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

setting up a conference in Berlin in November 1937 for the Jewish specialists of the higher echelons of the SD. 92 The essence of the papers given at this conference was that the persecution of the Jews

needed to be intensified and that further measures were needed to enforce Jewish

emigration. The SD felt it could resolve the dilemma that support for emigration

to Palestine produced—the wholly undesirable emergence of a Jewish state—by

calling a halt immediately after the conference to the limited support (or toler-

ance) it had hitherto shown for Zionist ambitions. This change of direction was

not to be declared to Jewish organizations, since, in the words of a working

directive issued by the Division, it was ‘wholly and exclusively’ a question of

‘convincing the Jewish population of Germany that its only way out is emigra-

tion’. 93 They were to be driven out at all costs, even if it was not certain where they were to go.

chapter 3

INTERIM CONCLUSIONS: THE REMOVAL OF

JEWS FROM GERMAN SOCIETY, THE

FORMATION OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST

‘PEOPLE’S COMMUNITY’, AND

ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR JEWISH

LIFE IN GERMANY

At this point I should like to pause to consider the concept of Judenpolitik or

anti-Jewish policy that is at the heart of this book and to attempt to set the

anti-Jewish measures described so far into the context of the policies of the

regime as a whole. My central thesis is that the overall effect of the individual

measures taken against Jews—but also the measures taken against other groups

who were being persecuted for racially motivated reasons—far exceeded the

mere exclusion of a group labelled as an enemy by the Nazis. Indeed Judenpolitik

and in a broader sense racial policy in general was an essential constitutive element

in the whole process of extending the National Socialists’ grasp on power.

Let us remember that the key aim of the National Socialist movement was to

create a racially homogeneous ‘Aryan’ people’s community. This utopian goal was

impossible to achieve via ‘positive’ means, and was hardly even adequately

articulated: the concepts of race that underlay it were defined in a wholly arbitrary

Interim Conclusions

71

manner and were unfit for practical politics; it was in no manner clear what the

‘Aryan’ or ‘purely German’ character of the utopian ideal was to be.

In practical terms, therefore, the National Socialists approached the formation

of the ‘people’s community’ in a negative manner, via measures that discriminated

against, excluded, and ultimately ‘expunged’ those who were supposedly racially

inferior or alien. These negative measures were to a large extent substitutes for the

unrealizable positive, utopian goals the National Socialists envisaged. The process

that was set in train was appalling: the longer it took to fulfil positive promises, the

more the negative measures had to be intensified and augmented. Hans Momm-

sen’s description of the process as one of ‘cumulative radicalization’ is an appro-

priate description of it. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that anti-Jewish

policy occupied an absolutely central role within this process.

As we have seen, in the first years after coming to power the National Socialists

systematically segregated the Jewish minority in Germany in pursuit above all of

the goal of reorienting the public sphere in Germany. Distancing the general

population from the Jews via massive propaganda, acts of terrorism on the part of

Party activists, and coercive measures applied by the state was aimed at winning

the assent of the population at large to a form of politics that was qualitatively

new, based on racist principles. Instituting the hegemony of racism was identical

with enforcing the NSDAP’s claims to power.

With the stabilization of the regime after 1934 the National Socialists were able to

use their racist policies to move beyond the reorientation of public life in order to

penetrate and fundamentally restructure individual spheres of people’s existences.

By the mid-1930s at the latest it is clearly evident that the various racist measures

implemented were coming to form a coherent independent field of politics at the

heart of the National Socialist dictatorship, a field that can be compared with other

more traditional areas such as social policy or economic policy. The emerging ‘racial

politics’ was concerned with excluding certain minorities from individual areas of

social life so as to effect a radical alteration of German society as a whole, and anti-

Jewish policy was a central part of this undertaking.

Since racial and anti-Jewish policy were key concepts in their aim for the

comprehensive and fundamental remodelling of society the Nazis gradually but

systematically set about reordering all areas of life. ‘Racial policy’ and ‘anti-Jewish

policy’ can therefore not only be seen as independent spheres of politics but as

their practical implementation progressed there also developed the potential to

affect, interfere with, and alter more traditional policy areas.

‘Clearing the Jews’ from individual areas of life, removing ‘Jewish influence’ on

Germany, meant that these areas themselves fell under the control of National

Socialism, the driving force behind the process of change, and were significantly

transformed and made more compatible with National Socialist aims and prin-

ciples. What is true of ‘anti-Jewish policy’ in the narrow sense is true in the wider

sense for ‘racial policy’ as a whole.

72

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

Implementing their anti-Jewish and broader racial policies was central for the

National Socialists’ exercise of power. This is not meant in a functionalist sense,

suggesting that the persecution of Jews and other racially defined groups was merely

instrumental or the side effect of a ‘pure’ form of power politics prioritized by the

National Socialists. On the contrary, it is important to understand that the imple-

mentation of anti-Jewish and racial policies was the fundamental prerequisite for

the National Socialists’ exercise of power, that the Nazis used it to put into practice

the core of their claims for a new order. ‘Racial cleansing’ or ‘removal of the Jews’

were inextricably intertwined with the Nazis’ ambitions for total domination.

In what follows I shall use a series of examples to show how anti-Jewish

measures went far beyond the persecution of the Jewish minority and transformed

whole areas of people’s lives by bringing them under the control of the National

Socialists. At the same time this provides an opportunity for looking in more

detail and more systematically at some aspects of the history of Jewish persecution

than has so far been attempted.

I have shown elsewhere how racial politics was used by the National Socialist

state as a decisive instrument for penetrating the private spheres of individual

citizens