Before The Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and The Reaction of German Elites and Institutions During The Nazi Takeover Hermann Beck

Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic
Violence and the Reaction of German

Elites and Institutions during the Nazi
Takeover Hermann Beck
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BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST

HERMANN BECK
BEFORE THE
HOLOCAUST
antisemitic violence and the reaction of
German elites and institutions during
the Nazi takeover
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford,  ,

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PREFACE
The focal point of this book is the wave of antisemitic violence that
engulfed Germany in the early spring of  and the reactions of
German institutions and elites to the antisemitic attacks and discrim-
ination. When I first discovered the existence and magnitude of local,
grassroots anti-Jewish violence perpetrated mostly by SA units and
uncoordinated from above, setting in a mere five weeks after Hitler
was appointed Chancellor, my first reaction was incredulity, for nei-
ther the fact that it happened nor its enormous extent are adequately
recognized in the historical literature. “Why was it not stopped?” was
my first question after discovering evidence of this antisemitic vio-
lence in the archives, since by early March  the Nazi dictatorship
was not yet fully ensconced in power and some opportunities to
oppose certain actions and policies still seemed to exist. My attention
therefore naturally turned to those institutions in the German State
and society, and the elites who led them, that might have intervened
in the early spring of . If German institutions and elites could not
put a halt to antisemitic violence at this early stage of the Nazi
takeover, how could anyone reasonably expect that this might happen
at a later point, in  or during the war, when the repressive
apparatus of the dictatorship was fully established? Was it not the
case that forfeiting the chance to put a stop to antisemitic violence and
legislation in March and April  meant that the opportunity would
be lost for good?
These thoughts crossed my mind over a decade ago while I was
researching the relationship between the Nazi Party and Hitler’s conser-
vative coalition partner, the German National People’s Party (DNVP, or

German Nationals).1 As I went through conservative party files, I came

across an unexpectedly large number of complaints about antisemitic
attacks and pleas for help from German Jews who were close to the
DNVP. This struck me as paradoxical and difficult to comprehend, since
these attacks began immediately after the elections of  March , only five
weeks after Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship. The spirit that informed
the institutions of the Weimar Republic, during which the rule of law was
largely intact and antisemitic attacks and other transgressions were pun-
ished (though not as severely as they might have been),2 should still have
been very much alive, since even after the March elections the NSDAP
(with . percent of the popular vote) did not have a majority. This
instinctively raised further questions: Why was there no immediate outcry
against such pervasive violence? Where were Germany’s conservative elites
in the administrative and judicial bureaucracy, the DNVP, the army, and the
Christian Churches? They surely must have been horrified at what they
could not have failed to notice and should have voiced their strongest
exception to antisemitic attacks and violence—be it only for reasons of
patriotism, since random violence that went unpunished did not accord
with their image of Germany, and because they staunchly opposed any kind
of popular lawlessness, social and political unrest, and disruptive “disorder.”
When I encountered a large number of protests from foreign consul-
ates in Berlin in the holdings of the Reich Chancellery (hundreds of
complaints from the Polish Consulate alone) remonstrating about violent
attacks perpetrated against their Jewish citizens that dated from mid-
March , my interest was piqued. How was it possible that such
enormous numbers of attacks occurred a little over a month after 
January? What also gave me pause was that previous research had rarely
. See The Fateful Alliance. German Conservatives and Nazis in : The Machtergreifung in a New Light
(Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, ); “Konflikte zwischen Deutschnationalen
und Nationalsozialisten während der Machtergreifungszeit,” Historische Zeitschrift,  (),
–; “The Antibourgeois Character of National Socialism,” Journal of Modern History, 
(), –.
. Cyril Levitt, “The Prosecution of Antisemites by the Courts in the Weimar Republic: Was
Justice Served?” Leo Baeck Yearbook,  (), –.
vi

emphasized the prevalence of anti-Jewish attacks in the spring of , let

alone made them the focus of their investigation. Yet the numbers of
attacks I encountered in DNVP party files and the numerous protests
from foreign consulates to the Reich Chancellery and Interior Ministry
indicated that anti-Jewish attacks were far more prevalent than previ-
ously assumed. What I had seen so far might, after all, be just the tip of an
iceberg. As I began to dig deeper, I found my suspicions confirmed. The
present book is the outcome of my quest in the archives.
The origins of my interest in the topic of this book can indirectly be traced
back to Henri Lefebvre’s seminar on twentieth-century Marxism in the Centre
Historique in the Marais in Paris in the spring of . It was then that I first
became intrigued by the notion of the “paradox.” Lefebvre, the grand old
man of the French Left, had a peculiar way of looking at politics and society
that could not fail to impress his students, leaving an indelible mark, even if
they did not agree with his political views. Lefebvre never tired of arguing
that modern history is replete with paradoxes, with which we have learned
to live, quite possibly without even being fully aware of them. Ever since,
I have been captivated by such inherent paradoxes whenever I stumbled
upon them in my own scholarly endeavors and, perhaps without realizing
it, even selected the themes of my research topics accordingly.
My first longer research project on the social thought of Prussian
conservatives and Prussian officials, in what some historians have termed
the age of bureaucratic absolutism between  and , had its origin
in what I then considered the strongly felt and seemingly paradoxical
animosity Prussian conservatives harbored for Prussian officials, an
extreme aversion and loathing that went beyond a mere struggle for
power. Conservatives accused high-ranking officials of having applied a
kind of utopian social engineering during the Reform Era (–),
thereby destroying the old Prussian state. In their own approach to social
and political reality, conservatives had always stressed the importance
of taking vested rights and privileges, as well as local and regional
particularities, into account, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding
institutions that had evolved historically, and accusing bureaucrats of
vii

violating what they considered the rules of gradual historical development.

These charges were unfounded, as I subsequently demonstrated, for
internal memoranda within the Prussian civil service showed that high-
echelon bureaucrats were pervaded by a similar mindset and the same
approach to social reality, urging their subordinate officials to be mindful
of regional particularities and vested rights when conceiving legislation.
Another intriguing paradox concerns the strong social concerns evinced
by Prussian conservatives, such as Joseph Maria von Radowitz and Her-
mann Wagener, their closeness to the extreme Left of their day, and the
numerous commonalities in the social and political thought of contem-
porary Prussian conservatives and socialists in the s through s. In
fact, several scholarly works in the s pointed to those Prussian con-
servatives as forerunners of National Socialism and praised their concept
of an authoritarian social kingdom.3
My second longer project, focusing on a topic in which I had long
been interested, embodied another vexing paradox: the fascination of
Germany’s educated bourgeois elite, the Bildungsbürgertum, with National
Socialism during the beginning stage of the regime’s consolidation of
power in . This cultured elite included the established professional
classes, the professoriate, administrators with a university education, and
the Protestant clergy. It had been instrumental in earning Germany’s
reputation for learning and technical expertise.4 Before the German
defeat in the First World War and the economic turmoil and inflation
following it, this educated elite had enjoyed significant material security
. The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social
Question, – (Ann Arbor: Michigan Press, ); “The Social Policies of Prussian
Officials: The Bureaucracy in a New Light,” Journal of Modern History,  (), –;
“Die Rolle des Sozialkonservatismus in der preußisch-deutschen Geschichte als Forschungs-
problem,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands,  (), –; “Konservative
Politik und Modernisierung in Preußen, –,” in Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, ed.,
Pommern im . Jahrhundert. Staatliche und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung in vergleichender Perspektive
(Cologne: Böhlau, ), –.
. The constituent element of the Bildungsbürgertum was the common Bildung of its members.
The notion was shaped by a belief in human perfectibility, specifically that an individual’s
potential could be realized through personal improvement and education. This was the
central notion of German Idealism and a cornerstone of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reform
of the Prussian university system, from where the concept spread throughout Germany.
viii

and comfort, as well as greater social prestige than its counterparts in

most other European countries. To them, defeat in the war was more
than a military disaster; it signified a personal humiliation and the loss of
a distinct cultural identity. During the Weimar Republic the majority of
the then predominantly conservative and intensely nationalistic educated
bourgeoisie (before the s its political orientation was mostly liberal)
initially viewed the rising Nazi movement with thinly veiled contempt
and favored the conservative DNVP at the ballot box. Even though some
common ground did exist in extreme nationalism and hatred of what
was considered the flagrant injustice of Versailles and dismay over
Germany’s treatment by the former Entente powers, the political message
advanced by National Socialism was too simplistic to be readily accepted
by the educated upper middle classes, whose cultural elitism ran counter
to the essential anti-intellectualism of the NSDAP. Yet, beginning in ,
large sections of the established members of the educated upper middle
class voted in disproportionate numbers for the NSDAP, and after Hitler
became Chancellor the academically trained flocked into the Nazi party.
In the same way that the respected bookstore owner and member of the
educated bourgeoisie Wilhelm Spannaus made the Nazi party socially
acceptable in the northern German town of Northeim, as William
S. Allen so vividly portrays in his The Nazi Seizure of Power, the cultivated
bourgeoisie’s initial enthusiasm for the regime helped to legitimate and
consolidate Hitler’s dictatorship. The major motivational shift in the
educated elite’s political orientation toward National Socialism seemed
to me well worth investigating, especially since opportunism alone
clearly could not explain the apparently genuine enthusiasm with
which the “national revolution” was welcomed. To what exactly could
National Socialism appeal in this segment of the population which, by
virtue of education, breeding, and often social background, would be
unlikely prey for the “temptations” of Nazism, whose public image was
initially dominated by vulgarity, social animosity, and street violence?
The actual search for specific reasons to explain the educated elite’s
preference for Nazism proved difficult. Perusals of civil service
ix

organization files yielded no concrete results, and what little I found in

literary bequests, autobiographies, letter collections, and other sources of
a more personal nature were often too dependent on the individual case
to permit generalization. It quickly became clear that the prominent
members of the educated bourgeoisie who had left their personal papers
to archives or had their correspondence published left out any com-
promising material that might provide evidence of their former partiality
for Nazism. Searches in local archives revealed that even the protocols of
city council meetings in the winter and spring of  had been cleansed
to obfuscate evidence of complicity. Yet, in researching the elusive
reasons why so many members of the educated elite enthusiastically
embraced the new regime, I happened upon what seemed to be another
paradox. During the last phase of the Weimar Republic, the remaining
established members of the educated elite had voted mostly for the
German National People’s Party (DNVP), which had entered a coalition
with the Nazi party on  January , thus facilitating Hitler’s accession
to the chancellorship. In DNVP party files I discovered documents that
contradicted basic assumptions regarding the supposedly close rela-
tionship between Nazis and their conservative coalition partner during
the first phase of the Nazi seizure of power between  January and
 July .
Conservative party files told a tale of Nazi hostility and loathing
toward their conservative allies that was often expressed in physical
terms, that is, extensive and hitherto little-known Nazi violence against
DNVP members and organizations, and pitched battles fought between
the SA and members of German National organizations. I also encoun-
tered widespread denigration of conservative symbols and Honoratioren,
Nazi efforts to undermine existing hierarchies (in the judicial branch of
the civil service, for example), and campaigns against the conservative
bourgeoisie that revealed the pronounced anti-bourgeois thrust of Naz-
ism. Given the impact of these unexpected findings and the dearth of
relevant archival materials on the educated bourgeoisie, the focal point of
my analysis turned to the relationship between conservative German
x

Nationals and the Nazis after Hitler became Chancellor on  January

. It was in conservative party files that I first discovered evidence of
widespread antisemitic violence setting in more than three weeks before
the  April boycott. While researching the dealings between the DNVP
and their more powerful coalition partner, the attitude of German con-
servatives toward anti-Jewish violence also inexorably came into focus.
As it became clear that the DNVP party leadership rebuffed calls for help
from conservative and national-minded Jews, who had fought for
Germany in World War I and whose families had lived in the country
for generations, I wondered about the responses of other entrenched
institutions, such as the Protestant and Catholic Churches and the admin-
istrative and judicial bureaucracies.
The answers I found constitute the paradox that lies at the heart of this
book: How could institutions, and the elites who ran them, that claimed to
be the standard-bearers of national morality, patriotism, and Rechtsstaat
values abandon Jewish Germans during the first onslaught of antisemitic
violence and discrimination? I quickly sensed that the prevalent anti-
Jewish mood in the winter and spring of  made antisemitism salonfähig
in a way it had never been before, so that now ingrained antisemitic
prejudices could be freely vented in public. In view of the fact that
antisemitism was now a publicly sanctioned ideology fueled by formerly
mostly private prejudices, it would also be less difficult to find excuses for
the innumerable violent acts committed against Jews in Germany.
xi
CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations xvii

