Nazi Germany 1933 to 1939
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Nazis Boycott Jewish Shops
- The Gestapo is Born
- The Burning of Books
Nazi Germany 1933 to 1939
Nazis Boycott Jewish Shops Just a week after the Enabling Act made Hitler dictator of Germany, a national boycott of Jewish shops and department stores was organized by Nazis under the direction of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The boycott was claimed to be in reaction to unflattering newspaper stories appearing in Britain and America concerning Hitler's new regime. The Nazis assumed most journalists were either Jewish or sympathetic to Jews and thus they labeled the bad publicity as "atrocity propaganda" spread by "international Jewry." T Most Germans ignored them. They were more interested in a bargain or in getting their Saturday shopping chores out of the way. And since it was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, most of the smaller neighborhood shops owned by observant Jews were already closed. In addition to the SA activities, Propaganda Minister Goebbels appeared before several thousand persons gathered in the Berlin Lustgarten and delivered a tirade "against the atrocities of world Jewry." His speech was broadcast nationally on all German radio stations. Goebbels asserted that if the Jews of Germany could not stop their fellow Jews around the world from dishing out anti-Nazi propaganda, then the Nazis would be forced to deal out justice to Germany's Jews. Goebbels, the little man (five feet tall) with a big voice would become the most influential anti-Semite in the Nazi hierarchy, second only to Hitler, in calling for continued persecution and eventual extermination of the Jews. This propaganda genius, who had sometimes been teased in his youth about his own Jewish looks, would subject the people of Germany to a never-ending barrage of anti-Jewish slander on the radio, in the cinema, and in newspapers. "Propaganda," Goebbels once wrote, "has absolutely nothing to do with truth." In contrast to the Nazi caricature of them, most Jews in Germany were actually quite cosmopolitan in nature and considered themselves to be Germans by nationality and Jews only by religion. They had lived in Germany for centuries but constituted only about one percent of the overall population. Before Hitler, over half of the Jews in big German cities married non-Jewish Germans. Politically, Jews in pre-Hitler Germany occupied the entire spectrum. Some were radicals on the left who would have welcomed a Russian-style revolution on the streets of Munich or Berlin. Others had been staunch supporters of Kaiser Wilhelm and the old German monarchy dating back to the days before World War I. Some of these conservatives might have even supported the Nazis were it not for the anti-Semitism so avowed by Hitler. Most Jews were middle-of-the-road politically. They wanted the same things for themselves and their families that everyone else wanted - a good place to live, a good job, quality education for their children and so forth. During World War I, German Jews by the tens of thousands fought bravely for the Fatherland, earning numerous medals and serving as officers. One of the Army officers in command of Hitler during the war was a Jewish lieutenant who recommended young Corporal Hitler for the Iron Cross first class, a rarity for a common foot soldier. To his dying day, Hitler wore that Iron Cross, passing on all other Nazi decorations and paraphernalia with the exception of his gold Party membership pin. However, for the new dictator, Adolf Hitler, no amount of patriotism or love of country by the Jews could overcome the very fact that they were Jews, and thus in Hitler's mind, the "eternal enemies" of the German Volk (racial community). The boycott of Jewish stores in April 1933 marked the beginning of a downward spiral for Jews that would eventually end in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The boycott was followed by a series of laws and decrees which robbed the Jews of one right after another. There would be, in the twelve years of Hitler's Reich, over 400 laws and decrees targeting Jews alone. Six days after the boycott, "The Law of the Restoration of the Civil Service" was introduced which made "Aryanism" a necessary requirement to hold a civil service position. All Jews holding such positions were dismissed or forced into early retirement. On April 22, Jews were prohibited from serving as patent lawyers and from serving as doctors in State-run insurance institutions. On April 25, a law against the overcrowding of German schools limited the number of Jewish children allowed to enroll in public schools. On June 2, Jewish dentists and dental technicians were prohibited from working with State-run insurance institutions. On May 6, the Civil Service Law was amended to close loopholes in order to keep out honorary university professors, lecturers and notaries. On September 28, all non-Aryans and their spouses were prohibited from government employment. On September 29, Jews were banned from all cultural and entertainment activities