Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (15 page)

In line with Bayreuth’s oft-repeated leitmotiv, Chamberlain called for the birth of a German-Christian religion, a Christianity cleansed of its Jewish spirit, as the sole basis for regeneration. In other words, the redemption of Aryan Christianity would be achieved only through the elimination of the Jew. But even here it is not entirely clear whether or not the redemptive struggle against the Jews was to be waged against the Jewish spirit only. In the closing lines of volume 1, after stating that in the nineteenth century, amid a chaos of mixed breeds, the two “pure” races that stood facing each other were the Jews and the Germans, Chamberlain writes: “No arguing about ‘humanity’ can alter the fact that this means a struggle. Where the struggle is not waged with cannon-balls, it goes on silently in the heart of society…. But this struggle, silent though it be, is above all others a struggle for life and death.”
⁷⁰
Chamberlain probably did not know himself what he meant by this in terms of concrete action, but he undoubtedly offered the most systematic formulation of what he considered the fundamental struggle shaping the course of world history.

Three years after the publication of Chamberlain’s
Foundations
, the
Frankfurter Zeitung
had to admit that it “has caused more of a ferment than any other appearance on the book market in recent years.”
⁷¹
By 1915 the book had sold more than one hundred thousand copies and was being widely referred to. As the years went by, Chamberlain, who in 1908 had married Richard and Cosima Wagner’s daughter, Eva, became ever more obsessed with the “Jewish question.” In nightmares, he reported, he saw himself kidnapped by Jews and sentenced to death.
⁷²
“My lawyer friend in Munich,” he informed an old acquaintance, “tells me that there is no living being whom the Jews hate more than me.”
⁷³
The war, and even more so the early years of the Weimar Republic, drove his obsession to its utmost limits. Hitler visited him in Bayreuth in 1923: The by now paralyzed prophet of redemptive anti-Semitism was granted the supreme happiness of meeting—and recognizing as such—Germany’s savior from the Jews.
⁷⁴

IV

The impact of the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution on the European imagination was stronger than that of any other event since the French Revolution. Mass death, shattering political upheavals, and visions of catastrophes to come fueled the pervasive apocalyptic mood that settled over Europe.
⁷⁵
Beyond nationalist exacerbation in several countries, the hopes, fears, and hatreds of millions crystallized along the main political divide that would run through the history of the following decades: fear of revolution on one side, demand for it on the other. Those who feared the revolution frequently identified its leaders with the Jews. Now the proof for the Jewish world conspiracy was incontrovertible: Jewry was about to destroy all established order, annihilate Christianity, and impose its dominion. In her 1921 book,
World Revolution
, the English historian Nesta Webster asked, “who are…the authors of the Plot?…. What is their ultimate object in wishing to destroy civilization? What do they hope to gain by it? It is this apparent absence of motive, this seemingly aimless campaign of destruction carried on by the Bolsheviks of Russia, that has led many people to believe in the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity.”
⁷⁶
Webster was among these believers, and so, in his own way, at the time, was Thomas Mann. “We also spoke of the type of Russian Jew, the leader of the world revolutionary movement,” Mann wrote in his diary on May 2, 1918, recording a conversation with Ernst Bertram, “that explosive mixture of Jewish intellectual radicalism and Slavic Christian enthusiasm.” He added: “A world that still retains an instinct of self-preservation must act against such people with all the energy that can be mobilized and with the swiftness of martial law.”
⁷⁷

The most explosive ideological mixture present in postwar Germany was a fusion of constant fear of the Red menace with nationalist resentment born of defeat. The two elements seemed to be related, and the chaotic occurrences that marked the early months of the postimperial regime seemed to confirm the worst suspicions and fuel the fires of hatred.

