Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (29 page)

On Hitler’s instructions Goebbels and Rosenberg intensified even further the pitch of their verbal onslaught at the 1936 Congress.
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For Goebbels “the idea of Bolshevism, that is, the unscrupulous savaging and dissolution of all norms and culture with the diabolical intention of a total destruction of all nations, could only have been born in the brain of Jews. The Bolshevik practice in its terrifying cruelty is imaginable only as perpetrated by the hands of Jews.”
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In his two programmatic speeches at the congress, Hitler also dealt with the Judeo-Bolshevik danger. In his opening proclamation of September 9, he briefly attacked the worldwide subversive activities of the Jewish revolutionary center in Moscow.
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But it was in his closing speech, on September 14, that he lashed out at length: “This Bolshevism that the Jewish-Soviet terrorists from Moscow, Lewin, Axelrod, Neumann, Béla Kun, etc., tried to introduce into Germany, we attacked, defeated, and extirpated…. And now, because we know and experience daily that the attempt of the Jewish Soviet leaders to interfere in our internal German affairs continues, we are also compelled to consider Bolshevism beyond our borders as our mortal enemy and to recognize no less a danger in its advance.”
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What Hitler meant was clear enough: The Luftwaffe was now increasingly intervening against the “Bolshevik” forces in Spain. And who was in charge of the Moscow terrorist center that directed subversive activities all over the world? The Jews.

That Hitler rehashed these themes in private conversations is not astonishing; that the approving interlocutor in one such conversation was Munich’s Cardinal Faulhaber is somewhat more of a surprise. On November 4, 1936, he met for three hours with Hitler at the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s residence in the Bavarian Alps. According to Faulhaber’s own notes, Hitler spoke “openly, confidentially, emotionally, at times in a spirited way; he lashed out at Bolshevism and at the Jews: ‘How the subhumans, incited by the Jews, created havoc in Spain like beasts,’ on this he was well informed…. He would not miss the historical moment.” The cardinal seemed to agree: “All of this,” he noted, “was expressed by Hitler in a moving way in his great speech at the Nuremberg Party rally (Bolshevism could only destroy, was led by the Jews).”
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It was at the Party Congress of Labor, in September 1937, that the anti-Judeo-Bolshevik campaign reached its full scope. During the preceding weeks the jockeying for congress preeminence among Hitler’s lieutenants had taken a particularly acerbic form. Rosenberg informed Goebbels that, according to Hitler’s decision, he (Rosenberg) was to be the first of the two to speak and that, given the time constraints, Goebbels’s speech was to be drastically cut down. This must have been a sweet moment for the master of ideology, especially as in the ongoing feud between him and Goebbels, the propaganda minister usually had the upper hand.

On September 11 Goebbels set the tone. In a speech devoted to the situation in Spain, the propaganda minister launched into a hysterical attack against the Jews, whom he held responsible for Bolshevist terror. In his rhetorical fury Goebbels undoubtedly succeeded in outdoing his previous performances. His speech may well be the most vicious public anti-Jewish outpouring of those years. “Who are those responsible for this catastrophe?” Goebbels asked. His answer: “Without fear, we want to point the finger at the Jew as the inspirer, the author, and the beneficiary of this terrible catastrophe: look, this is the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the nations, the son of chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition, the visible demon of the decay of humanity.”
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II

On the evening of September 13 Hitler spoke again. All restraint was now gone. For the first time since his accession to the chancellorship, he used the platform of a party congress, with the global attention it commanded, to launch a general historical and political attack on world Jewry as the wire puller behind Bolshevism and the enemy of humanity from the time of early Christianity on. The themes of the 1923 dialogue with Dietrich Eckart were being broadcast to the world.

