History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  These confusions, divisions and opacities in the American Jewish community, not least among its intellectuals, help to explain why American Jews, despite the enormous position of power they were beginning to acquire for themselves, were so curiously incapable of affecting events in inter-war Europe, or even of steering opinion in America itself. American anti-Semitism, as revealed by opinion polls, rose steadily throughout the 1930s, peaking in 1944; the polls also showed (in 1938, for instance), that 70-85 per cent of the nation were opposed to raising quotas to help Jewish refugees. The pollster Elmo Roper warned: ‘Anti-Semitism has spread all over the nation and is particularly virulent in urban centres.’98

  It is against this background in Europe and America that we must now examine events in Germany. Germany was the strongest economic, military and cultural power in Europe, and its assault on the Jews, from 1933 to 45, is the central event of modern Jewish history. It is still in many respects a mysterious event: not as regards the facts, which have been documented in stupefying quantity, but as regards the causes. Germany was by far the world’s best-educated nation. It was the first to achieve universal adult literacy. Between 1870 and 1933 its universities were the world’s finest, in virtually every discipline. Why did this highly civilized nation turn with colossal, organized yet senseless brutality on the Jews? The identity of the victim deepens the mystery. In the nineteenth century the fate of Germany and the Jews was very much interwoven. As Fritz Stern has pointed out, between 1870 and 1914 the Germans suddenly emerged as an actively powerful nation, just as suddenly as the Jews emerged as an actively powerful race.99 The two helped each other enormously. Among the many things they shared was an almost fanatical devotion to learning. The ablest Jews loved Germany because it was the best place in the world to work in. Modern Jewish culture had an essentially Germanic framework. But in turn, as Weizmann had pointed out in his famous talk with Balfour, the Jews gave all their finest efforts to Germany and helped to make her great. From its inception to 1933, for instance, Germany won more Nobel prizes than any other country, about 30 per cent of the whole; but of Germany’s share, the Jews provided nearly a third and in medicine a half.100 For Germany to turn on the Jews was not just mass murder; it was, in a real sense, mass parricide. How did it happen?

  Attempts to provide an explanation are already filling whole libraries, but in the end they always seem inadequate. The greatest crime in history remains, to some extent, baffling. All the same, the chief components can be summarized. The most important, probably, was the First World War. It had the effect of stunning the German nation. They entered it confidently just as their ascent to greatness was reaching its apogee. After fearful sacrifices, they lost it, conclusively. The grief and fury were unhinging; the need for a scapegoat imperative.

  The war had a second effect. It transformed the way in which Germany conducted its business. Pre-war Germany was the most law-abiding country in Europe. Civil violence was unheard of, un-German. Anti-Semitism was everywhere, but physical violence to Jews, let alone an anti-Semitic riot, was something which did not, could not, occur in Germany. The war changed all that. It accustomed men to violence everywhere, but in Germany it induced a violence of despair. The 1918 Armistice did not bring peace to central and eastern Europe. It brought a twenty-year interval between two huge, open conflicts, but in those twenty years violence, in varying degrees, was the main arbiter of politics. Both left and right used violence. Lenin and Trotsky set the pattern with their putsch in 1917. Their Communist allies and imitators followed suit in Germany, 1918-20. Jews were prominent in all these attempts to overthrow existing order by force. The Communist regime in Bavaria included not only Jewish politicians, like Eisner, but Jewish writers and intellectuals like Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam. The right responded by organizing private armies of veterans, the Freikorps.

  In Russia, the arbitration of violence favoured the left, in Germany the right. Jewish extremists like Rosa Luxemburg and Eisner were simply murdered. It ceased to be unusual for Jewish opponents to be ‘dealt with’. In the four years 1919-22 there were 376 political murders in Germany, all but twenty-two of left-wing figures, many of them Jews. One was Walter Rathenau, the Foreign Secretary. The courts dealt lightly with the ex-army thugs. Few were even brought to trial; fewer still sentenced to more than four months.101 When the old and distinguished Jewish writer Maximilian Harden was nearly beaten to death by two anti-Semites in 1922, the court held that his ‘unpatriotic articles’ constituted ‘mitigating circumstances’.

