Source: Saul Friedlaender, Chapter 2 in: Nazi Germany and the Jews , Vol I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, (New York 1997), p. 41-72.
In the summer of 1933, one of the main Zionist leaders in Palestine, the German-born Arthur Ruppin, paid a visit to the Nazi race theoretician Hans F. K. Guenther at the University of Jena. The Jews,' Guenther reassured him, were not inferior to the Aryans, they were simply different. This meant that a fair solution' had to be found for the Jewish problem. The professor was extremely friendly, Ruppin recorded with satisfaction.' 101 Thus, despite rapid awareness of the Nazis' unmitigated hatred of the Jews, some Zionist leaders' early responses to the new German situation were not negative. There was a widespread hope that the Nazi policy of furthering Jewish emigration from Germany offered great opportunities for the Yishuv. A stream of important visitors came from Palestine to observe conditions in Germany. The Labour Zionist leader Moshe Belinson reported to Berl Katzenelson, the editor of the main Labour daily, Davar : The streets are paved with more money than we have ever dreamed of in the history of our Zionist enterprise. Here is an opportunity to build and flourish like none have ever had or ever will have.' 102
Zionist hopes were moderated by practical worries about excessive numbers of immigrants. In order that the immigration not flood the existing settlement in Palestine like lava,' Ruppin declared at the Zionist Congress held in Prague in the summer of 1933, it must be proportionate to a certain percentage of that settlement.' 103 This remained the policy for several years to come, and well after the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws, both the German Zionists and the leaders of the Yishuv were still envisaging an annual rate of fifteen to twenty thousand German-Jewish emigrants, extending over a period of twenty to thirty years. 104
Whatever the practical steps that were envisioned, Zionist rhetoric was clear: Palestine was the only possible haven and solution. This was not obvious to some of the German Jews, who, on arrival on the land of Israel, were suddenly faced with a new and unexpected reality. The novelist Arnold Zweig, a left-wing Zionist of long standing who had arrived in the summer of 1933, summed up his feelings about his new homeland in a diary entry on December 31: In Palestine. In foreign parts.' 105
Some leaders of German Jewry still believed in 1933 that the Nazis would be duly impressed by an objective presentation of Jewish contributions to German culture. A few months after the change of regime, and with Max Warburg's and Leo Baeck's encouragement, Leopold Ullstein, a younger member of the publishing family, launched the preparation of a wide-ranging study to that effect. Within a year a hefty volume was ready, but in December 1934 its publication was prohibited. The naive reader of this study,' the Gestapo report pronounced, would get the impression that the whole of German culture up to the National Socialist revolution was carried by Jews. The reader would receive an entirely false picture of the real activity, particularly of the decomposing action of the Jews on German culture. Moreover, well-known Jewish crooks and speculators are presented to the reader as victims of their time and their dirty dealings glossed over.... In addition, Jews generally knows as enemies of the state...are presented as remarkable carriers of German culture.' 106 Jewish culture for Jews, however, was another matter, and whereas Ullstein had set his sight on an ultimate enterprise, another Berlin Jew, Kurt Singer, the former deputy director of the Berlin City Opera, came up with a different kind of idea: the establishment oa Jewish cultural association (Kulturbund deutscher Juden).
