Germans against Germans

The Fate of the Jews, 1938–1945

Moshe Zimmermann, Naftali Greenwood

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253062321
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Among the many narratives about the atrocities committed against Jews in the Holocaust, the story about the Jews who lived in the eye of the storm—the German Jews—has received little attention. Germans against Germans: The Fate of the Jews, 1938–1945, tells this story—how Germans declared war against other Germans, that is, against German Jews.

Author Moshe Zimmermann explores questions of what made such a war possible? How could such a radical process of exclusion take place in a highly civilized, modern society? What were the societal mechanisms that paved the way for legal discrimination, isolation, deportation, and eventual extermination of the individuals who were previously part and parcel of German society?

Germans against Germans demonstrates how the combination of antisemitism, racism, bureaucracy, cynicism, and imposed collaboration culminated in "the final solution."

ONE

THE DECLINE OF GERMAN JEWRY

THE DECLINE OF GERMAN JEWRY drew attention in various contexts even before the National Socialists acceded to power. As early as 1911, Felix Theilhaber published a scholarly work titled exactly that, discussing the demise of the Jews of Germany from demographic and sociological points of view.¹ Theilhaber, an Orthodox Jew and a Zionist, traced the onset of German Jewry’s decay back to the nineteenth century in the belief that the assimilation of this population group into its non-Jewish German surroundings had become unstoppable by then. Antisemites, in contrast, totally disagreeing about the sunset of German Jewry, spoke of “Judaism’s victory over Germanness.”²

From 1933 onward, the word “decline” was unquestionably valid in describing the history of German Jewry, although from a diametrically opposite direction—in other words, the days of assimilation and equality had passed. From that time on, the war cry “Germany, awake! Jews to the stake!” was heard everywhere in the cities and villages of Germany and became a guiding principle in German authorities’ operative policies. In a certain sense, the Middle Ages had reemerged in Germany, ushering the Jews of Germany into a process of disentitlement, discrimination, and ultimately deportation from the German lands. Accordingly, Gustav Krojanker, a Zionist who had emigrated to Palestine, titled his Hebrew-language booklet, published in 1937 in Palestine, The Rise and Fall of German Jewry.³ Although Krojanker saw 1933 as the tipping point in the decline, its economic and cultural portents had appeared long before. After World War II, historians carried this trend of thought further and regularly stopped their accounts of the history of German Jewry in 1933. When the liberal rabbi and historian Ismar Elbogen published his History of the Jews in Germany in 1935, three years before he left for America, one could understand and accept his specification of 1933 as the end year of his historical account and his “uncertainty about the future.” When the popular historian Amos Elon chose to wind up the historical description in his book German Requiem: Jews in Germany before Hitler in 1933 and titled his book accordingly, his decision was one not of technical discretion but, beyond all doubt, of principle. This approach makes it seem as though anything that happened afterward was not a new chapter but in fact the end or something after the end. Andreas Reineke, in his History of the Jews in Germany 1781–1933 (2007), follows the same trend of thought. An even more radical approach is taken by Albert Bruer in Rise and Fall: A History of the Jews in Germany 1750–1918,⁴ in which 1918 is seen as the year of demise. For Bruer, the Weimar Republic already belongs to the postemancipation era. Even the Leo Baeck Institute, devoted to research on German Jewry and its culture, long invested scanty attention to the fate of German Jewry after 1933. In this state of affairs, one is almost tempted to say that the National Socialist policies sank roots in historiography as well: from the historians’ standpoint, it was in 1933 that German Jewry crossed its finish line.

And if, all these postulates notwithstanding, the history of German Jewry under National Socialist rule after 1933 is described, this period is examined, by and large, separately and out of context with everything that preceded it, as though the National Socialist authorities not only introduced a new policy toward the Jews but also created a new German Jewry. Even if in no way intended to document the continuation, and least of all the end, of German Jewish history, this firmly demarcated investigation of post-1933 developments, in disregard of everything that happened before, has to some extent become a prequel to the history of the Holocaust in its broad sense.⁵ It usually spans the 1933–1938 period, up to the event—the pogrom of November 9—known as Kristallnacht. What happened to the German Jews after 1938 is assimilated into and embedded in the story of the Holocaust, since when they deal with World War II, historians and their readers obviously train their gaze on the history of European Jewry at large.

