PERSECUTION AND GENDER: German-Jewish responses to Nazism, 1933–39

Abstract

Germany’s Jews had enjoyed over 60 years of emancipation by the time the Nazis came to power in January 1933. They had achieved educational, economic, cultural, and political successes, even if antisemitism still limited their careers in the army, civil service, and professoriate until 1918. Socially, too, they experienced a level of integration in community, organizational, and public life never before imagined. Although the multiple economic and political crises of the Weimar era raised anxieties about an increase in political and economic instability with a concomitant rise in antisemitism, most Jews felt part of German society. Starting in 1933, however, Germany’s Jewish community, of about 525,000 Jews (byfaith), or under one percent of the total population, faced frightening, bewildering, and unprecedented state harassment, discrimination, and violence. In addition, the Nazis persecuted another 35,000 “mixed” marriages (by “race”) and as many as 300,000 “Mischlinge” (“mixed breeds”) or offspring of these marriages.1 This chapter touches on the Nazi regime’s persecution of Jews, as well as how most Germans transformed their “neighbors into Jews.”2 But it focuses on Jewish reactions and, in particular, on the gendered nature of these reactions. Memoirs, diaries, and letters help us reconstruct the grassroots experiences of Jews from the perspective of daily life, underlining the confusion and the gradual nature of changes that appear clear and catastrophic only from hindsight. German Jews, mostly urban, middle class business people, confronted a growingmenace bewilderingly embedded in life as they had known it. As government polemics reached crescendos of antisemitism, those Jews whose business or career could be maintained, albeit at reduced levels of activity, felt less urgency to leave their homeland than those (usually young people) whose education and career prospects looked bleak. Until the violent pogrom of November 1938, German Jews suffered the agonizing double-bind of preserving the sanity and normality of their lives while assessing the mounting danger around them, helpless to stop it. Their dilemma was magnified by their ties to Germany-their friends, culture, and identity-and by Nazi policy, which vacillated enough to keep its victims off guard.3 Indeed, contradictory government pronouncements, the economic depression, regional variations, lack of coordination, and the attempt to appear moderate to other nations gave most contemporaries profoundly mixed signals. But the Nazis clarified one point even before 1933: they conflated Jewish men with“Jews.” The vast majority of antisemitic caricatures as well as propaganda attackedJewish men.4 Nazi newspapers and newsreels depicted “the Jew” as a male with hideous facial features and a distorted body, as a rapacious capitalist or communist, a rapist of pure Aryan women, and a dangerous “race defiler.” Occasionally Nazi propaganda highlighted an obese Jewish woman bedecked in jewelry and her grotesque children. But (until the beginning of deportations in late 1941) the Nazis focused on males, attacking Jewish men both physically and economically, demolishing their careers and businesses, and leaving women to maintain their households and communities. Still, the Nazis ultimately saw Jewish women as procreators, hence enemies in their “race war,” and Jewish children as the racial enemies of the future. Thus racism and sexism were intertwined in the minds of the torturers.