Making of the Atomic Bomb
Page 25
The attributes of the Jew are legion, Hitler goes on. The Jew is “a garbage separator, splashing his filth in the face of humanity.” Or he is a “scribbler . . . who poison[s] men’s souls like germ-carriers of the worst sort.” Or “the cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director of this revolting vice traffic in the scum of the big city.” “Was there any form of filth or profligacy,” Hitler asks rhetorically, “ . . . without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!”
The Jew is “no German.” Jews are a “race of dialectical liars”; a “people which lives only for this earth”; “the great masters of the lie”; “traitors, profiteers, usurers, and swindlers”; a “world hydra”; “a horde of rats.” “Alone in this world they would stifle in filth and offal.”
“Without any true culture,” the Jew is “a parasite in the body of other peoples,” “a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him.” “He lacks idealism in any form.” He is an “eternal blood-sucker” of “diabolical purposes,” “restrained by no moral scruples,” who “poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own.” He “systematically ruins women and girls”: “With satanic joy on his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.” He is “master over bastards and bastards alone” and “it was and is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization.” Syphilis is a “Jewish disease,” a “Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonization of our mating instinct [that] will sooner or later destroy our entire offspring.” The Jew “makes a mockery of natural feelings, overthrows all concepts of beauty and sublimity, of the noble and the good, and instead drags men down into the sphere of his own base nature.” “An apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks,” responsible for “spiritual pestilence worse than the Black Death of olden times,” the Jew is a “coward,” a “plunderer,” a “menace,” a “foreign element,” a “viper,” a “tyrant,” a “ferment of decomposition.”
The sun shines in the wide windows of Hitler’s cell at Landsberg.649 Boyish in lederhosen, he remembers that he was blinded by mustard gas below Ypres.650 He wrote a poem during the war, a poem out of a dream, before he took shrapnel in the thigh on the Somme, before Ypres:
I often go on bitter nights651
To Wotan’s oak in the quiet glade
With dark powers to weave a union—
The runic letters the moon makes with its magic spell
And all who are full of impudence during the day
Are made small by the magic formula!
. . . . .
Hitler’s testament is almost finished. He dictates, his blanched face tumefying:
If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.652
* * *
The dispersion of the Jewish people from Palestine—the Diaspora—began in the sixth century B.C. when Babylon conquered the southern Palestinian kingdom of Judah, destroyed Solomon’s temple and carried a large body of Jews into captivity.653 By the beginning of the Christian era, under Roman hegemony, Jews had established communities in Egypt, in Greece, around the Mediterranean and on the shores of the Black Sea and there were Jewish slaves with the Roman legions on the Rhine. Conditions worsened again for the Jews when the Empire was Christianized in the fourth century A.D. with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine; Christianity and Judaism competed, in a Darwinian sense, for the same Holy Land and the same holy books. Under systematic persecution only a small remnant of the Jewish people remained in Judea. The fantasy of Jews as a brotherhood of evil was invented during this era when Christianity fought its missionary way to dominance.654
In the disorder of the Dark Ages the Jews lost even their vestigial Roman citizenship. Those who sought protection won it from rulers like Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious who knew their worth as merchants and craftsmen, but the price of protection was that they became the ruler’s property. Their rights were thus no longer inherent but chartered. Against that threatening insecurity Jews could count their gain of judicial autonomy: within their communities they were allowed to administer their own laws. In parts of Spain they had the power even of life and death.
The medieval Church, challenged by the spread of learning and the militancy of Islam to shore up its defenses against heresy, exercised its increasing power over the Jews balefully. The Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215 made the baleful conflict visible by denying Jews authority over Christians, denying them Christian servants, relegating moneylending to Jews by forbidding it to Christians, forbidding Christians lodging in Jewish quarters and thus officially sanctioning the establishment of ghettos and, most onerously, requiring every Jew to wear a distinguishing badge—frequently, on local authority, the yellow Magen David that the Nazis later restored. Every Jew who ventured from the ghetto distinctively marked was a painted bird, exposed to attack.
The fantasy of Jews as a brotherhood of evil swelled in medieval times to a full-blown demonology. The Jewish Messiah became the Antichrist. The Jews became sorcerers of Satan who poisoned wells, tortured the consecrated Host and murdered Christian children to collect their blood for diabolic rites. When the Black Death struck in the fourteenth century, a supposedly demonic people who poisoned wells were obvious suspects: they needed only to have infiltrated some more vicious poison into the water supply. A quarter of Europe died of plague, and in that time of horror tens of thousands of Jews were burned, drowned, hanged or buried alive in retaliation. Massacre became endemic; 350 Jewish communities were decimated in German lands alone.
The English were the first to expel the Jews entirely. The Jews of England belonged to the Crown, which had systematically extracted their wealth through a special Exchequer to the Jews. By 1290 it had bled them dry. Edward I thereupon confiscated what little they had left and threw them out. They crossed to France, but expulsion from that country followed in 1392; from Spain, at the demand of the Inquisition, in 1492; from Portugal in 1497. Since Germany was a region of multiple sovereignties, German Jews could not be generally expelled. They had been fleeing eastward from bitter German persecution in any case since the twelfth century.
