Ep. 54- Early Violence against Jews in 1933 with Hermann Beck

When did the Holocaust start?  How soon after Hitler took power did anti-Jewish violence begin?  These are some of the important questions we explore in this episode as I talk with Hermann Beck and the surge in antisemitic violence in the wake of the Nazi rise to power in 1933.

In his pathbreaking book, Hermann Beck has documented an explosion of serious violence including murders in the immediate wake of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933.   Importantly, we also talk about what institutions could have done at this early stage (and why they failed to act.)

Hermann Beck a professor of history at the University of Miami.

Beck, Hermann. Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions during the Nazi Takeover (2022)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.052)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waitman Bourne. Again, I apologize for there's been a pause in our recordings as I have been at a conference and then catching up. I know you're everyone who was waiting for a new episode. Apologies that we haven't had one, but we do have one now. And I think it's a really interesting topic. One of the things that

Hermann Beck (00:20.524)
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Hermann Beck (00:29.294)
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Waitman Beorn (00:29.864)
Holocaust historians even have often talked about is kind of when does the Holocaust start? Um, you know, is it 1933? Is it just the rise of the Nazis? Is it the beginning of the Reinhard camps and the actual physical extermination? Um, and one of the things that is often left out, um, and kind of a shocking phenomenon that actually, even for me, um, reading the book of the guests we're having on today,

Hermann Beck (00:35.062)
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Hermann Beck (00:40.43)
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Hermann Beck (00:54.688)
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Waitman Beorn (00:58.376)
I was kind of shocked at the level of violence took place very early on in 1933. Um, and so today we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the kinds of violence that, um, Jews experienced in Nazi Germany at the very beginning of the regime and what that might mean to our understanding, um, of, the Nazis of Holocaust and also of the reaction of some organizations, uh,

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Waitman Beorn (01:25.724)
to essentially what was, were violations of the law and morality. And so I couldn't think of a better person to talk about that than Hermann Beck. Professor Beck has just written an excellent book called Before the Holocaust. And the subtitle is Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions During the Nazi Takeover. And so Hermann, thank you so much for coming on.

Hermann Beck (01:36.232)
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Hermann Beck (01:50.702)
Thank you, Weigland, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Waitman Beorn (01:54.984)
can you start by telling us how you got interested in this particular topic?

Hermann Beck (02:00.302)
Yes, well, more than two decades ago when I was researching another book on the relationship between the Nazis and the DNVP, you the conservative party, they were in a coalition government when Hitler became chancellor on January 30th, 1933. Going through these DNVP files, the German National People's Party, I was struck at the enormous volume of anti-Semitic violence.

And that really struck me as odd. thought, well, that can't be so early on. In other words, know, five and six weeks after Hitler had come to power. How was this possible? Also, I found it strange that no previous work had really been done about this. I thought, well, since it was so early, you know, beginning on March 6th,

1933, that is to say the day after the elections of the 5th of March, I thought well then some institutions in German society were still in a position to protest. How come that I've never heard anything about any protest? And so I then continued digging and quickly realized it was very difficult to find information. So in conservative party files I found protest letters from

conservative German Jews who also asked for help. Then I went to police files and noticed there was nothing. Absolutely the police hadn't recorded anything. Then I looked at the files of the foreign office and there I found complaints from the Polish embassy and the Polish diplomatic missions complaining about encroachments and attacks on Polish nationals, meaning Polish Jews living in Germany.

And then from there, once I finished the other book, I then spent years researching this topic. So for example, I looked at the files of the British military government in Germany in 1945. They then went back to 1933 and looked at crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Nazi seizure of power. Also at recompensation files from the German government, you know, trying to...

Hermann Beck (04:16.982)
recompense German Jews for what had happened. Ultimately, they couldn't do much but give money. But there too, I found many interesting documents. Then I went to regional archives, church archives, and in total, I think I looked at more than 20 archival holdings. And then in the end, I found a truly incredible volume of anti-Semitic violence.

Actually, I found evidence of more than a thousand attacks and several dozen murder cases. And this is probably only the tip of the iceberg because so much has been destroyed or documents burned during the war or else, and that's even more likely, never recorded.

Waitman Beorn (05:04.611)
And so I think this is a great example of a couple of things. One is, I think really, you know, reading sources, looking for different things, probably lots of other people have, or finding new sources and, also of asking a question that seems obvious, but that no one has really asked before in the same way. Can you talk a little about why? mean, why, why has this picture? And it's a,

One of the things I think is, by the way, that's it's phenomenal about the book is it, it really covers in terms of the period of the violence about six months or so, right? That there's very, very, very short period of time, but we learn so much about it. So can you, why do you think this hasn't been delved into before?

Hermann Beck (05:54.862)
I think one reason is this anti-Semitic violence was never acknowledged in Germany. So when it happened in March and April and May 1933, there were protest movements outside Germany, economic boycotts in the United States and England and France, British and American newspapers wrote about it. The German government always denied it. Also, church leaders, other prominent German...

the leaders in German society said this never happens. And well, I guess in the end, many really came to believe this. I that's one reason. Reason number two, the police did not record anti-Semitic crimes. In fact, I found and I was mentioned in the book, five or six examples from the files where the police was asked to the side of a crime and they basically said,

It's not our job to protect German Jews. The police has nothing to do with this. so, you know, usually the first place a researcher would turn to are police files and there is nothing to be found there. So that's reason number two. Then I think, especially during the last 30 years, very much emphasis has been placed on the Holocaust itself. That is to say on the period

after 938, after Reichskristallnacht. And since very little has been written about this earlier period, mean, even, you know, prominent surveys of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and Nazi Germany and the Jews have a couple of pages on it. In fact, there is one article by Richard Bessel published in 2004 in the Journal of Contemporary History, it's called The Nazi Capture of Power. And in this article,

He focuses, he has about five or six pages on anti-Semitic encroachments. This is a great deal. And Bessel is one of the few people who was fully aware of it because he had written a very good book on the SA in Germany's eastern provinces, East Prussia, Silesia, and so on. And of course, so he knew what was happening in March and April. But otherwise, well, since no one ever really wrote about it.

