The Star of David in the Reich

On 1 September 1941, the second anniversary of the attack on Poland, a “Police Decree on the Marking of Jews” (Polizeiverordnung über die Kennzeichnung der Juden) was signed in Berlin. It bore the signature of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, who signed it “on behalf of” the Reich Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick. The decree was published on 5 September in the Reich Law Gazette (Reichsgesetzblatt) and came into force fourteen days later, on 19 September 1941.

The first paragraph forbade Jews over the age of six to appear in public without the “Jewish star” (Judenstern). The regulation described it precisely: a six-pointed Star of David the size of a palm, made of yellow cloth and outlined in black, bearing the word “Jude” (Jew) in black letters styled to resemble Hebrew script. The star had to be worn “visibly, firmly sewn on” on the left side of the chest. The second paragraph forbade Jews to leave the municipality in which they lived without the written permission of the local police, and to wear orders, decorations or other badges. Violations, whether deliberate or negligent, were punishable by a fine of up to 150 Reichsmarks or detention for up to six weeks, but the decree expressly stated that the police could also apply “more far-reaching security measures”. In practice this meant the Gestapo and a concentration camp.

The decree defined as a Jew anyone who was one within the meaning of the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law of 14 November 1935 – that is, according to the definition of the Nuremberg Laws, which was based on one’s grandparents’ descent rather than on religion. Baptised Christians of Jewish origin therefore also had to wear the star. The decree applied throughout the Reich, including Austria, annexed in 1938, and in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where the Reich Protector could adapt the ban on leaving one’s place of residence to local conditions.

What the decree required, and what it did not

Popular chronologies state that “all Jews under German rule” had to wear a yellow star with the word “Jew”, and that they were forbidden to live with non-Jews, to marry them and to leave their localities without written permission, “in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws of 1935”. This description needs several corrections.

The decree of 1 September did not apply to all Jews under German rule, only to Jews in the Reich and the Protectorate. In occupied Poland Jews had been wearing badges since the autumn of 1939: in the General Government white armbands with a blue Star of David from 1 December 1939, and in the Warthegau yellow stars on the chest and back. In the Soviet territories occupied from June 1941 badges were imposed by one German military and civil authority after another. In the countries of Western Europe the yellow star was introduced only in 1942.

The ban on marriage and extramarital relations between Jews and “citizens of German blood” did not come from the 1941 decree. It had been introduced six years earlier by the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, one of the Nuremberg Laws. The star decree referred to the Nuremberg Laws only in that it took its definition of a Jew from them. Nor did it contain a ban on living together; from 1939 Jews in Germany were gradually moved into so-called Jewish houses (Judenhäuser) under other regulations. The ban on leaving one’s locality without written police permission, on the other hand, is real, and it effectively tied Jews to their place of residence.

The regulation provided for exceptions. The Jewish spouse in a mixed marriage did not have to wear the star if there were children of that union who were not considered Jews, even if the marriage no longer existed or the only son had been killed in the war. The Jewish wife in a childless mixed marriage was also exempt for as long as the marriage lasted. The Jewish husband in a childless mixed marriage, however, had to wear the star. “Mixed-race persons” (Mischlinge) – people with one or two Jewish grandparents who did not belong to the Jewish community – were not covered by the decree.

The long road to the badge

The idea of marking Jews within Germany itself had been circulating in the leadership of the Third Reich for years. As early as 1937 Adolf Hitler told party functionaries that the question of “marking” had been under consideration for two or three years and would be carried out “one day, one way or another”; one only had to sense what one could get away with. In May 1938 general marking of Jews was proposed in a memorandum prepared on the initiative of the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels. After Kristallnacht, at a meeting held by Hermann Göring on 12 November 1938, Heydrich put forward the same idea. On 6 December 1938, however, Göring told the Gauleiters that Hitler had postponed the decision. Foreign reactions, especially in the United States, had to be taken into account, and at that time the regime still wanted to push the Jews out of the country through emigration, which Heydrich directed from January 1939.

