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

ening the position of German Jews by social and economic means, whilst the

Reich Association concentrated on political representation and education. The

leading Jewish organizations were represented on the Central Committee, which

was also chaired by Leo Baeck. In its first appeal, made at the end of April 1933, it

opposed what it called ‘unimpeded emigration’. The Committee was integrated

into the Reich Board in April 1935. 78 As far as its practical activities were concerned, the Central Committee took up the work begun before 1933 by the Jewish

support organizations. Economic measures for support were in the hands of the

Central Office of Jewish Economic Assistance, founded in March 1933.79

A broad range of support measures were coordinated under the umbrella of the

Central Committee and the Central Office, including distributing loans, correlat-

ing applications for and offers of capital funds, finding jobs for Jews who had been

dismissed, and a special support programme for out-of-work academics and

artists, to name only the most important measures. 80 An important area in which the Central Committee was active was ‘professional restructuring’, or the

re-education of the predominantly commercially trained Jewish minority for

technical, practical, or agricultural professions, which were more likely to be

useful for emigrants. It was in the first years of the ‘Third Reich’ that this work

was severely hampered by the authorities. 81

The Central Welfare Office of the German Jews had been founded in 1917 to

coordinate the various socially oriented Jewish organizations, and the main

problem that it faced was the severe diminution in resources for the support of

people in need that had been caused by the collapse of the small and medium-

sized Jewish communities in many towns. 82 Until 1938, even if Jews were discriminated against in many respects, they had the right to support from the social

services. Until then, Jewish welfare services were essentially supplementary to this,

and embraced many different types of allowances and subsidies.

In 1933 by far the majority of the approximately 60,000 Jewish school-age

children attended state-funded schools. 83 At the end of 1933 the newly created Education Committee of the Reich Board passed guidelines for the curriculum in

Jewish primary and secondary schools that emphasized the rootedness of the

German Jews in Germany. The foundation of new Jewish schools began rather

tentatively, but in 1935 there was a significant influx of children into Jewish

schools. 84

In July 1933 the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (the Cultural Association of

German Jews) was formed in Berlin. Its main considerations were to help Jewish

46

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

artists from the capital who had been dismissed from their positions to find other

means of supporting themselves and to spare the Jewish public the need to attend

the events organized by the ‘Aryanized’ culture industry. By 1934 the Kulturbund

attracted 20,000 members and was able to offer them a comprehensive pro-

gramme of culture, in part in its own theatre in Berlin. More Jewish cultural

associations were founded in the provinces during the months that followed. 85

From 1933 Jewish men and women were excluded from sporting clubs

and associations, and this strengthened the activities of the existing Jewish

sports clubs. 86 In 1934 the Jewish National Committee for Physical Education in Germany was founded as an umbrella organization for the 250 clubs and 35,000

activists.

In 1933 and 1934, therefore, significant initiatives towards the organization of an

independent Jewish life were discernable beneath the persecutions, which together

formed an impressive picture of Jewish self-determination and which enabled

individuals to have a degree of autonomy. From 1935, when the regime imposed

the segregation of Jews in all areas of life and increased the restrictions on their

economic activity, these early beginnings were to form the basis for a Jewish sector

that was independent within Nazi-dominated society, if under attack from all

sides.

Racial Persecution of other Groups in

the First Years of the Regime

The persecution of the Jews by the National Socialist regime was at the centre of a

more widely reaching implementation of racist policy. This approach was deter-

mined by two main considerations. First, measures against ‘alien peoples’ (Fremd-

völkische) or ‘alien half-breeds’ (fremdvölkische Mischlinge) can be grouped under

the heading of ‘ethnic racism’—these included measures against Gypsies and the

small group of non-Europeans living in Germany, mostly Africans, or the children

born of Germans with non-Europeans. The second target of Nazi racial policy—

under the slogan of ‘racial hygiene’—was the ‘eradication’ (Ausmerzung) of

undesirable elements in the ‘Aryan’ race and was thus directed against those

with so-called hereditary diseases, ‘social misfits’, and homosexuals.

‘Racial hygiene’ concentrated first above all on those suffering from ‘hereditary

diseases’. As has already been outlined, the sterilization law of 14 July 1933

provided for the enforced sterilization of men and women in this category,

whose offspring would ‘most likely’ inherit physical or mental deficiencies. 87

With the establishment of public health departments in the summer of 1934 the

regime had at its disposal an important instrument for carrying out ‘negative

hereditary care’. 88 These health departments evaluated medical and other official Displacement from Public Life, 1933–4

47

documents to identify ‘persons with heredity illnesses’ and to use these individual

cases as the basis for discovering ‘inferior hereditary lines’ within the German

people.

Doctors and other medical personnel were required to notify the authorities of

people they believed to be suffering from ‘hereditary diseases’. Applications for

sterilization could be made by state-registered doctors, the directors of medical

institutions, those concerned or their legal representatives, and decisions on such

applications were made by the ‘hereditary disease courts’, made up of a lawyer and

two doctors. 89 In by far the majority of cases these courts determined in favour of sterilization; the number of applications refused varied from 1934 to 1936 between

7 and 15 per cent. The total number of those subjected to sterilization will have

been about 360,000 in the Altreich (Germany as it was until the end of 1937),

although it may have been higher. Both men and women were sterilized, slightly

more men than women overall. 90

There were nine possible diagnoses included under the sterilization law, and of

these ‘mental deficiency’ was the most common, used in more than 50 per cent of

cases, followed by ‘schizophrenia’, ‘manic-depression’, and ‘epilepsy’. These four

psychiatric labels—which together accounted for more than 95 per cent of all

cases—did not in themselves constitute precise diagnoses of illnesses. Instead

mental deficiency and schizophrenia were blanket terms for a wide variety of

behaviours that attracted