Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer Page A
Authors: Saul Friedländer
Tags: History
Ads: Link
consequences of what has happened and give up my teaching for the coming summer semester.” 64 Kantorowicz was not tendering his resignation; he was merely withdrawing from the next semester. The implication was that he would wait for the policies of the new national Germany to change.
Whereas the attitude of the majority of “Aryan” university professors could be defined as “cultured Judeophobia,” 65 among the students a radical brand of Judeophobia had taken hold. At the end of the nineteenth century, some Austrian student corporations, followed by German ones, had already excluded Jews on a racial basis—that is, even baptized Jews were not accepted. 66 Michael Kater attributes a portion of extreme student anti-Semitism to competition—mainly in the remunerative fields of law and medicine, in which the percentage of Jewish students was indeed high, as was the percentage of Jews in these professions. In any case, in the early years of the Weimar Republic the majority of German student fraternities joined the German University League (Deutscher Hochschulring), an organization with openly völkisch and anti-Semitic aims, which soon came to control student politics. 67 Membership in the league was conditional on fully Aryan origin, with racial Germans from Austria or the Sudetenland accepted despite their not being German citizens. The league dominated the universities until the mid-1920s, when it was replaced by the National Socialist Students Association ( Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund ). 68 And demonstrations and acts of physical aggression by right-wing students against their enemies became common on German campuses from the late twenties on. 69
Soon professors who were too explicitly pacifist or anti-nationalist, such as Theodor Lessing, Günther Dehn, Emil Julius Gumbel, Hans Nawiasky, and Ernst Cohn, came under attack. 70 Gumbel was driven out of Heidelberg even before the Nazis came to power. In 1931 Nazis gained a majority in the German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft); this was the first national association to come under their control. Within a short time a whole cohort of young intellectuals would put its energy and ability at the disposal of the party and its policies. 71
After January 1933 student groups took matters into their own hands, not unlike the SA. The national leader of the Nazi student organization, Oskar Stabel, announced shortly before the April 1 boycott that student pickets would be posted that day at the entrances to Jewish professors’ lecture halls and seminar rooms in order to “dissuade” anyone from entering. 72 Such was the case, for example, at the Technical University in Berlin. Later on Nazi students with cameras positioned themselves on the podiums of lecture halls so as to take pictures of students attending classes taught by Jews. 73 This kind of student agitation was strongly encouraged by a violently anti-Jewish speech delivered on May 5 by Education Minister Rust in the Berlin university auditorium, and by such comments on the speech as these in the official Preussische Zeitung : “Science for a Jew does not mean a task, an obligation, a domain of creative organization, but a business and a way of destroying the culture of the host people. Thus the most important chairs of so-called German universities were filled with Jews. Positions were vacated to allow them to pursue their parasitic activities, which were then rewarded with Nobel Prizes.” 74
In early April 1933, the National Socialist Student Association established a press and propaganda section. Its very first measure, decided on April 8, was to be “the public burning of destructive Jewish writing” by university students as a reaction to world Jewry’s “shameless incitement” against Germany. An “information” campaign was to be undertaken between April 12 and May 10; the public burnings were scheduled to start on university campuses at 6:00 P.M. on the last day of
Whereas the attitude of the majority of “Aryan” university professors could be defined as “cultured Judeophobia,” 65 among the students a radical brand of Judeophobia had taken hold. At the end of the nineteenth century, some Austrian student corporations, followed by German ones, had already excluded Jews on a racial basis—that is, even baptized Jews were not accepted. 66 Michael Kater attributes a portion of extreme student anti-Semitism to competition—mainly in the remunerative fields of law and medicine, in which the percentage of Jewish students was indeed high, as was the percentage of Jews in these professions. In any case, in the early years of the Weimar Republic the majority of German student fraternities joined the German University League (Deutscher Hochschulring), an organization with openly völkisch and anti-Semitic aims, which soon came to control student politics. 67 Membership in the league was conditional on fully Aryan origin, with racial Germans from Austria or the Sudetenland accepted despite their not being German citizens. The league dominated the universities until the mid-1920s, when it was replaced by the National Socialist Students Association ( Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund ). 68 And demonstrations and acts of physical aggression by right-wing students against their enemies became common on German campuses from the late twenties on. 69
Soon professors who were too explicitly pacifist or anti-nationalist, such as Theodor Lessing, Günther Dehn, Emil Julius Gumbel, Hans Nawiasky, and Ernst Cohn, came under attack. 70 Gumbel was driven out of Heidelberg even before the Nazis came to power. In 1931 Nazis gained a majority in the German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft); this was the first national association to come under their control. Within a short time a whole cohort of young intellectuals would put its energy and ability at the disposal of the party and its policies. 71
After January 1933 student groups took matters into their own hands, not unlike the SA. The national leader of the Nazi student organization, Oskar Stabel, announced shortly before the April 1 boycott that student pickets would be posted that day at the entrances to Jewish professors’ lecture halls and seminar rooms in order to “dissuade” anyone from entering. 72 Such was the case, for example, at the Technical University in Berlin. Later on Nazi students with cameras positioned themselves on the podiums of lecture halls so as to take pictures of students attending classes taught by Jews. 73 This kind of student agitation was strongly encouraged by a violently anti-Jewish speech delivered on May 5 by Education Minister Rust in the Berlin university auditorium, and by such comments on the speech as these in the official Preussische Zeitung : “Science for a Jew does not mean a task, an obligation, a domain of creative organization, but a business and a way of destroying the culture of the host people. Thus the most important chairs of so-called German universities were filled with Jews. Positions were vacated to allow them to pursue their parasitic activities, which were then rewarded with Nobel Prizes.” 74
In early April 1933, the National Socialist Student Association established a press and propaganda section. Its very first measure, decided on April 8, was to be “the public burning of destructive Jewish writing” by university students as a reaction to world Jewry’s “shameless incitement” against Germany. An “information” campaign was to be undertaken between April 12 and May 10; the public burnings were scheduled to start on university campuses at 6:00 P.M. on the last day of
Similar Books
