Berlin полностью

As if to bring this point home, the regime launched a new series of anti-Jewish measures in the wake of the boycott. In Berlin, all Jewish judges were expelled from the court system and replaced by Aryans. Another measure limited the number of Jewish lawyers allowed to practice in the city to the overall percentage of Jews in the population. This amounted to a major cut, since 73.5 percent of the Berlin lawyers were of Jewish descent. As of August 1933, Jewish law students at the university were banned from taking examinations, thereby shutting them out of the profession. Jewish doctors faced similar discrimination. State Commissar Julius Lippert ordered Berlin’s hospitals to fire all its Jewish physicians as soon as possible. By October 1933 the medical purge was complete: the only Berlin hospital that still employed Jews was the Jewish Hospital, which was off-limits to gentiles. The city’s preparatory secondary schools, the Gymnasia, were ordered to restrict the number of their Jewish pupils to the percentage of Jews in the population. To strike at the Ostjuden, the regime made it illegal for noncitizens to sell goods in the streets or to work as artisans. In 1935 the Berlin police chief, Count von Helldorf, ordered the closure of all Jewish stores on the Kurfürstendamm. In that same year the notorious Nuremberg Laws reclassified Jews as “subjects” rather than as citizens, which reduced their social and political rights. Henceforth Jews could not marry or have sexual relations with German citizens, work as domestics in non-Jewish households, or display the national flag. In Berlin, social segregation between Jews and Germans was furthered by limiting Jewish use of public transport to certain hours and by restricting Jews to out-of-the-way, yellow-painted benches in the Tiergarten. These restrictions applied to all persons of “Jewish blood” whether or not they practiced the Jewish religion or even considered themselves Jewish. In Nazi Germany, it was the regime who decided who was a Jew.

Onerous and intimidating as these measures were, they did not provoke the reduction in the Jewish population that the Nazis had hoped for. In Berlin the number of departing Jews was offset by continuing immigration from the provinces. The Nazi leadership, especially Goebbels, was infuriated by this development, but the regime hesitated to institute even harsher anti-Semitic measures at this point because the country was about to host the 1936 Olympic Games, which offered an opportunity to show the world that Nazi Germany, contrary to many reports in the foreign press, was a humane and civilized place. For Berlin, which was to hold the summer games (the winter events were to take place in Garmisch-Partenkirchen), the spectacle could showcase the Nazi capital as a bastion of order, cleanliness, technological progress, cultural sophistication, social harmony, and rollicking good cheer.

Hitler’s Games

The decision to award the 1936 Olympic Games to Germany had been made in 1930 and confirmed at an International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Barcelona the following year. With the rise of the Nazis, however, many in the international sport world questioned this choice. During the 1932 Summer Games, held in Los Angeles, the Belgian president of the IOC, Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, asked a German IOC member to query Hitler regarding his stance on the games. Hitler replied that he contemplated Germany’s hosting of the event “with great interest.” Yet once the Nazis were in power reservations about allowing the games to take place in Germany increased. As part of its anti-Semitic campaign, the Nazi regime banned Jews from German sports clubs and forbade them to try out for the Olympic teams. The widely respected head of Germany’s Olympic Committee, Theodor Lewald, was dismissed from his post because he was half Jewish; his replacement was Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten, a Nazi hack whose only connection to sport was his ability to sit handsomely on a horse. These actions prompted demands from some quarters to remove the games from Germany, to boycott them if they were held there, or to cancel them entirely, as had been the case in 1916. Sweden, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Spain openly threatened to send no teams to Germany (in the end, only the Spanish Republic and Soviet Russia carried through with a boycott).