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.
Soon professors who were to explicitly pacifist or anti-nationalist, such as Theodor Lessing, Guenther Dehn, Emil Julius Gumbel, Hans Nawiasky, and Ernst Cohn, came under attack 70 . Gumbel was driven out of Heidelberg even before the Nazis came to power. In 1931 Nazis gained a majority in the German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft); this was the first national association to come under their control. Within a short time a whole cohort of young intellectuals would put its energy and ability at the disposal of the party and its policies 71 .
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After January 1933 student groups took matters into their own hands, not unlike the SA. The national leader of the Nazi student organisation, Oskar Stabel, announced shortly before the April 1 boycott that student pickets would be posted that day at the entrances to Jewish professors' lecture halls and seminar rooms in order to ΓÇ£dissuadeΓÇ¥ anyone from entering 72 . Such was the case, for example, at the Technical University in . Later on Nazi students with cameras positioned themselves on the podiums of lecture halls so as to take pictures of students attending classes taught by Jews 73 . This kind of student agitation was strongly encouraged by a violently anti-Jewish speech delivered on May 5 by Education Minister Rust in the Berlin university auditorium, and by such comments on the speech as these in the official Preussische Zeitung : Science for a Jew does not mean a task, an obligation, a domain of creative organisation, but a business and a way of destroying the culture of the host people. Thus the most important chairs of so-called German universities were filled with Jews. Positions were vacated to allow them to pursue their parasitic activities, which where then rewarded with Nobel Prizes.' 74
In early April 1933, the National Socialist Student Association established a press and propaganda section. Its very first measure, decided on April 8, was to be ΓÇ£the public burning of destructive Jewish writingΓÇ¥ by university students as a reaction to world Jewry's ΓÇ£shameless incitementΓÇ¥ against Germany. An ΓÇ£informationΓÇ¥ campaign was to be undertaken between April 12 and May 10; the public burnings were scheduled to start on university campuses at 6:00 P.M. on the last day of the campaign.
The notorious twelve theses the students prepared for ritual declamation during the burnings were not exclusively directed against Jews and the ΓÇ£Jewish spiritΓÇ¥: Among the other targets were Marxism, pacifism, and the ΓÇ£overstressing of the instinctual lifeΓÇ¥ (that is, ΓÇ£the Freudian School and its journal Imago ΓÇ¥). It was a rebellion of the German against the ΓÇ£un-German spirit.ΓÇ¥ But the main thrust of the action remained essentially anti-Jewish; in the eyes of the organisers, it was meant to extend anti-Jewish action from the economic domain (the April 1 boycott) to the entire field of German culture.
On April 13 the theses were affixed to university buildings and billboards all over Germany. Thesis 7 read: When the Jew writes in German, he lies. He should be compelled, from now on, to indicate on books he wishes to publish in German: translated from the Hebrew.' 75
On the evening of May 10, rituals of exorcism took place in most of the university cities and towns of Germany. More than twenty thousand books were burned in Berlin, and from two to three thousand in every other major German city 76 . In Berlin a huge bonfire was lit in front of the Kroll Opera House, and Goebbels was one of the speakers. After the speeches, in the capital as in the other cities, slogans against the banned authors were chanted by the throng as the poisonous books (by Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Sigmund Freud, Maximilian Harden, and Kurt Tucholsky, among many others) were hurled, batch after batch, into the flames. The great searchlights on the Opera Square,' wrote the Juedische Rundschau , also threw their light onto the swallowing up of our existence and our fate. Not only Jews have been accused, but also men of pure German blood. The latter are being judged only for their deeds. For Jews, however, there is no need for a specific reason, the old saying holds: The Jew will be burned.' 77
The Nazi students did not limit their activities to disrupting the lectures of Jewish professors and burning dangerous books. They attempted to impose their will at every level when it came to the hiring of teachers or their reinstatement as war veterans. On May 6 the leader of the Nazi student association of the Technical University in Heldburghausen, Thuringia, sent an anything but subservient letter to the Thuringian Education Minister in Weimar. The students had been told that a Jewish teacher named Bermann was to be reinstated. After casting doubt on the validity of Bermann's claim to frontline service during World War I, the student leader went on: Agitation among the students is very strong, as some forty percent are members of the National Socialist Student Association, and to be taught by a racially alien teacher is incompatible with their convictions. The National Socialist Student Association addresses the urgent demand to the National Socialist government of Thuringia not to reinstate the Jewish teacher.' 