The German Jews Under Hitler

By Donald L. Niewyk

Arnold Paucker, Sylvia Gilchrist, and Barbara Suchy, editors. Die juden im Nationalsozialistischen DeutschlandlThe Jews in Nazi Germany 1933-1943. Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1986. xxiv, 426 pages.

Peter Pulzer, The Beginning of the End. Peter Gay, In Deutschland zu Hause: Die Juden der Weimarer Zeit. Werner E. Mosse, German Jews: Citizens of the Republic. Arnold Paucker, Jewish Self-Defense. Ismar Schorsch, German Judaism: From Confession to Culture. Julius Carlebach, Orthodox Jewry in Germany: The Final Stages. Reinhard Rarup, Das Ende der Emanzipation: Die antijUdische Politik in Deutschland von der "Machtergreifung" bis zurn Zweiten Weltkrieg. Steven M. Lowenstein, The Struggle for Survival of Rural Jews in Germany, 1933-1938: The Case of Bezirksamt Weissenburg, Mittelfranken. Herbert A. Strauss, Jewish Autonomy Within the Limits of National Socialist Policy: The Communities and the Reichsvertretung. Avraham Barkai, Der wirtschaftliche Existenzkampf der Juden im Dritten Reich, 1933-1938. A. 1. Sherman, A Jewish Bank During the Schacht Era: M. M. Warburg & Co., 1933-1938. David Kramer, Jewish Welfare Work Under the Impact of Pauperization. Trude Maurer, Auslandische Juden in Deutschland, 1933- 1939. Werner T. Angress, JCidische Jugend zwischen nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung und judischer Wiedergeburt. Hajo Bernett, Die judische Turn- und Sportbewegung als Ausdruck der Selbstfinclung und Selbstbehauptung des cleutschen Judenturns. Joseph Walk, Jadische Erziehung geistiger Widerstand. Michael Daxner, Die private judische Waldschule Kaliski in Berlin, 1932-1939. Herbert Freeden, Kultur "nur fur Juden": "Kulturkampf' in der judischen Presse in Nazideutschland. Volker Dahm, Judische Verleger, 1933-1938. Claudia Koonz, Courage and Choice Among German-Jewish Women and Men. Rita Thalmann, JCidische Frauen nach dem Pogrom 1938. Abraham Margaliot, Emigration-Planung und Wirklichkeit. lehuda Reinharz, Hashomer Hazair in Nazi Germany. Otto D. Kulka, The Reiclisvereinigung and the Fate of the German Jews, 1938/9-1943: Continuity or Discontinuity in German-Jewish History in the Third Reich. Ian Kershaw, German Popular Opinion and the "Jewish Question," 1939-1943: Some Further Reflections.

Quite a few eyebrows were raised when the Leo Baeck Institute announced that Berlin was to be the site of its 1985 conference entitled "Self-Assertion in Adversity: The Jews in National Socialist Germany, 1933-1939." Never before in its thirty-year history had the institute held a general meeting in Germany- let alone in Berlin, the very center of evil in the Third Reich. For those participants who had not seen the city in nearly fifty years, the occasion must have called forth particularly strong feelings.1

Peter Gay, who had left Berlin in 1938, struck just the right note when he reminded the conference that his native city, long a center of light and life for the Jews before 1933, preserved a measure of tolerance and shielded thousands of Jews from the authorities when it was the capital of Nazi Germany. The progressive social and political values fostered by its business and cultural elites had enabled German Jewry to make giant strides in the decades between emancipation and Hitler, and especially during the Weimar Republic. As a result, the Jews had become thoroughly acculturated without surrendering their Jewish identity. In short, they felt at home in Germany, and with good reason. Gay places this analysis in opposition to the views of Gershom Scholem and others who maintain that German Jews, deluding themselves with the myth of the German-Jewish symbiosis, carried on what was, in reality, a one-sided love affair with Germany and thereby helped to bring about their own downfall.2 Gay is probably correct when he attributes this perverse reading of history to old battles between German and Eastern Jews, but it also owes something to rivalries between Zionist and liberal factions within German Jewry itself.

