The thesis that manifestations of "Antisemitism" in the Third Reich were largely a result of manipulations by Nazi politicians rather than the reflection of true sentiments among the German people appears firmly established nowadays. This thesis treats the course of German history as being devoid of a specific antisemitic tradition and regards what authentic symptoms of Antisemitism there were, before and during Hitler's rise to power, as merely incidental. One might well agree with Hajo Holborn's suggestion that Hitler, the supreme propagandist of his Nazi Party (NSDAP) and of the Third Reich, conjured up Antisemitism by arousing hatred within the Germans, in order to further the regime's ultimate goals. But then one cannot, like Eva Reichmann, altogether discount pre-existing notions of Judeo-phobia among the German people and, by implication, absolve them of their complicity in the Holocaust. Since the appearance of Reichmann's and Holborn's writings, certain younger scholars, while indubitably presenting cogent arguments, have overemphasized the degree of high-level Nazi management of antiJewish action. Conversely, they have downplayed the spontaneity of such action and its general popularity with the German public. In so doing, however, they have come close to miscomprehending the social basis of Antisemitism in the Third Reich and to ignoring its important historical antecedents.
In this essay these antecedents will be briefly reviewed, in order to document the continuity of Antisemitism in German history primarily as a social phenomenon. Even though the factor of manipulation of the antisemitic issue by the Nazi rulers from 1933 to 1939, for instance in the guise of antiJewish "legislation," cannot be denied, more attention will be paid to the gray zones of overlapping responsibilities of a semi-legal and semiprivate nature, as in cases of seemingly spontaneous pogroms by the Stormtroopers (SA), which were witnessed by neutral and often astonished bystanders. A further focus of this paper will be arbitrary, hostile activities visited upon the Jews by civilians or nonofficial institutions after 1933 that must be seen as a consequence of decades, if not centuries, of Antisemitism in Germany.
No one could seriously dispute the importance of Antisemitism as a social, economic, and political force of great vitality in the history of Germany, more precisely: in the history of coexistence of Germans and Jews since the late Middle Ages. In the centuries following the Protestant Reformation German Jews were able to improve their lot slowly, although they had to wait for the Enlightenment and for Napoleonic rule in order to experience real emancipatory progress. In the nineteenth century they gradually received full political, if not full social, rights. Significantly, the rate of Jewish integration into German society was not commensurate with the degree of political equalization - a condition that still distinguished this minority from other Germans. As George L. Mosse, Peter G.J. Pulzer, and others have indicated, the fate of German Jews again deteriorated at the dawn of the twentieth century, as the new factor of ideology that claimed to set the Jews anthropologically apart from Gentile Germans came into play. Perhaps one of the most negative side-effects of the budding modern democracy in those decades was that Antisemitism, as a novel racist creed, could now be articulated with impunity at various political levels. Due to the efforts of such politically influential men as Heinrich von Treitschke, Max Hugo, Liebermann von Sonnenberg, and Heinrich Class, anti-Jewish prejudices once more had become well entrenched within German society by the time of World War I. For many German Jews the phase of the Weimar Republic from 1918/19 to 1933 promised to complete the process of emancipation begun so prodigiously before 1914. At the outset, this impression surely seemed justified, especially when the Republic was compared with Eastern European countries. However, precisely because the Republic became associated, in the mind of the German public, with increased liberties for Jews, it provoked further Judeo-phobia. Hence, one can argue that there was a continuation of previous antisemitic trends, notably the ideologically motivated strains of the post-Bismarckian era, facets of which eventually merged easily with the pronouncedly virulent Jew hatred of the Nazis. Despite the fact that Jewish soldiers took full part in military activities during WWI, they were sometimes discriminated against in the armed forces, and the antisemitic German press characterized German Jews as war shirkers who would stay behind the front lines in order to engage in war-profiteering. Antisemitism at the grass-roots level became manifest in the fall of 1918, when angry mobs in Munich and Berlin physically attacked Jews during the turmoil of the revolution, and in 1923/24, when in several areas of the Reich, including the capital, Jewish shopkeepers were manhandled and even killed. The concentration of Jews in certain occupations (e.g., cattle-vending and tailoring within the lower middle class, and legal and medical practice within the upper class) and their preponderance in urban locations like Berlin, Frankfurt am Stain, Hamburg, and Breslau, facilitated random attacks on and wanton discrimination against them throughout the Weimar Republic. In her recently published memoirs, the German-Jewish physician Dr. Kaete Frankenthal writes that in the early days of the Republic she was ordered an opportunity to engage in postdoctoral studies at the University of Greifswald (hardly a mainstay of Antisemitism). Yet she did not accept the position, as she had doubts whether she would be tolerated there sufficiently to enable her to finish her studies. ‘Antisemitism, with all its well-known signs,' writes a surviving eyewitness, the German-Jewish high-school teacher Dr. Heinemann Stern, ‘fully showed itself at a time when Hitler and his movement were still the object of curiosity or of casual jokes.'
