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

This new study by Hermann Beck represents a superbly researched and invaluable contribution to the historiography of Holocaust studies, particularly in its attention to the dynamics of antisemitic violence in Germany during the Nazis’ seizure of power. In many respects, Before the Holocaust represents two books in one. It first provides a pioneering account of the wave of antisemitic violence perpetrated by members of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, National Socialist German Workers’ Party) and its affiliate organizations in early-mid 1933, attacks whose ubiquity had not been fully appreciated by existing historiography. Second, Beck outlines how traditional societal elites in institutions such as the churches, judiciary, and civil service responded to this outburst of antisemitic violence, and highlights how their refusal to speak out against it was typically grounded in a combination of self-interest and anti-Jewish prejudice. As Beck argues, “The simple fact of the matter is that the consensus of a general ‘cultural’ antisemitism was very broad, its spectrum reaching from the national-liberal and Catholic to the conservative and into the National Socialist milieux” (p. 375).

Before the Holocaust is an impressive work of scholarship, grounded in extensive research conducted in twenty archives. Its opening chapters provide a harrowing account of antisemitic violence during the opening months of 1933, drawing upon an eclectic range of primary sources that range from legal paperwork to newspapers, diaries, and memoirs. Beck highlights the diverse manifestations of Nazi antisemitic atrocity during the “seizure of power,” highlighting the ubiquity of attacks on “Ostjuden” who had migrated to Germany from Eastern Europe, the performative humiliation of pillory marches, and the lack of any meaningful legal consequences for those Nazi activists who assaulted, stole from, or even murdered Jews. One file at a time, Beck convincingly demonstrates the sheer scale of antisemitic outrage in 1933, highlighting how these attacks were often driven by enthusiasms and hatreds “from below.” For example, as early as March 11, 1933, the Polish Embassy possessed evidence of twenty violent assaults on its Jewish citizens in Berlin alone. The Czech Jew Anatole Friedmann was so badly beaten by SA men at a Schönhauser Allee café that he was subsequently hospitalized (pp. 55, 115). In so doing, Before the Holocaust supports the recent arguments of scholars such as Michael Wildt, who have claimed that antisemitic violence enjoyed greater popular support during the prewar period of Nazi rule than has been previously believed. Beck’s arguments also build upon Kim Wünschmann’s important work on Jewish prisoners within the prewar concentration camp system, in highlighting the extent to which Germany’s Jews lost the effective protection of the law early in the Nazi dictatorship, even while its letter continued to formally encompass them. To cite but one of the tragic cases movingly described in this study, Beck recounts the fate of the Wuppertal dentist, Dr. Alfred Meyer, who was “bestially murdered” by SA men on May 16, or 17, 1933, despite his service in the First World War and his past membership in the Freikorps. The regional police chief in Düsseldorf ensured this case was dropped as early as August 1933 and that it would never come to trial during the Nazi dictatorship (pp. 204–208).

Having established the ubiquity of such antisemitic violence in its opening chapters, the book proceeds in its second half to analyze the responses of Germany’s traditional elites. Suffice it to say, Beck’s analysis is scathing, underlining the extent to which these privileged groups were only too willing to subordinate concern for the Jews to a desire to safeguard their own institutional and societal influence. We learn, for example, that Hitler’s coalition partner, the conservative DNVP (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, German National People’s Party), often felt obliged in 1933 to support or excuse the antisemitic rhetoric and actions of the Nazi Party, for fear of losing its appeal in the eyes of nationalist, right-wing voters. As Beck argues, “For the DNVP, German Jews lost their rights as individuals in the Spring of 1933 and became subordinated to the political strategy of keeping pace with its NSDAP coalition partner” (pp. 447–48). He highlights that as early as 1920, the DNVP’s Grundsätze (founding principles) had lamented “the increasingly calamitous predominant power of Jewry” (p. 423). Before the Holocaust paints a similar picture regarding the reactions of both Protestant and Catholic Churches, with Beck’s analysis of the former especially benefiting from the consultation of original archival materials beyond those available in published source collections. In this regard, his work builds upon and supports the findings of earlier scholars, such as Saul Friedländer, Doris Bergen, and Manfred Gailus, who, over the past three decades, have done much to revise the traditional postwar portrayal of the German Churches as victims and resisters of the Nazi regime.

Before the Holocaust is a first-rate study of a crucial subject, greatly enriching our understanding of the Nazi regime’s persecution of Germany’s Jews during the initial months of its existence. Above all, it highlights the terrifying rapidity with which Nazi antisemitism acquired the status of political correctness, and the ease with which so many “Aryan” Germans at all levels of society accustomed themselves to this new reality—and behaved accordingly. In a trenchant sentence, Beck notes that “conservative German elites bear a heavy responsibility not only for failing to protest but for making antisemitism socially acceptable and increasingly publicly de rigueur in the emerging Nazi state” (p. 473). Beck’s new study thus forms part of a new historiography of 1933, going beyond a top-down account of how the Nazi Party established its dictatorship, and privileging a focus on shifting socio-cultural mentalities over these turbulent months. What Peter Fritzsche provided us regarding German popular opinion in his fine recent book, Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (2020), Beck has given us for the institutional self-understanding and positioning of elites, and for their adaptation to the newly racialized terrain of inclusion and exclusion instigated by the emerging Nazi regime.