including literature, art, film and theater. In early October, Jews were prohibited from being journalists and all German newspapers were either shut down or placed under Nazi control. In better times, the creative spark of the Jewish community in Germany had helped propel the country to unprecedented heights of scientific achievement, academic scholarship and artistic vision. Under Hitler, the vitality of the once-thriving Jewish academic and artistic communities in Berlin, Frankfurt and other cities was quickly snuffed out via endless rules, regulations, restrictions, prohibitions, and outright bans. The time was coming when a Jew would be forbidden even to share a park bench with a non-Jew, let alone marry one. Seemingly within days of Hitler's coming to power in 1933, Germany began a rapid evolution into a police state where individual freedoms were permanently lost for everyone. Jews and Germans alike were living under what would become one of the most violent and repressive regimes ever known. The principle terror mechanism would be a new secret organization, whose name to this day can still send a shudder through anyone who remembers Hitler's Germany - the Gestapo. The Gestapo is Born Although the Gestapo is generally associated with SS Leader Heinrich Himmler, it was actually founded by Hermann Göring in April 1933. Upon becoming Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler had appointed Göring as Minister of the Interior for the state of Prussia, Germany's biggest and most important state, which controlled two thirds of the country, including the capital at Berlin and the big industrial centers. As Minister of the Interior, Göring naturally had control of the police. The first thing he did was to prohibit regular uniformed police from interfering with Nazi Brownshirts out in the streets. This meant that innocent German citizens had no one to turn to as they were being beaten up by rowdy young storm troopers drunk with their newfound power and quite often drunk on beer. These young Nazi toughs took full advantage of police leniency to loot shops at will and terrorize Jews or anyone else unfortunate enough to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Next, Göring purged the Berlin police department of politically unreliable cops and had 50,000 storm troopers sworn in as special police auxiliaries (Hilfspolizei). Now the storm troopers had actual power of arrest and they relished its use. Jails were soon overflowing with people taken into "protective custody" resulting in the need for large outside prison camps, the birth of the concentration camp system. Having compromised the uniformed divisions, Göring next turned his attention to the plain-clothes police. On April 26, 1933, a decree was issued creating the Secret Police Office (Geheime Polizei Amt) which quickly became known as the GPA. But this abbreviation was far too similar to the GPU abbreviation used by the Soviet Political Police. Thus, the name was changed to Secret State Police (Geheime Staats Polizei). The actual term 'Gestapo' was supposedly created by a Berlin postal official who wanted a name that would fit on a regulation-sized postal rubber stamp. Gestapo was derived from seven letters within the full name Geheime Staats Polizei. Unknowingly, the postal official had invented one of the most notorious names in history. Göring promptly began using the Gestapo to silence Hitler's political opponents in Berlin and surrounding areas and also to enhance his own personal power. Much to his delight, Göring discovered that the old Prussian state police had kept many secret files on the private lives of top Nazis, which he studied with p Göring appointed Rudolf Diels as the first Gestapo chief. Although Diels was not a Party member, he had been a member of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior since 1930 and had served as a senior adviser in the police. Göring took full advantage of Diels' knowledge on how to operate a political police force. He also encouraged Diels to maintain and expand the secret files on Nazi leaders. The cunning and ambitious Göring would use that information to help solidify his own position within the Nazi Party. Another ambitious Nazi, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, soon set his sights on the Gestapo. A fierce rivalry then developed between Himmler and Göring, with both men working against each other to curry favor with Hitler as to who would actually run the Gestapo. On April 20, 1934, after much infighting, Göring decided to cede the Gestapo to Himmler and his associate, Reinhard Heydrich, who took over as Gestapo chief two days later. The ever-ambitious Göring had set his sights on something much bigger than being a policeman. The former World War I flying ace and recipient of the prestigious Pour le Mérite medal fancied himself as a military leader. He wanted to take charge of a rejuvenated German Air Force. His interest in police matters and the Gestapo had diminished as Hitler's plans for a huge military buildup became apparent. Within a few years, Himmler became Chief of the German Police