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

had even one Jewish parent or

grandparent was to be considered ‘non-Aryan’. 30

The Professional Civil Service Law marked the point at which the legal

equality of Jews across the Reich that had been in force since its foundation in

1871 was finally shattered, and it heralded the step-by-step revision of their

emancipation. The law also marked a significant infringement of the traditional

rights and privileges of the civil service, which were constitutionally protected

but, since the Enabling Act, liable to suspension. Whilst the political ‘cleansing’

of the civil service represented a measure that was not out of line with the kind of

personnel changes that usually accompany a change of regime, the dismissal of

civil servants ‘of non-Aryan descent’ was something completely new: a racial

criterion was being used to rob part of the civil service of the constitutionally

guaranteed status that formed such an important element of the German

tradition of the servant of the state. The fact that such a racially motivated

political intervention in the existing legal system was accepted by the service

meant a significant victory for the NSDAP in its attempt to subjugate the

conservative state apparatus that was so wedded to the principle of the consti-

tutional state founded on the rule of law.

The imposition of the ‘Aryan principle’ in public administration during the

next few weeks was perfected using further legal measures. In the months that

followed some 50 per cent of a total of about 5,000 Jewish civil servants were

deprived of their jobs by the new laws. 31

Displacement from Public Life, 1933–4

39

The elimination of Jewish civil servants was undertaken by the new government

simultaneously with the exclusion of Jewish members of the legal profession from

the legal system. Yet more wide-reaching plans to prevent even Jewish doctors

from exercising their profession failed initially because of resistance from the

Chancellor, Hitler, who did not consider such plans as opportune at that point. 32

Whilst the law concerning admission to the legal profession passed on 7 April33

did indeed determine that lawyers ‘of non-Aryan descent’ should lose their right

to practise their profession, there were the same exemptions made as in the

professional civil service law. As a result of these regulations more than 40 per

cent of the Jewish notaries and almost 60 per cent of the Jewish lawyers in the

largest German state, Prussia, were initially able to continue to practise. They

were, however, subject to innumerable obstacles put in place by the Party, which

went as far as forcibly expelling them from court buildings, which happened

several times in the spring of 1933. 34

Jews in other professions regulated by the state, like patent lawyers and

accountants, were soon hit by similar measures. Doctors and dentists were

excluded from practising in the health insurance system. 35 The ‘Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities’ also imposed a quota on the

numbers of Jewish pupils and students that could be accepted. 36 Jewish school and university students were subsequently discriminated against in many ways and

were excluded from certain activities such as participation in sport. 37

The National Socialists also took special measures to exclude Jews from the

cultural life of the nation. As early as 30 January the former senior functionary of

the National Socialist Campaign Group for German Culture, Hans Hinkel, was

made ‘Commissar without portfolio’ in the Prussian Ministry of Culture and

given the task of ‘removing Jews from cultural life’. In April, Goering directed

his attentions to the theatre in particular by making him Head of the Prussian

Theatrical Commission. 38 In March and April, as part of the familiar interplay of Party grass-roots ‘campaigns’ and administrative measures, National Socialist

rallies led to theatrical performances and concerts by Jewish artists being dis-

rupted and Jewish musicians and theatre directors being dismissed. 39

On 6 April 1933 Hitler once more voiced his public support for this policy, at a

reception for leading medical officials, where he explained that ‘the immediate

eradication of the excess of Jewish intellectuals from the cultural and intellectual

life of Germany is necessary if justice is to be done to Germany’s natural right to

an intellectual leadership appropriate to its own kind’. 40

The middle of April saw the beginning of the ‘campaign against un-German

thinking’ in most universities, where members of the National Socialist Student

League systematically combed through the holdings of private lending libraries.

On 10 May in many German cities works by left-wing, pacifist, and ‘morally

corrosive’ authors were burned alongside the works of Jewish writers and

scientists. 41

40

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

There was a temporary shift in the persecution of the Jews at the beginning

of July 1933 when Hitler proclaimed the end of the ‘National Socialist Revo-

lution’ in a speech to the Reichstatthalter, those established by the new regime

as the governors of the individual German states. 42 For reasons of foreign, domestic, and economic policy the regime felt compelled to rein in the

violence of the SA with the result that attacks on Jews and Jewish property

were moderated once more. But the government’s intention to find a com-

prehensive solution to the ‘Jewish question’ was interrupted after only a few

months. Of the three major legislative programmes announced in early July

by Hans Pfundtner, Permanent Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Inter-

ior, 43 only one, the sterilization law, was to find its way into cabinet discussions, whilst the two anti-Jewish projects he had listed—a Citizenship Law

and a law for the ‘Purification and Continuing Purity of German Blood’—

were postponed. Nonetheless, the July 1933 law concerning the revocation of

naturalization and deprivation of citizenship, did come into force. 44 It was especially important in that it created the legal foundations for removing

from the Reich the ‘Ostjuden’ or Eastern European Jews who had entered

since the end of the First World War, by depriving them of their German

citizenship.

Hitler explained what had originally been much more extensive planning in the

area of racial legislation and the reasons for its temporary postponement in a

speech to the Reichstatthalter conference on 29 September 1933:

He, the Chancellor, would have preferred to move gradually towards stepping up the rigour with which the Jews in Germany were treated, by creating first of all a nationality law and using this as the basis for ever harsher approaches to the Jews. However, the boycott

provoked by the Jews had necessitated immediate counter-measures of the severest kind.

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