Hitler took office as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. The persecution of German Jews under the law began within weeks. But the violence on the streets had been going on for a decade. The thugs who put on the uniforms of the new state in 1933 were not new. They were the same men who had been beating Jews up in alleyways and at political rallies all through the late Weimar period. The seizure of power did not start the violence. It legitimised it.
The street violence before 1933
The Nazi Party formed its private army, the Sturmabteilung or SA, in Munich in 1921. The brownshirts, as they were known after the colour of the surplus army uniforms they wore, were street fighters from the start. Their job was to protect Nazi meetings and to break up other people’s. By the late 1920s their job was to dominate public space and to terrorise anyone the regime considered an enemy: communists, social democrats, trade unionists and Jews. Ernst Röhm built the SA into a paramilitary organisation of around 400,000 men by 1932, larger than the regular German army.
The early targets included Jewish students at the universities, Jews leaving synagogue on the Sabbath, Jewish-owned shops, and Jewish cemeteries. The attacks on cemeteries were particularly common because they could be carried out at night with little chance of being interrupted. Tombstones were smashed. Graves were defaced with painted swastikas and antisemitic slogans. The Jewish community would clean up. The attacks would happen again. The local police, in many parts of Germany, would not investigate seriously, and would sometimes side openly with the attackers.
The SS, the Schutzstaffel, was founded in 1925 as Hitler’s personal bodyguard inside the SA. Heinrich Himmler took it over in 1929 and began building it into the elite formation it would become. The black uniform that distinguished the SS came in 1932. By the time of the Nazi seizure of power the SS was around 50,000 strong and had its own intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst, under Reinhard Heydrich.
The street fighting reached a peak in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Around 100 people died in political violence in Germany in 1932 alone. Jewish synagogues were burned in several cities. The Hep-Hep tradition of antisemitic riot, which had given Germany its first modern Jewish pogroms in 1819, was revived in the 1920s by SA agitators in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt. The German democratic government was unwilling or unable to stop them. The Reichstag was paralysed by the rise of both the Nazi Party and the Communist Party. The street belonged to whichever paramilitary force could fight hardest for it.
What changed on 30 January 1933
When Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor, the SA was no longer a private army of an opposition movement. It became, in effect, an arm of the state. Within weeks the SA was given the legal status of an auxiliary police force in Prussia, the largest German state. The same men who had been beating Jews in alleyways for ten years could now do so in uniform, under police orders, with the protection of the new government. Reports of violence against Jews increased sharply in the spring of 1933, partly because there was now no risk of arrest for the perpetrators.
By the time of the legal measures that followed, the German Jewish community had already absorbed a decade of street violence. Most of the early emigrants left because of what was happening to them at the bus stop, not what had been printed in the gazette.
What Nazi antisemitism was
The antisemitism of the Nazi state was different from the antisemitism that had run through European Christian culture for centuries. The older form was religious. Jews could in theory escape it by converting. The newer form, developed by nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific racial theorists and adopted wholesale by the Nazi movement, was biological. Jewishness was a matter of blood. It could not be washed off by baptism, by service in the German army, by intermarriage, by assimilation. A person was Jewish because of who their grandparents were, regardless of what they themselves believed or how they lived.
This was the foundation of every law and policy that followed. If Jewishness was biological, then a Jewish veteran of the First World War who held the Iron Cross was just as Jewish as an Orthodox rabbi from a Polish shtetl. A Lutheran whose grandmother had been Jewish was Jewish. A child born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother was Jewish. There was no exit. The regime made the boundary in 1935 and refused to soften it for any individual case, however much sympathy that case might have attracted.
The first year, 1933
The first systematic action under the new regime was a one-day national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses on 1 April 1933, organised by the Nazi Party with the cooperation of the SA. SA men stood outside Jewish shops with signs telling Germans not to enter. The boycott was not commercially effective; many ordinary Germans went into Jewish shops anyway. But it was the public signal that the new regime intended to act on its rhetoric.