  It was from this background of radical ex-servicemen’s violence that Adolf Hitler emerged. He was an Austrian, born on the Austro-Bavarian border in 1889, the son of a petty official. He lived in Linz and then in Karl Lueger’s Vienna. He had a distinguished war record and was badly gassed. Hitler later declared in Mein Kampf (written in 1924) that he was a young man before he became aware of the ‘Jewish problem’, but the evidence is clear that his father was an anti-Semite and that he was exposed to anti-Semitic notions all his childhood and youth. The Jews became, and remained, his lifelong obsession. His personal passion, and still more his colossal willpower, were central to Germany’s war against the Jews. It could not have taken place without him. On the other hand, he could have done little damage without the destructive elements within Germany which he found to hand. He had unusual skill in creating political dynamism by fusing together two sources of power and making the result greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, he married a small socialist group, the German Workers’ Party, to an ex-service strongarm squad, gave it an anti-Semitic platform, and turned it into a mass party, the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) with its military wing of stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung or SA. The SA protected his own meetings and broke up his opponents’. Next, he brought together the two consequences of the war, the need for a scapegoat and the cult of violence, focussing the result on the Jews: ‘If at the beginning of the war, and during the war, 12,000 or 15,000 of these Hebrew defilers had been put under poison gas as hundreds of thousands of our very best workers from all walks of life had to endure at the front, then the sacrifice of millions would not have been in vain.’102

  Hitler’s anti-Semitism was composed of all the conventional elements, from the Christian Judensau to pseudo-scientific race theory. But it was distinctive in two respects. First, it was to him a complete explanation of the world, a Weltanschauung, a world outlook. Other political groups in Germany dabbled in anti-Semitism or even gave it prominence, but the Nazis made it the centre and end of their programme (though they varied the emphasis according to their audience). Second, Hitler was an Austrian by birth but a pan-German by choice, who joined the German, not the Austrian, army in 1914; and his anti-Semitism was a marriage of the German and Austrian models. From Germany, he took the huge and growing fear of ‘Jewish-Bolshevist Russia’ and the proliferating mythology of the Protocols of Zion. Post-war Germany swarmed with Russian refugees of German origin, German Balts, and former members of old Tsarist anti-Semitic groups such as the Black Hundreds, the Yellow Shirts and the Union of the Russian People. All of them stressed the Jewish-Bolshevist connection, which became a central part of Hitler’s ideology. Alfred Rosenberg, a German Balt, became the Nazis’ chief theorist. The Russian Gertrude von Seidlitz enabled Hitler to acquire (1920) the Völkischer Beobachter and turn it into an anti-Semitic daily.103 In modern times, Germany, and especially Prussia, had been more afraid of the Russian threat than any other. Hitler was now able to place the threat in a plausible anti-Semitic context. But he blended it with the kind of anti-Semitism he had absorbed in Vienna. This concentrated on fear of the Ostjuden, a dark and inferior race corrupting the Germanic blood. Hitler was particularly interested in two topics, both of which he connected with Ostjuden: the white slave-trade, centred in Vienna and run by Jews—or so the moral reformers asserted—and the spread of syphilis, for which as yet there was no antibiotic cure. Hitler believed and taught that there was not only a direct poli
tical and military threat to Germany from Jewish Bolshevism but a deeper, biological threat from any contact, but especially sexual congress, with members of the Jewish race.104

  The sexual-medical aspect of Hitler’s anti-Semitism was probably the most important, especially among his own followers. It turned the merely prejudiced into fanatics, capable of any course of action, however irrational and cruel. Rather as the medieval anti-Semite saw the Jew as non-human, a devil or a sort of animal (hence the Judensau), the Nazi extremist absorbed Hitler’s sub-scientific phraseology and came to regard Jews as bacilli or a particularly dangerous kind of vermin. Apart from anything else, this approach enabled all Jews to be lumped together, irrespective of their circumstances or views. A Jew who held a professorial chair, who wrote impeccable German, who had served throughout the war and won the Iron Cross, was just as dangerous a racial polluter as a Jewish-Bolshevik commissar. An assimilated Jew carried the bacillus just as certainly as an old rabbi in a kaftan and was more of a threat, since he was more likely to infect, or ‘desecrate’ as Hitler put it, an Aryan woman. The extent to which he indoctrinated his followers can be seen by a letter written to him, in April 1943, by his Minister of Justice, Thierack:

