Source: Saul Friedlaender, Chapter 3 in: Nazi Germany and the Jews , Vol. I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, (New York 1997), p. 73-112.
I
On the afternoon of November 9, 1918, Albert Ballin, the Jewish owner of the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, took his life. Germany had lost the war, and the Kaiser, who had befriended him and valued his advice, had been compelled to abdicate and flee to Holland, while in Berlin a republic was proclaimed. On the thirteenth, two days after the Armistice, Ballin was buried at Ohlsdorf, a suburb of Hamburg. In the midst of revolution,' writes Ballin's biographer, the city paused to pay tribute to its most distinguished citizen, and from Amerongen the ex-Kaiser telegraphed his condolences to Frau Ballin.' 1
Ballin's life and death were but one last illustration of the paradoxical existence of the Jews of Germany during the Second Reich. Some had achieved remarkable success but were held at arm's length; many felt ΓÇ£at home in GermanyΓÇ¥, but were perceived as strangers; almost all were loyal citizens but engendered suspicion. Thus two years before the collapse, on October 11, 1916, by which time the military situation had reached a complete stalemate, the Prussian war minister signed a decree ordering a census of all Jews in the armed forces to determine... how many Jews subject to military duty were serving in every unit of the German armies.' 2 The War Ministry explained that it was continually receiving complaints from the population that large numbers of men of the Israelite faith who are fit for military service are either exempt from military duties or are evading their obligation to serve under every conceivable pretext.' 3 The census was held on November 1, 1916.
From the beginning of the war, the Jews of Germany had, like all other Germans, joined the army; very soon a number of them became officers. For the caste like Prussian officer corps in particular, this was a bitter pill to swallow, and officer organisations turned to anti-Semitic groups to find ways of putting an end to these promotions 4 . A wave of rumors, originating both within and outside the army, described Jewish soldiers as lacking in ability and courage, and accused Jews in great numbers of shirking frontline duty, settling into rear-echelon office jobs or flocking into the ΓÇ£war economy corporationsΓÇ¥ established for the acquisition of raw materials and food supplies 5 .
The industrialist Walther Rathenau, who was Jewish, had in fact become the head of the new War Resources Department in the War Ministry; and on the initiative of Ballin, the bankers Max Warburg and Carl Melchior (also Jewish), the Central Purchasing Company was established for acquiring foreign food products through a network of war corporations. According to extreme nationalist Germans, these corporations were becoming instruments of Jewish speculation and exploitation of the nation in its time of peril: The war profiteers were first of all essentially Jews,' wrote Gen. Erich Ludendorff in his memoirs. They acquired a dominant influence in the ΓÇ£war operationsΓÇ¥... which gave them the occasion to enrich themselves at the expense of the German people and to take possession of the German economy, in order to achieve one of the power goals of the Jewish people.' 6 Hitler, in Mein Kampf , wrapped it all up in his own typical style: The general mood [in the army] was miserable. ...The offices were filled with Jews. Nearly every clerk was a Jews and nearly every Jew was a clerk...As regards economic life, things were even worse. Here the Jewish people had become really ΓÇ£indispensable.ΓÇ¥ The spider was slowly beginning to such the blood out of the people's pores. Through the war corporations, they had found an instrument with which, little by little, to finish off the nation's free economy.' 7
Due to the professional structure of the Jewish population, approximately 10 percent of the directors of the war corporations were Jews 8 . Continuous anti-Jewish attacks induced a Catholic Center deputy, Matthias Erzberger, to demand a Reichstag inquiry 9 . He was supported by a coalition of liberals and conservatives. Even some Social Democrats joined in 10 . It was in this atmosphere that the Prussian War Ministry announced its decision to conduct its census of Jews ( Judenzaehlung ).
The Jews reacted, but only meekly. Warburg, then already one of the most influential Jews in imperial Germany, met with War Minister Stein in March 1917 to ask for the release of a statement that Jews were fighting as bravely as other Germans. Stein refused, and in order to underline the Jewish traits he most disliked, lectured Warburg about Heinrich Heine 11 .