Two months after Germany’s defeat, the extreme left-wing revolutionary Spartacists attempted to seize power in Berlin. The uprising failed, and on the evening of January 15, 1919, its main leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, probably having been betrayed, were arrested at their hiding place in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.
⁷⁸
They were brought to the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division, where they were interrogated by a Captain Pabst. Liebknecht was led out first, taken by car to the Tiergarten, and “shot while trying to escape.” Luxemburg, already brutally beaten at the Eden, was dragged out half dead, moved from one car to another, and then shot. Her body was thrown into the Landwehrkanal, where it remained until March. A military tribunal acquitted most of the officers directly involved in the murders (sentencing only two of them to minimal imprisonment), and Defense Minister Gustav Noske, a Social Democrat, duly signed these unlikely verdicts. Rosa Luxemburg and her closest companions among the Berlin Spartacists, Leo Jogiches and Paul Levi, were Jews.

The prominence of Jews among the leaders of the revolution in Bavaria added fuel to the already passionate anti-Semitic hatred of the Right as did their role among the Berlin Spartacists. It was Kurt Eisner, the Jewish leader of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) in Bavaria, who toppled the Wittelsbach dynasty, which for centuries had given Bavaria its kings. During his short term as prime minister, Eisner added enemies by publishing incriminating archives regarding Germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of the war and appealing to the German people to help in rebuilding devastated areas of enemy territory, which was simply interpreted as a call for the enslavement of Germans “from children to old people, [who would] be obliged to carry stones for the war-torn areas.”
⁷⁹

On February 21, 1919, Eisner was assassinated by Count Anton Arco-Valley, a right-wing law student. After a brief interim government of majority Socialists, the first of two Republics of the Councils was established. In fact only a minority among the leaders of the Bavarian republics were of Jewish origin, but some of their most visible personalities could be identified as such.
⁸⁰

Exacerbated right-wing opinion accused these Jewish leaders of being responsible for the main atrocity committed by the Reds: the shooting of hostages in the cellar of the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich. To this day the exact sequence of events is unclear. Apparently, on April 26, 1919, seven activists of the radical anti-Semitic Thule Society, among them its secretary, Countess Heila von Westarp, were detained at the organization’s office. Two officers of the Bavarian Army and a Jewish artist named Ernst Berger were added to the seven Thule members. On April 30, after news reached Munich, that the counterrevolutionary volunteer units, the Free Corps of Franz Freiherr Ritter von Epp, had killed Red prisoners in the town of Starnberg, the commander of the Red forces, a former navy man named Rudolf Egelhofer, ordered the shooting of the hostages. These executions, an isolated atrocity, became the quintessential illustration of Jewish Bolshevik terror in Germany; in the words of British historian Reginald Phelps, this “murder of hostages goes far to explain…the passionate wave of anti-Semitism that spread because the deed was alleged to represent the vengeance of ‘Jewish Soviet leaders’…on anti-Semitic foes.” Needless to say, the fact that Egelhofer and “all those directly connected with the shooting” were not Jews, and that one of the victims was Jewish, did not change these perceptions in the least.
⁸¹

The impact of the situation in Berlin and Bavaria was amplified by revolutionary agitation in other parts of Germany. According to the pro-Nazi French historian Jacques Benoist-Méchin, revolutionaries of Jewish background were no less active in various other regional upheavals: “In Magdeburg, it is Brandes; in Dresden, Lipinsky, Geyer, and Fleissner; in the Ruhr, Markus and Levinsohn; in Bremerhaven and Kiel, Grünewald and Kohn; in the Palatinate, Lilienthal and Heine.”
⁸²
What is important here is not the accuracy of every detail but the widespread attitude it expressed.

These events in Germany were perceived in relation to simultaneous upheavals in Hungary: the establishment of Béla Kun’s Soviet Republic and the fact that the “Jewish” presence was even more massive there than in Berlin and Munich. The British historian of Central Europe R. W. Seton-Watson noted in May 1919: “Anti-Semitic feeling is growing steadily in Budapest (which is not surprising, considering that not only the whole Government, save 2, and 28 out of the 36 ministerial commissioners are Jews, but also a large proportion of the Red officers).”
⁸³
Some of these revolutionaries, such as the notorious Tibor Szamuely, were indeed downright sinister figures.
⁸⁴
Finally, the massive disproportion of leaders of Jewish origin among the Bolsheviks themselves seemed to give cogency to what had become a pervasive myth that spread and resonated throughout the Western world.
⁸⁵

