5 - Reprieve

Summary

For a few crucial years after 1933, the fate of Jews and Polish speakers in Nazi Upper Silesia converged. The League of Nations Geneva Accord of 1922 primarily protected German and Polish minorities in Upper Silesia, but it also included provisions to protect religious minorities. The roughly 10,000 Jews in Nazi Upper Silesia invoked these minority protections. From 1934 to 1937, through appeals to the League, Jews used the Accord to gain a truly exceptional legal status: all Nazi anti-Semitic laws were voided in Upper Silesia. Economic and social freedoms unimaginable elsewhere in Germany remained commonplace in Upper Silesia. Jewish bureaucrats and doctors held onto their jobs, while Jews and non-Jews married despite the Nuremberg Laws. At the same time, the protections did not completely prevent extralegal violence or social exclusion of Jews. Nazi Germany nonetheless upheld the Accord out of fear that violating the treaty would give Poland pretext to retaliate against the German minority across the border in Polish Upper Silesia. With the end of the treaty in 1937, Nazi Germany immediately persecuted Upper Silesia’s Jews with the same virulence as elsewhere in the Reich.