Singer's Kulturbund fitted Nazi needs. When Singer's project of autonomous cultural activities by Jews and for Jews (only) was submitted to the new Prussian authorities, it received Goering's approval. For all practical purposes, it was controlled on the Nazi side by the same Hans Hinkel who was already in charge of the de-Judaisation of cultural life in Prussia. On the face of it the Kulturbund appeared to a perfectly functional initiative to solve the problems created both for the regime and for the Jews by the expulsion from German cultural life of approximately eight thousand Jewish writers, artists, musicians, and performers of all kinds, as well as their co-workers and agents 107 . Apart from the work it providedand the soothing psychological function it filled for part of the Jewish community, the Kulturbund also offered to the surrounding society an easy way to dismiss any potential sense of embarrassment: Aryans who found the regime's anti-Semitic measures distasteful could reassure themselves that Jewish artists were at least permitted to remain active in their chosen profession.' 108
The Kulturbund also played another role, unseen but no less real, which pointed to the future: As the first Jewish organisation under the direct supervision of a Nazi overlord, it foreshadowed the Nazi ghetto, in which a pretence of internal autonomy camouflaged the total subordination of an appointed Jewish leadership to the dictates of its masters. The Kulturbund was hailed by an array of Jewish intellectuals as offering the opportunity for a new Jewish cultural and spiritual life to a community under siege 109 . This ongoing misunderstanding of the true meaning of the situation was compounded by the ambition of some of its founders: to create a cultural life of such quality that it would teach the Germans a lesson. The literary critic Julius Bab summed it all up with extraordinary naivete when he wrote in a letter of June 1933: It remains a bitter fact - it is a ghetto enterprise, but one that we certainly want to accomplish so well that the Germans will have to be ashamed.' 110 Bab's statement could also mean that the Germans would feel ashamed to be treating the carriers of such high culture so shabbily.
Sporadically Hinkel would inform his wards of works Jews were no longer allowed to perform. In the theatre Germanic legends and performances of works from the German Middle Ages and German romanticism were prohibited. For a time the classical period was allowed, but Schiller was forbidden in 1934 and Goethe in 1936. Among foreign writers Shakespeare was allowed, but Hamlet's ΓÇ£To be or not to beΓÇ¥ soliloquy was forbidden: In a Jewish theatre in the Third Reich, ΓÇ£the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumelyΓÇ¥ could have sounded subversive, hence that line led to the exclusion of the entire speech 111 . Needless to say, despite the attachment of German Jews to the works of Richard Wagner and Richards Strauss, these composers were not to be performed by Jews. Beethoven was forbidden them in 1937, but Mozart had to wait until the next year, after the Anschluss 112 .
Such growing constraints notwithstanding, the activity of the Kulturbund, both in Berlin and, soon after, in all major German cities, was remarkable. More than 180,000 Jews from all parts of Germany became active members of the association. In its first year the Kulturbund staged 69 opera performances and 117 concerts, and, from mid-1934 to mid-1935, 57 opera performances and 358 concerts 113 . The opera repertory included works by Mozart, Offenbach, Verdi, Johann Strauss, Donizetti, Rossini, Tchaikovsky, and Saint-Saens, among others. Although, apart from the ideological and financial constraints, the choice of works performed was mainly traditional, in 1934 the Frankfurt Kulturbund organised a concert in honour of Arnold Schoenberg's sixtieth birthday, and the Cologne branch organised a performance of Paul Hindemith's children's opera Wir bauen eine Stadt (We're building a town) - locating it in Palestine 114 .
In principle the Jews were increasingly to be fed on ΓÇ£Jewish works.ΓÇ¥ But even this principle did not always satisfy the Nazi mind. On October 26, 1933, Rainer Schloesser, the Reich director of theatres of the Ministry of Propaganda, recommended to Hinkel that peof Emil Bernhard's (Emil Cohn's) Die Jagd Gottes (God's hunt) be forbidden, as the play was ΓÇ£a kind of consolation for the Jews,' a kind of heartening' for the Jews.ΓÇ¥ Moreover, the action took place against a background of mistreatment of Jews by Cossacks: It is easy to imagine with whom these Cossacks would be identified.' 115
Jewish audiences must have been partly aware that Kulturbund activities were intended to have a soothing effect on them. Nonetheless, Kulturbund theatres like the one on Berlin's Charlottenstrasse became a spiritual lifeline. The tram conductors knew their public; Charlottenstrasse,' they would call out. Jewish culture - everybody off!' 116
The goal of our stage,' declared the director of theatre activities of the Rhine-Ruhr Kulturbund in the November/December 1933 issue of its periodical, is to bring to all the joy and courage to face life by letting them participate in the eternal values of poetry or by discussing the problems of our time, but also by showing light-hearted pieces and not rejecting them. We intend to keep the connection with the German Heimat [homeland] and to form at the same time a connecting link with our great Jewish past and with a future that is worth living for.' 117
IV
By the end of 1933, tens of millions of people inside and outside Germany were aware of the systematic policy of segregation and persecution launched by the new German regime against its Jewish citizens. Yet, as already noted at the outset, it may have been impossible for most people, Jews and non-Jews alike, to have a clear idea of the goals and limits of this policy. There was anxiety among the Jews of Germany but no panic or any widespread sense of urgency. It is hard to evaluate how much importance German society at its various levels granted to an issue that was not on any priority list. Political stabilisation, the dismantling of the Left, economic improvement, national revival, and international uncertainties were certainly more present in the minds of many than the hazy outlines of the Jewish issue; for most Germans the issues and challenges of daily life in times of political change and of economic turmoil were the paramount focus of interest, whatever their awareness of other problems may have been. It is against this background that Hitler's own obsession with the Jewish issue must be considered.
