This Day in Holocaust History (Hitler Springs Nuremberg Laws on World)

September 15, 1935—Perhaps the fateful step toward the destruction of Europe’s Jews in the Second World War began because of an accident of political timing: a cancellation of a major event that left a void in the news. But typical of Adolf Hitler, he seized the moment for his own ends, announcing the Nuremberg Race Laws on the last day of the annual rally of the Nazi Party faithful.

Some—perhaps many—might dispute the importance I’ve assigned to this event in the context of the Holocaust. If you’re going to talk about importance, what about the Wannsee Conference of 1942, when the Nazis began to systematically organize the vast apparatus of the death camps? Or what about December 7, 1941, which saw the passage of the ominously titled “Night and Fog Decree,” in which Hitler broke free from international treaties and conventions in the treatment of prisoners?

But all the necessary groundwork for these terrible events, I would argue, had been prepared in 1936, when, with a stroke of the pen, Hitler:

* deprived German Jews of their rights as citizens;
* empowered the most radical anti-Semites in his party by codifying their demands;
* sowed the seeds for his later massive and unthinkable crimes with an early public use of the term “Final Solution” (of the so-called “Jewish Question,” that is);
* gave scientifically justified racism the force of law; and
* gave momentum to bureaucrats who would, for now, be confined simply to isolating Jews, but later would provide the fig leaf of the law to the mass murder of vulnerable minorities.

But first, a little background on what was expected to happen—then what did.

From the early 1920s until 1938, the Nazi Party held massive rallies each September in Nuremberg. Meant to demonstrate the party faithful’s absolute bond with The Fuehrer, they had evolved into multiple-day events.

Originally, Hitler had been expected to address the Reichstag on this last day of the rally concerning the League of Nations and Fascist Italy. Not long before the speech, however, he was persuaded to cancel the event.

Casting around for something to do to fill the vacuum, Hitler hit on a remedy: fan the fires of anti-Semitism that he had done so much to create in the beginning. That summer, Jews had come under even greater pressure in Nazi Germany than before, facing boycotts and even threats against their safety in public swimming pools.

Two years into the Third Reich, a struggle still existed between, for want of a better term, “moderate” and “radical” anti-Semites. I’m not sure “moderate” is the right word to be used about such an ugly tendency, but at least those espousing this view didn’t mind if Hitler dragged his heels on moving against the Jews. International reactions had to be considered, they contended, and how could the government even function if many of its best civil servants were forced out overnight?

Hitler gave irresistible support to the radicals, as he announced that henceforth Jews:

* Were no longer considered “citizens” of the Reich but “subjects”;
* Not only could no longer marry Germans but also could not have sex with Christians; and they
* Could not even hire young Aryan women to help manage the house.

But there was one problem with this enabling legislation (not surprising, considering that it had been drafted so quickly that its framers used the back of a hotel food menu, after midnight, to come up with the law): Jewishness was not defined. That meant that it was up to civil servants—party legal experts who, somehow or other, found the means to circumvent the law—to come up with suitable criteria for the term.

They settled on using as the legal basis for the determination an individual’s grandparents. Thus, three Jewish grandparents constituted a “full Jew”, while those with fewer were defined as Mischlinge (Germans of mixed race). If that was still not easy enough to figure out, the Nazis created elaborate instructional charts.

After these racial edicts, Hitler turned his attention to re-establishing Germany’s military might and saber-rattling to see incur retaliation from the victors of WWI. But he had provided a clear warning signal to Germany’s Jews that their status within the nation was being systematically undermined.

Moreover, in a short speech that night, he sounded an ominous note with a phrase that would resound years later: what he had tried to do, he said, was to "achieve the legislative regulation of a problem which, if it breaks down again, will then have to be transferred by law to the National Socialist Party for final solution."

When Hitler finally devoted greater attention to the “Final Solution” after 1941, the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for deciding that Europe’s Jews possessed “life not worthy of life” was in place. That infrastructure began to be built, in a serious way, starting with the Nuremberg Laws.

