Law on tenancy agreements with Jews

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Law on tenancy agreements with Jews

The law on tenancy agreements with Jews of April 30, 1939 ( RGBl I, p. 864), rarely also called Entlietungsgesetz ( Entlietungsgesetz ), changed the legal tenant protection at the expense of Jewish tenants and landlords. House communities with “ German-blooded ” neighbors were to be dissolved: communal authorities, in agreement with Aryan landlords, could clear the living space for non-Jewish families and direct Jews into the confined spaces of Jewish houses .

prehistory

When Austria was annexed in March 1938, the Viennese National Socialists began to forcibly expel Jews from sought-after apartments. In order to “avoid disturbances of public safety and order”, the “wild actions” should be slowed down. The aim was, on the one hand, to gain living space by merging Jewish families, to relieve the strained housing market and to comply with the popular slogan “Get out of the good and cheap apartments with the Jews”. On the other hand, after the November pogroms in 1938 , Hermann Göring considered separating the Jewish population into ghettos . Reinhard Heydrich , however, found it difficult to be monitored by the police there, recommended accommodation in individual Jewish houses and expected a check "by the watchful eye of the entire population".

After Göring's lecture, Adolf Hitler himself decided at the end of December 1938 not to “generally abolish tenant protection for Jews”, but rather “to proceed in individual cases, if possible, in such a way that Jews are merged into one house ...” The Aryanization of property was therefore linked to The end of the totalization . The priority is the Aryanization of businesses and businesses as well as agricultural property.

Content of the law

The official justification for the “Law on Tenancy with Jews” stated that there could be no trusting house community between Germans and Jews.

Paragraph 1 of the law stipulated that a Jewish tenant could no longer invoke the statutory tenant protection if his non-Jewish landlord could prove that his tenant could be accommodated elsewhere.

According to §2, long-term contracts could also be terminated prematurely if a part (tenant or landlord) was considered to be Jewish.

According to Section 3, Jewish tenants were only allowed to accept Jews as subtenants .

Section 4 stipulated that Jewish owners had to accept other Jews as tenants or subtenants at the request of the municipal authorities.

According to §5 Jews were only allowed to rent vacant or vacant rooms with the approval of the municipal authorities.

Further provisions concerned, among other things, actions for the cancellation of rent, claims for compensation, eviction periods and a general obligation to register Jewish living space, which had already been decreed in limited form for Berlin and Munich. The law should not apply to so-called privileged mixed marriages .

Effects

Housing authorities, house owners and brokerage firms worked closely with regional Gestapo and party offices to “de-Jew” houses and apartments. The allocated replacement apartments were in buildings that had not yet been Aryanised. This included not only “Jewish” houses, apartments and boarding houses, but often facilities of the Jewish communities: kindergartens and schools, old people's homes and hospitals, offices and assembly rooms, prayer rooms and cemetery halls.

At the same time, efforts were made to persuade “German-blooded” tenants to voluntarily move out of the apartments of Jewish owners. Since the statutory tenant protection continued to apply to them, they appealed to their “healthy public sentiment” and suggested they swap their homes. An "Ordinance to amend and supplement tenancy agreements with Jews" of September 10, 1940 (RGBl. I, p. 1235) particularly affected the major cities of Berlin, Munich and Vienna, where it now also dissolved the Jewish tenancy agreements in Jewish houses and introduced them a second wave of layoffs. Older estimates assume more than 30,000 apartments for Berlin alone that were cleared before the deportation began .

For the Jews, the forced change of residence represented a massive encroachment on their privacy and an attack on their self-esteem. In addition to the loss of the familiar shared apartment, they moved to mostly primitive and cramped rooms. With the admission to Jewish houses there were no earning opportunities through subletting or lunch guests.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Konrad Kwiet : After the Pogrom: Levels of Exclusion. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): The Jews in Germany 1933–1945. Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-33324-9 , pp. 631/632.
  2. ↑ The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 Volume 2: German Reich 1938 - August 1939. Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-486-58523-0 , Document 146: Review at Göring ..., p 432.
  3. ↑ Document 069-PS in: IMT: The Nuremberg Trial against the Major War Criminals ... , fotomech. Reprint Munich 1989, Vol. XXV, ISBN 3-7735-2521-4 , p. 132.
  4. ↑ Uwe Dietrich Adam: Jewish policy in the Third Reich. Unchangeable Reprint Düsseldorf 2003, ISBN 3-7700-4063-5 , p. 155, note 97 with reference to DtJustiz 1939, p. 791.
  5. ^ Ordinance on the reorganization of the Reich capital Berlin and the capital of the Munich Movement of February 8, 1939 (RGBl. I, p. 159)
  6. ↑ a b Konrad Kwiet: After the pogrom: levels of exclusion. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): The Jews in Germany 1933–1945. Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-33324-9 , p. 633.
  7. ^ Konrad Kwiet: After the Pogrom: Levels of Exclusion. In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): The Jews in Germany 1933–1945. Munich 1988, ISBN 3-406-33324-9 , p. 631.
  8. ↑ Hubert Schneider: The 'de-Jewification' of living space - 'Jewish houses' in Bochum. The history of the buildings and their inhabitants . Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10828-9 , p. 5 with numerous references in note 10.