Between Dignity And Despair Sparknotes

CHAPTER ONE
Between Dignity and Despair
Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

By MARION A. KAPLAN
Oxford University Press 1998
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In Public: Jews Are Turned into Pariahs, 1933-1938
The problem ... afterward all, was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. --HANNAH ARENDT

From the outset, the Nazi regime used legislation, authoritative decrees, and propaganda to defame and ostracize Jews and to lower their social, economic, and legal continuing. The Apr boycott of 1933 attempted to expose German language Jews to public opprobrium and to destroy Jewish businesses, and the laws of that calendar month limited Jewish participation in the economy. In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws formally deprived Jews of their rights every bit citizens and established racial segregation. It took less than two years to destroy the foundations upon which Jewish life had existed in Deutschland since the country's unification in 1871.

Jewish women shared the predicament of Jewish men: economical turn down, social ostracism, and the loss of trust in their children's economic and social futures. Jewish women also shared the reactions of Jewish men: disbelief, outrage, and fear. Still, their experiences were gendered. In their public tirades and actions, the Nazis focused on Jewish males. Moreover, at first they spared Jewish women physical abuse. Therefore, women took on new roles--interceding for their men with the police, the tax offices, and the landlord--while standing older patterns of mediating for their families in the neighborhood, at the grocery, or in the schools. They took their cues and considered their alternatives from their vantage point as Jews and as women.
POLITICAL LAWLESSNESS AND Economical OPPRESSION
The Nazis historic January xxx, 1933, with torchlight parades and what they called the "restoration of law and guild"--instantaneous and savage assaults on their political opponents. Hitler's SA bankrupt up socialist and communist headquarters--arresting, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering members of these parties and labor unionists. The violence worsened after February 28 when Hitler, using the Reichstag burn as a pretext, abolished basic civil liberties, raised penalties for many crimes from imprisonment to death, and increased the powers of the central government over those of the states. Most ten,000 communists were arrested and incarcerated in apace built concentration camps. The infamous "Enabling Human activity," officially labeled the "Constabulary for the Relief of the Distress of Nation and State," sanctioned Hitler's assumption of dictatorial power. By March 23, legality had given manner to "national will" as represented past Hitler and the Nazi Party.

The Nazis did not immediately single out Jews for attack, busy as they were analogous the states with the fundamental authorities, abolishing all other political parties, and destroying the trade unions. Nonetheless, Jews could not always escape violence. And, when a communist, socialist, or pacifist happened too to be Jewish, he or she had far more to fear than a non-Jewish political colleague. Jews were treated even more ruthlessly. Because of their double risk, some Jews fled Deutschland immediately. The Nazis frequently "taught a lesson" to those who remained. For example, right after the election of 1933, a Jewish father and daughter were arrested every bit suspected leftists. The immature woman had taken photos of socialist and Nazi demonstrations and of working-form children at play. Officials confiscated her camera and jailed her. She recounted: "The women were put in the same room as female person criminals. They were not beaten, they could read books and write letters, simply they heard the screams of men being tortured." Later iii weeks both she and her male parent were freed. The father had been tortured to such an extent that the cleaners asked if the man whose suit they were cleaning had been hit by a machine.

Politically affiliated or fifty-fifty politically interested Jews realized immediately the severity of the Nazi threat. They feared firm searches and the possibility that the Gestapo (the Hole-and-corner Land Law) would find--or plant--evidence that would incriminate them. While the Nazis burned books in public, many Jews burned portions of their libraries and their papers in private. In Berlin, the Jewish wife of a non-Jewish political prisoner arrested for "anti-Nazi" behavior was terrified of every motion she made. She had been active in the cooperative movement, in tenants' leagues, and, since 1932, in anti-Nazi activities. Although she "looked Aryan" and therefore met few antisemitic threats on the street, she adjusted to using only public telephone booths, fearing that her own telephone was tapped, and burned her "compromising documents." Announcer Inge Deutschkron also described how her mother insisted on burning the leftist fabric in their library: "Every time my mother consigned another pamphlet to the scrap heap, Father would protest mildly. `Are you sure?' he'd ask, and Female parent, who'd always been the more than practical of the two and had adult a nose for danger, would respond about gruffly."