78 Whether Bermann was reinstated or not is not known, but even seasoned Nazis considered the student activism something of an embarrassment. I have been informed by State Minister of the Interior, Party member Fritsch,' wrote one of the district leaders for central Germany to Manfred von Killinger, Prime Minister of Saxony, on August 12, that the State Ministry is not pleased with the situation at the University of Leipzig.... Over the last three months I have fought rigorously and consistently against any radicalisation of the university. According to your wishes, I have therefore forbidden the National Socialist students to boycott any professors.' 79
Sometimes students themselves perceived that they had gone too far: They had even blacklisted H. G. Wells and Upton Sinclair. The Foreign Ministry was up in arms because among the authors whose works had been burned in front of the Kroll Opera House on May 10 was the then famous promoter of European union, Count Richard Cudenhove-Kalergi. The student leader Gerhard Graefe confided to a correspondent that he was denying that Cudenhove's writings were burned, but that precautions would have to be taken in the future 80 . Such reservations also took other forms: In his diary entries for 1933, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of Romance literature at Dresden's Technical University who had been exempted from dismissal owing to wartime combat service, several times mentioned that the most assiduous participant in his seminar was the female leader of the university's Nazi student cell 81 .
A comparison between the attitudes of the churches and those of the universities toward the regime's anti-Jewish measures of 1933 reveals basic similarities along with some (very) minor differences. Although outright supporters of National Socialism as a whole were a small minority both in the churches and in the universities, those in favour of the national revival heralded by the new regime were definitely a majority. That majority shared a conservative-nationalist credo that easily converged with the main ideals proclaimed by the regime at its beginning. But what distinguished the churches' attitudes was the existence of certain specific interests involving the preservation of some basic tenets of Christian dogma. The Jews as Jews were abandoned to their fate, but both the Protestant and Catholic churches attempted to maintain the pre-eminence of such fundamental beliefs as the supersession of race by baptism and the sanctity of the Old Testament. (Later, at times, the private attitudes of Catholics and of members of the Confessing Church toward the persecution of the Jews would even be critical, mainly because of growing tension between them and the regime.) Nothing of the kind hampereacceptance by university professors of the regime's anti-Jewish acts. In principle the German academic elite was committed to pursuit of learning unimpeded by state intervention, but, as has been seen, other values and beliefs weighed far more heavily with it in the twenties and early thirties. The enthusiastic ΓÇ£self-co-ordinationΓÇ¥ ( Selbstgleichschaltung ) of the universities demonstrated that there was no fundamental opposition but rather a substantial measure of convergence between the inner core of the mandarins' faith and National Socialism's public stance as it appeared at the outset. In such a context, motivation for taking a stand in favour of Jewish colleagues and students was minimal. The consequences of such an overall moral collapse are obvious. In many ways elite groups were a bridge between National Socialist extremism and the wider reaches of German society; thus, their ready abandonment of the Jews set their attitudes and responses in a fateful historical light.
When Pastor Umfried criticised the attack on the Jews of his town, no church authority supported him; when Jewish businesses were boycotted, no religious voice was heard; when Hitler lhis diatribe against the Jews, Bishop Berning did not respond. When Jewish colleagues were dismissed, no German professor publicly protested; when the number of Jewish students was drastically reduced, no university committee or faculty member expressed any opposition; when books were burned throughout the Reich, no intellectual in Germany, or for that matter anyone else within the country, openly expressed any shame. Such total collapse is more than unusual. As the first months of 1933 went by, Hitler must have seen that he could count on the genuine support of church and university; whatever opposition may have existed, it would not be expressed as long as direct institutional interests and basic dogmatic tenets were not threatened. The concrete situation of the Jews was a litmus test of how far any genuine moral principle could be silenced; although the situation was to become more complex later on, during this early period the result of the test was clear.
