Source: Karl A. Schleunes, Chapter 4 in: The Twisted Road To Auschwitz ΓÇô Nazi Policy toward German Jews 1933-39, (Illinois 1970).
The April legislation was completed later in the month with the announcement of a law affecting Jewish medical doctors and another restricting the number of Jewish students in German schools. On April 22, non-Aryans and communists were subjected to the ΓÇ£Decree Regarding Physicians' Services with the National Health ServiceΓÇ¥ 22 . Henceforth patients covered by the National Insurance were informed their expenses would not be paid if they consulted a non-Aryan doctor. Once again the Hindenburg exceptions were applied. Jewish doctors who were war veterans or had otherwise suffered from the war were not subject to the decree. Exclusion from the National Health Service greatly weakened the economic position of Jewish doctors. The exclusion technique was shortly to be applied to other professions as well.
The ΓÇ£Law Against the Overcrowding of German SchoolsΓÇ¥ 23 was announced on April 25. Educational policy is usually a first target of revolutionaries. The Nazis were no exception. Their regime faced the imperative of perpetuating itself by passing its ideological insights to a generation of school children. Administrative efforts preceded the first Nazi legislation pertaining to schools. In Bavaria the Minister of Culture formulated a curriculum around Theodor Fritsch's ΓÇ£standard setting work on the Jewish questionΓÇ¥ 24 . In Berlin the Nazi school commissioner directed the city's Jewish teachers to take an immediate leave of absence to prevent incidents and unrest in our schools' 25 .
The School Law of April 25 was not, however, a direct response to these pressures. For the most part it was concerned with the overcrowded conditions in German schools. The World War and Depression had led to a lag in school construction, which by 1933 had begun to raise serious problems. Rather than embark on a school construction programme, the Nazi chose to limit enrolment in general and to reduce the enrolment of Jewish students in particular. In the first instance German higher schools (primary schools were unaffected) were directed to limit the number of students in such overcrowded professional studies as law. Jewish students on the other hand were subjected to a numerus clausus . The number of Jews to be admitted to high schools ( Gymnasien ), technical institutes, and universities was restricted to 1.5 percent of the total enrolment 26 .
With the concentration of German Jewry in the large cities such as Berlin and Frankfurt, the numerus clausus worked a particular hardship upon the Jewish community. Exceptions were made in communities where the percentage of Jews exceeded five percent of the total population. Here five percent of a school's students could be Jewish, but in no case was the Jewish percentage allowed to be greater. Consistent with the other April Laws, children of Jewish war veterans were not counted as part of the Jewish quota. The School Law was also the first of the Nazi laws to go slightly beyond the vague Aryan/non-Aryan definition of the Civil Service Law. A non-Aryan child had to have two non-Aryan parents. The child with one Aryan and one Jewish parent was still considered to be Aryan. The generosity of this legal definition did not have long to survive.
The Jewish community was forced by the School Law to set up its own emergency school system. However, those Jewish children who were still allowed to attend schools can hardly to be said to have been advantaged. They suffered the full burden of the anti-Semitism, which was being institutionalised into the Nazi education structure. Each school had in its curriculum a course in racial theory which both Aryan and Jewish students were required to attend. Here they learned of Jewish racial inferiority in its many dimensions. The notebook of a young Jewish girl from Offenbach, the daughter of a rabbi, indicates the content of her teacher'' lecture on racial theory. The girl was thirteen when she recorded that:
The Jewish race is much inferior to the Negro race.
All Jews have crooked legs, fat bellies, curly hair, and an untrustworthy look.
Jews are responsible for the World War.
They are to blame for armistice of 1918 and they made the Peace of Versailles.
They were the cause of the inflation.
They brought on the downfall of the Roman Empire.
Marx is a great criminal.
All Jews are communists.
They are the rulers of Russia 27 .
Shortly thereafter this girl's teacher became director of the school.
