Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Peter Longerich [essential books to read TXT] 📗

clear from a list of definitive statements compiled and published by the CV

that in 1931 and 1932 National Socialist speakers made demands that included

taking Jews as hostages to ensure that money allegedly taken out of the country be

brought back in or to fend off an attack by France. They demanded also that Jews

be removed from public office, from the field of journalism, or removed

altogether; they insisted that Jews be deprived of citizenship, called for the burning

of synagogues, or promised pogroms in the event of an attack on a member of the

National Socialist leadership. 48 Speakers indulged themselves in ever more extravagant comparisons of Jews with animals and fantasies of annihilation as they

demanded, for example, the ‘extirpation’ of Jews ‘like tapeworm’, or insisted that

they be made ‘harmless . . . like fleas’. 49 The National Socialist Party press seems to have had little occasion to rein in their anti-Semitic propaganda in these years: the

Völkische Beobachter, the Party’s main publication, revelled in violent anti-Semitic

tirades; 50 the same was true of Goebbels’s newspaper, Der Angriff—‘attack’—

which was tailored for the public of Berlin in particular.

Anti-Semitic activities and attacks by Party followers were just as evident in the

years 1930–2 when the Party was officially calling for moderation in the matter of

the ‘Jewish question’ and distanced itself from such actions. After 1930 there was

an increase in the number of attacks on cemeteries and desecrations of syn-

agogues, and in the cases where the perpetrators were identified a significant

proportion of these actions were committed by NSDAP followers. 51

NSDAP members repeatedly attacked Jews or ‘Jewish-looking’ people on the

streets, 52 and such activities reached an initial high in the violence organized by the Berlin SA on the Kurfürstendamm on 12 September 1930, the Jewish new year,

when more than a thousand SA followers, not in uniform, randomly attacked

Jewish passers-by. 53 Immediately after the Reichstag elections of 31 July 1932 NS

followers swamped East Prussia and various other regions of Germany with a

wave of violent attacks, a number including the use of hand grenades and

including the attempted murder of Jewish citizens; the windows of many Jewish

businesses were smashed, too. 54 The boycott of Jewish firms and other Jewish institutions, which we shall return to in more detail later, was driven forwards on

the authority of the NSDAP. National Socialists even went as far as making

accusations of ritual murder in order to fan the flames of anti-Semitism. 55

Women and men received threats because of their alleged ‘racial disgrace’. 56

During the election campaign for the poll on 6 November 1932 the Nazi Party

made use of massive anti-Semitic propaganda, coining the slogan ‘bigwigs and the

Lords’ Club57 with the Jew’, including a correspondingly large range of examples from their repertoire of anti-Jewish caricatures. 58

During the period from 1930 to 1933, however, with an eye to a possible coalition

with other right-wing forces, the NSDAP officially rejected the rowdy anti-Semitic

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

19

tendency and stressed its intention of solving the ‘Jewish question’ in a ‘reason-

able’, or in other words legal, manner.

The NS Monatshefte, the Nazi Monthly Journal published an article in its

October 1930 volume that explained, on the basis of the Party Programme, how

plans for anti-Jewish laws would be put into practice in the ‘Third Reich’ that was

to come. There was a plan, for example, to give Jews a special legal status which

would have as a consequence a ‘restriction in their simple rights as citizens’,

including the removal of both active and passive voting rights and of military

service. This general restriction imposed on German Jews would ‘not exclude

further interventions, if they prove necessary’. The author of the article then gave a

series of examples that read like a catalogue for the anti-Semitic laws that would be

introduced a few years later. In a similar vein, Ernst von Heydebrand von der Lasa,

the Deputy Director of the domestic policy office of the NSDAP, published a draft

law in 1931 that made provision for the exclusion of Jews from German citizen-

ship. 59

In contrast to fundamental draft plans such as these, it seems that there were

not so many requests for spectacular anti-Jewish laws made by the NSDAP’s

parliamentary group after 1930 as there had been previously. Nevertheless, in the

Prussian parliament there was a demand made that Jews be excluded from

theatres and the radio and for a numerus clausus to be imposed on Jewish

receivers. 60

Gregor Strasser, who was head of the Nazi Party’s national organization,

announced in October 1931 that a National Socialist government would ensure

that ‘the dominance of Jews in Germany would come to an end’ and that this

meant ‘the exclusion of Jews from all areas in which they are in a position to

hamper the German economy’. 61 In June 1932 Strasser declared in a radio address that the Party ‘did not want to persecute the Jews’, but that they did intend a

‘German leadership with no trace of Jewish or foreign spirit’. 62

Possible concerns were assuaged by an explanation given by Goering in May

1932 to an Italian newspaper. He noted the plans for far-reaching special laws to be

applied to Jews, but stressed ‘that any decent Israelite businessman who wishes to

live in Germany as a foreigner under the protection of the law to which all

foreigners are subject, will be allowed to pursue his business’. 63 Goebbels defended the anti-Semitic policies of his party again a few weeks before taking power, in an

interview with the Daily Express. 64

However, the facts that in Germany in 1933 radical anti-Semitism was elevated

to the status of official government policy and that with the help of initial anti-

Semitic laws the equality of citizenship of the Jews was destroyed are not

attributable solely to the rise of the NSDAP. It was above all crucial that the

thought of excluding the Jews from citizenship rights had been becoming an

increasingly popular notion in the socio-cultural milieu of the Conservatives, the

NSDAP’s future partners in government, since the 1920s. This was initially

20

Historical Background

because representatives of a radical anti-Semitic stance within conservative-

leaning organizations had used demands for expelling Jewish members to trigger

a long-lasting debate on the attitude of these organizations to the ‘Jewish

question’. These discussions often ended with the introduction of an ‘Aryan

clause’, which