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In particularly serious cases

the death penalty was proposed. 35

In the course of budget negotiations Reventlow made two demands in June

1930 that exceeded the provisions already envisaged in the NSDAP Party Pro-

gramme: he asked for ‘all Jews in Germany to be labelled visibly as such’ and for

‘the names of all Jews to be prefaced by the term “Jew” ’. These proposals were to

be put into practice by the Nazi regime in 1941 and 1938 respectively, but in 1930

they seemed so absurd that the members of the Reichstag actually laughed at

them. 36

In the summer of 1930 the Ostdeutscher Beobachter, the official organ of the

National Socialists in East Prussia, demanded that ‘children whose racial charac-

teristics suggest a father who was racially negro, oriental, near-Eastern, or Hamitic

be killed. National Socialists cannot conceivably permit racially inferior blood and

thus poor spiritual conditions to infiltrate the body of the nation once again. The

mothers of these bastards must be made infertile.’37

The anti-Semitic demands of the NSDAP were thus consistently repeated in

public after the refoundation of the Party and were even made more severe.

Corresponding activity in parliament shows that the Party would aim single-

mindedly at a series of special anti-Semitic laws after seizing power. What we do

not know, however, is to what extent anti-Semitic activity characterized the life of

the Party before 1933. The subject of anti-Semitism is neglected or even omitted in

most regional studies on the rise of the NSDAP. 38 Most historians agree that the Party markedly reduced its anti-Semitic propaganda after the election of 1930, but

this thesis is only partially defensible. 39

It is certainly true to say that by this point the ‘Jewish question’ was no longer

seen as an independent, free-standing issue. A glance at the Party’s election

posters—one of the National Socialists’ most important propaganda vehicles—

makes this clear. In 1924 these posters still portrayed the ‘puppeteer’, the stereo-

typical caricature of a Jewish capitalist and thus incarnating the very image of the

Party’s main enemy. But from 1930 anti-Jewish propaganda was linked with other

topics, with campaigns against the ‘Young Parties’ (the forces that were in favour

of accepting the Young Plan for reorganizing reparations) in which the relevant

posters showed the representatives of these views caricatured as Jews. One of the

main posters for the 1930 campaign had the heading ‘Battle against Corruption’: it

not only showed the National Socialist fist smashing a table at which were sitting

functionaries caricatured as Jews but also gave the name Sklarek to one of these

figures, a man who had been the principal defendant in a major corruption

scandal and who featured in right-wing propaganda as the very personification

of a fraudulent mentality portrayed as originating with the Eastern Jews. 40

The NSDAP was adept at deploying anti-Jewish stereotypes in its propaganda

with the minimum of overt effort and without always using the word ‘Jew’. The

most important methods that formed part of this propaganda technique were

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

17

abbreviation, allusion, symbolism, and personalization. National Socialist propa-

ganda made use of a semantic and visual code that was very easily recognizable to

an anti-Semite: it was enough merely to give a Jewish name, to hint at physical

characteristics or external traits that were generally associated with Jews, or to

use certain words to trigger prejudices about supposedly high levels of wealth

controlled by the Jewish population or the omnipresent Jewish conspiracy. 41

The CV-Zeitung, which had seen through this technique, commented in the

issue published on 21 September 1928 that Hitler knew very well that he no longer

needed to talk about ‘Jewish capital’ or ‘Jewish crimes’ and that it was enough to

refer to ‘international capital’ or ‘international crime’ since years of agitation and

propaganda had meant that everyone knew what he wanted to be understood by

his words. Hitler deployed this technique after the National Socialists’ electoral

success in September 1930 with renewed vigour. He was obviously perfectly well

aware that the number of those voting for him was greater than the total number

of radical anti-Semites in the German population, 42 and a few weeks after the election he gave an interview to The Times in which he spoke out against violent

anti-Semitism and pogroms, thereby establishing respectable credentials as one of

the leading German politicians. 43 ‘The movement discountenanced violent antiSemitism’, he was reported as saying. ‘Herr Hitler would have nothing to do with

pogroms, and that was the first word that had always gone forth from him in

turbulent times. Their doctrine was “Germany for the Germans” and their attitude

towards Jews was governed by the attitude of Jews towards this doctrine. They had

nothing against decent Jews, but if Jews associated themselves with Bolshevism, as

many unfortunately did, they must be regarded as enemies. The Party was against

all violence, but if attacked was ready to defend itself.’ But a more precise analysis

of Hitler’s speeches shows that he had not altered his basic position. As the

NSDAP achieved unprecedented successes in elections in the years from 1930 to

1933, the fundamental elements of Hitler’s ideology, ‘space’ and ‘race’, were

consistently at the forefront of his addresses. 44 On many occasions Hitler stressed how he continued to see the ‘Jewish race’ as the principal enemy of the German

people.

On 29 August 1930, for example, shortly before the National Socialists’ huge

success in the Reichstag elections, Hitler referred to the Jews in a speech given in

Munich: ‘The head of another race is on top of the body of our nation, heart and head

are no longer one and the same in our people.’45 In another speech held a few weeks later he depicted the struggle against the Jews—without naming them explicitly—as

a divinely appointed task: ‘if we appear today as Germans and try to resist the

poisonous effect of an alien people, what we are doing is attempting to return into the

hands of the almighty Creator the same creature as He has given us. ’46

There is much here to support the view that the reduction in anti-Jewish attacks

was a temporary tactical concession on the part of the National Socialist leader-

ship which, after its electoral success, was trying to enter into a coalition with the

18

Historical Background

Centre Party. When these plans collapsed, from late 1931 or early 1932 onwards, it

seems that more space was made for anti-Semitic tirades. 47

It is