The Anti-Semitic Policy of the SD from 1934 to 1938 (Part B)
Source: Michael Wildt, International conference: German Society's Responses to Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy 1933-1941, Yad Vashem, 10-13 February 1995.
It is true that the ministerial bureaucracy had successfully encouraged the legitimate elimination of the Jews from public life, the special law directed against the Jews had been filtered into much finer channels. Their expulsion from the commercial world had been a success due to their independent professions. Through so-called Aryanization thousands of small Jewish commercial and craft businesses had lost their means of existence. The Jews were excluded from the German "Volksgemeinschaft" and to a large extent had been relieved of their belongings and their fortunes. But the pauperised hardly had any chance of leaving the country voluntarily, even if they wanted to. The SD definitely perceived this contradiction of National Socialist politics. The SD Oberabschnitte complained about the low emigration figures. In Hamburg only 896 Jews emigrated in 1937 which corresponded to a percentage of 5.6 of the total Jewish population of the city. On the opposite side of the balance sheet of emigration figures there was an influx of 1,106 immigrants, which meant that at the end of 1937 the SD registered about 16,000 Jews in Hamburg. In Munich about 9,100 Jews were registered at the beginning of 1937, 8,860 by the end of the year, i.e. a decrease in the Jewish population of 2.6 percent. The SD Oberabschnitt South realised that the emigration figures had "come to a standstill" 19 . For the first quarter of 1938, the headquarters in Berlin declared dass die in der letzten Zeit getroffenen Massnahmen der Regierung auf dem Gebiete der Wirtschaft gegen die Juden vom Standpunkt des Reiches aus gesehen sehr erfolgreich waren', and continued: Auf der anderen Seite ist dadurch allerdings in starkem Masse die Auswanderungsmoeglichkeit fuer die Juden aus Deutschland beschraenkt worden.' 20 By expelling the Jews from the economy, the income of the Jewish communities and aid organisations had sunk. These had so far provided a large proportion of the financial support for the poorer and deprived Jews who wanted to emigrate.
The Austrian Model
In Austria the SD first had the opportunity of putting its concept of an anti-Semitic policy into practice. At the beginning of November 1937 Hitler had revealed to his closest military top operations staff that he was determined to declare war, whereby the prime aim must be the "blitzartige" suppression of Czechoslovakia and Austria. On 12th March 1938 German troops marched into Austria. During the previous night the Austrians had already freely demonstrated their anti-Semitic prejudices in Vienna and other places. Jewish businesses had been plundered, Jews had been arrested without any reason, driven from their homes and maltreated. Personal enrichment was the rule of the day 21 . In this situation, where there was violent anti-Semitism from below and a still indecent access from above, Eichmann, who had come to Vienna immediately after the invasion, made intensive effort to centralise National Socialist Jewish politics in his office. By the middle of April he produced a list of those Jewish organisations which were to be allowed to exist again in order to take them into service for compulsory emigration. Eichmann compelled Dr. Josef Loewenherz, the Chief Administrator of the Jewish Religious Community, who was re-released from his imprisonment, to co-operate. He blackmailed several hundred Reichsmark from the Religious Community itself and demonstrated with this that with sufficient - criminal - energy the SD had succeeded in getting the Jews to finance their own expulsion, in contrast to the complicated debates about currency control carried out by the ministerial bureaucracy. This combination of centralised and simplified emigration bureaucracy and the terroristic pressure from below, whereby pogroms spread fear and terror so that the persecuted Jews fled and were lucky if they could manage to save their necks, was the secret of success in Austria, which the SD presented as its model.
Eichmann's office, at first only the Department II 112 of the SD Oberabschnitt in Austria, was promoted in August 1938 by Reichskommissar Buerckel to the Zentralstelle fuer juedische Auswanderung. The target of centralising their Jewish policy within the SD had already been achieved to a great extent in Austria 22 . In November 1938 Hagen summarised once more the advantages of the Central Office in Vienna and demanded the founding of a similar central office for the former area of the Reich 23 . His report landed on Heydrich's desk just at a highly explosive moment in time. On 10th November, i.e. one day after the pogrom night and two days before the conference in the Reichsluftfahrtministerium Heydrich made a hand-written note that the SD should prepare a corresponding suggestion for the "Altreich" and the Sudetenland in co-operation with the Gestapo.
In this constellation the pogrom in November 1938 acted as a culmination and turning point. It was initiated neither by the SD nor by the Gestapo, but brought in a considerable gain in power for both parties. The SD was able to offer all its experience and knowledge, which seemed to point the way out of the self-created dead end, especially in view of the fact that time was pressing considerably. The concept it had put to the test in Austria promised the "Loesung der Judenfrage".
Heydrich had Eichmann come from Vienna on 12th November to give him firsthand information. At the conference in the Reichsluftfahrtministerium the same day, Heydrich introduced the Vienna Central Office as a model with which it had been possible to drive 50,000 Jews out of the country since the "Anschluss" compared with only 19,000 Jews within the same period from the "Altreich". Goering expressed his approval and a few weeks later announced the establishing of a Zentralstelle fuer juedische Auswanderung along the lines of the Vienna model and commissioned Heydrich with its leadership.