The Jews expelled from Western Europe fled to Poland, a large and thinly populated kingdom where elected monarchs welcomed them with generous charters. The medieval German of these emigrant Ashkenazim evolved to Yiddish; they founded villages and towns; they dispersed up and down the long eastern Polish frontier and lived in relative peace for two hundred years.
Twenty-five thousand at the end of the fifteenth century had increased at least tenfold by the middle of the seventeenth. Then, in violent wars with Russia and Sweden, Poland began to break up. Cossacks and their peasant allies murdered great numbers of Jews and sacked hundreds of their communities. The Ukraine was split in two; Poland lost the northern half to Russia. War and disorder continued into the eighteenth century with Prussia, Austria and Turkey variously joining battle. When Russia invaded Poland in 1768, Prussia proposed a three-way partition with Austria to forestall a complete takeover. That led to Poland’s partial dismemberment in 1772. In 1795, after another Russian invasion, the country was completely partitioned and ceased to exist. (Much truncated, it was revived by the Congress of Vienna in 1814 as Congress Poland, joined to Russia by the linkage of Polish kingship for the Czar.) Its Jewish population had increased by then to more than one million souls. Prussia acquired about 150,000 but promptly expelled them eastward. Austria acquired about 250,000. Russia, which soon controlled more than three-
fourths of what had been the Polish commonwealth, then also controlled the fates of most of the Eastern Jews. But while Poland had welcomed them, Russia despised them. Its economy was too primitive to need their commercial skills and it abhorred their religion. To Catherine the Great her one million new subjects were first and foremost “the enemies of Christ.”655
The enemies of Christ became Russia’s “Jewish problem.” In Russia’s benighted intolerance it framed only two solutions: assimilation (by conversion to Christianity) or expulsion. For the interim it practiced quarantine. A decree of 1791 limited Jewish residence to the formerly Polish territories and the unpopulated steppes above the Black Sea, a region that extended north across 286,000 square miles of central Europe to the Baltic: the Pale of Settlement (“pale” in its old sense of “enclosed by a boundary”). The Ashkenazim numbered one-ninth of the Pale’s total population, and might have prospered there, but they were burdened with further restrictions. They were heavily taxed, they could not live in the villages as they had done for generations, they could not keep the village inns or sell liquor to the peasants. Their traditional local governments, the kehillot, were stripped of legal authority but required to collect Jewish taxes. More horribly, under Nicholas I after 1825 the kehillot were charged to conscript twelve-year-old Jewish children for a lifetime of forced service in the Russian Army—six years of brutal “education” followed by twenty-five years in the ranks—a fate that befell between 40,000 and 50,000 Jewish sons before the requirement was relaxed in 1856. The memory of that cruelty would endure: Edward Teller’s grandmother responded to his childhood misbehavior, he reminisced once with a friend, by warning him to be a good boy or the Russians would get him.656
While Eastern Jews toiled to survive in Mother Russia, emancipation was proceeding in the West. Small Jewish communities had reestablished themselves, made up partly of nominal converts to Christianity who had escaped Spain and Portugal for Holland and England and America, partly of Eastern returnees. The Austrian emperor Joseph II issued an Edict of Tolerance in 1782.
The edicts of emperors were less important to the political future of the Jewish people than the temper of the Enlightenment with its religious skepticism and its faith in the self-evident rights of man. The time had come in the evolution of European forms of government when no single group or class any longer had the power to dominate all others as the nobility had previously done. The nation-state evolved in part to remove this impasse by investing power in the state itself. Such a mechanism made no distinction between Jew and Christian. American Jews thus became American citizens automatically with the Revolution and the Bill of Rights.
The French, remembering ghettos and expulsions, found the emancipation of the Jews of France more difficult. “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation,” the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre argued in the French National Assembly, “but granted everything as individuals. . . . It is intolerable that [they] should become a separate political formation or class in the country. Every one of them must individually become a citizen.”657 When a Jewish community contracted its loyalty to a monarch in exchange for his protection it only did what other medieval classes and orders had done. But the nation-state was secular and it considered the autonomous Jewish theocracies lodged within its borders in secular terms. In secular terms a separate political body, theocratic or not, to which citizens gave their first loyalty was potentially a rival and inherently subversive. Much monstrosity would devolve from that reification. In the meantime Liberty, Equality and Fraternity prevailed and the Jews of France became citoyens on a September Tuesday in 1791.
Emancipations as they progressed within less revolutionary states included Holland-Belgium, 1795; Sweden, 1848; Denmark and Greece, 1849; England by a gradual unmuddling completely in 1866; Austria, 1867; Spain by the withdrawal of its 1492 order of expulsion in 1868; the new German Empire, 1871. Though they were influential out of all proportion to their numbers, the emancipated Jews of Western Europe, many of whom moved directly to assimilate, were only a minute fraction of the Diaspora. The preponderance of the Jewish people, increased by 1850 to 2.5 million, by 1900 to 5 million, struggled in increasing misery in the Pale.
