Chapter 7: 1936-1937 – Nazi Germany Violates the Versailles Peace Treaty and Other Nefarious Actions
Nazi Germany in September 1935 stripped German Jews of their citizenship – even those Jewish men who earned Iron Crosses fighting for Germany in the First World War.
Now Nazi Germany turned its ambitions outward — first to reclaim land on its western border with France and Belgium:
An article by Colonel Donovan P. Yeuell, Jr., U.S. Army in the November 1955 Proceedings issue of the U.S. Naval Institute states:
When German troops occupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, the Nazi Third Reich succeeded in freeing Germany from the last fetter by which she had been bound after her defeat in 1918. More importantly, the Rhineland incident marks perhaps the last crucial occasion upon which the aggressive Nazi drive might have been checked with relatively little effort. Seldom has the course of history been so definitely fixed by a single act.”
Let’s pause for a moment to consider the sentence I boldfaced above:
“More importantly, the Rhineland incident marks perhaps the last crucial occasion upon which the aggressive Nazi drive might have been checked with relatively little effort.”
And so what happened?
Basically, nothing except for a few statements issued by British and French politicians.
In fact, perhaps not to be outdone by the dictator to the north, two months later on May 9, 1936, Mussolini announced to Italy and the world the foundation of the Italian Empire.
And then let’s note that, two months after this, the Spanish Civil War started on July 17, 1936 (only to end two weeks after Nazi Germany had finished swallowing up all of Czechoslovakia).
As Britannica Encyclopedia explains:
“Spanish Civil War, (1936–39), military revolt against the [democractically elected] Republican government of Spain, supported by conservative elements within the country. When an initial military coup failed to win control of the entire country, a bloody civil war ensued, fought with great ferocity on both sides. The Nationalists [led by General Francisco Franco], as the rebels were called, received aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Republicans received aid from the Soviet Union as well as from the International Brigades [Communist], composed of volunteers from Europe and the United States.”
What a great piece of luck! Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy got to test their weapons in the Spanish Civil War.
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Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso
American writer Ernest Hemingway took part as a war correspondent on the democratically elected Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. (He was an ambulance driver in the First World War.) His 1940 novel For Whom The Bell Tolls was inspired by his experiences.
Spanish artist Pablo Picasso created his 1937 anti-war painting “Guernica” depicting the horrors of the German aerial bombing during the Spanish Civil War of the Basque town Guernica.
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And now we come to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin (August 1-16) – where Hitler got to play host on the world stage.
Frederic Zeller in his 1989 biography When Time Ran Out: Coming of Age in the Third Reich wrote:
“In mid-July something odd happened in Berlin. The ‘Jews not welcome’ signs suddenly disappeared. I did not look for an explanation; it was enough for me to know that I could again go swimming at the Havel public bath. What else was important? Hermann Papiermeister came to the conclusion that it had something to do with the start of the Olympics and all those foreigners who were pouring into Berlin.”
And then a few pages later he wrote:
“Even if I had not had other sources of information, I would have known Hitler’s Olympiade was over at the end of August. The ‘No Jews’ signs started to reappear quite promptly, and at more places than ever before.”
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The 2004 documentary “Watermarks” directed by Yaron Zilberman showcases the women swimmers in the Hakoah sports club in Vienna. (After the Anschluss in Austria in 1938 the Nazis shut down the club.) Three of the members earned spots in the 1936 Austrian Olympic delegation — Ruth Langer, Judith Deutsch, and Lucie Golder. To protest Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews they all declined to participate.
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Yes, Hitler toned down some of his Jew-hatred during that brief period. Yet we might ask why the U.S. still participated in the games. Remember the 1980 Summer Olympics when the U.S. led a boycott of the games because of the Soviet-Afghan War?
The 1936 Summer Olympics were another missed opportunity to stop Hitler. Clearly he saw the participation of the U.S. and other major countries as a greenlight for his activities.
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African-American Track Star Jesse Owens
Jesse Owens won four gold medals for the U.S. in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. One wonders how Hitler “integrated” these wins into Hitler’s worldview of the Aryan superior race.
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Let’s not forget the Sachsenhausen concentration camp built in the summer of 1936 — the first new German camp after the appointment of Reich leader SS Heinrich Himmler as the Chief of the German Police in July 1936. Sachsenhausen was built close to Berlin and, besides imprisoning political prisoners, was used for training SS guards.
