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

that went on until late summer 1935. It was for the most part brought to a

close by the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September. 1 After Jews had been largely driven out of public and administrative life during 1933 and 1934, the

regime was concerned to take one further step towards the complete segregation

of the Jewish minority from the German population.

There were three core aims to be realized: the ban on ‘racial miscegenation’

between Jews and non-Jews; the introduction of a separate citizenship law for

Jews; and massive restrictions to the rights of Jews in the areas of finance and the

economy. The regime consistently saw segregation as a prerequisite for the

ultimate goal of Judenpolitik, already in view at this point, namely the complete

expulsion of the Jewish minority from Germany.

Realizing these aims meant more to the National Socialists than the intensifi-

cation of Jewish persecution. They had an important general domestic policy

function since they offered significant starting points for improving the Nazi

movement’s penetration of German society. Demands for a ban on ‘racial misce-

genation’, subjecting people’s choice of partner to the control of the National

Socialist state, represented a radical break with the concept of the ‘private sphere’

that had hitherto been a central constitutive element of bourgeois society. Attempts

Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7

53

to put these aims into practice questioned the notion that there existed behind a

public sphere controlled by the National Socialists an inviolable space into which

the individual might withdraw. The regime pursued the same goal of controlling

the private sphere whilst simultaneously attempting to prevent eugenically

undesirable marriages, and a Marriage Health Law was to follow on immediately

after the Nuremberg Laws. Yet again, there are close parallels between anti-Semitic

and other racist policies. With the introduction of elite Reich Citizenship Rights

(Reichsbürgerrecht), not only were Jews given their own special class of limited

rights but the very principle of equality of citizenship was abandoned. The Reich

Citizen’s enjoyment of full legal rights had to be earned—according to plans drawn

up and announced publicly—by demonstrating that he fulfilled criteria as yet

undefined but which were to be prescribed by the National Socialist state. The

measures against Jews planned in the economic sphere (exclusion from certain

trades, marking out Jewish businesses, complete expulsion from public office, etc.)

not only heralded direct economic advantages for owners of small businesses

under the aegis of the NSDAP; they also offered the Nazi movement as a whole

the potential to use increased intervention as a means of politicizing the entirety of

economic life in a manner that was essentially racially inspired.

The radicalization of the persecution of the Jews in 1935 was closely linked to an

intensified attack on the Catholic Church and on conservative circles labelled

reactionary by the regime. The main target was the German-nationalist veterans’

organization ‘Stahlhelm’ (Steel Helmet), which was eventually dissolved

altogether. After the SA was ‘decapitated’ in June 1934, the regime began to

consolidate its domestic political position on a broad front by eliminating all its

opponents. The intensification of anti-Jewish policy was thus only one aspect—if

clearly a central one—of the regime's increasing repressiveness.

Preparations for the National Socialists’ increasing penetration of the depths of

German society were made at the end of 1934 with a comprehensive restructuring

of the public sphere. The campaign against ‘the Jews’, which was conducted

alongside attacks against ‘the Priests’2 and ‘reactionary forces’, was intended to divert Nazi-controlled ‘public opinion’ from the obvious inadequacies of the ‘Third

Reich’ and focus it instead on new topics, values, and models explaining reality.

This restructuring of the public sphere was no mere propaganda campaign; it was a

mixture of targeted media deployment, Party-instigated terror and state coercion.

Under the dictatorship, restructuring the public sphere did not just mean using

propaganda to lead public opinion in one direction or another, or influencing the

public ‘mood’ in a particular manner. The regime was not primarily concerned

with genuinely winning the hearts and minds of the German people. Instead the

restructuring of the public sphere was achieved first and foremost as the everyday

life of the population began to conform overtly to NS norms and thus give

external expression to their acceptance of the regime’s politics. The segregation of

the Jewish minority, for example, was not only achieved by a series of administrative

54

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

measures, but above all because the majority of the population demonstrated their

distance from the Jews in the conduct of their everyday lives and were thus seen to

be bowing to the instructions of the Party. Such behaviour had to occur in full public

view, so that the general population’s deliberate distancing from the Jewish minority

could be presented in the state propaganda as the popular confirmation of the

regime’s policies. In this way, the ‘boycott’ of Jewish businesses and the prevention

of contact between Jews and non-Jews (which was ensured in a variety of ways, from

the numerous residence bans to accusations of ‘racial defilement’) took on a

particular symbolic significance—not only encouraging further discrimination

against Jews but demonstrating the apparent endorsement of the regime’s racial

policies by the people at large.

The innumerable illegal operations undertaken by Party activists against the

Jews—boycotts, demonstrations, daubing buildings with paint, smashing win-

dows, and so forth—also played an important role in the process of restructuring

the public sphere. These were not merely instances of excessive activism on the

part of radical Party supporters but part of a targeted attempt to impose segrega-

tion by means of many small-scale trials of strength both against the police,

judiciary, and state administration and in the face of an indifferent majority

amongst the population. It was a trial run for what was eventually to be the legally

sanctioned isolation of the Jews, which would later be adopted by broader sections

of the population, with even a degree of relief. The function of the so-called

‘individual operations’ was as stages in the step-by-step imposition of racial

views onto society at large.

If the anti-Jewish campaign of spring and summer 1935 is seen in this broader

context, therefore, it is clear that from the point of view of the regime it consti-

tuted the key to subordinating the whole of German society to the Nazi regime via

the establishment of racial norms.

Anti-Jewish Violence

The hostility to Jewish businesses that had flared up again in the Christmas boycott

of 1934 was revived with renewed vigour from early February 1935 in various areas

of the Reich, fanned