It was precisely because most Jews felt at home in Germany that they underestimated the Nazi threat, both before and after 1933. Peter Pulzer's insightful and learned introductory comments make plain the extent to which the Jews' familiarity with prejudice and their successful opposition to political antisernitism before 1933 dulled some of their sense of urgency. Nor did they feel alone, having found loyal allies among liberals and social democrats. This viewpoint is supported by Arnold Paucker's candid reassessment of the successful prosecutions of antisernites in the courts of the Weimar Republic by lawyers from the Jewish self-defense organization, the Centralverein.3

Werner E. Mosse, somewhat less impressed by the Jews' progress than by the growth of Judeophobia and the virtual exclusion of Jews from high public office during the Weimar years, notes, however, the increase in mixed marriages during the same period. It was, he avers, a time when Jews either strove for assimilation or worked out a modus vivendi with Gentiles that was based on assumptions of separate development. The latter understanding broke down only very gradually beginning in 1930, with the result that 1933 was not at first perceived as a catastrophic break with the past. Mosse's contention about separate Jewish evolution parallels the thesis of his recent study of Jewish economic achievements: German Jews carved out their own distinct spheres within the mainstream of Germany between 1820 and 1935.4

The problem of Nazism was, then, chiefly one of perception, for the Jews even more than for the rest of the German population. What, exactly, were Hitler's plans for the Jews? If he had any at all, they were obscured by what scholars usually describe as the "institutionalized anarchy" of administration in the Third Reich. Studies of Nazi policies toward the Jews by Karl Schleunes and Uwe Dietrich Adam inform the works of several symposium participants.5 Peter Pulzer argues that dismantling of emancipation "proceeded fitfully and unsystematically" and "varied from place to place according to local traditions and the arbitrary behaviour of particular individuals" (p. 26). Werner T. Angress describes the exclusion of Jews from the German economy and society as "unsystematic, selective, [and] arbitrary" (p. 212). Since Hitler neglected or consciously decided not to formulate Jewish policy, rivalries among organs of state and party caused it to bounce erratically between boycotts, violence, legislation, and "Aryanization" with only the general goals of apartheid and Jewish emigration in mind.

This view comes under attack by Reinhard Rurup in what is undoubtedly the most provocative and controversial essay in the collection. For Rurup the speed and uniformity of purpose shown by Nazi institutions in their pursuit of a judenfrei Germany are vastly more impressive than temporary differences of opinion within the Nazi hierarchy about how best to implement anti-Jewish policies. Borrowing from Gunter Morsch the term "calculated improvisation" to describe those policies, RUrup stresses the pragmatic and cynical nature of short-term concessions to Jews in important sectors of the economy. Bureaucrats who have been congratulated for defining Jews in the narrowest possible terms, thus sparing Germans of mixed race from persecution, were really working to make initial antisernitic policies function smoothly, argues Rurup. As for the Nuremberg Laws, usually described as hasty improvisations designed to end racist violence without alienating its perpetrators, they were in fact carefully prepared over a period of months. Only the moment of their publication was spontaneous, insists Rurup, who criticizes Adam and Schleunes for uncritically accepting the self-serving version of the Laws' genesis by Bernhard Losener, the expert on racial matters in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Obviously Rurup could not hope to sweep away traditional views of Jewish policy in Nazi Germany in a few pages, but his essay promises to stimulate a new round of research into a topic that is absolutely crucial to an understanding of the nature of Nazi totalitarianism and the place of antisemitism in Nazi ideology and practice.

Rurup's thesis probably does not add to our understanding of Jewish reactions to Nazi policies, however. Anyone supposing that Rurup's findings support allegations of Jewish self-delusion would do well to heed Herbert A. Strauss's observation that, although the Nazi leaders almost certainly planned all along to radicalize their persecution of Jews, the victims could perceive only the near chaos of harassment and sufferance combined with legal discrimination.6

Strauss goes on to point out that correct legal and formalized administrative relations between bureaucrats and Jews continued to be observed for years after 1933 along lines that had been well established before Hitler came to power. The state also continued to recognize Jewish community autonomy after 1933 as it had before. No wonder the Jews interpreted those policies as hopeful signs for the survival of at least some of their coreligionists in Germany rather than as a means of disguising ultimate Nazi goals.

