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

23,000 Jews left Germany in 1937, the reports of the

Jewish Reich National Association indicate that the numbers emigrating began to

stagnate in the third quarter of 1937. 80

During the whole of 1937, representatives of the National Socialist regime were

occupied with the question of whether increased emigration to Palestine was

desirable from a German perspective if this were to improve chances for the

foundation of a Jewish state. The regime had to decide whether it wished to

continue its policies intended to drive out the Jews without taking account of the

international situation or of their consequences for German foreign policy.

At the beginning of the year the Reich government’s policy on the Palestine

question seemed clear: on 16 January 1937, the Reich Minister of the Interior

informed the German Foreign Office that it was planning to continue to support

the policy of Jewish emigration regardless of the destination countries. 81 But after it began to emerge in early 1937 that Britain’s Peel Commission might opt for a

Jewish state in Palestine, on 1 June the Foreign Minister, Neurath, sent guidelines

to the embassies in London and Baghdad and to the Consul General in Jerusalem

in which he made it crystal clear that he was against the formation of a Jewish state

or ‘anything resembling a state’. Such a state would not be sufficient, he said, to

receive all the Jews, and like the Vatican for the Catholic Church or Moscow for

the Komintern, it would serve as an internationally recognized power base for

world Jewry. 82 As formulated in a general order sent to all German consulates by the Foreign Office on 22 June, in contrast to the expected recommendations of the

Peel Commission, there was ‘significant German interest in making sure that the

fragmented condition of the Jews was preserved’. 83

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

However, at an inter-ministerial meeting on 29 July the representative from the

Reich Ministry of the Interior announced that Hitler was in favour of emigration

to Palestine and thus of ‘concentrating’ the Jews in that area—in direct contra-

diction of the idea of ‘fragmenting’ Jewish emigration put forward in the Foreign

Office order the previous month. On 21 September, however, this was modified by

a representative from the Reich Ministry of the Interior to clarify that the ‘Führer’

was clearly in favour of the emigration of the Jews, but that he had not made any

specific comments on Palestine. 84 Another declaration of principle on Hitler’s part has been preserved from January 1938, and from that it is clear that he was

positive about emigration to Palestine. 85 This established that the continued expulsion of German Jews, using all available means, took priority over any

foreign-policy reservations.

The Judenpolitik of the Security Service

In addition to the state administration, the Party, the Four-Year Plan, and

the Gestapo, in spring 1937 the division of the Party’s Security Service (SD)

responsible for Jewish affairs increased its involvement in anti-Semitic persecu-

tion. Previously this division—which, as a part of the Party organization, had no

claim to any official state executive functions—had concentrated mainly on the

collection and analysis of information, but this situation changed when Dieter

Wisliceny took over its running in April 1937. At this point a group of relatively

young, self-confident activists, including Herbert Hagen, Theodor Dannecker,

and Adolf Eichmann, set about reforming the activities of the division.

This group very quickly claimed to be a ‘brains trust’ endowed with exceptional

expertise, and its first task was to develop a consistent conception for future

‘Jewish policy’. The self-appointed ‘intellectuals’ of the Division responsible for

Jewish affairs designated the prime goal of ‘Jewish policy’ as the ‘removal’

(Entfernung) of the Jews from Germany and in this respect they were to all

appearances working in line with the various official authorities working on

‘Jewish policy’. However, the SD specialists were unusually consistent in their

stress on the priority of ‘Zionist emigration’ and all other main elements of future

‘Jewish policy’ were subordinated to this main aim, including the ‘crushing’ of

German-Jewish organizations that promoted assimilation, the ‘exclusion’ of Jews

from the economic life of the country, and limited support for (or rather manipu-

lation of) Zionist activities. 86

In order to assume the leading role they wanted to occupy in the area of ‘Jewish

policy’, this Division’s tactics included muscling in on the executive functions of

the Gestapo, via which, as Dannecker noted, ‘the struggle was being carried out on

an exclusively administrative level and [which] for the most part lacked high-level

understanding of the subject matter’. 87 These tactics were very much in the spirit Segregation and Discrimination, 1935–7

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of Himmler’s ‘operational order’ of 1 July 1937: all ‘matters in principle concerned

with the Jews’ were thenceforth to be dealt with by the SD, whereas all individual

cases or implementation measures were to be the province of the Gestapo. 88 By proceeding skilfully the SD could harness the state apparatus for its own measures

concerned with ‘principle’.

The Division made a first attempt to break into the direction of Jewish

persecution in May 1937 at the point when the international Upper Silesia Accord

signed in 1922 was due to expire and when, after a two-month transition period,

the German anti-Jewish laws were due to come into force; this had previously

been prevented by minority protection measures set out in the Accord. Eichmann,

who had been sent to Breslau, now set about seizing all the Jewish civil servants,

lawyers, doctors, artists, and others who were to be removed from their positions

so that measures against them could be set in train as soon as the transition period

had expired. 89

In the last months of 1937, the position taken by the SD, according to which an

increase in economic pressure on the German Jews and limited support for

Zionists would force the pace of emigration, in particular to Palestine, underwent

something of a crisis. Unrest in the Arab countries meant that emigration to

Palestine was decreasing, and at the same time many countries were tightening up

their immigration policies, not least because of the impression made abroad by the

rigour of German activity in Upper Silesia and because of a widespread fear of

mass exodus by German Jews that had been prompted by the intensification of

anti-Jewish policy. 90

The SD reacted to the developing crisis in its deportation policy by sending its

specialists Hagen and Eichmann on a—not particularly successful—fact-finding

mission to Egypt and Palestine, 91 and by