Source: D. Kramer, 'Jewish Welfare Work under the Impact of Pauperisation', in: A. Paucker, (ed.), The Jews in Nazi Germany 1933 - 1943 , (Tuebigen, 1986), pp. 173 - 188
Introduction
Jewish welfare work in Germany under the conditions of pauperisation 1933-1939 constitutes a remarkable chapter in the history of modern European social work 1 . One reason for this is the remarkable nature of the pauperisation to which German Jews were subjected under the Nazi regime. Pauperisation was the intended result of a dynamic government policy which, in time, affected all persons who could be identified as Jews, even those who would otherwise not only have been able to provide for themselves and their own families, but who could also have provided considerable support for the maintenance of less fortunate members of their own group at no direct cost to the government. Welfare efforts by Jews were not allowed to succeed in the sense of actually stabilising the economic foundations upon which the life of German Jewry rested.
However, the achievements of German Jewry in the field of social welfare during the Third Reich were nonetheless remarkable. Despite the systematic destruction of the Jewish economic basis, Jewish welfare organisations were able to maintain - and partially even expand - some of the most important services, which had been built up during better times. In addition, strong emphasis was placed on helping Jews to emigrate from Germany - a task which proved to be the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of people, but which had little to do with traditional conceptions of welfare work.
The heroic efforts of the Jewish welfare organisations to improve the lives of persecuted and traumatised people have been the object of relatively little systematic research - virtually none from the German side. This is probably in part because such efforts are overshadowed by the sheer enormity of the "Holocaust". In retrospect, one's attention seems drawn almost automatically towards those institutions and initiatives, which helped to get Jews out of Germany - everything else appearing illusory and futile.
The purpose of this paper - without in any way wishing to detract from the central importance of emigration for German Jewry during the Third Reich is to help recover a perspective on the welfare efforts of an increasingly impoverished and stigmatised Jewish community within Nazi Germany. Such an undertaking relates not just to Jewish history and not just to the history of Jewish people in Germany: but also directly to a properly understood history of Germany itself. Nothing can undo the damage of the "final solution", but the recovery of elements of a multi-ethnic perspective on German history can help to expand the narrowness of mind which prepared the way for such a crime and which the Nazis did their best to foster during their wretched tenure.
This is easier said than done. In the mid-1970s a research team at the Fachhochschule fuer Sozialarbeit und Sozialpaedagogik Berlin (FHSS) began a project on the history of social work in Germany with particular reference to state welfare services and the city of Berlin. The project, which made use of interviews with Zeitzeugen, engendered several publications, including a widely-used textbook on the history of German social work 2 , and it may even have made a modest contribution to the upsurge of scholarly interest in the history of social welfare work in Germany which has been observed in recent years. It proved impossible to investigate the development of welfare work in Berlin without coming to appreciate the prodigious achievements of Berlin Jewry in this field. Those of us involved in this research became acutely aware of the huge gaps in our knowledge concerning Jewish welfare work. We tried to close the gaps, where possible, but particularly with respect to the Third Reich it seemed almost as if the very traces of Jewish welfare work in Germany had been erased. Most of the actors had either been killed or had emigrated to far countries (and many of the emigrants had died in the meantime). The original documents were scattered and secondary work sparse.
Two members of the original FHSS research team, Rolf Landwehr and the present author decided to prepare a special project on the history of Jewish welfare work within the German Reich. We had hoped to have advanced results of research on the topic to present to this historical conference in Berlin. However, the process of finding support for the project has proved more difficult than we had anticipated. So far, the FHSS Berlin is the only German institution to have actually committed resources to the support of the project. Thus the present paper reflects little more than our preliminary research among the fragments of information available in Berlin and the material in the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. It indicates the present state of our knowledge and points towards some of the areas, which we would like to investigate further. This is definitely not the final word on the subject.
