Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer Read Free Book Online

Point 23 demanded that control of the German press be solely in the hands of Germans. 80
    Nothing in the program indicated ways of achieving these goals, and the failure of the April 1933 boycott is a good example of the total lack of preparation for their tasks among Germany’s new masters. But, at least in their anti-Jewish policy, the Nazis soon became masters of improvisation; adopting the main points of their 1920 program as short-term goals, they learned how to pursue them ever more systematically.
    On March 9 State Secretary Hans-Heinrich Lammers conveyed a request from the Reich chancellor to Minister of the Interior Frick. He was asked by Hitler to take into consideration the suggestion of State Secretary Paul Bang of the Ministry of the Economy about the application of “a racial [ völkisch ] policy” toward East European Jews: prohibition of further immigration, cancellation of name changes made after 1918, and expulsion of a certain number of those who had not yet been naturalized. 81 Within a week Frick responded by sending instructions to all states ( Länder ):
In order to introduce a racial policy ( völkische Politik ), it is necessary to:
Oppose the immigration of Eastern Jews.
Expel Eastern Jews living in Germany without a residence permit.
Stop the naturalization of Eastern Jews. 82
    Bang’s suggestions were in line with Points 5 (on naturalization) and 8 (on immigration) of the 1920 party program. As early as 1932, moreover, both the German National Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Freiherr von Gayl and the Nazi Helmut von Nicolai had formulated concrete proposals regarding East European Jews, 83 and a month before Frick issued his guidelines the Prussian Ministry of the Interior had already taken the initiative to cancel an order previously given to the police to avoid the expulsion of East European Jews who had been accused by the police of “hostile activities” but had lived in Germany for a long period. 84 On July 14, 1933, these measures were enhanced by the Law for the Repeal of Naturalization and Recognition of German Citizenship, which called for the cancellation of naturalizations that had taken place between November 9, 1918, and January 30, 1933. 85
    The measures taken against the so-called Eastern Jews were overshadowed by the laws of April 1933. 86 The first of them—the most fundamental one because of its definition of the Jew—was the April 7 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. In its most general intent, the law aimed at reshaping the entire government bureaucracy in order to ensure its loyalty to the new regime. Applying to more than two million state and municipal employees, its exclusionary measures were directed against the politically unreliable, mainly Communists and other opponents of the Nazis, and against Jews. 87 Paragraph 3, which came to be called the “Aryan paragraph,” reads: “1. Civil servants not of Aryan origin are to retire….” (Section 2 listed exceptions, which will be examined later.) On April 11 the law’s first supplementary decree defined “non-Aryan” as “anyone descended from non-Aryan, particularly Jewish, parents or grandparents. It suffices if one parent or grandparent is non-Aryan.” 88
    For the first time since completion of the emancipation of the German Jews in 1871, a government, by law, had reintroduced discrimination against the Jews. Up to this point the Nazis had unleashed the most extreme anti-Jewish propaganda and brutalized, boycotted, or killed Jews on the assumption that they could somehow be identified as Jews, but no formal disenfranchisement based on an exclusionary definition had yet been initiated. The definition as such—whatever its precise terms were to be in the future—was the necessary initial basis of all the persecutions that were to follow. 89
    Wilhelm Frick was at the immediate origin of the Civil Service Law; he had already proposed the same legislation to the Reichstag as far back as