Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

‘sign of insecurity or even of weakness’.

First, however, ‘the most urgent racial problem for the nation, the Jewish

question, was to be legally regulated’, while the ‘question of the legal position of

people with other kinds of alien blood must receive consideration only in so far as

was unavoidably necessary to the movement’s fundamental attitude towards the

race question and in view of the basic significance of this question for the

continuing existence of the nation’.

If, as a consequence, ‘a general restriction of race legislation to the Jews proved

impossible in view of both National Socialist principles and general political

considerations, this would not rule out the possibility of individual exceptions

to stipulations of the race laws, if the foreign political interests of the Reich

urgently required it’.

In a response to the Foreign Office’s suggestion on 28 April, the director of the

Office of Racial Policy of the NSDAP, Walter Gross, also declared his opposition

to a change in the race laws ‘for educational reasons’. The dogmatism of ‘racial

policy’, these statements reveal, went far beyond the sphere of anti-Jewish policy. 17

However, there was a significant difference between the persecution of the Jews

and other groups considered racially inferior, because although the racial policy

measures directed against other groups before 1938 were to some extent more

radical than those of anti-Jewish policy (sterilization, compulsory abortion, cas-

tration, imprisonment in concentration camps), they were primarily directed, in a

‘racially hygienic’ sense, towards the elimination of ‘inferior’ individuals from the

‘Aryan race’, whereby this negative selection (with the exception of the small

group of Afro-Germans) was still preceded by a pseudo-scientific, and yet some-

what elaborate, analysis of individual cases. For National Socialist racial policy, on

the other hand, the Jews constituted a minority which, as a closed group, was seen

as the enemy.

chapter 5

COMPREHENSIVE DEPRIVATION OF RIGHTS

AND FORCED EMIGRATION, LATE 1937–1939

The Third Wave of Anti-Semitism: The Radicalization

of Persecution

The Political Context: Entjudung and Preparation for War

During 1938 the regime responded to the crisis in which the NS regime’s Judenpolitik

found itself at the end of 1937, when faced with dwindling opportunities for

emigration, with a series of radical steps which, taken together, can be described

as the third wave of anti-Semitism of the Nazi era.

The impending radicalization of persecution had already been indicated when,

after the end of the protection of minorities in the former Upper Silesian voting

area, the Reich’s anti-Semitic laws were ruthlessly introduced in the summer of

1937. They were accompanied by riots, boycotts, robberies, broken windows, and

the like. 1 The more radical course was introduced by Hitler’s strongly anti-Semitic speech at the Party rally in 1937, and by the anti-Semitic riots in Danzig (where,

because of its status as a ‘free city’, the German Jewish legislation did not yet

apply) in the second half of October 1937. 2 From the end of the year, anti-Semitic propaganda was massively intensified once again.

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

The clearly more radical course is directly connected with the regime’s expansion

policy, introduced late in 1937, which Hitler announced to the military leadership

and the Foreign Minister on 5 November, and which was then prepared by the

comprehensive reshuffle of staff in the armed forces (the dismissal of the War

Minister, Werner von Blomberg, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army,

Werner von Fritsch, in February 1938) and in the Reich government (the resignation

of Hjalmar Schacht as Reich Minister of Economics in November 1937 and of the

Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, in February 1938). Now all key positions

necessary for the waging of war were in the hands of reliable National Socialists.

With the transition to a policy of expansion, in the mid-term foreign-policy

considerations that had applied until then, and which had hitherto argued against

a further intensification of the persecution of the Jews, were dropped.

There was also no longer the fear that the definitive elimination of the Jews

from commerce would cause major negative economic repercussions. On the one

hand, the general economic situation of the ‘Third Reich’ had been consolidated,

and its dependency on exports had declined. On the other, the economic position

of the Jews had already been so undermined by the ‘boycott’ by Party activists, by

the numerous obstacles raised by state authorities, and the more or less compul-

sory ‘Aryanization’ or liquidation of businesses, that they no longer represented a

major factor in economic life. Finally, by now the network of controlling organ-

izations, taxes, and so on had been perfected to such an extent that the profits

achieved by the sale of Jewish businesses went to the state, the Party, and

individuals (often linked to the NSDAP) with an interest in Aryanization.

From the regime’s perspective there was a further reason to increase pressure on

the Jewish minority once again. Following the gradual general propaganda prepar-

ation of the population for a major state of emergency in Germany’s dealings with

foreign powers, the Jewish minority was to be assigned the function of an internal

enemy which formed the appropriate object for hatred and aggression.

The transition to the third phase of National Socialist Judenpolitik, which had

been introduced late in 1937, more intensely since spring 1938, and definitively

implemented with the November pogrom, the complete isolation, deprivation of

rights, and expulsion of those Jews still living in Germany became the goal.

For a third time after 1933 and 1935 the mood of the population was to be

remoulded through a large-scale campaign, a new wave of anti-Semitism; after the

exclusion of the Jews from public offices and the separation of the Jewish minority

from the non-Jewish population, the final Entjudung of German society was

placed at the centre of propaganda and of the policy of the regime. Anxieties

aroused by the regime’s risky foreign policy and its repressive domestic political

course were to be deliberately projected upon the image created by the National

Socialists of the Jew as enemy.

The renewed radicalization of ‘Jewish policy’ once again followed the familiar

dialectic of ‘actions’ and administrative or legislative measures, a process lasting

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

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about a year, which was to reach its climax in the November pogrom and the

subsequent anti-Jewish laws. This third phase of National Socialist ‘Jewish policy’

also signified a further extension of power in favour of National Socialism: the

concluding ‘legal’ Aryanization gave the NSDAP and its clientele numerous

opportunities to extend their influence in the economic sphere: with the passing

of diverse special regulations,