Read Online Alex's Wake by Martin Goldsmith - Free Book Online Page B

Jewish-ownedbusinesses across the country, with storm troopers dispatched to stand outside stores with signs reading “Germans! Defend Yourselves! Don’t Buy From Jews!” Six days later, Hitler’s Reichstag passed the Law for the Restoration of Tenure for the Civil Service, legislation stating that “civil servants who are not of Aryan ancestry” were to be immediately dismissed. The response was ruthless, as Jewish government workers, police officers and firefighters, postal workers, librarians, museum curators, and artists who were employed by state-supported cultural institutions were summarily fired.
    A month later, on Wednesday, May 10, the National Socialist Student Association staged what it proudly declared to be “the public burning of destructive Jewish writing” in the square in front of the State Opera House in Berlin. The students lit a huge bonfire and hurled an estimated twenty thousand books into the flames, including works by Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka. In their zeal, the student firemen, egged on by a speech from Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, also burned books by non-Jews such as Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Helen Keller.
    Over the next two years, more regulations were put in place, from denying Jews entry to public baths and swimming pools across Germany to forbidding Jewish youth groups to wear uniforms or carry banners. But these were mere preludes to the ordinances announced at the annual Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg in September 1935.
    From September 11 to 15, the gathering featured high-decibel speeches by day and spectacular torchlight parades by night, faithfully documented by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. On the last day of the conference, Adolf Hitler himself made a speech, declaring that the international Jewish conspiracy was growing ever more dangerous and that the German people, filled with righteous outrage, were ready to arise and defend themselves. In order to prevent such confrontations from occurring, and in order for the German Volk to enjoy “tolerable relations with the Jewish people,” Hitler declared that it was time for a “singular momentous measure,” a “legislative solution” to the ongoing, vexing Jewish Problem.
    That solution, a codification of the racial theories that formed the basis of so much Nazi ideology, came to be known as the Nuremberg Laws. The Reich Citizenship Law drew a major distinction between Germans and Jews. From then on, there were to be “citizens of the Reich,” who enjoyed full political and civic rights, and “subjects of the Reich,” who would be entitled to none of those rights. To qualify as a “citizen,” one had to prove that one possessed only pure German blood, which led to the next part of the Nuremberg Laws, the Law for the Defense of German Blood and Honor. It prohibited marriage and extramarital sex between Germans and Jews and also protected the flower of German female purity by making it illegal for any Jewish home to employ as a nanny, housekeeper, or maid a German woman under the age of forty-five.
    Finally, the Nuremberg Laws codified the Nazi concept of Judaism as a “race” by defining Jews strictly according to their parentage. Keeping kosher, attending synagogue, or holding a particular religious belief had no bearing; the new laws defined a Jew simply as anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents. And as a Jew, one was no longer a citizen, could no longer vote or hold office, and was subjected to constant and increasing levels of fear and intimidation.
    Over the next three years, the Nazis issued more and more edicts, decrees, and regulations. Public parks, libraries, and beaches were closed to Jews. Jews were excluded from the general welfare system. Driver’s licenses belonging to Jews were declared invalid. Even if he held a winning ticket, a Jew