Fear of house searches caused one couple to spend many evenings looking through books and messages to rid themselves of:

everything which could be interpreted as doubtful.... I ... fed to the flames many papers which might have been of involvement to children and grandchildren; for example, excerpts of various newspapers and periodicals, ... papers of the "World Peace Association of Women and Mothers." ... The Government minister of Civilization for Bavaria had stated: "Every pacifist deserves to be whipped out of the country."

The Nazis were cruel toward politically affiliated women, both Jewish and not-Jewish, and a number of female person Reichstag deputies and female country parliamentarians suffered beatings and death at their easily. Of the five nearly prominent Jewish women in politics--all members of socialist parties--everyone escaped. Four left the country immediately, presuming that their politics would bring the wrath of the Nazis downward on them. The fifth left in 1938 after her mother had died.

Jews jailed equally communists--whether the charge was true or false--had the nearly to dread. They were accused of "preparing for high treason." Recha Rothschild, a member of the Communist Party, chop-chop destroyed her files in Feb 1933. She fled her flat, returning to information technology (at the end of March) afterward the SA had stormed in, stolen her property, and shredded all of her books and papers. She hid but was caught and charged with being a courier for the Communist Party, fifty-fifty though there was no hard evidence against her. The Reich court declared the evidence too flimsy, but the Prussian court, nether Nazi command, sentenced Rothschild to two years in prison house. There, amongst political prisoners, criminals, and prostitutes, her health deteriorated dangerously. Spitting up blood, she still refused "to driblet dead for the Nazis." The Nazis treated Jewish women caught in the act of resistance even more brutally. Kathe Baronowitz was an active communist who led a jail cell of 10 people. Her landlord, who was in the SA, spied on her, and in 1936 she and eighty-3 other communists were arrested. First, she was tortured: "The cruelties and perversities of the interrogation tin hardly exist described. [She] had to undress completely. A howling pack goaded on past alcohol surrounded her. They stuck pens in her vagina and paper flags which they burned and then that they could gloat over the tortured woman's screams of pain." They chosen her "Jew whore" every bit they tormented her. Ultimately, she was sentenced to twelve years of difficult labor.

Equally was the instance for non-Jews, the Nazis frequently took Jewish wives hostage in order to force politically agile husbands who had fled or subconscious--often at the urging of their wives--to requite themselves upward. Also, the police or Gestapo interrogated wives or mothers about the whereabouts of men. Sometimes these women suffered punishment for their sons' or husbands' escapes. After Isaak Plaut fled the small boondocks of Rauschenberg in 1935, the police arrested his wife, Therese. Luckily she and the mayor had been classmates. She called him from jail and asked, "Aren't you lot ashamed to exit me sitting hither?" He freed her, and she left Frg in early 1936. Early Nazi terror was capricious. Although Therese Plaut managed to turn to an one-time friend, virtually women hostages had no such recourse. At the stop of 1935, 75 percent of all women in the Hohenstein jail, one of six women'due south penal institutions, were hostages for their male relatives. Hostages' memoirs give a sense of the extraordinary violence that started even in the very first weeks of the regime. When the Jewish married woman of a Leipzig Jewish communist was arrested equally a hostage later on he had fled for his life, their v-year-former son--atypically--was also imprisoned with his mother. Fearful, he refused to separate from her, hugging her tightly when the guard came to take her for interrogation. The guard tore him abroad from his mother, throwing him backward brutally. He died when his head hit the metal edge of a prison house bed.

More frequently than official arrest, Jewish families confronted sudden lawlessness: "Naked brutality, breach of law, the most dreadful hypocrisy, unmitigated barbarism pose[d] every bit law." The constabulary also became a source of persecution. As bourgeois champions of the Rechtsstaat, or dominion of police force, which had bolstered Jewish claims to equal citizenship in the nineteenth century, German Jews establish the perversion of law hard to bear. And individual Germans took advantage of the legal defenselessness of Jews. A Jewish adult female, living in Nuremberg, reported: "The most frightening fact at this moment was being deprived of the protection of the law. Everyone could charge you of annihilation--and you were lost." The worst was reserved for Jewish men. One woman described how her husband had been badly beaten by one of his tenants. When he asked the police for back up (something some Jews still tried to do in 1933), they refused. Some other homo was arrested because a neighbor complained of his beliefs toward her dog. Leaving a notation explaining that he "could no longer stand the unjust and caught life of a Jew in Germany," he killed himself in prison house.

