Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (8 page)

After 1933, the rise to power of the Nazis saw Germany ruled by people for whom the
Protocols
were literally and not just figuratively true. Two of Hitler’s earliest
Parteigenossen
and friends, Dietrich Eckart and Rudolf Hess, were members of the Thule Society, a group of Germanic occultists and racial mystics who had funded the first zur Beek version of the
Protocols
. Alfred Rosenberg, who was to become responsible during the war for the occupied East, carried the
Protocols
in his luggage when he fled from Estonia to Munich in 1918. In 1929, the Nazi Party itself bought the rights to the zur Beek
Protocols
.

The “Rabbi’s Speech” prospered too under the new regime. Johann von Leers, promoted to professor at the University of Jena by the Nazis, produced another version after 1933, as part of a longer work detailing various stories about the Jews and their devious (and sometimes disgusting) customs and habits. We will meet von Leers again, later in this chapter. And Theodor Fritsch’s
Handbook of the Jewish Question
, which included the “Rabbi’s Speech,” became a compulsory school text in Nazi Germany. A fictional potboiler had been transformed for millions of schoolchildren into higher historical truth.

Who Would Have Believed It?

There were those, of course, who had no difficulty dismissing the
Protocols
. In 1934, their Swiss publishers were put on trial for producing “smut literature.” At the end of the case, during which all the material about Joly, Nilus, Goedsche, and Rachkovsky emerged, Presiding Judge Meyer expressed his incredulity. “I hope to see the day,” he said, “when nobody will be able to understand why otherwise sane and reasonable men should have had to torment their brains for fourteen days over the authenticity or fabrication of the
Protocols of Zion . . .
I regard the
Protocols
as ridiculous nonsense.”
²⁸

Ridiculous nonsense, maybe, but also dangerous nonsense. For years the assumption has been that the
Protocols
were the kind of stuff served up by unscrupulous propagandists and absorbed by the ignorant.
²⁹
We are used to seeing gross prejudices as the product of peasant credulity, lumpen ignorance, or provincial small-mindedness. People like us, this implies, would not be fooled.

But belief in the
Protocols
was not just a prejudice; it was a fully worked-out view of how, as the American author Stephen Bronner puts it, “history operates behind our backs.” It was, in fact, a conspiracy theory, and one which took deep root in the youth movements, universities, professional bodies, and cultural associations of Germany—in other words, in organs of middle-class civil society. The German academic Binjamin Segel, for instance, was shocked by a speech given by the historian Professor Hans Kania in Potsdam in the spring of 1924. The occasion was the jubilee of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, but Kania “held forth about how wonderful it was that this remarkable historical and political document of 1897 had predicted events that were borne out a generation later. It was only logical to assume that those who foresaw these events were the very same people who caused them, that the Elders of Zion therefore constituted the secret supreme government of the world.”
³⁰
“If one reads objectively,” Kania added, “one can espy the prophecy of the world war.”
³¹

This was a full three years after the public unmasking of the
Protocols
, and Kania was no country peasant, yet there isn’t even a hint of qualification in his words. During the same period, a Jewish writer attempted to comprehend what was going on in the minds of his fellow countrymen. “In Berlin,” he reported, “I attended several meetings which were entirely devoted to the
Protocols
. The speaker was usually a professor, a teacher, an editor, a lawyer or someone of that kind. The audience consisted of members of the educated class, civil servants, tradesmen, former officers, ladies, above all students, students of all faculties and years of seniority . . . I observed the students. A few hours earlier they had perhaps been exerting all their mental energy in a seminar under the guidance of a world-famous scholar in an effort to solve some legal or philosophical problem.” Now, the writer observed, they were angry, irrational, and bloodthirsty. He concluded sadly, “German scholarship [has] allowed belief in the genuine-ness of the
Protocols
and in the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy to penetrate ever more deeply into all the educated sections of the German population, so that now it is simply ineradicable.”
³²

We can speculate that the educated classes were partly seduced by the neo-romanticism of the
Protocols
and their pseudo-intellectual content. But time and again we return to that phrase of Ford’s: “They fit.” And what these absurd forgeries appeared to fit was a world in which the middle classes, the salaried, the educated, the people who had something to lose, found themselves under threat—from communism, from industrialization, from uncertainty. These were the social classes who had exercised power and influence, and they were seeking some explanation for why everything was all now at hazard.

What Happened Next

However ridiculous the
Protocols
might have seemed to a Swiss judge, their propagation led to acts that ranged from the appalling to the unspeakable. In 1918, during the Russian Civil War, thousands of copies of the Nilus version were printed under the auspices of the White general Denikin in the Ukrainian city of Rostov and handed out to his troops, presumably to motivate them. Between 1918 and 1920, these same forces were responsible for the executing or massacre of up to 120,000 Jews before Denikin’s eventual defeat. In Germany, there was the Holocaust.

Norman Cohn, in his book
Warrant for Genocide
, quotes the postwar testimony of SS captain Dieter Wisliceny, who was tried and executed in 1947 for his part in killing Hungarian, Greek, and Slovak Jews. A straight line, said Wisliceny, ran from
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
to the precepts of the Nazis, and from there to the attempted murder of a race. The straightness of this line is evident from the activities of the Nazi academic Professor von Leers, last seen propagating the “Rabbi’s Speech” at the University of Jena, but by 1942 publishing
The Criminal Nature of the Jews
. As the Holocaust moved from improvisation to industrial organization, von Leers wrote, “Not only is each people morally justified in exterminating the hereditary criminals—but any people that still keeps and protects Jews is just as guilty of an offense against public safety as someone who cultivates cholera germs.”