There was no mystery in the fact that Jews joined the revolutionary left in large numbers. These men and women belonged to the generation of newly emancipated Jews who had abandoned the framework of religious tradition for the ideas and ideals of rationalism and, more often than not, for socialism (or Zionism). Their political choices derived both from the discrimination to which they had been subjected, mainly in Russia but also in Central Europe, and from the appeal of the socialist message of equality. In the new socialist world, all of suffering humanity would be redeemed, and with that, the Jewish stigma would disappear: It was, for at least some of these “non-Jewish Jews,”
⁸⁶
a vision of a secularized messianism, which may have sounded like a distant echo of the message of the Prophets they no longer recognized. In fact, almost all of them were actually hostile, in the name of revolutionary universalism, to anything Jewish. In no way did they represent the political tendencies of the great majority of the Central and Western European Jewish populations, which were politically liberal or close to the Social Democrats; only a fraction was decidedly conservative. For example, the German Democratic Party, favored by most German Jews, was the very epitome of the liberal center of the political scene.
⁸⁷
Much of this was ignored by the non-Jewish public. Particularly in Germany the nationalist camp’s accumulated hatred needed a pretext and a target for its outpourings. And so it pounced on the revolutionary Jews.

Rosa Luxemburg and the Jewish leaders in Bavaria represented the threat of Jewish revolution. For the nationalists the appointment of a number of Jewish cabinet ministers and other high officials proved that the hated republic was indeed in Jewish hands; the Right could point to Hugo Haase, Otto Landsberg, Hugo Preuss, Eugen Schiffer, Emanuel Wurm, Oskar Cohn, and to the most visible Jewish minister of all, Walther Rathenau.
⁸⁸
Rosa Luxemburg had been murdered on January 15, 1919; Walther Rathenau, appointed foreign minister barely six months before, was assassinated on June 25, 1922.

Rathenau’s murderers—Erwin Kern (aged twenty-four) and Hermann Fischer (twenty-six), both members of a Free Corps unit called Naval Brigade Ehrhardt, and their accomplices Ernst Werner Techow (twenty-one), his brother Gerd (sixteen), and Ernst von Salomon, also a former Free Corps member—were, in Salomon’s words, “young men from good families.”
⁸⁹
At their trial Techow declared that Rathenau was one of the Elders of Zion.
⁹⁰

The canonical text of the Jewish-conspiracy theorists,
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, was secretly fabricated in the mid-1890s by order of Piotr Rachkovsky, chief of the Paris office of the Okhrana, the czarist secret police.
⁹¹
The
Protocols
comprised elements of two works from the 1860s, a French anti-Napoleon III pamphlet and a German anti-Semitic novel,
Biarritz
, by one Hermann Gödsche.
⁹²
The entire concoction was meant to fight the spread of liberalism inside the Russian Empire. Rachkovsky was merely following the rich tradition of attributing worldwide conspiracies to Jews.

The
Protocols
remained obscure until the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. But the crumbling of the czarist regime and the disappearance of the Romanovs and then of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg dynasties suddenly endowed this mysterious text, which was carried westward by fleeing White Russians, with an entirely new significance. In Germany, where the
Protocols
was excerpted in 1919 in the
völkisch
publication
Auf Vörposten
, it came to be considered concrete proof of the existence of dark forces responsible for the nation’s defeat in the war and for its postwar revolutionary chaos, humiliation, and bondage at the hands of the victors. Thirty-three German editions appeared in the years before Hitler’s accession to power, and countless others after 1933.
⁹³

The various versions of the
Protocols
published over the decades in a variety of languages share a basically identical core consisting of purported discussions held among the “Elders of Zion” at twenty-four secret meetings. In the immediate future the elders are not to shy away from any violent means to achieve control of the world. Oddly enough total power is not intended to lead to some harsh despotism aimed only at benefiting the Jews. The ultimate goal is described as the establishment of a just and socially oriented global regime. The people would rejoice at such beneficent government, and their satisfaction would ensure the survival of the Kingdom of Zion for centuries and centuries.