The Holocaust (3 page)

From the Nazis’ earliest days, the swastika was held aloft on flags and banners, and worn as an insignia on lapels and armbands.

By the time of the establishment of the Stormtroops, membership of the Nazi Party had risen to three thousand. Hatred of the Jews, which permeated all Hitler’s speeches to his members, was echoed in the actions of his followers. Individual Jews were attacked in the street, and at public meetings and street-corner rallies Jews were
blamed, often in the crudest language, for every facet of Germany’s problems including the military defeat of 1918, the subsequent economic hardship, and sudden, spiralling inflation.

Hitler’s party had no monopoly on anti-Jewish sentiment. Several other extremist groups likewise sought popularity by attacking the Jews. One target of their verbal abuse was Walther Rathenau, who, as Foreign Minister, had negotiated a treaty with the Soviet Union. Street demonstrators sang, ‘Knock off Walther Rathenau, the dirty, God-damned Jewish sow.’ These were only words, but words with the power to inspire active hatred, and on 24 June 1922, Rathenau was assassinated.

Following Rathenau’s murder, Hitler expressed his pleasure at what had been done. He was sentenced to four weeks in prison. ‘The Jewish people’, he announced on 28 July 1922, immediately on his release, ‘stands against us as our deadly foe, and will so stand against us always, and for all time.’
¹⁰
In 1923, a Nuremberg Nazi, Julius Streicher, launched
Der Sturmer
, a newspaper devoted to the portrayal of the Jews as an evil force. Its banner headline was the slogan: ‘The Jews are Our Misfortune’.

On 30 October 1923 Arthur Ruppin, a German Jew who had earlier settled in Palestine, noted in his diary, while on a visit to Munich, how ‘the anti-Semitic administration in Bavaria expelled about seventy of the 350 East European Jews from Bavaria during the past two weeks, and it is said that the rest will also be expelled before too long.’
¹¹

On 9 November 1923 Hitler tried, and failed, to seize power in Munich. Briefly, he had managed to proclaim a ‘National Republic’. He was arrested, tried for high treason, and on 1 April 1924 sentenced to five years in detention.

After less than eight months in prison, Hitler was released on parole. During those eight months he had begun a lengthy account of his life and thought. Entitled
Mein Kampf
, My Struggle, the first volume was published on 18 July 1925. In it, the full fury of Hitler’s anti-Jewish hatred was made clear: he explained that he was drawing upon his personal experiences as a young man in Vienna before the First World War.
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He had come to Vienna in February 1908, shortly before his nineteenth birthday, and had remained there until May 1913.
¹³

Every page of Hitler’s recollections contained references to the
Jews of Vienna and their evil influence. ‘The part which the Jews played in the social phenomenon of prostitution,’ he wrote, ‘and more especially in the white slave traffic, could be studied here better than in any other West European city,’ with the possible exception, he added, of ‘certain ports’ in southern France: ‘a cold shiver ran down my spine when I first ascertained that it was the same kind of cold-blooded, thick-skinned and shameless Jew who showed his consummate skill in conducting that revolting exploitation of the dregs of the big city. Then I became filled with wrath.’
¹⁴

There were, Hitler argued, two perils threatening ‘the existence of the German people’, Marxism and Judaism.
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It was in Vienna, he wrote, that he had discovered the truth about the Jewish conspiracy to destroy the world of the ‘Aryan’, by means of political infiltration and corruption, using as its tool the Social Democratic Party, and as its victim, the working class. This word ‘Aryan’ was a linguistic term, originally referring to the Indo-European group of languages. Since before the end of the nineteenth century it had already been distorted as a concept by a number of writers, among them Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who gave it racial connotations, and used it to denote superiority over the ‘Semitic’ races. Yet the term ‘Semitic’ itself was originally not a racial but a linguistic term, relating, not to Jews and non-Jews, but to a language group which includes Hebrew and Arabic. None of these refinements troubled the new racialism. For Hitler, ‘Aryan’ was synonymous with ‘pure’, while ‘Semitic’ was synonymous with ‘Jew’, and hence ‘impure’.

