A History of the Final Solution E-Book

Daniel Rafecas

• Herausgeber: Siglo XXI Editores
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Singular
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 453

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This book explores the complex causes that led to the perpetration of the most significant genocidal crime in modern history: the Holocaust. The origin of this enquiry lies at the point where the utopia of the civilizing process failed to deliver: how could Auschwitz-Birkenau be possible? Daniel Rafecas builds a concise but explanatory narration supported by a strong, not obvious hypothesis —the Holocaust was not arrived at as the result of the willingness of a handful of anti-Semitic fanatics led by Adolf Hitler, but through the overcoming of successive stages across which the criminal decisions regarding the Jewish question were radicalized. Such decisions were gradually processed and rationalized by dozens of thousands of officials involved in the destruction process. This thorough chronicle of the relevant events covers the world war conflict (particularly, the dramatic circumstances that characterized the invasion of the Soviet Union), as well as the key role played by the state bureaucracy in charge of implementing anti-Jewish policies (the SS of Heinrich Himmler). And it sheds light over the path travelled by the Nazi regime towards the consummation of the Final Solution, a process that could only be possible as a result of the progressive trampling of basic human rights, which is typical of authoritarian states. With an austere but didactic style, Daniel Rafecas offers a historical synthesis that is essential to those English-speaking readers who, coming from any area of knowledge, approach this subject, worried by what Rafecas defines as the great black hole of Modernity.

Leseprobe

Índice

Cover

Index

Copyright

Prologue (Leonardo Senkman)

Introduction

1. Stage One. The Eradication of Jewish Influence

The First Anti-Jewish Measures

The Emigration of Jews from the Reich as State Policy

2. Stage Two. The Territorial Solution

Continuities and Breaks

The Nisko Plan

The Madagascar Plan

3. Stage Three. The Siberia Plan

Operation Barbarossa

Conceiving the Siberia Plan

The War in the East Begins

A Crucial Decision

The Deportation of the Jews of the Reich to the East

The Bitter Struggle on the Way to Moscow

The Siege of Leningrad

The Wannsee Conference: An Epilogue to the Siberia Plan

4. Stage Four. The Annihilation of the Jews Behind the Eastern Front

A Brief Retrospective

Selective Executions

Widening the Scope of the Killings

The Annihilation of Local Jewries by Gassing

5. Stage Five. The Extermination of all the European Jews in Gas Chambers

Events Marking the Final Path

Auschwitz and the Final Solution: An Enlightening Chronology

The Extermination Camp of Belzec and its Role in the Final Solution

The Sobibor Extermination Camp

The Treblinka Extermination Camp

The Role Played by the Concentration and Extermination Camp of Majdanek (Lublin)

Conclusions Regarding the Advent of the Final Solution

Final Reflections

Bibliography

List of Acronyms

Acknowledgements

Daniel Rafecas

A HISTORY OF THE FINAL SOLUTION

An enquiry into the stages that led to the extermination of European Jews

Translated byElena Odriozola

Rafecas, Daniel

A History of the Final Solution / Daniel Rafecas.- 1ª ed.- Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2021.

Libro digital, EPUB.- (Singular)

Archivo Digital: descarga y online

ISBN 978-987-801-125-7

1. Holocausto Judío. I. Título.

CDD 940.5318

© 2021, Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina S.A.

<www.sigloxxieditores.com.ar>

Diseño de cubierta: María Cecilia Cabrera y M. R.

Foto de cubierta: familia judía en el gueto, Budapest, Hungría, 1944 (Para que lo sepan las generaciones venideras. La recordación del Holocausto en Yad Vashem)

Digitalización: Departamento de Producción Editorial de Siglo XXI Editores Argentina

Primera edición en formato digital: noviembre de 2021

Hecho el depósito que marca la ley 11.723

ISBN edición digital (ePub): 978-987-801-125-7

What begins as something finite in destruction and limited in time can quickly develop into a monster of murder; that evil has gradations, but is also a process, and can move smoothly, effortlessly forward to greater evil.

Martin Gilbert

When the killing of Jews in Riga, capital city of Latvia, reached its peak, on December 7-9, 1941, 25,000 Jewish men, women, and children were killed.

Among them was Simon Dubnov, 81, who was then considered the greatest Jewish historian alive, author of a highly-renowned ten-volume history of the Jewish people. Sick, running a fever, his legs weak, he could not move as quickly as he needed to get from the ghetto to the execution site, and a guard shot him in the back. It is said that Dubnov’s last words when falling to the ground were “Schreibt und farschreibt!”: “Write and record!” (Gilbert, 1987:

229-230).

That forceful inescapable mandate has reached us unimpaired, and I would add that it might even be more relevant today than ever. May this volume, a compilation of all available information to this day on the advent of the Final Solution, which took the lives of Dubnov, his family, his students, all his community, and, in a nutshell, of six million Jews, be a homage to his work, his legacy, and his last, definitive, message, delivered with his last breath.

Prologue

Leonardo Senkman[1]

For many years, researchers have tried to answer the question of how the leaders in Nazi Germany came to the decisions which led to the so-called Final Solution regarding the European Jews. During the last years, answering that question gave way to understanding the process by which the orders that resulted in the extermination were validated and carried out, both by the highest and the intermediate ranks of the National Socialist Regime ruling Germany and by those involved in the conquest of “living space” in Eastern Europe (Bankier, 2001).

It is known that the extermination program implemented by the Third Reich did not begin in earnest until the spring and summer of 1942, although the relevant key decisions had already been taken by Nazi genocidaires in 1941. As Ian Kershaw (2007, Chapter 10) has shown, the first relevant decision dates back to the summer when the shooting of Jews in Soviet territory began. The second decision was arrived at with the purpose of implementing the Final Solution for all European Jewry.

