Hitler and the Holocaust (4 page)

Even the great German Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, despite his devastating assault on the corruption, falsehoods, and superstitions abounding in the papal Rome of his day, was not free of the demonic conception of the Jews that he had inherited from the medieval church.
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In his diatribe of 1543, “Concerning the Jews and Their Lies” (cynically used to justify the Nazi burning of synagogues in 1938), Luther reiterated the traditional Christian view of the Jews as a “damned” and “rejected” people. His “honest advice” to German rulers was to set Jewish houses of worship on fire, to break down their homes, deprive them of prayer books, forbid their rabbis to teach (“under threat of death”), and confiscate their passports and traveling privileges. The Jews had to be “stopped from usury” by being made “to earn their bread by the sweat of their noses” through hard labor in the fields. Luther proposed that the secular rulers of German principalities follow the example of France, Spain, and Bohemia by expropriating the property of the Jews, to “drive them out of the country for all time.” This program of “severe mercy” (as Luther called it) “ought to be done for the honour of God and of Christianity in order that God may see that we are Christians, and that we have not wittingly tolerated or approved of such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of His Son and His Christians.”
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Like medieval Catholicism, Luther’s Protestant Reformation in Germany created a powerful arsenal of myths, images, and fantasies on which Nazi anti-Semitism could build. Long before the Nazis, the Jews were the most potent and hated collective “other” against which Christian Europe could define itself.
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At times, they seemed to have been raised to the status of a metaphysical abstraction, embodying the most sinister forces of heresy, carnality, and black magic.
“The Jew” resembled a creature of a different order, scarcely human at all. Nazism secularized and sharply radicalized this image but invented relatively little at the level of basic stereotypes.

The biological racism of the Nazis did introduce a relatively new element into Judeophobia, though this apparent innovation also had Christian precedents. For example, in fifteenth-century Spain, Catholic “purity of blood” statutes had been introduced to distinguish “Old” from “New Christians” (
conversos
, or Jewish converts) and to help root out “Judaizing” influences.
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The manic hunt by the Spanish Inquisition for crypto-Jews, the violent pogroms that began in the late fourteenth century, the auto-da-fés, and the terrifying persecution that led to the mass expulsion of 150,000 Jews in 1492, were early modern foregleams of the Nazi genocide.
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It was surely significant that this witch-hunt occurred in precisely that European society where Jews had enjoyed the most remarkable “golden age,” a success story that anticipated the German-Jewish “symbiosis” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In medieval Spain, too, Jews had already gone far down the road of acculturation, social integration, and extensive conversions. They had attained remarkable heights in literature, philosophy, commerce, the professions, and even in government. The prosperity and success of the Spanish Jews and “New Christians” aroused the envy of their rivals as well as the hostility of the Catholic Church, which feared the seeds of heresy. No less important, the decision to exclude both Jews and Muslims provided a way for Spain’s ambitious rulers to proclaim the unity of a nation that had completed its “reconquest” from Islam under the banner of the Catholic faith. As elsewhere in Europe, the prospect of expropriating substantial Jewish wealth also provided a decidedly material incentive for both rulers and populace alike.

