Jewish Capitulations

1933 March 31 The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith issue a formal, official joint statement, counseling "that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged," and advising "that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed." (Gottlieb)

1933 August 30 The Union of German National Jews in a published statement blames the World Zionist Organization for German Jewry's present predicament. (Edelheit)

1933 July 5 The president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Neville Laski, publicly opposes anti-Nazi street demonstrations and boycotts.

1933 October 19 German Zionists and assimilationists clash for control of the Berlin Kehilla (Jewish Community Council).

1934 March 28 Dr. Max Naumann, leader of a small group of ultranationalist, assimilationist Jews in Germany, organizes a Nazi-like party.

German Jews have not fared well in historical accounts of Nazi anti-Semitism. From a distance of half a century, there is reproach, disbelief, even scorn: How could they have been so blind? The decision to remain behind, even when the Nazis made life miserable for Jews soon after the 1933 rise to power, is usually explained by the German Jews' simple, soothing mantra, "It cannot happen here," or by the words of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Richard Willstהtter: "One does not leave one's mother, even when she behaves badly."
But Dippel shows there were more complex motivations. For decades, centuries even, German Jews had sought to prove their loyalty, to show they were more German than the Germans. And indeed, they had picked up some stereotypically German qualities-quoting Dippel, "rootedness, complacency, incredulity, smugness, naivetי, wishful thinking, even opportunism." German Jews largely abandoned their own religion and traditions, seeking to blend into the larger society. Despite the fact that many Jewish families had been in Germany for centuries-the financier Max Warburg, one of Dippel's subjects, traced his German roots to the 1200s-it was only in the 20 years before the Nazis took over that Jews had finally felt accepted, serving with honor in the Kaiser's army.

So when the Nazis began trumpeting their anti-Semitism, many Jews refused to listen. The law would protect them, they thought. Average Germans would refuse to go along with Hitler's hate, they were certain. Jews who saw the Nazi demonization for what it was were dismissed as alarmists. Only one in 10 German Jews left the country in the first year of Nazi rule; the rest accepted the main Jewish organization's slogan, "Wait and See." Some nationalist and Zionist Jewish groups even praised the Nazis, if only for helping Jews return to their own traditions and identity when Nazi policies drew distinctions between them and Aryans. Prominent Jews helped the Nazis counter foreign press reports of oppression. Warburg's bank and other Jewish institutions helped Hitler by lending huge sums to the new government. "Wear the Yellow Badge with Pride!" a Jewish newspaper in Berlin told its readers.

The Nazis were eager for Jews to emigrate in those first years, but even dismissal from jobs and a gradual banishment from every aspect of public life could not break the Jews' bonds to German temperament, history, language, and culture. Rabbi Leo Baeck, the foremost religious leader of the community, vowed to be the last Jew in Germany, standing like the captain of a sinking ship, Dippel writes, "deaf to the nearing waves."

Years before the Nazis came to power, the German Jewish writer Jakob Wassermann wrote of his gentile countrymen, "It is futile to show them loyalty....It is futile to live for them and to die for them. They say: He is a Jew." But even after the attacks became physical, even after 319 new laws were passed against them in 1934, German Jewish leaders were preaching quiet faith and inner resolve.

Three-fourths of the Jews who had lived in Germany at the dawn of the Nazi era in 1933 were still there at the end of 1937. Incredibly, in January 1938, Jews in Hamburg celebrated the opening of a new community center, complete with theater, restaurant, and lecture hall.

Despite that bit of bravado, it was finally clear that Jews had no future in Germany. After the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Nazis no longer cared about foreign criticism of their anti-Semitic policies. But just as the terror against the Jews reached a new level, the rest of the world closed its doors to Jewish emigrants. The privileged, including five of the six characters in this book, got out-either through connections, payoffs, or blind luck. (The sixth survived in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, in Czechoslovakia.) To the very end, however, they worried about fitting in: Warburg, even in 1938, argued against a mass exodus from Germany, fretting that a large-scale movement of Jews, some of whom might not behave with the "uprightness" that Warburg valued, would stoke anti-Semitism worldwide. "He came across a little like a hotel manager insisting that his guests take off their pajamas and put on coats and ties before exiting a fire-engulfed lobby," Dippel writes.

Marc Fisher, a reporter and former Berlin bureau chief for The Washington Post, is author of After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History (Simon & Schuster, 1995).

Why Didn't They Go?
A look at six German Jews who stayed in a country that was determined to destroy them

Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire:
Why So Many German Jews
Made the Tragic Decision to
Remain in Nazi Germany
John V.H. Dippel '68
Basic Books, $27.50

Warburg and Hjalmar Schacht.

Warburg was on the general board of the Reichsbank (the German state bank), and in March 1933 he and two other Jewish bankers affixed their signatures to the appointment of Hjalmar Schacht as governor of the bank, alongside the signatures of Adolf Hitler and Paul von Hindenburg. Until his emigration to the United States in 1938, Warburg maintained close relations with Schacht. In his memoirs, Aus meinen Aufzeichnungen (From My Notes; 1952), Warburg relates that almost up to the time that he left Germany, he was in favor of Jews' maintaining the economic position they held despite Nazi rule, since he believed there was hope for a better future. As time went on the Warburg bank had to reduce its scope and confine itself to Jewish clients and the transfer of their assets abroad, yet it was only in 1938 that Warburg reversed his earlier conviction. Acting on a hint from Schacht, he transferred his bank to non - Jewish hands, at a substantial loss to himself.

Jewish Community Activities.

Courtesy of:
"Encyclopedia of the Holocaust"
©1990 Macmillan Publishing Company
New York, NY 10022

Conclusion:

The Jews too felt that global systemic anxiety and were, sometime, the willing victims of the Nazis.

They also sometime bowed to some demands for economic or short term tactical gains. When dealing with security of the Jewish People one must keep in mind the global picture and not necessarly do what his immediate interest tells him to do.

The best and easiest way to trap the Jews would be to use his short term tactical interest and his economic interest.

Remember that Shaul lost his Kingdom to David because he refused to kill the sons of Amalek because it made sense from an economical point ov view to keep them alive.

In any Democratic country the Jews are wrong because they are a minority!

My purpose is not to tell you to come to Israel, which would mean our common destruction, but to stand ready to fight the causes of Antisemitism.

We have the means of winning, we must chose our weapons and not take what the enemy chose to give us: it is not by killing a few antisemites that Jews will survive it is by helping God:

'totally obliterate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens.'

Nazism Is German

References:

Warburg, Max (1867 - 1946)

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