In general, Jews navigated increasingly menacing public spaces. Even a trip to the post role could have dire consequences. After Hilde Sichel muttered about the unreliability of the post, a postal clerk threatened to denounce her: "Every evening I thought about the day that just passed and asked myself if I had done or said annihilation that could endanger my husband or myself." Jews fifty-fifty feared beingness the recipients of occasional grumbling by non-Jews. Lily Krug described her reaction when an "Aryan" neighbor complained to her about the cost of butter in front of others: "I did not answer and hurried away without buying anything. I was frightened. Fearfulness, fear, fear--morning, apex and night. Fear followed the states into our dreams, racking on nerves. How imprudent, how inconsiderate of the woman to speak like that in public."

For Jews, daily fear was accompanied by economic strangulation. Long before forced "Aryanization"--the complete takeover of Jewish assets--occurred, families began to lose their businesses, could no longer pay for their backdrop, and were oft subjected to extortion. Although some larger Jewish business and manufacturing establishments maintained their economic position somewhat longer, as did Jews in certain sectors of the economic system (such as the fur trade), small-scale "mom-and-pop shops" ("Tante Emma" Laden) declined precipitously. Many individuals of "Aryan" ancestry benefited from the demise of Jewish businesses, purchasing them at profoundly reduced prices.

Governments, courts, and storm troopers urged customers and clients of Jews to practice business elsewhere. Almost immediately the SA began a series of economic boycotts against Jewish shops and professionals. Boycotts created a climate of fear that afflicted Jews and non-Jews, intimidating the latter and frightening and hurting the former. On April ane, 1933, "on one of the best business concern days of the yr, on the Saturday before Easter," the regime declared a national boycott of Jewish businesses. In announcing this outset national cold-shoulder, Hitler chosen it a "defensive measure out" against anti-Nazi propaganda abroad for which he blamed the Jews. The cold-shoulder generally lacked public enthusiasm. It was uneven, with niggling support displayed in Berlin but excesses, including injury to and fifty-fifty murder of Jews, reported elsewhere. SA and Nazi Political party circles were joyful, but apathy, fifty-fifty resistance, was widespread. While SA men stood in front end of businesses owned by Jews, threatening and taunting those who dared to enter, some Germans chose precisely that day to visit a Jewish doctor or grocer. Moreover, the stock marketplace barbarous, in part considering many Jewish stores were in foreign creditors' or German banking easily. And, the boycott over again raised a vexing question: Who, afterward all, was a Jew? These problems forced counterfoil of the boycott on the aforementioned solar day it had begun. Still, the Nazis claimed "success" despite their own disappointment at "Aryan" responses. To some extent, their claims were right. The cold-shoulder had taken a large toll amongst Jews in fear and intimidation.

Since the boycott was the starting time major public event turned specifically against them, many Jews left memoirs describing that day. A few shut their businesses to avert problem, but most remained open deliberately. Some commented on the loyalty of their customers during this commencement, early test. I human being recalled that his small department shop in Hanau did far more business concern the calendar week before the cold-shoulder than information technology had in years. His customers stocked up in case the cold-shoulder dragged on, declaring their solidarity with his family. In Dortmund, observers noted the cloy with which many Germans approached the cold-shoulder and the courage with which they entered Jewish stores while the SA hurled insults and abuse their way.

