English and American troops landed in southern Italy on September 3, and on the eighth the Allies announced the armistice secretly signed by Badoglio the day of the landing. The German reaction was immediate: On the ninth and the tenth the Wehrmacht, which had been moving troops to Italy for several weeks (also from the Eastern Front), occupied the northern and central parts of the country and seized all Italian-controlled areas in the Balkans and in France. The Allies remained entrenched in the south of the peninsula; over the coming months their northward advance would be slow.
The Allied successes on land were compounded by the steadily fiercer bombing campaign against both German military targets and cities. The July 1943 British bombing of Hamburg and the resulting “firestorm” caused the death of some thirty to forty thousand civilians. The nighttime raids were British, the daytime operations American.
Despite the uninterrupted series of military disasters and the increasing vacillation of “allies” such as Hungary and Finland, Hitler was far from considering the war lost in the fall of 1943. New fighter planes would put an end to the Anglo-American bombing campaign, long-range rockets would destroy London and play havoc with any Allied invasion plans, newly formed divisions equipped with the heaviest tanks ever built (just rolling out of the factories) would stem the Soviet advance. And if a military stalemate was achieved for some time, the Grand Alliance would crumble, due to its inherent political-military tensions.
However, such optimistic forecasts could not alter the unmistakable sense of crisis that had been spreading both in the German population and among the Reich leadership since the outset of 1943. Though Hitler’s authority was not in question, and no major step could be taken without his approval, the Nazi leader’s increasing obsession with every detail of the military situation (due in part to his endemic lack of confidence in his generals) interfered with the rational running of operations. His growing reluctance to speak in public created further uncertainty among the population and may have weakened the quasi-religious confidence that, until then, had set him beyond any criticism.
In early 1943 Hitler appointed a “Committee of Three”—Lammers, Bormann, Keitel—to achieve some coordination among the overlapping and competing state, party, and military agencies. Yet within a few months the committee’s authority dwindled, as ministers intent on defending their own power positions steadily undermined its initiatives. Only Bormann’s influence kept growing: Above and beyond his control of the party, he had become the “Führer’s secretary,” and Hitler increasingly relied on him. Independently Himmler’s power reached new heights when, in August 1943, he replaced Frick as minister of the interior. Goebbels, on the other hand, as clever an intriguer as he was, reaped no added power from preaching the “total war” effort, at least not in the immediate future; nor did he succeed, despite Speer’s support, in reviving Göring’s authority as head of the ministerial committee for the defense of the Reich (established at the beginning of the war) to counter the Committee of Three, due to Hitler’s fury at the repeated failures of the Luftwaffe.4
Whipping up anti-Jewish frenzy was, in Hitler’s imagination, one of the best ways to hasten the falling apart of the enemy alliance. If the Jews were the hidden link that held capitalism and Bolshevism together, a deluge of anti-Jewish attacks endlessly repeating that the war was a Jewish war launched only for the sake of Jewish interests, could influence foreign opinion and add momentum to the antagonism between the West and the Soviet Union. Moreover, at this time of peril for Fortress Europe, stamping out all remnants of the internal foe remained of the highest importance. Jews were—and Hitler kept harping on it—the subterranean communication line between all enemy groups; they spread defeatist rumors and hostile propaganda, and they were the ferment of treason in countries that Germany had not yet set under its heel. The renewed ferocity of the anti-Jewish campaign after Stalingrad had its inner logic.
