Israelitisches Familienblatt
Herbert A. Strauss characterised Israelitisches Familienblatt "as the gemütliche, middle-brow journal written for the average petit-bourgeois family in city and country, the Sunday paper that wants to edify, educate and comfort, the Jewish equivalent to the (antisemitic) Gartenlaube.
In its cultural insert the Familienblatt presented music, performing and visual art by examples of creative works by Jewish artists.
In 1905, Albert Wolf (1841–1907), a jeweller from Dresden, donated his collection of Jewish art, at that time the biggest of its kind in Germany, to the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin (founded in 1671).
[4] The community further enriched the art collection by its own possessions, acquisitions and donations and showed it the first time in 1917 and then with irregular frequency.
Carlebach had unveiled that Joseph Goebbels, who so vehemently defamed Jews and their alleged detrimental influence, had studied with Jewish professors, to whom he owed his scholarship at that time.
In November 1932 to January 1933 the Familienblatt published a series named 'Sowjetjudäa' (Soviet Judea) on Jewish life under communist reign, a report written by Carlebach on his journey through the USSR in summer 1932.
Especially adversaries of Hitler, who relied on the USSR and who naïvely or willfully downplayed the crimes there, were incited to give thought to his arguments or to be angry with Carlebach.
[5] "The articles brought forth a flurry of anonymous threatening letters and a vile pamphlet attack upon him from Hamburg's 'Jewish Workers' Study Group'.
On 30 January 1933 Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler, only since recently German after his seventh attempt to get naturalised finally succeeded on 25 February 1932, chancellor of a coalition government of right-wing forces.
A law, the Enabling Act of 1933, was passed (only opposed by the few unarrested social democrats who risked attending the session) that empowered the Reich's government to rule without parliamentary legislation.
Thus it happened that Gentiles, completely unaware of their Jewish descent, suddenly figured out that the Nazi government regarded them as Jews.
The paper now sought to collect Jewish Germans, converted by the Nazi government into a community of fate, to build up support for the new Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Reich's Deputation of German Jews seated in Berlin), the umbrella organisation established on 17 September 1933, which for the first time ever united all the quarrelling Jewish organisations and religious bodies on a nationwide range.
Especially emigration was difficult, not only because after the Great Depression many countries restricted immigration, but because in 1931 the German government had introduced the Reichsfluchtsteuer, a tax at prohibitive tariffs against capital outflow.
A great release was then the Haʿavarah Agreement initiated by Arlosoroff, which enabled about 50,000 Jewish German investors to withdraw capital at all, if they emigrated to Palestine, even though under the very costly prerogatives of the Reichsfluchtsteuer.
[10] It was an official gazette under Gestapo control, occupied to a large extent with announcing the ever-growing number of anti-Semitic discriminations imposed by the Reich's government in the aftermath of the November Pogroms.
[10] In order not to evoke more unease among non-persecuted Germans with the increasing anti-Semitic discriminations, as secretly reported to the Reich's government[11] they preferred not to publicise their invidiousnesses anymore, so that many of them very exclusively published in the Nachrichtenblatt,[12] not freely available on sale, but by subscription only for Jews.
Periodical Nazi secret service surveys on the German public opinion about positions as to Jews had revealed, especially after the November Pogroms, frequent discontent and disgust,[11] more so in urban centres, in western and southern Germany than elsewhere,[13] and the opinion that destroying other people's property and beating people in the streets as well as setting synagogues onto fire, goes much too far, such crimes would not go unpaid.
[13] On 16 December Hans Hinkel, State commissioner for Prussian theatre affairs including the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden, in Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, declared in front of Dr. Werner Levie (1903–1945), a Dutchman and therefore one of the few available members – not hiding or arrested – of the Kulturbund's executive board, that until the end of December all the still existing 76 Jewish publishing companies were to be shut down or sold to new owners.
The Kulturbund managed to save a great deal of the book stocks of the to-be-shut publishing houses from being pulped.
Levie reached the concession, that Jewish publishers obliged to liquidate their companies, might export their book stocks on their own until April 1939 – only few succeeded, because the market for German books was narrow, since impoverished German emigrants could not buy but eventually flooded the western markets by selling their last belongings – if the pertaining purchaser would pay in foreign exchange to the Reichsbank, while the respective publisher would be paid in inconvertible Reichsmarks only.
The Kulturbund's publishing department bought the remaining book stocks from their old proprietors at a discount of 80–95% of the original price and would only pay, once proceeds from sales abroad or to German or Austrian Jews and Gentiles of Jewish descent would materialise.
[15] In January 1939 Nova, a company of so-called Aryan owners, bought the Buchdruckerei und Verlagsanstalt Max Lessmann.
Thus the ministry ordered that the Kulturbund's publishing department commissioned the company Nova, using Lessmann's former devices, to print the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt.
By this reorganisation the Reichsvereinigung had become a device to better control and discriminate against German and Austrian Jews and Gentiles of Jewish descent.
After Germany started the Second World War by invading Poland, the Nachrichtenblatt's two editions per week were both halved in their number of pages.
In the East in German-occupied Poland and Lithuania, where the local population was anyway subject to open terror and public executions.