Hitler’s determination to exterminate all European Jews was a state secret of the highest order that Himmler –responsible to Hitler for the practical aspects of the Final Solution– did not communicate to SS officers and Nazi Party leaders until October 1943. However, the series of authorizations which cascaded during the fateful months of the summer and the autumn of 1941, during the stage of radicalization of genocidal practices that took place on account of the German invasion of the USSR, already expressed an intention to exterminate the Soviet Jews, whose massive killing anticipated the Final Solution to the “Jewish question” at the European level (Browning, 2004).

This valuable book authored by Daniel Rafecas stresses the stages that preceded the extermination, reconstructing the chain of cumulative authorizations based on circumstantial evidence in the domain of facts, the investigation of which the author undertakes with the astuteness and objectivity of a judge in one of the criminal cases without comparison in all of history.

In a brief previous study, Rafecas, as a criminal jurist, had already explored the way criminological discourse had shaped Auschwitz (cf. Rafecas, 2005). But now he undertakes this task with the documented objectivity of a thorough Shoah scholar attempting to unravel some historical facts and gain knowledge about the genocidal behavior of Nazi perpetrators.

Recent research on the Final Solution has moved beyond explanations based on functional motives, such as the frustration of Nazi military plans of conquest and resettlement of ethnic Germans in the Eastern Front; additionally, it has deepened the exploration of the ideological reasons of why expelled Jews together with their disintegrated families, as well as nomad Gypsies were chosen as deadly enemies to solve logistic problems pertaining to the World War (Tyrnauer, 1991, y Friedländer, 2007). The shift from the Nazi logic of a racial imperialism based on expulsion to massive killings took place, first, during war operations in the USSR, rather than in Poland, and it was the anti-Bolshevik war that enabled the radicalization of an early phobia against Jews, supported by Hitler, and its transformation into coercion aimed at annihilation, made possible by perpetrators colluding with collaborationists (Gellately, 2001).

Rafecas’s historical research and criminal investigation is attuned to the need to supplement causality hypotheses with an exploration of deep ideological motivations accounting for hatred of Jews and ethnic cleansing, both on the part of Nazi perpetrators and of collaborationists, and for the local population’s accomplice indifference, all of which existed long before the opening of the Eastern Front and the consequences of Pearl Harbor.[2]

The undisputed contribution of this book lies in its documented periodization of the stages which preceded the non-linear path which led to systematic extermination and in its welcome resistance to endorse the intentional theory put forward by historians who posited the existence of a straight path to Auschwitz (e.g., Lucy Davidowicz [1975]); similarly, the book moves away from the single-cause line embraced by researchers who gave excessive credit to the technological-organizational efficiency of the Third Reich Empire in its endeavor to implement a genocidal decision, allegedly taken beforehand and catalyzed by war (e.g., Hilberg [1992] and Browning [1992]).

Even though the author shows that the devastating counteroffensive launched by the Red Army ruined the previous plan of deportation to the East to solve the “Jewish question” (the Siberia plan), his discussion takes into account historical evidence suggesting that it was not the euphoria which resulted from war victories which gave rise to the lethal idea of implementing the Final Solution (thesis upheld by Ch. Browning[3]) but the failure of the colossal plan of resettlement and ethnic cleansing in the furthest territories of the USSR.

The entrance of the United States into the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor catalyzed the fulfillment of Hitler’s threat of January 1939 that a second world war would bring about “the inevitable consequence of the annihilation of Jews”. Rafecas agrees with Friedländer in stressing that the importance of that event cannot be overlooked when explaining the radicalization of Nazi destruction policy; however, he does not limit his analysis to war progress, but he discusses in-depth technological developments in connection with gassing and incineration in death camps’ crematoriums to study the viability of the Final Solution fifth stage–the deportation of European Jewry to death camps.[4]

Cumulative decisions concerning total annihilation taken after the ill-fated Wannsee Conference did not require anything but organization and implementation of a continental-scale Shoah. Consequently, this book closes with a thorough investigation and a sinister chronology of the evolution of the Lager of Auschwitz I to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the role played by the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Majdanek in the European Final Solution.

Readers will find in this book a pioneering synthesis, updated with the best academic bibliography on the Final Solution, offering an insightful analysis of the information required to understand the genocidal practices conducted in the Shoah, practices that, notwithstanding their singularity and magnitude ,reveal how that crime against humanity was ever possible.

Argentine readers will feel, as I do, proud to learn that this talented scholar and researcher, who follows the trail of the incommensurable Jewish genocide, is the same Federal Judge appointed to make justice in the First Army Corps case, perhaps the most far-reaching trial related to state terrorism and human right violations committed during the last military dictatorship in Argentina.[5]

Bibliography

Bankier, David. “Introducción”. In La política de exterminio nazi, 1939-1945: Investigación y polémica en la nueva historiografía alemana. Jerusalén-Yad Vashem, Ulrich Herbert (ed.), (2001) p. 109-112 (Hebrew edition).

Browning, Christopher. The Path to Genocide. Essays on the Launching of the Final Solution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

— “From ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ to Genocide to the ‘Final Solution’”. Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 1-25.

— The Origins of the Final Solution. The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press & Yad Vashem, 2004.

— “On my Book The Origins of the Final Solution: Some Remarks on its Background and on its Major Conclusions”. In David Bankier & Dan Michman (comps.). Holocaust Historiography in Context. Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements. Jerusalem and New York: Yad Vashem & Berghahn Books, 2008, pp. 403-420.

Dawidowicz, Lucy. The War against the Jews. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1975.

Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and The Jews 1939–1945. The Years of Extermination. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007.

Gellately, Robert. Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Hirschfeld, Gehrhardt (ed.). The Politics of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Regime. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986.

Kershaw, Ian. Decisiones trascendentales. De Dunquerque a Pearl Harbour (1940-1941). El año que cambió la historia. Barcelona: Península, 2007.

