Free Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer

155 By the end of the war, the number had reached four hundred thousand. 156
    From the outset of the sterilization policies to the apparent ending of euthanasia in August 1941—and to the beginning of the “Final Solution” close to that same date—policies regarding the handicapped and the mentally ill on the one hand and those regarding the Jews on the other followed a simultaneous and parallel development. These two policies, however, had different origins and different aims. Whereas sterilization and euthanasia were exclusively aimed at enhancing the purity of the Volksgemeinschaft , and were bolstered by cost-benefit computations, the segregation and the extermination of the Jews—though also a racial purification process—was mainly a struggle against an active, formidable enemy that was perceived endangering the very survival of Germany and of the Aryan world. Thus, in addition to the goal of racial cleansing, identical to that pursued in the sterilization and euthanasia campaign and in contrast to it, the struggle against the Jews was seen as a confrontation of apocalyptic dimensions.
    * The Nazis gave a peculiar ideological twist to a great many words, such as “German” (as opposed to “Jewish”), “healthy” (often meaning racially healthy or not spoiled by Jews), “modernity,” and so on. As the meanings are almost always recognizable, quotation marks will henceforth be avoided in most instances

Consenting Elites, Threatened Elites
    I
    About thirty SA men from Heilbronn arrived in Niederstetten, a small town in southwest Germany, on Saturday, March 25, 1933. Breaking into the few Jewish homes in the area, they took the men to the town hall and savagely beat them while local policemen kept watch at the building entrance. The scene was repeated that morning in neighboring Creglingen, where the eighteen male Jews found in the synagogue were also herded into the town hall. There the beatings led to the deaths of sixty-seven-year-old Hermann Stern and, a few days later, fifty-three-year-old Arnold Rosenfeld.
    At the Sunday service the next day, Hermann Umfried, pastor of Niederstetten’s Lutheran church, spoke up. His sermon was carefully phrased: It began with standard expressions of faith in the new regime and some negative remarks about Jews. But Umfried then turned to what had happened the previous day: “Only authorities are allowed to punish, and all authorities lie under divine authority. Punishment can be meted out only against those who are evil and only when a just sentence has been handed down. What happened yesterday in this town was unjust. I call on all of you to help see to it that the German people’s shield of honor may remain unsullied!” When the attacks against Pastor Umfried started, no local, regional, or national church institution dared to come to his support or to express even the mildest opposition to violence against Jews. In January 1934 the local district party leader ( Kreisleiter ) ordered Umfried to resign. Increasingly anguished by the possibility that not only he but also his wife and their four daughters would be shipped off to a concentration camp, the pastor committed suicide.
    Seven years and eight months later, at 2:04 P.M. on November 28, 1941, the first transport of Jews left the Niederstetten railroad station. A second batch boarded the train in April 1942, and the third and last in August of that year. Of the forty-two Jews deported from Niederstetten, only three survived. 1

    The boycott of Jewish businesses was the first major test on a national scale of the attitude of the Christian churches toward the situation of the Jews under the new government. In historian Klaus Scholder’s words, “during the decisive days around the first of April, no bishop, no church dignitaries, no synod made any open declaration against the persecution of the Jews in Germany.” 2 In a radio address broadcast to the United States on April 4, 1933, the most prominent German