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

4,585 Jewish lawyers practicing in Germany, 3,167 (or almost 70 percent) were allowed to continue their work; 336 Jewish judges and state prosecutors, out of a total of 717, were also kept in office. 97 In June 1933 Jews still made up more than 16 percent of all practicing lawyers in Germany. 98 These statistics should, however, not be misinterpreted. Though still allowed to practice, Jewish lawyers were excluded from the national association of lawyers and listed not in its annual directory but in a separate guide; all in all, notwithstanding the support of some Aryan institutions and individuals, they worked under a “boycott by fear.” 99
    Nazi rank-and-file agitation against Jewish physicians did not lag far behind the attacks on Jewish jurists. Thus, for example, according to the March 2 Israelitisches Familienblatt , an SS physician, Arno Hermann, tried to dissuade a woman patient from consulting a Jewish physician named Ostrowski. The Physicians’ Honor Tribunal that heard Ostrowski’s complaint condemned Hermann’s initiative. Thereupon Leonardo Conti, the newly appointed Nazi commissioner for special affairs in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, violently attacked the Honor Tribunal’s ruling in an article published in the Völkischer Beobachter . In the name of the primacy of “inner conviction” and “world view,” Conti argued that “every nonde-generate woman must and will internally shrink from being treated by a Jewish gynecologist; this has nothing to do with racial hatred, but belongs to the medical imperative according to which a relation of mutual understanding must grow between spiritually related physicians and patients.” 100
    Hitler was even more careful with physicians than with lawyers. At the April 7 cabinet meeting, he suggested that measures against them be postponed until an adequate information campaign could be organized. 101 At this stage, after April 22, Jewish doctors were merely barred de facto from clinics and hospitals run by the national health insurance organization, with some even allowed to continue to practice there. Thus, in mid-1933, nearly 11 percent of all practicing German physicians were Jews. Here is another example of Hitler’s pragmatism in action: Thousands of Jewish physicians meant tens of thousands of German patients. Disrupting the ties between these physicians and a vast number of patients could have caused unnecessary discontent. Hitler preferred to wait.
    On April 25 the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities was passed. It was aimed exclusively against non-Aryan pupils and students. 102 The law limited the matriculation of new Jewish students in any German school or university to 1.5 percent of the total of new applicants, with the overall number of Jewish pupils or students in any institution not to exceed 5 percent. Children of World War I veterans and those born of mixed marriages contracted before the passage of the law were exempted from the quota. The regime’s intention was carefully explained in the press. According to the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of April 27: “A self-respecting nation cannot, on a scale accepted up to now, leave its higher activities in the hands of people of racially foreign origin…. Allowing the presence of too high a percentage of people of foreign origin in relation to their percentage in the general population could be interpreted as an acceptance of the superiority of other races, something decidedly to be rejected.” 103
    The April laws and the supplementary decrees that followed compelled at least two million state employees and tens of thousands of lawyers, physicians, students, and many others to look for adequate proof of Aryan ancestry; the same process turned tens of thousands of priests, pastors, town clerks, and archivists into investigators and suppliers of vital attestations of impeccable blood purity; willingly or not these were becoming part of a racial bureaucratic machine