In the Weimar Republic, many of these Jew-haters turned to National Socialism because it offered them an outlet for their Antisemitism. Historically, many privately or spontaneously executed acts of Antisemitism during the early years of the Third Reich can be linked to precedents perpetrated by vicious antisemites in the republican era. Hence in Hanover, at a public meeting in July 1922, after local Nazi leader Gustav Seifert had blamed all of Germany's ills on the influx of Eastern Jews, his remarks were loudly applauded by the audience. The Nazis formulated a specifically antiJewish platform as part of their February 1920 program and toward the end of the Republic they reiterated that in a Third Reich Jews would be deprived of their rights by legal process.' They consistently fanned the flames of Antisemitism by the fabrication and distribution of hate propaganda, especially after 1929. Their tirades were ingeniously contrived to cater to all manner of German groups, whatever their antisemitic motives. Many German women, for instance, customarily bore grudges against Jews for religious or aesthetic reasons, so the Nazis tried to reach them on those grounds. Since in some areas of Germany, predominantly the small towns and rural districts, the myth of Jewish ritual killings of young Christian boys was still given credence, Der Stuermer, the weekly paper of Nuremberg Jew-baiter Julius Streicher, published spurious evidence on Jewish child-murders that was received from as far afield as East Prussia.
Many Germans of the Weimar Republic resented the Jews as economic rivals, be they doctors or lawyers within the upper segments of German society, or shopkeepers and tradesmen in the lower middle class. The latter found a particularly accommodating political champion in Adolf Hitler, and the Fuehrer and his lieutenants in turn fully exploited the Antisemitism of carpenters, greengrocers, and their likes. The durability of this alliance must be regarded as one of the chief reasons for the success of the Nazi movement until 1933. Examples of this mutually complementary relationship are plentiful. In January 1928 a paperhanger from Rheinish Krefeld sent a linocut he had made to the regional Nazi Party headquarters; it depicted a National-Socialist knight galloping over a Jewish dragon.
Three years later East Prussian tobacco vendors were said to be joining the Nazis because of the competition in the trade by "Eastern Galician Jews."
It must be said that the Nazis appealed to these feelings with a great deal of sensitivity, and it is entirely possible that with their clever slogans and specious but effective argumentation they inculcated antisemitic resentment among those members of the lower middle class who had formerly been neutral or impervious. A case in point is the well-known Nazi campaign against German chain stores, many of which were indeed owned by Jews, in the midst of the Great Depression in December 1930. The Nazi allegation, directed toward Gentile shopkeepers and corner-store proprietors, that "Jewish department stores are destroying the retail trade," not only fell on the open ears of those who had started to suffer from economic setbacks and were, typically, blaming the Jews already, but it may also have reached and converted to Nazism those who were afraid of running into trouble in the future. Squarely, the Nazis told them who would be responsible on all counts: the Jews. Hence new antisemites could easily have been reared. It was at about this time, after the Nazis had made astonishing gains in the September 1930 elections, that the first serious anti-Jewish pogrom broke out in Berlin, orchestrated, it is true, by the Nazi Wolf Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, but staged by people who, if they were National Socialists, certainly had not been compelled to join Hitler's movement by anything but their own decision, however that was motivated.