Hermann Beck (08:19.31)
it was sort of self-perpetuating, this ignorance became sort self-perpetuating and also I think there has always been an underlying, an implicit underlying assumption that anti-Semitic violence during the Nazi seizure of power or during the early Nazi period rose gradually. From low beginnings in 1933 to some violence in 1935, there's much more about the

anti-Semitic attacks in Munich and elsewhere in Berlin in 1935 and then of course up to 1938. Now this was clearly not the case. There was a huge bang, enormous explosion at the beginning. In fact we have one source, one American journalist, Michael Williams, he wrote about this in June of 1933 and he had spent time in Germany and he said well...

there have been at least 3,000 violent encroachments and he said, I estimate 300 murders. So there was this in, but that's a pure guesstimate, you we have no statistics, absolutely none. So there was this enormous explosion at the beginning and then it went down in the second half of 33. There was relatively little in 34. Then it rose again in 35. Then during the Olympics of course, as we know.

it went down considerably. And then 37 or 38 it rose again. And from there on steadily.

Waitman Beorn (09:51.174)
And I, and I wonder if part of it also is that you suggested this at the beginning of your remarks a little bit, you know, that, and again, depending on when we, when we term the Holocaust, but we'll say sort of the actual physical exterminations use sort of overshadows or has overshadowed everything that took place earlier. And I think one common misconception that your book brings into sharp relief is this idea that.

discrimination and violence against Jews from say, 33 to, you know, 38 or whatever was, was bad, but it wasn't really that bad. I mean, in comparison to everything else, right. Um, you know, but actually, you know, when we'll talk about this, you know, it's, you show that it's not only is it, it's sort of the, the beating up and all of that also actually really awful and, sometimes deadly. But as we talk, as you're going to talk about, think, you know,

there's actually murders like planned out like murders of Jews. And then the government's, the society's response to that, I think is, is quite chilling. And it's a, it's a fascinating and important reminder that, you know, just the sort of beating up period was actually incredibly deadly and awful. And, you know, and, and bears consideration.

Hermann Beck (11:18.414)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (11:19.876)
in its own time, I think, because, you know, if we look at it in the context of the Holocaust, right, and gas chambers, yeah, maybe it begins to sort of lose a bit of its a bit of its horror. But if you consider it before all that stuff takes place, you know, moving from a peaceful, you know, relatively speaking, normal Western European country to murder being basically overlooked and allowed, that's actually really, really

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Waitman Beorn (11:49.33)
horrific.

Hermann Beck (11:50.749)
Absolutely, and I think the point you just made is really important. There was relatively little anti-Semitic violence in the last phase of the Weimar Republic. During the Weimar Republic, the beginning, there was some. And toward the end, again, toward the middle, there was very, very little. Toward the end of the republic, after 1930, there were a number of prominent incidences, such as the Kurfürstendamm Gravalle in 1931.

and some other cases, but overall, you know, there was little anti-Semitic violence and what there was was, well, people who attacked Jews were then brought, were sentenced and had to serve jail time. And then all of a sudden this exploded and indeed, one, as I mentioned in the book, especially in the second part, what is really astonishing is the resourcefulness, for lack of a better word,

of the attackers. Not only were people beaten up and seriously previously injured, there also were these sprangermärsche, pillory marches, know, kind of a medieval punishment. What happened was that German Jews were actually put on an oxcart and then marched through town, accompanied by a posse of SA stormtroopers and they had to wear signs around their neck.

In one case in Pinnerberg near Hamburg, a tobacco merchant had fallen foul of SA members and he was then paraded through town, signs around his neck saying, I'm the biggest racketeer in Pinnerberg for hours on end and people threw rotten eggs at him, tomatoes, innards of dead animals. Afterwards, of course, he was a broken man. And these Prangermärsche

which we've all heard of from the Middle Ages and early modern times, were very, very widespread. Also, hundreds of thousands of people must have known about it because I found them mentioned in newspapers, especially in Silesia, but also in other parts of Germany. So this was really widely known. And I list at least a dozen towns in which they took place. And then in addition to the Sprangermärche,

Hermann Beck (14:12.75)
as I said, were well known. There was a kind of another sort of branding. In newspapers from the late spring and summer of 1933, I found the names of people, the names of persons, people who had close contact to Jews and who were accused of having sexual relations with them, was sort of set out in newspaper articles. Look at these people. They have sexual relations with German Jews.

and there was their name, full address and well, a biting comment underneath for everyone to read. And mind you, this happened three and a half years before the Nuremberg laws. So in 1933, every, I mean, most adult Germans must have known about this. Another form of violence which we never hear about or never read about

was that people were basically expelled from the country. I found many cases, for example, that of a Berlin doctor, and he worked free of charge for the SPD, and he was then attacked by the SA, brought to one of those SA concentration camps, these wild camps, SA torture cellars, badly beaten up, and he was told, well,

if you don't leave the country within a matter of 48 hours, we'll kill you and your family. So he left, went to Switzerland, and from there he wrote to the, he had a friend working for a Swiss newspaper, and that's where I got the report from, what happened to him. So this man really had to leave within a very short period of time, his entire existence was ruined. He also in detail describes the tortures he underwent.

And there were, well, there must have been hundreds of cases like his. I found evidence of a few dozen cases. Also, some cases where people that were beaten up, told to leave the country but didn't leave it. There was one case in Wiesbaden, a man who had a of an arts store and antique dealer. He was beaten up in March, was told to leave. He didn't leave. Once he had recovered from his wounds, he went back to his shop.

Hermann Beck (16:36.926)
days later he was murdered. These were just a few examples of different categories of attacks.

Waitman Beorn (16:47.816)
And I want to get to the categories because I really like the way that you both divide up sort of non-Jewish or non-German Jews and German Jews as well. We'll talk about that and also the different kinds of violence. One of the things I thought was really interesting, you know, as someone who I guess works on sort of the later Nazi period and the Holocaust, is the role of the essay in this because the essay sort of drops off the

the radar, so to speak, after 34, after the night of the long knives, when they become sort of a neutered organization and the SS is sort of in ascendance and they sort of become kind of a more of a symbolic thing. But in this period of time, the SA are actually a force to be reckoned with. Can you talk a little about what it is at this moment in history and their relationships with the Nazi state? I guess, you know, in this early period,

prior to the time when they sort of are moved along.

