Returning Home After the Holocaust

Dr. Stefanie Fischer Visiting Research Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam Economic Trust in the ‘Racial State’. A Case Study from the German Countryside Recent research has shown that categorizing actors into a victim–perpetrator–bystander triad does not help us grasp the complexity of agency within genocidal settings. Holocaust studies have, instead, shifted towards understanding the Holocaust as a social process and have taken to examining the various nuances in between the categories of victim, perpetrator and bystander. These studies offer a view of the Holocaust as a multilayered process of actions performed by Jews and non-Jews alike at various times and places.1 Such an approach casts the Holocaust as a history of relationships between members of both groups, all participating in very different ways. Specifically, it erases the black-and-white picture of Jews as passive victims and their Nazi tormentors as the sole executors of evil. This way of looking at the Holocaust allows us to see it as a social process mutually carried out by people with agency across Nazi-occupied Europe – in the streets, in schools, in pubs, in parks, in private homes, or simply wherever Jews and non- Jews met and communicated at different levels of engagement. 1 In order to understand the Holocaust as a social process, we must ask who the actors in the events that unfolded actually were, and what specific roles these actors played in the exclusion, persecution and eventual murder of Europe’s Jews. We also need to enquire into the social dynamics and changes influencing developments. What role did economic motivation, for example, play in decisions individuals made to participate in the genocide or to resist?2 In the present article, I examine the social process by exploring some of the ambivalences in Jewish–non-Jewish relations at the micro level. I take a close look at the relationships between Jewish cattle-dealers and non-Jewish farmers in an area of the German countryside. Here, over generations, the interaction between Jews and non-Jews had traditionally been more intimate than in urban areas; yet in rural areas the level of antiSemitic violence was often even worse than in the towns and cities. Various layers of interaction become evident when we examine the exclusion of Jews from the economic sphere. In rural trade, Jews and non-Jews cooperated in a trust relationship as accepted participants in business done to their mutual advantage, albeit not always on an equal footing. In many German states, there had been a strong Jewish presence in rural trade since the Middle Ages, and this was especially so in the cattle-dealing business, where relationships between dealers and farmers – in other words, between Jews and non-Jews – were particularly tight. The cattle-dealing business had been a predominantly Jewish 2 domain in the German provinces from the beginning of Jewish settlement there and remained so until the destruction of this arrangement during the Nazi area.3 When the Nazis came to power and tried to disengage the relationships between ‘Aryan’ farmers and the Jewish cattle-dealers, their racist goals were challenged: the farmers wanted to safeguard their economic interests. This was well expressed in a statement by a member of the Nazi-dominated city council of Gunzenhausen, who, in 1934, complained: ‘We need the Jews, because I’m still not able to sell my cattle without the Jews. Christian traders, in contrast, only offer overpriced cows, which Jews do not do.’4 This statement reveals a great deal about the relationships between Jews, non-Jews and Nazis in the German countryside, which I explore in this article. I suggest that the relationships between Jewish cattle-traders and non-Jewish farmers were built on economic trust which continued even after anti-Semitic violence had begun to make its impact.5 This applies even to such anti-Semitic regions as Julius Streicher’s Gau, where staunch local Nazi leaders initiated anti-Semitic attacks even before racist laws were introduced at the Reich level. Jews in the cattle-dealing business The strong Jewish presence in the cattle trade was a result of historical trade restrictions prohibiting Jews from owning land and thus confining them to trade. In the countryside, their activity was limited mostly to cattle-dealing and trade in agricultural products such as hops and corn. In 1933, especially in Bavaria, a large percentage of the Jewish population still lived in the countryside and most of them made their living in the 3 cattledealing business.6 There were various reasons for this. One was the after-effect of the Bavarian Judenedikt (Edict on the Jews) of 1813,7 which prevented emancipation of the Jews for a longer time than was the case in Prussian areas.8 While many Jews left their villages for bigger German