III
While Germany's intellectual and spiritual elites were granting their explicit or tacit support to the new regime, the leading figures of the Jewish community were trying to hide their distress behind a facade of confidence. Despite all difficulties, the future of Jewish life in Germany was not being irretrievably endangered. Ismar Elbogen, one of the most prominent Jewish Historians of the time, expressed what was probably the most common attitude when he wrote: They can condemn us to hunger but they cannot condemn us to starvation.' 82 This was the spirit that presided over the establishment of the National Representation of German Jews (Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden), formally launched in 1933, on the initiative of the President and the Rabbi of the Essen community. 83 It would remain the umbrella organisation of local and national Jewish associations until 1938, headed throughout by the Berlin rabbi Leo Baeck, the respected chairman of the Association of German Rabbis and a scholar of repute, 84 and by the lay leader Otto Hirsch. Despite opposition from ΓÇ£national German JewsΓÇ¥, ultra-Orthodox religious groups, and, sporadically, from the Zionist Movement, the National Representation played a significant role in the affairs of German Jewry until its transformation, after a transition period in 1938-39, into the National Association of Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland), an organisation very closely controlled by the Gestapo.
There was not any greater sense of urgency at the National Representation than there was among most individual Jews in Germany. In early 1934 Otto Hirsch would still be speaking out against ΓÇ£hastyΓÇ¥ emigration. He believed in the possibility of maintaining a dignified Jewish life in the new Germany. 85 That Alfred Hirschberg, the most prominent personality of the Central Association, denied any need at all to enlarge upon the utopia of resettlement [in Palestine]' was true to type, but that a publication of the Zionist Pioneer organisation defined unprepared immigration to Eretz Israel as ΓÇ£a crime against ZionismΓÇ¥ comes as a surprise, perhaps because of the vehemence of its tone. 86
Not all German Jewish leaders displayed such nonchalance. One who insistently demanded immediate emigration was Georg Kareski, head of the right-wing [Revisionist] Zionist Organisation. A vocal but marginal personality even within German Zionism, Kareski was ready to organise the exodus of the Jews from Germany by co-operating, if need be, with the Gestapo and the Propaganda Ministry. He may indeed have manoeuvred to establish his own authority within German Jewry by exploiting his collaboration with the Nazis, 87 but his sense of urgency was real and premonitory.
Even as the months went by, the leaders of German Jewry did not, in general, gain much insight into the uncompromisingly anti-Jewish stance of the Nazis. Thus, in August 1933, Werner Senator, who had returned to Germany from Palestine in order to become a director of the newly established Central Committee for Help and Reconstruction (Zentralausschuss fuer Hilfe und Aufbau), suggested, in a memorandum sent to the American Joint Distribution Committee, that a dialogue be established between the Jews and the Nazis. In his opinion, such a dialogue should lead to a kind of Concordat, like the arrangements between the Roman Curia and European States.' 88
No Roman Curia and no Concordat were mentioned as examples in the ΓÇ£Memorandum on the Jewish QuestionΓÇ¥ that the representatives of Orthodox Jewry sent to Hitler on October 4. The signatories brought to the Reich chancellor's attention the injustice of the identification of Jewry with Marxist materialism, the unfairness of the attribution to an entire community of the mistakes of some of its members, and the tenuousness of the connection between the ancient Jewish race and the modern, uprooted ultra rationalistic Jewish writers and journalists. Orthodox Jewry disavowed the atrocity propaganda being directed against Germany, and its delegates reminded Hitler of the Jewish sacrifices during World War I. The authors of the letter were convinced that the new government did not have in mind the annihilation of German Jewry, but in case they were wrong on this point, they demanded to be told so. Again, on the assumption that such was not the aim of the regime, the representatives of Orthodox Jewry demanded that the Jews of Germany be granted a living space within the living space of the German people, where they could practice their religion and follow their professions ΓÇ£without being endangered and insulted.ΓÇ¥ The memorandum was filed before it even reached Hitler's desk. 89