List of Archives xix
Introduction 
The Search for Archival Evidence 
The Wider Implications: Which Institutions Were in a
Position to Help? 
Overview of Contents 
Previous Literature on Antisemitic Violence in  
PART I. VIOLENCE AGAINST FOREIGN JEWS
. Violence against “Ostjuden” in the Winter and Spring of  

A Few Statistics 
A Litany of Violent Attacks in Early  
Economic Damage and Ruin 
Rituals of Humiliation 
Abduction and Forced Deportation 
Grievous Bodily Harm and Murder 
. “Ostjuden” as Predetermined Targets: a History of

Marginalization 
Roots of Prejudice 
Stigmatization and Violence during the Weimar Republic 
The Difficult Path to Citizenship 
The Policies of the NSDAP–DNVP Coalition Government 
German Jews and “Ostjuden” 

. Attacks against American and West European Jews,

among Others 
Attacks on American Nationals 
Attacks on West European, Czech, and Rumanian Jews 
PART II. VIOLENCE AGAINST GERMAN JEWS
. Violent Attacks 

Antisemitic Violence in the Weimar Republic 
Documentary Evidence for Crimes against Jews 
Forcible Expulsion through Violence and Threats 
Attacks in Jail and on Jewish Livestock Dealers 
. Pillory Marches and the Perfidy Decree 

Pillory Marches 
The Perfidy Decree 
. Murder 
Categories of Anti-Jewish Murder 
The “Spontaneous” Murder 
Murder while in Custody 
The Planned Murder 
. Boycott 
Boycott Movements before  April  
Global Protests and Boycotts against Germany 
The Boycott of  April  
Psychological Implications of the Boycott 
Continuation of the Boycott Movement 
. Legal and Economic Discrimination 

The Antisemitic Legislation of April  
The Law on the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service 
The Law on Admission to Legal Practice 
The Decree on the Admission of Physicians to the Statutory Health
Insurance System 
The Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and
Universities 
xiv

Impact of the April Legislation 

Economic Discrimination 
Other Discriminatory Measures 
PART III. REACTIONS TO ANTISEMITIC VIOLENCE
. The Protestant Church and the “Jewish Question:” the

Church as Conscience of the Nation 
Fragmentation and Efforts to Form a Unified Organizational
Structure 
The Church as a Moral Authority 
The Church in Politics: Interconnections with the DNVP 
The Church and Politics at the End of the Weimar Republic 
Political Groupings within the Church 
After  January : a “Church-friendly National Socialism” 
. Protestant Church Leaders and the “Jewish Question:”

Conscience Betrayed 
Foreign Reactions 
Church Reactions to Foreign Protests 
The Church and the Boycott of  April  
Church Reactions to Pleas for Help and Reports
of Discrimination 
Letter Exchanges between Wilhelm Menn and Ernst Stoltenhoff 
Growing Consensus with the Regime 
Otto Dibelius’s Position on Antisemitism and his
Relationship to the New State 
. The Protestant Church between Action and Silence 

The World Alliance for International Friendship Through the
Churches and the Situation in Germany 
The Protestant Churches under Pressure: Prelude to the
 April Meeting 
Church Leaders on the “Judenfrage:” Opinions and Comments 
The Memorandum on the “Judenfrage” 
xv

. The German Catholic Church between Doctrine and

Self-Preservation 
Before  January  
After  January  
The Church, the April Boycott, and Intervention on
Behalf of Jews 
. Reactions of the German Administrative and Judicial

Bureaucracy 
Officials Minimize Attacks 
Fabricated Charges against Victims 
Antisemitic Attacks and the Reaction of the Judicial Bureaucracy 
. Reactions of Hitler’s Conservative Coalition Partner 

The DNVP and the “Jewish Question” during the Weimar Republic 
The DNVP and National-minded German Jews in March  
Protests by Members of the DNVP and Active Help 
The Boycott and Völkisch Antisemitism 
Lacking Determination and Fearing to Decide 
Epilogue: How Could it Happen? 
Bibliography 
Acknowledgements 
Index 
xvi
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ADGB Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, General German Trade

Union Federation
AdR Akten der Reichskanzlei, Files of the Reich Chancellery
BNSDJ Bund Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Juristen, National Socialist
Association of German Jurists
DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei, German Democratic Party
DEKA Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenausschuss, German Evangelical Church
Committee
DNVP Deutschnationale Volkspartei, German National People’s Party
DVP Deutsche Volkspartei, German People’s Party
KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, German Communist Party
NS Nationalsozialismus/nationalsozialistisch, National Socialism/National
Socialist
NSBO Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation, National Socialist
Factory Cell Organization
NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, National Socialist
German Workers’ Party
NYT New York Times
SA Sturmabteilung, “Stormtroopers” (Nazi paramilitary force)
SOPADE Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands im Exil, Social Democratic
Party of Germany in Exile
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Social Democratic Party of
Germany
SS Schutzstaffel, “Protection Squad” (Nazi special elite formation)
USPD Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, Independent
Social Democratic Party of Germany
VJHZ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
LIST OF ARCHIVES
Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München, BayHStaA

Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, BA Berlin
Bundesarchiv Koblenz, BA Koblenz
Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, BA Freiburg
Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin, EZA Berlin
Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Dahlem GStAPK Dahlem
Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf, HStA Düsseldorf, now Landesarchiv Nordrhein-
Westfalen
Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, HStA Stuttgart
Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden, HHStA Wiesbaden
Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich IfZ
Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, formerly Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe, LABW
Karlsruhe
Landesarchiv Berlin, LA Berlin
Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein, LASH
Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin, LHA Schwerin
Landeskirchenarchiv der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Landeskirche Sachsens, Dresden
LAKA Dresden
Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, NHStA Hannover
Nordelbisches Kirchenarchiv Kiel, NEKA Kiel
Nordrhein-Westfälisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Düsseldorf HStA Düsseldorf
Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, SHStA Dresden
Staatsarchiv Hamburg, StA Hamburg
Staatsarchiv München, StA München
The passivity, the silence of the respectable people . . . [was] just as

important for the success of National Socialism as the bellowing of the
enthusiasts.
—Fritz Stern, Das feine Schweigen
N Königsberg
W E
Kiel
S Rostock Elbing
Hamburg
Stettin
Bremen
Berlin
Hanover
Magdeburg
Duisburg Leipzig
Dresden Breslau
Cologne Chemnitz

Hindenburg Gleiwitz
Frankfurt
Nuremberg
Stuttgart
Munich 0 60 120 240 Kilometers

GUGiK, Esri, HERE, Garmin, FAO, NOAA, USGS
German Borders 1933

Murder and Attempted Murder
Forceable Shop Closures and Boycotts before and after April 1, 1933
Attacks and other Actions against Foreign Jews - Ostjuden, Americans, Dutch, Czech
Violence against German Jews including Forced Expulsions
Pillory Marches
INTRODUCTION
The Search for Archival Evidence
I n the Preface I outlined how I happened upon the problems and events
discussed in this book while researching the conflict-ridden relation-
ship between the Nazi Party and the conservative German National
People’s Party, whose coalition brought Hitler to power at the end of
January . As I went through what is left of the conservative party
files,1 I was surprised by the large number of complaints about antise-
mitic attacks from members of the conservative party, by the violent
attacks on Jewish businesses, and pleas for help from conservative Jewish
Germans. Had Weimar’s legal system, which was still largely functional
in February, stopped working so abruptly within the space of less than
a month? Once I fully realized the extent of antisemitic violence in
March and April , one question immediately sprang to mind: if
anti-Jewish violence was so widespread during this time, why has previ-
ous research on the period of the Nazi takeover rarely stressed the
prevalence of violent antisemitism? Studies dealing with the period
from the perspective of the fate of German Jews focus primarily on
the economic aspects of violence and exclusion, such as the boycott of
shops and lawyers’ and doctors’ offices on  April , as well as on the
discriminatory legislation of April , but antisemitic violence as such,
though mentioned, is rarely thoroughly examined, let alone in the
. Until the early s, these were housed in the Zentrales Staatsarchiv I of the German
Democratic Republic in Potsdam and then relocated to the Bundesarchiv Berlin in Berlin-
Lichterfelde.
Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions during the Nazi Takeover.
Hermann Beck, Oxford University Press. © Hermann Beck 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192865076.003.0001
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context of relevant social and political forces that may have impacted or
mitigated it.2 The answer gradually became clear: the surviving documen-
tation, as far as it still exists, is deeply hidden in different archival holdings,
since antisemitic attacks went, for the most part, unreported and therefore
cannot be found in police files. This section thus deals with the search for
archival evidence to gain as complete a picture as possible of the extent of
antisemitic violence, though it should be kept in mind that since many
crimes against Germany’s Jews went unrecorded, even a systematic explor-
ation of German archives can yield only fragmentary results.
As the vast number of complaints in conservative party files left no
doubt that there must have been countless attacks, I began to dig deeper
and searched for further information in other archival holdings. In the
files of the Reich Chancellery I found hundreds of complaints from
foreign delegations in Berlin that protested against violent attacks per-
petrated against their Jewish citizens, including reports from the Polish,
French, Swiss, and United States consulates about acts of provocation
and violence directed against Jewish citizens of those countries.3 In the
holdings of the Prussian Ministry of Justice in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv
Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin-Dahlem I discovered documents relat-
ing to several antisemitic murders committed in the spring of .4 And
among the files of the British military government after  I found trial
documents on anti-Jewish attacks, murders, and so-called Prangermärsche
(“pillory marches”) that occurred in  but were prosecuted only after
the Second World War and collected under the heading “Crimes Com-
mitted during the National Socialist Revolution.”5
. For previous research on antisemitic violence in , see the fourth section of this
Introduction.
. BA Berlin, R II, no. , “NSDAP,” –; –; –; –; –; –.
. GStAPK Dahlem, Rep. a, no. , “Wegen Ermordung des jüdischen Milchhändlers Max
Kassel, März–Mai ;” Rep. a, no. , “Wegen Ermordung des jüdischen Rechtsan-
walts Schumm aus Neidenburg;” Rep. a, no. , “Ermittlungsverfahren gegen Unbe-
kannt wegen Ermordung des jüdischen Zahnarztes Dr. Alfred Meyer, Kommunist in
Wuppertal-Barmen am . Mai .”
. See, for example, BA Koblenz, Oberster Gerichtshof für die Britische Zone, Z, no. ,
“Strafsache gegen Karl Saucke wegen Freiheitsberaubung und Misshandlung von Angehöri-
gen linksgerichteter Parteien und Juden in Seesen;” no. , “Tötung eines jüdischen

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On the other hand, it quickly became apparent that the direct

approach yielded few results when it came to the specifics of the actual
crimes. The usual place to look for evidence of antisemitic attacks would
be the police records of larger German cities. Yet, there was barely any
evidence of antisemitic attacks in these records. After spending a consid-
erable amount of time going through police files for March and April
 in the Munich Staatsarchiv and in Hannover’s Niedersächsisches
Landesarchiv, for example, it became clear that research in police files
would yield no appreciable results.6 I soon discovered the reason for this:
already in March, police officers had been instructed not to record
antisemitic crimes and not to offer help to the victims. In Prussia,
Hermann Göring’s admonitions (as head of the Prussian police) not to
deploy police officers as protection squads for Jewish homes set the
tone. In one case in Dresden, five uniformed SA men forced their way
into the home of a Polish rabbi and beat him with rubber truncheons.
The policemen summoned to the scene refused to get involved, with the
standard excuse, “It is not the obligation of the police to protect Jews.”7 In
fact this particular phrase—“Die Polizei ist nicht dazu da, um Juden zu
schützen”—seems to have been a standard formulation repeatedly
encountered in the reports. Indeed, if victims called in the police in
March , they could be in for a nasty shock, for already in mid-
February about , members of the SA, SS, and the veterans’ organ-
ization Stahlhelm were amalgamated with the Prussian police, so that
assault victims might open the door to a Nazi stormtrooper now vested
with official police authority. Other German states then rapidly followed
the Prussian example. The fact that no assistance could be expected from
Hauptschriftleiters des sozialdemokratischen ‘Volksblattes’ in Detmold auf dem Transport

nach Dachau;” no. , “Anprangerung eines jüdischen Geschäftsmanns, Pinneberg .”
. Staatsarchiv München, Polizeidirektion München, nos. ; –; –;

Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, Hann.  Hannover, Hann.
 Hildesheim.
. BA Berlin, R II, no. , “NSDAP,” fol. .

