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

the Jewish minority was turned into an enforced

community that had to lead a life in the shadows and (along with its remaining

possessions and its labour potential) was exposed to the arbitrary actions of local

potentates. What was crucial, however, was that by virtue of the fact that the open

terror of the Party activists, hitherto unknown to such an extent, which culmin-

ated on 9 November in lootings, arson, abuse, mass transports, and numerous

murders, was sanctioned by the regime, the whole system of government of the

‘Third Reich’ underwent a qualitative change. If the Party and state leadership had

over the past few years, in public declarations at least, repeatedly distanced

themselves from the ‘individual actions’, and with the subsequent legislative

measures kept alive the illusion of a degree of legal security, now the regime’s

street terror was officially legitimized as an understandable expression of ‘national

rage’, and with the subsequent mass internment of Jews in concentration camps

was transformed directly into state terror. The laws passed after 9 November

amounted to the complete deprivation of the rights of the Jewish minority; they

represented a declaration of bankruptcy on the part of the lawyers in the Reich

ministries, since what these laws meant in essence was the fact that the Jewish

minority would henceforth be subjected to pure terror.

The German Jews had been publicly taken hostage, and the various public

threats of extermination voiced by leading representatives of the regime over the

coming weeks and months made it clear that the lives of the hostages could be

placed at their mercy once again and to a far greater extent than before.

If it had still been possible, up until the November pogrom, to nurture the

illusion that the regime gave free rein to terror only in emergencies, before

invariably re-establishing order afterwards, and that the state apparatus, bound

by norms, could repeatedly put a stop to the illegal ‘measures’ of the Party base,

now the entirely arbitrary, terroristic character of the regime was clearly revealed.

The regime no longer only controlled the professional careers of Jewish Germans,

their possessions and their everyday behaviour; it had now elevated itself to

become master of life and death.

The final capitulation of the conservative elites, and also of the general German

population, to National Socialism’s total claim to power could not have been more

clearly expressed than by this total delivery of a minority defined by racial criteria

into the hands of the regime. The total deprivation of the rights of the Jewish

minority, the extensive pervasion of German society by National Socialism and

the transition to a policy of expansion and heightened preparation for war were

three processes which ran in parallel, and not by chance.

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

New Anti-Jewish Measures

The more intense campaign begun late in 1937 led in early 1938 to a whole series of

anti-Jewish laws. Thus, for example, the law concerning changes of surnames and

forenames of 5 January 1938 empowered the authorities to revoke name changes

that had occurred before 30 January 1933, and to order official changes of fore-

names. (An implementation order of 17 August 1938 would finally stipulate that

Jews might only bear forenames contained in the ‘Guidelines for the Bearing of

Forenames’ passed by the Reich Interior Ministry on the same day, or else had to

assume the obligatory additional names Israel or Sara.)

Through the law of 28 March, the Jewish religious associations lost their

existing status as public corporations and thus a series of tax privileges. Also in

March Jews were definitively excluded from the allocation of public commissions.

In February 1938 Jews were excluded from the auction trade and in March from

the weapons trade, when a general prohibition against Jews owning weapons was

also introduced. In February 1938, through a change in the law concerning income

tax, Jews were excluded from child tax benefit. Further discriminatory legal

regulations were passed during this period, or else discussed and put on hold.

Early in 1938 Himmler, Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police, also

opened up a sideline of ‘Jewish policy’: the systematic expulsion of Eastern

European Jews from the Reich. Early in January 1938 he initially ordered that all

Soviet Russian Jews be expelled. This meant about 500–1,000 former Russian

citizens of Jewish extraction who had fled to the Reich and now, on the basis of

existing laws, were being expelled without further explanation. This policy would

finally lead to the expulsion of Polish Jews from the Reich in October 1938. 3

The Anschluss and the Austrian Jews

With the Anschluss of Austria, in March 1938 about 200,000 more Jews came

under immediate German rule. In Austria the persecution of the Jews very rapidly

reached a level far more radical than the situation that had built up gradually in

the Old Reich over a period of several years. The ‘backlog’ of anti-Semitic

discrimination led, amongst the Austrian National Socialists, amidst the general

frenzy of the assumption of power to a spontaneous discharge of hatred and

aggression that put the waves of German anti-Semitism in 1933 and 1935 in the

shade. Immediately after the German invasion the Austrian National Socialists, in

particular in Vienna, launched a hounding (Hatz) of Jews, in which men and

women were driven together and often forced by a mocking crowd to perform

humiliating ‘cleaning duties’ in public streets and squares and similar places. 4

Over the next few weeks the German anti-Jewish special legislation was intro-

duced in Austria. 5

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

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But in Austria from the very first, the direct and violent attack on Jewish

property was a central component of the persecution measures, while within the

Reich at the same time work was still under way on the preparation of the legal

foundations for an expropriation of the Jews and the ‘individual actions’ of Party

activists had been successfully contained for more than two years. In Austria,

immediately after the Anschluss the local Party organs introduced ‘Commissars’

for Jewish businesses, whereby the transition to open plundering was often fluid.

Gradually, however, Josef Bürckel, installed as Reich Governor by the Reich

government, managed to bring the commissariats under his control and centralize

the Entjudung of the economy. 6

Particularly radical was the action by the National Socialists against the mostly

Orthodox Jewish minority in Burgenland, numbering around 3,800 people, some

of whom had been driven over the unmanned border, while some had fled to

Vienna to disappear. In May, 2,000 Jews were