The Long Path to Auschwitz: A Three-Part Article

Racial Hate Laws One Step at a Time, with Family Notes

Prologue

WHEN I WROTE ASHES AND RUINS, the historical novel based on the true experiences of my grandmother Clara, I knew some regular readers of Holocaust novels would be puzzled by the absence of terror and misery. The majority of books about the Jewish experience under Nazi rule are about the concentration camps, the mass murders, and those who hid in basements and forests, hoping to survive one more day. They take place in Eastern Europe and countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, countries the German army rapidly conquered in the early months of WWII.

This was not the way German Jews experienced the Third Reich’s anti-Jewish policy. When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were no death camps. The Nazi terror did not burst upon them overnight. In Germany, the discrimination gradually escalated over nine years.

Writers are often advised to write the book they want to read, and that is what I did. Ashes and Ruins tells the story of my grandmother’s quiet heroism and, at the same time, shows how Nazi policy destroyed German Jewish lives step by step.

However, a reader’s comment that Clara didn’t suffer enough made me think that perhaps the progression of antisemitic policy in Germany needed further explanation. Thus, I offer here a synopsis (in three parts) to clarify what it was like for German Jews between 1933 and the beginning of the “Final Solution” in 1941.

Note to readers: This article makes no attempt to cover all aspects of Germany’s Jewish policy or the Holocaust. I have not dealt with the plight of Gypsies, the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, or the many others persecuted during the Nazi years. I have left out the horror visited on the Jews of Eastern Europe. I have not dealt with the execution of the Final Solution. My intention is to show the incremental aspect of Jewish persecution from 1933 to 1941 in the German homeland. Specifically, I have concentrated on aspects of Jewish policy that affected my family and thus affected the characters, both real and fictional, in my novels, Immigrant Soldier and Ashes and Ruins.

For those who want to learn more, there is a bibliography at the end of Part III.

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Part I: 1933 to 1935: The Boycott and the Law, including some background.

On the second-to-last day of January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. His ascent to leadership marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich. The people of Berlin flocked to see the marching bands and columns of Brown-shirted SA (Sturmabteilung) parading through the streets. As dusk fell in the capital, Nazis celebrated with a massive torchlight procession.

Germany’s defeat in WWI, the failures of the Weimar Republic, and nationwide inflation and unemployment—these things led to Hitler’s success in the 1933 election.

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But why did Jews become the main target for Hitler’s discontent?

In 1871, Bismarck’s constitution opened opportunities for Jews to prosper and become citizens in Germany. From that time on, the country became a haven for the beleaguered Jews of Eastern Europe. In Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, the Jewish population was subjected to vigorous persecution, including pogroms, restrictions on every area of life, and special taxes. As a result, emigration from these nations to Germany was a distinctive feature of the last years of the 19^th century.

Conservative, right-wing Germans were not happy with the influx of Eastern Jews or the social and financial success among Jewish families who had lived in Germany for generations—families like my grandmother’s. In 1850, Clara’s grandfather, Josef Kohn, was the first Jew to receive permanent citizenship from the city of Nuremberg!

Between 1921 and 1933, as the Nazi Party developed, they welcomed those who harbored anti-Jewish resentment. Guided by Hitler’s worldview, they believed Jews dominated the government, the arts, the press, and the legal and medical professions. Intermarriage had become common between gentiles and assimilated Jews and was considered an ominous development. For Hitler and his followers, children of these unions corrupted the perceived purity of Aryan blood.

In the early years, the Nazi Party concentrated its anti-Jewish efforts on propaganda. So-called “racial experts” created data from fantasy and pseudoscience, changing the previous definition of Jewishness as a religious minority into one of a racial subcaste. The “Jewish problem” was the cornerstone of Hitler’s beliefs and policies, but it would prove to be his inherent weakness too.

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Within days of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany, the pent-up racial hatred of Hitler’s followers emerged in street violence. The SA, under the leadership of Ernst Roehm, initiated a campaign of terror against the enemies of the Nazi party—communists, socialists, democrats, and Jews. (*1)

However, anti-Semitism had not been the main issue that attracted voters to Hitler in the recent election. More importantly, he promised to bring the country stability, prosperity, the return of national pride, and a renewed and stronger military. All these goals required an orderly approach that did not alienate big business or the military, traditionally a stronghold of the German nobility. To achieve his full vision, Hitler needed to control the actions of the SA and others who tended towards lawlessness and violence.

The April Boycott: A first attempt to disrupt Jewish business.

