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

Who are the enemies of our state? We group them together under the heading ‘reaction-

aries’. And this reaction is a tangled, many-coloured skein. We can see red flags. We can see coal-black flags. We can see flags of black, red, and gold. We can even see a few black, white, Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7

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and red flags. The leader of this reactionary rabble is the Jew. The Jew is the general leading the whole reactionary army. 16

At the end of July, before the anti-Jewish wave of terror and the campaigns of

violence had reached their climax, there were already attempts being made by the

NS leadership and the Reich government to stem the tide and to address the main

anti-Semitic demands of the Party activists with the help of legal measures.

It was quite evident that the wave of terror was not achieving the level of public

support that it had intended. It had not succeeded in its original aim of deploying

the ‘Jewish question’ to improve the popular mood, which was still as low as it had

been before, and was if anything getting worse during the summer. 17 In a circular to the Party of 9 August Martin Bormann (who ran the office of the Führer's

deputy, Hess) informed Party functionaries that Hitler had given the order to all

responsible Party offices to cease ‘individual operations’ against Jews. 18

The Nuremberg Laws

At the same time as the Party leadership was making efforts to stem the tide of

anti-Semitic violence, legal measures were being instituted with the aim of regu-

lating the three key elements behind the campaign of violence: ‘racial defilement’

and ‘mixed marriages’; economic discrimination; and the exclusion of Jews from

German citizenship.

Demands for penalties against ‘racial miscegenation’ were central to the

NSDAP’s racial policies. In March 1930 the NSDAP group in the Reichstag had

introduced a draft bill in this area that made provision for the death penalty in

severe cases. 19 Before 1933 the NSDAP leadership had already worked up several draft bills aimed at the ‘separation of races’. 20 In 1933, after preliminary work conducted by a group of experts selected from amongst Party functionaries and

civil servants, the Prussian Minister of Justice had proposed a draft bill, but it was

not taken up by the commission that had been set up to manage the reform of

criminal law. 21 After a law had banned ‘mixed marriages’ for soldiers and reservists in May 1935,22 and district courts had started to cover for registrars who were refusing to marry Jews and non-Jews, 23 the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, publicly announced on 25 July that a law against ‘mixed marriages’

was in preparation. On the following day he called upon registrars to postpone

issuing notices of marriage between Aryans and Jews until further notice, since

formal legal regulation of this matter was to follow shortly. 24 The Ministry of Justice had already developed a draft law to combat ‘marriages detrimental to the

German people’, which was intended to prevent marriages with both ‘members of

alien races’ and ‘people with hereditary illnesses’. 25 At the Gau Party rally in Essen on 4 August, Frick announced the legal settlement of the ‘Jewish question’; at the

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

same event Goebbels had already made an unambiguous demand for an end to

marriages between Jews and non-Jews. 26 On 20 August Franz Gürtner, the Minister for Justice, also declared that legal measures would shortly be put in

place. 27 What was originally planned was to declare a ban on ‘mixed marriages’

together with a ban on marriages considered undesirable for eugenic reasons in a

law against ‘marriages detrimental to the German people’. After the Blood Pro-

tection Law (Blutschutzgesetz) was passed in September the second issue was left

to the Marital Health Law (Ehegesundheitsgesetz) in October. 28

The second major legal anti-Semitic assault demanded by the National Social-

ists with increasing vigour in the spring and summer of 1935 was the deprivation of

citizenship. This was one of the NSDAP’s most long-standing demands and had

been included in their Party programme of 1920.29 Following an initiative from the Reich Ministry of the Interior work had begun on a Reich Citizenship Law as early

as July 1933, and it was intended to demote ‘non-Aryans’ to the level of second-

class citizens. Preliminary activities were suspended in September 1933, evidently

in response to international criticism of these plans. 30

However, from early 1935 onwards demands from within the Reich Ministry of

the Interior were being voiced publicly with increasing urgency. On 26 April Frick

announced the new version of the Citizenship Law. 31 The Immigration Law passed in May 1935 had already created room for refusing citizenship to Jews and others

who were unwelcome for reasons of race by removing existing immigration rights

and transferring responsibilities for decisions to the state authorities.

Under pressure from the continuing boycotts, the third of the National Social-

ists’ key anti-Semitic demands—the judicial restriction of the economic activities

of the Jewish minority—took a particular turn in summer 1935.

The way in which the organized street violence was instrumentalized is made

clear in a situation report by the section of the SD, the Party intelligence service,

responsible for Jewish affairs in August 1935. 32 ‘It will not be possible to tackle the Jewish problem thoroughly as long as there are no unambiguous laws in place. This

is the situation which gives rise to the individual operations that have so often been

condemned. . . . In order to put a stop in future to these acts of terror, which are

committed by National Socialists out of inner conviction, or to be able to identify

when operations are undertaken by groups hostile to us, it is desirable, as soon as

possible: (1) that a unified policy is developed for all the ministries handling the

Jewish question, and (2) that effective laws are passed that will demonstrate to the

people that the Jewish question is being dealt with from the top.’

In a speech delivered in Königsberg on 18 August the Reich Minister for

Economic Affairs, Schacht, protested against further ‘individual operations’. 33

What is more, the speech contained remarkably forthright criticisms of the

methods by which Jews were excluded from the economic life of the country. It

was, however, in no sense opposed to economic discrimination against