Hitler and the Holocaust (3 page)

The Jewish Holocaust was unprecedented—as compared to other genocides—because it was the planned, deliberate policy decision of a powerful state that mobilized its resources to destroy the
entire
Jewish people. In this diabolical aim, the Germans were almost successful in Europe, and only their military defeat prevented its gruesome completion. By 1945, two thirds of European Jewry had been wiped out by the Nazis, leaving only a remnant of the ancient Jewish culture that had existed on European soil for nearly two millennia. One of the more remarkable aspects of this mass murder was that Jews never constituted (except in the paranoid Nazi mind-set) any economic, political, or military threat to the German state. On the contrary, had there been a Nobel Prize for passionate identification with German language and culture before 1933, the Jews would surely have won it. During the First World War, many made great efforts to demonstrate their patriotic loyalty and validate their Germannness (
Deutschtum
) on the battlefield. Before the rise of Hitler, they had felt very much at home in what they regarded as a well-ordered state, based on the rule of law.

If anything, there were striking affinities between Germans and Jews that seemed to augur well for their common future: a great respect for education, hard work, the importance of the family, and a marked talent for abstract, speculative thinking. Both Germans and Jews were considered highly musical and often regarded by others as being both indispensable and troublesome, aggressive and prone to self-pity.
Judenhass
(Judeophobia) and
Deutschenhass
(Germanophobia) had more than a few attributes in common. But, as Freud shrewdly observed, the “narcissism of little differences” can produce great hatreds; proximity, affinity, and assimilation may in certain circumstances give rise to an intense and irrational backlash. The German “Jewish question” of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries was precisely such a case, amalgamating false perceptions, stereotypes, and delusions from many sources: Christian anti-Judaism, neo-Romantic
völkisch
mysticism, and a racist obsession with Jews and other “aliens” that assumed a special virulence in Nazi ideology.
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This shadowboxing with imaginary demons and projective angst persuaded the novelist Jakob Wassermann that Judeophobia was
the
German national hatred—a self-induced pathological delusion that was not only irrational but impenetrable. Germans, he concluded in 1921, were emotionally resistant to accepting Jews as their equals and given to scape-goating them for every crisis, setback, or defeat. Hatred of the Jews could encompass every conceivable sexual frustration, social anxiety, jealousy, animosity, bloodlust, and greedy instinct that Germans were otherwise unable to exorcise.
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Thirty years earlier, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had been equally severe, heaping aristocratic contempt on the anti-Semites of the 1880s as
Schlechtweggekommene
—life’s losers and born misfits; bungled, botched, and envious creatures, eaten up with neurotic
ressentiment
.
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This verdict was all the more remarkable since Nietzsche had at one time been under the spell of the composer Richard Wagner—the
fons et origo
of modern German anti-Semitism. Moreover, to compound the irony, his own rhetoric about the
Übermensch
(superman), the “blond beast,” and the “will to power” would later be eagerly annexed by fascists and Nazis. Indeed, Nietzsche’s relentless assault on Judeo-Christian morality did provide one of the deeper sources of inspiration for the Nazi revolution. It was, after all, Nietzsche who had branded priestly Judaism and the teachings of the Gospels as the beginning of “the slave-revolt in morals.” The Jews, he explained with oracular certitude, had engineered the greatest transvaluation of values in world history, two thousand years earlier in Roman-occupied Palestine. It was a most fateful and catastrophic event, responsible in his eyes for all the “decadent” modern ideologies of liberalism, rationalism, socialism,
and leveling mass democracy.
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In the 1930s, it would not be difficult for fascists and Nazis—intoxicated with self-deification—to adapt these Nietzschean ideas to their own totalitarian-nihilist agenda.
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It mattered little that few Nazis had actually read Nietzsche or paid attention to his contempt for Germans and admiration for Jews. The attraction lay in the prospect of transgression on a grand scale, the Nietzschean smashing of those taboos that still reined in the barbarian warrior-lust lurking under an increasingly thin “civilized” veneer. Nazism, (mis)understood as a Nietzschean experiment, seemed to be offering to the German people a Faustian pact. In return for destroying traditional Christian moral restraints, they might be granted future hegemony over the earthly kingdoms that other European powers had already partitioned among themselves.

