Hitler and the Holocaust (7 page)

The other great influence on Hitler’s view of the Jews was the German nationalist composer Richard Wagner, whose operas he knew by heart and whose diatribes against the corrupting role of Jews in music and art he avidly consumed at an early age.
¹⁵
The intensity of Hitler’s emotional identification with Wagner gave special weight to this connection. Those passages in
Mein Kampf which
claim that Jews have never produced any creative art—least of all in music (!) and architecture—and which portray their “parasitic” cultural activity in exceptionally malevolent language could have been lifted verbatim from Wagner’s writings.
¹⁶
For Wagner, the Jews represented the “evil conscience of our modern civilization” or, in a phrase much repeated by the Nazis, “the plastic demon of the decline of mankind.”
¹⁷

Nevertheless, there were distinctive features to Hitler’s antiSemitism. One element, which he himself directly related to “the visual instruction of the Vienna streets,” derived from his stylized encounter with the caftan-wearing Orthodox Galician Jews from eastern Europe. The way he tells it, this “apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks” first made him wonder about the foreignness of the Jew and whether this strange being could possibly be a German.
¹⁸
The impact was apparently instantaneous: “For a few pennies, I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life.” Once he had begun to take cognizance of the “Jewish question,” Hitler tells us that wherever he went he “began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.”
¹⁹
The climax of this psychodrama, which turned him (by his own somewhat hysterical account) from a “weak-kneed cosmopolitan” into a “coldly rational” anti-Semite, was the realization that the internationalist Austrian Social Democracy was “Jewish” in character: “When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion.”
²⁰

Of course, Hitler’s account need not be taken literally. No
doubt he had an interest in rationalizing his antiSemitism, demonstrating its iron logic and continuity. We know that Hitler did in fact mix quite freely with Jews in prewar Vienna and relied on them to sell his picture-postcard sketches and paintings.
²¹
Yet much of what he writes still rings true and reflects the greater salience of the “Jewish question” and of antiSemitism in the Austrian capital, especially compared to imperial Germany. The repressed sexual dimension to Hitler’s Judeophobia also seems striking: “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting maiden whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.”
²²
Hitler drew a direct parallel between this highly personal racist fantasy, drawn from the back streets of imperial Vienna, and the postwar occupation of the Ruhr by black French colonial troops. In both cases, he saw a Jewish conspiracy: “It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization.”
²³

Mein Kampf
is permeated by obsessions with “racial purity” as well as by the Social Darwinist principle of a relentless battle of each nation for its own self-preservation. In the case of the German
Volk
, its foremost vital need, Hitler wrote, was to acquire more
Lebensraum
in the east, at the expense of Soviet Russia, the menacing citadel of international Communism. Thus, for ideological, economic, and geopolitical reasons, Hitler called for an all-out war against “the Jewish doctrine of Marxism.” Its egalitarian doctrines contradicted “the significance of nationality and race,” denied the value of personality, and negated the “eternal laws of nature.”
²⁴
In an apocalyptic prophecy of the kind that he was to invoke frequently after 1939, whenever he referred to the “Final Solution” of the “Jewish question,” Hitler wrote in
Mein Kampf: “If
, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity.… Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
²⁵

Though Hitler had abandoned the simple Catholic faith of his boyhood, one can find in these and other passages crude echoes of popular Christian beliefs, transmuted into the new “political religion” of National Socialism.
²⁶
In claiming divine sanction for his fight against the Jews and “Jewish Marxism,” Hitler was signaling that he considered this political battle to be a crusade or holy war in which there could be no compromises. The “war against the Jews” was an existential matter of life and death, an “either-or” question in which the future of civilization itself was at stake.
²⁷
There were also other related themes that in retrospect seem to prefigure the Holocaust, such as the statement that twelve to fifteen thousand “Hebrew corrupters” ought to have been gassed in the First World War, so that “the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”
²⁸
This does not necessarily mean that Hitler envisioned gassing the Jews in 1924, but it is important to understand his peculiar logic in order to grasp its full implications. Like many demobilized soldiers of his generation, he was convinced that the German Fatherland had been betrayed in 1918 by pacifists and Marxists, deliberately incited by the Jews. This “betrayal” must never be allowed to recur, as Hitler made abundantly clear to the Czech foreign minister in early 1939: “We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November 1918.”
²⁹
The ninth of November symbolized for Hitler not only the disgrace of the German defeat and surrender but the chaos of Communist revolution and the advent of the hated “Jewish Republic.” He had entered politics to make sure this would never happen again. By implication,
only the preventive gassing of the Jews could forestall a repetition of “the stab in the back” and ensure a future German victory.