In contrast to the expulsions of Jews from England (1290), France (1306, 1332), the German principalities, and then from Spain and Portugal (end of the fifteenth century),
Poland was initially very welcoming to the Jews as an urban, commercial element who could help rebuild its shattered economy after the Mongol invasions. From the fourteenth century until the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, Jews enjoyed an unprecedented degree of autonomy under charters of liberty guaranteed by successive rulers. They were frequently employed by the Polish nobility as estate managers and tax collectors, often served as middlemen between landowners and peasants, and played similar intermediary roles as traders and craftsmen. Poland became a leading center of Ashkenazi Jewish scholarship and spirituality. On the other hand, the massacres associated with Bogdan Chelmnicki, leader of a Ukrainian peasants’ revolt in 1648–1649, were a frightening reminder of the vulnerability of the Jews’ position in the Polish lands. Between one quarter to one third of the Jewish population in the Ukraine and southern Poland were slaughtered as “Christ killers” and as middlemen serving the interests of the hated Polish landlords.
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In western Europe, Jews finally began to enter the modern era with the French Revolution of 1789. By sweeping away all the feudal privileges of the ancien régime (including the special position of the Catholic Church), the French National Assembly for the first time established Jewish civic equality in Europe. The revolutionary generation that emancipated the Jews in 1791 had been influenced by universalist Enlightenment ideals, an optimistic faith in reason, a generally cosmopolitan outlook, and the belief that human beings could be perfected through education and change in social conditions. The more radical strand of the Enlightenment offered to the Jews the promise of a new beginning, as long as they were willing to throw off the shackles of their own Judaic tradition. Count de Clermont-Tonnerre pointedly told the French National Assembly, “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.… If they do not want this … we shall then be compelled to expel them.”
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Many Jews of France and western Europe were ready to accept this emancipation contract (Orthodox Jews were an exception) although it involved abandoning a separate identity. The attractions of unrivaled individual opportunities, freedom of movement, new career prospects, and untrammeled entry into a modern, secular society proved difficult to resist.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, there was a distinct backlash by conservative forces in France against the legacy of the 1789 revolution and its emancipation of the Jews. The Catholic Church linked the Jews with the secular, anticlerical Third Republic that had become dominant, especially after 1880. The Monarchists (who dreamed of a Royalist restoration), aristocratic army officers bitter at their defeat by Prussia in 1870, and a motley crew of anti-Semites and nationalists hoped to overthrow the hated republic. Their best opportunity came when a Jewish army officer from Alsace, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused in 1894 of betraying French military secrets to the Germans. Dreyfus’s guilt became a dogma not only for intransigent anti-Semites, convinced that every Jew was a potential “Judas,” but also for those on the Catholic and nationalist right who believed that there had been a deliberate conspiracy to destroy the French nation.
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The plot had supposedly been hatched by all-powerful Jews (embodied by the Rothschild family and by “Jewish” international high finance), helped by Freemasons, Protestants, anticlerical republican radicals, and socialists. The Dreyfus affair provided an ideological matrix for the emergence of such ultranationalist and protofascist ideas.
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It was also a kind of dress rehearsal for the mob politics of Nazi-style anti-Semitism.