A few days after the surrender of the Sixth Army, Goebbels opened the floodgates of German rage: The minister’s “total war” speech, delivered at the Sportpalast on February 18, was in many ways the epitome of the regime’s propaganda style: the unleashing of demented passion controlled by the most careful staging and orchestration. The huge crowd packing the hall had been carefully selected to represent all parts of the Volk, to be ideologically reliable, and thus ready to deliver the expected response. The event was broadcast on all German radio stations to the nation and the world. And, as Goebbels’s speech was meant to mobilize every last spark of energy, it had to brandish the mobilizing myth of the regime:
“Behind the onrushing Soviet divisions we can see the Jewish liquidation squads—behind which loom terror, the spectre of mass starvation and unbridled anarchy in Europe. Here once more international Jewry has been the diabolical ferment of decomposition, cynically gratified at the idea of throwing the world into the deepest disorder and thus engineering the ruin of cultures thousands of years old, cultures with which it never felt anything in common…. We have never been afraid of the Jews and today we are less afraid of them than ever. We have unmasked Jewry’s rapid and infamous maneuvers to deceive the world in fourteen years of struggle before the accession to power and in a ten years’ struggle afterwards. The aim of Bolshevism is the world revolution of the Jews…. Germany in any case has no intention of bowing to this threat, but means to counter it in time and if necessary with the most complete and radical extermi—[correcting himself]—elimination” [Ausrott—Ausschaltung] [Applause. Shouts of “Out with the Jews.” Laughter].
The lengthy speech reached its climactic finale in the paraphrase of a verse written by poet Theodor Körner at the time of the national uprising against Napoleon, in 1814: “Und jetzt Volk, steh auf! Und Sturm brich los!” (“And now people, stand up and storm, break loose!”).5 Wild cheering greeted the apocalyptic outburst, with its litany of Sieg Heils and the singing of the anthem. Tens of millions of Germans, glued to their radios, were engulfed in a rhetoric of rage and vengeance. Most of them probably caught the “Ausrott—Ausschaltung.” In the hall, as we saw, it was greeted with applause and laughter. Simply put, the extermination of the Jews was no secret unveiled amid shock and stony silence.
“A few hours ago,” Moshe Flinker recorded, “I heard a speech made by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. I shall try to describe the impression this speech made on me and the thoughts it aroused in me. First of all I heard what I could have heard any number of times—unlimited anti-Semitism. One whole section of his speech he addressed to the great hatred he and nearly all Germans have for our people, the reasons for which to this day I cannot understand. A thousand times I have heard from the German leaders angry words against the Jews, accompanied by the epithets ‘capitalist’ or ‘communist,’ but I doubt very much if they themselves believe their own words. On the other hand, however, they pronounce these words with so much excitement that I can almost believe they are sincere. Apart from their excitement and emotion, there is other evidence for their sincerity. It should be remembered that now, when Germany is receiving blow after blow from all sides and when she is compelled to abandon one Russian city after another, they never forget the people they have already so tortured and crushed, nor do they let the slightest opportunity pass to shame or humiliate them. In these very days, which are times of trouble for Germany, the Propaganda Minister considers it to be the right moment to abuse us and blaspheme our people even more violently. Maybe it is that the wild, primitive hatred which exists in almost all peoples appears in the Germans more clearly and openly and with more consequence for us…. But from their actions we see that this war must end in the solution of the Jewish problem (speaking from the Orthodox Jewish point of view, I would say in the redemption of the Jews) because, as far as I know, the hatred of the Jews has never been as widespread or poisonous as it is now.”6
In Bucharest, Sebastian had also heard the Goebbels speech: “Goebbels’ speech last night,” he noted, “sounded unexpectedly dramatic…. The Jews are once more th
reatened with extermination.”7 The next day Klemperer got the text of the speech at the Jewish cemetery where he was working: “The speech contains a threat to proceed against the Jews, who are guilty of everything, ‘with the most draconian and radical measures’ if the foreign powers do not stop threatening the Hitler government because of the Jews.”8
In his two-hour-long address to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter assembled at Rastenburg on February 7, 1943, Hitler repeated once again that Jewry had to be eliminated from the Reich and all of Europe.9 On the Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers, March 21, the same threat reappeared with the extermination prophecy added for good measure. And, as constant repetition was of the essence, Hitler unleashed the traditional anti-Jewish torrent of invectives: “The driving force [behind capitalism and Bolshevism] is anyway the eternal hatred of that accursed race which for thousands of years punishes the nations like a true scourge of God, until the time comes when these nations will get back to their senses and arise against their tormentors.”10 The order of the day was anti-Jewish propaganda and ever more anti-Jewish propaganda. “The Führer issues instructions to set the Jewish question once more at the forefront of our propaganda, in the strongest possible way,” Goebbels noted on April 17.11
The propaganda minister did not miss the benefits of linking “Katyn” (the discovery of a mass grave in the eastern Polish Katyn Forest with the bodies of more than four thousand Polish officers shot by the NKVD about a year before the German attack against the USSR) and the “Jewish question.”12 In other words the Jews, always held responsible for all Soviet crimes, could now be denounced as the instigators and perpetrators of this major Bolshevik atrocity.
