Hitler’s Enablers Included Conservative German Jews

Early in 1934, as Adolf Hitler consolidated his stronghold in Germany, a 25-year-old youth group leader named Hans-Joachim Schoeps hailed the emerging dictatorship as the embodiment of “military order and discipline, will to power, and authority.” Schoeps embraced the adulation of Hitler, seeing the Nazis as Germany’s best hope to restore the nation to greatness. But there was one problem. Schoeps was Jewish.

A self-styled monarchist and scion of the distinguished family that had produced both the theologian-philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the composer Felix Mendelssohn, Schoeps described Nazi antisemitism as a “not very important side effect.” Of course, the vast majority of Germany’s approximately 525,000 Jews recognized that Nazism posed a threat. But a small number of politically conservative Jews saw themselves as indistinguishable from gentile Germans. They shared Hitler’s distaste for the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic.

Conservative German Jews “had every intention [of] marching with the [Hitler] regime,” writes Philipp Nielsen, a historian and author of the book Between Heimat and Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935. Schoeps, who named his youth group the German Vanguard, didn’t appear to realize that “the National Socialists’ emphasis on race might also be a problem for him as a Jew.”

Conservative Jews, who longed for restoration of pre-World War I imperial Germany, made up about 10 percent of the Jewish population. Few if any of them voted for the Nazis in the crucial elections between 1930 and 1933, when Hitler brought the curtain down on parliamentary democracy in Germany. Instead, many drifted toward the non-Nazi German National People’s Party, known by the acronym DNVP, which also was antisemitic and little interested in Jewish support. But the failure of Germany’s politically conservative Jews to accurately read the threat Hitler posed is a case study in what happens when a population has a clear idea of a leader’s track record of hatred but supports him anyway.

Some conservative Jews believed Hitler stoked antisemitism only as a way to “stir up the masses,” wrote Sarah Ann Gordon in her 1984 book Hitler, Germans and the “Jewish Question.” Others didn’t believe Hitler would last very long, considering the volatility of German politics.

Once Hitler came to power in 1933, conservative German Jews implored him to recognize them as loyal Germans. Their presence in the western part of Germany, they argued, dated back to at least Charlemagne. Many had fought in the trenches of World War I—some 12,000 Jewish soldiers had died fighting for Germany. Of course, there was absolutely no chance of changing Hitler’s mind. Hatred of Jews was a foundational principle of Nazism, as he outlined in 1925 in Mein Kampf. Yet some of these Jewish conservatives either didn’t seem to understand or they didn’t care—or perhaps a little of both.

They belonged to splinter groups that wanted to “make Germany great again,” says Michael Brenner, a professor of German and Jewish history at American University in Washington, DC. Like their non-Jewish counterparts, conservative German Jews “saw Hitler as a potential vehicle for German national revival,” says Volker Benkert, who teaches German and European history at Arizona State University. “Conservative German Jews thus thought that if they would assimilate enough, they could be part of this political group, and the fact that many German Jews served in World War I would make them immune to Nazi antisemitic attacks.”

Max Naumann was another prominent conservative Jewish figure who, along with Schoeps, cozied up to the Nazis. A veteran of trench warfare in World War I who was awarded the Iron Cross, Naumann saw German Jews as an indivisible part of the German body politic. As head of the League of National German Jews (Verband nationaldeutscher Juden), he advocated total assimilation.

The group’s monthly publication, The National German Jew (Der nationaldeutsche Jude), reportedly had a circulation of 6,000 in 1927. According to historian Nielsen, Naumann once proposed moving the Jewish observance of Shabbat to Sunday to conform with the rest of Germany. Naumann and other politically conservative Jews were anti-Zionist, believing advocacy for a Jewish state would undercut their status as Germans first.

Conservative German Jews thought that if they would assimilate enough it would make them immune to Nazi antisemitic attacks.

After Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933, Naumann stated: “We have always held the well-being of the German people and the Fatherland, to which we feel inextricably linked, above our own well-being. Thus, we greeted the results of January 1933, even though it has brought hardship to us personally.” As Germany’s crucial election of March 1933 approached, Naumann attempted to flip the Nazi script by arguing “the election campaign must not be a struggle of religious conceptions, it must be a decisive struggle about our Germanness!”

The words fell on deaf ears. Hitler began stripping Jews of positions within the civil service, universities and the medical and legal professions. Jews were barred from acting in stage and film productions. The pre-Holocaust purge of Jews led to the 1935 Nuremberg laws that deprived Jews of German citizenship and forbade interfaith marriage and other intimate relationships.