  A full Jewess, after the birth of her child, sold her mother’s milk to a woman doctor and concealed the fact that she was a Jewess. With this milk, infants of German blood were fed in a clinic. The accused is charged with fraud. The purchasers of the milk have suffered damage, because the milk of a Jewess cannot be considered food for German children…. However, there has been no formal indictment in order to spare the parents, who do not know the facts, unnecessary worry. I will discuss the race-hygienic aspects of the case with the Reich Health Chief.105

  If it be asked: how could such nonsense be widely believed in a highly educated nation like Germany, the answer is that Hitler never found any difficulty in acquiring intellectual backing, albeit sometimes oblique, for his views. The ‘scandal’ of Freud and his teachings was an important collateral proof of the Nazi case, since (it was argued) they removed moral guilt from sexual promiscuity and so increased it. Thus Freud enabled Jews to gain greater access to Aryan women. Here, Jung was able to come to Hitler’s assistance by drawing a distinction between Freudian-Jewish psychiatry and the rest:

  One cannot of course accept that Freud or Adler is a generally valid representative of European mankind…. The Jew as a relative nomad has never created, and presumably never will create, a cultural form of his own, for all his instincts and talent are dependent on a more or less civilized host people…. In my view it has been a great mistake of medical psychology to apply Jewish categories, which are not even valid for all Jews, to Christian German and Slavs. In this way the most precious secret of Teutonic man, the deep-rooted, creative awareness of his soul, has been explained away as a banal, infantile sump, while my warning voice, over the decades, was suspected of anti-Semitism…. Has the mighty phenomenon of National Socialism, at which the whole world gazes in astonishment, taught them to know better?106

  Scientists were similarly found to invalidate Einstein’s work as ‘Jewish physics’.

  Indeed, the German academy, taken as a whole, far from acting as a barrier to Hitlerism, assisted its progress to power. A key element in the Nazi triumph was the generation of schoolteachers who matured in the last decade of the nineteenth century, were infected with Völkisch anti-Semitism, and had become senior teachers by the 1920s.107 The textbooks they used reflected the same influences. The university academics similarly contributed to the rise of Nazi influence by preaching national salvation through panaceas and ‘spiritual revivals’, instead of sceptical empiricism.108 Above all, Hitler achieved his greatest success among university students. They were his vanguard. At each stage in the growth of the Nazis, student support preceded general electoral support. The Nazis worked in the first place through the student fraternities, which in 1919 adopted the ‘Eisenach Resolution’, excluding Jews on racial as well as religious grounds.109 As they grew more influential, they worked through the students’ union, the Hochschulring movement, which dominated student life in the 1920s. Finally, towards the end of the decade they set up their own student party. The success of the Nazis was due to the willingness of enough young fanatics to devote themselves full-time to the effort, to the party’s egalitarianism and radical programme.110 But an important bond between the Nazis and the students was the use of violent demonstrations against Jews. The students were among the first to organize boycotts and mass petitions to force Jews out of government jobs and the professions, especially teaching, and these forms of action soon developed into actual violence. In 1922 the threat of a student riot led to Berlin University cancelling a memorial service for the murdered Walther Rathenau. This would have been inconceivable before the war, and what was most sinister was not just the threat of violence but the pusillanimity of the university authorities in bowing to it. Attacks on Jewish students and on Jewish professors, who were forced to give up their lecture courses, increased to the point in 1927 when the government withdrew recognition from the Deutsche Studentenschaft because of its support for violence. But this made little difference and no resolute action was ever taken by the universities themselves to curb the student thugs. It was not that the professors were pro-Nazi. But they were anti-Weimar and anti-democratic and, above all, they were cowardly in standing up to student acts which they knew to be wrong—an adumbration of the more general cowardice of the nation later. As a result, the Nazis effectively controlled the campuses two or three years before they took over the country.

