Life_under_Siege_The_Jews_of_Magdeburg_under_Nazi_Rule.pdf

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their businesses. 127 Of the five cases to be discussed in this section, this was
certainly the case for those employees accused of ‘Rassenschande’ at
Magdeburg’s leading department store: ‘Kaufhaus Gebrüder Barasch’, owned and
operated by Hermann Broder, a member of the Synagogen-Gemeinde and
prominent figure in the Jewish community. However, the remaining three cases
only loosely fall into this category and perhaps bear even greater witness, not only
to covetous greed, but to the city’s determination to publicly vilify and destroy
ordinary Jews. 128 In the remaining four cases, one individual was the director of a
business college, one a solicitor, one an unnamed woman and the final individual
was a general practitioner. Of the five cases, only one of the accused miraculously
escaped conviction and was acquitted. In the remaining four cases all three were
convicted and sentenced to imprisonment, but there was one exception.
The most widely publicised and sensationalised trial for ‘Rassenschande’ in
Magdeburg for the entire Nazi period was that of Albert Hirschland, who was
tried and convicted in June 1935. 129 This was the first show trial in the city 130 and
attracted significant local and national media coverage. The propaganda value of
the trial was maximised by the Nazi Party with a sixteen-page special edition of
127 Barkai, op. cit., p. 71.
128 For a discussion on the practice of denunciations involving ‘Rassenschande,’ see
Christl Wickert, “Popular Attitudes to National Socialist Antisemitism: Denunciations
for ‘Insidious Offenses’ and ‘Racial Ignominy’,” in Bankier, ed., op. cit., pp. 282–
295.
129 Correspondence to the Oberlandesgerichtspräsidenten in Naumburg a/S, 22 June
1935, Bestand Rep. C 128, Signatur Nr. 81, LHASA MD, op. cit., p. 153.
130 Spector, ed., op. cit., p. 782. At the time of the completion of this chapter this
famous trial had only been referred to in this source and in David J. Hogan, ed., The
Holocaust Chronicle Lincolnwood, Illinois: Publications International, 2000, p. 92.