalists, and writers, some of whom were Nobel laureates or enjoyed international reputations. Albert Einstein was only the most celebrated among the many prominent scientists and intellectuals who emigrated. No fewer than two hundred Jewish academics followed suit in 1933 alone. Altogether in the first year of Nazi rule, about forty thousand Jews left Germany, those who were young and single having the best chance to begin a new life abroad. The
purges in the artistic and cultural spheres were especially swift. The new Chamber of Culture, established by Goebbels in September 1933, immediately excluded Jews from employment in theater, film, and music, and a National Press Law likewise prevented Jews from being journalists. The result was an unprecedented hemorrhaging of talent, with Germany’s loss a gain for the Western democracies, especially for Britain and America. This was not, however, the way the Nazis saw it. On 6 April 1933, Hitler had told representatives of the medical association in Berlin that the claim of Germany “to its own peculiar intellectual leadership must be met by the early elimination of the surplus Jewish intellectuals from cultural and intellectual life.”
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In May 1933, as if to underline the point, Goebbels solemnly declared at a book-burning ceremony in the capital that “the era of an exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is forever over.” The books of leading writers, both Jewish and Gentile but all considered “decadent” or opposed to Nazi ideology, were consigned to the flames in city squares all over the country, before excited crowds of Germans, with university students especially at the forefront. Alongside such well-known “Jewish” subversives as Marx, Freud, Einstein, Kurt Tucholsky, Heinrich Heine, and Leon Trotsky, the writings of non-Jews such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Erich Kästner, and H. G. Wells went up in smoke in a gigantic execution of what was now called “un-German literature.” In contrast to the economic boycott, neither the book burnings nor the purges in the arts or sciences elicited any public protests. The cultural “Aryanization” policy appeared to be popular, echoing a long-standing belief among many Germans that Jews were overrepresented in these areas. It held out the tempting promise of new career opportunities for ambitious non-Jewish Germans.

Jewish responses to this assault varied greatly. For some, the sudden vehemence of German antiSemitism after 1933 came as a total shock, and there were those who hoped that it
would pass away like a bad dream. Optimists easily persuaded themselves that Hitler was but a temporary aberration, a freak phenomenon who either would not last in office or would soon be forced by his blue-blooded coalition partners to moderate his policies. There were those who had built up family businesses over generations or were too deeply attached to the German language and culture to envisage any alternatives. There were the elderly, for whom a fresh start seemed inconceivable. Then there were the excessively well established, who had too much property to lose. Even after six years of humiliating and degrading persecution, philologist Victor Klemperer, an assimilated, converted German Jew, could write the following in his diary.

Until 1933 and for at least a good century before that, the German Jews were entirely German and nothing else. Proof: the thousands and thousands of half-and quarter-Jews
etc.
Jews and “persons of Jewish descent”, proof that Jews and Germans lived and worked together without friction in all spheres of German life. The antisemitism which was always present is not at all proof to the contrary, because the friction between Jews and “Aryans” was not half so great as, for example, that between Protestants and Catholics, or between employers and employees, or between East Prussians, for example, and southern Bavarians, or Rhine-landers and Berliners. The German Jews were a part of the German nation, as the French Jews were part of the French nation
etc.
They played their part within the life of Germany, by no means as a burden on the whole. Their role was rarely that of the worker, still less of the agricultural labourer. They were, and remain (even though now they no longer wish to remain so), Germans, in the main intellectuals and educated people.
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For thoroughly Germanized Jews, the “Jewish question” was altogether artificial, based on a zoological concept of “blood purity” that had no connection with reality. Hence it is not surprising that Klemperer despised the Zionist solution to the Jewish problem as “something for sectarians,” a historical
throwback and absurdity that was “contrary to nature,” not to say a crime against reason. “It seems complete madness to me,” he observed, “if specifically Jewish states are now to be set up in Rhodesia or somewhere. That would be letting the Nazis throw us back thousands of years.”
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But it was those like Klemperer, clinging on at all costs in Germany, who seemed increasingly out of touch with events. Nearly 10 percent of German Jews had already fled the country by the end of 1933, mostly to neighboring France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Holland, though these lands were themselves in the grip of economic depression, and Jewish refugees were not exactly welcomed. Moreover, as refugees, they had to forfeit much of their property, which had been confiscated by the German authorities, making emigration much more difficult. The Nazis cynically judged that the more destitute Jewish refugees appeared to be, the more of a burden they would become on potential host countries, thereby stirring up anti-Semitic sentiments there. The immigration quotas and closed-door policy of the United States and many other countries—including Canada, Australia, and South Africa, which had large territories and sparse populations within the British dominions—seemed to confirm their assessment. Nevertheless, about 200,000 Jews left Germany within the first six years of Nazi rule, and another 82,000 emigrated from Austria in 1938. Out of all these Jewish refugees, the largest single group (132,000) found new homes in the United States; 55,000 Jews emigrated to British-controlled Palestine, 40,000 to England, 20,000 to Argentina and Brazil; 9,000 went to Shanghai, 7,000 were accepted in Australia, and another 5,000 in South Africa. But the absolute figures are deceptive unless one takes into account the size, population, and resources of the host countries.

Palestine, as the “Jewish National Home” designated by the League of Nations, appeared for the first time to be an increasingly realistic prospect for many German Jews. By then, alternative options were shrinking fast. Jewish emigration to
Palestine was indeed initially encouraged by the Nazis as a way of making Germany
Judenrein
(free of Jews).
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The Third Reich even signed a “transfer” agreement (
Ha’avara
) with the Zionist leadership of Palestinian Jewry (the Jewish Agency), which permitted Jews to take out a portion of their capital in the form of German goods. This much-criticized deal enabled thousands of German Jews to emigrate to Palestine, where they significantly strengthened the Jewish community through an influx of educated manpower and technical and organizational skills. Although the new immigrants received only a portion of their money, they were nonetheless better off than if they had emigrated to other destinations, where no such arrangements were in place. Above all, their lives were saved, since they were physically farther removed from the Reich than those in neighboring European countries were. Of course, had the British Eighth Army not defeated Rommel in late 1942 in the deserts of North Africa, even that outcome might have been less fortunate.