Demographic and Economic Problems of German Jewry in 1933
German Jewry was facing a number of demographic problems, which would have confronted its traditional institutions of social welfare with perplexing challenges even if the Nazis had never come to power. Of course, Nazi policy exacerbated these problems during the Third Reich and added new ones, which could scarcely even be imagined in the Weimar frame of reference. However, it would be a mistake to become so fixated on Nazi depredations as to forget the problems, which existed before they took control of the Reich government. Each of these problems has been described in greater detail elsewhere; the point here is merely to call attention to the importance of these factors as a context for Jewish welfare work in Germany during the 1930s.
The official Jewish population of the Weimar Republic - i. e., those persons who declared themselves to be Jewish - was caught up in a process of both absolute and relative numerical decline which was a matter of deep concern to many Jewish officials. As a percentage of the total population of Germany, confessing Jews had declined from 1.25% in 1875 to merely 77% in 1933. The absolute numbers were even more disturbing: in less than a quarter of a century, from 1910 to 1933, the number of confessing Jews in the German Reich dwindled from 615,000 to 564,000. This development gave rise to a certain genre of alarmist journalism in some Jewish circles, which need not concern us here, but the question must be raised as to why German Jewry was in numerical decline.
The problem is a complex one, which certainly cannot be dissected in a few sentences, but the following points seem relevant in our context. The birth rate among German Jews had fallen dramatically during the 50 years prior to 1933. Although this seemed remarkable at the time, it may be the usual pattern among people making a rapid transition to urban middle-class conditions. In any event, the death rate for German Jews remained nearly constant during the same years, so that by 1933 nearly twice as many Jews died annually in Germany as were born there.
This was, at the most fundamental level, the biological basis of German Jewry's numerical decline. However, social factors were also at work, both indirectly and directly: indirectly in that the reproductive behaviour of the German Jews was certainly related to their quickly changing life-style in a rapidly modernising country; and directly in that mixed marriages between Germans and Jews were becoming quite common. The irony of this development in a country seething with anti-Semitism was not lost on one Jewish observer who commented towards the end of the Weimar Republic: "Despite National Socialism, [marital] connections with non-believers have increased in a puzzling way." 3 By the end of the Weimar Republic nearly four out of ten Jews who married were taking German partners. Moreover, between 1921 and 1930 the number of Jewish men taking German wivessurpassed the number of Jewish women taking German husbands by 10,617 to 6,020. In other words: assimilation was more than just a cultural attitude for many young Jews-especially young Jewish men-who documented their sense of belonging to German culture in their marital behaviour.
Changes in reproductive behaviour always have long term effects, not only on the overall numerical strength of a population, but also on its structure and inner composition. The Jewish population of Germany in 1933 was characterised by a disproportionately large percentage of old people. 40% of the Jews were over 45 years old, compared with only 28% of the general population 4 . Since old people are usually more dependent upon welfare assistance than younger wage-earners and since welfare agencies often rely in the final analysis on contributions front, or taxes on, the wages and profits of younger people, the seniority-bulge in the demographic structure of German Jewry would have raised difficult challenges for the Jewish welfare agencies even without Nazi strictures. As a result of the mass-emigration of (mostly) younger Jews, which the Nazis provoked and partially encouraged, the age-structure of those Jews remaining in Germany, became an increasingly heavy burden for the Jewish welfare organisations.
For reasons, which are still not entirely clear, the Jewish population in Germany at the beginning of the Third Reich also included a disproportionately large number of women. Among the population of Germany as a whole there were 106 women for every 100 men; among Jews there were 109 women for every 100 men 5 . Part of the explanation, of course, lies in the already mentioned greater inclination of Jewish men to marry across confessional lines; but other factors must have been at work as well. The implications for welfare work are obvious, given the greater likelihood of women- and especially older women- to require social assistance than men.