Yet another source of hope was the German public's lack of enthusiasm for antisernitic violence. Ian Kershaw adds a few afterthoughts to his outstanding study of popular attitudes in Bavaria during the Nazi years, chiefly in response to objections raised by Otto D. Kulka and Aron Rodrigue that he underestimated the cumulative effects of anti-Jewish propaganda in ascribing "indifference" to Germans in their attitudes toward Jews.7 Kershaw concedes that there may have been a hardening of German attitudes on the "Jewish Question," especially during the war years; but he stands by his belief that it never ranked very high among people's concerns. Only a small minority were actively antisemitic; the rest displayed varying degrees of apathy, indifference, and passive compliance. As Kershaw points out, a great deal depends on how one interprets Sicherheitsdienst reports, and he is probably correct to caution against uncritical acceptance of ritual pro-Nazi statements that are found therein. If most Germans were indifferent to the increasingly depersonalized and invisible Jews, it was perhaps natural for the latter to take comfort in the Nazis' failure to mobilize the masses for racial war. Some Jews may even have concluded that the unpopularity of radical antisemitism would stay the Nazi hand. The Nazis, of course, noticed something different, namely, that virtually no one was prepared to stand up for the Jews.

The Nazis' failure to persuade Germans to embrace radical antisemitism comes through in Steven Lowenstein's fascinating case study of three rural Jewish communities in the district of Weissenburg between 1933 and 1938. Located in the Nazi stronghold of Protestant Central Franconia, these very traditional Jewish communities of shopkeepers, cattle dealers, and their families were used to social isolation and at first felt only sporadic economic antisernitism in the form of personal attacks by competitors. And yet, most of their neighbors continued to do business with them as before. It required action from above in the form of Aryanizing shops and revoking cattle dealers' licenses to drive the Jews away. Even after that happened in 1936 and 1937, the largest of the communities, that in Treuchtlingen, held out until its synagogue was burned and its school was closed in the Kristallnacht pogrom. As Lowenstein admits, too much should not be made of the experiences of such a small group of Jews, particularly since most German Jews were urbanized. It is nothing less than remarkable, however, that in places where Nazism was strongest and the Jews least anonymous, antisemitism could fall far short of Hitler's desires.

When and why German Jews lost hope for a future in Germany is central to about a third of the essays. The contention of Pulzer and Strauss that the Nuremberg Laws were decisive in convincing both organized Jewry and large numbers of individual Jews to abandon that hope is confirmed by Abraham Margaliot's careful reconstruction of Jewish emigration policies. In the early years of Nazi rule, after the initial panicked flight of several thousand Jews early in 1933, generally only the Zionist minority and the young Jews increasingly influenced by Zionism committed themselves to departure for Palestine. Jehuda Reinharz describes the activities of the militant Zionist youth group Hashomer Hazair in preparing its members for the new homeland. Its membership, however, was small and consisted largely of Eastern European Jews. Before the Nuremberg Laws, most German Jews hoped to survive in their homeland. But by 1936 the debates between Zionists and liberals had shifted from the question of whether to emigrate to a discussion of which country might provide a new home-most Zionists insisting on Palestine, their detractors often looking elsewhere, principally the United States. By that year, too, Jewish schools were dropping all pretense of preparing pupils to be both good Germans and good Jews, as articles by Joseph Walk and Michael Daxner demonstrate. From that time on, curricula were clearly oriented toward furnishing young Jews with linguistic and vocational skills that would enable them to take up new lives abroad. Margaliot demonstrates that actual emigration did not increase dramatically in 1936, but that applications to do so did; as always, the biggest obstacle was finding places to go. Evidently few Jews were reassured by the official Nazi line that the new legislation provided a secure place for them as "subjects of the state" (Reichsangehdrige).

And yet, Margaliot shows that Jewish commitment to planned emigration was unaffected by this increased desperation to leave. Already in 1933, the Zionists had come out for policies that took into account the equally pressing needs of their coreligionists in the Eastern European lands and the limits on immigration into Palestine. Neither the Zionists nor their adversaries wanted a return to the panic conditions of early 1933. Planning continued to be the approach advocated by all Jewish leaders until Nazi pressures for forced mass emigration wrecked their projects in 1938. Until then, virtually all German Jews, including the Zionists, believed that at least a remnant of Jews, those least able or willing to leave, would live in Germany indefinitely. Margaliot's defense of the reasonableness of these policies appears irrefutable: the Jews had no way of knowing how rapidly and unreasonably the Nazis would move against them; and even if they did, they lacked the power to alter events in any significant way. Their policies, elaborated under conditions that were scarcely ideal, prepared more than 100,000 emigrants both vocationally and psychologically, and provided many of them with vital economic assistance.