And now come the “best buddies” treaties:
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia states:
“Rome-Berlin Axis
Italy and Germany began to pursue closer relations in 1936 after the League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy for invading Abyssinia [Ethopia] and after Italy’s alliance with Britain and France ended. On October 25, 1936, Germany and Italy entered into a treaty of friendship in which they pledged to pursue a common foreign policy. Based on a speech given by Mussolini a week later, the alliance became known as the Rome-Berlin Axis.
“Anti-Comintern Pact
On November 25, 1936, a month after Germany and Italy entered into a treaty of friendship, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. In this pact, the two countries pledged mutual assistance in combating the threat posed by the Communist International. Although the pact does not mention the Soviet Union, it was directed at that country, which was in hostilities with Japan at the time. Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact on November 6, 1937.”
We return to Edgar Mowrer for the 1937 chapter added to his 1933 book Germany Puts the Clock Back.
Mowrer sums up the situation as perceived in England in 1937 when he quotes from the British financial monthly, The Banker, in an issue in February 1937 dedicated to Germany:
“The article started with the statement that the German political leaders were ‘prepared to gamble with the lives of their people’ but that their threat to peace was in process of ‘creating a real League of free nations.’
“It delineated every phase of policy in Hitler Germany, studied the enslavement of public opinion and the Press, analysed industry and agriculture, noted the failure of the latter to make Germany self-supporting, calculated the amount wrung from the masses for rearmament, noted the creasing dominion of the Army – ‘now as ever …. the real trustee of the German nation’ – defined the foreign policy as ‘blackmail’ since Germany had no hope of beating a great coalition of Powers and could fight only a very short ‘smash and grab’ war, and ended with the injunction that England must under no circumstances yield to the ‘gangster tyranny that has forced Europe to become an armed or rapidly arming camp. Knowing as Britain does, that peace and Nazi methods go ill together, we should make no concessions to a country dominated by men who worship force and have shown no hesitation in using murder as an instrument of domestic and foreign policy.”
Mowrer goes on:
“These were strong words. They were accompanied by stronger deeds. At approximately the same time, the British Parliament voted a four-year, one and a half billion pound rearmament programme intended to make Britain the strongest existing European Power. The era of German blackmail seemed to be ended. Eventually it would be up to the Germans to fight or pipe down.”
In Diane Cole’s April 10, 1925, Wall Street Journal review of Joe Dunthorne’s 2025 memoir Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance about his German Jewish great-grandfather Siegfried Merzbacher, she writes:
“Once in Turkey [1935], Merzbacher’s job was to co-direct the Red Crescent gas-mask factory near Ankara.[T]he factory was a joint venture between Turkey and Merzbacher’s former German employer, Auergesellschaft, on whose payroll he remained and with which he shared his research results for much of his time in Turkey. A letter between Merzbacher and his old boss strongly hints at Merzbacher’s involvement in the 1937 sale, by Germany to Turkey, of chemical weapons used to kill thousands of Kurds and other ethnic minorities [May 1, 1937 – September 1, 1938]. That military operation, known today as the Dersim massacre or genocide, has an ‘implicit connection to the Holocaust,’ Mr. Dunthorne writes, ‘and has led to rumors that the Nazis saw Dersim as a proof of concept.’” (Boldface mine.)
And once again we have a connection with Turkey’s genocide of the Armenians in 1915 following Germany’s Namibian genocide in 1902 and the German-supplied chemicals in Turkey’s Dersim genocide of the Kurds. Only this time Turkey has upped its game from driving the Armenians into the desert to killing them with poisonous gas. And then Nazi Germany takes over this systematic killing.
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Degenerate Art and Degenerate Music (All That Jazz!)
Benedetta Ricci writes in his article “The Shows That Made Contemporary Art History: Nazi Censorship And The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition of 1937” in Artland Magazine:
“In the first decades of the 20th century, Germany was one of the major hubs of modern art in Europe. […](U)nder the Weimar government [established at the end of WWI] of the 1920s, the country saw a further renaissance that affected the cultural scenery in all its aspects. […] When Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, drastic change was visited upon all aspects of German society.
“The Nazi government considered the Weimar mores – mostly of American influence – as obscene and antithetical to traditional German values, making the Weimar culture, along with avant-gardism art in all its aspects, a threat in terms of both formal and intellectual expression.
