Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution

by Saul Friedlander

  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.

  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, ask
ed, “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.”103Mein 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.