At first glance the School Law, along with the exclusionary laws affecting Jewish professional activity, would appear to have been an effective means of disentangling the threats of German-Jewish assimilation. The School Law supported the legislation requiring immediate exclusion of Jews from the professions by assuring that only a very limited number of Jews would be trained to enter these professions. Within a generation the vast majority of Jews would have been excluded from the life which characterised their assimilation into German society. Within two generations the exclusion would have been virtually complete. If dissimulation was the Nazi objective, its' Jewish policy was at least headed in the right direction. Whether Nazi patience was equal to the leisurely pof such a solutiowas, however, highly questionable.
It was apparent to many Nazis that legislation regarding schools and professions did not strike at the heart of the Jewish problem. On April 8, the day after the announcement of the Civil Service and Lawyers Law, the Voelkischer Beobachter reminded the faithful that: Our aim is the biological separation of the Jews and German races'. Only a ban on German-Jewish marriages could effect such a separation, a measure finally incorporated by the Nazis in their last significant anti-Jewish legislation ΓÇô the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The SA, too, served notice during the remainder of 1933 that it considered a few laws insufficient to deal with the Jewish problem. Boycotts and terrorisation of Jews continued unabated.
Even the advocates of an orderly Jewish policy had little cause for satisfaction with the April Laws. They did not eliminate Jews from the civil service, law or medicine. Of 717 non-Aryan judges and prosecuting attorneys fewer than half (336 or 47 percent) fell under the exclusion provisions. Only 1,418 Jewish lawyers, or about 30 percent, could be removed from their professions 28 . At the same time no more than a quarter of the 4,500 Jewish doctors participating in the National Health Service could be excluded 29 . As with the boycott, the Nazis had miscalculated the nature of the Jewish problem. had been unaware that so many Jews had served in the World War or that so many others had been active in their professions prior to Weimar period.
Hitler, in his letter to Hindenburg, said the Civil Service and Lawyers' Law had been in preparation for only a week. In that short time it was hardly possible for the responsible authorities to do their necessary homework. The only constant factor in these early anti-Jewish actions was a lack of thorough preparation. This was as true of the legislation as it had been for the boycott, and in both cases the consequences were similar. On the first day of the boycott it had been necessary to call for a retreat. Within a week after proclamation of the Civil Service Law, the regime announced that it would apply the law only to the top levels of the civil service. For the time being officials at the lower and middle ranks were exempt from its provisions. The problem of replacing even those few officials to whom the non-Aryan clause applied had no been envisioned. The thousands of highly qualified Nazi followers of whom Hitler had spoken in his letter to Hindenburg did not exist. Rigorous application of the law at all levels, as initially proposed, would have threatened the continuity of orderly administration.
The four April Laws were merely the first of some 400 pieces of anti-Jewish legislation promulgated by the Nazis between 1933 and 1939. They were the first steps ia legal attack, which reached its peak in late 1935. In retrospect, legislation turned out to be the least important phase of National Socialism's attack upon German and European Jewry. Yet, in these early years it was the only approach officially approved by the party leadership. Hitler and his trouble shooters, Hess and Goering, expended considerable energy and ultimately the blood of the SA in suppressing or attempting to suppress a wealth of unofficial policies stemming from various quarters of the Nazi movement. For the time being he was unwilling to go beyond the reaches of the law, even though he himself defined what those reaches were.
The April Laws were followed on July 14 by a Denaturalisation Law which allowed the Reich government to revoke the citizenship of people it considered undesirable 30 . The law could be applied to anyone who had settled in Germany after November 9, 1918 ΓÇô another way of saying anyone who had received his citizenship from the Weimar government. By order of the Interior Ministry on July 26, the law was to be applied first against the estimated 150,000 Eastern Jews in Germany 31 . An Eastern Jew ( Ostjude ), unless he had in some way contributed to the well-being of the German Volk , he could have his citizenship revoked.