Rafecas, Daniel “El aporte de los discursos penales a la conformación de Auschwitz”. Nuestra Memoria, No. 25, June 2005, pp.139-144.

— “La especial brutalidad antisemita del terrorismo de Estado durante la última dictadura militar en la Argentina”. Nuestra Memoria, No. 29, December 2007, pp. 195-208.

— “La reapertura de los procesos judiciales por crímenes contra la humanidad en la Argentina”. In Gabriele Andreozzi (coord.). Juicios por crímenes de lesa humanidad en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Cara o Ceca, 2011, pp. 155-176.

Tyrnauer, Socrate. Gypsies and the Holocaust: a Bibliography and IntroductionEssay. Montreal: Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies, 1991.

[1] The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Professor of History at the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies; director of Academic Programmes at the Liwerant Center for the Study of Latin America, Spain, Portugal, and its Jewish Communities; Correspondant Member in Israel of the National History Academy, Argentine Republic.

[2] On the other victims of the Third Reich, and the regime cruelty towards Soviet war prisoners and civil citizens, see Hirschfeld (1986) and Browning (2000).

[3] Christopher R. Browning (2008: 412) considers that German euphoria resulted from the succesful blockade of Leningrade, on September 8th, 1941; the isolation of Soviet forces on the southern front, on September 16th; and the occupation of Kiev, ten days later. During the first days of October, German troops resumed their offensive against Moscow on the central front.

[4] See Browning (2008: 413).

[5] See Rafecas (2007 and 2011).

Introduction

This book is an attempt to explore and disentangle the complex causes that led to the perpetration of the most significant genocidal crime in the modern history of humanity: the Holocaust.

In spite of the numerous reliable and accurate studies conducted so far by renowned historians which have enlightened different aspects of the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis and their allies,[6] there still persists in broad segments of the public opinion the –no doubt reassuring– impression that what led to the Holocaust was purely and exclusively the willfulness of a handful of psychopathic leaders headed by Adolf Hitler.

This impression is based on the unspeakable nature of the final result achieved by the gigantic criminal endeavor undertaken by Nazism: in mid-twentieth century Europe, six million Jewish victims were exterminated, among them one and a half million children massacred by shooting or gassed in the chambers of the extermination camps. Only a collection of deranged minds –it is said– could have set off such a crime.

However, it is necessary to insist once again that this notion is mistaken. We have to ask ourselves if, as members of our modern, “civilized” societies, we are ready to admit the harsh reality that Auschwitz –and everything it stands for– was but another product of Modernity. In fact, a thorough analysis of the development of events during the National-Socialist dictatorship shows us that the Holocaust was arrived at through a series of stages during which the decisions concerning the situation of the Jews –first German, then European– were progressively radicalized, decisions that were taken, interpreted and implemented with a full awareness of the consequences involved in the acts by hundreds of thousands of individuals at all levels and practically all the offices under the control of the Nazi state and their allies.

It was precisely this advance through the successive stages –accompanied by the propaganda and the discourses legitimizing the persecution– which allowed the Nazi leaders and ideologues to lay the foundations so that the gigantic bureaucratic apparatus –including not only the public administration but also the armed forces– would become amenable to the directives ordering the persecution of the Jewish minority endorsed by the leaders of the movement. From this point of view, the leap of the bureaucracy to the last stage in the process of destruction was only possible once the rationalization of the previous stages had been fully consolidated and accepted.

For this reason, it seems crucial to discuss the genealogy of this unprecedented crime through the identification and the description, albeit brief, of each of the stages of the process that led to the gas chambers and the crematory furnaces of Auschwitz-Birkenau, given that “[e]ven a genocide has to be born, somehow or other, no matter how monstrous it might seem to us. Even a genocide has to have a genesis, no matter how hard historical research might find to apprehend certain events” (Burrin, 1990: 11).

In this sense, even though on the cover of this book a series of stages are mentioned, it is necessary to point out from the beginning that the events we will discuss do not follow a definite temporal line; the political, economic, and social circumstances that shaped those events, particularly those in the framework of the world war conflict, have to be considered in all their complexity, and in any case, the fact of placing these events after some events and before others should always be considered relative and approximate.

If we accept to resort to this concession –dividing in segments what clearly constitutes a highly complex process (a method that will therefore involve certain degree of discretion)–, it is because we are persuaded that by thus presenting the facts and enlightening the logic underlying the entire sequence, we will contribute to countering the invectives of those who still today deny or minimize the Holocaust on the basis that it is factually impossible that something similar, of such dimension, might have ever occurred. At the same time, we will try to highlight the unspeakable nature of the “Final Solution” pursued by this criminal endeavor of unprecedented proportion: wiping an entire people, its members, its history and its culture from the face of the earth, as if it had never existed, irrespective of everything: men, women, children or elderly people; religious, convert or atheist; rich or poor; erudite or without formal education; supporters of a conservative or revolutionary ideology; promoters of a state of their own or supporters of assimilation. The Nazi definition of Jew as an irreconcilable enemy exclusively on account of “racial condition” encompassed everyone, without exception.

So extraordinary was the magnitude of the crime that was being perpetrated that in 1944 the Polish jurist of Jewish origin Raphael Lemkin, residing in the Unites States, coined for it a new term: genocide, a word that conveys the deranged notion of pretending to pull out a branch from the tree of humanity, of depriving the world of an entire people, of making it disappear forever. That was what the Nazi perpetrators told the Jews who were imprisoned in the concentration camps: “No one will live to tell this story. And if somebody manages to escape, when he tries to tell what he saw, no one will believe that such a thing could have ever happened”.