The demonization of the Jews and Judaism assumed immense symbolic importance in this endeavor. The Nazi leaders (and especially Hitler) were obsessed with the idea of a “chosen people” and its imagined secret power. They read into it a prefiguration of their own will to set the races apart under an iron law until the end of time.
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The singularity of the Jews, and the mystery of their survival over thousands of years, was treated as if it were a vindication of the eternal truths of blood and race.
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Nazi racism can indeed be seen as a blasphemous gloss or perhaps even as a grotesque parody of Judaic chosenness. To put it bluntly, there could not be two chosen peoples. The character of Hitler’s messianic pretensions necessitated the removal of that very people who had embodied chosenness for three millennia. The Jews were responsible (or, rather, guilty) in his eyes for having
invented
the very notion of a moral conscience, in defiance of all healthy, natural instincts.
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They had bequeathed this noxious ideal to Christianity and Communism, with their contending dreams of the brotherhood of man, human equality, and justice. Though outwardly incompatible, these worldviews were for the Nazis
two sides of the same Judaic coin: egalitarian ideals that had caused endless suffering, persecution, and intolerance. Moreover, the Jews were accused of having deliberately encouraged the mixing of races, as well as inventing doctrines of democracy, which could only destroy the foundations of human culture itself. For the Nazis, the world had to be liberated from such “evil” principles so that mankind could return once more to its pristine natural order. Thus the planned, systematic eradication of Judaic values was the necessary prerequisite of the physical annihilation of the Jewish people.

In its own perverse way, Nazism did indeed grasp something fundamental about Judaism and the Jews. For at the heart of Judaism stood the belief in a single, all-powerful deity who had created the universe and installed humanity at its heart to uphold moral law. The revelation of the divine law and the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai had made the biblical Israelites into a covenanted people, who believed themselves to be chosen by God for a distinctive ethical mission; not to conquer an empire but to embody a divine revelation which affirmed that humanity was created in the image of its maker; that each human being carried a divine spark; and that each life was sacred. “Thou shalt not kill” rang out as the clarion call for any civilized moral code (one that Nazism would exactly invert), along with injunctions against adultery, theft, blasphemy, and the worship of false gods. In the Mosaic teaching, special attention was paid to the rights of the weak and oppressed, the orphan, the widowed, the enslaved, and the stranger within the gates. Judaism was in that respect the antithesis of the xenophobic racist nationalism espoused by fascists and Nazis. At the heart of the Torah (the five books of Moses) was the demand for “justice, and only justice.” The cry of Amos: “Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream,” is the leitmotif of biblical prophecy. The Amidah prayer of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) makes the fulfillment of God’s kingdom in this world conditional on the disappearance of arrogance, injustice, and oppression.
In the Judaic conception, it is
that ideal
which is the ultimate goal of human history, one wholly incompatible with the Nazi vision of the world. The Torah (completed by the Talmud and rabbinical teachings through the centuries) became the constitution and “law of life” of the Jewish people, holding them together through two millennia of dispersion. It was their “portable homeland,” in the profound words of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and also the mark of their vocation as a distinct people among the nations.

Only in the era of emancipation in the nineteenth century (primarily in the democratic societies of the West) did Jews begin to redefine themselves as a denationalized
religious
group, comparable in certain respects to Catholics or Protestants.
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Yet the bulk of the Jewish diaspora, concentrated as it was in eastern Europe, continued to preserve its distinct language (Yiddish), social code, value system, customs, and laws, as well as separate religious beliefs. The Jewish self-understanding of being a “people apart” was further reinforced by a strong sense of continuity with past glories. At the same time, the Jews were acutely conscious of the unceasing chain of persecutions to which they had been subjected during their long exile, following the destruction of the Second Temple
(C.E.
70). Thus, a sense of being linked in a common community of suffering and fate reinforced their diasporic identity.