Thus, the fate of German Jewry in its final decline, from 1938 to 1945—
between the November pogrom and the end of World War II—is poorly represented in the historiographic literature and emerges either as a negligible part of the history of the Holocaust or as a small appendix to German Jewish or general history. Namely, it is marginalized or, in the best case, set within a context that transcends the history of German Jewry. As a rule, even Götz Aly’s approach to the Final Solution since 1995, and his take on the dispossession of the Jews by the Nazi regime in his 2005 book,⁶ leaves no room for focused or specific attention to German Jewry, for understandable reasons. On methodological grounds, Saul Friedländer, in volume 2 of his monumental work, chose to subsume the history of German Jewry into the general history of relations between the Third Reich and the Jews of Europe. In Wolfgang Benz’s Die Juden in Deutschland 1933–1945, the last chapter, devoted to the 1938–1945 period, evolves into an appendix. The same may be said about the four-volume Modern German-Jewish History,⁷ published by the Leo Baeck Institute, and History of the Holocaust: Germany, a collection of articles published in two voluminous tomes under the editorship of Abraham Margaliot and Yehoyakim Cochavi. Only about one-fourth of the content of these works is devoted to the 1938–1945 period; the remainder takes up the 1933–1938 years. The authors of Jews under the Swastika, published in 1973 in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), also fail, for both historiographic and ideological reasons, to pay close and consistent attention to the 1939–1945 interval, even though in their subtitle they promise to discuss “the Persecution and Extermination of the German Jews 1933–1945.”

This chapter in the history of German Jewry, however, deserves more than an encyclopedia entry, such as that in Pinkas Hakehillot: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, published by Yad Vashem, and is owed a description that exceeds that of an appendix. It deserves its own synthesis, sedulous investigation, a monograph, and close photography, not only because no such things have yet been published but also, and mainly, because the specifics of German Jewish history in this context should be clearly sketched within the framework of the general history of the Holocaust, the Third Reich, and World War II, and the continuities and discontinuities of this community’s history should be given emphasis.

Unlike European Jews outside of Germany, who could clearly differentiate between “the Germans” and “the Nazis” and the collective that they perceived as “us,” for German Jews the enemies—the criminals and their supporters—also in fact belonged to “us,” irrespective of how they were understood. The singularity and tragicality of this nexus of criminals and victims germinates not only in the lengthier duration of the Holocaust in Germany, starting in 1933 and not only when the war began in 1939, but also in the disposition of the struggle and the war, the deportations and the murders, as Germans against Germans—at least from the standpoint of the victims, the Jews of Germany.

The road to correcting the status of this interval in history is already being paved, and important strides down it have been taken since this book first appeared in 2008 in German. The past two decades have seen a perceptible upturn in historiographic interest in German Jewish history of 1938–1945. Several important aspects of the topic have been thoroughly researched and analyzed. Much new information and knowledge have been amassed, most involving the use of new methodological approaches. The works of Beate Meyer, Wolf Gruner, Frank Bajohr, Avraham Barkai, Alexandra Przyrembel, Rivka Elkin, Konrad Kwiet, and Doris Tausendfreund are impressive examples. Archive research continues relentlessly. The Bundesarchiv (the German Federal Archive), for example, launched a documentary project on the deportation and murder of European Jewry, and volumes 2, 3, 6, and 11 concerning the Jews of the Reich from “Kristallnacht” to the end of the war have already appeared.⁸ In addition, survivors steadily continue to publish memoirs. Despite all these efforts, however, no historical synthesis has yet been created devoted solely to this chapter in history on the basis of study of the monographs that have been published on the topic in the meantime. By “synthesis,” I mean the history of a group of people in the course of one period, in the sense of a self-standing chapter grounded in existing documents and secondary literature dealing with secondary aspects. This is the rationale behind the study that follows. My purpose is to describe and explain a phenomenon, a multifaceted connection of things, without drowning in innumerable unnecessary details. As in all historiography, this work of course presents only an interim reckoning that will surely expand and improve as research progresses. As evidence, the twelve-year period between the publication of the book in German (2008) and its translation into English has seen the appearance of a respectable list of new books and articles on the topic.

One who deals with the history of German Jewry in 1938–1945 should broaden the perspective to an area that transcends the technical geographic borders of the Third Reich. This is because many who lived outside these borders at that time—both in the German-occupied territories and in sundry diasporas beyond the German authorities’ reach—considered themselves German Jews. Furthermore, paradoxically, German Jews who relocated to new milieus represented, in their own eyes and among those who viewed them, not only German Jewry but also, simply, “the Germans”—equally in Minsk, New York, and Tel Aviv.