Within days the legal apparatus was in motion. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933 dismissed Jews and political opponents from the civil service. Jewish judges, professors, schoolteachers, postal workers and railway officials were sacked. The Law on the Admission to the Legal Profession barred Jewish lawyers. The Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities limited the number of Jewish students. The Reich Chamber of Culture, established in September, excluded Jews from journalism, publishing, music, theatre, film and the visual arts. By the end of 1933 a German Jew could not work as a civil servant, a lawyer, a journalist or a state-employed academic.
The Nuremberg Laws, 1935
At the Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg on 15 September 1935, two laws were announced that gave the regime’s racial doctrine the force of statute. The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of German citizenship and reduced them to the status of subjects of the state. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, banned Jews from employing non-Jewish German women under the age of forty-five as domestic servants, and banned Jews from raising the German flag.
The laws produced their own bureaucratic problem: who counted as a Jew? The supplementary decrees of November 1935 set the test. A person was a full Jew if three or four of their grandparents were Jewish. A person with two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling, a half-breed, of the first degree. A person with one Jewish grandparent was a Mischling of the second degree. The categories had different legal consequences. The fact that the regime needed three categories shows how unworkable a purely biological definition turned out to be. The categorising was done by record offices, by the families themselves, and ultimately by the same Nazi officials whose own grandparents had not always been so easy to trace.
Aryanisation
The economic destruction of German Jewry happened by stages. In the early years, Jewish businesses were pressured by boycotts and by the loss of their professional clientele. From 1937 onwards the regime moved to systematic Aryanisation, the forced sale of Jewish-owned businesses and property to non-Jewish German buyers at prices set far below market value. The buyers were often politically connected. Some were ordinary local businessmen who saw an opportunity. By 1938 virtually no Jewish-owned businesses remained in Germany. The Aryanisation programme was one of the largest transfers of wealth in modern European history. It made many Germans personally complicit in the persecution: a man who had bought a Jewish neighbour’s shop at one fifth of its value had a direct interest in not having that neighbour return.
Kristallnacht, November 1938
On the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, in a coordinated operation across Germany, Austria and the annexed Sudetenland, the SA and SS attacked Jewish synagogues, businesses and homes. Around 1,400 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Around 7,500 Jewish-owned shops had their windows smashed and their contents looted. The Reich described it as a spontaneous outpouring of popular anger, triggered by the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew. It was nothing of the kind. The order had come from Joseph Goebbels and the operation was carried out by uniformed men.
In the following days, around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Several hundred were beaten or shot to death there. Most of the rest were released over the following weeks, on condition that they leave Germany within a fixed period and surrender their property to the state on the way out. Kristallnacht was the moment many German Jewish families who had still been hesitating realised that there was no future for them in Germany. The emigration figures jumped sharply. Most of those who could get out, did. Most of those who could not, would die.
What it added up to
The fifteen years from the founding of the SA to the outbreak of the Second World War were not the Holocaust. They were the part of the story that most German Jews lived through and survived. They are also the part that should never be allowed to be forgotten, because they are the part that shows what democratic decay looks like, what a constitutional state can do when it abandons the rule of law, and how quickly a hatred that begins as a marginal political position can become the legal framework of a civilised European country. The killing came later, but everything that made the killing possible, the racial laws, the bureaucratic machinery, the public participation, the silence of most of the rest of the world, was already in place by the autumn of 1939. The brownshirts who had been beating Jews on the streets of Munich in 1923 had become the legal authority in their own country.
See also
- Adolf Hitler
- Kristallnacht 1938
- Reinhard Heydrich
- Heinrich Himmler
- The First World War Connection
- The Nuremberg Laws
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, HarperCollins, 1997
- Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, 1998
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Daniel Siemens, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts, Yale University Press, 2017
- USHMM: Antisemitism in History, the Era of Nazism