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the police quickly became known to attackers, victims, and potential

victims alike, thus emboldening perpetrators.
After carefully perusing the federal German and central Prussian arch-
ives in Koblenz and Berlin and the central archives of German Protest-
antism in Berlin in search of further evidence, I turned to the regional
archives of the different German states, from Bavaria to Saxony, Baden,
Hessen, some of the other lesser German states, and former Prussian
provinces such as Schleswig-Holstein.8 In several regional archives
I found further revealing evidence of antisemitic violence as, for example,
in the so-called Wiedergutmachungsakten (compensation files) at the main
Hessian archives in Wiesbaden.9 In the Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein
in Schleswig and Nordrhein-Westfälisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Düssel-
dorf I discovered files on post-war trials that dealt with antisemitic
murder cases from the period of the Nazi takeover. Already in ,
public prosecutors’ offices were compelled to launch an investigation
into murder cases, and German authorities had accordingly initiated legal
proceedings and gathered evidence against potential suspects in the
spring of that year. In several instances murder suspects had been clearly
identified and overwhelming evidence against them had been collected.
Yet, even in cases where the killers were known, no sentences were
passed in . All offenders were released under the amnesty of  July
 for “Crimes Committed during the National Socialist Revolution.”10
But the files of the original investigation occasionally survived the war,
and in several instances murder cases were revived after , especially
. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München; Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden; Land-

esarchiv Baden-Württemberg, formerly Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe; Niedersächsisches
Landesarchiv in Hannover, Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden; Landesarchiv
Nordrhein-Westfalen, formerly Hauptstaatsarchiv Düsseldorf; Landesarchiv Berlin; Land-
eshauptarchiv Schwerin; Staatsarchiv Hamburg; Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein in
Schleswig; Landesarchiv Thüringen in Weimar.
. Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden, Abt. ., “Entschädigungsakten.” Of the ,  files docu-
menting claims of Nazi victims (Entschädigungsakten), about , were digitalized in the
s. Among these there were eleven cases that referred to crimes committed in .
. GStAPK Dahlem, Rep. a, no. , “Gnadenerweise aus Anlass der Beendigung der
nationalsozialistischen Revolution, aufgrund des Erlasses vom . Juni  in Verbindung
mit der allgemeinen Verfügung des Justizministers vom . Juli .”

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when the killers were suspected or known.11 Resumption of legal pro-

ceedings after the war was often prompted when friends or relatives of
the victims urged the German authorities, or, before , the occupation
authorities, to reopen proceedings and bring the murderers to justice.
Some of these post-war murder trials extended into the late s and
early s. But even after the war convictions were rare and sentences,
when passed, exceedingly clement by the standards of the time. This was
due mostly to lack of hard evidence and because the politically restorative
political climate of the s worked in favor of the defendants. In some
instances the trail had gone cold, former murder suspects had been killed
during the war, or witnesses had disappeared. In other cases murder
suspects, mostly former SA or SS men, gave each other alibis, or put the
blame on comrades whom they believed to have been killed in the war
and were thus beyond the reach of the law. Those convicted were often
criminal types with a long charge sheet, since even former Nazi judges
had no qualms about sentencing such people to long terms of
imprisonment.12
Taken together, the files tell the appalling and largely unknown story
of massive antisemitic attacks in the spring of . The attacks began
immediately after  March and then gradually abated during the summer.
Since the crimes were mostly not directly recorded, they have to be
pieced together from complaints in conservative party files, files from
prosecutors’ offices from the spring of , post- British occupation
authority files, trial records on Prangermärsche, regional incidents that
might be recorded in the archives of German states or former
Prussian provinces, such as Schleswig-Holstein, and information gleaned
from post-war trials. We also have no clear notion of the actual
number of attacks. The New York Times, Chicago Daily Tribune, London
. This happened, for example, in the murder cases of Max Kassel, Peter Stieldorf, Friedrich
Schumm, Felix Fechenbach, Fritz Solmitz, Wilhelm Spiegel, and Alfred Meyer, all of which
are discussed in Chapter  below.
. This occurred, for example, in the post-war murder trials of Max Kassel and Felix Fechen-
bach. In the latter case the chauffeur, who was only marginally involved, was sentenced to
five years’ imprisonment.

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Times, Manchester Guardian, and countless other newspapers and

magazines in the Western democracies carried accounts of antisemitic
attacks, but the reporting was too unspecific, since precise details, such as
names of victims and informants, were usually not revealed, in order to
shield them. And much of the information was based on reports from
Germans who wanted to remain anonymous. The same is true for the
numerous diplomatic reports and commentaries from the time of the
Nazi takeover. They mentioned the attacks in some detail, but were based
mostly on hearsay and oral accounts from unnamed informants and
cannot be used as a basis for a statistical assessment.13 We have one
concrete figure. An American journalist, Michael Williams, who visited
Germany from early April until mid-June, mentions the figure of about
 antisemitic murders and , other violent crimes against Germany’s
Jews in a New York Times article from mid-June .14 This figure was
not based on statistics or other concrete evidence. If we accept this as
a possible yardstick, however, the magnitude of antisemitic crimes
becomes starkly clear: since, during the depth of the Depression in ,
there were , cases of murder and manslaughter in the entire popula-
tion in Germany, the number of attacks that Williams mentions for the
late spring of  would account for more than one fifth of all murders
committed in Germany in  within a span of only three months.
Projected to twelve months, it would amount to , murders, that is,
very close to the  figure of all cases of murder and manslaughter for
the entire population.15 This onslaught of anti-Jewish violence set in
exactly five weeks after Hitler became Chancellor. One critical question
we have to answer now is: in the conditions of the late winter and spring
. Documents on British Foreign Policy –, nd series, IV (London: HMSO, ), –;
vol. V (London: HMSO, ), –; Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers ,
vol. II (Washington: Government Printing Office, ), –.
. Michael Williams, “Nazi Deeds Worst in History,” NYT,  June .
. The figure for murders and manslaughters compares with , male and , female
suicides (); Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich,  (Berlin: Statistisches Reichsamt,
), –.

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of , which parties and other institutions of the German State and
society were in a position to intervene on behalf of the victims?
The Wider Implications: Which Institutions

Were in a Position to Help?
In order to assess which institutions of the German State and society

might have been able to protest, help, or actively intervene on behalf of
Jews in Germany, the specific political conditions of the winter and
spring of  have to be taken into account. The first effective measure
of the new regime to stifle potential opposition was the presidential
decree of  February , authorizing the prohibition of newspapers
and public meetings that attacked institutions or leading officials of State.
This so-called Schubladenverordnung thus gave the new government the
power to (temporarily) ban the opposition press.16 But the system of law
courts still functioned in February and many newspaper prohibitions
could be successfully contested. Still, in these economically precarious
times even a temporary loss of advertisement revenue might mean
economic ruin, and so the opposition press moderated its critical tone
toward the new government from early on.
Especially in the largest federal state, Prussia, whose domestic politics
were conducted with implacable ruthlessness by Hermann Göring as
acting Interior Minister (after  January) and Minister President (after 
April), and which accounted for . percent of Germany’s population
and . percent of its size, the Nazi takeover made rapid progress.17 The
higher administrative bureaucracy, such as provincial and district gover-
nors and police commissioners, was ruthlessly purged. This amounted to
. Ironically, it was drafted by Hitler’s predecessors in office with an eye toward controlling
the activities of the Nazi Party.
. In , Prussia had ,. sq. km (Germany without the Saar ,. sq. km), with a
population of ,, (total German population: ,, million); Statistisches Jahrbuch
(), –.

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a removal of pro-Republican forces that followed closely on the heels of

the previous purge after the Preußenschlag—the overthrow of the Prussian
government by the Reich under Papen’s government on  July . On
 February  large contingents of SA, SS, and Stahlhelm units (about
,) were employed as auxiliary police and merged with the Prussian
police force, so that if anyone was attacked by Nazi stormtroopers in the
street and appealed to the police for help, SA men in auxiliary police
uniform might well come to their assistance. This meant that the  March
election campaign was no longer free, with the scales heavily tipped
against the SPD (Social Democratic Party), Center, and other pro-
Republican parties, since meetings of the democratic opposition were
now ruthlessly broken up. At the beginning of February, Kurt Schuma-
cher and other SPD deputies still believed that Nazi leaders were mere
pawns in the hands of the capitalists around the DNVP (German National
People’s Party) leader Alfred Hugenberg (a view also shared by many in
the Center Party); already by the end of that month Nazi violence showed
considerable effect in that many SPD politicians, such as Berlin’s former
police chief Albert Grzesinski, had resignedly stopped campaigning or
fled Germany, even before the electoral showdown of  March, as in the
case of the former Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun.18
The decisive event that smoothed the road to dictatorship was the
Reichstag fire—the burning of the houses of parliament—on the night of
 February. At the time a majority of Germans believed the version
propagated by the government that communists had set fire to the
Reichstag and that a communist coup attempt was imminent. Due to
fear of a communist uprising, President Hindenburg signed “The Decree
for the Protection of the People and the State,” the so-called Reichstag fire
decree that suspended the basic rights of citizens, such as freedom of
expression and the right of assembly, and outlawed the Communist
. Heinrich August Winkler, Der Weg in die Katastrophe. Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der
Weimarer Republik  bis , nd ed. (Bonn: Dietz, ), ; Erich Matthias, “Die
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands,” in Erich Matthias and Rudolf Morsey, eds.,
Das Ende der Parteien  (Düsseldorf: Droste, ), –.

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Party. Now letters could be opened, houses searched, and suspects held
without a warrant. Those interned had no right of appeal and redress for
false arrest. Since the Reichstag fire decree was not accompanied by
provisions about how to implement the law, as was customary, its
execution was left to the ministers of interior of the different German
states. It also authorized the Reich government to take over full
powers in any of the German states whose governments were unable
to restore public order, which was significant in the case of those states
where the NSDAP was not yet part of government. These states—
Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Schaumburg-Lippe, Hesse-Darmstadt, Baden,
Württemberg, Saxony, and Bavaria—were taken over in the weeks
following the  March elections.
Perhaps most significant of all was the fact that the Reichstag fire and
the seemingly decisive actions of the new Nazi government against the
perceived communist threat (by early March the NSDAP was clearly
considered the dominant force in the coalition) changed the public
mood in favor of Hitler and the NSDAP, widely seen as the only leader
and party ready to save Germany from communism. As the Nazi oppon-
ent Theodor Eschenburg wrote in his memoirs, the Reichstag fire was
“the first event that sent chilling fright through our bones . . . A premon-
ition went through Germany: Now things are getting dangerous.”19
During the last week of the election campaign the NSDAP therefore
enjoyed a decided advantage that was reflected in the voter turnout
(. percent) and, to a certain extent, in election results: the NSDAP
gained . million votes (from . to . million) and rose from . to
. percent of the national electorate, while conservative support
remained stagnant at  percent. Together the NSDAP/DNVP coalition
enjoyed an absolute majority after  March . Nazi tactics of outlawing
the KPD while letting voters cast their ballot for the communists now
bore fruit. The  Communist deputies who had been elected (the KPD
. Theodor Eschenburg, Letzten Endes meine ich doch. Erinnerungen, – (Berlin: Siedler,
), .

