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Continuum
Golden
Opportunity
The Nazi
simply escalated to its ultimate horror a
continuum. Anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in
Germany's history, and certainly in the history
of Frankfurt, "the city of Goethe, Rothschild,
and Anne Frank." As Amos Elon wrote in his The
Pity of It All, "In the eighteenth century,
Frankfurt was perhaps the most oppressive place
for Jews in Western Europe. Only Rome and the
Papal States treated Jews as harshly." Community
relations between Gentiles and Jews in Frankfurt
were ambivalent. There were plenty of examples
of hostility; yet between 1924 and 1933
Frankfurt's mayor, Ludwig Landmann, was Jewish.
Yet, as
Christopher Browning, points out for Jews
in the East, Germany was "a golden opportunity":
In comparison with western Europe, one might
conclude that Germany's right was more
anti-Semitic, its center weaker, its left
stronger, its liberalism more anemic, and its
political culture more authoritarian. Its Jews
were also more prominent. This prominent (to
be sure, in those areas of life not dominated
by the old elites, such as the professions and
business, as opposed to the officer corps and
civil service), the deep attachment of German
Jews to German culture, and a relatively high
rate of intermarriage indicate a German milieu
in which Jews did not face universal
hostility, but in fact thrived. Anti-Semitism
may have been strong in influential pockets,
especially in comparison to the west, but it
was not so pervasive or strident as in
territories to the east, from which
beleaguered east European Jews looked to
Germany as a land of golden
opportunity. (p. 7)
Deprived
That "golden opportunity" held true for the Jews
of Frankfurt, according to
Eugen Mayer:
No analogy can however be found for the
almost "explosive" rise of the Jews of
Frankfurt after the beginning of the 19th
century. In all areas of the economic, social
and cultural life of the city, as well in its
development into a center of international
trade and in the world of finances, they had
in comparison to their share in the general
population, a far exceeding proportion.
Wherever one opens the annals of the city,
from the founding of the Senckenberg Society
for Nature Research in 1817 to the foundation
of the Frankfurt University in 1914, if only
to refer to these two, the public spirit of
the Jews was evident everywhere. [But] History
goes its own way. At the end of this glorious
era of achievement we come to the terrible
tragedy of the Holocaust.
But then of course all changed, the Nazis called
Frankfurt "a deprived Jewish metropolis,
dominated by the needs of world Jewry."
Nazi action against the Jews began on April
1, 1933, with a boycott of Jewish businesses,
followed on April 7 by the dismissal of Jewish
white-collar workers, university teachers,
actors, and musicians. The Jewish community
[in Frankfurt and of course other cities]
reacted by expanding existing services,
establishing new agencies for economic aid,
reemployment, occupational training,
schooling, adult education, and emigration.
All institutions were under strict
surveillance by the Gestapo.
On November 10-11, 1938, the Big Synagogues of
the two Jewish communities [i.e. East and West
Ends of Frankfurt] were burned down. Community
buildings, Jewish homes, and stores were
stormed and looted by the S.A., the S.S., and
mobs they had incited. Hundreds of Jewish men
were arrested and sent to Buchenwald and
Dachau concentration camps, Members of the
Orthodox Religionsgesellschaft were compelled
to combine with the general community to form
a single community organization with the Nazis
named
Jüdische Gemeinde.
In 1939 this autonomous community was forcibly
merged into the State-supervised
Reischvereinigung. Jewish leaders were
compelled to enter into
Juden-Vertrage, transferring communal property
to Municipal ownership. The Frankfurt
community decreased by emigration from 25,158
in 1933, to 10,803 in June 1941. Deportations
to Lodz began on October 19, 1941, and were
followed by deportations to Minsk, Riga,
Theresienstadt, and other camps, In September
1943, after large-scale deportations stopped,
the Jewish population in Frankfurt totaled
602, including half-Jews.
[This excerpt is from a fuller recounting of
Jewish life in Frankfurt.]. Sometimes the detail
is more graphic than the synoptic. For example
the story of the
Philanthropin,
the most prominent and perhaps the largest
schools of the Jewish community in Germany, that
having existed for 138 years in 1942 was
declared to no longer exist.
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