The results of the census were not published during the war, ostensibly out of consideration for the Jews, as they were termed ΓÇ£devastatingΓÇ¥ by officials of the War Ministry 12 . Immediately after the Armistice, pseudo results were leaked to the radical anti-Semitic Voelkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund by the Jew-hating General Wrisberg and used as anti-Jewish propaganda on a massive scale 13 . Only at the beginning of the 1920s did a systematic study of the material show it to be the greatest statistical monstrosity of which an administration had ever been responsible.' 14 Detailed analysis indicated that Jewish participation in frontline service was equivalent to that of the general population, with a minimal deviation due to age and occupational structure. The damage had nonetheless been done.
Ernst Simon, who had volunteered for the army to find a sense of community with the German nation, perceived that the Judenzaehlung was more than the initiative of some malevolent officials. It was the real expression of a real mood: that we were strangers, that we did not belong, that we had to be specially tagged, counted, registered and dealt with.' 15 Walther Rathenau wrote to a friend in the summer of 1916: The more Jews are killed [in action] in this war, the more obstinately their enemies will prove that they all sat behind the front in order to deal in war speculation. The hatred will grow twice and threefold.' 16
After almost two decade of relative latency, the Jewish issue had resurfaced in full force in German political life during the 1912 Reichstag elections, which were soon dubbed the ΓÇ£Jewish electionsΓÇ¥ ( Judenwahlen ) 17 . The real political issue was the growth of the Left. However, as the Jews - opposed to (and by) the Conservatives and disappointed by the stand taken toward them by the National Liberals - turned to the Progressives and, in particular, to the Social Democrats, they became identified with the left-wing peril 18 .
The elections marked the disappearance of the anti-Semitic splinter parties and represented a significant setback for the Conservative right. The Social Democrats emerged as the strongest single party on the German scene, more than doubling their number of seats in the Reichstag from 53 to 110. Of the 300 candidates favored by organisations in which Jews were prominent, 88 were elected 19 . These results proved that the majority of the voters did not manifestly harbour intense anti-Jewish feelings, but the reaction of the Right was different and immediate. It had become obvious to the right-wing press that Jewish money and the Jewish spirit were in control of the ΓÇ£goldΓÇ¥ and the ΓÇ£redΓÇ¥ internationals, those two most dangerous enemies of the German nation. Even for a publication as close to the Lutheran Church as the Christlichsoziale Reichsbote , the workers who voted for the Social Democrats were ΓÇ£driven by the Jewish whipΓÇ¥ held by ΓÇ£the manipulators of international Jewish capitalism.ΓÇ¥ 20
Frantic activity now spread throughout the extreme right, with approximately twenty new ultra-nationalist and racist organisations springing up on the political scene. Some of them, such as the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden, were coalitions of previously existing groups 21 . Among larger groups, the evolution of the Pan-German League is particularly telling. In his previously mentioned 1912 pamphlet, If I Were the Kaiser , league press Heinrich Class fully spelledout a program for the complete expulsion of the Jews from German public life - that is, from public office, from the liberal professions, and from banks and newspapers. Jews would lose the right to own land. Jewish immigration would be banned, and all Jewish non-citizens deported. Those who were citizens would be subject to ΓÇ£alien StatusΓÇ¥ ( Fremdenrecht ). A Jew would be defined as a person belonging to the Jewish religious community on January 18, 1871, the day the German Empire was proclaimed, as would all the descendants of such persons, even if only one grandparent was Jewish 22 .