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had received . percent of the vote) went into hiding or were arrested,
and without them the  Nazi deputies alone had an absolute majority
in parliament.
All of this had been accomplished without flagrantly violating consti-
tutional provisions, which is the reason why some historians emphasize
that this was a “legal” or “semi-legal” takeover, though political violence
increased throughout March and reached a first high point in the course
of the Nazi takeover of the German Länder between  and  March.20 As
a result of National Socialist successes and the lack of resistance to the
takeover, there was growing defeatism in the ranks of those political
forces that had opposed Nazism. With the Communist Party already
outlawed, resignation now spread within the ranks of the SPD and Center
Party. In February and March, long-standing members of the Social
Democratic Party returned their membership cards,21 and after  March
countless members of the Republican Reichsbanner applied to the veterans’
organization Stahlhelm for membership to protect themselves from Nazi
retribution, while the leadership of the General German Trade Union
Federation (ADGB) declared its willingness to sever its long-standing ties
with the SPD.22 All were stunned by the energy and dynamism of the
movement and the ruthlessness with which any opposition was swept
aside. The leaders of the Reichsbanner and other organizations, whose rank
and file would have been willing to oppose the new regime more openly,
were also paralyzed by the seeming legality of the Nazi conquest of
power, since open rebellion against the new government would have
. Karl Dietrich Bracher stresses the “pseudo-legal” character of the Nazi takeover in Die
nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung, while Klaus Hildebrand speaks of a “semblance of
legality.” See Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer, and Gerhard Schulz, Die Nationalso-
zialistische Machtergreifung, nd ed. (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, ); Karl
Dietrich Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur. Entstehung, Struktur, Folgen des Nationalsozialismus, th
ed. (Berlin: Ullstein, ); Klaus Hildebrand, Das dritte Reich, rd ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg,
), .
. NHStA Hannover, Hann  II A, no. , –.
. Hermann Beck, The Fateful Alliance. German Conservatives and Nazis in : The Machtergreifung
in a New Light (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, ), –.


automatically summoned up the forces of law and order and the institu-
tions of the State against them.23
The Center and liberal parties’ support for the  March Enabling Act,
in which Hitler asked for absolute rule for four years and which required
a parliamentary two-thirds majority, was another ominous sign of the
momentous change in the political climate. While there were threats and
intimidation outside and inside the Kroll Opera House in which the
voting took place, its ready acceptance cannot be explained solely as a
combination of opportunism and fear of Nazi reprisals if the decree were
rejected. As one of the liberal deputies, Hermann Dietrich, wrote after the
war, never before in his life had he received such an enormous acclaim of
approval as on the occasion of this vote. The outcome ( to  in favor
of approval, with only SPD deputies voting against) was thus greatly
favored by the public mood, which demanded acceptance.24 In the spring
of , the overbearing propaganda and domineering publicity for the
Hitler government went to such extremes that even the newly appointed
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels ( March ) spoke out against
“nationalist kitsch,” which a contemporary (anti-Nazi) diarist commented
upon: “All the lowest instincts of taste seem to have been unleashed by
the National Socialist movement and its victory. Busts of the Führer
made out of lard are the least of it. Toilet paper: ‘we crack down’ is not
bad either. And the postcard industry!”25 In petitions to the Reich
Chancellery, owners of coffeehouses asked permission to name their
shops after Hitler, rose growers their roses, and the mayor of the East
Prussian village Sutzken requested a name change to “Hitlershöhe,” while
a registrar official in Düsseldorf reported to local Nazi Party authorities
that a party member requested to name his child “Hitlerine” but had to
. On the willingness of the rank and file of the Reichsbanner to resist at the local level, see
William S. Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power, rev. ed. (New York: Watts, ), –.
. Rudolf Morsey, Das Ermächtigungsgesetz (Düsseldorf: Droste, ), –; Eric Kurlander,
Living with Hitler. Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press,
), –.
. Erich Ebermayer, Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland (Hamburg and Vienna: Zsolnay, ), 
(entry from  April ).

  
settle for “Adolfine” instead.26 And this was just the tip of an adulation
iceberg. As administrative reports suggested, a generally favorable mood
toward the new government seemed to catch on even among former
opponents. In the second half of April, for example, the Regierungspräsident
(district governor) of middle and upper Franconia summarized reports
from his counties to the effect that “the takeover is viewed more sympa-
thetically, even among those not previously well disposed toward the
NSDAP, and there are indications, namely in workers’ circles, that point
to a certain leaning toward the new government.”27
This powerful wave of hopeful enthusiasm, which was often boosted
by opportunism but sometimes also genuine, buoyed and sustained the
“semi-legal” conquest of State and society. It was one characteristic of the
period; violence was another. This violence manifested itself not only in
rabble-rousing grassroots initiatives by local Nazi organizations against
perceived opponents and, after  March, antisemitic attacks throughout
Germany, but also in countless acts of revenge and intimidation against
political opponents, neighbors, business rivals, or anyone who had ever
crossed prominent Nazis or Nazi organizations. Ubiquitous terror was
the essential lubricant in eliminating opponents and in rendering innocu-
ous potential enemies, convincing them that accommodation with the
new regime was the only option they had. It would be wrong to assume
that social and political prominence was a protective shield against Nazi
attacks even at the beginning of Hitler’s rule. Every German, regardless of
social standing, who had ever fallen foul of the Nazis was now in danger.
There were house searches in the homes of prominent parliamentarians,
such as Siegfried von Kardorff, the former Vice-President of parliament,
the house of former President Ebert’s widow was searched for Republican
flags, and in Einstein’s (empty) house Nazi stormtroopers looked for
explosives. Any pretext would do to intimidate those seen as enemies.
. Beatrice Heiber and Helmut Heiber, eds., Die Rückseite des Hakenkreuzes. Absonderliches aus den
Akten des Dritten Reiches, nd ed. (Munich: DTV, ), –.
. Martin Broszat et al., eds., Bayern in der NS Zeit. Vol. , Soziale Lage und politisches Verhalten der
Bevölkerung im Spiegel vertraulicher Berichte (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, ), .


In the same vein, members and even leaders of the German National
People’s Party, the NSDAP’s coalition partner, were not spared either.
Many German National mayors were forcibly replaced by SA leaders, and
numerous pitched battles were fought between the SA and members of
the conservative German National Kampfring. Since conservatives were
usually outnumbered, they mostly came out on the losing side. Attacks
against members and leaders of the conservative party were carried out
with astonishing brutality. The files meticulously list the injuries, such as
knocked-out teeth, head wounds, and the occasional bullet wound. Even
prominent conservative politicians, such as Paul Rüffer, leader of the
German National workers’ movement, were subjected to such attacks.28
It goes without saying that the political Left suffered incomparably
more. Terror against KPD, SPD, the trade unions, and the Republican
Reichsbanner was more systematic and on a much larger scale. Hermann
Göring’s so-called Schießerlaß of  February, demanding co-operation
with “national associations” and the ruthless use of firearms against the
political Left, created a legal double standard and amounted to an invi-
tation to attack leftist parties and organizations. The vast majority of the
, inmates kept as “protective detainees” in camps, the more than
, prisoners temporarily kept in the “wild” concentration camps of
the SA, and the – murdered political opponents were members of
the Left.29 The opening of the first large concentration camp in Dachau
had been announced in the newspapers, and the existence of a large
number of SA “wild” camps and torture cellars was widely known. So
was the fact that neither the law courts nor the police could offer protec-
tion, and rumors as to what was happening inside these “extra-legal
. Hermann Beck, “Konflikte zwischen Deutschnationalen und Nationalsozialisten während

der Machtergreifungszeit,” Historische Zeitschrift,  (), –; BA Berlin, R II,
no. , fols. –v.
. Winkler, Katastrophe, ; Michael Schneider, Unterm Hakenkreuz. Arbeiter und
Arbeiterbewegung  bis  (Berlin: Aufbau, ), ; Martin Broszat, “Nationalsozialis-
tische Konzentrationslager –,” in Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat, and Hans-Adolf
Jacobsen, eds., Anatomie des SS-Staates, th ed. (Munich: DTV, ), –, esp. ;
Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL. A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux: ), –.

  
spaces” abounded. Fear nipped potential resistance in the bud. It was this
atmosphere of nationalist ecstasy and lawlessness, of seeming euphoria
and wanton arbitrariness, of fear, brutal repression, and the beginning of
tight surveillance coupled with hopes for a better tomorrow that char-
acterized the political climate of the late winter and spring of  and
that forms the backdrop of assessing the problem of who remained in a
position to protest against antisemitic violence and come to the aid of the
victims.
Given the speed of the Nazi takeover and the political and psycho-
logical implications arising from the largely unopposed conquest of State
and society, few German State or societal institutions remained in a
position to intervene and lend active support on behalf of the victims
by the end of March . Those democratic parties of the Weimar
Republic that had traditionally opposed antisemitism, in particular the
left liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) and the Social Democratic
Party (SPD), had been severely weakened. The DDP, once the third
strongest party in the early Republic with . percent of the vote and
seventy-five deputies in Weimar’s first elections on  January ,
whose predecessor in the Empire had already stood up for the rights of
German Jews, had merged with the antisemitic Jungdeutscher Orden (Young
German Order) in , even though this supposed accretion of its
strength had failed to arrest its decline. By  it had been reduced to a
splinter party with a mere  percent of the vote. In the second half of
March , it was fighting for its very survival and its five deputies
elected in March  all voted in favor of the Enabling Act.30
The SPD, which had emerged as far and away the strongest party after
the first elections in January , had managed to salvage parts of its
support base and remained (a distant) second to the NSDAP in the
elections of , with about one fifth of the electorate behind it. The
party had once been a vigorous defender of the position of German Jews,
. On their position on the “Jewish Question,” see Philip Bernard Wiener, “Die Parteien der
Mitte,” in Werner E. Mosse, ed., Entscheidungsjahr . Zur Judenfrage in der Endphase der
Weimarer Republik, nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, ), esp. –.


but this particular concern had gradually receded into the background
during the Republic’s last phase.31 Given their own precarious position in
the spring of , leading Social Democrats were first and foremost
concerned about the survival of their party and saving their own remain-
ing members and leaders. The issue of antisemitic attacks does not seem
to have been a major issue of discussion among party leaders.32 My
suspicions in this respect were confirmed during a visit to the Friedrich
Ebert Stiftung in Bonn-Bad Godesberg, where I found little information
on this issue,33 but was surprised to see that the prevailing preoccupation
of the SPD leadership at the very end of the Republic, much more so than
in the s, was to present the party as national-minded. Exertions to
emphasize one’s loyalty to the nation left even less space for the defense
of German Jews, who, in popular consciousness and despite all evidence
to the contrary, were frequently regarded as unpatriotic. At the end of the
day, of course, by the second half of March  all political parties other
than the NSDAP were most concerned about fighting for their very
survival. They were then banned or dissolved between  June and
 July. In fact, among the political parties, only Hitler’s alliance partner,
the conservative German National People’s Party, retained vestiges of
political influence. This small but still very influential party, representing
large parts of the Protestant elites, was a doubtful last resort, since its own
past was tinged with antisemitism. The party’s position, as well as the
divergent views of some of its members and leaders on how to respond
to anti-Jewish discrimination and often-violent attacks, still deserve to be
. See Donald Niewyk, Socialist, Anti-Semite, and Jew. German Social Democracy Confronts the
Problem of Anti-Semitism, – (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, ); Hans-Helmuth Knütter,
“Die Linksparteien,” in Mosse, ed., Entscheidungsjahr, –, esp. –: On the historical
background, see Lars Fischer, The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
. See also David Bankier, “German Social Democrats and the Jewish Question,” in David
Bankier, ed., Probing the Depths of German Anti-Semitism. German Society and the Persecution of the
Jews, – (New York: Berghahn, ), –. The meticulously researched accounts
of the SPD’s history from  to  by Winkler, Katastrophe, and from  to  by
Michael Schneider, Unterm Hakenkreuz, also have little to say about the SPD’s reaction to
antisemitism.
. In the holdings of the “SOPADE,” and in the available literary bequests and press organs.

  
examined here in some detail, not least in order to show that in  Jews
in Germany had very few influential champions left.34
Apart from the DNVP, there were only three institutions in German
society that remained in a position to protest effectively, insofar as they
had preserved at least a semblance of independence: first, the Christian
Churches, in particular the Protestant Church, to which almost two-
thirds of all Germans belonged as tax-paying members.35 As will be
discussed comprehensively in Chapters , , and  below, leaders of
the Protestant Church considered themselves as moral authorities,
responsible for upholding ethical standards throughout the country,
and frequently got involved in the political issues of the day; in ,
several Protestant leaders outspokenly opposed the Nazi party on a
variety of issues. Secondly, the administrative bureaucracy, which tackled
complaints from foreign consulates, and the judicial branch of the civil
service, which was charged with prosecuting and sentencing the perpet-
rators of antisemitic crimes. The reasons for their failure to do so
constitute an important part of the story presented in this book. Thirdly,
the Reichswehr, Germany’s small but highly professional army, which still
seemed autonomous and nominally free of Nazi influence in the first half
of . Yet it quickly became apparent that army leaders were, for the
most part, not interested in the issue, and not prepared to lend succor in
any form. At the German military archives in Freiburg, for example, only
two slender folders deal with antisemitism in . They focus on the
prehistory of the introduction of the “Aryan clause” in the Reichswehr in
February  and also contain appeals by national-minded German Jews
to have their war service recognized as frontline duty.36 In the early
s, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich prepared
. See Chapter  below.

