Protest in Hitler's “National Community”: Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response

Protest in Hitler’s National Community

Protest, Culture and Society

General editors:

Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Institute for Media and Communication, University of Hamburg

Martin Klimke, New York University Abu Dhabi

Joachim Scharloth, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany

Protest movements have been recognized as significant contributors to processes of political participation and transformations of culture and value systems, as well as to the development of both a national and transnational civil society.

This series brings together the various innovative approaches to phenomena of social change, protest and dissent which have emerged in recent years, from an interdisciplinary perspective. It contextualizes social protest and cultures of dissent in larger political processes and socio-cultural transformations by examining the influence of historical trajectories and the response of various segments of society, political and legal institutions on a national and international level. In doing so, the series offers a more comprehensive and multi-dimensional view of historical and cultural change in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

For a full series listing, please see back matter.

Protest In Hitler’s National Community

Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response

Edited by

Nathan Stoltzfus and Birgit Maier-Katkin

First published in 2016 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2016, 2017 Nathan Stoltzfus and Birgit Maier-Katkin

First paperback edition published in 2017

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Protest in Hitler’s national community : popular unrest and the Nazi response / edited by Nathan Stoltzfus and Birgit Maier-Katkin.

      pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-78238-824-1 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78533-733-8 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-78238-825-8 (ebook)

1. Protest movements—Germany—History—20th century. 2. Government, Resistance to—Germany—History—20th century. 3. Dissenters—Germany—History—20th century. 4. National socialism—Social aspects—History. 5. Germany—Politics and government—1933–1945. 6. Racism—Government policy—Germany—History—20th century. 7. Germany—Social conditions—1933–1945. 8. Germany—Race relations—Government policy—History—20th century. I. Stoltzfus, Nathan. II. Maier-Katkin, Birgit

DD256.7.P76 2015

303.48'4094309043—dc23

2015003128

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78238-824-1 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-78533-733-8 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-78238-825-8 (ebook)

Henry Friedlander at Ingeborg Hunzinger’s Memorial to the Rosenstrasse Protest, Block der Frauen, on January 28, 2009. Photo by Benjamin Friedlander.

This book is dedicated to professor Henry Friedlander, historian and Holocaust survivor, who was writing the preface when he suffered a devastating stroke on February 12, 2009. Although his work did not address dissent systematically, Professor Friedlander’s dissertation was on the German Revolution of 1918–19 and his final work, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, addressed the limitations that expressions of popular opinion imposed on Nazi euthanasia. On his final trip to Berlin, just two weeks before his stroke, Henry Friedlander paid a visit to the Rosenstrasse Memorial with his son, Professor Benjamin Friedlander. Henry repeatedly said that the release of Jews from Rosenstrasse only made sense to him when it was seen as the result of protest by their non-Jewish relatives, as he had begun to write: Germans could do something to oppose the regime. Rosenstrasse was proof of that. This is also what Sybil [Milton] thought. You don’t have a big roundup of Jews and imprison some of them because you want to make them take the jobs of the leadership you are now deporting. Some say they did not want to do these Jews any harm. But they were not arresting them to give them an iron cross medal.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Editor’s Preface

Introduction: Nazi Responses to Popular Protests in the Reich

Nathan Stoltzfus and Brigit Maier-Katkin

CHAPTER 1. Aspects of German Procedures in the Holocaust

Gerhard L. Weinberg

CHAPTER 2. Women and Protest in Wartime Nazi Germany

Jill Stephenson

CHAPTER 3. The Demonstrations in Support of the Protestant Provincial Bishop Hans Meiser: A Successful Protest Against the Nazi Regime?