Jews likewise described their own resistance. Some resisted silently, as in the case of World War I veterans who stood in front of their own stores wearing their uniforms and medals. Others resisted verbally. When a young ruffian, adamant to crusade damage, aggressively barged into Dr. Herta Nathorff's office shouting, "Is this a Jewish enterprise?" she responded: "This is non an enterprise at all, these are medico'southward function hours .... Are you sick?" With that, the male child left. Nathorff made a indicate of buying in stores endemic past Jewish people on that day and told the SA sentry, "For my money, I'll buy where I want!" Erna Albersheim, who had been born "half Jewish" in New York and had married a German-Jewish homo, displayed great personal courage in against Nazis in Frankfurt, where the boycott was relatively constructive. When the Nazis picketed her store, she confronted them as an "American" and told them to go out. They did. "I walked into my store with caput erect, simply I was glad that no one could come across my knees--they had the firmness of jello." In Stettin, Olga Eisenstadt tried education rather than confrontation. She stood outside her small store arguing her personal case to passersby, in the promise that they might generalize to other Jews:

I pointed out that I was a soldier's widow, that I had received the Emperor'due south Service Cross in the Beginning World War and the Cantankerous of Honour for soldiers' widows from Hindenburg.... I had too received a diploma from ... Stettin in recognition of my social work during the ... war. I had taught hundreds of soldiers' wives and widows [how] to make supplies for the ground forces.

Equally measured past Nazi expectations, the official boycott day failed. Jewish businesses were given a brief--official--lease on life considering the precarious German economy could not so stand further destabilizing measures. Moreover, Jewish big businesses remained relatively intact, since they employed many "Aryans" and their failure could hurt the overall economy.

Unofficial boycotts, however, whether spontaneous or instigated by local officials, persisted. Many Germans who had been angered or embarrassed by the boycott on April 1 and had shown courage on that day tended to retreat into privacy thereafter. They gradually submitted to the pressures of the "racial community," remaining silent rather than defending Jews. In rural areas, for instance, Jewish dealerships of cattle, horses, and grain declined as a event of long-term boycotts. Although at first some peasants remained loyal to business organisation relationships that had occasionally spanned generations, arguing that they got good prices and products from Jewish dealers, they gradually succumbed to pressure. Also, the Nazis disrupted long-term working relationships in the countryside between Jews and non-Jews. Jewish cattle dealers ofttimes had to burn down their non-Jewish helpers in club to protect them from abuse. But in the cities, too, customers who were loyal at first began to dwindle equally the government increased its attack on Jewish businesses.

Boycotts were only 1 amid many strategies used past the government and mercenary individuals to attack Jews in the economic system. Jews were physically brutalized by the regime: in Breslau, for example, the SA shell upwardly Jewish jurists, chasing them from their offices. The Nazis also pressured Jews to liquidate their businesses or sell out to "Aryans." Restrictions and official and unofficial harassment increased in frequency and fervor. Every bit a result, many Jewish businesses, specially small ones, were forced to shut down or sell out. Alice Baerwald, who lived in Danzig in the early on 1930s, described how the Nazis ruined the livelihoods of Jewish families. She wrote about a couple who had congenital up a large clientele as hairdressers to support themselves and two children. Afterwards the Nazi takeover, a German asked to purchase the shop for a ludicrously low price. Surprised, they turned him down. Before long thereafter, local authorities defendant the couple of tax evasion, arrested the homo, and confiscated their valuable equipment. The family suffered ruin inside a few days. Some other couple endemic a small drugstore, which they put up for sale when the wife suddenly went blind. An interested buyer exploited the situation by accusing the couple of tax evasion. The married man was arrested and forced to sell for a pittance. The government arrested another head of household for allegedly transferring coin abroad, although it was clear that he had legally purchased a delivery auto abroad. His business and domicile furnishings were confiscated. A variety of "Aryans" used the beleaguered position of Jews to their own financial advantage. One cattle dealer recalled: "Bribery occurred every mean solar day. Debtors demanded receipts for bills that they never paid. At that place was no indicate in bringing legal action against them in court." Tenants could decline to pay hire with impunity, and in some cases they accused the landlord of being an "enemy of the state" in social club to exist temporarily freed of their obligations. Past 1936, many areas of small business, particularly those associated with agronomics, were declared judenrein, "gratuitous of Jews."