Even before the loss of national independence nearly two thousand years ago, Jews had already displayed formidable powers of resistance and survival against the sway of vast ancient empires such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia. Under Judah Maccabee and the priestly clan of the Hasmoneans, they had revolted against the cultural and political yoke of an all-conquering Hellenism, leading in 142
B.C.E.
to the brief reestablishment of Jewish political sovereignty in Judea. Subsequently, the Jews rose in a series of unsuccessful revolts against the military might of Imperial Rome, preferring martyrdom to the betrayal of their heritage and faith. It
was in this messianic atmosphere that Christianity emerged in first-century Palestine, as the teaching of a dissident sect of Judaism. Not only Jesus of Nazareth but his mother, Mary, all of his disciples, and the Apostle Paul were born as Jews. The new faith that grew out of the teachings of Jesus (as recounted in the Gospels) was to have a powerful influence on the subsequent fate of the dispersed and exiled Jewish people in what would become, after Constantine the Great, an increasingly Christian Europe from the fourth century
C.E.
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On the one hand, Jews were permitted to exist with some protection from the church and secular rulers in the Middle Ages; the other side of the same coin was their abject theological status as an “accursed people” and “murderers of God.”
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In the New Testament there are a number of references to “the Jews” as children of “your father the Devil” or to the “synagogue of Satan.” Nor is it an accident that Judas, the disciple alleged to have betrayed Jesus for filthy lucre, eventually emerged as a synonym for the Jewish people, or that his name became a universal byword for treachery and cowardice. In the writings of the Church Fathers from the fourth century onward, Jews are consistently and malevolently depicted as “murderers of the prophets,” “adversaries and haters of God,” “enemies of the faith,” and “advocates of the Devil”; they were portrayed as vipers, slanderers, scoffers, and “leaven of the Pharisees”; carnal, sensual, dissolute, mercenary, and corrupt; they were supposedly driven exclusively by sex, money, and power—the things of
this
world that Christianity professed to despise.
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This invective echoed down the centuries, with greater or lesser intensity according to country and circumstances, throughout most of the lands of Christendom. The main effect of these savage polemics was to humiliate, discredit, and delegitimize the Judaic parent religion from which Christianity itself had sprung.
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Such a comprehensive negation demonstrated that Judaism had no raison d’être after the appearance of Christ, for the church had now become the “true” Israel and repository of the new covenant. The divine
blessings and promises given to the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible (appropriated as Christian Holy Scriptures and revered as the anticipation and validation of the Gospels) were reserved for the church itself and for “God’s people” (the Gentile Christians). Curses and maledictions were applied to the reprobate Jews. Had they not been abandoned and punished by God with permanent wandering and exile for their blindness in failing to recognize Jesus as Messiah? Would they not continue to be persecuted until they converted to the true faith?

After the First Crusade of 1096 (when crusading armies massacred Jews in the Rhineland as “infidels” and “Christ killers” before slaughtering both Muslims and Jews during their conquest of Jerusalem), the theological charge of deicide became increasingly explosive, blending with irrational popular superstitions.
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The so-called blood libel that spread from Norwich in England (in the eleventh century) to the Continent was based on the pure fabrication that Jews required the fresh blood of Christian children to make their
matzot
(unleavened bread) at Passover time, which usually coincided with the Christian Easter.
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The unexplained disappearance of any Christian child near Easter could, as a result, provoke suspicions that it had been kidnapped and killed by Jews. Such counterfactual myths produced ritual murder trials, pogroms, and violence against Jewish communities even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No less destructive was the irrational fantasy that Jews deliberately and malevolently pierced holy communion wafers to make them bleed (the so-called desecration of the host), as if they were compulsively reenacting the crucifixion of Christ. Other ominous medieval accusations included the allegation that Jews poisoned wells in order to provoke the bubonic plagues that decimated European society in the fourteenth century. Jews in the Middle Ages were also persistently depicted as bloodsucking usurers, sorcerers, blasphemers, insatiable enemies of Christ, and agents of the Devil, secretly plotting the
downfall of Christendom. Only on a soil watered for centuries by such fearsome demonology could the Holocaust have been conceived, let alone carried out with so little opposition.
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