On the other hand, it should be noted that to move through the successive stages, always attempting to get closer to the historical truth, we will resort to inquiry as the technique used to acquire knowledge. This is due to our professional background, in the framework of which judicial enquiry is a daily exercise.[7] In this sense, any enquiry tending to historically reconstruct a past event should identify beforehand what the more relevant aspects will be, at the expense of others which, on account of different reasons, will only be secondarily considered. No inquiry into the causal process that led to the Holocaust could neglect three cornerstones:

the character, the thinking, and the action of the leader of the National-Socialist dictatorship: Adolf Hitler;the structure and the development of the state-bureaucratic corporation that devised and implemented the solution to the Jewish question: Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich’s SS; andthe developments, sometimes unexpected and dramatic, that affected Germany in the context of the Second World War in Europe, particularly the events on the Eastern Front beginning late June 194When exploring the Holocaust historiography, it can be seen that, although most studies justly consider the two first aspects mentioned, the influence of the war conflict on the process tends to be underestimated, particularly during the period from the summer of 1941 to the end of 1942, when the total war against the Soviet Union had a crucial impact on the last stages of the Final Solution, transmitting to the Holocaust its definitive and dramatic traits concerning mode, time, and place, as we now know them. In this respect, we agree with Jürgen Matthäus, who asserts that “[i]n looking for answers to the questions how, when, and why the Nazi persecution of the Jews evolved into the Final Solution, the importance of the war against the Soviet Union can hardly be underestimated” (in Browning, 2005: 245).

Our analysis rests upon these three dimensions, which in turn have to be combined with many other issues that one way or another, at different times during the historical process studied, also exerted some influence:

the traditional anti-Semitism latent in Germany and in most European territory after being conquered by Hitler, apart from the anti-Jewish hate increasingly promoted by the Nazi regime during its existence;the attitude of the German people and the annexed and allied countries concerning Jewish persecution;the contribution of other governmental and non-governmental agencies, particularly the army, but also the National-Socialist Party, the public administration, and the industry;the role played by other high commanding Nazi leaders, such as Hermann Göring, second in command in the regime; Joseph Goebbels, his Minister of Propaganda; or Hans Frank, in charge of the General Government established in the occupied Poland, among others;economic needs (particularly of labor) of the German state as a result of the war effort;the role played by the Jewish victims and their representatives through the stages studied;the attitude assumed by the other Western countries in the face of the Jewish question before and during the Second World War.

I am frequently asked about the reasons that drove me to undertake this task. The answer is simple: the Holocaust was not only an attack on the Jewish people but on humanity as a whole. Seen from this perspective, it cannot be considered as pertaining only to one people, as it casts a shadow that calls into question the very human condition.

Wondering about the human essence without considering the Holocaust, without facing the deep meaning of Auschwitz would not make much sense in the 21st century, as a fundamental aspect of its complex history would be excluded. The answers humanity has been looking for since becoming self-aware and conscious of their potential, both for Good and for Evil, may be found right there: in the concentrationary universe, in the death camps.

For this reason, just because we are part of Western societies we should feel compelled to reflect upon this recent tragedy of our history, which has meant a crucial breakdown in the utopia of civilizing progress; and in fact, it may well be seen that Auschwitz, that black hole in Modernity, continues to attract the attention of every spheres of thought, whether philosophical or scientific, and bears influence on literature, film, and many other artistic expressions of universal culture.

In this sense, I would like to stress the fundamental importance of the study of these events and of the conclusions that should necessarily be drawn from them to the sphere of Law. I do not know of a better way of helping law students understand the crucial need of unconditionally upholding the rule of law, and the respect for guarantees and fundamental human rights than to show them what happened in Hitler’s Germany, where those rights and guarantees were trampled. There is no better way to appreciate their transcendence than denouncing the fatal destination of the authoritarian dynamics driving the National-Socialist state: the concentration camp, mass murder, genocide.

But to be in a position to understand the Holocaust, an undoubtedly complex phenomenon, its historical background has to be researched and mapped, so that on that foundation, further reflections may then be produced, whether it be from the point of view of psychology, sociology, or political science, just to mention a few disciplines. Precisely, the idea to undertake this study was born from the notion, in seminars on the Holocaust delivered at Law Schools, that the approach taken by authors and texts on this subject matter (Zygmunt Bauman, Giorgio Agamben, Enzo Traverso, and so on) assumed a previous knowledge of the Final Solution, not to mention a knowledge on how that solution had been arrived at, which the students did not have.

It is in this connection that this book is meant to be a modest contribution: to function as a bridge between the monumental work of some historians –such as Raul Hilberg or Saul Friedländer– and a reader who, coming from whatever walk of life, approaches, not without perplexity, not without worries, frequently with prejudice, the always hard subject of the Holocaust, with the intention of finding answers to the major question: how could it have been possible?

[6] Although in the present study we focus on the genocide of the Jewish people, we cannot fail to mention that the Nazis persecuted simultaneously other minorities, and that such persecution resulted in the extermination of between a quarter and a half million Romani people or “Gypsies” (see different estimations varying from those offered by Zadoff, 2004: 259, and Kenrick-Puxon, 1997: 152, to Hancock, 2005: 149-150, with quotations by Ulrich König and Sybil Milton); some 80,000 German political prisoners; 70,000 mentally handicapped individuals; more than 10,000 homosexuals; several thousand Witnesses of Jehovah. It should also be mentioned that, in the context of the Second World War, more than three million Soviet war prisoners were killed; in addition to a similar number of Polish Catholics, and some 700,000 Serbs murdered by Croatian Nationalists, who were allied with the Nazis in the Balkan area.

[7] Michel Foucault hightlights the historical relevance of this method: “[t]he great cultural movement that after the 12th century begins to pave the way for the Rennaisance may be largely defined as the development or the flourishing of inquiry as a general form of knowledge” (2000: 84-85).