Hermann Beck (17:47.254)
Right. Well, I think it's important to note that this violence was not ordered from above. In other words, this was grassroots violence emanating from SA units. At the time, at the time when Hitler came to power in late January, there were about half a million SA men. Well, later we hear in 1934, the figure that's usually given is four million, but that means there were many corporate members.

By then in 1934, all male German students had to be members of the SA. So this period doesn't count anymore. So in March, were, as I said, about 500,000 to 600,000 SA men. And the violence really came from them. Now, it was not welcomed by the Nazi state. In fact, beginning on March 10th, Hitler issued several injunctions against this violence. He said, please stop.

I mean, this really runs counter to what we want to achieve. And in one of these orders, he said, I know it's not you. This is done by communists in your own ranks. But this must stop immediately. Well, it didn't stop. In fact, it only then gradually petered out in late April, early May, and even during the summer. We have a few isolated incidences. So it was grassroots violence from SA members.

Also interesting, many of the crimes, most of them, were of a private nature. That is to say, someone who knew an SA man or the SA man himself had lost, had debts with a potential victim or had lost a lawsuit, had been in a lawsuit against him and the judge had decided against him. And then as a result, the Jewish German

was beaten up or subjected to a Pranger Mausch. So these were really mostly private crimes and also quite often they were committed for gain. Cancellation of debts, for example, or sheer hatred. In one example from Schleswig-Holstein, which I found in the regional archive,

Hermann Beck (20:12.384)
In the absence of the victim, his house was demolished. Every tile was smashed. In fact, it was so bad that the perpetrators had cut themselves because they smashed window panes and the police the next morning just had to follow the trail of blood to their own houses. Also another interesting fact, in 1933 itself, most of the perpetrators

for example, the attackers, know, the person who destroyed that particular house. Virtually all of the murderers were known to the authorities. Many had been arrested, but then were let go under an amnesty of July, mid-July 1933, an amnesty for crimes committed during the National Socialist Revolution. So they were then let go as if nothing had happened.

And in quite a few cases, relatives of the victims sued these people again after the war. then lawsuits actually went on through the 1950s into the 1960s. Many of the perpetrators, I would even say most of them, were eventually brought to justice. But they got, I mean, ridiculously light sentences. You know, a few months for murder, for example. And also interesting,

When the perpetrators were brought to justice, the lesser fry got more severe punishments. For example, there is one case, one murder case, and I categorized this particular murder case under shot while trying to escape. So this man, in fact, former secretary of court Eisner, the Bavarian prime minister was murdered in 1919, was brought to a forest.

and then told to run away and then he was shot in the back, so shot, killed, while trying to escape. All of the murderers then were eventually brought to justice. The only one who got a stiff sentence was the driver, a lowly SS guard, he got five years, the others just got a few months. So that really was typical. But it's interesting, at least prosecution continued after 9 and 4.

Waitman Beorn (22:40.038)
No, I think it's really, I mean, I'm a huge fan, I suppose, of trials and judicial sources. I really want to talk about those as well, because it's fascinating. People were able to come back, but I saw lot of parallels with some of the trials that I've worked with in the sense of the court saying, we just don't have the evidence, not recognizing that sort of the rules of evidence for a normal crime don't work quite as well.

when it comes sort of Holocaust stuff. Can we go back a little bit to the beginning and talk about, because you do a really interesting job of talking about the ways that German Jewish citizens and Jewish non-citizens of Germany began to experience this violence. Can you talk a little about sort of those two categories first?

Hermann Beck (23:32.91)
Yes, well the first part of my book deals with violence against non-German citizens, non-Jewish German citizens, well, Jews who lived in Germany but were not citizens, most of them were Ostjoden and in a sense they were the first targets. Of course, know, they had been...

had been a debate about Ostjuden and about whether or not to close the border to Russia and to Poland. And you might remember it was closed in April of 1918. Already during the empire they were not welcome. They also lived in certain segregated neighborhoods in Berlin and other large German cities, mostly Dresden and Leipzig. In Berlin, for example, in the Scheunenviertel. So they really were the first victims of these attacks.

and violence against them was quite different. So there were a few Pranger-Merche. Also extortion and crime or violence for gain, for monetary gain, didn't play a role because they had nothing. What happened with them, quite a number of them were actually attacked in synagogues. So, you know, the criminals did this for pure fun, singed off their beards.

forced them to eat pork. Many were forced to sing German nationalist songs. Many were beaten. There were many attacks in restaurants. Their restaurants were closed down. Now, these crimes are relatively easy to follow because most of them, about 60 % of all foreign Jews in Germany, were Polish citizens. And so many of them

went to the Polish consulate and then the Polish consulate general wrote to the German foreign minister or if it happened in Saxony to the interior minister of Saxony. So I got various sources here. And so these crimes are often described in great detail. Now, I don't know which percentage was actually recorded.

Hermann Beck (25:55.306)
and how many crimes fell by the wayside because they too were afraid. Of course, was enormous fear that very few of them went to the police because they felt, well, at the police they just poke fun at me and they won't help me in any case. But once they went to the Polish consulate or the Romanian consulate or some had Austrian citizenship, went to the Austrian consulate because they had fought for Austria during World War I.

Then it was recorded and then we have a very clear record. And in fact, there have been two articles written about this in Polish by a Polish historian. mentioned this, but of course that's very little known. The volume of violence was enormous. I think I probably saw evidence of more than 500 cases of violence against

Polish Jews alone. There also was some violence against West European Jews, Dutch Jews. There was a Swiss restaurant in Magdeburg that was attacked. Swiss Jewish citizens were beaten up. Then there was quickly put a stop to it because the Swiss general consul protested right away. Also American citizens were attacked.

In fact, there was one very prominent case in Leipzig of a Philip Sackerman from New York, a merchant dealing in furs. And remember, Leipzig was the center of the German fur trade. And he had been attacked by about 20 SA men, savagely mauled. And there was, of course, great protest also from the American Foreign Office and the State Department.