At his coronation in 1856, amid remissions and amnesties, Czar Alexander II abolished the special conscription of Jewish children. Other alleviations followed, all designed to encourage Jewish assimilation. “Useful” Jews—wealthy merchants, university graduates, craftsmen and medical assistants—were allowed residence in the interior of Russia, beyond the Pale. The universities were restored to autonomy and Jews allowed to attend. Within the Pale Jews received limited civil rights and became eligible for local councils. But the Czar who freed 30 million peasants from serfdom was dismayed to discover that reform after so many centuries of repression might lead not to expressions of gratitude but to revolutionary agitation and revolt, as it did in Congress Poland in 1863, and the liberalization of Russian life stalled.
Revolutionaries—a splinter group that called itself “The People’s Will”—murdered Alexander on March 13, 1881, by lobbing a hail of small bombs into his open carriage in broad daylight on a main street of St. Petersburg as he drove home from reviewing the Imperial Guards. One member of The People’s Will, not a bomber, was Jewish; that was pretext enough, in the confused aftermath of regicide, to blame the assassination on the Jews. A wave of pogroms—the curious Russian word refers to a violent riot by one group against another—began that continued until 1884. “Jewish disorders,” the dogmatic new Czar, Alexander III, called these murderous raids of drunken mobs on Jewish quarters everywhere in the Pale.658 They erupted with the active participation or tacit consent of the authorities. More than two hundred Jewish communities were attacked. The first wave of pogroms—there would be more in later decades—left 20,000 Jews homeless and 100,000 ruined.659 Women were raped, families murdered. The government blamed the violence on anarchists and moved to expel even the “useful” Jews back into the ghettos of the Pale.
With the pogroms came the 1882 May Laws, revising or repealing previous reforms and imposing catastrophic new restrictions. Between 1881 and 1900 more than 1 million Jews emigrated from Russia and central Europe to the United States and another 1.5 million between 1900 and 1920. A much smaller number of emigrants, like Chaim Weizmann, chose Western Europe and England. Most found less opportunity there than their American counterparts and more virulent anti-Semitism.
One of the important sources of German anti-Semitism in the years after the Great War was the strange forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Adolf Hitler took the Protocols as a text, to the extent that National Socialism had a text, for world domination. “I have read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” Hitler told one of his loyalists; “it simply appalled me. The stealthiness of the enemy, and his ubiquity! I saw at once that we must copy it—in our own way, of course.”660 Heinrich Himmler confirmed that connection: “We owe the art of government to the Jews.” To the Protocols, he meant, which “the Führer learned by heart.”661
The Protocols were Russian work. They link the Jewish experience in Russia with the Jewish experience in Germany, where so few Jews actually lived—only about 500,000 in 1933, less than 1 percent of the German population. If Russia’s hostility to the Jews was rooted in part in religious conflict, German anti-Semitism, by contrast, needed a secular myth. A half-educated apostate autodidact like Hitler especially needed some structure on which to hang his anti-Semitic pathology. German anti-Semitism had plentiful German antecedents—Richard Wagner’s foamings were high on Hitler’s list—but the Protocols happened to arrive at the right time and place to earn a prominent position well forward. In the 1920s and 1930s millions of copies of various translations and editions were sold throughout the world.
The book is cast in the form of lectures and begins in midsentence, its scene unset, as if torn from the evil hands of its perpetrators. To supply the missing background, editors usually bound in explanatory material. A popul
ar preliminary was a chapter from the novel Biarritz, the work of a minor German postal official, entitled “In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague.” Editors offered this lurid fiction, like the fiction of the Protocols themselves, as fact. The historian Norman Cohn summarizes its setting:
At eleven o’clock the gates of the cemetery creak softly and the rustling of long coats is heard, as they touch against the stones and shrubbery. A vague white figure passes like a shadow through the cemetery until it reaches a certain tombstone; here it kneels down, touches the tombstone three times with its forehead and whispers a prayer.662 Another figure approaches; it is that of an old man, bent and limping; he coughs and sighs as he moves. The figure takes its place next to its predecessor and it too kneels down and whispers a prayer. . . . Thirteen times this procedure is repeated. When the thirteenth and last figure has taken its place a clock strikes midnight. From the grave there comes a sharp, metallic sound. A blue flame appears and lights up the thirteen kneeling figures. A hollow voice [the thirteenth figure] says, “I greet you, heads of the twelve tribes of Israel.” It is the Devil speaking; and the figures dutifully reply, “We greet you, son of the accursed.”
The Protocols follow. They are twenty-four in all—some eighty pages in book form. “What I am about to set forth, then,” explains the speaker at the beginning of the first Protocol, “is our system from the two points of view, that of ourselves and that of the goyim” Much about the system set forth is incoherent, but the Protocols elaborate three main themes: a bitter attack on liberalism, the political methods of the Jewish world conspiracy and an outline of the world government the Elders expect soon to install.663