To subdue and appease the SA, Hitler announced a nationwide boycott aimed at his favorite scapegoat, the Jews. The boycott was planned to be all-encompassing. It mandated that Germans stay away from Jewish businesses, tradespeople, theaters, performers, movie houses, department stores, newsstands, and more. The boycott would prohibit the work of Jewish judges, lawyers, and doctors. Germans were warned not to advertise in Jewish-owned newspapers or to add to Jewish success in any way. The event planners instructed local committees to promote the day beforehand so all Germans would participate. To redirect possible violent actions by SA Brownshirts, the planning committee gave them the power to enforce the boycott, post notices on all Jewish shops and offices, and station men at every Jewish business to prevent customers from entering. Regular police were instructed not to hinder the boycott.

On April 1, 1933, the boycott began promptly at 10:00 am. However, it was unevenly successful. In Berlin, the day began slowly with only a few SA in front of prominent department stores and restaurants. In other towns, order rapidly broke down and violence occurred. In Frankfurt, SA Brownshirts raided the university and forced out Jewish professors, an activity not sanctioned by Hitler’s boycott committee.

The one-day event created many problems that the organizers did not anticipate. Businesses owned by Jewish foreign nationals had to be protected. Jewish department stores with outstanding loans from German (non-Jewish) banks also needed protection so that their German employees would not end up on the unemployment lists. There was no clear definition of who or what was Jewish. Though the national boycott was originally planned as a recurring event, it was not repeated.

Legal persecution: The use of anti-Jewish statutes to separate Jews from German society.

Hitler’s regime turned to enacting laws. Even before the boycott, many municipalities had initiated restrictions and forced retirements of selected local Jewish professions.

For the time being at least, moderate Nazis believed that the Jews of Germany could be controlled and ostracized by legal means. The 503,000 Jews counted in the 1933 census were a relatively small number compared to the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe. In Poland, for example, 10% of the population was Jewish, while in Germany the percentage of the population that identified as Jewish had hovered below 1% for more than a decade.

On April 7, the first law was passed to address the Jewish issue on a national level. The edict allowed for the removal of any “undesirable elements” from civil service and the legal professions. These bad elements were described as persons hired after the end of World War I, anyone who might now or in the future fail to support the Third Reich, and all those of “non-Aryan” descent. Because of its wording, the law applied to both political and racial enemies of the state.

On April 22, Jewish doctors who worked for the National Health Service were dismissed en masse, and the fees of private-practice Jewish doctors were no longer covered by the health service. Any patient who used a non-Aryan doctor was now personally responsible for all costs.

Three days later, the “Law Against Overcrowding of German Schools” restricted Jewish students admitted to any higher-level school or university to 1.5% of the total student body.

To mollify patriotic Germans, these April laws exempted military veterans and their descendants from the quotas. Thus, the children of Jewish men who fought in WWI could still attend school, though they were subjected to bullying and shunning. The “School Overcrowding” law also rewrote the national curriculum, adding mandatory instruction in Nazi racial theory. It was this law that caused my university-bound father to leave Germany early in 1934 and prevented my aunt Edith from attending university. Instead, Edith chose the local school for domestic arts, where she was admitted only because her father (my grandfather) was a WWI veteran.

The April laws were the beginning of a string of anti-Semitic laws. In July, legislation allowed the government to rescind the citizenship of anyone considered “undesirable.” In September, Jews were forbidden to engage in farming. These two laws were largely symbolic and had little effect on the Jewish population.

Later in September of 1933, legislation that restricted Jews from participation in culture and the arts had a major impact on the Jewish community. In one devastating edict, Jews were excluded from any job that involved music, art, literature, the theater, the press, or film. Jewish publishers, librarians, movie projectionists, reporters, violinists, film producers, newsstand owners, potters, painters, and conductors—all lost their livelihood.

Step by step, these laws chipped away at Jewish life. However, in 1934, the proliferation of anti-Jewish laws slowed to a trickle. So much so that in 1935, some of the many Jews who had fled the country in the first year of Hitler’s regime began to return home.

Most of the relative calm was due to the coming Olympic Games scheduled to be held in Berlin in the summer of 1936. In a disingenuous and calculated effort to lull international concerns about reported racial violence, Hitler declared the attacks against Jews to be over. He ordered all anti-Jewish posters be removed from Berlin and the surrounding areas, as well as from the site of the Winter Games. This temporary quiet period was nothing more than P.R. to ensure the coming Olympics proceeded as planned.

• To be continued next week.