1. Stage One

The Eradication of Jewish Influence

Interior view of a synagogue destroyed during the pogroms of the Night of Broken Glass. Source: Yad Vashem

From the moment Hitler came to power in 1933, the regime’s new measures aimed to substitute the prevailing democratic model for an authoritarian State through a combination of allegedly legal initiatives and the imposition of more open and unadorned state and parastate violence. Upon achieving this goal–and having dealt with Communists and other “political enemies”–the regime took measures intended to eliminate the alleged influence of Jews, who in 1935 lost their status as full citizens, one of a set of markedly discriminatory measures which exerted an increasing official pressure on the Jewry to emigrate. The pogrom perpetrated in November 1938 constituted the quintessential embodiment of such a process.

The First Anti-Jewish Measures

The Regime’s Initial Restrictions

The coming to power of Adolf Hitler on January 30, 1933, in the representative democracy established in post-war Germany known as the Weimar Republic, signaled the beginning of the process we are examining, aimed at the systematic persecution of Jews in Germany. By then, the new German Chancellor was still restricted by the authority of the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and by a ministerial cabinet with only two posts occupied by his followers. Germany, in turn, was still suffering the economic and political impact of the dishonorable conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, signed at the end of World War I.[8]

The National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP), led by Hitler, held a large share of the national electorate: in fact, on July 31, 1932, the Nazis had won almost 14,000,000 votes, whereas the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party combined had obtained scarcely more than 13,000,000. Given these results, in which he held 37.3% of the vote, Hitler had nominated himself for the position of Chancellor. However, he was still far from having a majority in the Parliament (Reichstag); thus, in order to maintain his power, his followers were forced to negotiate and establish alliances with other nationalist forces.

On the other hand, the conservative coalition that then ruled Germany eased Hitler’s path to the Chancellorship, believing that this would prevent the Social Democrats –or even worse, the Communists– from achieving power in the Weimar Republic.

And in fact, it did. First the Communists and then the Social Democrats fell victim to the violent practices of the new order established on January 30, 1933, which called itself the National Socialist Revolution. It was in those sectors of the national political arena that Hitler saw the most serious threat to the authoritarian regime he planned to establish in Germany. And it was on them that he prioritarily focused his and his followers’ attention.

In the face of Hitler’s increasing hostility towards members of the Communist Party –on February 5, 1933, an important number of Communist Party offices were attacked and ransacked, and their libraries burned–, on February 21, 1933, the Party leaders urged their followers, who belonged to the German proletariat, to disarm Nazi task forces. A few days later, the leadership of the German Communist Party issued a statement justifying the use of violence (Toland, 2009: 445). In this context of open confrontation with the Nazis throughout Germany, Marinus van der Lubbe, a 23-year-old Dutch communist who had arrived in Berlin a week earlier, gave Hitler the perfect excuse to intensify anti-Communist repression by setting fire to the Parliament building on February 27, 1933.

The next day, raising the specter of an impending Communist revolution and taking advantage of the fact that the Parliament had been dissolved due to the upcoming March 5 elections, a newly appointed Chancellor Hitler had President Von Hindenburg and the rest of the Cabinet pass a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State” instituting a sort of state of siege, invoking Article 48 of the 1919 German Constitution (this decree, renewed in 1937 and 1939, would later become permanent due to a subsequent decree passed in 1943; it stood in force until 1945).

Under this decree, civil liberties were suspended and “protective custody” of “conspirators” and “enemies” of the Reich was authorized. Even though the application of this decree was limited to “Communist acts of violence threatening State security”, the Gestapo, the German Secret State Police, was not restricted in its field of action; its acts were finally validated by the courts. On March 23, 1933, the rule of law was completely abolished with the enactment by the Reichstag of a delegation of power act known as the Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich, which bestowed upon Hitler full legislative and executive powers.

During the first months of the new regime, state and parastate forces, together with the propaganda apparatus, difamated, persecuted, apprehended, forced to emigrate, and, in many cases, murdered or made to disappear leaders and members of the German Communist Party, with whom Nazis had been competing in the streets and the ballot boxes long before coming to power. According to estimations of the German Communist Party leadership, the total number of Communists imprisoned during the first years of Nazi rule was more than 100,000, whereas the number of members murdered was approximately 2,500.

Thus, intended to hold political enemies, the first concentration camp was officially opened on April 1, 1933 outside Munich in Dachau. Its sponsor was the ambitious Chief of Police of the state of Bavaria, Heinrich Himmler, who had held since 1929 –that is, at 29-years-old– the post of Reichsführer of the SS, an elite corps created in 1925 as a personal “protection corps” for Hitler. A few days before the opening of Dachau, the Nazi press had reported that this Lager (facility) was intended for the imprisonment –under the figure of “preventive detention”– of “all Communist and, where necessary, Reichsbanner [shock force loyal to the Republic of Weimar] and Social Democratic functionaries” (Evans, 2005: 385).

Once the Communist Party had been suppressed, and pursuant to a strategy of eliminating every vestige of political opposition, it was now the most important center-left force’s turn. On June 22, 1933, under the Reichstag Fire Decree, Hitler officially banned the Social Democratic Party of Germany, accusing it of being “hostile to Nation and State”. By then, the Chancellor had added five more members to his Cabinet, so that on July 14, 1933, with no opposition raised, Hitler successfully enacted a law establishing the NSDAP as the only legal political party in Germany. During those days, Social Democratic deputies were expelled from Parliament, and several thousand leaders and party members suffered the same fate as their predecessors: imprisonment, torture, and exile. It is estimated that 3,000 Social Democratic functionaries were incarcerated.

Trade unions and other workers’ organizations also fell victim to the National Socialist Revolution at this stage– their leaders were arrested, and their organizations banned. A bylaw passed on December 7, 1933 ordered the dissolution of all trade organizations. In anticipation of this move, the Attorney General of Berlin had, seven months before, on May 12, seized trade unions’ assets, and occupied their headquarters later in June. A decree passed on October 24, 1934 replaced trade unions with a single organization representing German workers, the German Labor Front, led by a Nazi Party officer, Robert Ley.