Never since the fall of the ancient world order, Hitler declared, never since the rise of Christianity, the spread of Islam, and the Reformation had the world been in such turmoil. This was no ordinary war but a fight for the very essence of human culture and civilization. “What others profess not to see because they simply do not want to see it, is something we must unfortunately state as a bitter truth: the world is presently in the midst of an increasing upheaval, whose spiritual and factual preparation and whose leadership undoubtedly proceed from the rulers of Jewish Bolshevism in Moscow. “When I quite intentionally present this problem as Jewish, then you, my Party Comrades, know that this is not an unverified assumption, but a fact proven by irrefutable evidence.”
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Hitler did not simply leave the concrete aspects of this struggle of world historical significance to his audience’s imagination:

“While one part of the ‘Jewish fellow citizens’ demobilizes democracy via the influence of the press or even infects it with its poison by linking up with revolutionary manifestations in the form of popular fronts, the other part of Jewry has already carried the torch of the Bolshevist revolution into the midst of the bourgeois-democratic world without even having to fear any substantial resistance. The final goal is then the ultimate Bolshevist revolution, i.e., not, for example, consisting of the establishment of a leadership of the proletariat, but of the subjugation of the proletariat to the leadership of its new and alien master….
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“In the past year, we have shown in a series of alarming statistical proofs that, in the present Soviet Russia of the proletariat, more than eighty percent of the leading positions are held by Jews. This means that not the proletariat is the dictator, but that very race whose Star of David has finally also become the symbol of the so-called proletarian state.”
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Hitler usually repeated his main themes in an ever-changing variety of formulas all bearing the same message. The September 13, 1937, speech hammered home the menace represented by Jewish Bolshevism to the “community of Europe’s civilized nations.”
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What had been achieved in Germany itself was presented as the example to be followed by all:

“National Socialism has banished the Bolshevist world menace from within Germany. It has ensured that the scum of Jewish
literati
alien to the Volk does not lord it over the proletariat, that is, the German worker…. It has, moreover, made our Volk and the Reich immune to Bolshevist contamination.”
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A few months earlier Rudolf Hess had conveyed Hitler’s thinking to all party organizations: Germany yearned for relations of friendship and respect with all nations; it was “no enemy of the Slavs, but the implacable and irreconcilable enemy of the Jew and of the Communism he brought to the world.”
²⁷

In private Hitler had expressed puzzlement about the meaning of the events then occurring in the Soviet Union. “Again a show trial in Moscow,” Goebbels noted in his diary on January 25, 1937. “This time again exclusively against Jews. Radek, etc. The Führer still in doubt whether there isn’t after all a hidden anti-Semitic tendency. Maybe Stalin does want to smoke the Jews out. The military is also supposedly strongly anti-Semitic. So, let us keep an eye on things.”
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Although in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the army efforts were made to maintain a somewhat more realistic assessment of Soviet affairs, the equation of Jewry and Bolshevism remained the fundamental guideline for most party and state agencies. Thus, in 1937 Heydrich circulated a secret memorandum, “The Present Status of Research on the East,” which opened with the argument that the importance of the East, mainly of the Soviet Union, for Germany derived from the fact that “this territory had been conquered by Jewish Bolshevism and turned into the main basis of its struggle against National Socialist Germany; all non-Bolshevist forces that are also enemies of National Socialism consider the Soviet Union the most active weapon against National Socialism.”
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Apart from the axiom that Bolshevism was an instrument of Jewry, Nazi research aimed at proving the link between Jews and Communism in sociopolitical terms. This was shown, for example, in a June 1937 lecture by the head of the Königsberg Institute for the Economy of Eastern Germany, Theodor Oberländer (who was to be a minister in Konrad Adenauer’s postwar government), on Polish Jewry: “The east European Jews are, in so far as they are not orthodox but assimilated Jews, the most active carriers of communist ideas. Since Poland alone has 3.5 million Jews, of which over 1.5 million can be regarded as assimilated Jews, and since the Jews live in scarcely credible adverse social conditions in the urban ghetto, so that they are proletarians in the truest sense, they have little to lose but much to gain. They are the ones who are peddling the most militant and succesful propaganda for communism in the countryside.”
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The link between the Jews and Bolshevism in the Soviet Union could also be proven by erudite, “in-depth” reasoning. “It is not only the numerical importance of the Jews in the higher reaches of the Party and state system or the power exercised by individual Jews that should be simply interpreted as a ‘domination’ of Bolshevik Russia by the Jews,” wrote Peter-Heinz Seraphim, the specialist on East European Jewry at the University of Königsberg. “The question that ultimately needs to be asked is whether there is an ideological linkage and reciprocal influence between Leninist and Stalinist Bolshevism and the Jewish mentality.”
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Published in 1938, Seraphim’s massive study,
Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum
(Jewry in Eastern Europe), was to become the vade mecum of many Nazi practitioners in the East.

