Aug 31, 2020 3 min read

Editor’s note: This is the final column from Bruce Kauffmann, who died July 18.

Even before he took power in Germany in 1934, Adolf Hitler planned to rid Germany of its Jewish population, although his original goal was the deportation of all Jews. As part of that process, various decrees were issued and laws passed that gradually stripped Jews of their economic and political rights. And then, this week (Sept. 1) in 1941, a decree was issued mandating that every German Jew above the age of 5 must wear a yellow Star of David, with the German word for Jew, “Jude,” on all outer garments. The goal was to clearly identify Jews and increase their harassment by non-Jewish Germans. The official decree was signed on Sept. 19 by Reinhard Heydrich, chief deputy to the man charged with ridding Germany of its Jews, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

To German Jews it was a sign that their days as German citizens were numbered, and many of them committed suicide rather than be forced into the concentration camps that were springing up in occupied Poland and Germany. In Berlin alone, some 250 Jews killed themselves.

And yet, to the dismay of Nazi Party officials, rather than being harassed because of their identification as Jews, people in Germany and in German-occupied lands such as Poland and Czechoslovakia began to sympathize with the Jews, many of whom, due to their terrible treatment by the Nazis, looked emaciated and impoverished. The German people had been fed a daily diet of Nazi propaganda that the Jews were devious masterminds who had actually planned and started the war Germany was now fighting in order to destroy the Deutschland. Yet these Jews wearing these Star of David patches hardly fit that description. Soon many Germans, Poles and Czechs (the latter resentful of German occupation of their lands) were “tipping their hats,” then a common social practice, in solidarity with the Jews.

It so angered Nazi Party officials that they began targeting the regular German population in much the same way they had targeted Jews. All public displays of sympathy for the Jews were banned, and violators were actually sentenced to time in German concentration camps. “Anyone taking his [a Jew’s] side must be regarded and treated as a Jew,” wrote the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Unfortunately, the Nazi Party’s ultimate reaction to this surprising sympathy for the Jews was a hardening of its position regarding the ultimate fate of the Jews, and the policy of deporting all Jews soon became a policy of murdering all Jews. Three months later, in January of 1942 at a villa on Lake Wannsee, just outside of Berlin, the “Final Solution” was set in motion, which would result in the death of some 6 million Jews.