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

Association of the Jews in Germany’, it was subject to the supervision of the Reich

Ministry of the Interior, and represented the successor to the ‘Reich Board of

Deputies of the Jews in Germany’, formed in 1933. Compulsory subsumption into

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this organization was only put into force, however, on 4 July 1939, by the Tenth

Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law. 15 The Reich Association was not only to encourage emigration, but also to be responsible for the Jewish school system and

Jewish welfare. 16

Even though no agreement had been reached between the Reich government

and the Intergovernmental Committee, after the November pogrom there was

once again increased emigration of Jews from the territory of the ‘Great German

Reich’. Particularly decisive in this was the fact, among other things, that various

states, including in particular Great Britain and the United States, took in a larger

number of refugees. 17

Another stream of refugees was destined for the international zone of Shanghai,

where there were no restrictions on immigration. In August 1939 there were 14,000

Jewish refugees in Shanghai. 18 By the end of 1939 around 250,000 Jews had emigrated from the Old Reich Territory. 19

Summary: The State of Judenpolitik before the

Beginning of the War

Once the third anti-Semitic wave had reached its peak, the National Socialist

policy of total segregation of the German Jews had now been realized by extensive

measures in all spheres of life. The Jews, excluded from economic life, led a

wretched existence in complete social isolation: they lived on savings deposited

in blocked accounts, from which sums for their immediate needs could be

withdrawn only with permission from the Gestapo, Jewish welfare aid, or the

minimal wages from Jewish work deployment. Jews could only be economically

active for other Jews, for example as Rechtskonsulenten (legal advisers), Kranken-

behandler (treaters of the sick), or as hairdressers, lodgers etc. 20

According to the results of the May 1939 census, there were still 213,930 ‘faith

Jews’ (i.e. members of synagogues) living in the Old Reich Territory. The concen-

tration of Jews in cities had intensified. There was a disproportionately high level

of old people among the Jews living in Germany: 53.6 per cent were over 50, 21.6

per cent over 65. Only 12.7 per cent were children and young people under 20. As a

result of emigration there was a considerable surplus of women (57.5 per cent). 21

Only 15.6 per cent of the Jews counted in May were in work, almost 71 per cent of

all Jews over 14 came under the category of the ‘unemployed self-employed’. There

were also 19,716 people who did not belong to the Jewish religious community

(more than half were Protestants), but who were graded as ‘racial Jews’, as well as

52,005 ‘half-breeds grade I’ and 32,669 ‘half-breeds grade II’. 22

At the instigation of the NS state the compulsory ‘self-administration’ of the

Jewish minority had been rendered uniform: the religious associations became

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

branches of the Reich Association, the compulsory organization set up in July

1939, which also took over the whole of Jewish care, health, and schooling, as well

as all still existing Jewish organizations. The Reich Association with its local and

branch offices throughout the country thus became the organization that con-

trolled the isolated Jewish sector. Apart from this, the only remaining autonomous

Jewish organization was the Jewish Cultural Association. 23

If the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany, now dissolved, had been a

holding organization of independent Jewish organizations and communities, in

the new, hierarchical organization autonomy was as good as excluded. The

character of the Reich Association as a compulsory organization was also

expressed in the fact that it was also responsible for those people who did not

belong to the Jewish religious community, but were graded as Jews for ‘racial’

reasons. On the social level their task now no longer consisted of supporting needy

Jews alongside state care; falling back entirely on their own resources, they now

also had to undertake the care of the Jews who were completely excluded from the

state social system. In this way the regime had not only discharged responsibility

and expenses; it had also ensured that the Jewish minority was almost completely

isolated from the rest of the population and it had at its disposal a compulsory

organization that it made responsible for the execution of official orders. 24

This set-up, using a Jewish organization to control an isolated Jewish sector and

making it responsible for the implementation of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies,

marked the birth of a new and perfidious form of organization of Judenpolitik: the

Judenrat or Jewish council. After the beginning of the Second World War, the

regime was to create institutions with this title in the occupied territories, which

were to become the executive organs of German policy. This was despite the vain

and desperate hope of their members that they would receive a certain level of

autonomy.

At the same time the consequence of the total segregation of the Jewish minority

and the total withdrawal of their rights, which the Nazi state had carried out in

stages between 1933 and 1939, was that the individual spheres of life affected by

Entjudung, far beyond the exclusion of the Jews, were subjected to a new system of

norms dictated by the National Socialists, the hegemony of racism. As a result of

this complex process the engine of this policy, the NSDAP, was able to extend its

influence into the most diverse spheres and consolidate its pre-eminent position.

Thus the exclusion of Jews, but also of Gypsies, ‘social misfits’, and other groups

from the circle of those receiving state social services, went hand in hand with a

new definition of social policy in terms of Volksplege (care for the Volk), which

would only be available to gemeinschaftsfähige (those capable of being part of the

community), meaning racially ‘valuable’ compatriots, while health care was sub-

jected to the criteria of ‘racial hygiene’.

In parallel with the exclusion of Jews from the education system, racist para-

digms found their way into school education as well as into university teaching

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and research. The extensive Entjudung of the whole of cultural life and journalism

was the starting point for the implementation of an aesthetic defined by the

National Socialists, which presented itself as uncompromisingly ‘German’, a

dictatorship of taste which also affected such important areas of everyday life as

advertising, fashion, and architecture. Anti-Semitic