Although the law was designed to strike at the hated Ostjude , it actually served little practical purpose. Many Jews had indeed fled Eastern Europe following the pogroms during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. While large numbers had used Germany only as a springboard for emigration to the United States, others had chosen to settle in the land of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Most of these were eager to attain citizenship, but the difficulties of becoming a naturalised German were almost insurmountable. Each German State government had the right to veto any application for citizenship. Only by unanimous decision was such an application approved. The result was that most of these people, while they continued to live and even raise families in Germany, retained the citizenship of the country from which they had fled. For all practical purposes they became Germans, but unless they succeeded in acquiring citizenship, they, their children and their grandchildren remained ΓÇ£foreign JewsΓÇ¥. The situation did not improve markedly with the advent of the Weimar Republic. Naturalisation procedures underwent no basic changes. Any one state government could still veto an application for citizenship and when it came to a decision on a Jewish applicant the ultraconservative government of Bavaria usually chose to exercise its veto power. Consequently thousands of Jews whose grandfathers had settled in Germany and whose fathers had been born there were still citizens of foreign states.
Following the World War the situation became even more confusing when the kaleidoscopic shift of Eastern Europe's political boundaries rendered thousands more Jews stateless. During the early days of the Weimar Republic many of these people had found their way to Germany. Very few had become German citizens. The Nazis were to discover that even they could not revoke the citizenship of those who were not citizens. Outright expulsion of these foreign Jews was also out of the question. By the latter 1920's anti-Semitic regimes had captured control of many east European states. Poland, the homeland of most of Germany's Eastern Jews, was especially eager to avoid their return. Moreover, Hitler was at the outset unwilling to alienate the Pilsudski regime. The negotiations which in January 1934 would led to a non-aggression pact with Poland were already underway. Hitler went through the motions even so. On March 23, 1934 a ΓÇ£Law Regarding Expulsion from the ReichΓÇ¥ ΓÇô the Denaturalisation Law ΓÇô was proclaimed 32 . While it laid the legal foundation for the expulsion of the Eastern Jew, no such action was carried out until mid-1938.
Because so few Eastern Jews were citizens, the Denaturalisation Law was largely a meaningless gesture. The law provided, however, that the citizenship of ΓÇ£anyone who acted contrary to the spirit of the Volk or stateΓÇ¥ could be revoked. For the moment such terms were more applicable to the emigres who left Germany in the wake of Hitler's seizure of power. Between August 1933 and late 1934 such German notables as Leon Feuchwanger, Philip Scheidemann, Kurt Tucholski, Albert Einstein, Heinrich Mann and even Otto Strasser lost their citizenship after having fled the Third Reich 33 .
Ultimately, as with so many other early anti-Jewish measures, the Denaturalisation Law backfired. Some of the Eastern Jews had been German citizens. The revocation of their citizenship undermined eventually the later policy of forcing Jewish emigration. Without citizenship papers and a passport the possibilities of emigrating to another country were greatly reduced.
Three further pieces of legislation affecting Jews came into effect in 1933. On September 29, a ΓÇ£Hereditary Farm LawΓÇ¥ excluded Jews from owning farmland or engaging agriculture 34 . The effect of this upon Jews was minimal. Very few of them were engaged in farming of any sort. The Jewish peasant did not exist. Nonetheless the terms of the law reflected a classic example of racial thinking: The Reich government passes this law to secure the peasant foundations of our blood line through instituting the customs of laninheritance'. Jurist Frank's ΓÇ£substantive valuesΓÇ¥ of blood and soil were guaranteed by the law. Paragraph thirteen established that only a German could be a farmer or Bauer . Persons of Jewish or coloured blood were excluded. In order to inherit a peasant holding, the German Bauer had to be able to trace his racial purity back to the year 1800 35 , before the emancipation of west European Jewry.