“The assault on modernism was manifested in numerous systematic cleansing actions. Artists and musicians were discharged from teaching positions; museum directors that displayed modern art were dismissed; books were burnt; music, films and plays censored; thousands of artworks confiscated from public collections. The majority were destroyed, while others, those considered ‘marketable,’ sold abroad to raise funds for the regime. This extensive purge targeted what the Nazis deemed Entartete Kunst – ‘degenerate art.’
“Hitler signed an order authorizing a Degenerate Art Exhibition. A parallel show, the Great German Art Exhibition, was already planned to take place simultaneously to celebrate the regime values in a conventional academic style. Other so-called ‘shame exhibitions’ had come first, but the one mounted in Munich in 1937 would become the biggest.
“Though realised with the deliberate intention of triggering negative reactions, lines for the show went around the block.[…] Unintentionally, Hitler did more to promote modernism than anyone before him. But the greater irony is that the Degenerate Art exhibition hugely outnumbered the Great German Art show attendances, receiving almost four times the number of visitors.”
And the price young people in Nazi Germany paid for being fans of American jazz music is heartbreakingly portrayed in the 1993 movie “Swing Kids.”
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On the same day in July 1937 that the degenerate art show opened in Munich in southern Germany, the Nazi Germany concentration camp Buchenwald opened near the city of Weimar on July 19, 1937.
According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, Buchenwald “was considered the worse of the camps prior to World War II.”
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Nazi Concentration Camps
And here is where we have to take time out to clarify what the term “camps” means during the 12 years of Nazi rule (1933-1945).
First, I vividly remember (probably late 1970 or early 1971) standing in the original small Dachau camp museum in front of a wall map showing just the major concentration camp complexes. The map shocked me then. And today I know how few camps that map actually revealed.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is in the midst of a seven-volume project – “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945” – with the following website introduction (volumes I-IV are available for free on the museum’s website):
“The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945 provides comprehensive documentation of camps, ghettos, and other persecutory sites that the Nazi regime and its allies operated in a vast network spanning from Norway in the North to North Africa in the South, and from France in the West to the Soviet Union in the East. The volumes will document approximately 6,000 sites in narrative format in volumes 1 through 7, and data about an estimated additional 38,000 sites will be contained in the forthcoming Volume 7 database on forced labor camps.”
One major issue in trying to comprehend the massive, massive network of Nazi camps is that the term “concentration camp” is used generically for a number of different types of “camps.” And, for example, a camp such as Auschwitz could morph from one kind of camp to another kind of camp plus there were many hybrid camps.
Here are some commonly used terms for different kinds of Nazi Germany camps:
- Forced labor/slave labor/work camps
- Prisoner of war camps
- Prison exchange camps
- Internment camps
- Detention camps
- Transit/collection camps
- Deportation camps
- Death camps and death factories
- Extermination camps
- Killing centers
Also, many of these camps had factories built around them where individual companies such as Siemens used slave labor for factory work (paying the SS a nominal fee for the slave labor). Conditions at these factories might be even worse or slightly better than the camp from which the prisoners came.
One other important note: The gas chambers used to murder the Jews and others such as the Roma were different than the crematoria used to burn the bodies. Yet, as noted in many memoirs of Auschwitz, the gas chambers were often generically referred to as the crematoria – “going to the gas” or “going to the ovens” might be used interchangeably.
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In a Jewish Views article of January 26, 2021, about Erik Larson’s 2011 nonfiction book In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, I wrote:
“Page after page in BEASTS showcases the unwillingness of the German people to speak up against the brutality they saw taking place openly in front of them. Larson demonstrates how silence and inaction in the presence of anti-Semitism and racism can have deadly consequences.
“The book itself starts with how the then-chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago, William E. Dodd, became the U.S. ambassador to Germany in July 1933, six months after Hitler became chancellor. Then, in December of 1937, Dodd was forced to give up his ambassadorial post following pressure on President Roosevelt from the State Department and the German foreign office. Dodd’s anti-Nazi sentiments had gotten him in hot water:
“‘… The new German ambassador to America, Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, told Secretary of State Hull that while he was not making a formal request for Dodd’s removal, he ‘desired to make it plain that the German Government did not feel that he was persona grata.’”
“Dodd’s uneasy relations with top officials in both the U.S. and Nazi Germany shed a fascinating light on how the United States’ isolationist policy led much of the U.S. to ignore the more and more horrifying acts against humanity perpetrated by Hitler’s government before the start of World War II.”
And now we come to the pivotal year of 1938 ….