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

and saw to it that Reichskommmissar

Bürckel set up a Central Office for Jewish Emigration, formally under the control

of SD Oberabschnittsleiter Walther Stahlecker, but actually run by Eichmann

himself. 45 In fact, with this office, established by a state official, the Reichskommissar, the SD had for the first time succeeded in exercising executive functions in

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its own right. 46 Eichmann and the SD’s young ‘Jewish experts’ saw this decision as the opportunity to involve themselves energetically in the persecution of the Jews.

The expulsion of the Viennese Jews was to provide the model case.

The Central Office, based in the Palais Rothschild, contained branches of all

authorities required to be involved in applications to emigrate. Eichmann was to

describe the basic concept of the Central Office in his police interrogation in

Jerusalem as ‘a conveyor belt. The initial application and all the rest of the

required papers are put on at one end and the passport falls off the other end.’47

By means of this conveyor-belt-like process the applicants could be herded

through the building and be stripped almost seamlessly of their remaining assets.

With this money, extorted from Jews who were forced into emigration, Eich-

mann set up an ‘emigration fund’. The Central Office also sent officials from

Jewish organizations abroad to negotiate emigration places and obtain foreign

currency. 48 By placing the burden of finance for emigration on the expelled individuals themselves, or on foreign-aid organizations, Eichmann had shown

in exemplary fashion that one of the chief obstacles to larger-scale emigration, the

question of cost, could be solved.

In the balance sheet drawn up by the Central Office for 1938, however, it was

apparent that the number of emigrating Austrian Jews had not increased in spite

of the introduction of the ‘conveyor belt’. Whereas 46,000 Austrian Jews had

emigrated in the five months from March to August 1938, the figure for the period

between 26 August—the day the Central Office opened—and the end of the year

was 34,467—a development that, given the diminishing opportunities for emigra-

tion overall, the Jewish department neverthless considered a success. 49

But the ruthless expulsion of the Jews from Austria was only able to work

because of the considerably more radical line taken in that country, particularly

through the combination of riots, expulsions, and complete expropriation, and

even then only for a limited period of time.

The Sudeten crisis made it very clear to those responsible for Germany’s

Judenpolitik that they constantly had to reckon with the possibility of entering a

war before the emigration of the German and Austrian Jews was complete. The

previous general plans, on the other hand, had always been based around a longer-

term preparation for war, in which the Entjudung of Germany was considered an

important precondition for the achievement of readiness for war in terms of the

economy and morale. Now, though, there was suddenly a real prospect of having

in the country, during a war, several hundred thousand people who were seen as

enemies of the state.

One initial suggestion as to how this situation might be overcome was made by

the head of the SD Jewish Department, Herbert Hagen, early in September under

the title ‘Activity of the Department in the Event of Mobilization’. 50 Apart from the ‘arrest of all Jews of foreign nationality to prevent their making contact with

other countries’, Hagen suggested (as their deployment in Ersatzreserve II51 would Deprivation of Rights and Forced Emigration, late 1937–9

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contradict the ‘military ethos of the German army’) the ‘accommodation of all Jews

in special camps and their deployment in munitions production and other work on

the home front’; Jewish women who were unfit for war work could ‘look after those

in need of help’. If mobilization were to occur after the planned census (which was to

make the complete record of all Jews possible for the first time, Hagen went on to say,

‘the definition of a person’s Jewish character should be undertaken according to the

stipulations of the Reich Citizenship Law, unless particular reasons relating to the

intelligence service or the security police require special treatment’. The document

does not reveal whether the term ‘special treatment’ merely refers euphemistically to

an exemption from the stipulations of the Reich Citizenship Law or—which in my

view seems more likely—is supposed to refer, according to the usual terminology of

the SS, to the liquidation of this group.

Between Sudetenland Crisis and Pogrom: Increasing

Attacks on the German Jews

A further brutalization of ‘Jewish policy’ began in September with the end of the

Sudetenland crisis, when Party activists resumed their anti-Jewish operations. As

in the summer riots, these activists were still determined to intensify the pressure

to emigrate still further. The tension that had built up during September in the

face of the expectation of the immediately impending military conflict was now

discharged in direct acts of violence by Party activists against Jewish property and

Jewish life, which put the activities of the summer in the shade.

This connection between a foreign-policy crisis and increased outbreaks of

anti-Semitic hatred was established, for example, in a report by the SD for the

month of October, 52 according to which ‘the increasing anti-Jewish attitude of the population, which was chiefly caused by the provocative and impertinent behaviour of individual Jews during the period of the foreign policy crisis’, found ‘its

most powerful expression in actions against the Jewish population, which in the

south and south-west of the Reich partly assumed the character of a pogrom’.

According to an SD report that would not be dispatched because of the events

of 9 November, the operations in late September/October were at first largely

concentrated upon the area of the SD regional headquarters South, South-West,

West, and Danube, before moving in isolated instances to Danzig and central

Germany. The focus of the riots lay without question in Middle Franconia. 53

In many places synagogues were damaged or destroyed beginning in late

September:

^ in Beveringen and Neuenkirchen (Kreis Wiedenbrück) in September;

^ in Neuwedel (Neumark) on the night of 28/9 Sept. 1938;

^ in Mellrichtstadt (Lower Franconia) on the night of 30 Sept./1 Oct.

1938; 54

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^ in a small village near Euskirchen on the night of 1/2 Oct. 1938; 55

^ in Leutershausen on the night of 16/17 Oct.;

^ in Dortmund-Hörde on 27/8 Oct.; 56

^ in October, in the district of Alzenau (Lower Franconia) two syn-

agogues were damaged by stones; 57

^ at the end of October