Former President Herbert Hoover on the Persecution of Jews and Civil Rights in Nazi Germany

Background

1933 was a dark year for Germany and the world at large. In January of that year, Adolf Hitler became the chancellor. Scarcely a month later, on February 27th, a Dutch communist burnt down the Reichstag, Germany’s parliamentary building, resulting in an immediate constitutional crack-down on German citizens’ civil liberties, with the Reichstag Fire Decree. By the end of March, Germany passed The Enabling Act, which allowed Hitler to pass laws without the consent of the parliament, establishing his position as a dictator. As Hitler and the National Socialists set about dismantling the Weimar Republic and transitioning to the Third Reich, they made sure to do it with the unmistakable signals of intimidation and domination: there was much violence, and Hitler’s SS were stationed outside of the Reichstag, communicating to the German people that their public institutions were literally captured. 

By April 1st, the government officially boycotted Jewish businesses and shortly thereafter, passed the Civil Service Law, which removed Jewish public service professionals, including judges, lawyers, professors, and teachers, from their jobs. It was around this juncture that Albert Einstein resigned his academic position in Berlin, renounced his German citizenship, and emigrated to the United States. Fascism was moving at breakneck speed.

This letter is former President Herbert Hoover’s response to his friend and former personal secretary Lewis Strauss, a Jewish investment banker and later public official, on July 5, 1933, regarding the worsening situation in Germany. Only nine days later, Hitler would dissolve all other political parties in Germany, officially making it a totalitarian regime. Hoover had left office on March 4, 1933, but by July, things were already much worse. 

In his response to Strauss, Hoover commends Strauss’s activism in working towards “alleviation of the situation of the Jews in Germany,” as well as his leadership in fighting the “abhorrent bigotry of religious persecution” and the violation of the “common rights of men” to practise their professions and earn a living. 

Hoover had made his name doing relief work during World War I, a conflict of massive proportions that was clearly on his mind when he wrote this letter. After declining to make any public statements about the persecution of German Jews lest he “embarrass the current administration,” Hoover, ever the isolationist, admonished Strauss not to judge the German people unfavorably despite the noose tightening around the necks of their Jewish compatriots: “We must not be misled into believing that this is the feeling or character of the German people as a whole. Our people were misled into this illusion in 1914. The groups who misled the German people in both instances did not represent the true German instinct, which is as tolerant and liberty-loving as any nation.” 

Five years later, in 1938, Hoover traveled to Germany. Despite privately believing that a European war was imminent, Hoover did not see the third Reich as a military threat to the United States, and maintained his isolationist position right up until Pearl Harbor. 

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