. According to article , section , of the Weimar Constitution, as institutions under public
law religious communities were entitled to levy taxes based on the legal provisions of the
individual German states.
. BA Freiburg, Allgemeines Wehrmachtsamt, RW , nos. a, b. During the Weimar
Republic and the early years of the Third Reich (until the introduction of general con-
scription on  March ), the official name of the German armed forces was “Reichs-
wehr;” thereafter the term “Wehrmacht” was used.


questionnaires dealing with the “Reichswehr and National Socialism

before ,” which German generals were asked to fill out. One central
question was: “What did you not like about National Socialism?” I found
only one case among the more than three dozen Fragebögen I perused, in
which a General emphasized that he was offended, as he put it euphem-
istically, by the “Überspitzung des Rassegedankens,” the undue weight
accorded to “racial issues” in National Socialism.37 One main reason for
the overall lack of any concern was undoubtedly entrenched antisemitic
convictions within the officer corps, and the widespread belief, as Reich-
swehr Chief Hans von Seeckt once put it, that “. . . the Jewish talent is
purely critical, hence negative, and can never help in the construction of a
State,” or in the words of Werner von Fritsch, later Commander-in-Chief
of the Wehrmacht (–), “. . . Ebert, pacifists, Jews, democrats, Black,
Red, and Gold, and the French are all the same, namely the people who
want to destroy Germany.”38 A second reason was the increasing close-
ness of the officer corps to the new regime. As the leading magazine for
Reichswehr officers, the Militär-Wochenblatt, wrote during the summer: “It
has to be clear to the German officer that if his own [political] views are
in contradiction to those of National Socialism, he will have to revise
them.”39 It would thus be illusory to expect help from an allegedly
. At the military archives in Freiburg, I was given a list of possible research assistants who,
for a fee, would scour the files for visiting historians. Some of these researchers had worked
there for decades and knew the files probably better than some of the archivists. After
having spent a week in Freiburg with little to show for my efforts, I decided to discuss my
topic with some of the most experienced of these paid researchers. Without exception they
told me that they did not want to squander their time and my money. In their opinion,
senior German officers were simply not interested in this particular issue. In  the
Reichswehr thus abdicated any responsibility for protecting Jewish Germans from Nazi
attacks, even those who had been decorated during the First World War, and it is therefore
not a topic of discussion in this book.
. The first quotation is from a March  letter Seeckt wrote to his wife; the second from a
letter Fritsch wrote to his friend Joachim von Stülpnagel in November , quoted in
Francis L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), , . For a
later period see Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, –. German Troops and the Barbarization
of Warfare (London: Macmillan, ); Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army. Soldiers, Nazis, and War in
the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
. “Der Soldat und die nationale Revolution,” Militär-Wochenblatt,  ( August ),
–, esp. .

  
apolitical army that proved only too eager to jump on the Nazi
bandwagon.40
Overview of Contents
Part I: This book is subdivided into three parts: Part I focuses on violence
against foreign Jews (mostly from Eastern Europe) who lived in Germany
without citizenship; Part II on different forms of violence, from assaults
to pillory marches, murder, and boycotts against German Jews; and Part
III on the reaction of those institutions that were still in a position to
protest in the spring of —the Christian Churches, the bureaucracy,
and Hitler’s coalition partner, the DNVP. Foreign Jews were the most
vulnerable and thus became the initial targets of attacks by SA and SS
bands, who felt free to vent their hatred on them in the most brutal
fashion, unencumbered by fear of legal accountability. Chapter  deals
with violence against “Ostjuden” (mostly from Poland), since they consti-
tuted the largest group and attacks against them are best documented.
Violence against them fell into five categories: (i) physical violence and
robbery; (ii) financial damages such as the forced cancellation of debts,
vandalism of property, and destruction of goods; (iii) rituals of humili-
ation, such as “pillory marches,” in which victims were paraded through
streets; (iv) kidnapping, often in combination with pressure on victims to
relinquish their businesses and emigrate; and (v) aggravated bodily
assault and murder. While German authorities were initially reluctant
to introduce specific discriminatory legal measures against Polish Jews,
as these might trigger administrative retaliation against the German
minority in Poland, SA and SS members felt themselves under no such
constraints as they threatened, humiliated, and intimidated “Ostjuden.”
. There were exceptions to this rule. For example, former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher
intervened with Hindenburg in the spring of  with regard to the treatment of German
Jews; BA Koblenz, N/, fol.  (my thanks to Professor Thomas Weber for this
reference).


Physical violence was abundant, as was the wanton destruction of

property and countless other forms of personal degradation that served
the attackers’ twisted sense of visceral satisfaction to pressure the reviled
“Ostjuden” into leaving Germany quickly. In addition to pillory marches,
the demolition of religious artifacts and the shearing of beards were
means to demoralize and humiliate victims.
Chapter  investigates the roots of prejudice against “Ostjuden,” the
stigmatization and violence against them during the Weimar Republic,
their thorny path to citizenship, the policies of the NSDAP–DNVP
coalition government, and the often-ambivalent relationship between
German Jews and “Ostjuden,” who, by some, were perceived as dangerous
brothers from the East whose distinctly foreign identity might trigger
antisemitic resentments at home, while others saw them as a pure
unspoiled force capable of rejuvenating Judaism in the West. Already in
 the Prussian government resorted to a policy of committing
“undesirable Ostjuden” to internment camps.41 This chapter also high-
lights the difficulties of obtaining German citizenship, even if born in
Germany. When obtained after seemingly unending bureaucratic com-
plications, it was then quickly rescinded with a stroke of the pen in .
Since Germany knew no national citizenship before February ,
applicants had to apply for the citizenship of a specific German state,
which further complicated the process.
Chapter  concentrates on attacks against American and Western
European Jews, as well as on Czech and Rumanian Jews who had
property in Germany and cannot easily be subsumed under the “Ostjuden”
category. As this chapter makes clear, not even an American passport
guaranteed safety from attacks, and women (in what might still be
considered a more chivalrous age) were also not spared mistreatment
by the SA. Monetary gain was a frequent motive for violent assaults,
. In Germany, discrimination against “Ostjuden” goes back to the Empire. In the United
States, immigrants from Eastern Europe were also identified as an undesirable group of
newcomers. Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, ), –.

  
many of which are reminiscent of organized crime, and politics was often
used as a pretext for enrichment and for venting pent-up frustration on
defenseless victims. One cause célèbre, the July  attack on the American
businessman Philip Zuckerman in Leipzig, shows that even when attacks
were an embarrassment for Germany’s reputation, so that it would have
been in the government’s interest to apprehend the attackers, arrests
proved difficult as the perpetrators were shielded by their SA superiors.
As a result of the publicity the attacks received worldwide, Germany’s
image abroad, which had just begun to recover from the country’s
stigmatization following World War I thanks to Gustav Stresemann’s
foreign policy, rapidly deteriorated.
Part II: The second part of this book concentrates on violence against
German Jews. Since boycott actions were often causally connected to
physical violence, they are discussed here as well. Chapter , “Violent
Attacks,” begins with a brief examination of antisemitic violence in the
Weimar Republic. While there was a significant amount of anti-Jewish
crime during the Weimar Republic, including assaults and cemetery and
synagogue desecrations, political opponents of the Nazi Party, in par-
ticular the SPD and DDP, usually made them public, if only to show up
their political adversary. Offenders, when apprehended, were sentenced
by the courts, though punishments were often lenient. In early March
, by contrast, violence was widespread, and the perpetrators mostly
went unpunished even when they were apprehended, as the documen-
tary evidence for crimes against Jews for the two-day period between
 and  March  in this chapter illustrates. Following these case studies
is an investigation into the frequent instances of expulsions from Germany
instigated by violent attacks and threats, which tore many families apart.
The chapter concludes with attacks in prisons and in the workplace, such as
against Jewish livestock dealers and butchers in stockyards.
Chapter  focuses on pillory marches and the so-called “Perfidy
Decree,” which was designed to repress rumors, criticism, and news
unwelcome to the regime. A widespread form of violence directed
against Jews and those who remained on a friendly footing with them


was public branding in its various forms. In “pillory marches” victims

were paraded through town by foot or on an oxcart accompanied by a
posse of SA men. Like other antisemitic crimes, pillory marches were
registered only indirectly through allusions in diplomatic reports, judicial
documents, intra-bureaucratic complaints, or newspaper articles. While
it is impossible to gauge their exact number, frequent references
to pillory marches in newspapers make it likely that most adults in
Germany would at least have heard of this very conspicuous form of
public humiliation in the spring of . Photographs of such events have
even been reprinted in history schoolbooks, though historical scholar-
ship has rarely focused on them. Another widespread form of pillorying
was the publication on city hall billboards or in newspapers of the names
of those who continued buying in Jewish shops. In  (and on various
occasions throughout the Third Reich) Nazis considered public stigma-
tization an effective means of socially destroying potential opponents,
while enforcing conformity on others. In fact, the elimination of the
private sphere and the remorseless dragging into the public realm of
matters that were previously private were hallmarks of the dictatorship.
This chapter also traces the origins of pillory marches as a form of
medieval and early modern punishment, which Nazis took up instinct-
ively as an effective means of destroying potential enemies, forcing
doubters into line and compelling them to profess allegiance to the
new regime. Those who stood apart were met with hostility as potential
opponents of the regime, lukewarm toward the “national revolution,”
and traitors to the German people.
The Heimtücke-Verordnung (Perfidy Decree), signed by President Hinden-
burg on  March , punished the circulation of rumors “designed to
seriously harm the welfare of the Reich or a Land or the reputation of the
Reich or a Land government or the parties or associations that support
these governments.”42 It granted authorities wide-ranging discretionary
. Paragraph  of the ordinance read: “Whoever intentionally puts forward or circulates an
untrue or grossly misrepresented claim of a factual nature that is designed to seriously
harm the welfare of the Reich or a Land or the reputation of the Reich or a Land