In a remarkable dispatch sent to Foreign Minister Sir John Simon on May 11, 1933, the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, described the course taken by an interview with Hitler once he had alluded to the persecution of the Jews: The allusion to the treatment of the Jews resulted in the Chancellor working himself up into a state of great excitement. I will never agree,' he shouted, as if he were addressing an open-air meeting, to the existence of two kinds of law for German nationals. There is an immense amount of unemployment in Germany, and I have, for instance, to turn away youths of pure German stock from higher education. There are not enough posts for the pure-bred Germans, and the Jews must suffer with the rest. If the Jews engineer a boycott of German goods from abroad, I will take care that this hits the Jews in Germany.' These remarks were delivered with great ferocity. Only his excitement, to which I did not wish to add, prevented me from pointing out that there were, in fact, two standards of treatment of German nationals, inasmuch as those of Jewish race were being discriminated against.' At the end of the dispatch, Rumbold returned to the issue: My comment on the foregoing is that Herr Hitler is himself responsible for the anti-Jewish policy of the German government and that it would be a mistake to believe that it is the policy of his wilder men whom he has difficulty icontrolling. Anybody who has had the opportunity of listening to his remarks on the subject of Jews could not have failed, like myself, to realise that he is a fanatic on the subject.' 118
The American consul general in Berlin reached the same conclusion. One of the most unfortunate features of the situation,' George S. Messersmith wrote to the Secretary of State Cordell Hull on November 1, 1933, is that, as I have already pointed out in previous dispatches and again in this one, Mr. Hitler himself is implacable and unconvinced and is the real head of the anti-Jewish movement. He can be reasonable on a number of subjects, but on this he can only be passionate and prejudiced.' 119
Hitler did not express his obsession with the Jewish peril in major public utterances during 1933, but its lurking presence can be perceived in his remarks about the Concordat, in the last part of the letter to Hindenburg, in the discussion with Bishop Berning, as well as in outbursts such as those reported by foreign diplomats. It is no less apparent however that the new chancellor was not yet sure of the leeway granted him by the shifting political and economic situation. International reactions did concern him. As he put it in his meeting with the Reich district governors, on July 6, 1933, for Germany the most dangerous front at the time was the external one: One should not irritate it, when it is not necessary to deal with it. To reopen the Jewish question would mean to start a world-wide uproar again.' 120 Clearly the shaky economic circumstances of the Reich were also a major factor in his decisions, as already noted. Once the bumbling minister of the Economy, Alfred Hugenberg, and his ineffective successor Kurt Schmitt, had been eased out, Hitler, on July 30, 1934, appointed Hjalmar Schacht, the conservative ΓÇ£wizard,ΓÇ¥ as minister and overlord of the economy of the Reich. For practical economic reasons, Schacht insisted that no major interference with Jewish businesses would be allowed 121 . In general terms Hitler backed Schacht's position until the new transition period of 1936-37. Finally, on some matters such as the issue of Jewish physicians, Hitler certainly took into account German public opinion. In other words he understood the need for tactical pragmatism regarding immediate anti-Jewish measures, and thus his policy had to remain, for a time at least, close to the pre-existing anti-Jewish agenda of the conservatives.