This Day in Holocaust History (Auschwitz Receives 1st Prisoners)

June 14, 1940—Though it became a byword for the mass destruction of European Jews, the first prisoners received by Auschwitz on this date were 728 teachers, priests, and other non-Jewish Poles.

The final grim demographics produced by this concentration camp—more than a million dead, site of the greatest mass murder in world history--illustrates one of the pithiest summaries of who suffered during the Holocaust: “Not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”

This dilapidated, vermin-infested former Polish military garrison, which once contained a huge horse-breaking yard, had been hastily converted over the past month and a half by Jewish slave labor into a holding pen that broke the bodies and spirits of other political prisoners, gypsies, homosexuals, common criminals, Russian prisoners of war and Jews.

Look at the photo accompanying this post. The letters over the iron gate, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, translate roughly as “Work makes you free.” But it might as well have read, “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”

I’m not sure even Dante could have conceived this particular version of hell. After all, as Edward R. Murrow reported in his radio broadcast of December 13, 1942, in one of the earliest news reports about the Holocaust, the Nazis were perpetrating “a horror beyond what imagination can grasp.”

Six concentration camps already existed either in Germany or the lands it had absorbed as part of its ruthless drive for lebensraum. But the Nazis judged the small town of Oswiecim (renamed Auschwitz by the new occupying force) to be particularly suitable for the first camp of this kind in Poland, for several reasons:

* it was centrally located in Europe;

* it was located near a major railroad junction, making it easy to transport prisoners to the facility;

* it was located in an area rich with coal deposits, creating the possibility for a unique—and lethal—public-private partnership with chemical cartel I.G. Farben;

* its military buildings might be crumbling, but at least they didn’t have to be created from scratch—and the fabled German industrial efficiency could make it useable in no time.

A key phrase should follow “German industrial efficiency” in the prior sentence: and slave labor. The Third Reich couldn’t spare any tools for this experiment in terror, so prisoners were forced to make do with stones instead. If the guards didn’t like the job done with so little, they beat you. It was just a small preview of what was to come.

Rudolf Hoss, promoted to commandant of the new facility because of his brutal efficiency at the Dachau concentration camp, threw himself into adapting the complex to its new use—driving up to 100 miles for the prisoners’ kitchen, hustling to the Sudetenland section of Czechoslovakia for bed frames and straw stacks, even stealing badly needed barb wire.

What made this elevated thug (he’d been imprisoned for murder in 1923) throw up his hands was the truly impossible assignment SS head Heinrich Himmler gave him after all this: triple the camp capacity. The commandant’s protest—it was impossible!—was met with no sympathy by his boss, who said: “For an SS officer there are no difficulties! When they come up, it’s his job to get rid of them. How you do that is your business, not mine.”

It would take another couple of decades for the term to be invented, but Himmler was already transmitting its essentials: plausible deniability. In a way, it’s the same defense used by the Holocaust denial industry ever since.

The death industry achieved irresistible momentum at Auschwitz after the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, where plans were put in place for “the Final Solution.” But the first steps had already been taken when the initial bureaucratic barriers toward opening and enlarging the complex were overcome in June 1940.

This Day in Holocaust History (Birth of Julius Streicher, Purveyor of Hate)

February 12, 1885—In the quiet village of Fleinhausen, in the Bavarian section of Germany, Julius Streicher, the son of a teacher, was born. As an adult, he would only briefly take up the educational profession into which his father and some siblings entered, instead teaching Germany, through his newspaper and publishing house, rancidly racist principles that resulted in the deaths of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazi regime.

In Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, the father of fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, disturbed by a short story he regards as encouraging anti-Semitism, prevails upon a judge friend of his to send the young writer a questionnaire. One of the questions is, “Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?” That little incident vividly expresses the revulsion this propagandist can still inspire.

It’s hard to believe that Streicher was born 20 years after the last birthday that Abraham Lincoln ever celebrated. While the American used words to remind listeners of their shared humanity with a group they eventually freed, the Nazi publisher used his paper, Der Stürmer (translated, chillingly, as “The Stormtrooper”) in an inflammatory campaign that sought, in stages, to defame, disenfranchise, dehumanize, then destroy the Jews of Germany.