By then Jews in Germany were already marked in many other ways – just not in the street. From August 1938 they had to add “Israel” or “Sara” to their names, from October 1938 their passports were stamped with a red letter “J”, from January 1939 they had to carry special identity cards, and from 1940 their ration cards were marked with a “J”. In May 1940 the Berlin labour office ordered Jewish forced labourers on its own authority to wear yellow stars, but the Gestapo quickly rescinded the order.

The matter came up again in the summer of 1941. At the end of July Karl Hermann Frank, State Secretary in the office of the Reich Protector, asked for permission to introduce in the Protectorate the same marking of Jews as was in force in occupied Poland. Wilhelm Stuckart, State Secretary in the Interior Ministry, took the view that the regulation should cover the whole Reich and brought other ministries into the matter. In mid-August Leopold Gutterer, State Secretary in the Propaganda Ministry, called a meeting of several dozen officials from various ministries. He presented a list of “urgent measures on the Jewish question”: restrictions on shopping and on the use of public transport, bans on entering many places, forced labour and the seizure of more of the Jews’ money from blocked accounts. All these measures, it was argued, could be enforced only once a Jew could be recognised in the street. According to surviving notes, Gutterer said that of Berlin’s some 70,000 Jews only 19,000 were working, and that the rest ought to be shipped off to Russia.

Goebbels, who as Gauleiter of Berlin had for years been pressing for the capital to be “cleansed” of Jews, took these proposals to Hitler at his headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolf’s Lair. In his diary under 19 August 1941 he noted that Hitler had agreed to the marking of the Jews and had also promised that the Jews of Berlin would be deported to the east as soon as the first means of transport became available. Some historians date Hitler’s consent to 18 or 20 August, but this does not change the meaning of the decision. Goebbels justified the marking by the needs of the war: the Jews were not to be able to spread defeatism and spoil the public mood “unrecognised”. The considerations that had held Hitler back in 1938 no longer counted. The United States was already openly supporting Britain and the USSR, and the war in the east was in full swing. Two weeks later the decree was signed.

A star for ten pfennigs

The stars were produced by the Berlin flag manufacturer Geitel & Co., which until then had mainly made swastika flags. Within three weeks it printed nearly a million stars on bolts of cloth and was paid 30,000 Reichsmarks for the order. Distribution was handled by the compulsory Jewish organisations: in the so-called Old Reich (Altreich) the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, and in Vienna and Prague the local Jewish communities. Everyone had to pay for their star, usually 10 pfennigs apiece, and sign a receipt for it. In doing so they also signed a declaration that they knew the regulations and an undertaking to treat the badge “carefully and with care” and, when sewing it on, to turn under the cloth projecting beyond its edges. The Jewish community newspapers warned that covering the star with a collar, a bag or a briefcase was a punishable offence.

The decree affected some 300,000 people. According to estimates, some 160,000 Jews were then living within Germany’s pre-1938 borders, several tens of thousands in former Austria, almost all of them in Vienna, and some 88,000 in the Protectorate. To a large extent they were elderly and impoverished people who had not managed to emigrate; the younger and able-bodied were largely assigned to forced labour. From 19 September 1941 every one of them could be recognised at first glance in the street, on the tram and in the shop.

Living with the badge

For German Jews, many of whom had fought in the First World War and held decorations for bravery, the star was a particular humiliation, all the more so as the decree forbade them to wear those decorations. The Dresden scholar of Romance languages Victor Klemperer, who survived the war thanks to his marriage to an “Aryan” woman, called the star “Pour le Sémite” in his notes on the language of the Third Reich, a sardonic allusion to the highest Prussian military order, the Pour le Mérite. In the diary he kept throughout the war he described both insults in the street and small gestures of kindness, a handshake or food discreetly handed over. On 4 October 1941 he noted: “Without doubt the people feel the persecution of the Jews to be a sin.”