The extent to which Hitler was torn between hatred of the Jews and desire for radical action on the one hand, and the need for tactical restraint on the other, emerged clearly in the July 14 cabinet meeting, at which he declared that the Concordat with the Vatican would help the Reich in its struggle against world Jewry. When, during discussion of criteria for the continued exercise of the legal profession by Jews, several ministers suggested that the identification of frontline veterans should be based on membership in combat units, Hitler protested: The Jewish nation in its totality was being rejected. Therefore all Jews had to be dismissed [from the professions]. One could make an exception only for those who had taken part in direct combat. Only participation in combat, and not mere presence in the combat zone, was decisive. A commission to check the rolls of the various units was necessary.' 122 But how was this need for an ongoing struggle against the Jews to find its expression in the economic sphere, for example, without leading to the dangerous results of which Hitler was well aware? When the topic was raised at the same cabinet meeting, the Reich chancellor launched into an explanation that clearly laid bare the dilemma facing him. The Jews were continuing their silent boycott of Germany,' Hitler explained, and their aim was only just that the Jews in Germany be the first to feel the effects of this boycott. There were too many enterprises in Germany, and clearly some would have to disappear. In this situation the opponent, Jewish enterprises, had to be the first to go - equal treatment in this domain would be wrong.' 123 In other words, Jewish enterprises had to be discriminated against - to a point. Within the category of those enterprises that had to disappear, the Jewish ones were to be the first on the list. Such a statement could be read in many ways.
That Hitalso manipulate the Jewish issue in order to achieve some general political goals is not impossible. Although the economic boycott of Jewish businesses had to stop, at least officially, the menacing party rhetoric clearly indicated that henceforward the Jews were considered potential hostages whose fate would depend upon the outside world's attitude toward the new Germany. Such use of the Jews would, incidentally, remain as a threatening theme throughout the thirties and find its most violent expression after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 and during the last months of peace, particularly in Hitler's Reichstag speech of January 1939. Moreover, the April 1933 boycott and the other early anti-Jewish measures allowed for some release of the pent-up violence simmering among the ΓÇ£party radicals.ΓÇ¥ Throughout the coming months and years, but particularly in 1935, Hitler would use his anti-Jewish policies as a safety valve against a build up of ideological or material resentment among the party rank and file and the more extreme of his underlings.
Finally, as far as the regime's first year is concerned, were there any indications that - beyond general ideological obsession and immediate tactics - Hitler was already considering further systematic steps against the Jews of Germany? It seems indeed that the idea of establishing a fundamental legal distinction between German (Aryan) citizens and the Jews living in Germany, a staple demand of many conservatives in the past and an item of the Nazi Party program, was on both the conservative civil service's agenda and Hitler's mind from the very outset of his government.
The first draft of a new citizenship law appears to have emerged in the Ministry of the Interior at the end of May 1933, and was submitted to the Committee of Experts for Population and Racial Policy of the Ministry in the following month 124 . No immediate results came of these efforts, but Hitler, it seems, was considering similar plans for the future. Thus, at a that September 28 meeting with the minister of the interior and the Reich district governors, Hitler explained that he would have preferred to take a step-by-step approach toward sharpening anti-Jewish measures; this could have been achieved had a citizenship law been established which would then have allowed him to take further, sharper steps. However, the boycott started by the Jews had called for an immediate and very sharp reaction.' 125
As will be seen, even in the atmosphere of uncertainty following his accession to power, Hitler did not lose sight of his ideological goals with regard to the Jews, as well as in relation to the other issues that formed the core of his worldview. Although he avoided public statements on the Jewish issue, he could not restrain himself entirely. In his closing speech at the September 1933 Nuremberg party rally, called (for the occasion) the Congress of Victory, he launched into disparaging comments about the Jews in his expostulations on the racial foundations of art: It is a sign of the horrible spiritual decadence of the past epoch that one spoke of styles without recognising their racial determinants.... Each clearly formed race has its own handwriting in the book of art, insofar as it is not, like Jewry, devoid of any creative artistic ability.' 126 As for the function of a worldview, Hitler defined it in his address: Worldviews,' he declared, consider the achievement of political power only as the precondition for the beginning of the fulfilment of their true mission. In the very term worldview' there lies the solemn commitment to make all enterprise dependent upon a specific initial conception and a visible direction. Such a conception can be right or wrong; it is the staring point for the attitude to be taken tall manifestations and occurrences of life and thereby a compelling and obligatory rule for all action.' 127 In other words a worldview as defined by Hitler was a quasi-religious framework encompassing immediate political goals. Nazism was no mere ideological discourse; it was a political religion commanding the total commitment owed to a religious faith 128 .
