Hitler

come down on one side or the other. ‘Jewish Question still not decided,’ noted Goebbels on 1 October. ‘We debate for a long time about it, but the Führer is still wavering.’
    By early November, with still no final resolution in sight, Schacht and the Reichsbank Directorate, claiming the uncertainty was damaging the economy and the foreign-exchange rate, joined in the pressure on Hitler to end the dispute. Hitler had no intention of being pinned down to accepting security of rights for Jews under the legislation, as the Reichsbank wanted. The prospect of open confrontation between party representatives and state ministers of the Interior, Economics, and Foreign Affairs, and likely defeat for the party, at a meeting scheduled for 5 November to reach a final decision, made Hitler call off the meeting at short notice. A week later, the First Supplementary Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law finally ended the uncertainty. Wagner got his way on most points. But on the definition of a Jew, the Ministry of the Interior could point to some success. Three-quarter Jews were counted as Jewish. Half-Jews (with two Jewish and two ‘aryan’ grandparents) were reckoned as Jewish only if practising the Jewish faith, married (since the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws) to a Jew, the child of a marriage with a Jewish partner, or the illegitimate child of a Jew and ‘aryan’. The definition of a Jew had ended with a contradiction. For legislative purposes, it had been impossible to arrive at a biologicaldefinition of race dependent on blood types. So it had been necessary to resort to religious belief to determine who was racially a Jew. As a result, it was possible to imagine descendants of ‘pure aryan’ parents converted to Judaism who would thereby be regarded as racial Jews. It was absurd, but merely highlighted the absurdity of the entire exercise.
    The approach of the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, then the summer games in Berlin, along with the sensitive foreign-policy situation, meant that the regime was anxious to avoid any repetition of the violence of the summer of 1935. For the next two years, though the wheel of discrimination carried on turning, the ‘Jewish Question’ was kept away from the forefront of politics. When Wilhelm Gustloff, the leading NSDAP representative in Switzerland, was assassinated by a young Jew in February 1936, the circumstances did not lend themselves to wild retaliation. Frick, in collaboration with Heß, strictly banned ‘individual actions’. Hitler restrained his natural instinct, and confined himself to a relatively low-key generalized attack on Jewry at Gustloff ’s funeral. Germany remained quiet. The absence of violence following Gustloff ’s murder is as clear a guide as the outrages in the anti-Jewish wave of 1935 to the fact that the regime could control, when it wanted to, the pressures for action within the ranks of the party radicals. In 1935 it had been useful to encourage and respond to such pressures. In 1936 it was opportune to keep them in check.
    For Hitler, whatever the tactical considerations, the aim of destroying the Jews – his central political idea since 1919 – remained unaltered. He revealed his approach to a meeting of party District Leaders at the end of April 1937, in immediate juxtaposition to comments on the Jews: ‘I don’t straight away want violently to demand an opponent to fight. I don’t say “fight” because I want to fight. Instead, I say: “I want to destroy you!” And now let skill help me to manoeuvre you so far into the corner that you can’t strike any blow. And then you get the stab into the heart.’
    In practice, however, as had been the position during the summer of 1935 before the Nuremberg Rally, Hitler needed do little to push forward the radicalization of the ‘Jewish Question’. By now, even though still not centrally coordinated, the ‘Jewish Question’ pervaded all key areas of government; party pressure at headquarters and in the localities for new forms of discrimination was unceasing; civil servants complied with ever tighter constraints under the provisions of the ‘Reich CitizenshipLaw’; the law-courts were engaged in the persecution of Jews under the provisions of the Nuremberg Laws; the police were looking for further ways to hasten the elimination of Jews and speed up their departure from Germany; and the general public, for the most part, passively accepted the discrimination where