Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer Page B
Authors: Saul Friedländer
Tags: History
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combat the widely obtrusive and subversive Jewish influence on our popular life. We demand a Christian authority for the Christian people and Christian teachers for Christian pupils.” 116
The Conservatives, in other words, demanded the exclusion of Jews from any government position and from any influence on German education and culture. As for the main thrust of the forthcoming 1935 Nuremberg laws—segregation of the Jews according to racial criteria and placing of the Jewish community as such under “alien status”—this had already been demanded by radical Conservative anti-Semites, particularly by Heinrich Class, president of the Pan-Germanic League, in a notorious pamphlet, entitled Wenn ich der Kaiser wär ( If I Were the Kaiser ), published in 1912. Thus, although what was to become the Nazi program of action was a Nazi creation, the overall evolution of the German right-wing parties during the Weimar years gave birth to a set of anti-Jewish slogans and demands that the extreme nationalist parties (the DNVP in particular) shared with the Nazis.
The conservative state bureaucracy had sometimes anticipated Nazi positions on Jewish matters. The Foreign Ministry, for instance, tried, well before the Nazis came to power, to defend Nazi anti-Semitism. After January 1933, with the blessings of State Secretary Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow and Foreign Minister Neurath, senior officials of the Ministry intensified these efforts. 117 In the spring of 1933, anti-Jewish propaganda work in the Foreign Ministry was bolstered by the establishment of a new Department Germany (Referat Deutschland), to which this task was specifically given.
At the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, State Secretary Herbert von Bismarck of the DNVP participated in the anti-Jewish crusade with no less vehemence than Frick, the Nazi minister. Apparently stung by the recently published biography of his great-uncle Otto, the Iron Chancellor, by Emil Ludwig (his real name was Emil Ludwig Kohn), Bismarck demanded prohibition of the use of pseudonyms by Jewish authors. Moreover, as Bismarck put it, “national pride is deeply wounded by those cases in which Jews with Eastern Jewish names have adopted particularly nice German surnames, such as, for example, Harden, Olden, Hinrichsen, etc. I consider a review of name changes urgently necessary in order to revoke changes of that kind.” 118
On April 6, 1933, an ad hoc committee—following an initiative that probably originated in the Prussian Interior Ministry—started work on a draft for a Law Regulating the Position of the Jews. Again the German Nationals were heavily represented on the eight-member drafting committee. A copy of this draft proposal, sent in July 1933 to the head of Department Germany of the Foreign Ministry, remained in the archives of the Wilhelmstrasse. The draft suggests the appointment of a “national guardian” ( Volkswart ) for dealing with Jewish affairs and employs the term “Jewish council” ( Judenrat ) in defining the central organization that is to represent the Jews of Germany in their dealings with the authorities, particularly with the Volkswart . Already in the draft are many of the discriminatory measures that were to be taken later, 119 although at the time, nothing came of this initiative. Thus for part of the way at least, Nazi policies against the Jews were identical with the anti-Semitic agenda set by the German Conservatives several decades before Hitler’s accession to power. 120
And yet the curtailment of the economic measures against the Jews was also a conservative demand, and whatever exceptions were introduced into the April laws were instigated by the most prominent conservative figure of all, President Hindenburg. Hitler understood perfectly how essentially different his own anti-Jewish drive was from the traditional anti-Semitism of the old field marshal, and in his answer to Hindenburg’s request of April 4, regarding exceptions to the exclusion
The Conservatives, in other words, demanded the exclusion of Jews from any government position and from any influence on German education and culture. As for the main thrust of the forthcoming 1935 Nuremberg laws—segregation of the Jews according to racial criteria and placing of the Jewish community as such under “alien status”—this had already been demanded by radical Conservative anti-Semites, particularly by Heinrich Class, president of the Pan-Germanic League, in a notorious pamphlet, entitled Wenn ich der Kaiser wär ( If I Were the Kaiser ), published in 1912. Thus, although what was to become the Nazi program of action was a Nazi creation, the overall evolution of the German right-wing parties during the Weimar years gave birth to a set of anti-Jewish slogans and demands that the extreme nationalist parties (the DNVP in particular) shared with the Nazis.
The conservative state bureaucracy had sometimes anticipated Nazi positions on Jewish matters. The Foreign Ministry, for instance, tried, well before the Nazis came to power, to defend Nazi anti-Semitism. After January 1933, with the blessings of State Secretary Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow and Foreign Minister Neurath, senior officials of the Ministry intensified these efforts. 117 In the spring of 1933, anti-Jewish propaganda work in the Foreign Ministry was bolstered by the establishment of a new Department Germany (Referat Deutschland), to which this task was specifically given.
At the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, State Secretary Herbert von Bismarck of the DNVP participated in the anti-Jewish crusade with no less vehemence than Frick, the Nazi minister. Apparently stung by the recently published biography of his great-uncle Otto, the Iron Chancellor, by Emil Ludwig (his real name was Emil Ludwig Kohn), Bismarck demanded prohibition of the use of pseudonyms by Jewish authors. Moreover, as Bismarck put it, “national pride is deeply wounded by those cases in which Jews with Eastern Jewish names have adopted particularly nice German surnames, such as, for example, Harden, Olden, Hinrichsen, etc. I consider a review of name changes urgently necessary in order to revoke changes of that kind.” 118
On April 6, 1933, an ad hoc committee—following an initiative that probably originated in the Prussian Interior Ministry—started work on a draft for a Law Regulating the Position of the Jews. Again the German Nationals were heavily represented on the eight-member drafting committee. A copy of this draft proposal, sent in July 1933 to the head of Department Germany of the Foreign Ministry, remained in the archives of the Wilhelmstrasse. The draft suggests the appointment of a “national guardian” ( Volkswart ) for dealing with Jewish affairs and employs the term “Jewish council” ( Judenrat ) in defining the central organization that is to represent the Jews of Germany in their dealings with the authorities, particularly with the Volkswart . Already in the draft are many of the discriminatory measures that were to be taken later, 119 although at the time, nothing came of this initiative. Thus for part of the way at least, Nazi policies against the Jews were identical with the anti-Semitic agenda set by the German Conservatives several decades before Hitler’s accession to power. 120
And yet the curtailment of the economic measures against the Jews was also a conservative demand, and whatever exceptions were introduced into the April laws were instigated by the most prominent conservative figure of all, President Hindenburg. Hitler understood perfectly how essentially different his own anti-Jewish drive was from the traditional anti-Semitism of the old field marshal, and in his answer to Hindenburg’s request of April 4, regarding exceptions to the exclusion
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