Thirty-seven thousand of the approximately 525,000 Jews in Germany left the country in 1933; during the four following years, the annual number of emigrants remained much lower than that (23,000 in 1934, 21,000 in 1935, 25,000 in 1936, 23,000 in 1937). 90 In 1933 about 73 percent of the emigrants left for counties in Western Europe, 19 percent for Palestine, and 8 percent chose to go overseas. 91 Such seeming lack of enthusiasm for leaving a country where segregation, humiliation, and a whole array of persecutory measures were becoming steadily worse was due, first of all, to the inability of most of the Jewish leadership and mainly of ordinary German Jews to grasp an essentially unpredictable course of events. I do not believe,' Klaus Mann wrote in his autobiography, that the insights of shopkeeper Moritz Cohn differ basically from those of his neighbour, the shopkeeper Friedrich Mueller' 92 Most of the Jews expected to weather the storm in Germany. In addition, the material difficulty of emigrating was considerable, especially in a period of economic uncertainty; it entailed an immediate and heavy material loss: Jewish-owned property was sold at ever lower prices, and the emigration tax (the Bruening government's 1931 ΓÇ£tax on capital flightΓÇ¥, which was levied on assets of two hundred thousand Reiand up, was raised by the Nazis to a levy on assets of fifty thousand Reichsmarks and up) was prohibitive. The Reichsbank┬┤s purely arbitrary exchange rate for the purchase of foreign currency by emigrants further depleted steadily shrinking assets. Thus, until 1935, Jewish emigrants exchanged their marks at 50 percent of their value, then at 30 percent, and finally, on the eve of the war at 4 percent. 93 Although the Nazis wanted to get rid of the Jews of Germany, they were intent on dispossessing them first by increasingly harsh methods.
In one instance only were the economic conditions of emigration somewhat facilitated. Not only did the regime encourage Zionist activities on the territory of the Reich 94, but concrete economic measures were taken to ease the departure of Jews for Palestine. The so-called Haavarah (Hebrew: Transfer) Agreement, concluded on August 27, 1933, between the German Ministry of the Economy and Zionist representatives from Germany and Palestine, allowed Jewish emigrants indirect transfer of part of their assets and facilitated exports of goods from Nazi Germany to Palestine. 95 As a result, some one hundred milliReichsmarks were transferred to Palestine, and most of the sixty thousand German Jews who arrived in that country during 1933-1939 could thereby ensure a minimal basis for their material existence. 96
Economic agreement and some measure of co-operation in easing Jewish emigration from Germany (and in 1938 and 1939) from post-Anschluss Austria and German-occupied Bohemia-Moravia) to Palestine, were of course purely instrumental. The Zionist had no doubts about the Nazis' evil designs on the Jews, and the Nazis considered the Zionists first and foremost Jews. About Zionism itself, moreover, Nazi ideology and Nazi policies were divided from the outset: while favouring, like all other European extreme anti-Semites, Zionism as a means of enticing the Jews to leave Europe, they also considered the Zionist Organisation established in Basel in 1897 as a key element of the Jewish world conspiracy - a Jewish state in Palestine would be a kind of Vatican co-ordinating Jewish scheming all over the world. Such necessary but unholy contacts between Zionists and Nazis nonetheless continued up to the beginning (and into) the war.