A further important characteristic of German Jewry in 1933 was its extraordinary degree of urbanisation. Over 70% of German Jews lived in large urban areas. Greater Berlin alone had a Jewish population of over 160,000. What this meant for Jewish welfare services was "that all common institutions and organisations of Prussian and German Jewry were directly or indirectly dependent upon the financial support of the Berlin community." 6 In absolute size, the Berlin Jewish community was unparalleled, but in percentage of municipal population it was surpassed by the Jewish community of Frankfurt a. Main (4.7% to 3.8%). 7 Thus Jews were highly concentrated and highly visible in certain urban areas. The approximately 20% of German Jewry which belonged to the category of Ostjuden - emigrants from Eastern Europe - was even more densely concentrated in large urban areas than the more assimilated, old-line German Jews (the so-called Reich German Jews) 8 Urbanisation, too, was exacerbated during the Third Reich and presented Jewish welfare agencies with headaches such as absorbing new people in the urban areas while at the same time trying to maintain exanguinating smaller communities.
According to Max P. Birnbaum, "abnormal distribution of population and abnormal occupational structure went hand in hand" 9 . The following table comparing the occupational distribution of Jews and the general population in Germany in 1933 shows the extent to which Jews were concentrated in certain areas of the economy:
Table I
Occupational Distribution of Jews and General Population in Germany 1933 occupation Jews (%) General pop. (%)
I. Trade and transportation 61.3 18.4
2. Industry and handicrafts 23.1 40.4
3. Public and private services 12.5 8.4
4. Agriculture and forestry industries 1.7 28.9
5. Domestic services 1.4 3.9
100.0 100.0
Source: Herbert Kahn, Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Schichtung der Juden in Deutschland', in Juedische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik, Berlin 1936, p. 100.
This concentration made it relatively easy for the Nazis to introduce discriminatory measures against Jews - or to exclude them altogether - without undue damage to the functioning of the economic mechanism 10 . It also meant that Jewish welfare organisations would face a very difficult task of occupational "re-education" under the conditions of the Third Reich .
The specific occupational distribution of German Jews made them particularly vulnerable to the dislocations of the inflation at the beginning of the Weimar Republic and the depression at the end. Many Jews, having been ravaged by the Great Depression, were already in desperate economic straits when the Nazis came to power. However, Jews - in contrast to most other residents of Germany - did not benefit from the relative stabilisation of the German economy which was achieved during 1933-1935; instead they were increasingly subjected to boycotts, terror, discrimination and harassment. Thus their economic plight merely turned from bad to worse. Indicative of how bad it was, however, even before turning worse, is the fact that the Zentralstelle fuer Juedische Darlehnskassen E. V , an agency designed to stimulate loans at favourable conditions to support Jewish economic activity, was established in Berlin on 12th January 1933, more than two weeks before Hitler came to power 11 .
Jewish Welfare Work after 1933:
Organisation, Assumptions, Problems
Jewish welfare experts recognised that the Nazi take-over confronted German Jewry with grave challenges; but it is understandable that most seemed to underestimate the profound changes which would be imposed upon Jewish welfare work by the regime. The lengths to which the Nazis would eventually go in their effort to destroy the Jews simply seemed inconceivable - even to notorious pessimists - in 1933.
In a wide-ranging article from 1933 Max Kreutzberger tried to sort out the new agenda facing Jewish welfare work as a result of the political transformation of that year. His observations provide interesting insights into the mixture of ideas circulating at the time. Kreutzberger correctly believed that the first months of the Nazi regime were of "revolutionary" significance ("umstuerzende und umwaelzende Bedeutung") for Jewish social work 12 . The process of exclusion of Jews from the German economy could no longer be overlooked; and yet, Kreutzberger clearly did not suspect how much worse things would become. With respect to traditional welfare work, he wrote that not everything, which had been inherited from the past, could be maintained under the new conditions. The resources available to Jews should be concentrated in those areas which were "vital and necessary for life" 13 .
Kreutzberger believed that special attention should be paid to the areas of occupational re-structuring and emigration, especially to Palestine. In this he was rather far-sighted, since the majority of German Jews at this point was clearly not interested in emigration. Of the 37,000 Jews who emigrated during the first year (the largest single group of any subsequent year during the Third Reich), many did so for political rather than "racial" reasons; and many returned after the "taming" of the SA in 1934 under the mistaken impression that legality had been restored in Germany 14 .