Christiane Kuller

CHAPTER 4. The Catholic Church, Bishop von Galen, and ‘Euthanasia’

Winfried Süß

CHAPTER 5. The Possibilities of Protest in the Third Reich: The Witten Demonstration in Context

Julia S. Torrie

CHAPTER 6. The Legend of Women’s Resistance in the Rosenstrasse

Katharina von Kellenbach

CHAPTER 7. Auschwitz, the Fabrik-Aktion, Rosenstrasse: A Plea for a Change of Perspective

Joachim Neander

CHAPTER 8. The 1943 Rosenstrasse Protest and the Churches

Antonia Leugers

CHAPTER 9. Protest and Aftermath: Placing Protest in the History of Nazi Germany

Nathan Stoltzfus

Afterword: Protest and Resistance

David Clay Large

Appendix 1. The Situation of the Mischlinge in Germany, Mid-March 1943 by Gerhard Lehfeldt

Appendix 2. Decree Regarding the Removal of Jews from Frankfurt/Oder Factories, February 24, 1943

Appendix 3. April 1, 1943, OSS Document Identifying Protest in Berlin with the Interruption of Deportation of Jews

Appendix 4. Translated Excerpts from the Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Frölich (Munich: K.G. Saur)

Appendix 5. Excerpts from testimonies of women who protested for their Jewish husbands in response to a request from the Berlin Bureau of Reparations, 1955.

Appendix 6. Excerpts of Individual Sections and Paragraphs from Legal Texts and Ordinances (1933–1941)

Appendix 7. RSHA Guidelines for Deportation to Auschwitz, Berlin, February 20, 1943

Appendix 8. Documents of the SS at Auschwitz from early March 1943 indicating their pull for workers from Berlin and their expectation that more working Jews (intermarried) would be sent from Berlin

Appendix 9. Documents in response to the Witten Protest and from 1944 indicating Hitler’s continuing refusal to use force against racial civilians who refused to follow regime guidelines for evacuating bombed areas.

Appendix 10. Excerpts from the recent German press representing controversies about public protest by ordinary Germans in the Third Reich.

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figure 6.1a. The Jüdische Allgemeine, February 18, 1955, called for all who had resisted and suffered under National Socialism to register at the Berlin Bureau of Reparations, including the participants in the demonstration march of the Aryan wives on Rosenstrasse.

Figure 6.1b. In response to the Jüdische Allgemeine’s call, more than 60 women attested to the Berlin Bureau of Reparations that they had demonstrated on Berlin’s Rosenstrasse for the release of Jews in early 1943, using their own descriptions to describe their actions, including Demonstrations, Processions, Demonstration March.

Figure 6.1c. In their own words they also described their collective action of calling out together, We want to have our husbands back, and of being ordered by the guards to clear the streets or we will shoot. In postwar interviews Goebbels’ Head Deputy, Leopold Gutterer, said that the threats of shooting had been directed at the women, and not at the imprisoned Jews, but that this was not done since this would have caused a yet greater circle of unrest within non-Jewish family circles.

Figure 8.1. Whoever wears this symbol is an enemy of our people. Nazi propaganda instructing Germans on why German Jews were required to wear the Star of David. It marked the Jews identified specifically for deportation, which was illustrated during the Gestapo’s Action to Clear the Reich of Jews, the arrests (dubbed the Factory Action after the war) that led to the Rosenstrasse Protest. During the early night hours of March 1, 1943, following the second full day of the imprisonment of intermarried Jews at Rosenstrasse 2-4, about 30 who lived in privileged intermarriage and thus did not wear the Star of David, were released while those wearing the Star remained at Rosenstrasse. Eleven days earlier, Berlin’s Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels had vowed to deport all persons wearing the Star, once and for all. I have set for myself a goal to make Berlin entirely free of Jews by the middle or end of March at the latest, he wrote on February 18. With the final deadline of February 28 they are supposed to be first collected in camps and then deported, up to 2,000, batch-by-batch, day-by-day. Weeks after the release of Jews held at Rosenstrasse 2-4, Goebbels admitted that, because there were still persons wearing the Star, the The Jewish question in Berlin is still not yet completely solved. A whole collection of so-called ‘Geltungsjuden’ [‘half-Jewish’ ‘Mischlinge’ who were counted as Jews and wore the Star], Jews from privileged intermarriages [full Jews according to the Nuremberg Laws who were exempted from wearing the Star], and also Jews from intermarriages [full Jews required to wear the Star] are still to be found in Berlin . . . I do not want Jews with the Jewish star running around the Reich capital. Either one must take the Jewish star away and privilege them, or on the other hand once and for all evacuate them from the Reich capital, he wrote on April 18, 1943. Historians who write that intermarried Jews were all privileged overlook the regime’s careful categorization of intermarried Jews it privileged and those it did not. (http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/parole.htm).