And everything was done, well, allegedly everything was done to find the perpetrators, but the SA protected their own. And so, you know, even though Neurath got involved, the Foreign Minister, the actual perpetrators could not be found. But in any case, so while there was some violence against West European, Swiss,

Hermann Beck (28:20.64)
and American Jews, there was an enormous volume of violence against East European, especially Polish Jews.

Waitman Beorn (28:29.16)
And this is something that you highlight, you touch on this as well, for maybe for listeners, the all student, sort of traditional religious Jew who wears the kaftan and the black robes and these kind of long beards and kind of stuff, they're particularly visible. But also I suspect part of it is that even in Nazi sort of antisemitic ideology, they are sort of the worst of the worst.

as they're, as they're depicted, right? Hitler's, Hitler says, mean, whether we believe him or not, you know, he says that one of the things that really awakened his own anti-Semitism was seeing an Austrian specifically an Eastern European Jew on the street in Vienna, not, not a more assimilated, you know, Western European Jewish person who might not have any outward appearance of being Jewish. And so this, this might also have something to do with, with the fact that these are sort of the, the scary boogeymen of

Hermann Beck (29:18.894)
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Hermann Beck (29:25.166)
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Waitman Beorn (29:27.432)
of German anti-Semitism or Nazi anti-Semitism.

Hermann Beck (29:31.054)
you know, the 1920s, before 1924, tens of thousands of Ostjuden had been incarcerated in camps in Bavaria and in Pomerania. There was the infamous Staggart camp and many of them then were forcibly expelled. And this was actually done by the Weimar coalition in Trusche, you know, under an SPD interior minister.

So, as you say, the Ostjuden were not popular even among left-wing German politicians. Also within German Jewish communities in the Rhineland and in Dresden and Leipzig, they did not have full voting rights. And many established German Jews, of course, were afraid of a great influx of Ostjuden because they feared that it might fan the flames of anti-Semitism.

Initially, mean of course numbers of Ostjuden went down during the Weimar Republic. At the end of the war there were about 150,000 180,000 Ostjuden in Germany. By the mid-1920s that number had basically been cut in half. It then rose, well it then, in fact it didn't rise, the number of foreign Jews rose slightly up to 1933. The number of Ostjuden

actually went down to maybe 58 to 65 000 by the time Hitler came to power. But you're right, of course they were in a sense predestined targets, the first targets, very very unpopular and as you say the Bogen man, yes.

Waitman Beorn (31:10.216)
And so if we move then on to German citizens, can you talk about sort of the different kinds of violence that they experienced and what that tells us about sort of the early, early Nazi state? Because again, I think you're absolutely right that one of the things that your book explodes in a good way is this idea of a sort of gradual

increase in antisemitism and violence, which you might be able to trace in terms of the sort of the, the evolution of laws, which is kind of a gradual thing. but the violence itself, it's almost day and night, you know, the, election of the Nazis and all of a sudden, you know, really, really extreme violence takes place.

Hermann Beck (31:57.518)
Right, well we have to mention during the first four weeks after Hitler was in power there was little anti-Semitic violence because you see SA violence initially was directed against Hitler's political opponents. The SPD, the centre party, communists, all of this changed after the 5th of March and now the SA was free and now they focused on either the Ostjuden

or on German Jews. But you're perfectly right. was violence directed against German Jews was somewhat different in nature. First of all, we must say it was far more difficult to find documentation because, well, no one was interested in recording violent acts perpetrated against German Jews. They themselves had to go to the police and that was risky.

So one central category of violence directly against German Jews were these Prangermärsche, these pillory marches as I mentioned. And it only made sense to have a pillory march with an established person. That is to say, you know, a prominent citizen in a town or in a village, someone who had something to lose, someone whose honor, in quotation marks, could be destroyed.

And as I said, that these Pranger-Merche were very, very numerous. Now, we have in history books, we have several depictions of these Pranger-Merche. And of course, you saw one on the cover of my book. And we also know them. I actually saw some of them in my school history books. It's odd because we have depictions of them and photographs, but there is no actual literature.

And very, very little has been written about this. And it's astonishing to see how very widespread this was in 1933. These Panger-Marschall also were directed against political opponents. So in the case of Berlin, for example, I found some evidence that members of the SPD also were paraded through town and spat at and so on. So that was one central category.

Hermann Beck (34:24.846)
Another one was the murders. There I found about three to four dozen cases, enough to categorize them, enough to place them into different categories. And you might remember the first category was sort of the accidental murder. That is to say, violence that went wrong. The SA

just wanted to beat up a person, he resisted fiercely and was then shot. Interesting again, in this case, like in most murder cases, the culprits were identified and then brought to justice, but then afterwards released. This context is quite interesting to see how the public prosecutors dealt with these cases.

Initially, before the amnesty, they were determined to bring these people to justice, put together a case. But once they realized that in the end they would have to let him go, they changed. They found excuses for him. So for example, in the case of one murder case, the murder case of a milkman, of a dairy merchant in Wiesbaden in the second half of April,

1933. Once it became clear that the public prosecutor had to let him go, all of a sudden this there emerged and the man in his late 50s became a communist. So the case file it says, Motfall Max Kassel, communist aus Wiesbaden. Of course he was not a communist and you know this label was invented to make him somewhat guilty and to somewhat exonerate the murderers. And then

the public prosecutor did his best to really exonerate the murderers he mentioned.

Waitman Beorn (36:24.348)
I mean, this was just to interject. This was one of the examples that I found amazing. because, know, you have someone who in a, you know, the regime has changed and it seems like the public prosecutor is actually at the beginning doing, doing his best to actually follow the law and actually is, sort of conscientiously trying to prosecute this.

Hermann Beck (36:46.766)
Indeed.