The expulsion concept was expressly encouraged by Hitler. The main principle, as Goering explained to the Gauleiter, Oberpraesident and Reichsstatthalter at the beginning of December 1938, should be valid according to Hitler's command: An der Spitze aller unserer Ueberlegungen und Massnahmen steht der Sinn, die Juden so rasch und so effektiv wie moeglich ins Ausland abzuschieben, die Auswanderung mit allem Nachdruck zu forcieren, und hierbei all das wegzunehmen, was die Auswanderung hindert.' 24 Goering still insisted on maintaining the overall competence in the "Judenfrage" but the initiative to act had already been transferred to the Security Police and the SD.
Outlook
The murders and pogroms of 9th and 10th November 1938 forced thousands of German Jews to flee. Between 126,000 and 129,000 Jews had left Germany between 1933 and the end of 1937. In 1938 33-44,000 fled and in 1939 another 7580,000 25 . Those who stayed were robbed of their every possession and then, out of work and impoverished, they were sent away to do forced labour.
On 30th January 1939 Hitler threatened the Jews that, if it came to a war, the result would not be the "Bolschewisierung der Erde" but the "Vernichtung der juedischen Passe in Europa". In March 1939 Germany, in violation of the Munich Agreement, occupied the rest of the Czech Republic, six months later they invaded Poland.
Under the shadow of the War the "Loesung der Judenfrage" increasingly took on the shape of physical destruction. The men from SD Department 11 112 which was integrated into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in September 1939, played an immediate part in the conception and organisation of the Shoah. In the whole of Europe they acted as "experts" in deporting the European Jews into the death camps in the East: Dieter Wisliceny from 1940 to 1943 as so-called "Judenberater" to the Slovakian government and participated 1943/44 in the deportation of the Jews from Salonika and Hungary; Theodor Dannecker 1940 to 1942 as "Judenberater" to the Security Police in occupied France, 1942 in Italy, 1943 in Bulgaria, 1944 in Hungary; Herbert Hagen also came to France in 1940, led the local branch office of the Security.
Police in Bordeaux, became personal adviser to the Hoeheren SS- und Polizeifuehrer; Adolf Eichmann was made leader of the special department "Raeumung in den Ostprovinzen" in the RSHA in December 1939, from which the later department IV B 4 was developed. From the great number of authorities of the HS regime who worked on the concepts for the "Loesung der Judenfrage" the SD succeeded in putting its suggestions into effect. From 1934 onwards it concentrated on documenting the "Judenfrage" in a racial-biological perspective objectively, rationally and with statistical precision and thus differentiating itself from the "Radau-Antisemitismus" yet without proceeding less radically. The institutional advantage of the SD was in its close connections with the political police, which attracted more and more executive functions as an expanding instrument of power. In this way the SD gained information and competencies which would have been denied it as a party institution. In reality its position was not so much on the periphery as the SD Department 11 112 looked on the face of it in the power structure of the NS system. The work-sharing association with the Gestapo from 1935 onwards was not alone responsible for the success of the SD in its anti-Semitic policy. It was particularly due to the option of compulsory emigration, which it had developed in good time and constantly kept upright and which in a certain historic constellation, in which the other paths had run up against their boundaries, appeared to offer the "Loesung der Judenfrage". Not least the policy of the SD met with constant approval by Hitler who regarded the "Entfernung der Juden" as the cornerstone of his politics, irrespective of any tactical considerations. It was not the confusion of competencies of the various NS institutions which led to the most radical solution as the smallest common denominator, but the deeds of the actors which first created the dead ends which then had to be overcome even more radically. The "Jewish experts" in the SD were not driven structurally to radicalisation, they radicalised politics themselves.
These perpetrators were not the wheels of a destructive machinery, but themselves actively constructed the devices which made the murder of millions possible.
References:
19.Annual Reports of the SD Oberabschnitte, 1937; Moskau, 500/3/316.
20.Report II 112, January - March 1938; Moskau, 500/3/316, fol. 205-217.
21.Cf. Hans Safrian/Hans Witek, Und keiner war dabei. Dokumente des alltaeglichen Antisemitismus in Wien 1938 , Wien 1988.
22.Cf. Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Maenner , Wien 1993, p. 36-46.
23.Bericht ueber die Zentralstelle fuer juedische Auswanderung in Wien, November 1938; Moskau, 500/1/625, fol. 87-89.
24.Goering, speech, 6.12.1938; cited by Susanne Heim/Goetz Aly, "Staatliche Ordnung und 'organische Loesung'. Die Rede Hermann Goerings "ueber die Judenfrage" vom 6. Dezember 1938, in: Jahrbuch fuer Antisemitismusforschung 2 (1992), p. 384.
25.Ino Arndt/Heinz Boberach, "Deutsches Reich," in: Wolfgang Benz (Hg.), Dimension des Voelkermords. Die Zahl der juedischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus , Muenchen 1991, p. 23-65.
