Hitler and the Holocaust (6 page)

The ordinary Poles who carried out these barbarities, described in Jan Gross’s harrowing book on Jedwabne, were no different in their brutal sadism from the German perpetrators analyzed by Daniel Goldhagen. Resentment against the Soviet occupiers who had fled Eastern Poland in June 1941 following the German advance—and the stereotypical identification of the Jews with Communism—was more likely an exacerbating factor than the real cause of the massacre.
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More important was the potent cocktail of prewar anti-Semitism embedded in the radical nationalism of the Endecja and a deeply reactionary, primitive Catholicism, mixed with sheer greed and the desire to plunder Jewish property, opened up by the German war against the Soviet Union.
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Similarly bestial
pogroms were carried out by rural Poles elsewhere in the Bialystok region, with enthusiastic spectators laughing loudly and applauding as Jews fell under the merciless blows of murderers. As one eyewitness put it: “The seed of hatred fell on well-nourished soil, which had been prepared for many years by the clergy. The wild and bloodthirsty mob took it as a holy challenge that history had put upon it—to get rid of the Jews. And the desire to take over Jewish riches whetted their appetites even more.”
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This was already the Holocaust in miniature, revealing the more archaic layers of the monstrous enterprise and its use of primitive, ancient weapons. It was but one small episode in the murderous war of Hitler against the Jews, but similar scenes would soon occur all over Europe.

2

FROM WEIMAR TO HITLER

As for the final goal and mission of the Germanic
völkische
movement, as far as the Jews are concerned,… it is to wipe out the East European and vermin Jew with an iron broom. A perfect job needs to be done.

Völkische Beobachter
editorial, 10 March 1922

We want to point the finger at the Jew as the inspirer, the originator, and the beneficiary of this terrible catastrophe [the Spanish civil war].… This is the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the peoples, the Son of Chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition, the plastic demon of the decay of humanity.

JOSEPH GOEBBELS, Nuremberg Party Congress, September 1937

And when I heard that the Jews were being driven from their professions and homes and imprisoned in ghettos, the points switched automatically in my mind.… It was only “the Jew” who was being persecuted and “made homeless.”

MELITA MASCHMANN, head of the League
of German Girls in the Hitler Youth

T
he illfated Weimar Republic was established after 1918 in the wake of unparalleled national traumas. The unexpected defeat in the First World War, the abdication of the emperor, the threat of Communist revolution, the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, and the prospect of huge reparations payments to the Western Allies weighed heavily on Germans. The specter of economic and political chaos could only benefit the enemies of the republic, especially those on the nationalist right.
¹
They damned the government with the responsibility for signing a treaty that had accepted German “war guilt,” and blamed it for the substantial loss of territory, the “shame” of an emasculated army, and the dependence on foreign loans. While the Communists were forcibly put down in 1919, a further blow to the republic came with the massive inflation of 1923 and the consequent monetary collapse, which had a devastating effect on the working classes as well as on many in the middle strata of German society who lost their life savings. Although the Weimar Republic enjoyed a brief period of economic and political stability between 1924 and 1928, important changes beneath the surface were already weakening the middle ground in German politics. More liberal parties, such as the Democrats and the German National People’s Party, were steadily losing support. So, too, were the conservative nationalists whose share of the vote by 1928 had declined from 20 percent to 14 percent. The Social Democrats, the dominant party in the early years of the republic, also began to lose votes—mainly to the Communists, who never forgave them for 1919.
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For its part, the Catholic Center Party, whose electoral base remained stable, was no
longer willing to form a coalition with the socialists and began to move to the right.