Waitman Beorn (36:52.37)
and you're sort of in a certain sense, I think, kind of as a reader, I was kind of like, good. There's, there's one good guy doing what he's supposed to be doing. And then all of a sudden he literally just turns around and it's like, well, nevermind. and makes up all this stuff and you give all these great examples of, know, the guy is literally bending over backwards. So the guys were drunk, they were tired, they'd been provoked. mean, like just all this stuff that like literally before he was basically told to lay off.

he would have, you know, was going after the prosecute these guys and really bring them to justice. I thought that was an amazing example.

Hermann Beck (37:29.326)
And in this particular case, as I said, the murderers were then arrested, let go, but then after the war actually brought to justice. Also interesting, the actual murderers were habitual criminals. Remember I say a little bit about this one guy Ernst Franz Reb, who was sort of a typical SA thug, and who actually had been thrown out of the Nazi party because of other crimes he had committed.

And then after the war, justice finally caught up with him and he was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. But the people behind it, the people who actually commissioned that murder, so to speak, who had earlier said, well, let's go and get him and let's beat up Max Kassel. Nothing happened to them. Of course, the public prosecutor, well, he was under enormous pressure. He thought of his own career and he thought, well, how can I get out of this?

and what can I do to do what I actually must do, namely let the criminals go. So he fabricated indictments against Kassel, communists and so on, and excuses for the culprits.

Waitman Beorn (38:49.192)
I mean, it's, it's amazing. And one of the other things that we think we're talking about sort of the, the way that officials in the system sort of participated in this. one of the other categories that you, that you bring up is this sort of death in custody. Um, you know, and, some of these, you know, I have to be honest as an American, they closely resemble lynch mobs, you know, from, from the time of, of, uh, you know,

Hermann Beck (39:05.358)
Good.

Waitman Beorn (39:17.288)
before the Civil War, but then also after during Jim Crow. mean, you have people that are arrested, falsely arrested, taken to a prison, and then, you know, either killed by the staff, some of whom are, and here's that place we had that interesting crossover between sort of official police and members of the SA who are sort of working with the police or our police. And then, you know, it makes things unsafe everywhere.

Hermann Beck (39:43.049)
you

Waitman Beorn (39:46.93)
for people involved.

Hermann Beck (39:48.494)
What you just mentioned, that was probably the most prominent murder case of all of them, Friedrich Schumm in Kiel on April 1st, you the day of the boycott. And well, he got into an argument with two SS men and he actually had a gun and shot one of the SS men. And then went to the police, turned himself in, was jailed. And then, as you said, a lynch mob caught up with him.

and killed him, killed him in jail. Yes, I know that subsequently I mentioned that his father had to pay, well, had to make compensation payments to the wounded SS men. His son had been killed. But again, here too, the police president of Kiel, a Graf von Ransow,

where the law went after him after 1945 until it was finally discovered that he had died in 1948, someplace on the Rhine. But here too, a number of the minor culprits were then also brought to justice and had to serve minor prison terms after 1945. That was a very prominent case, widely known. Also the international press reported about this and Otto de Belius.

the superintendent, the Protestant bishop of the Mark Brandenburg mentioned this case in a famous radio address to an American audience, an address of April 4th, 1933. And he said, you know, that one murder had been committed during the boycott, the boycott, the day of the boycott, Saturday, April 1st, which otherwise was a quiet day. That wasn't true, as I show in the book. And he said, but, you know, this was understandable because Friedrich Jum, after all.

headshot NSS men. So here, very prominent case of a prominent Protestant clergyman excusing a Nazi crime. you know, De Belius really believed what he said.

Waitman Beorn (41:58.588)
And this is a, this is a great segue to sort of the, really the second half of the book, where you do something I think is really nice, which is a lot of times people talk about resistance to the Nazis or, whatever in kind of a very generalized, once over the world kind of approach. but what you do is you say, look, I think there are three organizations that, that could have done something, could have said something, should have said something.

you know, in this early period, you know, the church, the bureaucracy and the DNVP, right? The conservative party. And then you go and look at like what it is that they did or didn't do. And so the churches, for example, is the first one. So can you talk a little about that, you know, because as you suggest and as there are these great examples of Americans, American clergy who are kind of writing and saying,

What do think you should be doing, German church, in the face of the Nazis? What did they do and what was the reasoning behind their response?

Hermann Beck (43:05.432)
Yeah, well of course, know, by the time this began, by early March 1933, there were very few institutions in German society who could do something against this violence, who could actually protest. So first I looked at the army archives, I thought, the Reichswehr was relatively free of Nazi influence. They might have done something, but as I quickly discovered, the army wasn't interested in the issue. Also political parties, which during the Weimar Republic,

protested against anti-Semitism, especially the SPD and the left liberals, the DDP, their heads were on the block themselves. I mean, they were under siege. They also couldn't do anything. So in the end, there really was the Protestant Church, the Catholic Church, the bureaucracy, and the DNVP, in other words, Hitler's coalition partner. And well, first of all, I think I show very clearly that churchmen were

aware of this. That's an important point because you many others might say well of course you know all of this happened but we didn't know. They did know because they had many letters of protest from fellow church members who wrote to their bishops and said look what's happening, look here what is happening, do something about it. And so now you asked why didn't they? In other words why did they not protest?

because after all they were admonished to protest by their own flock, then by the international Protestant church, the Weltkirche Draht and churchmen in America and Switzerland and France, they all said, do something about this. Well, there is a whole cluster of reasons why they remained silent and why they deliberately elected to remain silent. Number one.

obvious reason, fear. They were afraid that Nazis might attack them next. It's interesting, initially in March a good many churchmen were in favor of protest and then in the second half of April during that crucial meeting of April 26th 1933 when the Kirchenausschuss, the leading 40 Protestant church leaders were assembled, only one

Hermann Beck (45:34.422)
opted in favor of protest. And the other said, no, no, we have to remain silent. As I said, reason number one, fear. Reason number two, contentment with the regime. That was for me the most startling reason. And many church leaders said, well, look, one guy said, we now finally have an Oprigkeit. Finally, again, we have a strong state.

you know, that defends our interests, let's not do anything against this. they, many members of the establishment, many and especially person-charged leaders, were very, were initially very happy with the Nazi leadership. So that was the second reason. Also connected with this, they were also happy with Nazi measures. In other words, they were not unhappy about the April legislation.