One of the main benefits the new regime hoped to reap from the Haavarah was a breach in the foreign Jewish economic boycott of Germany. The Nazi fears of a significant Jewish boycott were, in fact, basically unreal, but Zionist policy responded to what the Germans hoped to achieve. The Zionist organisations and the leadership of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) distanced themselves from any form of mass protest or boycott to avoid creating obstacles to the new arrangements. Even before the conclusion of the Haavarah Agreement, such ΓÇ£co-operationΓÇ¥ sometimes took bizarre forms. Thus, in early 1933, Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein, a man who a few years later was to become chief of the Jewish section of the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, or security service, the SS intelligence branch headed by Reinhard Heydrich), was invited along with his wife to tour Palestine and to write a series of articles for Goebbels┬┤s Der Angriff. And so it was that the Mildensteins, accompanied by Kurt Tuchler, a leading member of the Berlin Zionist Organisation, and his wife, visited Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel. The highly positive articles, entitled ΓÇ£A Nazi Visits Palestine,ΓÇ¥ were duly published, and, to mark the occasion, a special medallion cast, with a swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other. 97
Seen from the perspective of 1933 and in the light of Nazi interests at the time, the Angriff series may have looked less strange than they appear today. The same can be said about the memorandum sent to Hitler by the leaders of the Zionist Organisation for Germany on June 22, 1933. In Francis Nicosia┬┤s words, It seemed to profess a degree of sympathy for the voelkisch principles of the Hitler regime and argued that Zionism was compatible with these principles.' 98 This compatibility was clearly defined: Zionism believes that the rebirth of the national life of a people, which is now occurring in Germany through the emphasis on its Christian and national character, must also come about among the Jewish people. For the Jewish people, too, national origin, religion, common destiny and a sense of its uniqueness must be of decisive importance to its existence. This demands the elimination of the egotistical individualism of the liberal era, and its replacement with a sense of community and collective responsibility.' 99 It further demanded for the Jews a place in the overall structure, based on the race principle, established by National Socialism, so that they too, in the sphere allocated to them, could make a fruitful contribution to the life of the fatherland. 100
References:
70 Ibid., p. 157.
71 Kater, The Nazi Party , p. 184.
72 Rudolf Schottlaender, ΓÇ£Antisemitische Hochschulpolitik: Zur Lage an der Technischen Hochschule Berlin 1933/34,ΓÇ¥ in Reinhard Ruerup, ed., Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft: Beitraege zur Geschichte der Technischen Universitaet Berlin 1878ΓÇô1979 , vol. 1 (Berlin, 1979), p. 447.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., p. 448.
75 Sauder, Die Buecherverbrennung , p. 89. In Berlin, the publication of these theses led to an immediate conflict between students and the rector of the university, Eduard Kohlrausch, who had ordered the removal of the notices and posters from university grounds; the students countered by announcing his resignation. Giles, Students and National Socialism , p. 131.
76 George L. Mosse, ΓÇ£Die Bildungsbuerger verbrennen ihre eigenen BuecherΓÇ¥ in Horst Denkler und Eberhard Laemmert, eds., ΓÇ£Das war ein Vorspiel nur...ΓÇ¥ Berliner Colloquium zur Literaturpolitik im ΓÇ£Dritten ReichΓÇ¥ (Berlin, 1985), p. 35.
77 Ibid., p. 42.
78 Professional schools group leader Hildburghausen to Minister Waechtler, Thuringia Education Ministry, Weimar, 6.5.1933. Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (NSDStB), microfilm MAΓÇô228, IfZ.
79 District leader mid-Germany to Prime Minister Manfred von Killinger, Dresden, 12.8.1933, NSDStB, micro film MAΓÇô228, IfZ.
80 Gerhard Graefe to Georg Ploetner, main office for political education, Berlin 16.5.1933, ibid. It seems that, on the other hand, Arthur Schnitzler's famous ΓÇ£JewishΓÇ¥ novel, Der Weg ins Freie (The Road into the Open) , was spared, probably because it was interpreted as carrying a Zionist message.
81 Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebuecher 1933ΓÇô1945 , vol. 1, 1933ΓÇô1941 (Berlin, 1995), pp. 31ΓÇô43.
82 Jacob Boas, ΓÇ£GermanΓÇôJewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933ΓÇô1938,ΓÇ¥ LBIY 29 (1984): 3.
83 An earlier federative association of the organisations of Jewish communities ( Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft der deutschen Landesverbaende juedischer Gemeinden ) had been established as early as January 1932; it represented the Jews of Germany during the first months of the Nazi regime before being replaced by the Reichsvertretung .