Jewish businesses in which not-Jews held pregnant shares were relatively safe at outset. Some Jewish owners could continue their businesses if they found an "Aryan" partner. But this was a short-term solution at best. Ultimately, Jews had to sell out to their "Aryan" partners, and Jews whose "Aryan" partners had died or disassociated themselves had to requite up their businesses. For example, a Jewish adult female, no longer protected by her deceased husband's "Aryan" condition, had to requite upward her business at the weekly marketplace in 1939. She became a cleaning woman. Of the approximately l,000 Jewish minor businesses operating at the stop of 1932, but 9,000 yet existed by July 1938. The bulk had faded to attract "Aryanizers" and had simply collapsed. By November 1938, no more than than 20 to 25 percent of all Jewish businesses remained.

While some Jews lost businesses, others lost their jobs or realized the futility of finding jobs as a result of laws passed in Apr 1933. Feigning strict legality, the Nazis passed the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" and others like information technology. The Nazis used these "laws" to exclude opponents of the government and "not-Aryans," defined as people who had one "non-Aryan" parent or grandparent. The then-called Aryan Paragraph of the Apr laws forced the dismissal or early retirement of Jewish doctors, lawyers, judges, and civil servants (along with political "undesirables"), with the exception, insisted upon by the aging President Hindenburg, of those who had fought in World War I or had been in their jobs before August 1914. Virtually half of Jewish judges and prosecutors and almost a third of Jewish lawyers lost their jobs. A meaning proportion of Jewish doctors lost their German National Health Insurance affiliation (severely limiting or ruining their practices). Since the civil service in Germany encompassed far more than jobs than, for example, in the The states, the April laws meant that even lower-condition jobs such as civil service messengers, city street cleaners, and train, postal, or Reichsbank employees had to be filled by "Aryans." A farther prepare of decrees put a quota on Jewish students in schools and universities. These decrees affected up to 867,000 people, Jews as well as other "non-Aryan" Christian Germans.

Hereafter, the jobs of millions of Germans--Jews, "Aryans," and those defenseless in the middle--depended on the Nazi definition of their racial status. A scramble for proof of "Aryan" lineage ensued. The journalist Bella Fromm noted in her diary that "genealogists are doing a yard business. There are advertisements ... daily....`We provide you with every kind of certificate and evidence.'" They located nascency, parish, or synagogue records, acquired declarations from Vital Statistics Offices, or unearthed old family trees.

The field of teaching illustrates the changes that occurred. In 1933 in Prussia, 1 percentage of male teachers and 4.5 percentage of female teachers were discharged (at to the lowest degree two-thirds of the women who were fired were "non-Aryan," every bit were almost all the women educatee teachers who were fired). In early on April 1933, Hanna Bergas entered the school in which she taught for the terminal fourth dimension:

When I arrived at the schoolhouse building,... the principal, saying "Good morn" in his customary, friendly way, stopped me, and asked me to come to his room .... When nosotros were seated, he said, in a serious, embarrassed tone of voice, he had orders to ask me not to go into my classroom. I probably knew, he said, that I was not permitted to teach anymore at a German language school. I did know, but was information technology to happen so abruptly? ... Mr. B. was extremely sorry... I collected myself [and] my property .... There was nobody ... to say farewell to, considering everybody else had gone to the classroom .... In the afternoon ... colleagues, pupils, their mothers came, some in a lamentable mood, others angry with their land, lovely bouquets of flowers, large and small, in their arms. In the evening, the little house was full of fragrance and colors, like for a funeral, I thought; and indeed, this was the funeral of my time teaching at a German public school.

Bergas's pain at losing her position reflected the loss not only of a job but also of a community and profession. Like Jewish men, professional women suffered economic arduousness and the anguish of seeing their social status diminished and their professional reputation rendered meaningless.