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body; a projection from the thoracic side-pieces, forming a long
pouch, into which a fold on the inner side of the elytra fits, the two
being subsequently locked by the action of some special projections.
This arrangement is similar to that which exists in the anomalous
family of water-beetles Pelobiidae. In order to make this mechanism
more perfect the side-pieces in Belostoma form free processes.
Martin has informed us that the young have the metasternal
episternum prolonged to form a lamella that he thinks may be for
respiratory purposes.[499] About twelve genera and upwards of fifty
species of Belostomidae are known. None exist in our isles, but
several species extend their range to Southern Europe. In the waters
of the warm regions of the continents of both the Old and New
Worlds they are common Insects, but as yet they have not been
found in Australia.
Fam. 24. Notonectidae.—Prosternum short, so that the legs are

placed near the back part of it as well as near the front; back of the
head overlapped by the front of the pronotum.—The water-boatmen
are extremely common in our ponds, where they may be seen rising
to the surface and raising the posterior extremity of the body for
breathing. They swim on their backs instead of in the usual position,
and have an elaborate arrangement of long hairs on the body to
assist them to carry about an air-supply. They are said to be lighter
than the water, and to have some difficulty in keeping away from the
surface. Notonecta glauca is the only British species, but we have a
second minute Insect, Plea minutissima, belonging to the family. It
lies in the mud at the bottom of shallow waters, and may sometimes
be fished up in great numbers. It is considered by some authors to
form a distinct family. The oviposition of Notonecta has been
observed by Regimbart; the eggs are inserted into the stems of
aquatic plants.
Fam. 25. Corixidae.—Prosternum short, as in Notonectidae; summit

of the head free from the thorax.—We have numerous species of the
genus Corixa in Britain; and others extremely similar in appearance
occur in various parts of the world. The head is remarkably free, and
capable of great rotation. On dissection it is found to be attached to
the thorax only by a narrow area; in this respect it differs widely from
Notonecta, which possesses an extremely large occipital foramen,
and the head of which possesses but little freedom of movement.
The extremely short proboscis is more or less retractile, and
therefore frequently appears absent. A second British genus consists
of a single species, Sigara minutissima. These Insects, unlike
Notonecta, are quite at home beneath the water, where they scurry
about with extreme rapidity, and occur sometimes in enormous
numbers. In Mexico the eggs of Corixa americana and of C.
femorata are used as food, and are said to be very nice. The Insects
themselves are used as food in both Mexico and Egypt. The species
of this family can make a noise beneath the water by rubbing the
front feet against the proboscis.[500] The males have a very complex
asymmetry of the terminal segments, and in some species possess
on one side of the dorsal surface a curious asymmetrical organ
consisting of rows of very closely-packed, intensely black, comb-like
plates, called by Buchanan White a strigil. This organ seems to be
similar to the peculiar structures found on the terminal segments of
certain species of Scutellerides.
Sub-Order II. Homoptera.[501]
Fam. 1. Cicadidae.—Head with three ocelli, placed triangularly on

the summit between the compound eyes; antennae consisting of a
short basal joint, surmounted by a hair-like process divided into
about five segments. Front femora more or less thick, armed with
teeth. Peduncle (or basal joints) of antennae without sensitive
organs.—This important family consists chiefly of large Insects, few
being as small as one inch across the expanded wings, while in
some the expanse is as much as seven inches. As a rule the four
wings are transparent and shining, with the nervures remarkably
distinct and dark coloured; but there are numerous forms where the
whole creature, including the wings, is highly pigmented in a showy
manner; frequently in black and yellow. Cicadas are said to be
without any special protection, and to be destroyed in considerable
numbers by birds and other animals. The body is broad and robust,
and is never shaped into the extravagant forms we meet with in
some of the other families of Homoptera.
Fig. 280—Cicada septendecim. North America. (After Riley.) A, Larva;

B, nymph; C, nymph skin after emergence of the imago, D; E,
section of twig with series of eggs; F, two eggs magnified.
Cicadidae are almost confined to the warmer regions of the earth,

but we have one species, a great rarity, in the extreme south of
England; altogether there are about 800 species known. These
Insects are seen above ground—so far as the life-histories are at
present known—only in the perfect condition, the creatures in their
earlier stages being subterranean and living on roots. As soon as the
individual comes out of the ground it splits open the nymph-skin, and
the perfect Cicada emerges. One species—the North American
Cicada septendecim—is a most notorious Insect owing to its life-
cycle of seventeen years. It is considered that the individual, after
nearly seventeen years of underground existence, comes to the
surface and lives for a brief period the life of a noisy Insect. This is
the only Insect at present known having so considerable a longevity.
This fact, and several other peculiarities, have attracted much
attention, so that there is an extensive literature connected with the
seventeen-year Cicada. It has a wide distribution over the United
States, but does not confine its appearance to every seventeenth
year, being found somewhere or other—frequently in numerous
localities—almost every year. The evidence as to its periodicity has
been obtained by taking the locality and other points into
consideration as well as the year of appearance. By so doing it has
been found possible to establish the existence of twenty-two broods
which are distinguished by consecutive numeration. This being done,
the evidence as to the years during which Cicadas have appeared in
any given locality is examined, and the result is believed to bear out
the view that the life-cycle of the individual Insect is really one of
seventeen years. According to this view there are, underground, in
certain localities individuals of different ages that will appear on the
surface as mature individuals in different years. Thus in 1885 it was
understood that there were underground in Alabama two broods, viz.
brood xviii. that would appear on the surface in 1894, and brood iv.
that would appear on the surface in 1896. The predictions made as
to the years in which Cicadas would appear in some given locality
are considered to have proved correct. Moreover, particular
entomologists have in certain localities verified by personal
examination the appearance of the Insects for several consecutive
periods of seventeen years. These facts appear fairly conclusive, but
they are much complicated by another point, viz. that in certain
localities the period is one of thirteen, not of seventeen, years. This
is to some extent a question of climate, the thirteen-year interval
being chiefly characteristic of the Southern States. It is not, however,
entirely so, for there are localities in which the broods have an
interval of either thirteen years or seventeen years. Another fact
should be remembered, viz. that it is admitted that not quite all the
individuals of a particular brood are true to their proper time of
appearance; in other words, a few specimens may appear
precociously a year or two before their comrades, while some may
lag behind to a considerable extent. It is therefore a matter for great
surprise that, under these circumstances, the broods should keep
distinct at all, for one would suppose that time-variation of this kind
would lead to completely obscuring the distinctness of the broods.
We must also call attention to the fact that both the seventeen-year
and the thirteen-year broods have a dimorphic form, or sub-species,
called C. cassinii which accompanies the ordinary form, with which it
is apparently as a rule not connected by intermediates.[502]
Cicadidae are provided with powerful ovipositors. The eggs of C.
septendecim are deposited in the woody stems of bushes; after
remaining there a few weeks the young hatch out, drop to the
ground, and, as previously stated, disappear for nearly seventeen
years, nearly the whole of which time is passed in the larval state,
the nymph-condition existing for only a few days. They feed on the
roots of various trees; it has been said that they are injurious in this
way, but other authorities maintain that they suck only a moist
exudation from the roots. It is very difficult to obtain information as to
their strange, prolonged, subterranean life; it said that the Insects
sometimes penetrate to a great depth—ten feet, even twenty feet are
mentioned;—and as great changes may take place on the surface
during their long lives, these Insect Rip Van Winkles sometimes
emerge in very strange conditions, and may appear even in deep
cellars. When the pupa comes to the surface it hooks itself on to the
stem of some plant or other object, the skin of the back splits, and
the Cicada emerges. Among the inexplicable peculiarities of this
Insect must be mentioned the fact that when emerging it sometimes
constructs chimneys, or flues, extending several inches above the
surface of the ground. The reason for this is much disputed; it was
said that they are for refuge against inundations, but this appears to
be very doubtful. Certain of the broods consist of an almost
incalculable number of individuals, and it is very strange to hear
woods, or other localities, that have been for many years free from
these Insects, all at once resounding with their noisy song. The
seventeen-year Cicada is considered to be doomed to a speedy
extinction; the extension of cultivation and building, and the
introduction to America of the English sparrow, are likely to prove too
much for the Insect.
Although Hemiptera are classified by many among the Ametabola or

Insects without metamorphosis, it is impossible to deny that the
Cicadidae exhibit a considerable amount of metamorphosis, and
they are usually mentioned as exceptional. The young (Fig. 280, A)
is totally unlike the adult in form and colour, and maintains, to a
certain extent, its existence by the aid of a different set of
implements. The larva of the Cicada is colourless, with an
integument of very feeble consistence, rather large antennae, and a
remarkable pair of fossorial legs; the wings are totally wanting. The
mode of passage from the larval to the pupal state has not been
recorded. The pupa, or nymph, differs from the larva by its much
shorter, compressed form; by being encased in a remarkably hard
shell; and by the antennae approximating in form to those of the
adult. It has short wing-pads at the sides of the body; the front legs
are remarkably powerful, and the creature is capable of moving
about; the imago escapes from the pupa by the splitting dorsally of
the middle of the thoracic segments. The empty pupa-skin does not
shrivel, but retains its form, and in countries where Cicadas occur,
frequently attracts attention by the strange form it presents, being
often placed in a conspicuous position.
Song.—Cicadas are the most noisy of the Insect world; the shrilling
of grasshoppers and even of crickets being insignificant in
comparison with the voice of Cicada. Darwin heard them in South
America when the Beagle was anchored a quarter of a mile from the
shore; and Tympanoterpes gigas, from the same region, is said to
make a noise equal to the whistle of a locomotive.[503] A curious
difference of opinion prevails as to whether their song is agreeable
or not; in some countries they are kept in cages, while in others they
are considered a nuisance. The Greeks are said to have decided in
favour of their performances, the Latins against them. Only the
males sing, the females being completely dumb; this has given rise
to a saying by a Greek poet (so often repeated that it bids fair to
become immortal) "Happy the Cicadas' lives, for they all have
voiceless wives."[504] The writer considers the songs of the
European species he has heard far from unpleasant, but he is an
entomologist, and therefore favourably prepossessed; and he admits
that Riley's description of the performances of the seventeen-year
Cicada is far from a satisfactory testimonial to the good taste of that
Insect; Riley says, "The general noise, on approaching the infested
woods, is a combination of that of a distant threshing-machine and a
distant frog-pond. That which they make when disturbed, mimics a
nest of young snakes or young birds under similar circumstances—a
sort of scream. They can also produce a chirp somewhat like that of
a cricket and a very loud, shrill screech prolonged for fifteen or
twenty seconds, and gradually increasing in force and then
decreasing." The object, or use of the noise is very doubtful; it is said
that it attracts the females to the males. "De gustibus non est
disputandum!" perhaps, however, there may be some tender notes
that we fail to perceive; and it may be that the absence of any
definite organs of hearing reduces the result of a steam-engine
whistle to the equivalent of an agreeable whisper. No special
auditory organs have been detected[505] as we have already
intimated; and certain naturalists, amongst whom we may mention
Giard, think that the Insects do not hear in our sense of the word, but
feel rhythmical vibrations; it is also recorded that though very shy the
Insects may be induced to approach any one who will stand still and
clap his hands—in good measure—within the range of their
sensibilities. There is a good deal of support to the idea that the
males sing in rivalry.
Vocal structures.—Although we may not be able to pronounce a

final opinion as to the value to the Insect of the sounds, yet we
cannot withhold our admiration from the structures from which they
proceed. These are indeed so complex that they must be ranked as
amongst the most remarkable voice-organs in the animal kingdom.
They are totally different from the stridulating organs that are found
in many other Insects, and are indeed quite peculiar to the
Cicadidae. Some difference of opinion has existed as to the manner
in which the structures act, but the account given by Carlet, some of
whose figures we reproduce, will, we believe, be found to be
essentially correct. The structures are partly thoracic and partly
abdominal. On examining a male Cicada there will be seen on the
under surface two plates—the opercula—usually meeting in the
middle line of the body and overlapping the base of the abdomen to
a greater or less extent according to the species, sometimes nearly
covering this part of the body; these are enlargements of the
metathoracic epimera; they can be slightly moved away from the
abdomen, and, as the latter part is capable of a still greater extent of
movement, a wide fissure may be produced, displaying the complex
structures. In order to see the parts it is better to cut away an
operculum; underneath it three membranes can be seen, an
external, the timbal; an anterior, the folded or soft membrane; and a
posterior, the mirror. This last is a most beautiful object, tensely
stretched and pellucid, yet reflecting light so as to be of varied
colours; there are also three stigmata, and some chambers
connected with the apparatus. The sound is primarily produced by
the vibrations of the timbal, to which a muscle is attached; the other
membranes are probably also thrown into a condition of vibration,
and the whole skeleton of the Insect helps to increase or modify the
sound, which is probably also influenced by the position of the
opercula. The stigmata probably play an important part by regulating
the tension of the air in the chambers. In the female some of the
structures are present in a rudimentary form, but there are no
muscles, and this sex appears to be really quite voiceless.
Fig. 281.—Musical apparatus of Cicada plebeia. (After Carlet.) A,

