Underlying the actions was the unspoken threat of violence against anyone who did not agree with Nazi ideology. Those who did not fit into the standard Aryan mould were in particular danger. Committed Christians, handicapped people, Gypsies, homosexuals, foreigners: in a cosmopolitan city like Hamburg there were seemingly endless targets for persecution. Even teenage jazz enthusiasts found themselves on the wrong side of the authorities. When American phonograph records were banned early in the war, scores of swing fans in Hamburg were rounded up and sent to the youth concentration camp at Moringen. Their crimes? Sexual promiscuity, dancing ‘like wild creatures’ to ‘Negro music’, and deliberately speaking English, which was also banned at the beginning of the war. 13
The first people to suffer, however, were undoubtedly the city’s Jews. Shortly after the Nazis came to power a national boycott of Jewish businesses was declared. Despite intimidation from Nazi vigilantes, many Hamburgers defied the boycott – but the message was clear nevertheless. Six days later, on 7 April 1933, a law was passed banning Jews from the civil service. This was soon followed by similar laws prohibiting them from working in the legal and medical professions, the media, the performing arts and the army. In 1935 the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws were passed, depriving Jews of citizenship and forbidding marriage between Aryan Germans and Jews. 14Once again, the background to this anti-Semitism was one of constant low-level violence. Random acts of brutality against Jews in and around Hamburg accumulated, and there were incidences of policemen standing by while Jewish shopkeepers were assaulted. The net result was a culture of fear and helplessness in much of the city, but particularly among Hamburg’s Jewish community. They could sense what was coming: those Jews who could afford it, and were able to gain visas, fled to other countries. Within two years of the Nazis coming to power a quarter of the city’s Jews had emigrated.
For those who stayed behind the final proof of their helplessness was not long in coming. On the night of 7 November 1938, in response to the murder of a German diplomat by an expatriate Jew, Joseph Goebbels orchestrated the nationwide pogrom that came to be known as Kristallnacht. During the course of just twenty-four hours more than a thousand synagogues across the country were either vandalized or burned to the ground. Jewish cemeteries, like that at Altona, were vandalized, Jewish homes were set alight, thousands of Jewish shops were looted and their windows smashed, and nearly a hundred people were murdered. Approximately thirty thousand Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Afterwards, in a final absurd insult, Germany’s Jews were ordered to pay a collective bill of one billion Reichsmarks to the government to cover the cost of the damage to their own property. 15
While most Germans were shocked by the pogrom, few dared to speak out against it. Hamburg, to its credit, was one of the only places where such vandalism was openly condemned. In their ‘Reports on Germany’, the exiled Social Democrats claimed that:
The broad mass of people has not condoned the destruction, but we should nevertheless not overlook the fact that there are people among the working class who do not defend the Jews… If there has been any speaking out in the Reich against the Jewish pogroms, the excesses of arson and looting, it has been in Hamburg and the neighbouring Elbe district. 16
Those who spoke out against the Kristallnacht pogrom were taking their lives into their hands: the judicial authorities in Hamburg were notoriously harsh when judging political dissidents. 17However, while Hamburgers might have been unusually vocal about the atrocities they had seen, few people translated their outrage into action. As one Hamburg woman wrote in her diary shortly afterwards, while the persecution of the Jews had ‘inflamed all decent people with anger’, there was depressingly little that any of them did about it:
For me nothing was more devastating than the fact that nobody, not even those who opposed the régime most vehemently, stood up against this, but remained passive and weak. I cannot stress these facts too strongly. It was as if we were caught in a stranglehold. And, worst of all, one even gets used to being half throttled; what at first appeared to be unbearable pressure becomes a habit, becomes easier to tolerate; hate and desperation are diluted with time. 18
Once the battle against the enemy within was under way, Hitler turned his attention to the enemy without. The treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War had considerably reduced Germany’s power, and imposed severe restrictions on its armed forces, and limited rights to defend its borders. As the main architects of the treaty, Britain and France were considered responsible for Germany’s humiliating status, although the whole League of Nations was implicated. One of Hitler’s first actions on the international stage, therefore, was to pull out of the Geneva Peace Conference, in October 1933, and withdraw from the League of Nations.
In direct violation of the Versailles treaty, Germany now embarked on expansion of its armed forces. In March 1935 the German government shocked the world by revealing the existence of the Luftwaffe, a branch of the Wehrmacht (armed services) that had hitherto been banned. A year later Hitler broke the terms of Versailles once again by marching his troops into the Rhineland on the border with France. His borders secure, he now reintroduced the conscription of men into the army, and embarked on a huge four-year plan of rearmament. It was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that such measures were meant only for Germany’s defence, and many suspected that Hitler was actually inviting a reaction from the rest of the world. In the words of Hermann Goering, Hitler was ‘preparing the German economy for total war’. 19
Given its shipping links and huge manufacturing capacity, it is unsurprising that Hamburg now became important to the Nazi regime’s plans. In 1936, military contracts suddenly poured into the city’s shipbuilding companies – so much so that HAPAG lodged a complaint that its military commitments were making it fall behind on orders for merchant and passenger ships. Other shipping companies also worried that they were becoming far too dependent on the German Navy for business. 20
The up-side to the story was that rearmament provided Hamburg’s ailing industries with a much-needed tonic. Until now the city had gained little from the change of regime. While the rest of Germany had started to recover as early as 1934, unemployment in Hamburg was still high. The entire Lower Elbe area had always depended on international trade, and Hitler’s policy of restricting imports in favour of German-made goods had had a disastrous effect on the city’s trade and shipping industries. Rearmament, however, brought jobs and money to Hamburg. New businesses were set up, all devoted to preparation for war: oil refineries, engine factories and aviation engineering works. The need for huge amounts of raw materials also increased trade, particularly with Scandinavia.