Unlike the Farm Law the two remaining pieces of legislation in 1933 dealt a major blow to Germany's Jews. On September 29 German cultural life ΓÇô and therefore a major portion of Jewish cultural life ΓÇô was delivered into the hands of Joseph Goebbels. Chambers of Culture were established within his Propaganda Ministry, one each to regulate the film, theatre, music, fine arts, literature, broadcasting, and the press. Each chamber was to regulate completely the activity within its own province. The film chamber, for example was granted authority over everything from the producer and actors in a movie to the ticket collectors in the theatre. To be active in any of these areas required the licensed permission of the appropriate chamber president 36 . In one grand sweep Jews, if they were engaged in anything related to the film, music, or the press were subject of exclusion by Goebbels' decree. The law establishing the Chambers of Culture contained no Arclause. None was necessary. Goebbels had been granted authority to refuse admission of undesirables to any of the chambers. By avoiding the legal problems associated with the Aryan clause, Goebbels was unhampered in his exclusion of Jews. A more specific law dealing with journalists was effected on October 4 37 . Its provisions were similar to the ones, which established the chambers of culture. Henceforth journalists and editors needed official permission to carry on their work.
Exclusion of Jews from the professions covered by the various chambers was eventually much more effective than it had been through the Civil Service of Lawyers' Law. During the next years thousands of Jewish artists, writers, actors, musicians, and Jews in related fields were to be excluded from participating in German cultural life. The technique of creating a bureaucratic structure outside of the regular state apparatus allowed the Nazis a freedom, which more ordinary legislation did not.
By the late 1933 the official anti-Jewish energies of the Nazi regime seemed temporarily to have been spent. The feverish activity surrounding the boycott and the early legislation subsided into a period of relative calm. Even the SA seemed to let up occasionally in its rowdyism. Between the stick of Hitler's call to discipline and the carrot of Roehm being invited into the Reich's Cabinet, its revolutionary enthusiasm fell to a lower ebb. In July Hitlhad proclaimed the Nazi revolution to be ended 38 . By December the claim had taken on a ring of truth.
The later months of 1933 witnessed what many people ΓÇô even Jews ΓÇô considered to be a withdrawal from the rabid phase of anti-Jewish policy. In Jewish circles the hope that the Nazi storm was subsiding gained currency. Exclusion from the professions or even from the schools did not necessarily mean the end of the Jewish community. More likely it meant a period in which Jewish participation in German life would be circumscribed. Nazi legislation had already provided for that. But the halt to the boycotts, along with Hitler's pronouncement that the revolution was ended, at least made continued existence possible. The Jewish community began to hope for a stabilisation of the status quo . In mid-November a leading Jewish newspaper, the Judische Rundschau reviewed the experiences of 1933 and speculated on their meaning.
If we look at the events of the past year, we must note that many German Jews have lost their economic base for existence. Yet it appears from the pronouncements of authoritative sources that in the future our economic existence will be guaranteed, though limited, by the new legal situation. . . . In this light we can understand Dr. Goebbels' remark that what needs to be solved concerning the Jewish question has been solved by the government' 39 .
Such hopes were buttressed in December by a joint announcement from the Economic and Interior Ministries that the Aryan clause was not applicable to the field of commerce 40 .
Nazi party radicals and many in the lower ranks feared that the stabilisation for, which Jews were hoping was actually being effected. Hess' orders that all spontaneous anti-Jewish actions cease caused confusion and consternation among those who were pressing for more radical measures. The party leadership could hardly afford to ignore these sentiments. Goebbels addressed himself to this situation in September 1933. He chose the forum of the gigantic Nuremberg Party Rally, the gathering place for thousands of the SA and rank and file party followers. He spoke to them of domestic pressures with precluded a more radical Jewish policy and the foreign considerations, which made any sort of a Jewish policy a ΓÇ£heavy burdenΓÇ¥ for the Reich government. Despite this difficulty he asked for their perseverance 41 . Goebbels rarely was candid in public. His admission of internal and external pressures was a transparent effort to justify what to many of the assembled faithful seemed an un-ambitious Jewish policy.