in addition to his duties as SS leader. Heydrich, his number two man, proved to be something of a genius in creating a hugely efficient national intelligence system that kept tabs on everyone. No one was exempt from Gestapo snooping, no matter how high up in the Nazi hierarchy. On February 10, 1936, the Nazi Reichstag passed the 'Gestapo Law' which included the following paragraph: "Neither the instructions nor the affairs of the Gestapo will be open to review by the administrative courts." This meant the Gestapo was now above the law and there could be no legal appeal regarding anything it did. Indeed, the Gestapo became a law unto itself. It was entirely possible for someone to be arrested, interrogated and sent to a concentration camp for incarceration or summary execution, without any outside legal procedure. Justice in Hitler's Germany was completely arbitrary, depending on the whim of the man in power, the man who had you in his grip. The legal policy as proclaimed by Hitler in 1938 was: "All means, even if they are not in conformity with existing laws and precedents, are legal if they subserve the will of the Führer." Surprisingly, the Gestapo was never actually a very big organization. At its peak it employed only about 40,000 individuals, including office personnel and the plain-clothes agents. But each Gestapo agent operated at the center of a large web of spies and informants. The problem for the average citizen was that no one ever knew for sure just who those informants were. It could be anyone, your milkman, the old lady across the street, a quiet co-worker, even a schoolboy. As a result, fear ruled the day. Most people realized the necessity of self-censorship and generally kept their mouths shut politically, unless they had s Anyone foolish enough to say something risky or tell an anti-Nazi joke in mixed company might get a knock on the door in the middle of the night or a tap on the shoulder while walking along the street. Letters were also sent out demanding an appearance at No. 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, to answer a few questions. The Gestapo prison center in Berlin (the Columbia-Haus) became notorious as a place where pedestrians strolling outside the building could hear screaming coming from inside. Gestapo interrogation methods included: repeated near drownings of a prisoner in a bathtub filled with ice-cold water; electric shocks by attaching wires to hands, feet, ears and genitalia; crushing a man's testicles in a special vice; securing a prisoner's wrists behind his back then hanging him by the arms causing shoulder dislocation; beatings with rubber nightsticks and cow-hide whips; and burning flesh with matches or a soldering iron. As the SS organization rapidly expanded in the late 1930s, the super-ambitious Heydrich acquired immense powers and responsibilities. One of his main accomplishments was the reorganization and bureaucratic streamlining of the entire Nazi police state. In September 1939, just after the outbreak of war, he created the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). This new organization had seven main branches. The Gestapo was designated as the fourth branch and was now headed by Heinrich Müller (nicknamed as Gestapo Müller). Back in 1931, as a member of the Munich police, Müller had successfully hushed-up the scandal surrounding the suicide of Hitler's niece Geli Raubal. Thus he had proven himself to be a very dependable man. Section B4 of the Gestapo dealt exclusively with the "Jewish question" and came under the permanent control of Adolf Eichmann. This energetic and efficient organizer would keep the trains running on time from all over Europe to Nazi death camps located in occupied Poland during the Final Solution of the Jewish question. The Gestapo followed Hitler's armies into every country during the conquest of Europe. By pitting neighbor against neighbor, Gestapo agents established the same kind of terror mechanism in each occupied country that had worked so well back in Germany. In 1942, the Gestapo took things a step further via Hitler's Night and Fog Decree. Suspected anti-Nazis would now vanish without a trace into the misty night never to be seen again. The desired effect as stated by Himmler was to "leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender." The victims were mostly from France, Belgium and Holland. They were usually arrested in the middle of the night and whisked off to far away prisons for torture-interrogation, eventually arriving at a concentration camp in Germany if they survived. From the very beginning of Hitler's regime, the ever-present threat of arrest and indefinite confinement in a concentration camp robbed the German people of their personal freedom and left them as inhibited, dutifully obedient subjects. But even this was not enough. The Nazis wanted to change people's thinking. And so, just as they had purged their hated political enemies, they began a campaign to purge hated "unGerman" ideas. That effort started in May 1933 with the worst of all crimes against human thought and culture - the burning of books.