Editors’ Preface

The purpose of this book is to investigate the influences and the limits of this influence on popular unrest and protest in Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft—the German-blooded National Community he aspired to create. It focuses on the response of National Socialism to unrest and protest, rather than on the motivation for that protest, taking account of the importance of popular support from the dictatorship’s perspective. We would like to thank all authors for submitting and revising their chapters on time, and we are grateful for the extensive work of German-to-English translators, led by Birgit Maier-Katkin and including Colleen Chapman and Paul Natiw. Thanks as well to Maria Foscarinis and Dan Maier-Katkin for their editing suggestions, and to Christopher Griffin for preparing the index. We are grateful as well for the work of Marion Berghahn and the editors at Berghahn books, in particular Mollie Firestone, our copy editor.

Nathan Stoltzfus and Birgit Maier-Katkin

Nathan Stoltzfus is the Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University and the author or editor of numerous books and articles, including Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (W.W. Norton, 1996), Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, co-edited with Robert Gellatlely (Princeton, 2001), Shades of Green (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) co-edited with Christof Mauch and Douglas, Weiner and Nazi Crimes and the Law, co-edited with Henry Friedlander (Cambridge, 2008).

Birgit Maier-Katkin is Associate Professor of German at Florida State University. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century literature and culture. She has published numerous articles on transnational literature, German exiles, as well as Jewish writers among them the essay Ruth Klüger: Reflections on Auschwitz. Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 39.2 (Summer 2013): 57-70. Her book, Silence and Acts of Memory (2007), examines Anna Seghers’s exile work and explores literature’s contribution to the representation of historical memory as well as its impact on cultural identity.

Introduction

Nazi Responses to Popular Protest in the Reich

Nathan Stoltzfus and Brigit Maier-Katkin

This book seeks to show that popular mobilizations of protest have a place in the histories of Nazi Germany. The term protest does occur in existing histories, but identifies a very broad array of actions. In this book, protest is defined as a heightened form of social unrest by the German blooded Volk within the Reich, that was public and cooperative but spontaneous or loosely improvised, and caused the regime to respond. Popular dissatisfaction and its most strident form of street protest have posed a fundamental departure point for histories of the East German dictatorship, while it is frequently missing altogether in treatments of the Nazi dictatorship. There are various important reasons for this, and yet at least some of this discrepancy is due to interpretations of the Nazi period which became firmly established before historians were accustomed to considering the function of ordinary persons. Over the decades, histories of Nazi Germany have changed to take the German people into account, but attention has continued to shy away from the rare but compelling popular mobilizations of dissent. This book investigates the history of social dissent in Nazi Germany, focusing on popular protest as its most strident form, to show that it was a specific form of popular behavior within the spectrum of popular responses to the dictatorship. The regime’s reactions to this form of protest also provide valuable perspectives for understanding the importance of the Volk for the way the dictatorship consolidated and held power.

Of course there were relatively few incidents of popular protest, not only because of Nazi terror but also because many, many Germans were invested in the belief that Hitler was a rare great Leader. Further, the history of protest is difficult because the records of protest are even more rare than was protest itself. A regime determined to make it appear as though all Germans supported it, was equally determined to minimize any evidence that protest existed and so the sparseness of records about popular protest cannot indicate that there was no significant events of protest, nor does the absence of repression and punishment of ordinary Germans who protested show that the regime was unconcerned about it. Rather, it indicates that this dictatorship had an acute anxiety about maintaining popular morale, which it never attempted to address merely by means of terror. This challenges the perception that protest was merely an aberration, or that the Gestapo always repressed all signs of dissent.