The term
anti-Semitism
had been coined by the radical German journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879 to mark it off from more traditional Christian forms of animosity toward Judaism. Indeed, Marr’s “anti-Semitism” was also noticeably hostile to supranational Catholicism and to monotheistic religion in general. In a mediocre if sensational pamphlet, he claimed that German society had already become “Judaized”
(a code word for the victory of materialism, Mammon, and laissez-faire capitalism); gloomily, he asserted that the Jews had conquered Germany by seizing control of its press and stock exchanges.
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Similar charges were made in the same year by the Protestant court preacher, Adolf Stöcker, a powerful orator who had just founded the lower-middle-class Christian-Social Party in Berlin; and by the illustrious Prussian conservative historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who came up with the notorious slogan (much favored by the Nazis) that “the Jews are our misfortune.” Between 1880 and 1914, imperial Germany emerged as the favored laboratory for ideological anti-Semites, both Christian and anti-Christian.
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While this Judeophobia was by no means “eliminationist,” its extent and obsessive quality played a part in preparing the way for the outrages to come.
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There were other full-fledged racist propagandists, such as the anticlerical Theodor Fritsch (1852–1933), whose
Handbook on the Jewish Question
was familiar to the young Hitler in Vienna before 1914. Fritsch was an indefatigable publicist, active in Saxony, who had founded the Hammer Publishing House for anti-Semitic literature in 1883 and a decade later produced a popular racist decalogue (“Ten Commandments for an Antisemite”).
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His catechism sternly warned Germans against having social, sexual, business, or professional intercourse with Jews or consuming any Jewish writings, “lest their lingering poison may unnerve and corrupt you and your family.” Fritsch’s handbook went through more than forty editions, inspiring a number of Nazis, who later honored him as an elder statesman. Other pre-1914 ideological anti-Semites highly regarded in the Third Reich included the orientalist scholar Paul de Lagarde (advocate of a virile Germanic and de-Judaized Christianity), who denounced the evils of Western liberalism, capitalism, and parliamentarism;
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and Eugen Dühring, a former socialist and a vehement anti-Christian, who demanded radical measures to return Jews to the ghetto by subjecting them to a discriminatory
aliens’ legislation. Dühring insisted that the Germanic-Nordic race could fulfill its evolutionary destiny only after it threw off the yoke of a “Semitic” Judeo-Christianity.
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Even more influential was the expatriate Teutomaniac Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose bestselling book,
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(1899), greatly appealed to the bombastic imperialism of the German emperor, Wilhelm II. Chamberlain, a passionate Wagnerian and philosophical dilettante, lived long enough to hail Hitler in 1923 as the future “saviour” of Germany.
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Despite the growing influence of anti-Semitic ideologies in imperial Germany, the Second Reich still appeared to most Jews as a stable, prosperous, and highly cultured society where their civil rights were respected. Similarly, for Jews in the rest of western and central Europe (including the more than two million Jews in Austria-Hungary), the prospects of integration seemed promising before the First World War. Yet for many Jews, the war and its consequences had cruel repercussions. The Jews in Galicia and those along the Russian front soon found themselves fleeing for their lives, often punished as spies and traitors by the tsarist high command or deported into the Russian interior. In Poland, at the end of the war in 1918, the proclamation of national independence was accompanied by jarring pogroms against Jews, especially in places of mixed population, where their loyalties were arbitrarily deemed by Poles to be suspect.
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Although the German Army on the eastern front treated Jews reasonably well, a special census (
Judenzählung
) of Jewish soldiers engaged in active duty at the front was undertaken in 1916. This was supposedly intended to verify rumors of shirking and black marketeering. The results were never published, though twelve thousand German Jews laid down their lives for the fatherland, and a relatively high number won awards for bravery on the battlefield. Such sacrifices did not prevent the pernicious legend from circulating that Jews (and Marxists) had “stabbed Germany in the back” during the war—a myth that became a
powerful propaganda weapon for Hitler and the entire German nationalist right after 1918.

In November 1917, two events of decisive importance for modern Jewish history took place. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia overthrew an all-too-brief experiment in parliamentary democracy, led primarily by moderate Russian liberals and socialists. Although it consolidated the emancipation of Russian Jewry granted ten months earlier with the fall of tsarism, the immediate consequences of this revolution were disastrous for Jews: the worst pogroms hitherto recorded in Jewish history, with more than one hundred thousand fatalities among the Russian and Ukrainian Jewish population between 1918 and 1921.
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Most of the atrocities were committed by the anti-Bolshevik White reactionaries and by the Ukrainian nationalist army, for whom Jews had become synonymous with the Communist Revolution. Though this amalgam was plainly a myth, there were a disproportionate number of leading Bolsheviks of Jewish origin in key positions during the early days of the revolution. None of these “non-Jewish” Jews identified in any way with Judaism, Jewish nationalism, or Russian Jewry.
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Similarly, most Russian and Ukrainian Jews did not sympathize at all with Communism, but the anti-Semitic savagery of the anti-Bolshevik pogromists eventually drove them into alliance with the Reds.
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The impact of the Bolshevik specter on Germany was to prove particularly fateful. After 1919, the newly created Nazi Party, along with other right-wing forces in Germany (and far beyond its borders), assiduously propagated the myth of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to destroy Germany and Western Christian civilization. This ideological fantasy was to become a central driving force of the Holocaust.