about the Aryan clause, know, the Beamtengesetz and the lawyers law and so that in other words full agreement with the regime and third reason obviously deep-seated anti-Semitism. Now here we have to mention that these church leaders, these 40 church leaders who made the decision in April 933

were all members of an older generation. That is to say, these were not German Christians. These were all people who turned the republic had voted for the DVP or the DNVP. For the most part, they were not Nazis. I don't think that any one of them was a Nazi before the summer of 1933. They were born between the late 1850s

and the late 1870s. So they were all older in their mid-60s and 70s, so an older generation, and they had their private but very strong reservations against Jews. That of course then aided their silence. Then, fourth reason you might say, completely misunderstood patriotism. They felt in this hour of need

Hermann Beck (48:01.442)
We have to stand by the regime. We cannot criticize it. And by the way, the one church member, a church leader from Bavaria, Pichmann, the one who was in favor of protest, he then eventually converted to Catholicism.

Waitman Beorn (48:22.304)
So sort of out of out of the frying pan into the fire there. But I guess, you know, one of other things that's really interesting that comes through in regards to this are protests from people who are either in mixed religious marriages or actually have converted to Christianity. And they're asking the church, you know, one example you have in the book that was quite striking, you know, is I think it's a guy who writes in and says, look, I've converted to

through Protestantism to Christianity. And now I'm, I have no Jewish community, but yet the Nazi state considers me to be Jewish. Will you help me? And what's the response then for those people?

Hermann Beck (49:07.191)
Well, as you saw, of course, the response was, absolutely not. Embarrassment. So these people really were left in the lurch. remember, there was this one example I give of a Freiburg school teacher. And then the Protestant church leader, the Kirchen president of Baden, whom she had written to, said, well, I can't help you.

Look at German minorities in Poland, look at German minorities all over the world. They are also persecuted. absolutely no help was forthcoming. And you're right, I give many examples from people in Hamburg and other places in Germany who had converted from their earlier Judaism to Protestantism and they now really had no one to look after them. These so-called Juden Christen really were in a...

Terrible plight, absolutely.

Waitman Beorn (50:04.104)
And so if we move on then to the bureaucracy, I think it's an interesting proposition that you raised, that sort of the bureaucracy had a chance, had a moment where it might have been able to do something. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Hermann Beck (50:21.486)
Well, yeah, of course, see, German bureaucrats, members of the administrative and judicial bureaucracy found themselves in a very strange predicament. They all knew that the charges were true. In other words, they received complaints from the Polish embassy and Polish consulates about attacks on Polish Jews and so on. And they knew this is of course true. But they also knew that they were expected

to uphold.

Well, the Charmin flag, so to speak. They could not attack their own country. And so they did what they could to besmirch the victims. Remember, in many cases I show that the victims then were labeled communists or quite often rapists or people with an immoral, leibenswandel, know, unsteady people who really didn't deserve any better. So, yes.

I assume in many instances they were also worried about their own career and they knew in this new Nazi state, well, I have to support Germany no matter what.

Waitman Beorn (51:40.602)
It's interesting. It's interesting to me how quickly, you know, everybody, everybody really, I mean, but but also the bureaucracy is sort of reading what the regime wants, because, you know, from one perspective, you could say, you know, look, Hitler is elected in January, and this is a very it's a very new regime. And it's not.

You know, this isn't 1939 where you know, you know, sort of the Fuhrer Princip and like all of this stuff. This is very early on and you know, there might've been some ambiguity as to, you know, exactly, you know, what's the difference between Hitler on the campaign trail and Hitler in office, you know, is, and are we, what are we supposed to do? But it sounds like what you're saying is that very quickly they realized, you know, this is the direction that the regime is going in and we're going to, we're going to follow along.

Hermann Beck (52:33.038)
And keep in mind from early on, the bureaucracy was under siege. Already in March, they were asked to sign out, to fill out these long questionnaires about their political prehistory, which parties had they belonged to, were they Jewish or not. So, you know, all of them had the democles sought of potential dismissal hovering over them.

By the way, one great source for that is Sebastian Hufner defying Hitler. His father was a high ranking Prussian civil servant. And he mentioned how other officials came to his father at night with worried faces, asking for advice, what can I do? So the bureaucracy is especially, course, know, feared the Nazi state and then bent over backwards to, well, as Ian Kershaw said,

work toward the Führer, in other words, do what the state might expect from them. And the best example was now to tone down anti-Semitic violence and said it didn't really happen in this way and the only culprit was the victim, not the perpetrator.

Waitman Beorn (53:50.588)
And it's interesting. wonder if, I wonder if, if this is the case where one of the best areas for a bureaucrat to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime is regarding Jewish matters. because, you know, if, if you're a, you know, superintendent of parks or something, just doing a great job as that doesn't show whether or not you're, you're loyal to the regime. But if you, if you take an anti-Jewish action,

Hermann Beck (54:08.524)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (54:19.024)
That's really sort of raising your hand, both literally, I suppose, and figuratively, and saying, I'm on board with the Nazi state. Not, I'm just a good bureaucrat, but I'm actually on board ideologically.

Hermann Beck (54:22.926)
you

Absolutely.

Hermann Beck (54:29.922)
Yes, that is a key point. know, as Sebastian Haffner said in a different book, Germany, Czachlan Hyde, he said, anti-Semitic violence, anti-Semitic measures strengthened the Nazi in-group. These were the iron crimes, anti-Semitic crimes were the iron trammels that bound the Nazi in-group together. Absolutely, of course, you know, by dint of their anti-Semitism, they could show

that they were good Nazis. another German sociologist at the time, Max Halkheimer, know, who emigrated with his Institut für Sozialforschung from Frankfurt to New York, anti-Semitic violence, pogroms, are meant for the onlookers. In other words, they are meant to show other Germans, look, this might happen to you if you don't fall into line.

And I think the same was behind the Prangermarch. It was the same idea. You too might be ostracized in this brutal fashion unless you fall into line.