Considering the ‘satanic skill’ displayed by Jewish ‘evil councillors’, Hitler wrote, ‘how could their unfortunate victims be blamed?’ The Jewish politicians were masters of ‘dialectical perfidy’, their very mouths ‘distorted the truth’. Marxism was a Jewish device, a Jewish trap. ‘The more I came to know the Jew, the easier it was to excuse the workers.’
¹⁶

Hitler presented himself as the man who had seen, and who would prevent, not only the destruction of German life, but the destruction of life on earth, by ‘the Jew’. The dangers, as he saw them, concerned the racial integrity of the German people, and a deliberate assault on that integrity. As he told his readers:

For this reason, Hitler added, ‘the Jew systematically endeavours to lower the racial quality of a people by permanently adulterating the blood of the individuals who make up that people.’
¹⁷

In
Mein Kampf
Hitler outlined his mission: to expose, and then to destroy the threat posed by a worldwide Jewish effort to destroy the foundations of ‘Aryan’ life. ‘Was there any shady undertaking,’ he asked, ‘any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate?’ and he went on to answer his own question in these words: ‘On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.’
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Germany could only become a great nation again, Hitler argued, if it saw, and repelled, the Jewish danger. Germany’s defeat in 1918 could have been prevented, but for ‘the will of a few Jews’: traitors inside the German Reich.
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‘There is no such thing’, Hitler concluded, ‘as coming to an understanding with the Jews. It must be the hard-and-fast “Either-Or”.’
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In his book, Hitler described the mission that inspired him, telling his readers:

There was little reason for anyone to heed such hate-mongering in the summer of 1925. The Weimar republic was scarcely halfway through its first decade, slowly establishing a democratic, parliamentary regime. The twin economic pressures of reconstruction and the payment of reparations to the Allies were being lessened year by year. The crisis of whirlwind inflation had passed. Employment was slowly rising. International conferences offered Germany, for the first time since her defeat, equal participation in European diplomacy. On 16 October 1925, three months after the publication of Hitler’s first, bitter, obscure volume, Germany signed the Locarno Agreement, guaranteeing, as an equal partner with Britain, France, Belgium and Italy, the frontiers of Western Europe.

Under Article Two of Locarno, Germany and France, as well as Germany and Belgium, mutually undertook ‘that they will in no case attack or invade each other or resort to war against each other’.
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These undertakings offered the prospect of security for the war-weary masses of all the signatory states, which included Poland and Czechoslovakia.

For the eight million Jews of Europe, Locarno seemed to offer the prospect of a quiet life. Several years had passed since the Ukrainian massacres of 1918 and 1919. But in at least one Jew’s mind, vengeance was called for. His name was Shalom Schwarzbard—his Hebrew first name meaning ‘Peace’. On 25 May 1926, in Paris, he killed the exiled Ukrainian leader, Simon Petlura. ‘I am performing a duty for our poor people,’ he had written to his wife a few hours earlier. ‘I am going to avenge all the pogroms, the blood….’
²³

On 10 December 1926 Hitler published the second volume of
Mein Kampf
. Once again, anti-Jewish venom permeated its pages. ‘At the beginning of the war,’ Hitler wrote, ‘or even during the war, if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jews who were corrupting the nation had been forced to submit to poison gas, just as hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from every social stratum and from every trade and calling had to face it in the field, then the
millions of sacrifices made at the front would not have been in vain.’ On the contrary, Hitler continued, ‘if twelve thousand of these malefactors had been eliminated in proper time, probably the lives of a million decent men, who would be of value to Germany in the future, would have been saved.’
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These were still the writings of an extremist with no prospect of political influence, let alone power. In 1926 his party’s membership stood at seventeen thousand, among them the black-uniformed
Schutzstaffeln
, ‘Protection Squad’, or SS, set up a year earlier to provide Hitler and the Nazi leadership with personal protection: a personal security service. It was all on a small, if noisy, scale.