During the early days of the Third Reich the German Jews were not persecuted within the framework of a rationally conceived scheme nor according to a secret master plan, although Hitler's instinctive antipathy to them always remained, implicitly, the ideal guideline. After January 30, 1933, Nazi policy against the Jews came to resemble a pattern of interactions between private or personal initiative, semi-legal activities (in which the avantgarde of the Nazi Party, notably the SA, were often pitted against the more temperate officials of the state), and, Finally, governmental legislation. Such legislation was introduced relatively haphazardly and appeared to touch only on major aspects of what was officiously called the "Jewish Question," but it was intended to be synchronized with the less official action. Evidently Hitler and his cronies hoped that such action would in itself suffice to motivate the German Jews to leave the country. Paradoxically, when popular and official persecutions did begin, the opportunities for Jewish emigration abroad were progressively curtailed until, in the end, Hitler and his followers consolidated and carried out the plan of the Final Solution.
Prior to the outbreak of World War II, official antisemitic policy, which not only lacked the sanction of populist initiative but transpired entirely beyond the control and even knowledge of the common people, was implemented at two levels: that of the state and of the party. This distinction is important, because activities at the party level -at least potentially -allowed for the participation of "Aryan" civilians and thus could provide visible proof of the kind of popular, spontaneous Antisemitism which the Nazis were always at great pains to demonstrate, particularly to foreign critics. There were two main ordinances at the governmental level, and two additional lines of action at the party level that were government-inspired and officially supported. The first governmental law against German Jews was the one regarding the "Reconstitution of the Civil Service" of April 7, 1933, and it was later followed by the Nuremberg race legislation of September 15, 1935. The anti-Jewish machinations instigated by agencies of the NSDAP consisted of the boycott of April 1, 1933, and the events of the so-called Reichskristallnacht of November 9 to 10, 1938, about which much has already been written. In both these scenarios, the main protagonists were members of the predatory SA. Taking his cue from these Brown Shirts, who had been molesting Jews - especially those with small and medium-sized business - indiscriminately since the political takeover at the end of January 1933, Hitler, while trying to ensure full control over the SA, decided to give them free reign in the boycott of Jewish businesses and offices on April 1, 1933, thereby attaining several goals at once. First, he could teach German Jews a harsh lesson by letting them know that his brand of Antisemitism was not trivial but serious. Second, he was able, momentarily at least, to placate the impatient Brown Shirts who were increasingly crying out for the fulfillment of a "second" Nazi revolution; at the same time he could attempt to contain them. And third, he could utilize these initial anti-Jewish measures to gain a sense of future direction for himself, in terms of how far the German people would be prepared to go, the Jewish reaction with a view to emigration, and the technical and logistic aspects of the implementation of antisemitic policy.
Consequently, the boycott of Jewish businesses and professional offices was launched on April 1 and continued for days thereafter, engineered by the SA and, in certain localities, by the SS. The efficiency of its execution apparently left much to be desired, certainly in the eyes of the government. And this is of prime significance for the purposes of this exposition. For example, the fact that the boycott was allowed to get out of hand locally, and that in some areas, such as East Prussia and Lueneburg, it was begun several days ahead of schedule, goes a long way to fit the thesis of antisemitic spontaneity and to contradict the elements of planning, direction, and manipulation of the "Jewish Question" by officials of the Nazi regime, whose existence has commonly been posited.
The period from March to early August 1933 in particular was one of unbridled SA violence throughout Germany. Its perpetrators claimed that this violence was justified on "revolutionary" grounds, and in this form, Adolf Hitler, the supreme revolutionary, tacitly approved of it, although as Chancellor of the Reich he was pledged to safeguard the time-honored institutions of state. The violence was directed against anyone who was regarded as an enemy of the regime, and particularly against the Jews. One may argue that much of the terror perpetrated by bands of SA-men was carefully monitored by some responsible SA command post, which in turn was linked to a certain official agency of the regime, and hence that any actions against Jews, for instance, were decreed from above or at least officially sanctioned. But there are two considerations that serve to refute this view. One is the simple fact that at that time in Germany the SA comprised approximately two million men over the age of 17, or roughly 10 percent of the entire civilian male population in the entire civilian male population in the corresponding age brackets. If one now presumes that the SA by virtue of its historic and contemporary selfperception was violently antisemitic, one is inevitably led to the conclusion that in the early summer of 1933 every tenth male adult German was inimically disposed toward Jews. This figure does not take into account members of the NSDAP, the SS, the Nazi Motor Corps, or other party affiliates who in all likelihood were also antisemites. Therefore, any anti-Jewish infringement commenced by the activist representatives of Germany's known antisemitic 10 percent, must have gained the approval of a much larger, inactive section of the entire German population.