War, revolution, and the Jews were inseparably locked together in Hitler’s mind. Revealingly enough, his first known statement about political affairs comes in a letter on the “Jewish question” dated 16 September 1919, in which he defines Jewry strictly as a “racial,” not a religious, group. He describes its actions in a horrifying metaphor as resulting “in a racial tuberculosis of peoples.”
³⁰
Rejecting mere pogroms as a purely “emotional” response to the Jewish problem, Hitler called instead for a “rational antiSemitism” that would revoke the Jews’ “special privileges.” The final objective, he wrote to his correspondent, “must be the complete removal [
Entfernung
] of the Jews.”
³¹
This ambiguous term could mean either their forced emigration, their extermination, or perhaps a mixture of both.

Hitler’s speeches of the early 1920s, like those of other leading Nazis in southern Germany such as Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher, and Hermann Esser, constantly hammer away at the need to take ruthless, systematic measures against the Jews; to remove them from all government employment, newspaper offices, theaters, and cinemas; to “eliminate” their “spirit” from German culture and the economy; and to break their imagined political power by sweeping away the Marxist parties. In
Mein Kampf as
in many of his speeches, Hitler conjured up the specter of Bolshevik Russia, where “the Jew” (frequently compared to a vampire or giant parasite) had “killed or starved about thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman tortures, in order to give a gang of Jewish journalists and stock exchange bandits domination over a great people.” In his unpublished
Secret Book
of 1928, Hitler elaborated still further on the meaning of the “Jewish-Bolshevik” tyranny: “The end of the Jewish world struggle therefore will always be a bloody Bolshevization. In truth this means the destruction of all the
intellectual upper classes linked to their peoples so that he can rise to become the master of a mankind become leaderless.”
³²

Marxism was thereby reduced to a weapon of terror that the Jews had ruthlessly used to destroy an “inherently anti-Semitic Russia” and to extirpate the Russian national intelligentsia along with the Russian upper classes. The massive atrocities in “this Jewish struggle for hegemony in Russia amounted to 28–30 million people in number of dead. This is fifteen times more than the world war cost Germany.”
³³
The Bolshevik Revolution had not only destroyed marriage, sexual morality, and the bonds of social order, it had deliberately created a “chaotic bastardization” that left the Jews as its “only intellectual cement.” Hitler’s unbending conclusion from this so-called Jewish-Bolshevik genocide—which he regarded as the “most terrible crime of all times against mankind”—was that only the National Socialist movement could prevent a similar victory for Jewry in the bitter struggle that “is being waged in Germany at the present time.”
³⁴
For Hitler, in other words, Germany was the pivotal land that would determine whether Communism (and Jewry) would triumph or not. The problem was that even the bourgeois parties were tools of Jewry. Behind “the Jew” stood not only Marxism, democracy, and “the so-called Christian Center” but also “the bourgeois national parties of the so-called national fatherland leagues”—in short, the entire parliamentary political spectrum. Hence, National Socialism in its
total war
against the Jews would have to completely destroy the Weimar “system” and replace its rotten foundations with a ruthless racist dictatorship.