On 4 July 1926 a youth movement had been inaugurated for young Nazis: the Hitler Youth. In 1927 the Nazi membership rose to forty thousand. The uniformed Stormtroops were active on the streets: brutal thugs, with a political party to give them respectability.

In May 1928, the Nazi Party participated in the German national elections, securing twelve seats in the Reichstag.

European democracy did not seem to be endangered by such apparently minor developments. Germany, disarmed, by the Treaty of Versailles, posed no military threat to its neighbours. The Locarno Agreement, signed with such high hopes, continued to serve as an apparent guarantee of stability. Germany’s remaining reparations payments were being rapidly reduced by negotiations.

Suddenly events began to favour Hitler and his followers. Inflation began to rise again. Unemployment grew to unprecedented levels. The growth of German Communist support triggered a reaction on the right. Extremism replaced the Weimar democratic ideal.

The internal problems which had given the Nazis their first few seats continued to worsen. Unemployment rose yet again, reaching three million by the end of 1929. Both workers and employers were its victims. Small businessmen suffered equally with those on the factory floor. As the economic distress grew, the Nazis denounced Jewish ‘wealth’ and ‘conspiracy’. In Berlin on 1 January 1930, brown-uniformed Stormtroops killed eight Jews: the first Jewish victims of the Nazi era. For the next nine months, Jews were molested in cafés and theatres, and synagogue services were
constantly interrupted by these uniformed hooligans, already dignified by the title ‘Party Members’.
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An election was called for mid-September 1930. During the campaign, the Stormtroops were again active in terrorizing Jews as well as Communist voters and other political opponents. In the course of the campaign, seventy-eight Jews were among those wounded by SA thugs. The election itself was held on 14 September 1930. To the amazement of election-watchers in Germany and abroad, the number of Nazi seats rose from 12 to 107. With more than six million votes, the Nazi Party was now the second largest party in the state.
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On the day the Reichstag opened, several Jews were attacked in Berlin, and the windows of Jewish-owned department stores were broken. As the Nazi deputies walked to the Reichstag, their supporters in the crowd chanted one of the party’s popular slogans, ‘
Deutsckland erwache, Juda verrecke!
’, ‘Germany awake, death to Judah!’

On 15 March 1931 Nazi Party officials were told: ‘The natural hostility of the peasant against the Jews, and his hostility against the Freemason as a servant of the Jew, must be worked up to a frenzy.’
²⁷
Six months later, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, squads of young Stormtroops attacked Jews returning from synagogue. An eye-witness recorded how, in one incident, ‘while three youths beat an elderly gentleman with their fists and rubber truncheons, five other young men stood around to protect them.’
²⁸

The strong helping the strong to attack the weak; this was to become a hallmark of Nazi action. So too was the deliberate choice of a Holy Day in the Jewish calendar and of a religious target. In 1931 alone, fifty synagogues were desecrated, and several thousand tombstones defiled in more than a hundred Jewish cemeteries.
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Frequent though they were, it was not these anti-Jewish actions, but the spectre of unemployment that made daily headlines throughout Germany, providing the Nazis with a massive source of discontent, recruits and votes. In the election for President in June 1932, which the incumbent President, Field Marshal Hindenburg, won with 53 per cent of the ballot, the former corporal, Adolf Hitler, came second, winning over 36 per cent of the votes cast. The Communist candidate, Ernst Thälmann, received only one in ten of the votes. Of the two extremes, Nazism had proved the more attractive. It was also the more effectively organized: in 1931 the SS,
organized and enlarged by Heinrich Himmler, established its own Intelligence Service, the
Sicherheitsdienst
, or SD, headed by Reinhard Heydrich, to keep a close watch on dissent within the party.