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

. . had already led to serious disruptions to public

order’. The national government supported this view and in the same month

recommended that regional governments deploy the police to restore order ‘if for

example pickets are set up in front of a shop and grossly offend those attempting

to gain entry by making threats, insulting them or in any other way’. The method

the National Socialists used to organize the boycott of Jewish businesses in April

1933 thus corresponded to a model that had been tried and tested even before their

‘seizure of power’. 90

From the mid-1920s on, the Centralverein received more and more complaints

about discrimination against Jews applying for jobs in large firms. Such discrim-

ination, which the CV mainly attributed to the activities of former army officers

working in the personnel departments of these firms, was justified as an attempt to

avoid friction with völkisch-minded employees. It too grew to the extent of

becoming a boycott. According to the CV, the firms principally affected were

large banks, the domestic departments of large insurance firms, the chemical

industry, heavy industry, mining, shipbuilding, and the firm of Siemens. 91

As had happened in Imperial times, in the Weimar Republic a large number of

hotels, guesthouses, tourist, and spa resorts refused to accommodate Jewish guests

and exclusively targeted a völkisch-minded public. The most famous example of

this form of boycott is the holiday island of Borkum, which was positively proud

of banning Jewish visitors. The number of anti-Semitic restaurants and cafés also

increased during the 1920s. The CV published blacklists and in 1932 eventually

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

25

established a tourist office to advise Jewish travellers about the current status of

local anti-Semitic activity. 92

The Director of the CV made the following summary at the end of 1925: it was

depressing to note ‘that a form of social anti-Semitism that far exceeds what had

been the case before the war is now a dominant feature of the reactionary political

and social climate; that with many, too many fellow citizens, whilst the atmosphere

fostering aggressive anti-Semitic activity has waned, a “passive” anti-Semitism is

still present, a tendency to avoid all contact with Jews’. 93

The boycott movement that originated with the National Socialists and other

radical völkisch forces was only supported by a minority of the population at large;

it was not a truly popular movement, but the openness with which the boycott was

propagated proved to be decisive, as did the fact that the boycott, although it

was in many instances against current law, was generally tolerated and did not

produce a counter-movement to offer resistance. Those who encouraged others to

boycott Jewish businesses, heads of personnel who refused to employ Jewish

applicants, guesthouse owners who did not accommodate Jews risked no general

social disapproval or fatal economic consequences.

It became clear, therefore, that radical anti-Semitism and its central demand for

the exclusion of Jews from the rights of citizenship was not limited to the agitation

of the NSDAP but gradually took root in the political and social life of the Weimar

Republic. The radical anti-Semitic forces had succeeded in forcing the Republic to

enter into a debate on the ‘Jewish question’.

It was against this backdrop that an informal compromise was worked out in

the early 1930s between the National Socialists and their political partners on the

right. Whilst the National Socialists indicated that they would give up the overly

violent forms of anti-Semitism if they were to take power, their partners in the

leadership of the DNVP, the Stahlhelm, and other right-wing organizations were

obviously more and more willing to accept the old demand that the Jews be legally

driven out of certain areas of public life. This increasing willingness was not

evident from public decrees but it was clearly detectable in the public statements

of leading right-wing intellectuals and it manifested itself in the policies of

organizations discussed above that were prepared to exclude Jews definitively

from their membership for fear of criticism from the National Socialist camp. 94

In 1933 the radical anti-Semites had triumphed in the matter of exclusion after a

struggle that had lasted more than fifty years. With the imposition of their radical

viewpoint towards the ‘Jewish question’ they had won a significant symbolic

victory that in turn emphasized their leading role amongst the political right.

However, it is not the gradual erosion of conservative reservations about taking

on radical anti-Semitic positions that explains how the National Socialists were so

easily able to introduce their anti-Semitic policies immediately upon taking

power. There is an additional important factor: in the last years of the Weimar

Republic there were no significant political or social groupings that might have

26

Historical Background

prevented the success of the radical anti-Semitic movement. The Liberals who had

inscribed the emancipation of the Jews on their banners in the nineteenth century

(even though they were mainly concerned with founding a German nation state in

which non-Christians could also thrive as citizens with equal rights) no longer

existed as a political force by the early 1930s. 95 Anti-Semitism was also rife amongst Catholics. For religious reasons, because of the Catholic view of mankind, Catholicism was in essence incompatible with radical racist anti-Semitism.

However, this did not cause the Catholic Church to stand up to that form of anti-

Semitism; instead it was by no means hostile to a certain weakening of the Jews’

position in society so that in the end both variants, religious and racist, were

mutually supportive. And the workers’ movement, which was relatively clear of

anti-Semitism, saw it principally as a diversion from the realities of the class

struggle and did not take the anti-Semitic demands of the National Socialists

especially seriously. They did not seriously fear their implementation, and in the

view of the Socialists these demands ultimately undermined the interests of

‘capital’ (including the stereotype of the ‘Jewish capitalist’ that was also prevalent

in the workers’ movement). 96 This, then, was the political scenario that faced the National Socialists in 1933 when they began to put their anti-Semitic policies into

practice.

Part I

RACIAL PERSECUTION, 1933–1939

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chapter 1

THE DISPLACEMENT OF THE JEWS FROM

PUBLIC LIFE, 1933–1934

Before the war German Jews were the victims of three waves of Nazi anti-

Semitism, each of which inaugurated a new stage in their persecution. The unrest

of March 1933 was followed by the boycott of 1 April and the first anti-Semitic

laws, which initiated the process of driving Jews out of