Dismissing Jewish teachers conveniently allowed the authorities to observe pedagogy assignments for lx percentage of one,320 "Aryan" job applicants in 1933. Here were opportunities for the unemployed and up mobility during the Great Depression. Similarly, the dismissal of Jews in the Prussian administration affected betwixt 12.5 and 15 percent of positions, and in other states betwixt 4.5 and 5 percent. There seems to have been niggling public complaint--and silent endorsement--virtually the ousting of Jews. When the Nazis purged the courts, even as staunch an anti-Nazi as Thomas Mann approved. Married to a Jewish adult female, he nevertheless confided to his diary: "It is no great misfortune ... that ... the Jewish presence in the judiciary has been ended," although he worried about his "secret, troubling" thoughts regarding the Jews. He evinced satisfaction when Alfred Kerr, a well-known Berlin critic who had often attacked Mann's work, lost his position. Selfish motives played an important role with Isle of man every bit with others. In Hamburg, Lotte Popper's friendly non-Jewish neighbor told her that her daughter had chosen ane of 2 suitors, the banana gauge: "`Now he has the all-time prospects ... in court, where they are firing and then many ... people.' Mrs. Hansen stifled the discussion `Jews' and ... expounded at neat length upon her daughter's happy time to come."

Non-Jewish doctors, too, profited from the removal of Jewish doctors, accepting positions that had "become free" and patients who no longer patronized Jewish doctors. In June 1933, there were about 5,500 Jewish doctors in Federal republic of germany, or 11 percent of all physicians (although the percentage is higher if one includes all "not-Aryan," that is, partly Jewish, doctors). They were concentrated in large cities, where most Jews lived. The early on 1930s had seen barbarous contest amongst doctors, resulting from the depression and from the increasing numbers of doctors who either belonged to or wanted to join the National Health Insurance organizations. While some doctors demanded the removal of their Jewish colleagues from the National Health Insurance, others pushed for their full ruin. Dr. Henriette Necheles-Magnus described the crude tactics of a non-Jewish medico who was so eager to absorb her practice that he told her patients she had killed herself.

In June 1933, about xiii percent of women doctors were Jewish, with the proportion much college in big cities. A few weeks afterward the German language Doctors' League (Verband der Arzte Deutschlands) expelled Jews, the League of German Women Doctors (Deutscher Arztinnenbund) ousted its Jewish members. Herta Nathorff described this exclusion in her diary:

Apr 16, 1933: Meeting of the League of German Women Doctors. As usual, I went today, afterwards all this is where the most respected and best known women colleagues in Berlin gather. "Strange atmosphere today, I thought, and so many strange faces." A colleague whom I did not know said to me, "You must also exist ane of u.s.a.?" and showed me the swastika on the lapel of her coat. Before I could answer, she stood up and fetched a admirer into our meeting, who said that he had to demand the Gleichschaltung [the Nazi takeover or Nazification] of the League in the proper name of the authorities.... Some other colleague ... my predecessor in the Reddish Cantankerous ... who had been dismissed ... because of unfitness and other non very prissy human qualities ... stood upwardly and said, "Now I ask the German colleagues to go into the next room for a word." Colleague S., a good Catholic, ... asked: "What does that mean--High german colleagues?" "All who are not Jews, of course," was the respond. At present it had been said. Silently, we "Jewish and one-half-Jewish" doctors stood up and with u.s. some "German" doctors--silently we left the room--pale, outraged to our innermost selves. We then went ... to discuss what we should practice now. "We should quit the League as a united grouping," some said. I was opposed. I will gladly allow them the honor of throwing u.s.a. out, but I will at to the lowest degree not voluntarily abandon my claim to membership.... I am and then agitated, and then pitiful and confused, and I am aback for my "German" colleagues!

Either on their own or considering of government force per unit area, patients, too, turned away from Jewish doctors. The National Wellness Insurance organizations scolded and later on threatened them for continuing to become to Jewish doctors (and this was merely to those remaining Jewish doctors who had not been dropped from the insurance system in April 1933). Moreover, racial enthusiasts accused patients who connected to go to Jewish doctors of being traitors to the Volk.

Late to enter what Germans called the "costless" professions--notably medicine and constabulary--Jewish women suffered severe job losses. Whereas some Jewish men could claim infrequent condition as veterans or because they had been in their jobs since before 1914, Jewish women could hardly profess to have fought at the front. Furthermore, considering of the late admission of women to German universities, most female Jewish professionals had taken their positions only after 1914. The result in the medical field was that the vast majority of Jewish women doctors lost their health insurance affiliation, compared with almost xl percentage of Jewish males. In a alphabetic character about her sis's loss of most of her medical practise, Betty Scholem concluded that Jews "are existence destroyed in this anemic way merely as certainly as if their necks had been wrung."