Waitman Beorn (55:39.208)
Well, and you give, you give some examples in the book also of, non-Jews who by, by dint of their, you know, helping Jewish people or association are actually pilloried in this way as well. So it's not just a, a theoretical threat. It's, it's an actual, you know, threat that there, we will also go after non-Jews that we think are, are Jew friendly or whatever Jew, lovers, as they would say.

Hermann Beck (55:43.059)
you

Hermann Beck (56:06.304)
Absolutely, there is this one case in Flensburg of this lawyer who had acted on behalf of a wealthy Jew to basically reclaim debts and he was then put on an oxcart and marched through Flensburg. The same happened to him, indeed. And there was another category I mentioned, the profiteer ordinance. Remember the Heimzügeverordnung? In other words, this profiteer ordinance

Waitman Beorn (56:29.896)
Yeah.

Hermann Beck (56:35.278)
specified that rumors that were harmful to the reputation of the Reich would be punished by prison terms. And what's interesting there, exactly what you might expect, German Jews were punished far more severely for infractions of this Heimtige Verordnung than non-Jews. And they actually show, you know, similar things that had happened to Jewish people were

Punished farm, farm or severely.

Waitman Beorn (57:06.851)
And so lastly, so I want to cover this too. You mentioned the DNVP, the German National Fatherlands Party, is the sort of Hitler's, you know, eventually sort of subsumes it, there's partners, but they're also a far right conservative party. you know, were people asking them for help or what, why might we've even expected them to care at all about Nazi violence?

Hermann Beck (57:33.742)
Absolutely. Well, one forgets that there were a number of Jewish members in the DNVP and of course the conservatives were quite different from the Nazis. There was a good deal of common ground. You know, wanted to make Germany great again. So in terms of foreign policy, they had a common program. But their social base was very different.

And so these Jewish members of the DNVP are sympathizers. They felt, the conservatives, that's the only party that can help me now in this plight. So they wrote to the leadership and there were actually quite a number of voices who wrote, people who write to Hügelberg and others saying, we should help them. We can't let this happen. But.

At this point, after the elections of March, the DNVP leaders were very, very afraid to be considered to be Judenfreundlich. And so no help was forthcoming. We must add that the leader of the DNVP, Hugenberg, was not anti-Semitic. He had a close helper, Reinhold Quartz, who himself was partly Jewish.

The DNVP indeed did have anti-Semitic overtones, but their anti-Semitism was very different from Nazi anti-Semitism.

Waitman Beorn (59:14.19)
and, and so I want to, I want to pull back now and, and, and ask you what, what this tells us about Germany, about the Nazi state, about sort of the Holocaust that will, that will come after it. In other words, what, is the significance of this? but before I do that, I want to mention something that, that, that I think really brought this into, into relief for me reading your book. and I think the year was 1921.

a year of extreme political violence. You mentioned that there were a thousand or so murders across Germany nationwide. And 31, sorry, 1931. there are a thousand homicides of all kinds across Germany, you know, from your normal to crime, whatever else. And that, again, the low estimate

Hermann Beck (59:55.038)
I see. Right. That 9th, 9th 31. 31.

Hermann Beck (01:00:02.582)
Right, I know exactly what you mean.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:12.388)
Again, we don't know the numbers, but the low estimate of Jews murdered in the first, we'll say, six months or so of 1933 is 300, which really gives us a sense of the extremity of the violence. know, 300 just Jews just because they're Jewish or resulting from some kind of Nazi ideological motivation. So with that is sort of for our listeners to give you a sense of the scale of the violence.

You know, it's already, you know, a third of a normal, of a very, very violent year's homicides in six months. And that's the low estimate. So, can you talk about what does this tell us about the Nazi state, about Germans, about their relationship to the Nazis, et cetera?

Hermann Beck (01:00:50.407)
Exactly.

Hermann Beck (01:00:59.918)
Right, so the figures were in 1931 there were 1,365 cases of murder and manslaughter in all of Germany and you know this Michael Williams had said in 1933 between March and June there had been 300 anti-semitic murders and 3,000 violent attacks. So indeed in other words a very substantial portion

Waitman Beorn (01:01:08.54)
Yep. Sorry.

Hermann Beck (01:01:29.376)
of all the murders in Germany in 1931. well, I mean, that of course really tells you it was an extremely, well, it's reluctant to say an extremely anti-Semitic society because virtually all of the murders and all of the political violence was committed by the SA.

What is significant, and I think that's really the significant part of my book, that there was no protest. There was no protest at a time when protest was still possible. Later in 35 and 38, well, no one could have openly protested. That would have meant consignment to a concentration camp. But in March and April, know, members of the church, leaders of the Protestant Church, Catholic Church,

bureaucrats and members of the DNVP, leaders of the DNVP could have protested, but they did not. I think that's the very significant fact.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:35.176)
Well, and even the, even the police reaction I found extraordinary in the sense that, I mean, I could imagine, you know, a police official, even if they were a Nazi saying, look, I'll make your beating up of this person go away. I'll make your ransacking of their apartment go away, but you murdered somebody. Like I can't, I can't sweep it under the rug because that's murder. But in fact, the police.

almost explicitly in all these cases of murder, we're kind of like, we don't care about murder. We don't care about Jewish murder. It's not a, it's not a crime. You know, the, documents don't exist. There's no investigation. There's not even a sort of investigation that, that changes direction. It's just, it's, it's accepted. And I found that shocking in a certain way.

Hermann Beck (01:03:07.566)
Thank

Hermann Beck (01:03:24.27)
Of course it is. But you see, the police commissars in charge of the murder cases were told from above to drop it, and then it went to the Staatsanwaltschaft, to the public prosecutor, so it was out of their hands. In quite a number of cases after 1945, local police commissars actually went to the authorities, to the British authorities in Cologne, for example, and then had these cases resurrected, so to speak.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:51.396)
okay.

Hermann Beck (01:03:53.186)
the police official, know, some lowly police inspector or even police superintendent was utterly powerless.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:01.928)
I mean, that's something that's interesting too. we should take a minute talk about this because I think one of the things that, and what's nice, the way that you write it in the book is that you include these, sort of rest of the story at the moment that you introduce the event, rather than having like a whole chapter on, you know, post-war trials, for example. But the fact that there are these post-war trials, you know, oftentimes raised by relatives, sometimes friends, acquaintances of people.