Hence, from a demographic viewpoint, it is difficult to conceptualize the capricious acts of terror of the SA against Jews as having been executed in total isolation from public opinion as a whole, and this connection establishes a potential for the German people's complicity in anti-Jewish crimes to a much higher degree than has previously been asserted. The second consideration relates to the links in the chain of command from the highest state or party sources down to the spontaneous SA activists. The anti-Jewish harassment was often triggered at very low SA-command levels, both vertically (in the hierarchy) and horizontally (in the geographic location). More often than not, SA-Scharfuehrer or Sturmfuehrer, the equivalents of sergeant or second lieutenant, respectively, initiated the raids on their own authority; frequently, in the absence of their immediate superior, three or four ordinary rank and file members of the SA would start a rumpus which was then post factum approved by the political police or the Interior Ministry. Such incidents may today be reported by historians as having been planned and directed in Berlin. On the other hand, there is no denying that Hitler's peculiar aura of calculated permissiveness, in which his old supporters thrived, could only encourage such developments.
The wanton terror of the SA was nation-wide. In Breslau on March 11, 1933, SA bands invaded a department store that was said to be Jewishowned, and then made their way to the judicial chambers and lawyers' offices. Ludwig Foerder, a Jewish attorney, was clubbed over the head with a lead cudgel, but managed to save his life by escaping to nearby Czechoslovakia. His colleague Walter Eckstein, a World War I veteran like Foerder, was tortured by the Brown Shirts for five days until he died. Similar SA rampages against Jewish lawyers and judges were waged in Chemnitz, Gleiwitz, Goerlitz, and Berlin. In the capital itself, anybody who was Jewish was unsafe. The home of artist Steinhardt, a student of Louis Corinth, was raided by the SA in April; allegedly he was suspected of hiding a radio transmitter. Nothing happened to him because his neighbor, a Nazi party member, shielded him and he was thus able to emigrate to Palestine.
Especially vulnerable were the members of the Jewish petite bourgeoisie because many of the SA were in the same business and simply regarded them as rivals. Three examples of precipitate aggression serve to document this. On March 12, in the small town of Arys (East Prussia), five SA-men, armed to their teeth, invaded the home of cattle-dealer Itzig just before midnight. His daughter complained about the transgression in a letter to Prussian Minister-President Goering:
At once, a SA-man said to my father: Why, you dirty dog, you are still in bed and want to resist?' He then drew a weapon. When my mother saw this, she threw herself upon my father, who was sitting on his bed, trying to put on his trousers. He was pulled back onto the bed and the shot passed by his head and hit the window. Then the same SA-man first beat my father, then my mother, and finally myself with a rubber truncheon. My mother received a deep cut on her head, and my forehead was also lacerated. The doctor can vouch for this. Then they searched the entire house, but we have no weapons and nothing was found. My father had his hands tied behind his back and then they took him away. The people are saying that he put up a fight, but this is not true. Outside the front door all of my father's competitors had gathered, and they behaved in such an indecent manner that l, as a young girl, cannot relate of this to you'.
In Dresden, the SA committed acts that surpassed the boycott of April 1. Jewish prayer houses were stormed and 25 worshippers arrested. Five Polish Jews among them were forced to drink castor oil, while other Jews had to submit to the shaving of their beards or to the clipping of their hair. Finally, in Munich, also in April, the SA entered Jewish shops, led the customers outside, and forced the proprietors to close down. In some instances shop assistants were maltreated.
Such arbitrary actions were not the sole prerogative of the SA. The Brown Shirts set the example, and other ancillary party organizations, sometimes even state institutions, emulated them. Two of these party organizations were the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend - HJ), and the NationalSocialist Lawyers' League (BNSDJ). Again in Munich, during the night of May 12, HJ members posted signs on the outskirts of the city reading "Jews Not Wanted." Nazi jurists, during a convention in Leipzig on March 14, demanded the "cleansing" of all German law courts of officials of a "foreign race" and the dissolution of all Jewish attorneys' offices - three weeks before the official "legislation" was enacted.