A hundred years before the advent of Hitler, the German-Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, had declared: "Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too." On the night of May 10, 1933, an event unseen in Europe since the Middle Ages occurred as German students from universities once regarded as among the finest in the world, gathered in Berlin to burn books with "unGerman" ideas. The students, along with brownshirted storm troopers, tossed heaps of books into a bonfire while giving the Hitler arm-salute and singing Nazi anthems. Among the 20,000 volumes hurled into the flames were the writings of Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Förster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, André Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Margaret Sanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Upton Sinclair, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Theodor Wolff, Emilé Zola, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels joined the students at the bonfire and declared: "The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death - this is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed - a deed which should document the following for the world to know - Here the intellectual foundation of the November [Democratic] Republic is sinking to the ground, but from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise..." Germany was now led by a self-educated, high school drop-out named Adolf Hitler, who was by nature strongly anti-intellectual. For Hitler, the reawakening of the long-dormant Germanic spirit, with its racial and militaristic qualities, was far more important than any traditional notions of learning. Before Hitler, German university towns had been counted among the world's great centers of scientific innovation and literary scholarship. Under Hitler, Germany's intellectual vitality quickly began to diminish. Truth, rational thinking and objective knowledge, the foundation stones of Western civilization, were denounced by Nazified students and professors in favor of mysticism, speculation and collective thinking toward a common goal - the pursuit of a glorious future for Germany. The youth-oriented Nazi movement had always attracted a sizable following among right-leaning university students. Even back in the 1920s they sensed Nazism might be the wave of the future. They joined the National Socialist German Students' League, put on swastika armbands and harassed any anti-Nazi teachers. Now, many formerly reluctant professors were swept along by the outpouring of student enthusiasm that followed Hitler's seizure of power. Most of the professors eagerly surrendered their intellectual honesty and took the required Nazi oath of allegiance. They also wanted to curry favor with Nazi Party officials in order to grab one of the academic vacancies resulting from the mass expulsion of Jewish professors and deans. The entire teaching profession throughout Germany, from elementary schools to university level, had been purged of Jewish instructors and anyone deemed politically suspect, regardless of their proven teaching abilities or achievements, including 20 past (and future) Nobel Prize winners. About ten percent of Germany's university teaching force was sacked in 1933-34, with devastating results for disciplines such as quantum physics and mathematics where Jews had been prominent. The world's premier physicist, Albert Einstein, settled in the United States along with many other intellectual refugees from Hitler's Germany. Lovers of truth and freedom who remained behind in Germany only managed to escape through the phenomenon of inner-emigration. The Nazis could never actually know one's inner-most thoughts as long as one maintained a kind of poker face and didn't reveal those private thoughts. However, this could also be a dreadfully lonely existence. Eventually, small groups of like-minded students and professors still opposed to Nazism found each other. They sometimes held clandestine off-campus discussions featuring a free exchange of ideas. One such group based at the University of Munich became known as the White Rose and boldly distributed leaflets demanding that Hitler "return to us the personal freedom which is the most valuable possession of each German, and of which he has cheated us in the lowest possible manner." Two members of the group, Hans and Sophie Scholl, were arrested by the Gestapo for this and executed. In the college classroom, professors gave lectures amid the nagging fear they might be denounced by one of their students for any reason and possibly wind up in a concentration camp. Politically ambitious teachers sometimes kept secret dossiers on the utterances and activities of their fellow educators which could be turned over to the Gestapo to further their own careers. The widespread insecurity that resulted caused academic timidity which further lowered educational standards. Grammar schools and high schools throughout Germany now had National Socialist teachers of questionable ability forming young minds in strict adherence to the Party motto: "The supreme task of the schools is the education of youth for the service of Volk and State in the National Socialist spirit." They taught Nazi propaganda as truth and had their young students recite it back from memory. During the war years, the Hitler Youth organization gradually supplanted the traditional elementary and secondary school system and became the main force educating German children. And the quality of that education continually worsened. Students emerging from the elite Adolf Hitler Schools were in superb physical condition and thoroughly drilled in Nazi ideology, but lacked basic skills in math and science. Nazi scientists, educated before Hitler, complained they were hindered in developing new super-weapons by the recruitment of graduates from the Nazified school system. German Army leaders also complained that young officer candidates displayed "a simply inconceivable lack of elementary knowledge." They didn't even know enough to capitalize the first letter of a proper name. But for Hitler, these shortcomings really didn't matter. The school system now produced what he needed - unquestioning young men ready to obediently serve the Fatherland unto death amid Nazi slogans such as: Believe, Obey, Fight! "My program for educating youth is hard," Hitler had once boasted. "Weakness must be hammered away. In my Ordensburgen [special Nazi colleges] a youth will grow up before which the world will tremble. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes...That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication...That is how I will create the New Order." And in this New Order, anyone refusing to conform was simply removed from society and sent away for a special kind of re-education within the confines of a concentration camp. There they would be broken physically, mentally and spiritually until they either submitted completely or died. The first such camp was Dachau located near Munich. It was so successful that it become the model for all subsequent concentration camps, and there would be hundreds of them. Yüklə 1,15 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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he boycott began at 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 1, 1933, and lasted only a day. Nazi Brownshirts, the SA storm troopers, stood at entrances to Jewish shops, department stores, professional offices and various places of business. They held poster signs saying: "Germans, defend yourselves against the Jewish atrocity propaganda, buy only at German shops!"
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