It is a tribute to many Jewish welfare officials within and without Germany that they so quickly decided to support emigration. However, their perspicacity in this regard was not always matched by realistic assessments of the possibilities for welfare work within Germany. Kreutzberger, for example, assumed that the economic plight of a large portion of the Jewish middle class could be improved by Jewish lending organisations and employment agencies. This was wishful thinking. Even the Jewish lending institutes, which existed prior to, 1933 were described by Shalom Adler-Rudel as often having been little more than disguised relief institutions 15 . Impoverished older Jews who were in economic difficulty were granted loans which were not always repaid, but which did spare the recipients the indignity of having to apply for public welfare assistance. With the increasing pauperisatioof Jews after 1933, newly ruined members of the liberal professions and other formerly solvent persons joined the traditional clientele of the Jewish lending institutes. Over 12,000 persons received a total of RM 4,350,000 from the Jewish lending institutes from 1933 to the autumn of 1938 - before these institutes were liquidated at the "suggestion" of the Nazis on 1st January 1939 16 . This infusion of capital was clearly not adequate to reverse the economic destruction of the Jews which was intended by Nazi policy, and it is unlikely that any conceivable amount of money could have achieved that goal.
It was assumed that the public (i. e.: state) welfare system in Germany would continue to guarantee a minimal level of support for Jews, so that the institutions of Jewish welfare could concentrate their energies on forms of "productive" assistance, rather than on mere maintenance. The demand was raised that the Jewish welfare organisations "... take the standpoint that as a rule the rates of support given by state welfare agencies must be sufficient" 17 . As it turned out, Jews were, in the final analysis, excluded from the benefits of public welfare, thus being left to the mercies of the Jewish organisations.
Interestingly, however, Jews did have the same legal rights to public welfare as Germans until after 1938 18 . But the Nazis often found ways of excluding needy Jews from public welfare benefits long before the law was changed 19 . In the first place, enthusiastic Nazi officials at the local level could simply refuse to grant Jews the welfare benefits to which they were entitled. If no protest was lodged, that was the end of the matter. In the early years of the Third Reich protests were often successful 20 ; but as time went on, it transpired that Nazi policy was to exclude Jews from all forms of state and quasi-state benefits and to make their own efforts at self-help as difficult as possible.
The financial basis of Jewish welfare work was laid by the system of community taxation rather than voluntary contributions. In Prussia, the so-called "Jewish Law" (Judengesetz) of 1847 granted the various Jewish communities the right to tax their members and the autonomy to spend the proceeds as they saw fit. Different Jewish communities varied greatly in their level of prosperity, their tax rate and the structure of their expenditures. Efforts had been made to find a way to equalise burdens and benefits somewhat, but they had not achieved the hoped for results 21 . The Nazis did not formally change this system when they came to power; they did however change it indirectly through the pauperisation of the Jews.
A direct Nazi attack against Jewish welfare work was, however, mounted in the very first year of the Third Reich. The Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden, a co-ordinating agency of Jewish welfare work, which had been founded in 1917, was excluded from the national council of private welfare agencies. This policy of isolation and stigmatisation would eventually be applied to all types of Jewish welfare work. However, for the time being, the Jews could consider themselves fortunate in this regard: at least their main welfare organisation was allowed to exist (two other large welfare organisations had been disbanded by the Nazis).
Having been excluded from the national German family of welfare organisations, Jewish welfare work because even more strongly anchored in the life of the Jewish community than before. On 13th April 1933, leading Jewish organisations in Germany founded the Zentralausschuss fuer Hilfe und Aufbau (Central Committee for Help and Construction). The Zentralausschuss brought together not just the leading Jewish organisations in a visible form of Cupertino, but also greatly broadened the scope of work previously performed by the Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle. Men such as Leo Baeck provided symbolic leadership as the historically fragmented elements of German Jewry, under the pressure of adversity, began searching for greater unity in areas of practical interest 22 .
