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The Defamation of the Jews 12 were early portents for the events of 1933. The chances for an objective and humane resolution of the ‘‘Jewish question’’ were still open. Within months, however, any such possibility vanished—in part because of the rapid implementation of Nazi racial laws, in part because of the church’s failure to protest them. ∞ Church Responses to Early Anti-Jewish Measures Despite the intense pace of Hitler’s early weeks in office, it was in his own vital interest that the policies toward the Jews, as outlined in Mein Kampf, be carried out skillfully. In retrospect, the rapid succession of events between 23 March and 1 April 1933 suggests a calculated drama. The first step was the 23 March Law for the Removal of Distress from People and State (the Enabling Act), which gave the government the right to pass laws without the Reichstag’s consent, even when these laws deviated from the Constitution.∞ This set the precedent for the next step, the 1 April boycott of the Jews, a deliberate experiment for a law that would isolate the Jews from state and society. the boycott of 1 april Given the almost universal acclaim in Germany for the Enabling Act, it was easy to justify the boycott of the Jews as a ‘‘defensive reaction against the Jewish parasites threatening the Volk,’’ in the words of the ns-Kurier. Where there was reason to fear that the boycott would meet with protest, the Nazi press declared the government’s actions to be the acts of communists . The vandalism of the sa was played down as ‘‘revolutionary overzealousness.’’ This did not fail to have an effect among church officials and lay Christians; the fear of communism was great everywhere and needed only to be exploited skillfully by the party. The Nazi party viewed the outcome of the experimental boycott of Jewish commercial, medical, and legal practices as promising. Confronted by the staged demonstrations of the ‘‘powerful people’s movement,’’ which Hermann Göring defended by citing the ‘‘boycott and atrocity propaganda by the Jews at home and abroad,’’ protest against the boycott was limited.≤ Here and there, sheltered in diaries, a few quiet voices suffered under Church Responses to Early Anti-Jewish Measures 13 their fainthearted church. The respected novelist Jochen Klepper, whose wife was Jewish, wrote: The silent pogrom today reached a high point with the legalization of the boycott against Jewish businesses, judges, lawyers, doctors, artists. The hatred this sows among young Jews must become terrible. Beginning of a new age? . . . But I believe in God’s mystery, which he established in Judaism; and because of that, I can only suffer under the fact that the church tolerates the present proceedings. I sense what it means to be a ‘‘servant of God.’’≥ There is little evidence of abhorrence within the church for the intensifying anti-Semitism.∂ One such response came from the Rhineland, where Wilhelm Menn, a social welfare pastor, wrote to his superintendent , Dr. Stoltenhoff: The personal persecution of people whose ‘‘guilt’’ consists of nothing more than political conviction or of belonging to a race, this persecution with the clear aim of destroying their very existence, is a slap in the face of the simplest moral judgment. It is obvious that the masses cannot be permitted for years and years to scream ‘‘To hell with the Jew!’’ without eventually succumbing to this brutal desire for persecution. And our ‘‘Christian Volk’’ rejoices. I have never doubted my people as deeply as now. Who will have the courage to say what needs to be said here? To say that the Christian Church . . . clearly characterizes it as a moral injustice , as anti-Christian, to persecute and injure individuals because they belong to a group against which it appears necessary, for some reason, to fight. Do we not owe such a statement, above all, to those Jewish people who have become Christians?∑ Stoltenhoff’s reply exemplified the feelings of most Christians at the time.∏ He expressed ‘‘great joy at what these drastic changes have brought us,’’ even while he acknowledged a certain ‘‘concern’’ that ‘‘the individual’’ could do ‘‘next to nothing against the elemental force of this movement of our age.’’ Typical, too, was his candid animosity toward the Jews: ‘‘But I must say this openly: I can understand why the legitimate resentment, which has built up even among those who are in no way anti-Semitic, at what the Jewish-dominated press, stock exchange, theater...

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