Naumann and other conservative Jews saw Italy’s Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, as a hopeful model—a fascist dictator who was not notably antisemitic. For Hitler, antisemitism was hard-wired into Nazi ideology, so a switch was never in the cards.

Jews on the right eventually realized that their loyalty to Germany afforded them no protection against the Nazis.

Conservative Jews also worked to undercut a stereotype they imagined was playing into Germany’s worst instincts about Jews. A consortium in 1929 bought a farm near Cottbus, southeast of Berlin, to demonstrate to Germany’s rural population that Jews too could undertake hard agricultural labor. At the time, Berthold Timendorfer of the B’nai B’rith Masonic Lodge called the farm an important element in the “war against antisemitic stereotypes.”

For their part, Schoeps, Naumann and others sought to deflect Nazi antisemitism by drawing distinctions between themselves and “Eastern European Jews”—more recent arrivals on German soil from Poland and former Austro-Hungarian regions such as Galicia, much of which is in present-day Ukraine. These Jews embodied the stereotypes of shtetl Jews and primarily spoke Yiddish.

Some were Social Democrats or Communists. They were a sharp contrast to the long-standing Jewish communities in the Rhineland who spoke High German and were not culturally distinguishable from non-Jewish Germans.

They “hoped to convince Hitler that Jews would be loyal followers if he only erased antisemitism from his program,” says Brenner of American University. They naively thought disassociating themselves from Eastern European Jewish immigrants could accomplish that.

One conservative Jew in Germany, Leo Löwenstein, appealed directly to Hitler on behalf of Jewish veterans of World War I. He won a meeting with a Hitler underling who asked him to write a follow-up memo. In it, Löwenstein contrasted Eastern European Jews, who he suggested were overly active in left-wing anti-Nazi politics, and “indigenous” Jews who were loyal. Löwenstein promised that through his Jewish veterans group, young Jews would be educated in military spirit and groomed for military service.

Löwenstein made little progress with Hitler’s staff but found a more receptive audience in an appeal to Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, who had won fame as commander of German ground forces in World War I. Von Hindenburg agreed with Löwenstein and exempted Jewish war veterans from antisemitic dictates. But the aging general died in 1934, and the status of Jewish war veterans faded away as the 1935 Nuremberg decrees took effect and the Nazis plunged forward to Kristallnacht, war and the Final Solution.

The death of von Hindenburg arguably erased the last structural obstacle between Hitler and dictatorial power. With the office of president vacant after von Hindenburg’s passing, the Nazis held a plebiscite on Aug. 19, 1934, in which voters were asked to approve merging the presidency and the position of chancellor, which Hitler occupied. Naumann’s League of National German Jews urged a vote for the merger—in other words, a vote essentially to formalize the Hitler dictatorship. “To the German fatherland belongs body and soul that portion of Jews who, like ourselves, know no other fatherland than Germany…We urge all Jews who feel German to vote ‘Yes.’”

The League statement, which was reported in The New York Times, reiterated how its membership had welcomed Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 “although it brought rigors for us.”

The plebiscite result: 38 million—about 90 percent of Germans—voted yes. In those long-ago days before exit polls, it is impossible to say how many German Jews were among them. But 4.25 million Germans overall had the courage to vote no, according to William L. Shirer in his landmark book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Jews on the right eventually realized that loyalty to Germany afforded them no protection against the Nazis. In the eyes of Hitler, they were simply Jews. The Holocaust loomed before them, as it did for all German Jews and the entire Jewish population of Europe.

The Gestapo closed down Naumann’s League of National German Jews in 1935, and he died of cancer in 1939. Löwenstein was sent to Theresienstadt but survived the war. He died in 1956 on a visit to Israel. After Kristallnacht in 1938, Schoeps fled to Sweden, where he sat out the war. His parents were less fortunate. His father died in Theresienstadt; his mother, at Auschwitz. He returned to Germany in 1946.

Though derided in some quarters as a “Heil-Hitler Jew” (“Heil-Hitler Jude”), Schoeps became a professor of religious history at the University of Erlangen in northern Bavaria. He died in 1980. His son, Julius Schoeps, has angrily denied that his father was ever a Nazi. Like other German Jews, Hans-Joachim Schoeps believed Hitler and the Nazis were “a nightmare that would soon pass,” Julius said in a 2019 interview. He acknowledged his father thought it “possible for German Jews to come to some kind of arrangement with the regime.’’

“But,’’ he added, in retrospect, “that was a mistake.”

Opening picture: Association of National German Jews newsletter, Jan. 1925. (Photo credit: Digitized by the University Library J.C. Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main, 2018)

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