By mid-1934, with the intention of winning the support of the reluctant Armed Forces for the National Socialist cause, Hitler decided to do away with his most radicalized wing– the Storm Troopers (SA), led by Ernst Röhm, who by Februar,y 1934 counted 4 million men.[9] Thus, the regime undertook a deep violent purge of some of its most unpredictable components (that reached its peak with the “Night of the Long Knives”,[10] on June 30, 1934), which led to the beheading of the SA, and the incorporation of its men into other Nazi organizations.

Due to this decision to neutralize, first, left wing sectors but also internal sources of conflict as a way of adapting to its newly acquired power position, the Nazi relegated the Jewish question to a secondary position, but this did not mean its exclusion from the Nazi agenda during this period. On the contrary, the identification of Jews and Communism, so frequent in European far-right discourse, placed German Jews, albeit indirectly, in the crosshairs of those who feared a permanent Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destabilizing the bourgeoisie State, the new face of which was the Hitlerian regime, to compound contradiction.

But the truth is that during these first two years, the internal and external political, economic, and social limitations bearing on the Hitlerian regime, together with the government decision to target left-wing sectors –long-standing rivals of the Nazi– reduced state policies aimed at the Jewish minority to a series of legal measures tending to “eradicate the influence” of this group on different spheres of German life. In fact, “anti-Jewish policy occupied a relatively limited place in their prevailing interests. Their efforts were essentially aimed at regaining freedom of action in Europe and recovering their military force” (Burrin, 1990: 58).

The Precept of the Early Years

Eradicating Jewish influence was a precept not only articulated in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but also widely propagated in German Nationalist circles. While Hitler was in power, it became a pervading policy, referred to in many of his public and private speeches and conversations. After an obscure reference to Jewish influence on finances, the press, the industry, and the arts, appropriate measures tending to counter such influence would be urged. In this sense, and “even though it may seem quite marginal in hindsight, cultural life was the first area from where the Jews and ‘left-wingers’ were massively expelled. […] they had turned against the most conspicuous representatives of the ‘Jewish spirit’, which would subsequently be eradicated” (Friedländer, 2009: 29).

Changes brought about by Hitler’s appointment to the position of Chancellor on January 30, 1933 made a number of German people, Jews and non-Jews feel that the time to leave the country had come (in fact, during 1933, approximately 37,000 Jews emigrated). Among the Jews, the physicist Albert Einstein[11] may be mentioned; among non-Jews, author Thomas Mann. However, the majority of the half-million Jews living in Germany (less than 1% of the population) largely “believed that they would be able to weather the storm” (Friedländer, 2009: 95). By the end of 1933, “dozens of millions of people, inside and outside of Germany, were aware of the systematic segregation and persecution policy that the new German regime had put into effect against Jewish citizens. However […] it is possible that neither Jews nor non-Jews may have been able to discern clearly the objectives and scope of such policy. There was anxiety, but no apparent sense of panic or urgency among German Jews” (2009: 103).

According to Friedländer, “the Jewish community, however, had gained visibility by gradually concentrating in the larger cities, keeping to certain professions, and absorbing an increasing number of easily identifiable East European Jews” (2009: 114). This author points that Jews were prominent in the areas of business and finance (at the beginning of the 20th century, 30 out of 52 Berlin banks belonged to Jewish bankers), journalism and cultural activities, medicine, and law, as well as their involvement in liberal and left-wing politics. “Economic success and growing visibility without political power produced, in part at least, their own nemesis”, as they became a target for anti-Semitic agitation (2009: 119).

The first noticeable development, revealing a new state of affairs, occurred on April 1, 1933, when Nazi shock forces organized a boycott against Jewish businesses. The event achieved high national and international visibility thanks to the coverage afforded by official propaganda and was favored by police tolerance.

Bishop Otto Dibelius, the main Protestant authority in Germany, justified the actions of the new regime in an address for United States radio delivered on April 4:

My dear Brethren: We all not only understand but are fully sympathetic to the recent new motivations out of which the völkisch movement has emerged […]. I have always considered myself an anti-Semite. One cannot ignore that Jewry has played a leading role in all the destructive manifestations of modern civilization (in Friedländer, 2009: 68-69).

Hardly a week after the boycott, when the impact of the move was still present, Hitler issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, drafted by the Ministry of the Interior, under which a relentless purge aimed at two million federal, provincial, and municipal public servants was set in motion. The purpose was to identify and expel Jewish, but also Communist, civil servants, including judges and attorneys, university lecturers, teachers, and even students holding grants. Since the emancipation of the Jews in 1871, not a single discriminatory law had been passed in Germany.[12] Paragraph 3 of the law (known as the “Aryan paragraph”) read: “I. Officials of non-Aryan origin should be forced to retire”.

Although in its second article the law initially established some exceptions, these came to be gradually eliminated in the course of the following years so that the law finally encompassed all Jews, creating significant social and economic consequences. On April 11, the first supplementary ordinance defined a “non-Aryan” individual as “anyone descendent from non-Aryan parents or grandparents, particularly Jews. It is enough that one parent or grandparent be non-Aryan”. This definition was intended to be as wide and all-encompassing as possible, a consequence of the anti-Semitic racial zeal which prevailed among the experts in racial issues at the Reich’s Ministry of the Interior.

At that time, Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper, had reproduced a speech delivered by Hitler, where he publicly promised “to purge the Nation and, particularly, the intellectual classes of influences of foreign origin and racially foreign infiltration”. Before the representatives of culture, he assured “that immediate eradication of the majority of Jewish intellectuals from the cultural and intellectual life of Germany should be undertaken, with the purpose of guaranteeing the undeniable right of the country to its own intellectual leadership” (Gellately, 2002: 48).

