Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer Page A

M.’s relatives and on aspects of her own physical appearance, led to most positive results. The report excluded any signs of Jewishness. Although Fräulein M. had “a narrow, high and convexly projecting nose,” it concluded that she had inherited the nose from her father (not from the grandmother burdened with the name Goldmann) and thus was a pure Aryan. 111
    In September 1933 Jews were forbidden to own farms or engage in agriculture. That month the establishment, under the control of the Propaganda Ministry, of the Reich Chamber of Culture, enabled Goebbels to limit the participation of Jews in the new Germany’s cultural life. (Their systematic expulsion, which would include not only writers and artists but also owners of important businesses in the cultural domain, was for that reason delayed until 1935.) 112 Also under the aegis of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, Jews were barred from belonging to the Journalists’ Association and, on October 4, from being newspaper editors. The German press had been cleansed. (Exactly a year later, Goebbels recognized the right of Jewish editors and journalists to work, but only within the framework of the Jewish press.) 113
    In Nazi racial thinking, the German national community drew its strength from the purity of its blood and from its rootedness in the sacred German earth. Such racial purity was a condition of superior cultural creation and of the construction of a powerful state, the guarantor of victory in the struggle for racial survival and domination. From the outset, therefore, the 1933 laws pointed to the exclusion of the Jews from all key areas of this utopian vision: the state structure itself (the Civil Service Law), the biological health of the national community (the physicians’ law), the social fabric of the community (the disbarring of Jewish lawyers), culture (the laws regarding schools, universities, the press, the cultural professions), and, finally, the sacred earth (the farm law). The Civil Service Law was the only one of these to be fully implemented at this early stage, but the symbolic statements they expressed and the ideological message they carried were unmistakable.
    Very few German Jews sensed the implications of the Nazi laws in terms of sheer long-range terror. One who did was Georg Solmssen, spokesman for the board of directors of the Deutsche Bank and son of an Orthodox Jew. In an April 9, 1933, letter addressed to the bank’s board chairman, after pointing out that even the non-Nazi part of the population seemed to consider the new measures “self-evident,” Solmssen added: “I am afraid that we are merely at the beginning of a process aiming, purposefully and according to a well-prepared plan, at the economic and moral annihilation of all members, without any distinctions, of the Jewish race living in Germany. The total passivity not only of those classes of the population that belong to the National Socialist Party, the absence of all feelings of solidarity becoming apparent among those who until now worked shoulder to shoulder with Jewish colleagues, the increasingly more obvious desire to take personal advantage of vacated positions, the hushing up of the disgrace and the shame disastrously inflicted upon people who, although innocent, witness the destruction of their honor and their existence from one day to the next—all of this indicates a situation so hopeless that it would be wrong not to face it squarely without any attempt at prettification.” 114

    There was some convergence between the expressions of the most extreme anti-Semitic agenda of German conservatives at the beginning of the century and the Nazi measures during the early years of the new regime. In his study of the German Civil Service, Hans Mommsen pointed to the similarity between the “Aryan paragraph” of the Civil Service Law of April 1933 and the Conservative Party’s so-called Tivoli program of 1892. 115 The program’s first paragraph declared: “We