Read Online Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer - Free Book Online Page A

gymnastics organization was ordered, with full Aryan descent of all four grandparents stipulated. 132 Whereas in April Jewish doctors had been excluded from state-insured institutions, in May privately insured institutions were ordered to refund medical expenses for treatment by Jewish doctors only when the patients themselves were non-Aryan. Separate lists of Jewish and non-Jewish doctors would be ready by June. 133
    On April 10 the president of the state government and minister for religious affairs and education of Hesse had demanded of the mayor of Frankfurt that the Heinrich Heine monument be removed from its site. On May 18 the mayor replied that “the bronze statue was thrown off its pedestal on the night of April 26–27. The slightly damaged statue has been removed and stored in the cellar of the ethnological museum.” 134
    In fact, according to the Stuttgart city chronicle, in the spring of 1933 hardly a day went by without some aspect of the “Jewish question” coming up in one way or another. On the eve of the boycott, several well-known local Jewish physicians, lawyers, and industrialists left the country. 135 On April 5 the athlete and businessman Fritz Rosenfelder committed suicide. His friend, the World War I ace Ernst Udet, flew over the cemetery to drop a wreath. 136 On April 15 the Nazi Party demanded the exclusion of Berthold Heymann, a Socialist (and Jewish) former cabinet minister in Württemberg, from the electoral list. 137 On April 20 the Magistrate’s Court of Stuttgart tried the chief physician of the Marienspital (Saint Mary’s Hospital), Caesar Hirsch, in absentia. Members of his staff testified that he had declared he would not return to Nazi Germany, “as he refused to live in such a homeland.” 138 On April 27 three hundred people demonstrated on the Königsstrasse against the opening of a local branch of the Jewish-owned shoe company Etam. 139 On April 29 a Jewish veterinarian who wanted to resume his service at the slaughterhouse was threatened by several butchers and taken “into custody.” 140 And so it continued, day in and day out.
    In his study of the Nazi seizure of power in the small city of Northeim (renamed Thalburg), near Hannover, William Sheridan Allen vividly describes the changing fate of the town’s 120 Jews. Mostly small businessmen and their families, they were well assimilated and for several generations had been an integral part of the community. In 1932 a Jewish haberdasher had celebrated the 230th anniversary of the establishment of his shop. 141 Allen tells of a banker named Braun, who tried hard to maintain his German nationalist stance and to disregard the increasingly insulting measures introduced by the Nazis: “To the solicitous advice that was given to him to leave Thalburg, he replied, ‘Where should I go? Here I am the Banker Braun; elsewhere I would be the Jew Braun.’” 142
    Other Jews in Thalburg were less confident. Within a few months the result was the same for all. Some withdrew from the various clubs and social organizations to which they had belonged; others received letters of dismissal under various pretexts. “Thus,” as Allen expresses it, “the position of the Jews in Thalburg was rapidly clarified, certainly by the end of the first half-year of Hitler’s regime…. The new state of affairs became a fact of life; it was accepted. Thalburg’s Jews were simply excluded from the community at large.” 143
    For young Hilma Geffen-Ludomer, the only Jewish child in the Berlin suburb of Rangsdorf, the Law Against the Overcrowding of German Schools meant total change. The “nice, neighborly atmosphere” ended “abruptly…. Suddenly, I didn’t have any friends. I had no more girlfriends, and many neighbors were afraid to talk to us. Some of the neighbors that we visited told me: ‘Don’t come anymore because I’m scared. We should not have any contact with Jews.’” Lore Gang-Salheimer, eleven in 1933 and living in Nuremberg,