Who are able to come back, um, you know, after 1945 and say, this happened in 33 prosecuted. know, as someone that works with, with German trials, um, I know not to expect too much, um, you know, but, you know, in the context of sort of what we can expect the fact that there are a large number of, of convictions, regardless of

Hermann Beck (01:04:44.43)
you

Hermann Beck (01:04:49.246)
you

you

Waitman Beorn (01:05:00.112)
of how weak the sentence is, even the number of convictions shows that this held some purchase, in some ways more than a lot of actual Nazi Holocaust perpetrators after the war.

Hermann Beck (01:05:05.187)
you

you

Hermann Beck (01:05:14.651)
Right, indeed. It is well, gratifying to see that at least some of these people then were brought to justice or that the trial was sort of, you know, re-warmed and brought up again and, well, these criminals were persecuted. Well, some in the end had to be let go. Remember, there was this murder in the stockyards in Cologne. One person had actually murdered two people.

and despite a series of trials he couldn't be brought to justice but at least the attempt was made. Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:48.476)
Yeah, and of course, we mentioned this before we started recording, but one of the challenges, of course, with all of these prosecutions after the fact is that the justice system in a certain sense is limited to the criminal statutes that existed at the time. And they are always applying the rules of evidence that they would apply in a normal day-to-day crime to a situation.

you know, which which didn't necessarily lend itself to that. So it makes it makes prosecution quite difficult. But it is interesting to see that. Right. You know, even and again, to compare it to the impetus to investigate, you know, Holocaust perpetrators, it's interesting because there's actually it seems like the German government is much more interested or much more willing to.

to address these kinds of crimes in the late 40s, 50s, I mean after 49 and then it is other crimes.

Hermann Beck (01:06:52.15)
Also, right, also keep in mind there was a paper trail. In other words, there were files from the Prussian Ministry of Justice that then could be used in post-war trials.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:04.966)
Yeah, and they're criminal already. that's, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're sort of a professional police investigation, perhaps.

Hermann Beck (01:07:05.694)
Is it? Right. Right.

Hermann Beck (01:07:11.214)
And then also it helped that some of the murderers had a long criminal record, like this one person, this Franz Reb in Wiesbaden, and others.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:15.836)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:21.34)
But it's also one of those things that in a certain sense is more damning to your ordinary Germans, you know, than the camp guard at Treblinka, you know, because these are these are much sort of more ordinary events. And as you say, while the perpetrators may have been the essay, there are lots of other peripheral people who are actually quite.

not maybe not legally complicit, but are culpable or approving or involved in some way, or form, which is more of an indictment of Germans in some ways, you know, the worst.

Hermann Beck (01:08:01.614)
Exactly, and these murders happened in the streets of Germany and not in camps. That of course made a big difference. Remember there was this one case of Dr. Alfred Meyer in Wuppertal. He actually then, you know, he was in hiding from the SA, went to Düsseldorf, was then abducted and then brutally... Exactly, that's the one, yes. And you know, his wife went to an SA barracks

Waitman Beorn (01:08:13.309)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:20.358)
Is this the one that his wife accidentally gave away where he was?

Hermann Beck (01:08:30.592)
and accidentally told the person in charge where the husband was hiding. And then he was abducted in the plain light of day and the abduction actually was announced on the radio. So people were looking for him. Then a few days later he was found dead near a river. And trials against the murderers then continued throughout the 1950s and six people eventually were sentenced.

to minor prison sentences. But still, you know, it continued and something happened. Also, remember I mentioned in the book that during the Third Reich, several of the criminals, several of the perpetrators involved yelled out at night in a drunken state, I killed Alfred Meyer, taking great pride in the fact. So, you know, they bragged about his murder.

Well, in the end, of course, they had to pay for it. But a very paradoxical story altogether, yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:35.366)
And of course, in the end, they only have to pay for it because the regime changes just like it did in the beginning, right? know, the things that were illegal, i.e. murder, becomes okay under the Nazis. But then when, as long as you're murdering the right person, but then afterwards, when we sort of revert back to, you know, morality, hopefully, or a more moral form of government, they're sort of

Hermann Beck (01:09:39.544)
Yeah, of course.

Hermann Beck (01:09:44.108)
Yeah.

Hermann Beck (01:09:50.286)
As long as you kill the Jewish person, yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:04.462)
left out because they have, you know, sort of signed up for the other one. Herman, we've taken so much of your time. Thank you so much. Can you tell us our last sort of question that we are able to ask is what is one book that you would recommend for our listeners to read about Holocaust that's been meaningful to you?

Hermann Beck (01:10:24.078)
Well, you know, I always like reading autobiographies and diaries. So I have an excellent suggestion in German. Walter Tausk Breslauer Tagebuch. He is a Handlungsreisender, travelling salesman, and he confides to his diary what happened to him between 1933 and 38. Very, very moving. And for those of our listeners,

who don't read German. I found Peter Gay's book. Peter Gay was a well-known Yale historian, initially born as Peter Fröhlich in Berlin, and then when he came to America, well, he had its name translated from Fröhlich into Gay. Peter Gay, his autobiography, My German Question.

another wonderful book. the third book I have, again, unfortunately in German, Herta Nathorf, Das Tagebuch der Herta Nathorf. She was a doctor in Nazi Berlin. And in this diary, she recorded her life between 1933 and 1938, 1939, when she emigrated and all the absolutely terrible things that happened to her.

It's unfortunately not translated, but written in very simple basic German, a deeply moving document.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:56.536)
Well, thank you for those recommendations. That's fantastic. And I'll put those as always, along with your book in the show notes. all our listeners, again, thank you so much for listening. Apologies for the brief hiatus. And again, if you're finding the podcast thought provoking, engaging, please leave us a comment on Apple podcasts or on Spotify and give us a rating as well on those two apps so that we can...

I continue to climb. We've hit over 100,000 downloads, which is fantastic. So thank you all for listening. And Professor Beck, again, thank you so much for coming on.