84 Leo Baeck has remained to this day a target of sharp criticism for what has appeared to some as subservience to and even co-operation with the Nazis. Hannah Arendt referred to him as the ΓÇ£FuehrerΓÇ¥ of German J. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963), p. 105. Raul Hilberg has kept to his initially harsh evaluation; for him Baeck was both pompous and pathetic all along. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933ΓÇô1945 (New York, 1992), p. 108.
85 Paul Sauer, ΓÇ£Otto Hirsch (1885ΓÇô1941), Director of the Reichsvertretung,ΓÇ¥ LBIY 32 (1987): 357.
86 For these quotations see Abraham Margalioth, ΓÇ£The Problem of Rescue of German Jewry During the Years 1933ΓÇô1939: The Reasons for the Delay in Their Emigration from the Third Reich,ΓÇ¥ in Yisrael Guttman and Ephraim Zuroff, eds., Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 249ff.
87 Abraham Margalioth, Between Rescue and Annihilation: Studies in the History of German Jewry 1932ΓÇô1938 (Jerusalem, 1990), p. 5 (in Hebrew). See also Francis R. Nicosia, ΓÇ£Revisionist Zionism in Germany (II): Georg Kareski and the Staatszionistische Organisation, 1933ΓÇô1938,ΓÇ¥ LBIY 32 ([London] 1987) pp. 231ff.
88 Yehuda Bauer, My Brother's Keeper: A History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 1929ΓÇô1939 (Philadelphia, 1974), p. 111.
89 The Free Association for the Interests of Orthodox Jewry to the Reich Chancellor, Frankfurt, October 4, 1933, Akten der Reichskanzlei , vol. 2, 12/9/33ΓÇô27/8/34 , pp. 884ff.
90 See Werner Rosenstock, ΓÇ£Exodus 1933ΓÇô1939: A Survey of Jewish Emigration from Germany,ΓÇ¥ LBIY 1 ([London] 1956): 377, and particularly Herbert A. Strauss, ΓÇ£Jewish Emigration from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses (I),ΓÇ¥ LBIY 25 ([London] 1980): 326.
91 Ibid., p. 379.
92 Klaus Mann, The Turning Point: Thirty-five Years in This Century (1942; reprint, New York, 1985), p. 270.
93 Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation , pp. 99ff.
94 Hans Mommsen, ΓÇ£Der nationalsozialistische Staat und die Judenverfolgungen vor 1938,ΓÇ¥ VfZ 1 (1962): 71ΓÇô72.
95 For a detailed account of the Haavarah negotiations and agreement, see Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (London, 1985), pp. 29ff., and in particular p. 46. See also Nicosia's updated article on the major themes of his book: ΓÇ£Ein nuetzlicher Feind: Zionismus im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933ΓÇô1939,ΓÇ¥ VfZ 37, no. 3 (1989): 367ff.
96 Nicosia, ΓÇ£Ein nuetzlicher Feind,ΓÇ¥ p. 383.
97 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York, 1993), p. 30.
98 Nicosia, The Third Reich , p. 42.
99 Ibid.
100 Nicosia, ΓÇ£Ein nuetzlicher Feind,ΓÇ¥ p. 378. It is in the same spirit that Robert Weltsch, editor of the Zionist Juedische Rundschau and possibly the best-known German Jewish journalist after 1933, wrote one of his most famous columns on April 4, 1933: ΓÇ£Tragt ihn mit Stolz, den gelben FleckΓÇ¥ (Wear the yellow badge with pride). In this memorably titled article, Weltsch argued that Nazism was offering a historic opportunity to reassert Jewish national identity. The Jews would regain the respect they had lost in assimilating, and they would launch their own national revival, as the Germans had. The Jews owed a debt of gratitude to the Naz: Hitler had shown them the path to the recovery of their own identity. The column aroused immense enthusiasm among German Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists alike.
