The minds of the hunters and the hunted

Anne McElvoy

NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS: THE YEARS OF PERSECUTION, 1933-39 by Saul Friedlander Weidenfeld, f20, pp. 436 In April 1939, the Jewish Kulturbund in Berlin was able to stage J. B. Priestley's People at Sea, the playwright having agreed to forgo royalties. An audience of 500 gath- ered in a theatre for the first time since the pogrom of the previous November. The play follows 12 people adrift on a ship in danger of sinking. A mainly Jewish audience nodded and emitted sighs of empathy with the characters. At the end of the play, the characters were rescued.

Most of the Jews in the Charlottenstrasse theatre did not survive the years that followed. This is the story with which Saul Friedlander ends the first volume of his study of Hitler's Germany and the Jews. It is a characteristic shaft of melancholy understatement in a work whose eloquence lies in its self-control and whose strength is the calm intelligence of its approach to subject matter which seems to produce less reflection and more rants as the years pass.

As the author points out in his introduc- tion, there is a new fervour and intensity in historical writing about Jews and their per- secutors in the Third Reich. A new genera- tion of historians now wields the pen, without even a broad agreement having yet been reached as to how to define the Nazi regime and interpret its dynamics. The popularity in the 1960s and 1970s of excep- tionalist theories which stressed the regime's exclusive moral barbarism may indeed have served to reinforce this undiscriminating approach.

In his brief discussion of the problem of catch-all theories (it deserves more space than he accords it), Friedlander sets out his belief that there can be no rounded under- standing of Germany and the Jews in the Third Reich which does not proceed from an awareness of

the relationship between the uncommon and the ordinary: the fusion of the widely shared murderous potentialities of the world that is also ours.

He thus avoids entrapment in any one particular school of interpretation, but still manages to provide (without naming names — a nice touch of contempt) a powerful corrective to Daniel Goldhagen's well-publicised but deeply flawed account Hitler's Willing Executioners — a J'Accuse aimed at the entire German nation and its allegedly inbred, universal anti-Semitism.

This book makes us aware that the truth has many more levels. Belief in 'redemp- tive' anti-Semitism, Friedlander contends, was strongly present in the NSDAP and other organs of state, and transmitted itself efficiently to the wider population. Yet the assumptions of the zealots jostled — often uneasily — with a view of the Jewry in the Aryan population which tacitly accepted discrimination against the Jews but was uneasy about the use of physical violence. To the end, the regime never explicitly admitted to the killing of Jews.

One of the most fascinating areas of enquiry here is the involved web of formal and intangible connections between the deepening ideology of the Nazi state, local government and the legal system. Hitler was not content to create a dictatorship he was determined to anchor that dictator- ship within the appearance of a `Darn it, son, this is Bermuda — you can build sandcastles anywhere.' conventional legal framework. By precisely what steps does a state of law become a state of barbarism? This is the question which compels us in both its spiritual and practical aspects. And by what channels does the malevolent intent of an elite enable and encourage citizens to persecute their fellow citizens? Many accounts at this point concentrate on the machinery of per- secution and the effect of the race laws. Friedlander focuses his attention more tightly on the attitudes of the men and women involved — the states of mind of the hunters and the hunted.

His use of provincial archives is fruitful in proving that a state which sets targets of hatred within its boundaries cannot avoid the unwelcome complexity of smashing the `wrong' people. Take the case of Karl Berthold, a civil servant in the social securi- ty office in Chemnitz, Nazi party member and fervent anti-Semite who found himself caught in the mangle of repression. In 1933 it was suspected that he was the illegitimate son of a Jewish circus artiste and thus fit for neither party membership nor to be a civil servant.

The first appeal tribunal concluded that his upbringing

in a strong Christian and military-nationalist spirit should be considered to balance out his unfortunate background.

That was before the race laws of 1934 clarified for the worse the status of Mischlinge. But Herr Berthold did not give up easily. Five years later, with his health and marriage in ruins, he had exhausted all legal alleys and petitioned Hitler personal- ly:

I feel myself to be a true German .. . who has nothing in common with the Jewish rabble.

Deputy Fiihrer Hess finally approved a reprieve. The tale, in its dark pathos, is used to illustrate that the bureaucracy of the National Socialist regime expressed minutely the race ideology of the rulers. But by its very nature it contained loop- holes, ambiguities and delaying tactics which could be exploited by the particularly tenacious complainant.

There was thus a persistent dislocation between the statute book and the jack- boot. That did not stop the jack-boot from emerging triumphant: it was the stubborn and tireless determination of the Nazi elite which gave the process of persecution a momentum which bureaucracy and attitu- dinal anti-Semitism could never have achieved alone. And yet the men responsi- ble for the years of persecution were not entirely free of outbreaks of deracinated unease about their actions. One thinks of Goring in conversation with Heydrich on whether Jews should wear a badge or a full uniform to express their racial status. 'I would not like to be a Jew in Germany', says Goring. There spoke the voice of understanding without empathy, insight without regret.