Desperate now to come up with a politically acceptable “German Jazz,” the regime sponsored a nationwide contest to identify a band that could swing in lock-step. The final round of the contest, held at the Berlin Zoo in March 1936, featured three regional bands, two that were obviously inept plus a fairly decent group from Hamburg. Most Berliners expected the Hamburgers to win, but the judges, all Nazi hacks, gave first prize to an unknown outfit from Frankfurt because it could make the fox-trot sound like a march. Of course, this band went nowhere, except back to Frankfurt. The authorities eventually abandoned their promotion of nazified jazz, just as they gave up on producing Nazi cabaret. The jazz music that Berliners continued to listen to in the Third Reich was by no means as “hot” as one could hear in New York, but it retained enough soul to disgust the state officials. Fritz Stege, a hard-line cultural bureaucrat, could lament in 1937: “It is true: jazz is still with us, in spite of prohibitions and decrees.”
Toward a “Jew-free” Berlin
If certain elements of Weimar culture hung on tenaciously in Berlin during the early years of the Third Reich, so did most of the capital’s Jews. The campaign to “aryanize” Berlin’s cultural establishment drove away some prominent Jewish artists early on, but the vast majority of the city’s sizable Jewish community, which in 1933 numbered 160,564 souls (3.78 percent of the total population), saw fit to remain. Like other groups who were threatened by the new regime, many of Berlin’s Jews chose to believe that Nazism was simply a passing storm. “The Nazis will never last,” was the hopeful word of the day. In retrospect, such optimism may seem foolhardy, and the Jews who stayed on in Berlin and other German cities were later harshly criticized, especially by pioneering Zionists, for failing to recognize from the outset that they had no future in Nazi Germany. This criticism, while understandable, is unjustified. We must remember that in much of Germany, certainly in Berlin, it was the Nazis, not the Jews (at least not the assimilated native Jews), who were the newcomers, the “foreigners.” As the German-American historian Peter Gay, who fled Berlin with his family in 1939, put the matter in his memoir, My German Question:, “the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were.” Recently arrived Ostjuden, meanwhile, hoped to find safety in numbers, as did Jews from the German provinces who moved to Berlin in the early years of the Third Reich to escape harsher persecution in their hometowns.
The Nazi regime responded to the Jews’ determination to stay put by sharpening discriminatory measures designed to induce emigration. Supposedly in revenge for reports of anti-Jewish persecution in the foreign press, Goebbels called for a Reich-wide boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933. The campaign was backed by the Kampfbund des gewerblichen Mittelstandes (Fighting Association of the Commercial Middle Class), which hoped to curtail competition from Jewish businesses. Because Berlin had so many thriving Jewish-owned enterprises, the Nazis focused their effort on the capital. Storm trooper thugs scrawled jingles like “Jede Mark in Judenhand / Fehlt dem deutschen Vaterland (Every mark in a Jew’s hand is one less for the fatherland)” on Jewish shop windows and stationed themselves menacingly in doorways. They employed similar tactics at Jewish-run law offices and medical practices. The State Library was closed to Jews, and Jewish students were forbidden to enter the University of Berlin. Litfass Pillars, usually covered with advertisements for plays and concerts, now bore announcements of the boycott. At the Anhalter Railway Station Bella Fromm was shocked to find a group of Brownshirts greeting incoming trains with the cry: “To hell with the Jews! Shameful death to the Jews! We won’t have any more Jews!”
SA man warning Berliners not to patronize a Jewish-owned shop during the Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933
The boycott, however, proved a flop, at least in the capital. Many Berliners continued to shop at the stores defaced by anti-Semitic slogans. Whether they did this out of protest against the Nazis, or out of a determination to get the best bargains, is impossible to know. Perhaps in many cases it was a bit of both. In any event, Goebbels was not pleased by the response of “his city” to the Nazi campaign. Clearly, the Berliners needed more “enlightenment” with respect to the Jewish menace.
As if to bring this point home, the regime launched a new series of anti-Jewish measures in the wake of the boycott. In Berlin, all Jewish judges were expelled from the court system and replaced by Aryans. Another measure limited the number of Jewish lawyers allowed to practice in the city to the overall percentage of Jews in the population. This amounted to a major cut, since 73.5 percent of the Berlin lawyers were of Jewish descent. As of August 1933, Jewish law students at the university were banned from taking examinations, thereby shutting them out of the profession. Jewish doctors faced similar discrimination. State Commissar Julius Lippert ordered Berlin’s hospitals to fire all its Jewish physicians as soon as possible. By October 1933 the medical purge was complete: the only Berlin hospital that still employed Jews was the Jewish Hospital, which was off-limits to gentiles. The city’s preparatory secondary schools, the Gymnasia, were ordered to restrict the number of their Jewish pupils to the percentage of Jews in the population. To strike at the Ostjuden, the regime made it illegal for noncitizens to sell goods in the streets or to work as artisans. In 1935 the Berlin police chief, Count von Helldorf, ordered the closure of all Jewish stores on the Kurfürstendamm. In that same year the notorious Nuremberg Laws reclassified Jews as “subjects” rather than as citizens, which reduced their social and political rights. Henceforth Jews could not marry or have sexual relations with German citizens, work as domestics in non-Jewish households, or display the national flag. In Berlin, social segregation between Jews and Germans was furthered by limiting Jewish use of public transport to certain hours and by restricting Jews to out-of-the-way, yellow-painted benches in the Tiergarten. These restrictions applied to all persons of “Jewish blood” whether or not they practiced the Jewish religion or even considered themselves Jewish. In Nazi Germany, it was the regime who decided who was a Jew.
Onerous and intimidating as these measures were, they did not provoke the reduction in the Jewish population that the Nazis had hoped for. In Berlin the number of departing Jews was offset by continuing immigration from the provinces. The Nazi leadership, especially Goebbels, was infuriated by this development, but the regime hesitated to institute even harsher anti-Semitic measures at this point because the country was about to host the 1936 Olympic Games, which offered an opportunity to show the world that Nazi Germany, contrary to many reports in the foreign press, was a humane and civilized place. For Berlin, which was to hold the summer games (the winter events were to take place in Garmisch-Partenkirchen), the spectacle could showcase the Nazi capital as a bastion of order, cleanliness, technological progress, cultural sophistication, social harmony, and rollicking good cheer.
Hitler’s Games
The decision to award the 1936 Olympic Games to Germany had been made in 1930 and confirmed at an International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Barcelona the following year. With the rise of the Nazis, however, many in the international sport world questioned this choice. During the 1932 Summer Games, held in Los Angeles, the Belgian president of the IOC, Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, asked a German IOC member to query Hitler regarding his stance on the games. Hitler replied that he contemplated Germany’s hosting of the event “with great interest.” Yet once the Nazis were in power reservations about allowing the games to take place in Germany increased. As part of its anti-Semitic campaign, the Nazi regime banned Jews from German sports clubs and forbade them to try out for the Olympic teams. The widely respected head of Germany’s Olympic Committee, Theodor Lewald, was dismissed from his post because he was half Jewish; his replacement was Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten, a Nazi hack whose only connection to sport was his ability to sit handsomely on a horse. These actions prompted demands from some quarters to remove the games from Germany, to boycott them if they were held there, or to cancel them entirely, as had been the case in 1916. Sweden, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Spain openly threatened to send no teams to Germany (in the end, only the Spanish Republic and Soviet Russia carried through with a boycott).