It is at the start of this darkening path that the Nazis achieved one of their greatest propaganda victories: the successful unfolding of the 1936 Olympic Games. Visitors to Germany for the Olympics discovered a Reich that looked powerful, orderly, and content. As the American liberal periodical The Nation expressed it on August 1, 1936: “[One] sees no Jewish heads being chopped off, or even roundly cudgeled…. The people smile, are polite and sing with gusto in beer gardens. Board and lodging are good, cheap, and abundant, and no one is swindled by grasping hotel and shop proprietors. Everything is terrifyingly clean and the visitor likes it all.”4 Even the president of the United States was deceived. In October of that year, a month before the presidential election, Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress, was invited to meet with Roosevelt at Hyde Park, When the conversation turned to Germany, the president cited two people who had recently “toured” Germany and reported to him that “the synagogues were crowded and apparently there is nothing very wrong in the situation at present.” Wise tried to explain to his host the impact of the Olympic Games on Nazi behavior, but left feeling that Roosevelt still regarded accounts of persecution of the Jews as exaggerated.5
Signs forbidding access to Jews were removed from Olympic areas and from other sites likely to be visited by tourists, but only very minor ideological concessions were made. The Jewish high-jump finalist Gretel Bergmann, from Stuttgart, was excluded from the German team on a technical pretext; the fencing champion Helene Mayer was included because she was a Mischling and thus a German citizen according to the Nuremberg Laws.6 Only one German full Jew, the hockey player Rudi Ball, was allowed to compete for Germany. But the Winter Games in those days were far less visible than the summer ones.7
The negotiations that had preceded the Olympics showed that Hitler’s tactical moderation emanated only from the immense propaganda asset they represented for Nazi Germany. When, on August 24, 1935, the Führer received Gen. Charles Sherrill, an American member of the International Olympic Committee, he was still adamant: The Jews were perfectly entitled to their separate life in Germany, but they could not be members of the national team. As for the foreign teams, they were free to include whomever they wanted.8 Finally, because of the threat of an American boycott of the Olympics, very minor concessions were adopted, as has been seen, which allowed Germany to reap all the expected advantages, the recent passage of the Nuremberg Laws notwithstanding.
The limits of Nazi Olympic goodwill were clearly revealed in the privacy of diaries. On June 20, just before the Olympics opened, Goebbels waxed ecstatic about Max Schmeling’s victory over Joe Louis for the world heavyweight boxing championship: “Schmeling fought and won for Germany. The white defeated the black and the white was a German.”9 His entry on the first day of the Olympics was less enthusiastic: “We Germans win a gold medal, the Americans win three, of which two by Negroes. White humanity should be ashamed. But what does that mean down there in that land without culture.”10
The Winter Games had opened on February 6 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The day before, Wilhelm Gustloff, the Nazi Party representative in Switzerland, had been assassinated by the Jewish medical student David Frankfurter. Within a few hours a strict order was issued: Because of the Olympic Games, all anti-Jewish actions were prohibited.11 And indeed no outbursts of “popular anger” occurred.
Hitler spoke at Gustloffs funeral in Schwerin, on February 12. He recalled the days of defeat when, according to him, Germany had been “delivered a lethal stab at home.” During those November days of 1918, the national Germans attempted “to convert [the working masses,] those who, at that time, were the tools of a gruesome supranational power…. At every turn we see the same power…the hate-filled power of our Jewish foe.”12 A few months later the exiled Jewish writer Emil Ludwig published a pamphlet entitled “Murder in Davos.” Goebbels reacted immediately in his diary entry of November 6, 1936: “A nasty, typically Jewish work of incitement to glorify…Frankfurter, who shot Gustloff…. This Jewish pestilence must be eradicated. Totally. None of it should remain.”13
The struggle between the new Germany and that gruesome supranational power, the Jewish foe, was now redefined as the total confrontation on the widest international scale with Bolshevism, “the tool of the Jews.” At the 1935 party congress the anti-Judeo-Bolshevik declarations had been left to Goebbels and Rosenberg. Soon Himmler joined the fray. In November 1935, at the National Peasants Day (Reichsbauerntag) in Goslar, the ReichsFührer SS described the threat represented by the Jews in bloodcurdling terms: “We know him, the Jew,” Himmler exclaimed, “this people composed of the waste products of all the people and nations of this planet on which it has imprinted the features of its Jewish blood, the people whose goal is the domination of the world, whose breath is destruction, whose will is extermination, whose religion is atheism, whose idea is Bolshevism.”14
Hitler had personally intervened in the new anti-Jewish campaign in his speech at Gustloff’s funeral. A no less threatening tone appeared in his secret memorandum of the summer of that same year outlining the goals of the Four-Year Plan. The introductory paragraph addressed the issue of ideology as such: “Politics is the conduct and process of the historical struggle for the life of nations. The aim of these struggles is survival. Idealistic struggles over world views also have their ultimate causes, and draw their deepest motivating power from purposes and aims in life that derive from national sources. But religions and worldviews can give such struggles an especial sharpness and by this means endow them with a great historic effectiveness. They can put their mark on the character of centuries….” In a series of quick associations, this theoretical prologue led to the foreseeable ideological illustration: “Since the beginning of the French Revolution, the world has been drifting with increasing speed towards a new conflict, whose most extreme solution is named Bolshevism, but whose content and aim is only the removal of those strata of society which gave the leadership to humanity up to the present, and their replacement by international Jewry…”15
On Hitler’s instructions Goebbels and Rosenberg intensified even further the pitch of their verbal onslaught at the 1936 Congress.16 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.”17
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.18 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.”19
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…. H
e 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).”20
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.”21
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.”22
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….23
“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.”24
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.”25 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.”26 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.”28
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.”29
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.”30
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.”31 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.32 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.”33
Hitler’s most threatening anti-Jewi
sh 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.34 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]”
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution Page 24