On April 11, 1933, a new anti-Jewish discriminatory law, proposed by Fanz Gürtner, Minister of Justice, was passed, excluding all Jewish lawyers from courts, with the same scope and exceptions as the Law of the Professional Civil Service.[13] Truth be told, this law formalized what had in fact been happening in the courts; by the end of March 1933, physical harassment of Jewish jurists had spread throughout the Reich: “In Dresden, Jewish judges and lawyers were dragged out of their offices, and even of the courts during trials, and they were often beaten […]. There were dozens of similar events throughout Germany” (Friedländer, 2009: 53).

Subsequently, on April 25, the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools, also known as of numerus clausus, was passed. It was aimed exclusively at non-Aryan students. The law limited the enrollment of new Jewish students to 1.5% of the total applicants and established that the maximum number of students in any institution could not exceed 5%. Thus, a drastic reduction of the number of Jews in higher-education was enforced; from such educational institutions, near 1,200 faculty members had already been dismissed, among them the great jurist Hans Kelsen, Dean of the School of Law at University of Cologne (Rafecas, 2010: 133-153).

Some days later, Bernhard Rust, Minister of Science, Education, and German Culture –who that very same year came to be known on account of issuing a rule making it mandatory for students and teachers to greet each other with the Nazi salute, as well as defending the idea that education in Germany should be functional to the education and indoctrination of new generations of National Socialists– expressed, in the University of Berlin’s auditorium, his views regarding the enactment of the law that expelled Jewish students from schools:

Science for a Jew does not mean a task, an obligation, a domain of creative organization, but a business, and a way of destroying the culture of the people who hosted him. For that reason, the most important chairs of so-called German universities are filled with Jews. Positions were vacated to allow them to pursue their parasitic activities, which were then rewarded with Nobel prizes (in Friedländer, 2009: 88).

Hitler, for his part, after reminding his audience that it had been the Catholic Church that had isolated Jews in ghettos and forbidden Christians to work with them, explained that he would simply be more efficient in pursuing the goal the Church had tried to attain over several centuries, as Jews were “nothing but injurious enemies of State and Church, and consequently he wanted to expel more and more Jews, particularly from academic life and public office” (in Toland, 2009: 466).

The regime’s intentions were carefully explained in the press; thus, the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published the following on April 27, 1933:

A nation with self-respect cannot leave, on the scale accepted until now, its highest activities in the hands of individuals of foreign racial origin. […] Allowing the presence of an exceedingly high percentage of people of foreign origin amidst the general population could be interpreted as an acceptance of the superiority of other races, which should be categorically rejected (in Friedländer, 2009: 53).

Meanwhile, hostility towards Jews was orchestrated by the SA and other Nazi paramilitary forces, as well as by the widespread defamation campaign conducted by the Regime’s mass media. In the context of this anti-Jewish campaign, on May 10, 1933, “exorcism rituals” took place in most German universities and towns. In Berlin, while fanatics listened to Goebbels speaking, more than 20,000 books were burned, and the results were similar in other German cities

Another relevant measure which was part of the strategy implemented after Hitler’s arrival to power regarding the Jewish question was to forbid Jews, in September 1933, from owning farms or engaging in agriculture. For Friedländer,

...in Nazi racial thinking, the German national community drew its strength from the purity of its blood and from its rootedness in the sacred German earth. Such racial purity was a condition of superior cultural creation and of the construction of a powerful State, the guarantor of victory in the struggle for racial survival and domination. From the outset, therefore, the 1933 laws pointed to the exclusion of the Jews from all key areas of this utopian vision (2009: 56).

This implied excluding them from State, laws, culture, and earth.

As Bankier points out, during those early years, Hitlerian dictatorship attuned its anti-Semitism to the feeling of public opinion; thus, each move against Jews was made taking into account people’s reaction. Johnson, too, states that in the pursuit of their genocidal goals, Nazi leaders were “particularly sensitive to the popular mood of German citizens –it was fundamental to secure their silence and collusion” (2003: 351). They had come to the conclusion that the German people would endorse Nazi policies as long as they did not affect non-Jews in any way or seriously impact national interests, particularly the international image of their country.

The common denominator of all such discriminatory legal measures, as well as boycotts and other acts of harassment and persecution suffered by Jews and the institutions that represented them during this first stage was the desire of Nazi leaders to remove Jewish influence from all areas of German life, with special emphasis on education and science, journalism, arts, finance, trade, and liberal professions, apart, of course, from political activity.

In this context, although considered a desirable goal by Nazi leadership, the emigration of German Jews was not still a state policy, a target in the service of which the powerful lever of official bureaucracy would be moved. In any case, during the early years of the prevailing new regime, emigration was considered to be a consequence that might be expected as a result of the measures taken against Jews. As Peter Longerich argues, over the first years of the Third Reich, neither the Gestapo nor the other police or state security agencies which were instrumental in dealing with those considered to be internal enemies of the regime “played a prominent role in Jewish persecution”, but rather it was “the subtle interaction of Party activists and state legislation which drove decisively the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazi regime during this period” (Longerich, 2009: 203).

It should be pointed out that the first set of anti-Jewish discriminatory legislation, reviewed above, would be followed in subsequent months and years by an interminable series of rules and measures directed at perpetuating the harassment and persecution of this minority group, among them, those intended to remove any contribution made by writers, scientists, or artists of Jewish descent from German literature, sciences, and music, as well as many other similar measures that would incessantly be implemented from then on.

The Nuremberg Laws

The relentless trampling by the Nazi regime of the members of the German Jewish community’s citizen rights was accompanied by a loud choir of voices, that of jurists specialized in public law, who endorsed the principles of the racial state and anticipated, from the legal doctrine, proposals of concrete measures to put into effect the most widespread discrimination, forcing the targeted groups, particularly the Jews, to play a role of mere subjects deprived of legal entitlements, in line with the increasing acceptance of the stereotype of the Jude as the mortal enemy of the German people.

The consolidation of such an atmosphere finally decided Hitler to promote a bill that had been on stand-by since 1933. Apparently, the first drafts had been written in the Ministry of the Interior in late May 1933, and had been sent in June to the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy of that same Ministry.