Neither should it be forgotten that after 1933, and after 1938 as well, only from antisemites’ point of view in reference to German Jews were Germans and Jews embroiled in confrontation; for everyone else, it was an intra-German tussle. In fact, the events of that time are but a chapter in German history because, when all is said and done, the array of forces was comprised of Germans against Germans, non-Jewish Germans against Jewish Germans, who in no way intended to harm other Germans. In this context, people largely overlook the question of who sought to dispose of whom. Even German Zionists or Orthodox German Jews did not aspire to repudiate Germany, Europe, or Germanness. It was non-Jewish Germans who invented the separation and then translated it into the language of political action. The Third Reich earned its peculiarity by thrusting the wheel of history into reverse, revoking and obliterating the emancipation that the Jewish population had already attained. It declared the Jews non-Germans, enemies of the people and the state; thus, by legal means the Jews lost all their civil rights and, by the time it ended, their human rights as well. The SS pithily summarized the authorities’ judicial, political, and social stance toward the Jews of Germany. In “Instructional Manual 4: Know the Enemy: What Does the ‘Friend of the Jews’ Say?” published on August 15, 1937, the following catechistic statements appear:

8.The Jew speaks German and therefore is German. We reply: Accordingly, a black who speaks German would also become German. . . . However, one cannot learn to be German; one can only experience it, provided German blood makes one fit to have such an experience.

9.. . . But at least the veteran Jews have assimilated among the Germans to the point of having sunk roots throughout Germany. . . . We reply: . . . Even lengthy residence in Germany cannot surmount the foreignness of blood inside. At the crucial moment, the mask will fall off the faces of the assimilated. . . . Where were the Jewish defenders of Germanness?⁹

The presentation of Jews as “non-Germans,” aliens, rivals, and enemies legitimized the “struggle” against them. Every anti-Jewish act was shown as a response to a Jewish provocation and was received accordingly.

An additional factor in German Jewish history in 1938–1945 places historians in an exceptional predicament. The ordinary or average observer of events is of course aware of the bitter denouement of German Jewry. In greater part, however, she or he also senses that this demise was predestined, at the latest after the nighttime pogrom in 1938—either predestined by the German Jews’ failure to grasp the post-Enlightenment reality or predetermined by the perennially eliminationist nature of German antisemitism or of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies. This knowledge, however, does not flow from a probing analysis; it is but a corollary of the random advantage of those who know the final outcome of a process that could have played out differently. It resembles stock trading: one cannot tell whether bear markets have already bottomed out and which response—staying in or cashing out—is riskier. No one could have known ab initio that the post-1933 years and the post-1938 period would see humankind’s most extreme act of ruination.

When even historians who step forward to clarify our topic use the same post factum knowledge, they unknowingly and unintentionally promote an ex post confirmation of the prejudices of National Socialist or other antisemitic societies: the Jews should have realized that they had to leave Germany, not only because they could have known that the Nazis were scheming to exterminate them but also because they truly were strangers in German society. Even today, it is not uncommon to find such a stance among wise-after-the-fact Zionists and “good Germans.” Ultimately, it leads to the conclusion that, at day’s end, the parties at fault for the events were not the criminals and the many accomplices who facilitated and even profited from the terrifying deeds but the victims themselves, who must not have wanted to escape from the menace, may have lacked the requisite civil courage, and, in any event, did not realize that they were not German in Hitler’s Gestapo state. In our inquiry, we will pay consistent and strict attention to this difference. Namely, we know not only the criminals’ identity but also the magnitude of the crime. Thus, responsibility for the final outcome cannot in any way be foisted on the victims—least of all after the night of the pogrom, the eruption of the war, and the ban on Jewish emigration from Germany.

By 1940, Charlie Chaplin in his film The Great Dictator addressed himself to the fate of German Jewry and elucidated its intrinsic problematique. Between the lines of this impressive artistic achievement, the film also discusses the accusation already then being leveled at the Jews concerning their failure to resist their disentitlement. In one of the key scenes, set in a “Jewish ghetto” somewhere in Tomainia (none other than Germany), the erstwhile “stormtrooper commander Schultz,” now an opponent of the regime, scours the Jewish population of the ghetto in search of someone who might assassinate the dictator. The Jewish heroine of the film, the lover of the Jewish barber played by Chaplin, answers correctly: the Jews have no interest in spearheading resistance to the regime because they’re in such danger to beg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. The Decline of German Jewry
• 2. The Tabula Rasa Policy
• 3. “Days of Grace” in a Mousetrap
• 4. From Quarantine to Depatriation
• 5. Lost in the East
• 6. Mischlinge, “Divers,” and Virtual Jews
• 7. “The Jews Were Our Misfortune”
• 8. Jews as Expatriate Germans
• 9. Looking Back, Looking Ahead
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author