Back in Berlin on May 7, for the funeral of SA chief Viktor Lutze, Hitler exhorted the assembled Gauleiter to “set anti-Semitism again at the core of the ideological struggle, as we fostered and propagated it in the party in earlier days” [dass der Antisemitismus, wie wir ihn früher in der Partei gepflegt und propagiert haben, auch jetzt wieder das Kernstück unserer geistiger Auseinandersetzung sein muss].13
Goebbels recorded further Hitler promptings on May 9. “The Führer attaches great importance to hard-hitting anti-Semitic propaganda. Success will be achieved by constant repetition. He is extremely pleased with our sharper anti-Semitic campaign in the press and on the radio. I tell him how important the place of anti-Semitic propaganda is in our foreign broadcasts. It amounts at times to 70 or 80 percent of our entire foreign broadcasts. The anti-Semitic bacteria are naturally present in the entire European public; we need only to make them virulent” [Die anti-semitischen Bazillen sind natürlich in der ganzen europaischen Öffentlichkeit vorhanden; wir müssen sie nur virulent machen].14
To “make the bacteria virulent,” the minister turned to some basic recipes: “Once more I thoroughly study the Zionist Protocols” [sic; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion], he noted in his diary entry of May 13, 1943.15 “The Zionist Protocols are as modern today as when they were published for the first time. It is amazing to see the extraordinary consistency that characterizes the Jewish striving for world domination. If the Zionist Protocols are not authentic, then they have been invented by a genius interpreter of our epoch. At noon I broach the topic with the Führer. The Führer thinks that the Zionist Protocols can be considered as absolutely authentic. Nobody would have had such an extraordinary ability to describe the Jewish striving for world domination, as the Jews themselves perceive it. The Führer is of the opinion,” Goebbels went on, “that the Jews do not need at all to follow a pre-established plan; they work according to their race instinct; it will always drive them to act as one, as they have demonstrated in the course of their entire history.”16
The discussion of the Jewish race instinct allowed the German leader to roam far and wide. He pointed to the similarity of Jewish characteristics all over the world and to the natural causes that explained the very existence of the Jews: “The modern peoples have no option left but to eliminate the Jews,” the obsessed Führer went on. “They use all available means to defend themselves against this oncoming extermination process. One of these means is war. Thus we have to know that in this conflict between Aryan humanity and the Jewish race we still have to withstand hard battles, as Jewry has been able, consciously or unconsciously, to use large national groups of the Aryan race at its own command.”17 And so it continued, on and on.
In the course of his monologue Hitler repeated his belief that the Jews were not, as they thought, on the eve of a “world triumph” but on the eve of a “world catastrophe.” “The peoples who were the first to recognize the Jew and the first to fight him would raise to world domination in his [the Jew’s] stead.”18 The themes of these anti-Jewish tirades were not new, but this was no speech to the masses: Hitler was discussing the Jews with his propaganda minister, the minister who had just rediscovered the “Protocols.” The conversation had a ring of demented authenticity. And for the first time, it seems, Hitler revealed his ultimate goal: world domination.