The pauperization of the Jews has long been known to have contributed mightily to their despair over surviving in Germany. Avraham Barkai here summarizes the main points of his thesis, placing mass impoverishment earlier than previously believed.8 Usually attributed to the last great Aryanization campaign begun late in 1937, pauperization was, Barkai maintains, well under way by then, with most middle- class Jews deprived of regular incomes and living on what was left of their savings. Until 1938 Hjalmar Schacht might shield a few prominent Jews, as A. J. Sherman demonstrates in the case of Hamburg banker Max Warburg. But Barkai portrays Schacht as preoccupied with the well-being of the economy, not that of the Jews, the vast majority of whom knew by 1937 that they had nothing to look forward to in Germany but destitution. Should future research substantiate Barkai's thesis, the impact would be far-reaching. For one thing, Rurup's interpretation of the consistency and celerity of Nazi Jewish policies will take on added force, since Barkai underlines what he views as the smooth cooperation of party, government, and private institutions in squeezing the Jews out of the economy. Such substantiation will also give added weight to economic motives as opposed to purely political and social concerns arising from the Nuremberg Laws in impelling more and more Jews to decide on emigration in 1936 and 1937.

Just how Jews reached a determination to depart is something about which we know little. In one of the most stimulating contributions to the symposium, Claudia Koonz suggests that Jewish women may have played crucial roles in moving their families toward the difficult decision to emigrate. Masculine values may have impelled Jewish men to stand their ground, while their business experience perhaps led them to believe that loopholes in the Nazi system could be exploited to the Jews' benefit. Jewish women, on the other hand, were less assimilated into comparatively tolerant business and professional circles than were Jewish men and more aware of the social antisemitism experienced in schools and neighborhoods. As a result, she argues, they were quicker to perceive the full dimensions of the danger and more willing to chance starting over in other countries. In two-thirds of Koonz's small sampling (she admits that these are the findings of a pilot study), Jewish women pressed for emigration against male objections. Here is a fruitful subject for additional research.

Those German Jews who were unable to leave shared with those who chose to stay the difficulties of adjusting to unpredictable Nazi rule. David Kramer reminds us that one of German Jewry's greatest achievements was the maintenance of a system of welfare agencies and programs that served the growing numbers of increasingly pauperized coreligionists. It was not, of course, a creation of that period but had grown up in the decades preceding 1933 in order to aid Eastern Jewish immigrants and, during the Weimar years, increasing numbers of German Jews who had been rendered redundant by structural changes in the German economy. The remarkable thing is that the Jews were able to keep their welfare agencies going well after 1933 as the burdens on them multiplied and the pool of potential donors declined. Kramer's figures show that in 1935-- 1936, Jews gave half as much again per capita to the Jewish Winter Aid as non-Jews contributed to the Nazi Winter Aid program; it is unclear, however, whether this says more about Jewish success or Nazi failure. As Kramer admits, there has not been enough research on Jewish welfare during the Nazi years. We still do not know precisely how well the welfare agencies fared under the far more difficult conditions after 1937, nor are we well informed about the extent to which Jews were denied public welfare benefits. Anecdotal evidence suggests that local Nazi officials increasingly violated Jewish rights to such benefits before 1938, but there is no precise picture of how rapidly that practice evolved and whether there were significant regional and local variations in its severity.

That Eastern European Jews, traditionally overrepresented among recipients of Jewish welfare, were also arbitrarily granted or refused state assistance reinforces the impression of chaotic Nazi policies. Trude Maurer's well-documented essay shows that in other respects foreign Jews were sometimes treated better, sometimes worse than German Jews. Although occasionally denied employment and residency permits and expelled for minor offenses, they were protected by their foreign citizenship; the Nazis dared not risk foreign retaliation against German citizens abroad. Most precarious was the position of Jewish immigrants whose Weimar-era naturalizations were revoked by Germany's new masters. Now stateless, such Jews were fair game for Nazi harassment and were seriously handicapped in securing entry to places of refuge. Maurer stresses the Eastern Jews' complete integration into German Jewish welfare schemes as well as their plucky self-help programs, which in practice concentrated on legal defense measures.

