Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (16 page)

The last part of the
Protocols
reads like a prescription for some totalitarian utopia, precisely what many people longed for in that period of economic uncertainty and political crisis. Why, then, did this booklet inspire such fear and loathing? The hate effect of the
Protocols
was due simply to the very idea of
Jewish
domination over the Christian world. The elders were plotting the disintegration of Christendom. In the same vein the destruction of traditional elites and the very idea of revolution were terrifying to the upper- and middle-class majority of the
Protocols
’ readers. A 1920 American edition, for instance, clearly linked the machinations of the Elders of Zion to the Bolshevik peril.
⁹⁴

In an article headlined “The Jewish Peril, a Disturbing Pamphlet: Call for Inquiry,” the London
Times
of May 8, 1920, asked, “What are these ‘Protocols’? Are they authentic? If so, what malevolent assembly concocted these plans and gloated over their exposition? Are they forgery? If so, whence comes the uncanny note of prophecy, prophecy in part fulfilled, in part far gone in the way of fulfillment?”
⁹⁵
A year later the
Times
reversed itself, declaring that the
Protocols
was indeed a forgery. Nonetheless the May 1920 article had pointed to a fear buried deep in many minds: of falling victim to secret forces lurking in the dark. The
Protocols
thus exacerbated to the most extreme degree the paranoia prevalent in those years of crisis and disaster. If the Jewish threat was supranational, the struggle against it had to become global too, and without compromise. Thus, in an atmosphere suffused with concrete threats and imaginary forebodings, redemptive anti-Semitism seemed, more than ever before, to offer answers to the riddles of the time. And for the anti-Jewish true believers, the ultimate struggle for salvation demanded the unconditional fanaticism of one who could show the way and lead them into action.

V

“Middle-class anti-Semites and young students came…. Adolf Hitler spoke.” The
Münchner Post
was describing a meeting, in the spring of 1920, of the former DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German Workers’ Party), newly renamed NSDAP. “He behaved like a comedian. After every third sentence of lecture, as in a music-hall song, came the ‘refrain’: the Hebrews are guilty…. One thing must be recognized: Herr Hitler himself admitted that his speech was dictated by racial hatred. When the speaker brought up the question of how one should defend oneself against the Jews, calls from the assembly gave the answer: ‘Hang them! Kill them!’”
⁹⁶

Although Hitler, in the letter (quoted earlier) to Adolf Gemlich, denounced emotional anti-Semitism and insisted on a rational, systematic course in order to achieve total elimination of the Jews, his own style during the first years of his anti-Jewish agitation was very close to the rabble-rousing techniques of other
völkisch
orators, and his arguments did not reach far beyond the usual
völkisch
interpretations of history.
⁹⁷
“What happened to the city of the easy-going Viennese?” he asked on April 27, in a speech entitled “Politics and Jewry,” and in answer exclaimed, “For shame! It’s a second Jerusalem!” The police report at this point mentions “stormy applause.”
⁹⁸
None of that, however, amounted to a detailed presentation of Hitler’s anti-Jewish credo. A major attempt at this was made for the first time on August 13, 1920, in a three-hour speech in the Hofbräuhaus, a Munich beer hall. The announced title was “Why Are We Anti-Semites?”
⁹⁹

At the very outset Hitler reminded his listeners that his party was spearheading a fight against the Jews that was of direct relevance to the workers and their basic problems. There followed a long disquisition on the essence of creative work. In a convoluted way, Hitler argued that work, considered not as imposed necessity but as creative activity, had become the very symbol and essence of the Nordic race, its ultimate form being the construction of the state. This led him back to “the Jew.”