On 17th September 1933, Cupertino among the leading Jewish organisations in Germany reached a new level with the founding of the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden. (The name was later changed at Nazi insistence to Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland). On 1st April 1935, the Zentralausschuss was integrated into the Reichsvertretung. Although the expanded Reichsvertretung had a broad spectrum of welfare and educational activities, its main emphasis lay in helping young Jews to emigrate from Germany.
The relative weight of the various activities supported by the Reichsvertetung is reflected in the budget of the organisation. According to the budget for 1936, the Reichsvertretung spent a total of RM 4,296,565.15 that year. Of this sum, RM 1,461,462.92 was spent for "migration". This is only slightly less than the amount spent for economic aid (RM 1.085,876.05) and welfare work (RM 426,504.17) together. No less interesting than the distribution of the revenues is their origin. Only RM 1,691,119.55 was raised in Germany; RM 2,123,125.64 came in the form of grants from abroad (the rest was sheer deficit). The American Joint Distribution Committee alone sent the equivalent of RM 1,188,884.82 to the Reichsvertretung during 1936 23 .
References:
1. The author is indebted to Rolf Landwehr, one of the knowexperts on modern German welfare institutions, for critical assistance in the preparation of this paper. Interested readers are also referred to his essay on Jewish social welfare in modern Germany: Zur Geschichte der juedischen Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland', in Wolfgang Dressen (ed.), Juedisches Leben , (Berlin: Museumspaedagogischer Dienst), Berlin 1985, pp. 44ΓÇô53.
2. Rolf Landwehr and Ruedeger Baron (eds.), Geschichte der Sozialarbeit , Weinheim-Basel 1983.
3. Ernst Kahn, Ein historischer Wendepunkt im Judentum', in Juedische Wohlfahrtspflege und Sozialpolitik (JWSP), 1933/1934, p. 2.
4. Albert J. Phiebig, Die Bedeutung der Volkszaehlung von 1933 fuer die juedische Sozialarbeit', JWSP, 1936, p. 24.
5. Ibid. , p. 25.
6. Max P. Birnbaum, Die juedische Bevoelkerung in Preussen, Verteilung und wirtschaftliche Struktur im Jahre 1931', in Herbert A. Strauss, Kurt R. Gorssmann (eds.), Gegenwart im Rueckblick. Festgabe fuer die Juedische Gemeinde zu Berlin 25 Jahre nach dem Neubeginn , Heidelberg 1970, p. 126.
7. Ibid. , p. 118.
8. A. J. Phiebig, Die Glaubensjuden im Deutschen Reich', JWSP, 1937, pp. 96ΓÇô97.
9. Birnbaum, Bevoelkerung', loc. cit. , p. 123.
10.S. Adler-Rudel, Juedische Selbsthilfe unter dem Naziregime 1933ΓÇô1939. Im Spiegel der Berichte der Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland , Tuebingen 1974 (Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts 29), p. 7.
11. Ibid. , p. 127.
12.JWSP, 1933/1934, p. 89.
13. Ibid. , p. 93.
14.Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews 1933ΓÇô1945, Toronto etc. 1981, pp. 232ΓÇô233.
15.Adler-Rudel, Selbsthilfe, op. cit. , p. 127.
16. Ibid.
17.JWSP, 1933/1934, p. 132.
18.Adler-Rudel, Selbsthilfe, op. cit. , pp. 159ΓÇô160.
19.JWSP, 1937, p. 143.
20.JWSP, 1933/1934, p. 136.
21.JWSP, 1936, pp. 29ΓÇô30.
22.Adler-Rudel, Selbsthilfe, op. cit. , pp. 10ΓÇô11.
23.American Joint Distribution Committee, European Executive Offices, Jewish Constructive Work in Germany during 1936 , Paris 1937, p. 32.