In September 1933, Goebbels took over the Chamber of Culture and excluded Jews from German cultural life, moving-picture show, theater, music, fine arts, literature, and journalism--areas in which Jews had been disproportionately active. Simultaneously, many private businesses and state licensing boards demanded that their employees exist "Aryans."

Unemployment began to plague the Jewish community. In 1933, nearly two-thirds of Jewish salaried employees worked in Jewish businesses and firms. With the disappearance of many Jewish firms, joblessness soared. By the bound of 1933, nearly one-third of Jewish clerks--compared with one-fifth of the not-Jewish ones--were looking for jobs. In Berlin lone, where the full general unemployment charge per unit hovered at 16 percent, more than a third of Jewish salaried employees and half of Jewish workers were jobless. Even as the German language economic system improved, with unemployment dropping from six million in Jan 1933 to 2.v million in January 1936, Jews took no role in the general recovery.

Considering more than half (53 percent) of employed Jewish women worked in concern and commerce, largely as family administration (22 per centum) and salaried employees (40 percent), they lost their jobs as family businesses and Jewish shops closed down. Jewish sources estimated that three-quarters of Jewish women in business organization and merchandise were injure by the discriminatory laws and the early anti-Jewish boycotts. Jewish Employment Bureau statistics for 1934 and 1936 show that, although women seemed to find employment more readily than men (except in the gratuitous professions), merely a minority of job seekers of either sex actually found placements. Past April 1938, over lx percent of all businesses that Jews had owned earlier 1933 no longer existed, and Jewish social workers were trying to assistance threescore,000 unemployed Jews. Furthermore, those businesses that lingered on tended to be either at the very meridian (a few banks and financial institutions) or the lesser (contained artisans). Women rarely worked in either.

Despite limited job options, many Jewish women who had never worked outside the home suddenly needed employment. While some sought jobs with strangers, others began to work for their husbands who could no longer afford to pay employees. The hope was that "work for married women [was] only ... an expedient in an emergency." By proclaiming the crisis nature of women'southward new position, Jews, both male and female, could dream of amend times and ignore the even more unsettling consequence of irresolute gender roles in the midst of turmoil. Contrary to their hopes, past 1938 at that place were "relatively few families in which the wife [did] not work in some way to earn a living." Finding a job nether new and hostile circumstances, particularly for women who had never worked outside the home, could be deeply demoralizing. Women had to appraise their abilities in midlife--often with little more than than a typical girl's education and no marketable skills. Task ads, employment offices, friends, and acquaintances held out little hope.

Yet, in spite of discouragement, both memoirs and statistics testify that women eagerly sought opportunities either to train for a job for the first time or, in many cases, to retrain for new jobs. Some prepared for new work in Federal republic of germany, many for jobs they hoped to fill abroad. Ruth Abraham took a speed form in becoming a corsetiere while on a three-calendar month visit to her sister in Palestine. Although Jews could no longer be licensed by the time she returned to Deutschland, she quickly developed a private circle of customers. Some women prepared for several jobs and studied several different languages at once, assuming that they needed to be versatile should they emigrate. One woman studied English language and took lessons in sewing furs, making chocolate, and doing industrial ironing. A mother and her daughter took courses in Castilian, English, blistering, and fine cookery. And then they asked their laundress to take them every bit apprentices. This role was not merely new for them but was likewise a reversal of their previous class position.

Whereas most women understood their behavior within the context of an emergency, some may have taken advantage of dire circumstances to fulfill ambitions that would have languished in improve times. One woman non only took cooking classes considering she would shortly need to handle the household herself but also began preparation as a psychotherapist to support her family unit when they emigrated. She had to leave her husband and children for an entire year in guild to report at Jung's plant in Zurich. In normal times, she probably would have remained but a doctor's wife.