A few months later a memorandum was submitted to the crown prince, Wilhelm II's eldest son, by another member of the league, Konstantin von Gebsattel; it proposed the same measures against the Jews as well as a ΓÇ£coup d'etatΓÇ¥ to put an end to parliamentarianism in Germany. The crown prince - who later would become a member of the SS - was ΓÇ£captivatedΓÇ¥ by Gebsattel's memorandum and transmitted it to his father and to Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Himself a strange mix of traditional conservatism and radical right-wing opinions 23 , the Kaiser was dismissive. He considered Gebsattel an ΓÇ£oddball,ΓÇ¥ the Pan-Germans who supported such plans ΓÇ£dangerous people,ΓÇ¥ and the idea of excluding the Jews from public life ΓÇ£downright childishΓÇ¥; Germany would be cutting itself off from civilized nations. The chancellor was more deferential to the crown prince, but no less negative 24 .
The Association Against Jewish Arrogance (Verband gegen die Ueberhebung des Judentums) was established on February 11, 1912, by the remnants of the old anti-Semitic parties and various other anti-Semitic organisations. Its aim was the creation, under nationalist auspices, of a mass movement to achieve political change. One of their top priorities was to exclude the Jewish ΓÇ£raceΓÇ¥ from the nation's public life. The founding of the association, clearly linked to the 1912 elections, was but one more manifestation of the new right's determined ΓÇ£defenceΓÇ¥ against Juda .' 25
II
Jews never represented more than approximately 1 percent of Germany's overall population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between the beginning of the century and 1933, that percentage slightly declined. The Jewish community, however, gained in visibility by gradually concentrating in the large cities, keeping to certain professions, and absorbing an increasing number of easily identifiable East European Jews 26 .
The general visibility of the Jews in Germany was enhanced by their relative importance in the ΓÇ£sensitiveΓÇ¥ areas of business and finance, journalism and cultural activities, medicine and the law, and, finally, by their involvement in liberal and left-wing politics. The social discrimination to which the Jews were subjected, and their own striving for advancement and acceptance, easily explain their patterns of activity. Interpreted as Jewish subversion and domination, these patterns in turn led, at least in parts of German society, to further hostility and rejection.
Of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thirty were Jewish-owned. Later on Bismarck asked the Rothschilds to recommend a private banker (it was to be Gerson Bleichroeder), and Kaiser Wilhelm I chose for himself the banker Moritz Cohn. When, at the turn of the century, many private banks became shareholding companies Jews frequently held a controlling percentage of the shares or served as directors of the new enterprises. Add the banking aristocracy of the Warburgs, the Arnholds, the Friedlaender-Fulds, the Simons, the Weinbergs, and so on, to such financial potentates as chain-store owners Abraham Wertheim and Leonhard and Oskar Tietz, founding electrical industrialist Emil Rathenau, publisher Rudolf Mosse, and shipping magnate Albert Ballin, and it becomes obvious that Jews held an eminent and visible place in the financial world of imperial Germany 27 .
The Jewish economic elite's particular function during the nineteenth century had been its decisive role in capital mobilisation and concentration through development of the Berlin stock market 28 , and linkage of the still relatively parochial German economy with world markets 29 . The centrality of ΓÇ£JewishΓÇ¥ banking during the Weimar period did not decrease 30 , contrary to what has sometimes been argued. But there was no correlation between Jewish economic activity and any kind of lasting political influence in German society.