Among governmental agencies whose malfactions against Jews are documented for those weeks were the municipality of Munich, the Bavarian Political Police, and the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. The first of these sent circulars to Gentile businessmen in Munich warning them not to have any dealings with Jewish business partners. There was not even a trace of legal precedent for such a step. The Bavarian Political Police (Bapopo), headed by Heinrich Himmler, exceeded its legal competency by using the Emergency Ordinance promulgated after the Reichstag fire on February 28, 1933 , in order to arrest a wide circle of Munich Jews who were totally innocent of any misdemeanor. And in April 1933 the Bavarian Justice Ministry managed, by means of administrative manipulations, to impel Jewish justices to resign their positions, although they were not in any way affected by the stipulations of the April 7 Law.
This tradition of pseudo-legality in discriminations against German Jews, established in the spring of 1933, was continued by agencies of the state and of the party in the following months and years. There is particularly rich evidence for 1935, in connection with the infamous race legislation of September, and aided by a certain lull in anti-Jewish agitation during 1934, when Hitler's main occupation was, ironically, with Ernst Roehm and the corrupt leadership of the burgeoning SA. Although the SA was stifled after June 1934, it had been left with sufficient energy to carry on its anti-Jewish binges. Thus in July 1935, in a small town in Saxony, a few SA-men provoked the manager of Eckstein's Central Store and involved him in a brawl, until police arrived and arrested the innocent Jew. A month later a Jewish storeowner in Dresden was subjected to similar treatment in an incident capriciously staged by SA members. Such action was stepped up when the race laws were being promulgated. In September 1935, rural SA in Herxheim (Palatinate) went after a Jewish cattle-dealer who sought refuge in a friendly farmer's house. Not only did the hoodlums drive that merchant out of town (without any legal ground) but they also demolished the farmer's property. At the same time in Papenburg (north west Germany), the site of a notorious concentration camp, the SA seized the Jewish cattle-broker Sigmund Windus, hung a defamatory sign around his neck, and forced him to beat a large drum while they dragged him around town. Once again the SA was not alone in this rampage. As in previous months, the same kinds of degradation and identical acts of random terror were perpetrated with little or no "legal" justification, even according to the widest of Nazi standards, by units of the HJ, by party affiliates such as NS-Hago, the Nazi traders' and shopkeepers' association, and by municipal administrative offices of all sorts.
Between 1933 and 1939, discrimination by Germans against Jews in the private sphere, without the involvement or sanction of state or party agencies and without heed to existing laws, was both spontaneous and calculated. It spanned the entire spectrum from verbal humiliation to denunciation, depredation, and physical harm. It could be committed by individuals or by corporate bodies, who may have had formal connections with party or state, but were not under their directive at the time of the transgressions. These acts were everyday events, and they were possible both because there was a tradition of populist Antisemitism in Germany and because Hitler had created an atmosphere in the Third Reich in which Jews were progressively being deprived of their civil rights.