It is evident that the Nazi discourse on these issues had qualitatively moved some distance beyond the familiar themes of pre-1914 antiSemitism, whether Christian or anti-Christian. Hitler had adopted a political conception of Jewry that was ultimately derived from the war; he had embraced a mental universe of
Sieg oder Untergang
(victory or
downfall) in relation to Communism and the Jews. Moreover, the latter were consistently dehumanized in zoological language either as an inferior race or as “vermin” to be cleansed or else as germs, bacilli, and microbes that attack and poison organisms unless they are eradicated.
³⁵
Jewry is presented as the equivalent of a bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, only the medical metaphors in this case invoke more modern diseases like cancer and tuberculosis. “The Jew” was invariably referred to in Nazi discourse as a type to which
all Jews
conformed, whether western or eastern, men or women, secular or religious, assimilated or unassimilated, bourgeois or proletarian. Even baptized Jews were irrevocably tainted in Nazi ideology by the stigma of degenerate blood. Jews as a “counter-race” were perceived as the polar opposite to the German “Aryans,” being inherently destructive, parasitical, and agents of decomposition (
Zersetzung
).
³⁶

By virtue of their abstract intellect, mercenary egoism, and corrupt mentality, the Jews were a special danger to German women. Julius Streicher in
Der Stürmer
, the most pornographic of all Nazi anti-Semitic publications, specialized (much to Hitler’s delight) in elaborating on the presumed sexual pathology of the “Jewish peril.” Streicher regularly accused Jews of rape and of exploiting German girls for prostitution; he revived the medieval blood libel that Jews abducted German children for ritual murder purposes; he even claimed that Jews deliberately sought to poison the blood of German women through sexual intercourse.
³⁷
Der Stürmer
reveled, for example, in the absurd theories put forward by the racist author Arthur Dinter in his bestselling novel,
The Sin Against the Blood
(1918). Dinter had claimed in all seriousness that if a German woman had ever engaged in sexual relations with a Jew, she would transmit Jewish hereditary characteristics even to children conceived with German fathers. For Hitler, who had gnawing doubts about the possible taint of Jewish blood in his own family background, such obsessions had a special significance.
³⁸
Intense, guilt-ridden
sexual puritanism, the deeply rooted desire to avenge himself for early deprivations and social humiliation, together with a morbid fixation on blood and race heightened the irrational extremism of his Judeophobia.

But how far could such personal obsessions be shared by other groups in German society? To what extent, if any, did paranoid antiSemitism help Hitler to win power? It is probably impossible to measure its impact on Germans in any convincing way. We do know that the consequences of the First World War encouraged many disillusioned former soldiers not only to despise the postwar republic and its democratic politicians but also to blame the Jews for the debacle. Right-wing nationalists, conservative monarchists, and members of the old elites, frightened by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the prospect of an encore in Germany, were often receptive to the myth of a Jewish conspiracy. Among the lower classes, many did indeed believe that Jews had profiteered from the war or the reparations. There were others, too, who resented Jewish immigration from the east or believed that the stock exchange and banking capital were mainly in the hands of Jewish financiers. Such arguments were hardly new. They had long attracted impoverished artisans, craftsmen, and small traders.
³⁹
But now, in the overheated atmosphere of the early postwar years, extreme antiSemitism did seem to burst through traditional restraints. It extended from the semi-respectable DNVP (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, the German National People’s Party) to the student fraternities, where it was especially violent; it penetrated the churches and found an echo in Communist efforts to play the nationalist card by denouncing “Jewish finance capital.”
⁴⁰
The notorious Russian anti-Semitic forgery,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, translated into German shortly after the war, briefly became a bestseller.
⁴¹
By 1933, there were more than four hundred anti-Semitic associations and societies in Germany, along with some seven hundred anti-Jewish periodicals. Some of the scurrilous pamphlets portrayed the Jews in the
hysterical tones reminiscent of
Der Stürmer.
More respectable conservative opinion deplored the permissive mores, modernist culture, and radical politics of Berlin in the 1920s, which was attributed to Jewish and Marxist influence.
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