Culture was possibly the most sensitive domain. In March 1912 a telling exchange was triggered by an article written by a young Jewish intellectual, Moritz Goldstein, and published in the arts journal Kunstwart under the title ΓÇ£Deutsch-juedischer ParnassΓÇ¥ (German-Jewish Parnassus). As Goldstein put it, We Jews administer the spiritual possessions of a people that denies us the right and the capability of doing so.' 31 After admitting to Jewish influence on the press and in the literary world, Goldstein re-emphasised the insuperable rift between the Jewish ΓÇ£adminstratorsΓÇ¥ of German culture, who believed they were speaking for and to the Germans, and the Germans themselves, who considered such presumption insufferable. What, then, was the way out? Zionism, Goldstein thought, was not option for people of his background and generation. In an emotional and most emphatic fashion, he called instead for an act of courage on the part of the Jews of Germany: that, in spite of their deep feelings for Germany and all things German, in spite of their centuries-long presence in the land, they must turn their backs on the host society and stop vowing ever-renewed and ever-unrequited love 32 . On the cultural level Jews should now turn to Jewish issues, not only for their own sake but to create a new type of Jew, new not in life but in literature.' 33 Goldstein's closing was on an emotional par with the rest: We demand recognition of a tragedy that, with a heavy heart, we have exposed to all.' 34
Goldstein's sharp diagnosis/tearful lament induced the editor of Kunstwart , Ferdinand Avenarius, to produce in the August issue a long comment entitled ΓÇ£Aussprachen mit JudenΓÇ¥ (Debates with Jews). We are not anti-Semites,' he wrote. We know that there are domains in which the Jews are more able than we are, and that we have greater ability in others; we hope that with good will on both sides, peaceful co-operation will be possible, but we are convinced that relations cannot continue much longer in their present form.' Avenarius called for some sort of ΓÇ£negotiationΓÇ¥ between ΓÇ£leadersΓÇ¥ of both sides in order to avoid bitter cultural battles [ Kulturkaempfe ]...Given the growing excitement [Avenarius did not specify whose],' he did not believe that success could easily be achieved 35 . The argument was clear, the ΓÇ£weΓÇ¥ and ΓÇ£theyΓÇ¥ even clearer. But as to the basic facts (though obviously not their interpretation), both Goldstein and (implicitly) Avenarius were not entirely wrong.
As for the press ΓÇô excluding the great number of conservative and specifically Christian newspapers and periodicals, as well as most of the regional papers - there was, on the national level, a strong Jewish presence in ownership, editorial responsibility, and major cultural or political commentary. Rudolf Mosse's publishing empire included the Berliner Tageblatt , the Morgenzeitung , the Volkszeitung , and the Boersenblatt . The Ullstein family owned the Neues Berliner Tageblatt , the Abendpost , the Illustrierte Zeitung , and B.Z. am Mittag , ΓÇ£the first German paper based completely on street sales.ΓÇ¥ 36 The paper with the largest circulation, the Morgenpost , also belonged to Ullstein, as eventually did the Vossische Zeitung , ΓÇ£Berlin's oldest newspaper.ΓÇ¥ 37 Among the three most prominent publishers who took the largest share of the pre-1914 daily press - Mosse, Ullstein, and Scherl - the first two were Jews 38 . The relative importance of these three publishers would be altered somewhat in the twenties by the acquisition of Scherl by the ultra-right-wing Alfred Hugenberg and by the consequent rapid expansion of press holdings.
The editors in chiand main editorial writers of many of the most influential newspapers (such as Theodor Wolff, editor of the Berliner Tageblatt ; Georg Bernhard, editor of the Vossische Zeitung ; and Bernhard Guttmann, the influential Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung ), were Jews, as were dozens of other political commentators, cultural critics, and satirists in a wide array of dailies and periodicals 39 .
In book publishing Mosse and Ullstein were major figures, as was Samuel Fischer, who founded his publishing house in Berlin in 1886. Fischer, as important in the history of modern German literature as, for example, Random House or Scribner's in the United States, published Thomas Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Hermann Hesse, among others 40 .
Along with the Jewish publishers and editors in chief, there was a solid group of Jewish readers and theater- and concertgoers. A striving for Bildung (culture/education) had turned the Jewish bourgeoisie into the self-appointed (and ecstatic) carrier of German culture. Writing in December 1896 about the first performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's play Die versunkene Glocke (The Sunken Bell), Baroness Hildegard von Spitzemberg noted in her diary: The house was packed with Jews and Jew-companions and with the representatives of press and literature: Maximilian Harden, Hermann Sudermann, Erich Schmidt, Theodor Fontane, Ludwig Pietsch, the last [two] of whom, however, shook their heads disapprovingly and did not join in the frenetic applause of the poet's [playwright's] supporters.' 41 Fontane and Pietsch were non-Jews.