The Jewish communities in various towns and cities also offered courses in which women eagerly enrolled. In Hamburg, such courses included cooking and blistering, sewing and tailoring, hat making, glove making, artificial bloom arranging, and smocking. Communities too offered typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, photography, and languages classes. By 1935, Jewish organizations needed more dwelling house economics teachers. While many financed their training (and, in many cases, retraining) themselves, the Jewish community's Central Agency for Economic Relief supported the instruction of 20,000 men and women until the cease of 1937. Moreover, by 1938 at that place were 90-four retraining collectives for agronomics, handicraft, home economics, and nursing. Zionist organizations played a large role in these collectives through their Hachsharah centers, which taught practical skills needed in Palestine. Almost 23,000 immature people--about one-third of them females--learned how to raise chickens or to piece of work as locksmiths, tailors, or baby nurses. Ultimately, by 1941, 17,000 Jews readied in these centers entered Palestine under its quota for "workers."

According to Jewish observers, women seemed "more than accommodating and adjustable" and had "fewer inhibitions" than men; were willing to enter retraining programs at older ages than men; and were more acquiescent to changing their lives to fit the times. The number of women who successfully retrained in these years was well-nigh evenly distributed betwixt the ages of twenty and l, whereas men most frequently retrained betwixt the ages of twenty and thirty, and usually stopped seeking retraining past xl. Leaders of the Berlin Jewish Community noted that retraining for women was less costly and took less time than for men (3 to six months for women, compared with about i year for men). Presumably, women were taught less skilled jobs than men. Also, although most had worked as sales clerks or role help, they already knew many of the skills necessary for jobs as seamstresses, milliners, or domestic workers.

Younger women nether historic period thirty-five were the near probable to still observe piece of work. They took jobs in Jewish concerns as other Jews began to emigrate. Likewise, the demand for help picked up in the expanding Jewish social service sector and--after the Nuremberg Laws--in Jewish households. In 1936, 52 per centum of the female applicants for commercial jobs in Berlin could be placed, compared with 22 percent of the male applicants. That same twelvemonth the demand for Jewish female household personnel in Berlin exceeded the supply. In that location was a general shortage of female household helpers, particularly in modest towns, and an even more serious shortage of nurses in Jewish hospitals and convalescent homes.

Job availability in some sectors notwithstanding, the employment and economic prospects of all Jews was dour. Whereas just eight percent of Jews were manual workers in 1933, 56 percent fell into that category by 1939. Equally unemployment increased, then too did poverty. The highest percentages of needy Jews were found in areas with the largest proportion of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In 1937 the Berlin Jewish Community supported xv soup kitchens and provided used clothing for thousands of Jewish Berliners.

Legally, Jews had rights to public assistance until 1939. In practice, however, the Nazis found ways of denying all forms of state and quasi-state benefits to Jews. Although the full number of Jews receiving every form of public welfare during the 1930s is not available, as early as the winter of 1935-36 the Jewish Winter Relief Bureau subsidized xx pct of the Jewish population; another 20 to 25 percent were living off the capital they had received from the sale of their businesses. In 1936, nearly lx,000 Berlin Jews received clothing from such used-article of clothing storerooms. Men's suits, in particular, were in great demand, whereas women'southward clothing, easier to repair by experienced housewives, could exist replaced more readily. Wintertime Relief Bureau workers remarked that the social descent of Jews could be seen "about clearly by their depleted clothing. To remedy [this] means non only cloth, but also psychological relief."

As early equally April 1933 (a few months before the founding of the Fundamental Organization of German Jews), leading Jewish organizations had founded the Central Commission for Help and Construction (Zentralausschuss fur Hilfe und Aufbau) to prepare for possible emergencies. The Cardinal Committee broadened the telescopic of social welfare work, joining the Primal Organization of German Jews in early 1935. The Key Organization spent its upkeep for 1936 (of about 4.iii million marks) on migration and emigration, economical assistance, and welfare work. Its revenues came only in part (ane.6 1000000 marks) from the German-Jewish community; grants from away provided about 2.1 million marks, and the rest was pure deficit. Sadly, as early as 1937 the Key Organization recognized that information technology could no longer meet the requirements of its constituencies. It had received monetary requests "from all regions ... because poverty had soared. All of these petitions had to be turned down with a heavy heart."

(C) 1998 Marion A. Kaplan All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-19-511531-7