Von Leers, with whom we haven’t finished yet, was an extreme case. Most Germans were not involved in extermination and, even before the war, would not have described themselves as anti-Semitic. Can it be argued that, had there been no zur Beek and no Nilus to disseminate the
Protocols
, people would have behaved differently? At the very least, argues historian Richard S. Levy, they created a gulf between Jews and other Germans, so that when disaster struck, “the
Protocols
helped render Jews ineligible for rescue by the great majority of their fellowmen.”
³³
They also helped Adolf Hitler to believe that the war he himself had caused was actually the fault of the Jews, and that this justified the attempt to liquidate them.

Carmen Callil’s 2007 book
Bad Faith
shows how the fabulist and spendthrift boulevardier Louis Darquier de Pellepoix (de Pellepoix being yet another of Darquier’s inventions) was helped into becoming Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish affairs and playing an active part in the delivery of French Jews to their wartime deaths by his complete belief in the authenticity of the
Protocols
. No wonder that after the war and the Holocaust, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in a reflexive echo of
Mein Kampf
, argued that the provenance of the
Protocols
was not its main significance. “The chief political and historical fact of the matter is that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery.”
³⁴

Nor did the
Protocols
entirely die as a consequence of the Second World War. Idi Amin promoted them in his mad Ugandan fiefdom. New translations were produced in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Croatia. No less than twelve editions of the
Protocols
were published after 1945 in Argentina, which had (and has) both sizable Jewish and German populations. In the 1970s, there was a sudden rash of conspiracy stories in the Argentinian popular press, in which it was claimed that a “Chief Rabbi Gordon” of New York City was involved in a plot to create a second Jewish state, this time in Patagonia, to be called Andinia. The tale sparked a dozen books elaborating on this conspiracy, many carrying direct excerpts from the
Protocols
. Needless to say, there was no Rabbi Gordon and no plot.
³⁵
In 1994, a car bomb went off outside the Jewish Argentine Mutual Association in Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five people. It was not only the worst terrorist outrage in Latin American history, it was the worst act of anti-Semitic terrorism since the death of Hitler.

The Protocols and the Middle East

Gaza City, when I visited it in May 2003, was a terrible place: its beach a parody with smashed concrete and rusting iron, the city a warren of unfinished houses and tangled electric cables. On three sides, and overhead, were the Israelis, penning a population of more than a million Palestinians into a narrow strip of dust. The strongest political and social association among the Palestinians had come to be the group known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. That spring, I was there to see one of the leaders of Hamas, and to ask him about a most extraordinary aspect of his group’s program.

The Hamas
Covenant
is about twenty pages long and made up of thirty-six articles. It is a mixture of political manifesto, historical observation, and exaltation to the faithful. It begins with a quotation from the 1920s founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna—“Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it has eliminated its predecessors”—and sets out the nature and duties of the membership, who must be good and pious Muslims.

Article Seventeen is about “the role of Muslim women” but contains a digression concerning the enemies of Hamas, who will use every effort to further their cause, including education curricula, movies, and culture, “using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist organizations which take all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs . . . and the like . . . Those Zionist organizations control vast material resources, which enable them to fulfill their mission amidst societies, with a view of implementing Zionist goals.”

By the time the reader reaches Article Twenty-two
, “
On the Powers That Support the Enemy,” the scale of this malign mission has expanded.

This wealth [allowed the Zionists to] take over control of the world media . . . They used this wealth to stir revolutions in parts of the globe . . . They stood behind the French and Communist Revolutions . . . They stood behind World War I so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate . . . They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations . . . They also stood behind World War II . . . and inspired the establishment of the United Nations . . . There’s no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.

And if you think you have heard all this somewhere before, Article Thirty-Two, “The Attempts to Isolate Palestinian People,” confirms it. “Zionist scheming,” the
Covenant
claims, “has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates . . . Their scheme has been laid out in
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and their present conduct is the best proof of what is said there.”

It is like one of those novels in which the hero encounters an archaic or ancient legend which has somehow managed to survive, still potent, to the modern day. So, a Palestinian child in a Gazan class at the beginning of the twenty-first century may well be hearing things written by a Parisian lawyer about Napoleon III 140 years earlier, falsified by a Russian spy three decades later, and used as a pretext for racial mass murder in Germany.

Inside one of these concrete houses in Gaza, its walls and stairs bare, I met the man who was then Hamas’s number two. Abdel-Aziz Rantisi wore tan slacks and one of those ubiquitous checkered shirts that are the new uniform for men in the Middle East. A serious-looking man with dark eyebrows, he had once been a pediatrician, his radicalization dating from a period he spent exiled to a no-man’s-land on the Lebanese-Israeli border with four hundred others. Here in Gaza, in a room with curtains closed against spying eyes, containing a child’s model of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and a picture of al-Banna, we conducted a short interview. He spoke partly in English and partly in Arabic.

Toward the end, I asked him directly about the
Protocols
and what they were doing in the Hamas
Covenant
. Rantisi frowned. “You know,” he said, “when I first heard about this document, I didn’t want to believe it. But then I saw what was happening in Palestine and I could see that it was genuine.” It fitted then, it fits now. Reality provides the best commentary. Hamas was then the second-largest organization among all Palestinians, and was growing fast as hope for peace receded. Rantisi, however, was dead within a few months. The second attempt on his life by a helicopter gun-ship succeeded. He was by that time the leader of Hamas, having replaced the assassinated blind Sheikh Yassin some weeks previously.