It might be surmised that the regime would have responded to popular protest more firmly, had there been more of it. Terror did preempt most open and organized opposition, and its effectiveness was amplified by popular support for it. But the realization that brute force was not equally well suited for achieving all his goals for the Volk was a key to Hitler’s criminal cunning.¹ The Nazi leadership lived with anxiety about discord among Germans, a concern that reached an apex during war. Jill Stephenson’s study, in chapter 2, shows that the incidence of public protests by the Volk, rare as they were, did not decrease during World War II, but increased. Further, the regime continued to appease them, without punishing dissidents and sometimes making concessions, which it considered to be temporary. These protests, Stephenson finds, were largely the initiative of women, the large majority on the home front.

To find the rationale for the dictatorship’s appeasement of popular dissidence, it is not necessary to posit some semblance of civil society or elements of a constitutional democracy. Rather, it resulted from Hitler’s self-serving beliefs that Germany had lost World War I because of a stab in the back rather than military defeat, while keeping in mind the Nazi leader’s determination to convince the people that he represented their collective will and interests—the new mass age as appropriated by fascism. The stab-in-the-back myth was shared by many Germans and provided the basis for effective Nazi propaganda as well as Nazi domestic policies.² Also conducive to Hitler’s decisions to make temporary concessions to the Volk as a whole were his wildly unrealistic ambitions to reshape the Volk’s attitudes from the bottom up, to form the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft—Hitler’s National Community.

Working toward his plan to transition his Volk into a Nazi Volksgemeinschaft that would serve as a cornerstone for his fantasy of a thousand-year Reich, Hitler deployed a variety of means to consolidate power and diffuse popular dissent. The dictatorship sought to lead the Volk convincingly phase by phase, so that they followed even as the dictatorship substituted new perspectives for long-established values. While some German traditions went hand in glove with the new Nazi policies, Volk dissent, when it expressed stubborn popular habits, could cause the dictatorship to change course on a particular policy in order to mitigate dissent, and shift public appearances into alignment with its claims of popular consensus. The dictatorship sometimes made concessions in the methods or pace at which it pursued its course, as it pushed to align popular attitudes more completely with Nazism, struggling to avoid the violation of popular customs too abruptly. The dictatorship did not view these concessions as defeats but rather as lessons learned about the limits of how fast the Volk could be pushed.³

The preemption of social unrest was important because it served the propaganda image that Germans were united behind the Führer, and thus dissent was desperately isolated and suicidal. Ameliorating troublesome popular unrest required what the Führer, along with those who shared his perspective, thought of as methods appropriate for any given stage of development in the evolution toward this Volksgemeinschaft. Tactics to dispel dissent should not draw further attention to dissent. This is illustrated by the interactions between Volk and dictatorship regarding Nazi euthanasia, examined by Winfried Süß in chapter 4. Although regime leaders agreed that Bishop August von Galen had committed treason from his pulpit, Hitler prohibited executing or even punishing the bishop because of fears that this would cause the multitudes of the bishop’s followers to lose enthusiasm for fighting war, since his dissent represented the opinion of millions around the Reich. The adjustments the dictatorship made to appease popular defiance remained limited to specific policies, although these were sometimes policies that touched on its basic purposes, such as the racial hygiene intentions behind euthanasia. In 1934, the refusal of Protestants in southern Germany to merge with the Reich Church caused Hitler to suspend his dream of unifying German Lutherans within one unit, under a single bishop (see chapter 3 by Christiane Kuller). This frustrated Hitler’s drive to directly centralize his control over the churches.