Ingrained anti-Jewish prejudices often caused citizens of the Third Reich to become tactless or needlessly offensive to Jews. Some of these offenders were women who had long believed in the bio-sexist stereotype of the Jew as a filthy but nevertheless intriguing seducer of "Aryan" maidens - a stereotype publicized decades before the advent of Hitler, in books such as Artur Dinter's Die Suende wider das Blut. Here, then, the sexual and other racist-ideological motives were mixed. As one young woman told US interrogators after World War II, she had long thought, even prior to her school classes in race theory, that Jews were simply disgusting. They are so fat, they all have flat feet and they can never look you straight in the eye. I could not explain my dislike for them.' She then readily admitted that such views had been inherited in childhood from her father. This kind of racist-sexual motive often played a key role in anonymous denunciations of Jews, usually of men with blond German girl friends. Even educated upper-class women fell victim to this cliché; significantly, the unmarried among them frequently exhibited a hysterical admiration for the Fuehrer. Nor did "seductresses" go unpunished. During June 1935 in Mudersbach near Wetzlar, the "Aryan" Karl Gelzenleuchter was prevented from marrying the Jewess Martha Mayer by an antisemitic magistrate who acted without recourse to existing laws but whose decision was upheld, months before the novel and binding race legislation, by a Wetzlar court. At times, this sexual motive was inverted. In a small town in Hesse a Gentile butcher's apprentice was helping his Jewish master's widow run the shop, until in the summer of 1935 he decided to make a sexual pass at her. The widow resisted and proceeded to dismiss him, whereupon he denounced her to the SA. The SA-men mistreated and insulted the Jewish woman, before she was formally arrested. Pure malice and a sadistic disposition were another motive. Dr. Else Behrend-Rosenfeld, a German Jewess who escaped the Holocaust only through an incredible run of good luck, has related the following pathetic story: in 1934 Frau Winterling took her and her children into her house near Munich and, while feigning sympathy, acted as a spy for the Nazi authorities. Physical cruelty was just as common. At the end of 1934 the chauffeur of a Nazi functionary in Leer (East Friesland) got hold of a Jewish cattle-dealer, pulled him up by his coat, fastened the collar to an iron gate, and left the poor man hanging. Later on that year, demonstrations that resulted in violence against Jewish store owners in Munich were incited by a former SA-man, who, upon closer examination by the authorities, could prove no affiliation whatsoever with the NSDAP. The sexual factor may also have played a part in the discrimination against Jewish medical students by their Gentile fellows at German universities, and Jewish physicians by their Gentile colleagues. German medical students had been under heavy pressure from potential Jewish competition in the Weimar Republic, when the percentage of Jewish students in the medical faculties had been the second highest in any discipline. There is evidence that in the first few years of the Nazi dictatorship they attempted to accelerate the government's anti-Jewish legislation by initiating inter-faculty measures of their own. One of these was the proposal that Jewish interns should not be allowed to perform genital inspection on "Aryan" women, so as to exclude the Jew from the realm of "German" sexuality even in clinical surroundings. This measure was adopted in most German medical faculties in the spring of 1936, clearly as an immediate consequence of the Nuremberg Race Laws of the preceding fall, but in contravention of the yet existing legislation governing the academic and social rights of Jewish university students.
Additional stipulations in the medical students' proposal of 1936 called for the manifold restriction of Jewish interns with a view to curtailing their overall professional prospects as doctors. In this case, the motive was blatantly economic. In their efforts to oust Jewish colleagues from the profession, Gentile medical students and doctors stopped short of nothing, particularly since the evolving anti-Jewish legislation was considered much too cumbersome. Jewish physicians were not legally forbidden to practice medicine until an act to that effect was passed on September 30, 1938. But German physicians, with the help of their professional unions, found ways to exclude their Jewish colleagues from their ranks long before that date. One popular ploy was to evict Jewish doctors from the monopolistic health plan association (Kassenaerztliche Vereinigung Deutschlands - KVD), membership in which was obligatory for the treatment of patients covered by health insurance. Invariably, the Jewish doctors were ostracized on the basis of false evidence. In the case of Jewish Doctor M. from Waldenburg (Lower Silesia), who, like so many of his Israelite colleagues, had seen active service during World I and was therefore, for a while, exempt from certain anti-Jewish government clauses, the KVD denied his war record and wrote: Under these circumstances [the KVD] cannot be blamed for wanting to exclude from its ranks a colleague who constantly has damaged the honor and the prestige of the medical profession by his conduct.' In the case of another Jewish physician, Dr. T., a KVD functionary stated early in 1938 that it was the principle of the Vereinigung to make compensation payments due to Jewish physicians after their eviction, only if the association has actually been compelled to do so by court order.'
