Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

Over the next few days Goebbels ensured that the anti-Jewish atmosphere that

he had systematically stirred up in Berlin was combined with the Reich-wide

major action by the criminal police against ‘social misfits’ to form a campaign

against ‘Jewish criminals’.

The ‘Asocial Operation’31 was intended to send thousands of tramps, beggars, pimps, and others to concentration camps for the purposes of the ‘labour mobilization programme’. In addition, all Jews who had been sentenced to previous

convictions of at least one month were to be drawn into this operation. This

extension of the operation, as a private remark of Heydrich reveals, goes back to a

direct decision by Hitler, to arrest ‘anti-social’ and criminal Jews across the Reich

to carry out important earth-moving works. 32

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

In Berlin alone, within the context of the ‘Asocial Operation’ the police arrested

between 1,000 and 2,000 Jews for minor misdemeanours, traffic offences, ‘pro-

vocative behaviour’, and the like. In Buchenwald concentration camp alone there

were already more than 1,200 Jewish prisoners in the summer of 1938.33

In parallel with this, the anti-Jewish riots that had continued since May in

various districts of Berlin were now systematically extended by the Berlin NSDAP

to the whole of the city. Not only were Jewish shops and Jewish legal practices

‘labelled’ with daubings, but many windows were smashed and in the night of

18 June three synagogues and two prayer houses were demolished. 34

The fierce riots and the mass arrests happening at the same time systematically

created a bloodthirsty atmosphere throughout the capital, which Goebbels now

plainly wanted to use to enforce the special measures he had demanded against

the Jews. On 21 June, however, it was decided at a meeting of the Party and police

leadership that the operation should be terminated. 35

Goebbels noted in his diary entry for 22 June concerning the previous day’s

events:

Helldorf got my orders completely the wrong way round: I had said, the police acts with a legal face, the Party looks on. The reverse is now the case. I get all the Party agencies together and issue new orders. All illegal actions have to stop. The Jews are to clean their shops up themselves. Funk must get a move on with his measures. And incidentally there is something good about this kind of popular justice. The Jews have been given a shock, and

will know better than to see Berlin as their Eldorado. 36

In fact, however, the operation, as an internal note from the SD reveals, had

been terminated after a personal intervention on Hitler’s part. 37 In the case of the Berlin June Operation—unlike all other anti-Jewish actions in which the role of

the ‘Führer’ was carefully concealed by the Party—it is possible to reconstruct in

detail the central role played by Hitler: not only had the ‘Führer’ personally

authorized the inclusion of Jews in the ‘Asocial Operation’, and involved himself

in details of the propaganda justification of the deployment of police against the

Berlin Jews, 38 but now he had personally also declared the end of the operation.

Major riots and broken windows, damage to synagogues, a close collaboration

between vandals and police, and finally the attempt to mobilize a supposed

popular movement for the enforcement of drastic state measures aimed at the

expulsion of the Jews—the essential elements of the Berlin June Operation

suggested that this was the dry run, staged to a large extent by Goebbels, for the

pogrom that was organized in November. The cause for the termination of the

Operation may have been that, in the spring of 1938, the ‘Third Reich’, in view of

the unfolding Sudeten crisis, wanted to avoid anything that might intensify anti-

German feeling in the West, and which might increase the chances of a military

intervention against the ‘Third Reich’—unlike the situation in November, when

such foreign policy considerations were no longer relevant.

Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

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The SD saw the Berlin Operation as the confirmation of its attitude that the

primary goal, the emigration of the Jews, could only be achieved by a systematic

policy of expulsion that excluded uncontrolled acts of violence. According to the

leader of Division II of the SD, Professor Franz Six, in his message to Higher

Command South (Oberabschnitt Süd), the operation in Berlin had shown that in

future ‘no Party operation’ might occur ‘without previous authorization from the

local police authority’, and such operations had to be most keenly overseen by the

SD, to channel violent measures against the German Jews. 39 On 5 July SD

Headquarters informed the Higher Commands (Oberabschnitte) that the head

of the Security Police, Heydrich, had ‘because of the events in Berlin, reserved to

himself the granting of permission for individual actions against the Jewish

population in the Reich’. 40

The Berlin Operation was followed in June/July by further riots against Jewish

businesses, particularly in Frankfurt, Magdeburg, and Hanover, but also in Stutt-

gart. But by the end of July these attacks, expressed in daubings, boycotts, and so

on, had subsided once more. 41

Forced Expulsion

With the International Conference on Refugees held in July 1938 in Evian on the

initiative of President Roosevelt in July 1938, and the formation of the Intergov-

ernmental Committee on Political Refugees, the German side gained the prospect

of the expulsion of the Jews from the Reich area being made an internationally

soluble ‘problem’. 42 First of all, however, according to a report on the conference produced for Heydrich by the Jewish department of the SD, it was ‘the most

urgent task for the immediate future to cause as many Jews as possible to emigrate

under the existing conditions while no decisions have been made by the new

Committee’. But foreign currency would have to be raised for the purpose. 43

With the dissolution on 30 August of the state Zionist organization, already

demanded by the Jewish department in February 1938 because of diminishing

chances of emigration, the regime finally abandoned the option of encouraging it

through apparent support of Zionist efforts to emigrate to Palestine. 44

Meanwhile in Austria, Eichmann was developing a model that might speed up

the expulsion of the Jews, without eating into the Reich’s foreign-exchange

reserves. Since April Eichmann had been acting as the official responsible for

Jewish affairs in the local SD regional headquarters (Oberabschnitt), where he was

initially responsible for the control of Jewish organizations. To accelerate the

emigration, Eichmann took the initiative