cities or emigrated to America during the process of emancipation, the rural Jews who remained continued to follow traditional patterns of living.9 For my case study, I have chosen the North Bavarian district of Middle Franconia, because it presents a number of characteristics important for this research. First, up to 1933, Middle Franconia was home to one of the largest rural Jewish communities in Germany. Some 1.37 per cent of the whole population there was Jewish – a much larger figure than the German average of 0.9 per cent.10 Secondly, Middle Franconia was a Nazi stronghold, where Julius Streicher, publisher of the weekly journal Der Stürmer, enjoyed great popularity, along with his followers, from the mid 1920s on. In 1925, 69.25 per cent of the region's inhabitants were Protestant, 11 and historians like Manfred Kittel have argued that Middle Franconia’s Protestant and middle-class population constituted the backbone of the early Nazi movement.12 This is reflected in pre-1933 elections, where in some areas, such as the Rothenburg-Land district, the Nazi party had gained as much as 87.5 per cent of the free vote by April 1932.13 Due to these facts, Middle Franconia may in some aspects be an extreme case;14 yet it seems to show general trends that can also be found – sometimes slightly later – in other German regions. 4 Previous research on the region has been predominantly perpetrator-focused,15 and very little has been written on its Jewish history.16 As for scholarship on the economic history of German Jews and the history of their persecution, studies have largely excluded rural Jewry, even though the rural Jews constituted one-third of the German Jewish population and were the group most severely targeted by Nazi attacks.17 Up to the late 1990s, the historiography on German Jews focused primarily on the urban and assimilated Jewry who represented the majority of the Jewish population on the eve of their destruction.18 Even when Jews outside the cities have been discussed, most scholarship has neglected Jews in rural trades – such as Jewish cattle-dealers – and it has missed their significance for the rural economy and for rural society. Holocaust historiography has yet to put this group on its research agenda. But it is a group of great relevance. Jewish cattle-dealers were middlemen between farmers and urban market outlets, and, as such, they were essential both to the local economy and to the urban population.19 Until tractors became affordable for farmers in the 1960s, the majority of small-scale farmers in south-west Germany depended on cattle for farming. As a consequence, the number of livestock a farmer owned defined his status in the village community.20 Traditionally, most farmers were unable to pay cash for their animals, and they therefore depended on the cattledealer’s willingness to grant them loans. This put the cattle-dealer in a very sensitive position: on the one hand, he was the man who provided farmers with the cattle they needed; on the other, he was the one who would take the cattle away, should the farmers be unable to pay off their debts.21 Put another way, Jewish cattle-dealers 5 depended on the farmers’ ability to pay back their debts, and the farmers, in turn, depended on the dealer’s willingness to grant them credit. Thus, the cattle-dealer-farmer business relationship was one based on mutual dependency. Previous studies have explained the farmers’ reluctance to fall in line with the Nazi antiSemitic boycott policy by pointing to the high number of Jews in the cattle-dealing business. Without scholarly proof, many have argued that Jews held a monopoly in the cattle trade, so that farmers had no choice but to do trade with them,22 and anti-Semites used this argument to blame Jewish cattle-dealers for pooling stock, manipulating prices and controlling a market devoid of Christian competitors. At 37 per cent in the 1920s, the number of Jews in the cattle-dealing business was indeed much higher than in any of the other so-called ‘Jewish professions’ (it was 13 per cent in the Bavarian legal sector, for instance).23 Nevertheless, it is extremely important to emphasize that Jews had no monopoly in cattle-dealing. The fact that 63 per cent of all cattle-dealers were non-Jews means that the obstinate disregard of some farmers towards the Nazi boycott policy cannot solely be attributed to the lack of Christian alternatives. This fact suggests that there were further non-structural bonds between Jewish cattle-dealers and farmers that could even endure the impact of anti-Semitic violence. Trust in the cattle-dealing business In order to understand these non-structural bonds in the cattle-dealing business and their meaning for social processes, we need to have a grasp of the character and traditions of 6 this business sector.

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