Like Adolf Hitler, Streicher was a decorated (Iron Cross, First Class) WWI veteran who threw in his lot with right-wing extremists in the fevered aftermath of the conflict. He gained credibility with Hitler by merging the German Socialist Party with the fledgling National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), or Nazi Party. Almost overnight, according to Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich, Streicher’s action succeeded in virtually doubling the Nazi Party membership.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect-turned-armaments-minister, noted that in the years after the disastrous Beer-Hall Putsch of 1923, Streicher was one of only four men for whom Hitler employed the familiar address du. No wonder: while the presence of intelligent, urbane men such as Speer might have convinced some well-meaning citizens of Western democracies that the threat of Nazism was way overhyped, it was people such as the crude, head-shaven, whip-wielding Streicher who supplied much of the vicious energy of the movement. He was truly one of Hitler's foot soldiers.

It was Streicher who, in the 1920s, was ejected from one public meeting after another, often escorted out by police, for his incivility. It was Streicher who provided Hitler with a foothold in Nuremberg, then gave one of the speeches urging the overthrow of the Weimar government in the 1923 putsch. It was Streicher who organized the first boycott against Jewish merchants after Hitler seized power 10 years later.

Hitler expressed his gratitude by appointing Streicher a Gauleiter (district leader) of Franconia. In that post, Streicher displayed no real talent for administration but plenty for turning other Nazis against him. Running afoul of Herman Goering meant that he ended up being relieved of his government posts.

Hitler had enough residual affection for his old party comrade that he allowed Streicher to remain at Der Stürmer until the end of the Third Reich. That was where his evil genius lay, in any case. Day after day, for 20 years, his newspaper churned out anti-Semitic bile, often in the form of cartoons featuring Jews as, among other things, vampires.

His most baleful influence, I think, might have been on children. As a schoolteacher, Streicher learned how to reach young minds; as a publisher, he twisted them.

One particularly shocking example of his handiwork was Der Giftpilz (“The Poisonous Mushroom”), a children’s tale sometimes used in German classrooms, featuring all kinds of leering, innuendo-filled propaganda (e.g., a cartoon of an Aryan woman, “Inge,” visiting her Jewish doctor is accompanied by this caption: “Two criminal eyes flashed behind the glasses and the fat lips grinned.")

One minute with the contents of Streicher’s publications would be enough to convince anybody that his was an essentially pornographic imagination, and that’s exactly what turned out to be. When he was removed from office in 1940, a large cache of pornography was discovered in his home. For nearly 20 years, he had projected the contents of his own diseased mind onto an entire race.

Though his removal from office meant that he did not help plan the Holocaust nor participate in killings, Streicher was found guilty at the postwar Nuremberg trials and hanged for inciting Germans to commit mass murder. In his final statement at the trial, he vehemently denied any role in this: “I repudiate the mass killings . . . in the same way as they are repudiated by every decent German.”

It was one more big lie told by a regime that specialized in it. As early as February 1940, Streicher predicted in Der Stermer: “"At the end of this Jewish war the extermination of the Jewish people will have been brought about."

After 9/11, Americans were shocked to find that Saudi textbooks were filled with ant-Semitic stereotypes and invective very similar to those peddled by Hitler’s hate merchant. Yet, so far as I’m aware, nobody has ever set out to expose the Julius Streichers of the Arab world. More than 60 years after his death, on an entirely different continent from where he wreaked havoc, the falsehoods he spread continue to infect the minds of millions.

This Day in Presidential History (FDR and the Holocaust Eyewitness)

July 28, 1943—For approximately an hour and twenty minutes, Franklin Roosevelt met secretly with Jan Karski, an agent of the Polish government-in-exile, who gave him the fullest account he had heard to date of what posterity knows as the Holocaust.

Though he left out what he had experienced himself as an eyewitness—robberies, beatings and stabbings of Jews transported from Czechoslavakia to the transit depot in Izbica Lubelska in Poland, 40 miles from the extermination camp of Belzec—what Karski told the President was grim enough:

* He informed the President of the existence of one of the most infamous concentration camps, Auschwitz.