  The climate of actual violence which nourished Nazism was itself sustained by growing verbal and pictorial violence in the media. It is sometimes argued that satire, even of the most savage kind, is a sign of health in a free society and that no restrictions should be placed on it. Jewish history does not lend support to this view. The Jews have been more frequently the target of such attacks than any other group and they know from long and bitter experience that the violence of print is often the prelude to the violence of blood. Weimar was, by German standards, an ultra-liberal society and one of the effects of its liberalism was to destroy most restraints in the press. Just as the Arab extremist newspapers took advantage of Samuel’s liberalism in Palestine, so the Nazis revelled in Weimar’s licence to insult. There had long been a pornographic side to anti-Semitism, especially in Germany and Austria; the Judensau theme itself was often a symptom of it. But Hitler’s stress on the sexual, race-defilement issue combined with Weimar permissiveness to produce a peculiarly vicious form of anti-Semitic propaganda epitomized by the weekly Der Stürmer, run by the Nazi boss in Middle Franconia, Julius Streicher. It helped to spread and intensify one of the chief, perennial sources of anti-Semitic violence: the notion that Jews are not part of humanity and therefore not entitled to the protection we instinctively accord a human being. It was by no means the only such publication. But it set the increasingly unrestrained tone of visual assault on Jews. Under Weimar’s laws it was exceedingly difficult to prosecute, for Streicher enjoyed immunity as a Landtag and later a Reichstag deputy. It seems to have sold only 13,000 copies in 1927 (the only reliable circulation figure), but in the last phases of the Nazi ascent to power it won a national audience.111

  Unfortunately, the media violence was not one-sided. Just as Communist street gangs, as well as Nazis, took violence systematically into the streets, and so co-operated in preparing national violence, a great deal of verbal savagery was produced from the liberal side, much of it by Jews. Satire came naturally to Jews, and in Germany Heine had forged a powerful and often vicious matrix, the inspiration for many later Jewish writers. Between 1899 and 1936 the Viennese writer Karl Kraus (1874-1936), baptized like Heine, ran a paper called Die Fackel (The Torch), which set new standards in aggressive satire, much of it directed against Jews, such as Herzl and Freud. ‘Psychoanalysis’, he wrote, ‘is the newest Jewish disease’ and ‘the unconscious is a ghetto for people’s though
ts’. His venomous skill in finding the tender spot was widely admired and imitated in Weimar Germany, and used in a highly provocative manner, especially by Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) and the journal Weltbühne. It too had only a small sale, 16,000 (1931), but it aroused enormous controversy because of its deliberate attacks on everything right-thinking Germans held dear. Tucholsky’s 1929 book, Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, went for the judiciary, the churches, the police, Hindenburg, Social Democrats and trade union leaders, and contained a brilliant photomontage of German generals entitled: ‘Animals are looking at you’.112

  From the start this media violence from the left played into the hands of anti-Semites. Karl Gerecke made skilful use of Weltbühne in his tract Biblischer Antisemitismus (1920), a Nazi standby. Jewish attacks on the army were particularly dangerous. The Jewish ex-servicemen’s association was able to show from official figures that the number of Jews who served in the war, and who were killed, wounded and decorated, was strictly in accordance with the Jewish proportion of the population. But there was a popular belief, shared and propagated by Hitler and the Nazis with relentless persistence, that Jews had evaded service and, indeed, stabbed the army in the back. The most violent satirist of the army-Junker class was, in fact, a non-Jew, George Grosz; but he was closely associated with Jewish artists and writers and so was said to have been ‘put up to it’. Tucholsky was Grosz’s prose version. Many of his statements were deliberately designed to fill people with rage: ‘There is no secret of the German army’, he wrote, ‘which I would not hand over readily to a foreign power.’113 But enraged people, especially if they are inarticulate and incapable of replying in kind, may retaliate physically, or vote for those who will; and Tucholsky and his fellow satirists enraged not just professional army officers but the families of countless conscripts killed in the war. The anti-Semitic and the nationalist press ensured that Tucholsky’s more wounding attacks were given the widest circulation.