References:
1. Lamar Cecil, Albert Ballin: Business and Politics in Imperial Germany 1888ΓÇô1918 (Princeton, N.J., 1967), p. 347. Cecil does not decide whether the overdose of sleeping pills was intentional or not. At the end of his novel A Princess in Berlin . Arthur R. G. Solmssen appends the (untitled) afterword: On August 31, 1935, the Board of Directors of the Hamburg-Amerika Line announced that henceforth the SS Albert Ballin would carry the name SS Hansa .' Arthur R. G. Solmssen, A Princess in Berlin (Hamondsworth, England, 1980). I am grateful to Sue Llewellyn for this information.
2. Werner T. Angress, ΓÇ£The German Army's Judenzaehlung' of 1916: GenesisΓÇôConsequencesΓÇôSignificance.ΓÇ¥ LBIY 23 ([London] 1978): 117ff. See also Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Goettingen, 1969), pp. 528ff.
3. Werner T. Angress, ΓÇ£The German Army's Judenzaehlung,ΓÇ¥ p. 117.
4. Werner Jochmann, ΓÇ£Die Ausbreitung des Antisemtismus,ΓÇ¥ in Werner E. Mosse, ed., Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916ΓÇô1923 (Tuebingen, 1971), p. 421.
5. Ibid., p. 423.
6. Saul Friedlaender, ΓÇ£Political Transformation During the War and their Effect on the Jewish Question,ΓÇ¥ Herbert A. Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernisation: Studies on Modern Anti-Semitism 1870ΓÇô1933/39: GermanyΓÇôGreat BritainΓÇôFrance (Berlin, 1993), p. 152.
7. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (London, 1974), p. 193.
8. Friedlaender, ΓÇ£Political Transformations,ΓÇ¥ p. 152.
9. Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik , p. 525.
10.Ibid., in particular note 42.
11.Chernow, The Warburgs , p. 172.
12.Jochmann, ΓÇ£Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,ΓÇ¥ p. 427.
13.Ibid.
14.Ibid., p. 426. Jochmann quotes the classic study by the Jewish statistician and demographer Franz Oppenheimer, Die Judenstatistik des Preussischen Kriegsministeriums (Munich, 1922).
15.Ernst Simon, Unser Kriegserlebnis (1919) , quoted in Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik , p. 533.
16.Rathenau to Schwaner, August 4, 1916, quoted in Jochmann, ΓÇ£Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,ΓÇ¥ p. 427.
17.See especially Werner T. Angress, ΓÇ£The Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912 on the Jewish Question: A Synthesis,ΓÇ¥ LBIY 28 (1983): 367ff.
18.For the shift of the Jewish vote, its dynamics and political significance, see ibid., p. 373ff., as well as Marjorie Lamberti, Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: The Struggle for Civil Equality (New Haven, Conn., 1978), and Jacob Toury's classic study, Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland: Von Jena bis Weimar (Tuebingen, 1966).
19.Angress, ΓÇ£Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912,ΓÇ¥ p. 381.
20.Ibid., p. 390.
21.Uwe Lohalm, Voelkischer Radikalismus: Die Geschichte des deutsch-voelkischen Schutz-und-Trutz-Bundes 1919ΓÇô1923 (Hamburg, 1970), p. 30.
22.Daniel Frymann, Das Kaiserbuch: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten , 7th ed. (Leipzig, 1925), pp. 69ff.
23.For the distinction between the traditional and the new trends in German nationalism after 1912, see Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866ΓÇô1918 , vol. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich, 1992), pp. 606ff. For the Kaiser's sometimes rabid anti-Jewish outbursts, see John C. G. Roehl's ΓÇ£Das beste waere Gas!ΓÇ¥ Die Zeit , Nov. 25, 1994.
24.Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886ΓÇô1914 (Boston, 1984), p. 287.
25.Angress, ΓÇ£Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912,ΓÇ¥ p. 396.