Ventral view (Operculum on right side is removed); ap, apophysis;
C, cavern; c, trochantin (cheville of Réaumur); ent, part of internal
skeleton of abdomen; mi, specular membrane; m.pl, soft or folded
membrane; P, base of leg; st, st′, st″, stigmata; t, drum "timbale";
v, operculum; 1a, first, 2a, second abdominal segment: B, same
seen laterally, portion of abdominal wall as well as operculum
removed; A, point of insertion of hind wing; Mes, mesothorax; sc,
scutum of metathorax; 3a, third abdominal segment; rest as in A.
Fam. 2. Fulgoridae.—Ocelli two (rarely three, or entirely obsolete),

placed beneath the eyes or near the eyes, usually in cavities of the
cheeks, antennae placed beneath the eyes, very variable in form;
usually of two joints terminated by a very fine hair, the second joint
with a peculiar texture of the surface, owing to the existence of
sensitive structures (Hansen). Form of head very diverse; vertex and
face forming either a continuous curve, or the planes of the vertex
and face forming an acute angle, or both prolonged so as to form a
projection or growth that may be monstrous. Prothorax neither
armed nor unusually developed.
Fig. 282—Fulgora candelaria. × 1. China.
This family is of large extent, and includes at present so great a

variety of forms that it is really almost impossible to frame a definition
that will apply to all. The unusual situation of the ocelli and the
peculiar second joint of the antennae must at present be taken as
the best diagnostic characters: occasionally a third ocellus is
present. Some of the Fulgoridae are amongst the largest Insects,
others are quite small. The family includes the so-called Lantern-
flies, in which the front of the head forms a huge misshapen
proboscis that was formerly believed to be luminous. Many of the
species are of brilliant or beautiful coloration. A great many—and of
very different kinds—have the curious power of excreting large
quantities of a white, flocculent wax. This is exhibited by our little
British Insects of the genus Cixius, and in some of the exotic forms is
carried to an extent that becomes a biological puzzle. The Tropical
American genus Phenax may be cited as an example; being about
an inch long it flies about with a large mass of this waxy substance
twice as long as itself; indeed, in the Mexican P. auricoma, the waxy
processes are four or five inches long. This wax forms a favourite
food of certain kinds of Lepidoptera, and two or three larvae of a
maggot-like nature may frequently be found concealed in the wax of
the live Fulgorids; this has been recorded by Westwood as occurring
in India; and Champion has observed it in the New World.[506] The
wax of Fulgorids is used by the Chinese for candles and other
purposes; and this white Insect-wax is said to be much esteemed in
India. Very curious chemical substances have been obtained from it,
but its importance in the economy of the Insects that produce it is
quite obscure. We have about seventy species of Fulgoridae in
Britain. They belong to the subfamilies Tettigometrides, Issides,
Cixiides, and Delphacides, which by many authors are treated as
separate families. The exotic subfamily Flatides is highly peculiar. In
some of its members the head is very different from that of the
ordinary forms, being narrow, and the vertex and front forming a
continuous curve. Some of these Insects are remarkably like
butterflies or moths (e.g. the African Ityraea nigrocincta and the
species of the genus Pochazia), but the young are totally unlike the
old, the posterior part of the body bearing a large bush of curled,
waxy projections, several times the size of the rest of the body.
Fig. 283—A, B, Heteronotus trinodosus. A, Male seen from above; B,

profile of female; a, terminal part of pronotum; b, terminal part of
abdomen: C, front view of head and pronotum of Cyphonia
clavata. Both species from Central America. (From Biol. Centr.
Amer. Rhynch. Homopt. II.)
Fam. 3. Membracidae.—Prothorax prolonged backwards into a

hood or processes of diverse forms; antennae inserted in front of the
eyes; ocelli two, placed between the two eyes.—This family is of
large extent but its members are chiefly tropical, and are specially
abundant in America. Although not of large size the Membracidae
are unsurpassed for the variety and grotesqueness of their shapes,
due to the unusual development of the pronotum. We figure two of
these forms (Fig. 283).[507] Very little is known about their habits and
life-histories. We have only two species of the family in Britain, and
these do not afford any ground for supposing that there are any
peculiarities in their lives at all commensurate with the oddness of
the Insect's structures. Belt has recorded the fact that in Nicaragua
the larvae of certain Homoptera were assiduously attended by ants
for the sake of a sweet juice excreted by the bugs, but it is by no
means clear that these larvae were really those of Membracidae. In
North America Ceresa bubalus and C. taurina place their eggs in an
extremely neat manner in the woody twigs of trees. The young have
but little resemblance to the adults, the great thoracic hood being
absent, while on the back there is on each segment a pair of long,
sub-erect processes having fringed, or minutely spiny, margins.[508]
Fam. 4. Cercopidae.—Ocelli two (occasionally absent) placed on

the vertex; antennae placed between the eyes. Thorax not peculiarly
formed.—In the characteristic forms of this family the front of the
vertex bears a suture, touched on each side by one at right angles to
it, or converging to it so as to form a triangle or a sort of embrasure;
the hind tibiae have only one to three strong spines. The Cercopidae
are much less extraordinary than many of the previously considered
families. But some of them have the habit of secreting a large
quantity of fluid; and when in the immature stages, certain of them
have the art of emitting the liquid in the form of bubbles which
accumulate round the Insect and conceal it. These accumulations of
fluid are called cuckoo-spits or frog-spits; and the perfect Insects are
known as frog-hoppers, their power of leaping being very great. The
most abundant of the frog-hoppers in our gardens is Philaenus
spumarius, a little Insect of about a quarter of an inch long, obscurely
coloured, with more or less definite pale spots; it is so variable in
colour that it has received scores of names. Some of the Insects do
not use their fluid in this manner, but eject it in the form of drops, and
sometimes cast them to a considerable distance. The phenomena
known as weeping-trees are due to Cercopidae; some of the species
make such copious exudations of this kind that the drops have been
compared to a shower of rain. In Madagascar it is said that Ptyelus
goudoti exudes so much fluid that five or six dozen larvae would
about fill a quart vessel in an hour and a half. The frog-spit is
considered by some naturalists to be a protective device; the larvae
are, however, a favourite food with certain Hymenoptera, which pick
out the larvae from the spits and carry them off to be used as stores
of provision for their larvae. In Ceylon the larva of Machaerota
guttigera constructs tubes fixed to the twigs of the tulip-tree, and
from the tube water is exuded drop by drop. According to Westwood,
this Insect is intermediate between Cercopidae and Membracidae.
[509]
Fam. 5. Jassidae.—Ocelli two, placed just on the front margin of the

head (almost in a line with the front of the eyes or more to the front)
or on the deflexed frons. Hind tibiae usually with many spines. This
vaguely limited family includes a very large number of small or
minute Insects, usually of narrow, parallel form, and frequently
excessively delicate and fragile. They are often mentioned under the
name of Cicadellinae. Ashmead distinguishes two families,
Bythoscopidae, in which the ocelli are clearly on the frons or front,
and Jassidae, in which they are on the upper edge thereof. Ulopa,
Ledra, and a few other exceptional forms, are also by many
distinguished as representatives of distinct families. Very little is
actually known as to the life-histories of these small and fragile
Insects, but it is believed that the eggs are usually deposited in the
leaves or stems of plants, and more particularly of grasses. In North
America the development of Deltocephalus inimicus, from hatching
to assumption of the adult form, has been observed by Webster to
occupy about six weeks. As Jassidae are numerous both in species
and individuals it is believed that they consume a considerable part
of the vegetation of pastures. Osborn has calculated that on an acre
of pasture there exist, as a rule, about one million of these hoppers,
and he considers they obtain quite as large a share of the food as
the Vertebrates feeding with them.
Fam. 6. Psyllidae.—Minute Insects with wings usually transparent,

placed in a roof-like manner over the body; with three ocelli, and
rather long, thin antennae of eight to ten joints. Tarsi two-jointed.—
These small Insects have been studied chiefly in Europe and North
America, very little information having yet been obtained as to the
exotic forms. They are about the size of Aphidae, but in form and
general appearance remind one rather of Cicadidae. The wings are
in many cases even more perfectly transparent than they are in
many Cicadidae. They are sometimes called springing plant-lice, as
their habit of jumping distinguishes them from the Aphidae. Löw has
called attention to the remarkable variation in colour they present in
conformity with either the age of the individual, the food-plant, the
climate, and, more particularly, the season of the year.[510] Réaumur
long since pointed out that at their ecdyses these Insects go through
a remarkable series of changes of colour, and Löw found that this did
not take place in the normal manner in the winter generation that
hibernates. This has been confirmed by Slingerland in North America
in the case of Psylla pyricola,[511] which has been introduced there.
He finds that there are several generations in the year, and that the
hibernating adults differ from the summer adults in size, being nearly
one-third larger; in their much darker colouring; and especially in the
coloration of the front wings.
Fig. 284—Psylla succincta. x 15. Europe. (After Heeger.) A, larva

before first moult. B, larva after third moult. C, adult.
In the earlier stages, Psyllidae differ greatly in appearance from the

adult forms; the legs and antennae in the newly hatched larvae are
short, and have a less number of joints. In the nymph the shape is
very peculiar, the large wing-pads standing out horizontally from the
sides of the body, so that the width of the creature is about as great
as the length. The period occupied by the development apparently
varies according to season. Witlaczil, who has given an account of
many details of the anatomy and histology of various Psyllidae,[512]
considers that there are four larval stages; Heeger's account of
Psylla succincta is not quite clear on this point, and Slingerland
indicates a stage more than this, the perfect Insect being disclosed
as the result of a fifth moult; it is probable that he is correct. In these
earlier stages the body bears long hairs called wax-hairs; according
to Witlaczil in the young larvae of certain species—Trioza rhamni,
e.g.—these are broad and flat, so as to make the body appear
studded with oval processes; he states that these hairs change their
form during the growth of the individual. Nothing is more remarkable
in Psyllidae than the amount of matter they secrete or exude from
their bodies; in some species the substance is a "honey-dew," and
the nymph may keep itself covered with a drop of it: in other cases it
is solid, as shown in Réaumur's figures of P. buxi, where this
exudation forms a string several times longer than the body, and
attached to it. Another form of exudation is a light downy or waxy
matter. Slingerland says that honey-dew was exuded by P. pyricola
in such quantities that it "literally rained from the trees upon the
vegetation beneath; in cultivating the orchard the back of the horse
and the harness often became covered with the sticky substance
dropping from the trees. It attracts thousands of ants, bees, and
wasps, which feed upon it." The writer last year observed in the New
Forest a stunted sloe-bush, about which a large number of Bombi
were busily occupied; and examination showed that they were
thrusting their proboscides into the curled and deformed leaves, in
which were secreted nymphs of a Psylla exuding honey-dew. It must
not be assumed that this honey-dew is the excrement of the Insect;
this also is known, and is a different substance. Those who have
tasted it say that the honey-dew has a clean, good flavour. The
source of the honey-dew is not quite certain, but it seems probable
that it comes, like the solid matter figured by Réaumur, directly from
the alimentary canal, and not from hairs or pores on the body.
Psyllidae give rise to definite formations or galls on certain plants;
sometimes these Psyllid galls are mere changes in form of a limited
part, or parts, of a leaf, giving rise either to crumpling or to growth of
a portion in one direction only, so that on one surface of the leaf a
swelling is formed, and on the opposite side a more or less deep
cavity in which the Insect dwells. A formation of this kind on the
leaves of Aegopodium podagraria is described by Thomas[513] who
states that the growth is due to the deposition of an egg of the
Psylla, and is independent of the after life of the Insect; a fungus—
Puccinia aegopodii—forms similar structures on the leaves.
Structures much more definite than this may be the result of the
attacks of Psyllidae; for an example the reader may refer to
Réaumur's account of Psylla buxi.[514] In Australia and Tasmania
there are Psyllidae known as Laap or Lerp Insects, the products of
which are called leaf-manna or Lerp, and are used as food. This
manna is a scale produced by the young Insect on the leaves of
Eucalyptus as a covering or protection. The scale is fastened to the
leaf by a hinge, and is somewhat like the shell of a cockle. Although
the scales are said to be in some cases objects of great beauty, very
little is known about these Australian Psyllidae, one of which has,
however, been referred by Schwarz to the genus Spondyliaspis,
Signoret.[515] About 160 species of Psyllidae are known to occur in
the Palaearctic region, and about fifty of them have been found in
Britain.[516]
Fam. 7. Aphidae (Plant-lice or Green-fly.)—Minute Insects; as