Occasionally, German doctors risked a brush with the law in order to disadvantage their Jewish colleagues. In Reichenhall near Munich, a certain German Dr. Z. simply moved into the premises and practice of Jewish Dr. Stern in October 1933 while the latter was recuperating in Merano (Italy) from a stroke. As a regional state official reported to the Bavarian Political Police, Dr. Z. wrote to Dr. Stern that the party had confiscated his residence, in order to circumvent the payment of compensation to Dr. Stern and to prevent him from bringing the matter to the attention of the courts.' In Saxon Crimmitschau during the summer of 1935, the baptized Jew Dr. Boas, a dermatologist and reserve officer, had his windows broken and his professional sign destroyed at the instigation of his "Aryan" colleagues. Although the action was obviously illegal and the courts would have had to back Boas, the SA interceded and took the "prosecution" into its own hands. Boas' dwelling was ransacked and the doctor marched off to "protective custody."
Denunciations of Jewish physicians at the time of the first "official" boycott of April 1933, highlight the economic motive of the action. As in earlier centuries of persecution by Germans of their Jewish neighbors, professional rivalry was the mainspring of unauthorized antisemitic acts by German businessmen and business institutions. Among the latter were the Bavarian chambers of commerce which took advantage of the directives of the boycott in order to denounce to the police Jewish businessmen in all spheres of commerce. In the wake of this boycott the Nuremberg association Merkur, which was dedicated to the training of young commercial personnel, excluded all of its Jewish members arbitrarily and without legal support. After Hitler, motivated by political and economic reasons, had strictly forbidden "individual actions against Jews" by members of the party in the summer of 1935, and Reich Interior Minister Frick had immediately extended this ordinance to the non-party realm, the German Savings Bank Association (Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverband) was caught in error. On September 11, 1935, Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht sent a letter to the executive of the association, in which he expressed his astonishment at the fact that independent boycott measures against Jews had been taken by individual savings banks, without the authorization of the responsible controlling agencies.' He then urged the bank branches to remove those restrictions, such as the display of posters discouraging Jesus from entering the banks' premises.'
Since National Socialism and the Third Reich were largely a lower-middle-class phenomenon, it is hardly surprising that the great majority of non-organized, unauthorized and populist actions against the Jews after 1933 originated with "Aryan" businessmen of the petite bourgeoisie. Their aim was to eradicate the Jewish competition once and for all. Whether or not it was official boycott time, "Aryan" businesses ensured the spread of anti-Jewish propaganda and persuaded Gentile customers to refrain from any dealings with their Jewish rivals. The businessmen often employed the SA in these ventures, which seemed the logical thing to do, for there were relatively few SA-men whose interests did not coincide with those of lower-middle-class artisans, shopkeepers or merchants.
Medium-sized businesses took care to advertise the "Aryan" character of their proprietors and to denounce and defile their Jewish competitors. A special target of such businessmen were the large department stores, which the party had - for the time being - not yet "Aryanized." From official contemporary reports, it is obvious that "Aryan" shopkeepers played a key role in all acts of physical violence against Jewish businesses and their owners. If rural councils or small-town municipalities were not directly responsible for the posting of anti-Jewish signs, then the local merchants or their party and SA stooges were. Such involvement applied especially in the case of the aforementioned cattle-vendors. Often, of course, the municipal officers of a village or town were themselves trades people, and the conflict of interests, is now quite evident. Practical considerations also motivated the anti-Jewish discrimination of tavern keepers, for it was in the local pubs that business deals were often begun and concluded. And finally, owners of medium-sized businesses did their utmost to profit from "unofficial" Aryanization procedures, in which they could gain possession of formerly Jewish businesses for a token price.
This essay has attempted to demonstrate the capriciousness of antiJewish action in the Third Reich prior to 1939, the lack of any real coordination between antisemitic measures originating in the private and public sectors, and the presence of a substantial populist basis for the Judeo-phobia of Germany's most prolific ethnic-cultural minority. By way of a conclusion, one may cite the example of anti-Jewish measures designed to keep German Jews out of public baths, in order to illustrate one again the arbitrariness and, at the same time, the curious admixture of elements of popular initiative and state legislation in Third Reich Antisemitism.