What Herbert A. Strauss refers to as German Jewry's "vibrant subculture" deserves a place alongside welfare assistance in any assessment of the Jewish communities during the prewar Nazi years. Several contributions to the symposium stress youth culture. The persecution of young Jews in public schools was one of the forces that impelled Jews to leave small communities for cities with Jewish schools. By 1937 two-thirds of Jewish pupils attended such urban schools, which Joseph Walk credits with fostering both Jewish identity and "spiritual resistance" to Nazi hostility. The cooperation of Zionists, liberals, and Orthodox Jews, which would have been unlikely under normal circumstances, permitted the creation of a unified curriculum that shifted from traditional education toward practical preparation for emigration as the future for Jews in Germany grew darker. Werner T. Angress shows that the various Jewish youth groups did much the same kinds of things, often in the face of parental hostility. The Jewish sport clubs that ballooned when the German clubs expelled non-Arvans in 1933 played a similar role. The essay by Hajo Bernett describes how the clubs helped dispel the Jews' self-image of physical weakness. It also notes the not entirely friendly rivalries that grew up between teams from Zionist and anti-Zionist clubs. Of special interest is Bernett's description of the Nazis' attempts to disguise their discrimination against Jewish athletes on the German Olympic team in 1936 by recruiting the half-Jew Helene Mayer to return from the United States to fence for Germany.

German Jews have also been credited with generating an internal "Jewish renaissance" under Nazi rule, a massive immersion in Jewish culture without parallel in recent European history.9 The contributions of Volker Dahm and Herbert Freeden cast doubts on the notion. Dahm's study of the Jewish book trade in Nazi Germany suggests that there was neither the time nor the freedom to produce any such renaissance. The well-known Jewish classics published by the Schocken Press, planned for the most part before 1933, undoubtedly fostered Jewish self-awareness and brought comfort to their readers. That they were the most read literature among German Jews is much less certain. It is implausible that this thoroughly acculturated group would suddenly lose their taste for Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, as Herbert Freeden's study of the Jews' cultural organization, the Kulturbund deutscher juden, bears out. The vigorous debate in the Jewish press (Freeden calls it a Kulturkampf)between Zionists and liberals over whether the organization should foster purely Jewish or European culture signified little. Jewish audiences voted with their money and their feet for books, plays, operas, and concerts without any particular regard for Jewish origins or content.

The upholding of a vibrant Jewish subculture impresses Peter Pulzer as a form of resistance to Nazi persecution. Arnold Paucker doubts that more direct forms of resistance were within reach, holding that organized Jewry was in no position to offer more than ineffectual formal protests against the regime on any significant issue. 10 He is contradicted by Otto D. Kulka's analysis of the last central organization of the German Jews, the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, established in February 1939. In the past it has been viewed as little more than a creature of the Gestapo, and hence as quite unlike earlier Jewish central organizations under the Nazis. Kulka uses both Nazi documents and the files of the Reichsvereinigung, recently discovered in East Berlin, to argue that the organization arose in part from the dissatisfaction of Jewish leaders themselves with the federal structure of the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland and that there was considerable continuity in the leadership of the two organizations. Moreover, Kulka asserts that the Reichsvereinigung carried on the old struggles to promote education, welfare assistance, and emigration, adding to those efforts courageous but unsuccessful intervention with Eichmann for the purpose of stopping regional deportations in 1940. The new organization also warned Jews who were away from their homes in the districts initially affected by deportation orders not to return. A lively debate followed the paper in Berlin about whether the conditions under which Jewish leaders had to work after 1938 can faithfully be reconstructed from the written documents. This writer finds himself in agreement with the participant who observed that the Reichsvereinigung, like the Jewish Councils in occupied Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, had no choice but to function as a creature of the Third Reich. Terms such as resistance and collaboration ought to be used cautiously, if at all. The best that organized German Jewry could hope for was to buy time and survive.

The contributions of women to the survival of the German Jews is the subject of Rita Thalmann's presentation to the Berlin symposium. Before 1938 Jewish communities and organizations treated women as they always had, which is to say condescendingly. Thalmann attributes women's growing importance thereafter at all levels of Jewish institutional life to changes in the Jewish communities and in the threats against them. The massive emigration of young and male Jews after 1938 thrust increasing responsibilities upon Jewish women, some of whom meanwhile had been subjected to the same illtreatment as men during the 1938 expulsions of Polish Jews and the Kristallnacht pogroms. The day-to-day operation of community institutions depended largely on Jewish women. Under conditions of extreme adversity, they won the recognition and responsibilities for which their organization, the Judischer Frauenbund, had worked for decades to ready them.