Seraphim started from the postulate that the Jews held a “hegemonical position” within the Bolshevik system.
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As the argument from sheer numbers and individual influence did not suffice, the question of mental affinity indeed became of central importance. Seraphim had not the least doubt, it seems, about the Jewish features underlying this affinity: “this-worldliness, a materialistic and intellectualistic attitude to the surrounding world, the purposiveness and ruthlessness of the Jewish nature.”
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Hitler’s most threatening anti-Jewish outburst before his Reichstag speech of 1939 was triggered by the apparently minor issue (in Nazi terms) of the identification of Jewish-owned retail stores.

A debate on this issue had been in progress for several years. An April 1935 report prepared by SS main region Rhine tells of the initiative taken by the Frankfurt Nazi trade organization to have its members put up signs marking their own shops German Store, which was one way of solving the problem. According to the report, 80 to 90 percent of the German-owned stores there displayed the sign.
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This must have been a rather isolated project, as a similar demand put forward by Nazi activists after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws was deemed unmanageable and the marking of Jewish stores advanced as the only possible course of action.

Grass-roots agitation for such marking reached such a pitch that Hitler decided to address the situation at a meeting of district party leaders at the School for Elite Party Youth at (Ordensburg) Vogelsang, on April 29, 1937. Hitler began with a stern warning to party members who wanted to accelerate the anti-Jewish measures in the economic domain. No one should try to dictate the pace of such measures to him, Hitler threatened darkly. He would have a word with “the fellow” who had written in a local party newspaper: “We demand that Jewish shops be marked.” Hitler thundered: “What does it mean, ‘we demand?’ I am asking you from whom does one demand? Who can give the order? Only I! Thus this gentleman, the editor [of that party paper], demands of me, in the name of his readers, that I do this. I would first like to say the following: much before this editor had the least idea about the Jewish question, I had already studied it very thoroughly; second, this problem of a special identification of Jewish businesses has already been considered for two years, three years, and one day will naturally be solved one way or the other.” Hitler then inserted a cryptic remark: “And let me add this: the final aim of our policy is obviously clear to us all.” Did this mean the total expulsion of the Jews from German territory? Did it hint at other goals? Was it a formula used to cover the uncertainty of the plans? The comments on strategy that followed could accommodate any interpretation: “For me what matters constantly is not to take any step forward that I would have to retract, and not to take any step that could cause us harm. You know that I always move to the most extreme limit of what may be risked, but I never go beyond this limit. One has to have a nose sensitive enough to feel: What can I do more of? What can I not do? [Laughter and applause]”

The finale that followed did not point to any specific measures, but the tone, the words, the images contained a yet unheard ferocity, the intimation of a deadly threat. Without any doubt Hitler was thereby creating an atmosphere in which his listeners could imagine the most radical outcomes:

“I do not immediately want to force an enemy into a fight,” Hitler exclaimed. “I do not say ‘struggle’ because I want to fight, but I do say: ‘I want to annihilate you!’ And now may cleverness help me to maneuver you into a corner in such a way that you will not manage one single blow; it is then that you get the stab in the heart!”
³⁵
The recording of this secret speech survived the war. By this stage Hitler is shouting at the top of his voice. Then, in an orgiastic spasm, the three last words literally explode: “
Das ist es!
” (That’s it!) The audience’s applause is frenetic.