Juridically speaking, a blanket prohibition against Jews seeking admission to pool or bathing facilities in the Third Reich did not exist until the Kristallnacht legislation at the end of 1938. Probably because of Gauleiter Streicher's pathologically vituperative Antisemitism in Franconia, the Nuremberg town council served as the vanguard of those municipal administrations that came to ban the use of public swimming pools by Jews at the start of the regime. This happened as early as August 1933, when there was no legal precedent for such action at either the Reich or the state level. From Nuremberg, the practice of closing municipally managed baths to Jews quickly spread to other communities in Upper and Middle Franconia. Later that month Munich followed suit, but this time a distinction was made between swimming pools on the one hand and shower and tub-bath facilities on the other: Jews could still use the latter. By August 22, one publicly operated spa in Berlin, the famous Badeanstalt Wannsee, had locked its gates to the Jews, yet most other bathing spots in the Reich, including apparently all private ones, still had not imposed such restrictions.
This situation began to change in the summer of 1934, a period when Jews were generally less molested in the Reich. In July of that year, the municipality of Bad Kissingen, an official spa, closed its town pool to all "nonAryans" because of the allegedly bad behavior of certain Jews. The insinuation here was a sexual one, for it was well known in Germany that pools could be used for dating purposes or as trysting places, especially if they were located in a naturally landscaped setting. This ruling, too, was inconsistent with hitherto existing ordinances, for the Nuremberg Race Laws were not enacted until autumn of the following year, and no legal definition of "Jew" as yet existed.
Some two months before this legislation was introduced, Jews were accosted at the Maria Einsiedel open-air pool in Munich as well as at the main pool in Heigenbruecken (north west Bavaria). According to the official report of the Bavarian Political Police, juvenile Gentile bathers had taken exception to the composure of young Jewish males seen in the accompaniment of "Aryan" girls. The German swimmers were then said to have started repetitive chants, demanding the expulsion of the Jews. It is likely that the young chanters were in fact Hitler Youths who had been ordered to commence the heckling; hence the demand for the antisemitic restrictions could have been anything but "spontaneous." On the other hand, there is probably some truth in the same report regarding Jews in Bad Kissingen during this summer season. Ever since the town pool had been closed to them, they were said to have flocked to some of the other baths in the town, and their proprietors were now complaining, for fear of losing regular resort guests and those who visited the spa for medicinal treatment. If the report can be believed, it is easy to see that in this case the well-worn economic argument against Jews was once again being put to use by commercially minded entrepreneurs, without recourse to existing legal precedent or even impending discriminatory laws. Moreover, there were other pools and baths, both public and private, that now chose to inveigh against the Jews, notwithstanding Hitler's orders to members of the Nazi movement to leave the Jews alone, and prior to the official race announcements at the Nuremberg Party Rally on September 15, 1935. Again, in the closing of some of these baths, sexual overtones came to the fore. ‘In innumerable municipalities,' reported functionaries of the exiled Social Democratic Party in Prague, ‘bathing facilities have been barred to Jews, and “race molesters” [Rassenschaender-implying sexual promiscuity] have been arrested, beaten, dragged around, and taken to concentration camps.'
Conventional wisdom would now have it that once the Nazis had proclaimed a law, particularly an antisemitic one, the people would have been forced to obey it, contrary to how they truly might have felt. However, the evidence presented here leads one to infer that the Nazis promulgated a law - the Nuremberg Race Law - as a result of certain impressions they may have gained from the prevailing mood of the German public. In the case of the swimming pools, affiliate members of the NSDAP might well have been involved in extensive manipulation in order to create the image of a public consensus on the officially sensitive issue of "Aryans" mixing with Jews in erotically conducive situations. However, since such manipulation cannot be proved conclusively, it is equally possible that many ordinary Germans, notably those beholden to the hard core of convinced Semites, really were offended by the company or sight of Jews. Whether they had been sufficiently conditioned by Nazi propaganda in the summer of 1935 in order to react in this manner is a question that cries out for an answer. Nevertheless, one would be hard-pressed to reply to it in the affirmative if further proof could be adduced that the German people, with no particular record of philo-Semitism behind them, basically did not like the Jewish minority in their midst, before or after 1933, and were fully aware of what they were doing when, in the national elections of July 1932, they voted for the NSDAP, thus making it the largest party in the Reichstag, and when they kept on cheering Hitler after his appointment to the Chancellery in January 1933.
Source: Michael H. Kater, Everyday Antisemitism in prewar Nazi Germany- the Popular Bases, Yad Vashem Studies XVI (Jerusalem, 1984), pp. 129-159.
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