26.In 1925 66.8 percent of all German Jews lived in the major cities, with Frankfurt and Berlin first and second in Jewish population. In 1871 36,326 Jews lived in the Greater Berlin area, accounting for 3.9 percent of a population of 931,984. In 1925 the official census for the same area indicated 172,672 Jews, or 4.3 percent of a general population of 4,024,165 (in Frankfurt that year, the Jewish population represented 6.3 percent). The number of Jews in Berlin was, in fact, probably higher than indicated by the official census, since many Jews did not register with Jewish communal organisations (the basis for the census), and a number of East European Jews were not registered anywhere at all. According to some estimates, as many as 20,000 Jews, or approximately 5 percent of the general population, were living in Greater Berlin in the immediate post war period. Gabriel Alexander, ΓÇ£Die Entwicklung der juedischen Bevoelkerung in Berlin zwischen 1871 und 1945,ΓÇ¥ Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fuer Deutsche Geschichte , vol. 20 (Tel Aviv, 1991), pp. 287ff., an particularly pp. 292ff. Such urban concentration was enhanced by the high visibility of East European Jews in the major German cities. Jews from the East had long been in Germany and Austria, arriving in particular after the late-eighteenth-century partitions of Poland and the annexation of Polish territory by both Prussia and Austria. A hundred years later, from 1881 on, a decisive change took place, with the beginning of a series of major pogroms against Jewish communities in the western provinces of czarist Russia. A mass exodus of JewsΓÇômost of them heading to the United StatesΓÇôfrom Russian-Polish territory began. Of the 2,750,000 Jews who left Easter Europe for overseas between 1881 and 1914, a large proportion passed through Germany, mostly in the direction of the northern seaports Bremen and Hamburg, with a small number remaining in the country. For a detailed account see Shalom Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1880ΓÇô1940 (Tuebingen, 1959). At the same time a more substantial number of Galician and Romanian Jews settled in Austria, especially in Vienna. In 1900 7 percent of the Jews in Germany were Ostjuden , the percentage of East European Jews growing to 19.1 by 1925 and 19.8 by 1933. Ibid., p. 165. Moreover, their concentration in the large cities progressed at a rate faster than that of German Jewry's overall urbanization. In 1925 Eastern Jews represented 25.4 percent of Berlin's Jewish population, 27 percent of Munich's, 60 percent of Dresden's, and 80.7 percent of Leipzig's. Ibid.
27.See mainly Werner E. Mosse, ΓÇ£Die Juden in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,ΓÇ¥ in Werner E. Mosse, ed., Juden im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890ΓÇô1914 (Tuebingen, 1976), pp. 69ff, 75ff.
28.Werner E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820ΓÇô1935 (Oxford, 1987), p. 396.
36.These details and the quotations are taken from Ralph Max Engelman's Ph. D. dissertation, ΓÇ£Dietrich Eckart and the Genesis of NazismΓÇ¥ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1971) pp. 31ΓÇô32.
37.Ibid.
38.Ibid., p. 32.
39.Maximilian Harden's Die Zukunft was ΓÇ£Jewish,ΓÇ¥ and so was Siegfried Jacobsohn's Schaubuehne (later Weltbuehne ). Otto Brahm's Freie Buehne fuer modernes Leben , succeeded by the Neue Rundschau , was ΓÇ£Jewish,ΓÇ¥ as were the leading cultural critics of the major daily papers, Fritz Engel, Alfred Kehr, Max Osborn, and Oskar Bies. Engelman, ibid. Soon Kurt Tucholsky would become the most visibleΓÇôand the most hatedΓÇôjournalist-author of Jewish origin of the Weimar years. Siegried Breslauer would be associate editor of the Berliner Lokalanzeiger , Emil Faktor editor in chief of the Berliner Boersen-Courier , Norbert Falk, cultural affairs editor of the B.Z. am Mittag , Joseph Wiener-Braunsberg editor of Ulk , the satirical supplement of the Berliner Tagblatt , and many more. Bernd Soesemann, ΓÇ£Liberaler Journalismus in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik,ΓÇ¥ in Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Juden als Traeger buergerlicher Kultur in Deutschland (Bonn, 1989), p. 245.