Confusion in the ranks was not dispelled by Goebbels' blandishments at Nuremberg. In January 1934, a local party official from Bonn sent a letter of complaint to Julius Streicher. The official had been planning to organise a boycott of Jewish business locally and had just received an order from Munich demanding the boycott be cancelled. He hoped Streicher would be able to tell him why. I have been very active in anti-Semitic affairs within our local party and have arranged among other things, many lectures on anti-Semitism. I know that you must be very busy, but I do hope you will be able to answer my question. Please tell me in what form it is still possible, despite the existing laws and orders, to carry on anti-Semitic actions and propaganda?' 42 . His confusion was real. He was a conscientious Nazi trying to do his duty. Many others like him shared his frustrations. There was little he could do about Germany's plight, but he could assist the Fuehrer in his campaign against the Jews. There were always a few Jewish shops to be boycotted or local Jews to harass. In this he could demonstrate his loyalty to the cause and contribute to its success. It accorded him a sense of contributing to the new Germany. But without a free hand against the Jew his only meaningful contribution was severely limited.
Complaints of this sort were to no avail. During 1934 very few official measures of any public significance were being taken against the Jew. On the surface it appeared as if the Nazi regime was planning to allow Jews an economic basis for a continued, if circumscribed, existence. For what other reason would the government exclude the Aryan clause from commerce and business? Or why would it issue orders, which in effect protected Jews from its own followers? There were, to be sure, continued incidents of harassment and small-scale boycotting, but they did not have the sanction of the government. The purge of radical elements within the movement, especially of the SA leadership, in June 1934 brought for the most part even these ΓÇ£uncoordinatedΓÇ¥ incidents to an end. To many Jews these signs seemed to point in a promising direction. An estimated 37,000 Jews had left Germany in the wake of Hitler's take over. In 1934 the number dropped to 23,000 43 . Then, during the first months of 1935, some 10,000 of those who had fled began to return 44 , in hope of an improved situation for Jews in Germany.
Legislative action against Jews was renewed on a very subdued scale in May 1935 with the announcement of a new Military Service Law 45 . The new law reintroduced general conscription and was, therefore, a major step in Hitler's plan for German rearmament. Its effect upon Jews centred on the question of who was eligible for military service. Aryan ancestry was an absolute prerequisite for entry into the services. Only under very unusual circumstances could a non-Aryan qualify. Even then he had to initiate an appeal to a review committee established jointly by the Ministries of Interior and War which would review the applicants' previous record, his political reliability and his general character. If he met this board's approval it was technically possible for him to be accepted for military service.
It is hardly necessary to point out that this law was not a frontal attack upon the Jew. Only those Jews convinced of the virtues of military life were directly affected. Yet German Jewry had generally prided itself on the role of Jewish soldiers in defence of the fatherland. The Reichsbund judischer Frontsoldaten, a veterans group, which had internalised many German military values, was bitterly humiliated. Even the Jews less committed to military life did not fail to see the implications of the military law. By deeming Jews unfit to serve in the armed forces, it also made them citizens of a lesser rank. The effect of this new status upon the morale of German Jews is impossible to assess. It must be noted, however, that an overwhelming majority of German Jews were deeply attached to Germany, an attachment, which included an interest in its military defence.
The Hand of the SS in Jewish affairs became publicly apparent for the first time in connection with the Military Service Law. It had been dealing with limited aspects of the Jewish question for some time, but only behind the official scene. On May 15, a few days before the Service Law was announced, the recently established voice of the SS, Das Schwarze Korps , published an editorial entitled ΓÇ£NO ROOM FOR JEWS IN THE MILITARY;ΓÇ¥ We advise Jews to give up their efforts to enlist in the military service. It would be better for them to throw their enlistment papers into the waste basket, avoiding military service as Jews have always done, and let it go at that'. In 1935 the bureaucratic and police network of Reich's Leader of the SS Heinrich Himmler, free from SA control, was beginning to function with some efficiency. It was also confident enough to express itself on issues related to military service and the Jews. Those who hoped for a Nazi retreat on the Jewish question were unaware that a structure entirely outside the traditional state apparatus and the restrictions of even pseudo-legality was already making its influence felt 46 .
