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

by appeals from regional NS leaders and the Party press.

Immediately after the National Socialist triumph in the Saar Plebiscite of 13

January, when 90 per cent of voters opted for reunion with Germany, the

foreign-policy considerations that had so far militated against the pursuit of radical

anti-Jewish persecution no longer seemed to Party activists to be relevant. As part

of the boycott Party activists organized demonstrations, smashing windows

and assaulting Jews. These operations were focused in Pomerania, Hesse, the

Rhineland, and Franconia. Alongside attacks on Jewish businesses and their

proprietors the activists also targeted so-called ‘race defilers’. Since the end of

Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7

55

1934 there had been increasing demands from within the Party for legal measures

to prevent marriages or sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews. 3

These unofficial steps were accompanied by measures sponsored by the state.

When the Gestapo banned the raising of the swastika by Jews in February 1935, the

Reich Minister of the Interior felt obliged to sanction this ruling by issuing a

decree, which he did on 27 April. 4 Jews were excluded from the call-up to military service, initiated in May of that year. 5 In addition all émigrés returning to Germany, whether Jews or non-Jews, were sent to internment camps from the

beginning of 1935.6

At the end of April the instances of anti-Semitic violence began to diminish.

There were doubts expressed in various quarters about continuing operations that

had not led to changes in how the general public shopped and which had been met

with widespread criticism and opposition from the populace at large. 7

There were evidently also foreign-policy considerations in play. The government

was anxious to overcome what was by then its almost complete isolation on the

international scene after the formation of the ‘Stresa Front’, the joint diplomatic

reaction of France, Britain, and Italy to the German reintroduction of compulsory

military service. Germany was particularly concerned to improve its relations with

Great Britain. Hitler’s Reichstag speech of 21 May, in which he announced the

Reich’s wish for peaceful coexistence with other nations and its willingness to seal

non-aggression pacts, signalled a phase of détente in questions of foreign affairs. At

the same time, negotiations with the British government were taking place, the

source of much disquiet amongst the British public, which ended on 18 June with

the signing of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. In the period from the middle

of April to the middle of June, therefore, further anti-Jewish violence would have

put the foreign policy of the ‘Third Reich’ at some considerable risk. 8

Whilst the violence continued to recede in the main areas of unrest from the

end of April to the middle of May, by the end of May a second series of anti-Jewish

operations was beginning in other areas, intensifying in June and reaching a high

point in July 1935. The month of May presents a very uneven picture, therefore,

since the first phase of violence was receding in some areas whilst the second was

beginning in others. 9

This unrest came to a climax with serious anti-Semitic violence in Munich at

the end of May. There were open confrontations between members of the SA and

SS on the one side and the police on the other. The reactions of high-ranking

National Socialists demonstrate how inconvenient the government found these

spectacular anti-Jewish incidents at this point. 10 The Reichsführer of the SS

(Himmler), the Führer’s Deputy (Hess), the Gauleiters of Cologne (Grohé) and

Hessen-Nassau (Sprenger) all made public declarations of opposition to these

‘individual operations’. 11

In July the Party organization in Berlin made a renewed attempt to radicalize

anti-Semitic policies by means of a wave of terror ‘from below’. 12 Members of the 56

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

Hitler Youth had been organizing demonstrations outside Jewish businesses and

restaurants since the beginning of June, and they spread rapidly throughout the

city. The anti-Jewish mood had also been stoked up very significantly in a speech

by Goebbels, who was also Gauleiter of Berlin, at the 30 June Party rally.

The situation escalated when the Berlin newspaper edited by Goebbels, Der

Angriff, which was as rabidly aggressive as its name suggests, made an open appeal

on 15 July for people to take physical action to prevent disruptions to a Swedish

anti-Semitic film supposedly initiated by Jewish cinema-goers. On that evening

there were riots on the Kurfürstendamm during which NS activists forced their

way into cafés and forcibly drove out Jewish customers, and these ended in

confrontations with the police. The events attracted the attention of the inter-

national press and led to the dismissal of the Chief of the Berlin Police Force, von

Levetzow. Goebbels seized the initiative, issued a ban on the very acts of violence

that he had himself been partly responsible for encouraging, and managed to

restore at least a superficial level of goodwill between the police, the city author-

ities, the Gau leadership, and the SA, with a slogan promising the systematic

cleansing of Berlin of ‘Communists, Reactionaries, and Jews’. 13 The violence in Berlin was the starting gun for a new anti-Semitic propaganda campaign that now

extended across the whole of the Reich.

The reports of the Centralverein, the Gestapo, the SPD in exile, and other

sources show quite clearly that NS activists were once more carrying out large-

scale anti-Jewish operations across the Reich from mid-July onwards. Regional

centres for this violence were the Rhineland, Westphalia, Hesse, Pomerania, and

East Prussia. 14 The list of the techniques typically employed includes blockading and obstructing Jewish businesses, threatening customers who tried to get past

these measures, driving Jews from public swimming pools, smashing windows and

daubing shopfronts with paint, desecrating Jewish cemeteries and synagogues,

putting up anti-Jewish signs, and preventing the sale of goods to Jews. ‘Race

defilers’ often had to be taken into protective custody by the Gestapo after attacks

by Party activists. In many places Jewish economic life was destroyed altogether by

the end of the summer as a result of these large-scale hate campaigns.

Radical forces within the Party made an attempt to make a link between the

wave of anti-Jewish sentiment and a general reckoning with all ‘enemies of the

state’ still present in Germany. Thus in many cities Party activists organized

demonstrations against supposedly anti-social businessmen and senior officials

who refused to bow to the demands of local Party bosses. 15 The newspaper Der Stürmer, edited by the radical Nuremberg Gauleiter, tried in June to summarize

the whole campaign in