* He told him of conditions of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, which were so desperate that they had led to an uprising against the Nazi regime that had been harshly crushed.

* He said that 1.8 million Jews had already been killed in Poland.

* He passed on the belief of the commanders of Poland’s underground Home Army that if the Allies didn’t intervene within the next year and a half, the Jews of their country would “cease to exist.”

The problem that this courier from the Polish underground faced was only partly that the crimes he was describing lay beyond the capacity of most people’s imaginations. Just as worrisome was America’s experience with atrocity stories in World War I. Edward Bernays, who became known as a public relations genius after the war, admitted afterward that his colleagues whipped up anti-German sentiment in Latin America by spreading around atrocity stories.

One thing that Karski had going for him was this: as a Christian, he could not be accused of special pleading on behalf of Europe’s Jews. Moreover, as the interview came to an end, the 29-year-old Karski could not help but feel comforted by the President’s words: "You will tell your leaders that we shall win this war. You will tell them that the guilty ones will be punished for their crimes. You will tell them that Poland has a friend in this house."

In some ways, FDR was as good as his word. He was determined to bring the Nazis to heel—and did. He was determined that Hitler and his henchmen would be punished—and, as soon as the Allies won the war, they initiated the Nuremberg trials. But in the unspoken yet implied promise of his last words, he did all too little—and far too late—to halt the Nazi death machine.

A half century after the White House meeting, Karski told interviewer Hannah Rosen that his visit did not have an effect on the President. In contrast, John Pehle, later head of the War Refugee Board, claimed that the interview led ultimately to the creation of that humanitarian organization.

What makes both men’s statements tenable is FDR’s way of dealing with people. He was used to charming everyone, thinking it would do no harm in telling someone exactly what he or she wanted to hear. He told his longtime friend (and Secretary of the Treasury) Henry Morgenthau Jr. that he was a juggler and that, even if he seemed inconsistent, he was willing to mislead in order to win the war. At the same time, as Michael Beschloss noted in his superb history, The Conquerors, the war was already so straining his capacity to keep multiple balls in the air that he could sometimes not recall having committed to a particular course of action.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the charge brayed most consistently by FDR’s vociferous GOP critics—that Eastern Europe fell under Soviet sway because of the President’s concessions at Yalta—has lost its potency. And, as The Wall Street Journal reported this past weekend, the regulatory systems he engineered, which had been systematically stripped away beginning with the Reagan Revolution, are coming back with a vengeance now because of the current distress in the financial and housing industries.

But over time, the question of FDR’s passivity in the face of the Holocaust has gained greater potency. It threatens one of the most enduring parts of his legend and legacy: that he was, to borrow the subtitle of the James MacGregor Burns biography, “The Soldier of Freedom.”

In moving America away from isolationism, Roosevelt took a number of huge risks that could have gotten him impeached, including an undeclared shooting war in the North Atlantic. But one wishes he could have gambled once more and acted faster, when it would have counted, to save more of Europe’s Jews from the gas chambers.

This Day in Holocaust History (Conference for Saving Hitler's Jewish Victims Concludes)

July 25, 1943—With Adolf Hitler’s master plan for mass murder moving ahead virtually unimpeded, approximately 1,500 people trade ideas on how to halt the killings by attending the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe in New York City’s Commodore Hotel. The event was part of a campaign employing tactics to influence public opinion that are taken for granted today but that at the time caused no end of controversy, including full-page newspaper ads, public rallies, and lobbying of the President and Congress.

Though intended to raise alarms about the massive human-rights abuses occurring in Europe, the conference was highly risky for its organizers because it held the potential to embarrass and annoy President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had included American Jews as a key component of his New Deal coalition.

Yet the principal force behind the protest, a Zionist emissary from Palestine known as Peter Bergson, had grown desperate in the face of an administration that not only refused to take military action to halt the death camps, but that softpedaled the fact that Jews formed a disproportionately large number of Hitler’s victims.