The ΓÇ£visible directionΓÇ¥ of a worldview implied the existence of ΓÇ£final goalsΓÇ¥ that, their general and hazy formulation notwithstanding, were supposed to guide the elaboration and implementation of short-term plans. Before the fall of 1935 Hitler did not hint either in public or in private what the final goal of his anti-Jewish policy might be. But much earlier, as a fledgling political agitator, he had defined the goal of a systematic anti-Jewish policy in his notorious first political text, the letter on the ΓÇ£Jewish questionΓÇ¥ addressed on September 16, 1919, to one Adolf Gemlich. In the short term the Jews had to be deprived of their civil rights: The final aim however must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether.' 129
References:
101 Segev, The Seventh Million , p. 19.
102 Ibid., p. 18.
103 Margalioth, ΓÇ£The Problem of Rescue,ΓÇ¥ p. 94.
104 Ibid., p. 95.
105 Quoted in Jost Hermand, ΓÇ£'Buerger zweier Welten?' Arnold Zweigs Einstellung zur deutschen Kultur,ΓÇ¥ in Julius Schops, ed., Juden als Traeger buergerlicher Kultur in Deutschland (Bonn, 1989), p. 81.
106 Quoted in Robert Weltsch, ΓÇ£Vorbemerkung zur zweiten AusgabeΓÇ¥ (1959) in Siegmund Kaznelson, ed., Juden im Deutschen Kulturbereich: Ein Sammelwerk (Berlin, 1962), pp. xvff.
107 The number is taken from Eike Geisel's essay on the history of the Kulturbund , ΓÇ£Premiere und Pogrom,ΓÇ¥ in Eike Geisel and Heinrich M. Broder, eds., Premiere und Pogrom: Der Juedische Kulturbund 1933ΓÇô1941 (Berlin, 1992), p. 9.
108 Steinweis, ΓÇ£Hans Hinkel,ΓÇ¥ p. 215.
109 Geisel, ΓÇ£Premiere und Pogrom,ΓÇ¥ pp. 10ff.
110 Ibid., p. 12.
111 Dahm, ΓÇ£Anfaenge und Ideologie,ΓÇ¥ p. 114.
112 Ibid., p. 115. For details about the forbidding of Schiller and Goethe, see Jacob Boas, ΓÇ£Germany or Diaspora? German Jewry's Shifting Perceptions in the Nazi Era (1933ΓÇô1938)ΓÇ¥ LBIY 27 (1982): 115 n 32. In his personal memoir about the epoch, Jakob Ball-Kaduri suggests that at the outset Hinkel was keen on developing the Kulturbund because of his ambivalent relation to Jewish matters and because the growth of the Kulturbund meant the growth of the domain that he was in charge of. Ball-Kaduri, Das Leben der Juden in Deutschland im Jahre 1933 , p. 151. Such ΓÇ£ambivalenceΓÇ¥ appears rather as mere ambition on the part of a dedicated anti-Semitic activist.