German Jews, who numbered slightly more than half a million, were less than 1 percent of the population in the 1920s, and clearly oriented to the liberal-left wing of German politics. They had little political influence, despite anti-Semitic legends to the contrary, but they were disproportionately prominent in publishing, journalism, the arts, the free professions, trade, private banking, and commerce, including the ownership of department stores, which began to develop at this time. In 1933, Jews were 11 percent of Germany’s doctors and about 16 percent of its lawyers—a degree of visibility that was even more pronounced in the big cities. Middle-class antiSemitism in Germany—especially rampant among doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers, artisans, small businessmen, academics, and students—was undoubtedly stimulated by professional jealousy and envy.
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It was also nourished by the intensive post-1918 propaganda of
völkisch
anti-Semitic organizations that branded Jews with the stigma of wartime profiteering, black-market dealings, stock-exchange speculation, and responsibility for defeat in the war. The economic and political crises between 1918 and 1923 exacerbated these embittered feelings.
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A constant refrain of the political right was the singling out of radical socialists and Communists of Jewish origin for their roles in the abortive revolutions of 1918 and 1919, thus accrediting the idea that Jews were inclined toward subversive activity and revolution. And indeed, the Spartacist revolt in Berlin (a Communist uprising) was led by the Polish-born internationalist Rosa Luxemburg, who, like a number of the early leaders of the KPD (German Communist Party), was Jewish, though thoroughly alienated from her origins. In the Bavarian capital, Munich, after the downfall of the Wittelsbach dynasty, the first Independent Socialist prime minister, Kurt Eisner, was not only a Jew but also a bohemian intellectual, a Berliner, and a pacifist who had published documents
attributing responsibility for the First World War to Germany.
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These attributes made him an almost perfect target for the hate of the conservative and antirepublican elements in Bavarian society. The middle classes were even more panic-stricken when in 1919 a Munich Soviet Republic was established that featured a number of Russian Jews in leading positions. It was soon crushed by the local Freikorps (on instructions from the Social Democrats), who exacted a murderous revenge. Over the course of 1918 and 1919, some of the most prominent Jewish revolutionaries, including Luxemburg, Eisner, Gustav Landauer, Eugen Leviné, and a number of other radical Jews like the Independent Socialist Hugo Haase were either brutally assassinated or shot—a fate that also befell the Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht, who was not a Jew.
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This wave of assassinations culminated in the killing of Germany’s first ever Jewish foreign minister, the highly assimilated and versatile industrialist Walther Rathenau, by youthful right-wing nationalist fanatics in 1922. Rathenau, an ardent Prussian patriot who had contributed much to the efficiency of the Germany economy during the war, was demon-ized as an “Elder of Zion” and a “Jewish Bolshevik” by his blond, blue-eyed killers. Rathenau’s murder was a worrying omen for German Jewry.
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The stream of impoverished Polish Jews arriving in Berlin in the early 1920s was another troubling development to some Germans. These Ostjuden (eastern Jews) were frequently unemployed and disoriented by the postwar upheavals and revolutions in eastern Europe. Moreover, they were cultural outsiders and an easy target for xenophobic accusations (made also by Social Democrats) of economic parasitism. In the Weimar Republic, they made up approximately one fifth of the Jewish population. The more assimilated and established members of German Jewry tended to believe that the revival of antiSemitism was directed primarily or even exclusively against the Ostjuden, but this turned out to be a tragic self-deception.

