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

to the manipulation of the media by the NS propaganda apparatus. In a broader

sense it encompassed all the ways in which the public sphere was influenced and

manoeuvred, including the day-to-day behaviour of the population, and in par-

ticular increases in the control of informal exchanges of information. The gradual

segregation of Jewish minorities from mainstream daily activities and the

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

suppression of any criticism of these measures appeared to offer proof that the

greater part of the German population was in full agreement with the regime’s

‘anti-Jewish policy’.

Third, reshaping the public domain was the most important prerequisite for the

NSDAP’s ability to use the ‘racial question’ or the ‘Jewish problem’ for the gradual

extension of its own power base, not least at the expense of its conservative

coalition partners. Since virtually every political question possessed a ‘racial’

element, and since every dimension of life was subject to Entjudung, the National

Socialists had almost unlimited possibilities for intervening in what had hitherto

been relatively autonomous areas of existence. In practice, racism made possible

the almost complete elimination of a private sphere. Questions such as the choice

of a partner and the conception and education of children were no longer

the responsibility of the individual but subordinated to racialized concepts of

the family. Racism undermined traditional ideas of the equality of the citizenry

and led to the creation of radically new criteria for judging personal capacities and

capabilities, and therefore also to a redistribution of opportunities for social

advancement. Racism established the basis for a new order of financial relation-

ships; articulated, for example, in the ‘Aryanization’ programme it transformed

traditional social policy into notions of ‘nurturing the nation’.

Finally, imposing racial and anti-Semitic patterns of thinking onto inter-

national and foreign policy appeared to create considerable confusion on the

international stage which in part prevented the build-up of a widespread rejection

of the Nazi regime from outside Germany.

The First Anti-Semitic Wave during the

Nazi ‘Seizure of Power’

The very first steps towards the persecution of the Jews taken by the National

Socialists clearly demonstrate how National Socialist ‘anti-Jewish policy’ always

remained closely related to aims that had little or nothing to do with the ‘Jewish

question’. The first wave of anti-Semitism, the attacks on Jewish citizens in March

1933, the boycott that followed on 1 April, and the discriminatory legal measures

taken immediately afterwards are all of a piece with the tactics deployed by the

National Socialists for the ‘seizure of power’.

In the first phase of the National Socialists’ ‘seizure of power’, between

30 January and the Reichstag elections of 5 March 1933, the new government

concentrated on its opposition to the Left, the Communist Party (KPD) and the SPD.

But even if socialist functionaries of Jewish origin were persecuted with particular

intensity, 1 and attacks on Jewish or ‘Jewish-looking’ people in the street and raids on apartments inhabited by Jews were routine elements in the violence of the SA, 2

Displacement from Public Life, 1933–4

33

this form of attack on Jews was still very much overshadowed by the National

Socialists’ strategies for the elimination of the workers’ movement.

In the second phase of the ‘seizure of power’, which began after the Reichstag

elections of 5 March and lasted until early May, the National Socialists were

principally concerned with bringing into line (Gleichsschaltung) the Länder and

local government. Alongside these measures, in March and April, the NSDAP

began to take control of the employers’ associations, and the organization of the

unions and the SPD were paralysed by direct interventions (by this time the KPD

had already been crushed). In this phase, and often in direct conjunction with the

tumultuous occupation of town halls, union headquarters, and Social Democrat

newspaper offices, the National Socialists intensified their attacks on Jewish

citizens and Jewish businesses across the whole Reich. Within a few days, two

principal targets emerged: lawyers of Jewish origin and businesses in Jewish

ownership. At the same time similar campaigns were initiated against department

stores, chain stores, and cooperative societies (or in other words against large

retailers who were branded by the NSDAP’s propaganda aimed at the lower

middle class as typical products of the ‘Jewish’ drive for profit), regardless of

whether they were actually owned by Jews or not. This wave of attacks on Jewish

businesses, amongst others, was not unexpected: it was the continuation and

culmination of the dogged low-level war that the NSDAP had waged against

undesirable entrepreneurs since the end of the 1920s. Driving Jewish lawyers

out of the judiciary was, as has already been demonstrated, an old keystone of

anti-Semitism. 3

Violence and ‘Boycott’

The spread of the first wave of anti-Semitism can be reconstructed precisely. 4 It was begun on 7 March 1933 in the Rhine-Ruhr district, reached central Germany

and Berlin on 9 March, hit Hamburg, Mecklenburg, and Frankfurt on 11 March

and a series of cities in the south-west on 13 March. Spreading to certain regions in

leaps and bounds like this indicates that the violence was organized at district

level, from within those Gaus where the functionaries of the Combat League of

Small Business (the militant organization of Nazi shopkeepers) and regional SA

leaders will have been prominent.

The violence always followed the same pattern: Nazi supporters demonstrated

outside the shops, stuck posters on the windows, and prevented customers from

entering. There were frequently scuffles, and in most cases the shops were forced

to close. These campaigns were often accompanied by violent attacks on Jews, but

these did not at this stage take on the shape of a pogrom. 5

In the very first days the National Socialist leadership had encouraged the

attacks on Jewish businesses—the Prussian Minister for the Interior, Goering,

for instance, declared on 10 March that he refused to allow ‘the police to act as a

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

protection agency for Jewish department stores’. 6 However, the NS leadership very soon began to row against this trend: in a call made on 10 March Hitler

warned against any further unauthorized individual campaigns and a decree from

the Reich Minister for the Interior issued on 13 March also warned explicitly

against ‘the closure and intimidation of retail premises’. 7

In response to these warnings from on high, attacks made by grass-roots Party

members on Jewish shops had slackened off by 13 March. 8 In the second half of March, the SA concentrated mainly on measures against unions and the Social

Democrats and on preventing all forms of Communist activity. Two events