Although it reintroduced the Aryan paragraph for the first time since 1933, the Military Service Law represented no progress in defining the Jew. In fact its definition of the non-Aryan was less precise than it had been in the 1933 April Laws. The question of definition could be left unresolved as long as legislation dealt with the periphery of Jewish problem. The entire Nazi ideological structure rested on the assumption, however, that the Jew was evil because of his blood. His most monstrous crime had been to defile the purity of the Aryan race, not the infiltration of the civil service, the various professions, or even the German economy. If this basic aspect of the Jewish problem was ever to be solved, the regulation of marriages between Jew and German was inevitable.
The logic of such a ban had not escaped racial radicals inside or outside the SA, nor the officials at the state marriage bureaux or Standesamter. Instances of local SA units pressuring Standesamt officials into refusing marriage licenses to ΓÇ£racially mixedΓÇ¥ couples were common. Occasionally the officials would merely warn such a couple that their marriage was inadvisable 47 . At other times a license would actually be refused. In such instances, because the marriages were not illegal, some petitioning couples brought suit in the courts. The SA naturally expected the judges faced with these cases to uphold the spirit of National Socialist ideology. Without a law upon which to base a decision, however, the courts were at a loss to give their judgements legal sanction. The judge in these cases was caught between trying to maintain the law and attempting to placate the SA 48 . Marriage officials were caught in the same uncomfortable position.
Understandably both judges and Standesamt officials looked to the Reich's Interior Ministry for guidance. A law, a decree, or even a directive would have given them some basis for their decisions. Nothing was forthcoming. Interior Ministry Frick, in early 1934, answered queries related to mixed marriages by emphasising the importance of Germany's image abroad: If our actions stay within certain legal boundaries, they will be better received at home and abroad' 49 .
References:
22 Ibid., p. 222.
23 Ibid., p. 225
24 Voelkischer Beobachter, April 7, 1933.
25 Voelkischer Beobachter, April 2 and 3, 1933.
26 Solomon Colodner, ΓÇ¥Jewish Education under National SocialismΓÇ¥, Yad Vashem Studies 3 (1959): 161-180.
27 Denemann, ΓÇ¥MemoirenΓÇ¥, p. 21a.
28 Deutsche Justiz (1934), p. 950.
29 Bruno Blau, Das Ausnahmerecht fuer die Juden in Deutschland, 1933-1945, 2nd ed. (Dusseldorf, 1954), p. 7.
30 RGB1, I, 1933, p. 480.
31 Ibid., p. 539.
32 Ibid., p. 213.
33 Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preussischer Staatsanzeiger, August, 1933. Through November, 1934, passim.
34 RGB1, I, 1933, p. 685.
35 Maxine Y. Sweezy, The Structure of Nazi Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), pp. 180-183.
36 See Derrick Sington and Arthur Weidenfeld, The Goebbels Experiment: A Study of the Nazi Propaganda Machine (London, 1942), pp. 111-113.
37 RGB1, I, 1933, p. 713.
38 Voelkischer Beobachter, July 17, 1933.
39 Judische Rundschau, November 17, 1933 (italics mine).
40 Central Verein Zeitung, December 7, 1933.
41 Dokumente der deutschen Politik und Geschichte, vol. 1, p. 183.
43 Werner Rosenstock, ΓÇ¥Exodus 1933-1939: A Survey of Jewish Emigration from GermanyΓÇ¥, Year Book I of the Baeck Institute (London, 1956), pp. 373-390.
44 Judische Rundschau, May 10, 1935.
45 RGB1, I, 1935, p. 607.
46 The role of the SS will be treated in subsequent ch.