A fundamental element thus came to be incorporated into the anti-Jewish campaign through the Nuremberg Laws, two rules passed on September 15, 1935. The very name of the laws refers to one of the founding sites of National Socialism, where year after year Hitlerism honored the Party martyrs and carried out flamboyant mass rallies. It was precisely in that city, in the context of the annual Party rally held in 1935, where what was a by then completely Nazified Parliament, convened by Hitler, drafted and passed these laws.

One of the rules issued, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, prohibited marriages and extramarital sexual contact between Aryan and non-Aryan persons (Jews). The criminal aspects of this legislation that accompanied the legal definition of “Jew” gave rise to new “crimes”, aimed at punishing with prison sentences not only marriages between Jews and Aryans, but also “all extramarital carnal trade between Jews and subjects of German blood”, among other new figures. The other rule enacted laid, in an impersonal bureaucratic language (that would, anyway, condemn millions of people in the following years), the foundations on which it would then be determined who should be legally considered Jewish according to German law.

The arrival of these laws was preceded by a wide dissemination effort on the subject, and their enactment was accompanied by a significant campaign in the official mass media celebrating the Führer’s decision to separate Aryans from Jews. The main purpose of these laws was to endow with legal force the fact that German Jews would no longer be full but rather second-class citizens, a development that manifestly meant the abolition of the principle of equality under the law. This was a decisive step in the long process of legal exclusion of the German Jewry.

These laws required subsequent further clarification, particularly because they did not specify who should be considered “Jew” from a legal point of view. Consequently, on November 14, 1935, the First Ordinance of the Law of Citizenship of the Reich was issued; this ancillary ordinance clarified who was to be deemed “Jew” and established an automatic method to classify Jews into different categories. According to this ordinance, the mischlinge (mestizo) who had one two Jewish grandparents but who was not married to a Jewish partner or did not practice the Jewish religion was exempted from the law.

Once a person was declared to be legally Jewish, all legal and administrative regulations, past or future, could be applied to him, with no further consideration.

Having come into force on January 1, 1936, these calculated stipulations aimed at defining who was a “Jew” in technical-legal terms were immediately enforced by the bureaucratic state machinery –devoted to the persecution of that group– and then copied, and even amplified, in almost all the territories annexed, conquered, or controlled by Hitler’s allied regimes.

It should be mentioned that the enactment of this abject legislation became widely known, not only in Germany, but throughout the whole world. And the truth is that there was practically neither criticism nor condemnation, but rather a certain aloofness–at best, it was pointed out that this was a question of German domestic policy that would have no further consequences (Lipstadt, 1986: 77-80). The success achieved by the Nazi regime at the Olympic Games held in Berlin the next year leaves no doubt in this matter.

The Nuremburg laws were justified by the official Catholic organ, Klevsblatt, as “indisputable safeguards for the qualitative make-up of the German people” (Toland, 2009: 746). The enactment of these laws signals the end of the first stage of this study. From then on, once the discriminatory anti-Jewish policies (including the explicit legal recognition of their status as second-class citizens) were digested and assumed by the state bureaucracy and the public opinion, the material conditions for the implementation of a new strategy had been established: if Jewish being was irreconcilable with German being –hence the radical policies tending to suppress every trace of its influence– then “the Jew” could not persist in his pernicious cultural life or his treacherous activities in Germany; “the Jew” had to leave; Germany had to be Judenfrei, “free of Jews”.

So, if as Friedländer argues, “before the passage of the Nuremberg laws, segregation of the Jewish community had been the main goal”, emigration would now be the objective to be attained. This author stresses that precisely in September 1935, in a conversation with Walter Gross–an outstanding anti-Semitic member of the party and an expert in racial issues– Hitler mentioned “a stronger emigration of German Jews” as one of his new goals. Friedländer adds that “somewhere between the end of 1935 and 1936, the still dubitative directives of Hitler became a firm guide for all the institutions linked to the State and the organizations of the Nazi Party”, which means that a state policy basically aimed at German Jews emigration began to take shape.

Particularly in connection with the shift from the stage of cultural eradication to that of physical Jewish emigration, Friedländer argues that “the shift to new goals coincided […] with a recent internal and external radicalization”, referring to the Nuremberg laws, in the first case, and the military occupation of Rhineland, together with the ensuing violation of the Treaty of Versailles (March 7, 1936) in the second (Friedländer, 2009: 309, Burrin, 1990: 56).

The Emigration of Jews from the Reich as State Policy

Strengthening the Regime

By autumn of 1935, Hitler’s regime was remarkably strong–by then, all possible trace of the existence of rule of law had practically vanished, as shown in the most significant aspects of political and social life:

Suppression of the Parliament: After its legal dissolution in February 1933, agreed upon by Hitler and President Hindenburg on account of the upcoming elections of March 5, there were no longer free and transparent sessions of the Legislature. After an initial short period of irregular functioning –many parliamentary deputies were exiled or in jail (Communists at the beginning, but later on, also Social Democratic politicians)– there came the final stage, which extended from the passage of the Law of Authorization in 1935, to the end of the war, where the Parliament met sporadically only for the purpose of a propagandistic effect on behalf of the regime.Subordination of the judiciary: Hitler’s self-appointment as “supreme judge of the German People” (June 30, 1934) meant the virtual suppression of judicial independence; some time later, a law passed on July 3, 1934 by the Parliament ensured total impunity for the killings perpetrated under Hitler’s orders on the Night of the Long Knives.Control and increasing censorship of independent media: “With the establishment of the Press Chamber of the Reich, editors and printers were subjected to their control, and the last traces of independence were suppressed. Together with freedom of the press, literary, radiophonic, theatrical, musical, cinematographic, and artistic freedoms also disappeared” (Toland, 2009: 481).