Taking the Bible, “which no one can say was written by an anti-Semite,” as the basis for his argument, Hitler affirmed that for the Jew work was punishment: The Jew was unable to work creatively and thus unable to build a state. Work for him was but the exploitation of the achievements of others. Starting from this postulate, Hitler then stated the parasitic nature of Jewish existence in history: Throughout millennia, the Jew’s subsistence and his racial striving to control the other people of the earth meant the parasitic undermining of the very subsistence of the host peoples, the exploitation of the work of others for the Jew’s own racial interests. The absolute character of the racial imperative was unquestionable, and Hitler stated it in absolute terms: “With all that, we must recognize that there is no good or bad Jew; everyone here works according to the imperatives of the race, because the race—or do we prefer to say, the nation?—and all that is linked to it, character and so on, lies, as the Jew himself explains, in the blood, and this blood compels every single individual to act according to these principles…. He is a Jew: he is driven only by one single thought: how do I raise my nation to become the dominating nation?”
¹⁰⁰

The National Socialist Party had entered the arena at this crucial moment of the struggle. A new hope had arisen that “finally the day will come when our words will fall silent and action will begin.”
¹⁰¹

As German historian Eberhard Jäckel has emphasized, the broad scope of Hitler’s anti-Semitism appeared only in
Mein Kampf
,
¹⁰²
in which the full force of the apocalyptic dimension of the anti-Jewish struggle found its expression. That may have been an outcome of Hitler’s independent evolution; it was probably the result of the ideological input of a man whom Hitler met either in late 1919 or early 1920: the writer, newspaper editor, pamphleteer, drug addict, and alcoholic Dietrich Eckart.

Eckart’s ideological influence on Hitler and the practical help he extended to him on several decisive occasions between 1920 and 1923 have often been mentioned. Hitler himself never denied Eckart’s impact: “He shone in our eyes like a polar star,” he said of him, and added: “At the time, I was intellectually a child at the bottle.”
¹⁰³
Mein Kampf
was dedicated to Hitler’s comrades killed during the 1923 putsch and to Dietrich Eckart (who had died near Berchtesgaden on Christmas Eve 1923).

The notorious “dialogue” between Eckart and Hitler,
Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und Mir (Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue Between Adolf Hitler and Myself)
, published some months after Eckart’s death, was written by Dietrich Eckart alone, probably even without Hitler’s knowledge.
¹⁰⁴
For some historians the
Dialogue
is the expression of Hitler’s basic ideological stance with regard to the Jewish issue;
¹⁰⁵
for others the text belongs much more to Eckart’s rather than to Hitler’s way of thinking.
¹⁰⁶
Whoever the author of the pamphlet may have been: “Everything we know about Eckart and Hitler lends credence to the document as a representation of the relationship and the ideas they shared.”
¹⁰⁷

The themes of the
Dialogue
clearly appear in
Mein Kampf
, wherever Hitler’s rhetoric surges to the metahistorical level. What is immediately striking in the
Dialogue
, even in its very title, is that Bolshevism is not identified with the ideology and the political force that came to power in Russia in 1917; Bolshevism is instead the destructive action of the Jew throughout the ages. Indeed, during the early years of Hitler’s career as an agitator—and this includes the writing of the text of
Mein Kampf
—political Bolshevism, although always recognized as one of the instruments used by the Jews to achieve world domination, is
not
one of Hitler’s central obsessions: It is a major theme only insofar as the Jews from whom it derives are
the
major theme. In other words, the revolutionary period of 1919 is not at center stage in Hitler’s propaganda. Thus, to consider Nazism primarily a panic reaction to the threat of Bolshevism, as has been argued by German historian Ernst Nolte, for example, does not correspond to what we know about Hitler’s early career.

The
Dialogue
is dominated by the apocalyptic dimension attributed to the Jewish threat. Eckart’s pamphlet is certainly one of the most extreme presentations of the Jew as the force of evil in history. At the very end of the text, “he” (that is, Hitler) sums up the ultimate aim of the Jew: “‘It is certainly so’ he said, ‘as you [Eckart] once wrote: “One can understand the Jew only when one knows toward what he aims for in the end. Beyond the domination of the world, toward the
destruction
of the world.”’”
¹⁰⁸
This vision of the world ending as a result of the Jew’s action reappears almost word for word in
Mein Kampf
: “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world,” Hitler wrote, “his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through [the] ether devoid of human beings.”
¹⁰⁹

At the end of the second chapter of
Mein Kampf
comes the notorious statement of faith: “Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
¹¹⁰
In Eckart, and in Hitler as he came to state his creed from 1924 on, redemptive anti-Semitism found its ultimate expression.