That Jewish women were prepared for the burdens of the Nazi era is but one example of how previous experience and established traditions and institutions enabled the Jews to endure the Nazi onslaught. Arnold Paucker speculates about the role of Weimar-era Jewish ideologies in aiding survival. Certainly the Zionists could view the whole Nazi phenomenon as confirmation of their Weltanschauung, although even they had not anticipated the intensity of Hitlerian fury. They also deserve credit for doing more than any other organized Jewish group before 1933 to foster the schools, welfare services, and youth and sport organizations that afterward proved invaluable. Paucker suggests that the liberal ideology of most German Jews also promoted a survival psychology by keeping alive faith that decent Germans-the "other Germany"-would not let them down in the end. Naturally this view also encouraged ill-founded optimism about the chances of long- term survival of at least a few Jews in Germany. But who is to say that this myth was any more damaging than the Zionists' faith that they could do business with Hitler, since both wanted to see the Jews emigrate?

Judaism's role in shoring up Jewish spirits receives the sympathetic consideration of Ismar Schorsch. Far from verging on self-inflicted exhaustion on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, he argues, Judaism was finding new sources of strength even as it was fending off the forces of secularization and assimilation. Schorsch dwells on such "channels of transmission" as book clubs, journals, adult education programs, research institutions, and the like, many of which continued to function after 1933. No one will deny that those cultural institutions brought solace to thousands of German Jews, but the extent of their actual religious content is less clear. The religiosity of the Jews both before and after 1933 is a subject on which we need to be better informed. Julius Carlebach is on firmer ground in his discussion of the ancient rabbinic concept of Derech Erez, which mediates between the Jews and the world. Concentrated under emancipation on the preservation of Jewishness, it reverted under the Nazis to its earlier function of defining Jews as part of humanity.

The papers presented at the Berlin conference confirm what is best known about the Jews in prewar Nazi Germany, especially their deep sense of belonging in Germany and their admirable social and cultural achievements. The papers also usefully remind us of the lack of popular support among the German people for Nazi antisernitism and of the persistence of Zionist-liberal rivalries, which abated only partially under Nazi pressure. Most valuable of all is the revelation that in some respects research on the German Jews under Hitler remains at a fairly early stage. Peter Gay in his concluding remarks to the conference lamented that no one has yet employed the tools of psychohistory to shed light on this subject. Others of more traditional bent will be thankful enough that these papers point up the need for scholars to pay more attention to the amount of planning in Nazi policies toward the Jews; to the progress of pauperization and sources of economic sustenance of the Jews after 1935; to the ways in which individuals and families decided to leave Germany; and to the situation of the Jews during the war years, including a more precise understanding of the role of the Reichsvereinigung.

NOTESq

1. See Lucy S. Dawidowicz, "In Berlin Again," Commentary 82 (1986): 32 41, for the perceptions of participants.

2. Gershorn Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York, 1976), pp. 61-92; Sidney M. Bolkosky, The Distorted Image: German Jewish Perceptions of Germans and Germany, 1918-1935 (New York, 1975).

3. See Paucker's earlier, less positive appraisal in Der judische Abwelirkampf gegen Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus in den letzten jahren der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg, 1968), pp. 74-84. Compare Donald L. Niewyk, "Jews and the Courts in Weimar Germany," Jewish Social Studies 36 (1975): 99- 113; and Udo Beer, Die Juden, das Recht, und die Republik: Verbandswesen und Rechtsschutz 1919-1933 (Frankfurt, Bern, and New York, 1986).

4. W. E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-jewish Economic Elite 1820-1935 (Oxford, 1987).

5. Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939 (London, 1972); Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Dusseldorf, 1972).

6. See Friedrich S. Brodnitz, "Memories of the Reichsvertretung: A Personal Report," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 31 (1986): 267-77.

7. Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1983); Otto D. Kulka and Aron Rodrigue, "The German Population and the Jews in the Third Reich: Recent Publications and Trends in Research on German Society and the 'Jewish Question,' " Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984): 421-35.

8. For more detailed statements of Barkai's argument, see Das Unrechts regime: Internationale Forschung aber den Nationalsozialismus, ed. Ursula Buttner, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1986) 2:45-68; and Vom Boycott zur "Entjudung": Der wirtschaftliche Existenzkampf der juden im Dritten Reich, 19331943 (Frankfurt am Main, 1988).

9. Heinz Moshe Graupe, Die Entstehung des modernen Judentums: Geistes geschichte der deutschen Juden, 1650-1942 (Hamburg, 1969), p. 370.

10. This is consonant with the standard work on Jewish resistance in Nazi Germany, which locates it almost entirely outside organized Jewry. See Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, Selbstbehauptung und Widerstand: Deutsche juden im Kampf um Existenz und Menschenwiirde, 1933-1945 (Hamburg, 1984).

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