The reactions of German society were varied and hard to measure. Reports on public opinion by the SS security service (the SD) from October 1941 stated that the decree had been “mostly welcomed”, but that in Catholic and middle-class circles it had aroused sympathy, and some people spoke of “medieval methods”. The party press condemned “false pity” for Jews, to whom people gave up their seats on trams. Historians stress that such sources must be read with caution: the authors of SD reports may have wanted to influence their superiors, while Jews recorded in their diaries above all the kind gestures, since it was precisely to them that people showed such gestures without fear of being denounced. According to accounts from the Protectorate, the occupation authorities there had to forbid Czechs to bow ostentatiously to Jews wearing the star, which had become a form of protest against the occupation. On 24 October 1941 the Reich Security Main Office threatened Germans who publicly showed friendly feelings towards Jews with three months’ protective custody in a concentration camp.

The star was not merely a humiliation. It was a tool. It allowed the police, officials and neighbours to check that a Jew was not shopping outside the permitted hours, sitting on a bench, riding a tram or entering a park. Each of the further bans that rained down in the following months could be enforced only because the Jews were marked. Above all, however, the star, together with the ban on leaving one’s place of residence, made easier what followed a few weeks later.

Place in the war

September 1941 was a month of decisive change in the Third Reich’s policy towards the Jews. A few days after the first stars appeared in Germany, in mid-September, Hitler decided that the Jews of the Reich and the Protectorate were to be deported to the east while the war was still going on, rather than after it had ended. On 18 September Heinrich Himmler informed the governor of the Warthegau, Arthur Greiser, that several tens of thousands of Jews from the Reich would be sent to the Łódź ghetto. The implementation of this decision was entrusted to Heydrich, who since 31 July 1941 had held Göring’s authorisation to prepare a “total solution of the Jewish question” and at the end of September also became Deputy Reich Protector in Prague. On 15 October 1941 the first of the transports to Łódź left Vienna, from which Jews had already been deported to the General Government at the beginning of the year, and in the following weeks trains from Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Prague and Vienna carried Jews to Łódź, Kaunas, Riga and Minsk. People marked with the star were easy to find, register and bring to the stations. On 23 October Jews were forbidden to emigrate from the Reich. At the end of November, in Kaunas and near Riga, during the Rumbula massacre, the first thousands of deported German and Austrian Jews were shot.

Over the following year, from October 1941 to October 1942, the Germans deported some 183,000 Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, to ghettos, camps and killing sites in the east, as well as to the Theresienstadt ghetto, set up in the Protectorate at the end of 1941. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 Heydrich presented the plan for the “Final Solution”, which was to cover the Jews of all Europe. In 1942 the Gestapo ordered the doors of Jewish flats to be marked with a white star as well, and the badge that the Jews of the Reich had worn since 19 September 1941 was for most of them the last stage before deportation. Of the Jews marked that autumn, only a small proportion survived the war – mainly Jewish spouses in mixed marriages, those who went into hiding and the few survivors of the camps.

The Germans and their allies carried the Reich model over to other countries. Slovakia introduced the yellow star in its Jewish Code as early as 9 September 1941; in occupied Luxembourg the star replaced the earlier armbands in October 1941; and in the occupied Soviet territories and the former eastern provinces of Poland the German authorities standardised the badges Jews had been wearing since the summer. In 1942 Jews in the Netherlands, Belgium and the occupied zone of France had to sew on the star – in France some people demonstratively wore yellow objects as a sign of solidarity – in 1943 in Greece, and in Hungary only after the German troops marched in in the spring of 1944. In Denmark, despite pressure, the badge was never introduced. The decree signed by Heydrich on 1 September 1941 was formally repealed only in September 1945 by the Allied Control Council, and the yellow star with the word “Jude” became one of the most recognisable symbols of the Holocaust.