Some historians have turned Hitler’s ideological expostulations into a tight and highly coherent system, a cogent worldview (in its own terms); others have entirely dismissed the significance of the ideological utterances as either a system or as policy guidelines.
¹¹¹
Here it is argued that Hitler’s worldview indicated the goals of his actions, albeit in very general terms, and offered guidelines of sorts for concrete short-term political initiatives. Its anti-Jewish themes, presented in clusters of obsessive ideas and images, had the internal coherence of obsessions, particularly of the paranoid kind. By definition there are no loopholes in such systems. Moreover, although Hitler’s worldview was entirely geared toward political propaganda and political action, it was no less the expression of a fanatical belief. The combination of total belief and a craving for mass mobilization and radical action led naturally to the presentation of the worldview in simple and constantly repeated propositions, whose proof was offered not by means of intellectual constructs but by those of additional apodictic declarations reinforced by a constant stream of violent images and emotionally loaded metaphors. Whether these anti-Jewish statements were original or merely the rehashing of earlier and current anti-Semitic themes (which indeed they were) is basically irrelevant, as their impact stemmed from Hitler’s personal tone and from his own individual style of presenting his metapolitical and political beliefs.

Does this mean that Hitler’s anti-Jewish obsessions ought to be analyzed in terms of individual pathology? It is a lead that has often been followed;
¹¹²
it will not be taken up here. Suffice it to say that any such interpretation usually appears to be highly speculative and often reductive. Moreover, similar anti-Jewish images, similar threats, a similar readiness for violence were shared from the outset by hundreds of thousands of Germans belonging to the extreme right and later to the radical wing of the Nazi Party. If “pathology” there was, it was shared. Rather than an individual structure, we must face the social pathology of sects. It is unusual, however, for a sect to become a modern political party, and it is even more unusual for its leader and his followers to keep to their original fanaticism once they have acceded to power. This, nonetheless, was the unlikely course of things. And this road, which was to lead to domains of unfathomable human behavior, has a well-documented starting point lying in the full light of history: the ranks of a small extremist party in postwar Bavaria, which, after the failure of its 1923 putsch attempt, seemed doomed to oblivion in the German Republic’s new atmosphere of increased political stability.

Hitler relentlessly repeated a story of perdition caused by the Jew, and of redemption by a total victory over the Jew. For the future Führer, the Jew’s ominous endeavors were an all-encompassing conspiratorial activity extending throughout the span of Western history. The structure of Hitler’s tale was not only inherent in its explicit content; it was also the essence of the implicit message the story conveyed. Despite the pretense of a historical analysis, the Jew, in Hitler’s description, was dehistoricized and transformed into an abstract principle of evil that confronted a no less metahistorical counterpart just as immutable in its nature and role throughout time—the Aryan race. Whereas Marxism stressed the conflict of changing historical forces, Nazism and particularly Hitler’s worldview, considered history as the confrontation of an immutable good and an immutable evil. The outcome could only be envisioned in religious terms: perdition or redemption.

There was another level to Hitler’s vision of the Jewish enemy: The Jew was both a superhuman force driving the peoples of the world to perdition and a subhuman cause of infection, disintegration, and death. The first image, that of the superhuman force, raises a question left unanswered both in
Mein Kampf
and in Hitler’s speeches: Why did the people of the world offer no resistance, why for centuries had they been driven to ruin by the machinations of the Jew without offering any effective resistance? This question will arise strongly many years later, in connection with Hitler’s Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939, when he “prophesied” the extermination of the Jews if they were again to drive the European peoples into a war. How
was
it that the nations of the world were unable to withstand these machinations?