In the meantime, of course, Goebbels was furiously mobilizing all German media outlets for the most systematic anti-Jewish campaign ever. On May 3, 1943, the minister issued a highly detailed circular (labeled confidential) to the press. After berating papers and journals for still lagging in this domain, the minister offered his own suggestions: “For example, countless sensational stories can be used, in which the Jew is the culprit. Above all, American domestic politics offers an inexhaustible reservoir. If those journals, in particular, which are geared to commenting on current affairs, apply their staff to this issue, they will be able to show the true face, the true attitude and the true aims of the Jews in a varied manner. Apart from that, of course, the Jews must now be used in the German press as a political target: the Jews are to blame; the Jews wanted the war; the Jews are making the war worse; and, again and again, the Jews are to blame.”19
Klemperer soon became aware of the systematic aspect of the new propaganda frenzy, and his diary entries show that Goebbels’s directives were being faithfully applied: “The last few days have been dominated by the river dam business,” he recorded on May 21, 1943. “First the English have ‘criminally’ bombed two dams (location not stated); very many civilian casualties. Then: It has been proven, proven by an English newspaper article, that the criminal plan was hatched by a Jew…. The river dam business—it has superseded the 10,000 officers’ corpses at Katyn—is reinforced by the American child murder in Italy: There the Americans dropped toys filled with explosives (also similarly prepared ladies’ gloves). A ‘Serbian newspaper’ writes, this murder of children is a Jewish invention. No news-hour without such reports.”20 On May 29 Klemperer noted that one of his coworkers at the Zeiss factory brought a newspaper article from the Freiheitskampf, “The Jew is to blame” by Professor Dr. Johann von Leers:…‘If the Jews are victorious our whole nation will be slaughtered like the Polish officers in the forest of Katyn…. The Jewish question became the core and central question of our nation once it had let the Jews loose.’”21
A few days later Klemperer once again turned to the unceasing anti-Jewish blasts: “On the radio, on Friday evening, Goebbels’s editorial from Das Reich on the dissolution of the Comintern [the Communist International had been dissolved by Stalin]. The Jewish race always master of camouflage. They adopt every political position that can benefit them, according to country and circumstance. Bolshevism, plutocracy—behind Roosevelt, behind Stalin there are Jews, their goal, the goal of this war is Jewish world dominion. But our propaganda is gradually having an effect, even in the enemy camp. The victory of our ideas is certain.”22
“Katyn” had some effect on anti-Bolshevik hatred and fear among the German population; yet comparison of these Soviet atrocities with German atrocities against the Poles and Jews came up quite frequently, according to SD reports. A typical reaction of this kind was overheard in mid-April: “If I did not know that in our people’s struggle for existence every method is right, the hypocrisy shown in the pity
for the murdered Polish officers would be unbearable.”23 The report drew the conclusion that even among “positively attuned Volksgenossen, superficial comparisons were made which allowed for easy exploitation by hostile circles.”24
Yet almost a year later, in March 1944, Klemperer recorded that the relentless anti-Jewish propaganda had its effect. He mentioned a conversation with a good-natured foreman at the Zeiss factory. They came to speak of cities both of them knew, also about Hamburg; this led to a discussion of the bombing, and, for this mild fellow, the Americans, whom Europe had never threatened, were in the war because “a few billionaires” pushed them into it. “Behind the couple of billionaires,” Klemperer noted, “I heard ‘a couple of Jews’ and felt the belief in Nazi propaganda. This man, who is undoubtedly not a Nazi, most certainly believes that Germany is acting in self-defense, is completely in the right, and that the war was forced upon it; most certainly he believes, at least in large part, in the guilt of ‘world Jewry’ etc., etc. The National Socialists may have miscalculated in the conduct of the war, but certainly not in their propaganda. I always have to remind myself of Hitler’s words, that he is not making speeches for professors.”25
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination Page 61