The most militant of the many disparate
völkisch
anti-Semitic sects that mushroomed in the aftermath of the war was the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, or Nazi Party for short), founded in Munich in 1919. Its official party program of 24 February 1920 stood for “the uniting of all Germans within one Greater Germany” on the basis of national self-determination. The party called for the annulment of the Treaty of Versailles, demanding more land and soil for the German population; it advocated that the “yoke of interest-capital” be broken, favoring widespread nationalizations as well as profit sharing, land reform, the communal-ization of department stores, and other radical-sounding measures. Article 4 of the NSDAP program made it clear that only “persons of German blood” could be nationals (
Volksgenossen
) and therefore citizens. This automatically excluded Jews, who in the future, they hoped, would be permitted to live in Germany only as guests “subject to legislation for Aliens.” Article 23 insisted that publishers, journalists, and “all editors and editorial employees of German-language newspapers must be German by race.” It also called for laws against “trends in art and literature that have a destructive effect on our national life” (an implicit reference to Jews). Article 24 observed that the NSDAP stood for “positive Christianity” and fought “against the Jewish-materialistic spirit
within
and
without us.”
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Until 1930, the Nazi Party remained a minor although highly vocal
völkisch
grouping that continued to advocate (without much success) a nationalist form of socialism underpinned by strong anti-Semitic foundations. Between 1919 and 1924, it remained confined to Bavaria, appealing mainly to ex-soldiers, anti-Communists, antiSemites, and a hodgepodge of déclassé elements that were attracted to the vague slogans of a “national revolution.” Nevertheless, its leader, Adolf Hitler, a raucous, spellbinding Austrian agitator who had been a corporal in the German Army during the First World War, had already attracted some national attention. On
8 and 9 November 1923, the thirty-four-year-old Hitler, together with the old war hero General Erich von Ludendorff, had attempted to seize power in Bavaria, hoping eventually to march on Berlin and overthrow the Weimar Republic. The putsch failed miserably when Hitler and his followers were fired on by the Munich police while marching through the city center. The putschists dispersed in some confusion. Following his arrest, Hitler managed, with the help of a sympathetic judge, to turn his trial into a harangue against the “traitors of 1918,” a public indictment of Weimar democracy, and a platform for his own extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic views. Though guilty of high treason, he was sentenced to a mere five years’ imprisonment, of which he served just nine months in Landsberg prison, where he wrote
Mein Kampf
(My struggle). This sprawling, poorly written, primitive book was to become the Bible of the Nazi movement and a core anti-Semitic text as well.

As a political autobiography,
Mein Kampf
offers us vital insight into Hitler’s background and the formative influences on his worldview. Hitler had been born in the small town of Braunau on the Inn, which lay on the border between Austria and Bavaria, on 20 April 1889. In his adolescent years, spent partly in Linz, he had come under the influence of the Pan-German ideology of Georg von Schönerer, the leading German nationalist in Austria, who advocated the
Anschluss
(union) of the two German states into one German Reich. (Hitler fulfilled this dream in 1938.) The rancorous Schönerer passionately hated the cosmopolitan Habsburg ruling dynasty of Austria, the Czechs, and other neighboring Slavs who threatened German hegemony, the Roman Catholic Church, and especially Jews.
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Schönerer had in 1885 proclaimed antiSemitism the “main pillar of a true folkish mentality, and thus … the greatest achievement of this century.”
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Schönerer turned his advocacy of “Germandom” into a matter of faith and early in his political career had added an “Aryan” clause excluding even the most ardent German nationalist
Jews from membership in his movement. Hitler fully accepted Schönerer’s intransigent ethnic antiSemitism (rooted in blood and race), adopted his hatred of the “Jewish press” and the “Jewish-led Social Democracy,” and shared his loathing for universal suffrage. He was no less scathing about parliamentarianism, liberal democracy, and the House of Habsburg, which he held responsible for betraying the German
Volk.
The young Hitler learned to identify with the Germanic cult of the
Führer
(leader) and adopted Schönerer’s German greeting of “Heil!”
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Another important Austrian role model for the young Hitler, to whom he devoted many pages in
Mein Kampf, was
the extremely popular and elegant mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, leader of the Christian-Social Party. He had come to power largely through the skillful, demagogic use of antiSemitism, focusing his attacks on the prominent role of Viennese Jews in the liberal press, in the stock exchange, and in banking and industrial capitalism.
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In his propaganda, he fused Catholic prejudice against the “Christ killers” with the more modern anticapitalist resentments of a lower middle class facing economic crisis. Lueger cleverly mixed this with the xenophobic feelings of many Viennese toward the Ostjuden, who by 1900 already formed about 25 percent of Vienna’s 175,000-strong Jewish community. Hitler greatly admired Lueger and absorbed from him the lesson that antiSemitism could be an extremely effective instrument of mass mobilization in crystallizing the resentments of the “little man.”
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But he disliked the easygoing opportunism behind Lueger’s policy toward Jews and Slavs, the Viennese mayor’s refusal to embrace the racial principle, and his tight alliance with the Catholic Church, though he did appreciate the tactical shrewdness behind this strategy in prewar Austria. According to Hitler, Lueger, who still allowed Jews the escape route of baptism, was simply not radical enough. “Lacking was the conviction that this was a vital question for all humanity, with the fate of all non-Jewish peoples depending on its solution.”
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