Though the FDR administration’s inactivity flummoxed such prominent Jewish Democrats as Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and the Rabbi Steven Wise, a co-founder of the NAACP, ACLU, and the American Jewish Congress, they refused to break with him.

And really, when you think of it, how much maneuvering room did they have? Would they back the Republican Party? Not very likely—the GOP had made few if any attempts to woo them. The attitude of the American people did little to move them in this direction. “Americans don't like Jews much better than do Nazis," observed Fortune in 1939. The sad thing is not that this statement could be made, but that more than half of all American surveyed agreed with this statement at the time.

Bergson, however, made few concessions to good opinion. The last time he had done so was when he changed his name (born Hillel Kook, he changed it to Bergson to avoid embarrassing the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Abraham Isaac Hacochen Kook). His response to Wise ought to stand as a standard reply by any ethnic or religious leader when faced with the charge of being a “self-appointed” leader:

"Who empowered you? We represent the conscience of the Hebrew nation. We represent ourselves. You are an American clergyman and a member of the Democratic Party.... On the day on which one square yard of Palestine will be free, I shall be there as a citizen, and abide by the decision of whoever will be the government of the Hebrew people.... Whereas you will then continue to be an American clergyman, member of the Democratic Party."

A play by Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, We Will Never Die, was a sellout in half a dozen cities, giving Bergson enough revenues to organize the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe. Two million European Jews had already died. The meeting, which began on July 20, included a host of panelists who laid out, in deep detail, how the Allies could go about saving the rest before it was too late, including on such topics as transportation, relief, international relations, military action, religious appeals, and public opinion.

Most important of all, Bergson assembled a coalition that stretched across the ideological spectrum. He had already demonstrated an impressive ability to enlist unexpected people in his cause—notably the Irish-American Congressman Andrew Somers, whose antipathy toward British imperialism was one that Bergson shared. Somers ended up sponsoring a bill in favor of the Committee for a Jewish Army. As former New York Mayor Ed Koch has noted, Somers spoke out repeatedly in favor of Bergson’s group and castigated Britain for keeping Jews out of Palestine, thereby putting himself in serious jeopardy with FDR.

The Emergency Conference featured 19 co-chairs ranging from the conservative (Herbert Hoover) to the liberal (Democratic Senator Edwin Johnson). It was hard for FDR to dismiss such a broad, blue-ribbon group of speakers. Later that year, Bergson’s efforts led to a Congressional resolution urging the creation of a U.S. government agency to rescue Jewish refugees.

The War Refugee Board that FDR finally created in January 1944 had a small budget, but it has been credited with saving the lives of 200,000 people in the last year and a half of the war.
To me, it’s virtually inconceivable to think of modern political advertising, pressure-group advocacy, or humanitarian intervention efforts without the contribution of Bergson. At the same time, his clash with Rabbi Wise over the proper approach to gaining FDR’s aid might be thought of as a forerunner of the more recent split in their religious community that Samuel Freedman chronicled in Jew Vs. Jew. This early struggle, fought on somewhat different grounds than the one Freedman depicted, featured an American assimilationist (Wise) against an Israeli who believed power—whether through military force or aggressive concerted action—was the best means of ensuring the survival of their people.

For the most part, FDR’s actions regarding the Holocaust have not excited as much controversy as those of Pope Pius XII. But, while it is true that he saw the threat posed by Hitler far earlier than the great majority of his countrymen, it is also true that political considerations, as well as his own background, prevented him from taking the kind of preventive action that Bergson wanted.
It is true that exaggerated atrocity stories in WWI had led Americans to be suspicious of similar claims in WWII, so the President had to tread carefully in breaking isolationist sentiment. Nevertheless, there might have been a bit more to it.

In 1942, the President shocked his Irish-American economist, Leo Crowley, by saying, “You know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.” That lord-of-the-manor spirit—that sense of “How can you possibly doubt someone like me who has done so much for your people?”—forms an element of his relationships with the out-groups who formed such a key part of his political base. That characteristic has to be weighted—not just purely military considerations—when one evaluates the validity of his inaction regarding the Holocaust.