113 Levi, Music in the Third Reich , pp. 51ΓÇô52.
114 Ibid., pp. 33, 247.
115 Wulf, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich , p. 102.
116 Dahm, ΓÇ£Anfaenge und Ideologie,ΓÇ¥ p. 104.
117 Kurt Duwell, ΓÇ£Jewish Cultural Centres in Nazi Germany: Expectations and Accomplishments,ΓÇ¥ in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, N.H., 1985), p. 298.
118 Sir Horace Rumbold to Sir John Simon, May 11, 1933, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919ΓÇô1939 , Second Series, vol. 5: 1933 , London, 1956, pp. 233ΓÇô5.
119 The Consul General at Berlin to the Secretary of State, November 1, 1933, Foreign Relations of the United States , 1933 , vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1948), p. 362. (italics added.)
120 Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler , part 1, vol. 1, p. 631.
121 Schacht's position was solely motivated by immediate economic goals. Otherwise he favoured the ΓÇ£limitation of Jewish influenceΓÇ¥ in German economic life, and on several occasions he did not hesitate to make blatantly anti-Semitic speeches. In other words, Schacht fully expressed the conservative brand of anti-Semitism, and when faced with the regime's ever more radical anti-Jewish measures, he toed the line like all the Nazis' conservative allies. See in particular Abert Fischer, Hjalmar Schacht und Deutschlands ΓÇ£Judenfrage,ΓÇ¥ (Bonn, 1995), mainly pp. 126ff. One of Schacht's most outspoken anti-Semitic speeches was his ΓÇ£Luther speechΓÇ¥ of November 8, 1933. The journalist and socialite Bella Fromm, who was Jewish, was in the audience and commented in her diary: ΓÇ£The intimate friend of Berlin Jewish society [Schacht] did not skip a single one of Martin Luther's manifoldanti-Semitic remarks....Certainly Jew-baiting is a legal affair since February 1, 1933. But there is no excuse for Schacht's infamy. Schacht has not always been prosperous. Everything he has he owes to friends who are no National Socialists.ΓÇ¥ Bella Fromm, Blood and Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary (London, 1943; reprint, New York, 1990), p. 136.
122 Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler , part 1, vol. 1, p. 675.
123 Ibid., p. 677.
124 Noakes, ΓÇ£The Development of Nazi Policy Towards the German-Jewish Mischlinge,'ΓÇ¥ p. 303.
125 Reichsstatthalterkonferenz, 28.9.1933, Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Regierung Hitler , part 1, vol. 2, p. 865.
126 Adolf Hitler, ΓÇ£Die deutsche Kunst als stolzeste Verteidigung des deutschen Volkes,ΓÇ¥ Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 4, no. 34 (Oct. 1933), p. 437.
127 Quoted in Wolfgang Michalka, ed., Das Dritte Reich , vol. 1 (Munich, 1985), p. 137.
128 The ΓÇ£religiousΓÇ¥ dimension of Nazism, in terms both of its beliefs and its rituals, had already been noted by numerous contemporary observers; some blatant uses of Christian liturgy drew protests, mainly from the Catholic Church. The concept of ΓÇ£political religionΓÇ¥ in its application to Nazism (and often to Communism as well), as a sacralisation of politics and a politicisation of religious themes and frameworks, was first systematically presented in Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (Stockholm, 1939). After the war the theme was taken up in Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements , 2nd ed. (New York, 1961). The political-religious dimension of Nazi ideological themes and rituals was also analysed in Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Goettingen, 1971). During the seventies Uriel Tal further developed the analysis of Nazism as a political religion, mainly in his article ΓÇ£On Structures of Political Ideology and Myth in Germany Prior to the Holocaust,ΓÇ¥ in Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rothenstreich, eds., The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York, 1981). Tal's interpretation appears as a guiding theme in Leni Yahil's The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (New York, 1990). See also the conclusion to Saul Friedlaender, ΓÇ£From Anti-Semitto Extermination: A Historical Study of Nazi Policies Toward the Jews,ΓÇ¥ Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984).