usually met with destitute of wings, though many individuals have
two pairs of transparent wings. Antennae long, or moderately long,
three- to seven-jointed; abdomen frequently with a pair of tubes
(siphons), or short processes on the upper side of the fifth abdominal
segment. Tarsi two-jointed, first joint sometimes excessively short.—
These soft-skinned Insects are frequently called blight, and are so
abundant in temperate climates that a garden, however small, is
sure to afford abundance of specimens during the warm months of
the year. This great abundance is due to peculiarities in the
physiological processes that render these obscure little animals
highly important creatures; the individual life for several generations
is restricted to constant, or at any rate copious, imbibition of food,
accompanied by an almost uninterrupted production of young by
parthenogenetic females, the young so produced becoming rapidly
(sometimes in the course of eight or ten days, but more usually in
about twenty days) themselves devoted to a similar process; so that
in the comparatively short period of a few months the progeny
resulting from a single individual is almost innumerable. This
remarkable state of affairs is accompanied by other peculiarities of
physiology, with the result that the life-histories of successive
generations become very diverse, and complex cycles of series of
generations differing more or less from one another are passed
through, the species finally returning to bi-sexual reproduction, and
thus inaugurating another cycle of generations. The surprising nature
of these facts has in the last 150 years caused an immense amount
of discussion, but no satisfactory light has yet been thrown on the
conditions that really give rise to the exceptional phenomena. These
phenomena are (1) parthenogenesis; (2) oviparous and viviparous
reproduction; (3) the production of generations of individuals in which
the sexes are very unequally represented, males being frequently
entirely absent; (4) the production of individuals differing as to the
acquirement of wings, some remaining entirely apterous, while
others go on to the winged form; (5) the production of individuals of
the same sex with different sexual organs, and distinctions in the
very early (but not the earliest) stages of the formation of the
individual; (6) differences in the life-habits of successive generations;
(7) differences in the habits of individuals of one generation, giving
rise to the phenomenon of parallel series. All these phenomena may
occur in the case of a single species, though in a very variable
extent.
The simple form of Aphid life may be described as follows:—eggs

are laid in the autumn, and hatch in the spring, giving rise to females
of an imperfect character having no wings; these produce living
young parthenogenetically, and this process may be repeated for a
few or for many generations, and there may be in these generations
a greater or less number of winged individuals, and perhaps a few
males.[517] After a time when temperature falls, or when the supply
of food is less in quantity, or after a period of deliberate abstention
from food, sexual individuals are produced and fertilised eggs are
laid which hatch in the spring, and the phenomena are repeated. In
other cases these phenomena are added to or rendered more
complicated by the intercalated parthenogenetic generations
exhibiting well-marked metamorphosis, of kinds such as occur in
apterous or in winged Insects; while again the habits of successive
generations may differ greatly, the individuals of some generations
dwelling in galls, while those of other generations live underground
on roots.
Parthenogenesis.—Returning to the various kinds of peculiarities

we have enumerated on the preceding page, we may remark that
the phenomena of parthenogenesis have been thoroughly
established as occurring in Aphidae since Bonnet discovered the fact
150 years ago; and though they have not been investigated in much
detail it is known that the parthenogenesis is usually accompanied
by the production of young all of the female sex. In other cases
males are parthenogenetically produced; but whether these males
come from a female that produces only that sex is not yet, so far as
the writer knows, established. A note by Lichtenstein[518] suggests
that usually only one sex is produced by a parthenogenetic female,
but that both sexes are sometimes so produced. There is not at
present any species of Aphid known to be perpetuated by an
uninterrupted series of parthenogenetic generations. It was formerly
supposed that there are no males at all in Chermes, but, as we shall
subsequently show, this was erroneous. It has, however, been
observed that a series of such generations may be continued without
interruption for a period of four years, and we have no reason to
suppose that even this could not be much exceeded under
favourable conditions. The parthenogenetic young may be produced
either viviparously or oviparously, according to species.
Oviparous and viviparous reproduction.—The distinction between

these two processes has been extensively discussed, some
naturalists maintaining that they are thoroughly distinct ab initio. This
view, however, cannot be sustained. The best authorities are agreed
that in the earliest processes of individualisation the ovum, and the
pseudovum[519] giving rise to a viviparous individual, are
indistinguishable. Leydig, Huxley, Balbiani, and Lemoine are agreed
as to this. Nevertheless, differences in the development occur
extremely early. The nature of these differences may be briefly
described by saying that in the viviparous forms the embryonic
development sets in before the formation of the egg is properly
completed. Balbiani says, "In fact at this moment [when the
viviparous development is commencing] the germ [pseudovum] is far
from having obtained the development it is capable of, and from
having accumulated all the matter necessary for the increase of the
embryo, so that the evolution of the former coincides, so to speak,
with that of the latter. On the other hand, in the true ovum the two
processes are chronologically separate, for the rudiment of the new
individual never appears before the egg has completed the growth of
its constituent parts."[520] As regards the difference in structure of
the organs of viviparously and oviparously producing individuals, it is
sufficient to remark that they are not of great importance, being
apparently confined to certain parts remaining rudimentary in the
former. Leydig, indeed, found an Aphis in which certain of the egg-
tubes contained eggs in various stages of development, and others
embryos in all stages.[521]
As regards the physiology of production of winged and wingless

individuals there has been but little exact inquiry. Vast numbers of
individuals may be produced without any winged forms occurring,
while on the other hand these latter are occasionally so abundant as
to float about in swarms that darken the air; the two forms are
probably, however, determined by the supply of food. The winged
forms are less prolific than the apterous forms; and Forbes has
noticed in Aphis maidi-radicis, where the generations consist partly
of apterous and partly of winged individuals, that when the corn
begins to flag in consequence of the attacks of the Aphis, then the
proportion of winged individuals becomes large.[522] The
appearance of winged individuals is frequently accompanied by a
peculiar change of habit; the winged individuals migrating to another
plant, which in many cases is of a totally different botanical nature
from that on which the apterous broods were reared: for instance
Aphis mali, after producing several apterous generations on apple,
gives rise to winged individuals that migrate to the stems of corn or
grass, and feeding thereon commence another cycle of generations.
The study of this sort of Aphis-migration is chiefly modern, but many
very curious facts have already been brought to light; thus
Drepanosiphum platanoides, after producing a certain number of
viviparous generations on maple (Acer), quits this food-plant for
another, but after two or three months returns again to the maple,
and produces sexual young that lay eggs.[523] Histories such as this
are rather common. Even more interesting are the cases of those
species that, after some weeks of physiological activity on a plant,
pass into a state of repose on the same plant, and then after some
weeks produce sexual young. On the whole, it would appear that the
appearance of winged forms is a concomitant of decreasing nutrition.
It is a very remarkable fact that the sexually perfect females are
invariably apterous, and this is frequently also the case with the
males. It is also highly remarkable that the sexually perfect
individuals are of comparatively small size. There are at least three
kinds of males in Aphidae—1, winged males; 2, wingless males with
mouth well developed; 3, wingless small males with mouth absent.
As regards some of these points the conditions usual in Insect life
are reversed.[524] Huxley inclined to treat all these products of a
fertilised egg, that are antecedent to another process of
gamogenesis (i.e. production with fertilisation), as one zoological
individual: in that case the Aphis zoological individual is winged
before attaining the mature state, and is wingless and smaller when
mature. Some species may have as a rule two, others three, winged
generations in a year.
Fig. 285—Chermes abietis; hibernating female or "winter-mother."

Europe. Much magnified. (After Cholodkovsky.)
Parallel series.—In certain cases individuals of one generation
assume different habits, and so set up the phenomenon known as
parallel series. This has been recently investigated in the genus
Chermes by Blochmann, Dreyfus, and Cholodkovsky. This latter
savant informs us[525] that a wingless parthenogenetic female of
Chermes hibernates on a fir-tree—Picea excelsa—and in the spring
lays numerous eggs; these hatch, and by the effects of suction of the
Chermes on the young shoots, galls are formed (Fig. 286), in which
the Insects are found in large numbers; when they have grown the
galls open, and allowing the Insects to escape these moult and
become winged females. They now take on different habits; some of
them remain on the Picea, lay their eggs thereon, and out of these
there are produced young that grow into hibernating females, which
next spring produce galls as their grandmothers did; but another
portion migrates to the Larch (Larix); here eggs are laid, from which
proceed wingless parthenogenetic females, that hibernate on their
new or secondary plant, and in the following spring lay their eggs
and give rise to a dimorphic generation, part of them becoming
nymphs and going on to the winged condition, while the other part
remain wingless and lay eggs, that give rise to yet another wingless
generation; in fact, a second pair of parallel series is formed on the
new plant, of which one is wingless, and exclusively
parthenogenetic, and continues to live in this fashion for an indefinite
period on the secondary plant, while the other part becomes winged;
these latter are called sexuparous, and go back to the Picea, and
there lay eggs, that give rise to the sexual forms. If we would
summarise these facts with a view to remembering them, we may
say that a migration of a part of a generation from the Picea was
made with a view of producing a sexual generation, but that only a
portion of the migrants succeeded in effecting the object of the
migration, and this only in their third generation. Thus portions
remained on the Picea, producing unisexual (female) individuals,
and a portion of those that emigrated to the Larix remained thereon,
producing also unisexual (female) individuals, while the others
returned to the Picea and produced a sexual generation. How long
the production of the unisexual generations may continue has not
been determined.

Before The Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and The Reaction of German Elites and Institutions During The Nazi Takeover Hermann Beck

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Before The Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and The Reaction of German Elites and Institutions During The Nazi Takeover Hermann Beck

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Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic

Violence and the Reaction of German

BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford,  ,

German Nationals).1 As I went through conservative party ﬁles, I came

emphasized the prevalence of anti-Jewish attacks in the spring of , let

violating what they considered the rules of gradual historical development.

and comfort, as well as greater social prestige than its counterparts in

organization ﬁles yielded no concrete results, and what little I found in

Nationals and the Nazis after Hitler became Chancellor on  January

List of Abbreviations xvii

PART I. VIOLENCE AGAINST FOREIGN JEWS

. Violence against “Ostjuden” in the Winter and Spring of  

. “Ostjuden” as Predetermined Targets: a History of

. Attacks against American and West European Jews,

PART II. VIOLENCE AGAINST GERMAN JEWS

. Violent Attacks 

. Pillory Marches and the Perﬁdy Decree 

. Legal and Economic Discrimination 

Impact of the April Legislation 

PART III. REACTIONS TO ANTISEMITIC VIOLENCE

. The Protestant Church and the “Jewish Question:” the

. Protestant Church Leaders and the “Jewish Question:”

. The Protestant Church between Action and Silence 

. The German Catholic Church between Doctrine and

. Reactions of the German Administrative and Judicial

. Reactions of Hitler’s Conservative Coalition Partner 

Epilogue: How Could it Happen? 

ADGB Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, General German Trade

Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München, BayHStaA

The passivity, the silence of the respectable people . . . [was] just as

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/6/2022, SPi

Munich 0 60 120 240 Kilometers

German Borders 1933

The Search for Archival Evidence

  

On the other hand, it quickly became apparent that the direct

Hauptschriftleiters des sozialdemokratischen ‘Volksblattes’ in Detmold auf dem Transport

. Staatsarchiv München, Polizeidirektion München, nos. ; –; –;

  

the police quickly became known to attackers, victims, and potential

. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München; Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden; Land-

when the killers were suspected or known.11 Resumption of legal pro-

  

Times, Manchester Guardian, and countless other newspapers and

The Wider Implications: Which Institutions

In order to assess which institutions of the German State and society

  

a removal of pro-Republican forces that followed closely on the heels of

  

  

. Hermann Beck, “Konﬂikte zwischen Deutschnationalen und Nationalsozialisten während

  

  

. See Chapter  below.

questionnaires dealing with the “Reichswehr and National Socialism

  

Physical violence was abundant, as was the wanton destruction of

  

was public branding in its various forms. In “pillory marches” victims

Fam. 24. Notonectidae.—Prosternum short, so that the legs are

Fam. 25. Corixidae.—Prosternum short, as in Notonectidae; summit

Sub-Order II. Homoptera.[501]