The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (44 page)

One of the great puzzles of the twentieth century, then, is that the most extreme racial violence in all history had its origins in a society where assimilation was progressing with exceptional rapidity. Hitler’s determination to exclude Jews from the
Volksgemeinschaft
meant identifying and persecuting a tiny minority that was inextricably interwoven into the fabric of German society. And that may be the crucial point. Perhaps the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is best understood as a reaction to the very success of German-Jewish assimilation. In the words of Peter Drucker, author of
The Jewish Question in Germany
(published in Vienna in 1936): ‘The Jewish Question was so especially sensitive in Germany because the assimilation [
Selbstauflösung
– literally ‘self-dissolution’] of the Jews had advanced further there than anywhere else.’ Can it really be a mere coincidence that Martin Heidegger, who so eagerly embraced Hitler’s new order, was also embroiled between 1925 and 1928 in a passionate love affair with his Jewish student, Hannah Arendt?

Hitler had made his own views on the specific question of racial intermarriage clear as early as February 1922: ‘Every Jew who is caught with a blonde girl should be [Interjection: ‘Strung up!’] I don’t want to say “strung up”, but there should be a court to condemn these Jews. [Applause.]’

In
Mein Kampf
he elaborated on the point at considerable and
revealing length. ‘Race,’ he declared, ‘does not lie in the language, but exclusively in the blood.’ No one understood this better than

the Jew, who attaches very little importance to the preservation of his language, but all importance to keeping his blood pure… While he seems to overflow with ‘enlightenment’, ‘progress’, ‘freedom’, ‘humanity’, etc., he himself practises the severest segregation of his race. To be sure, he sometimes palms off his women on influential Christians, but as a matter of principle he always keeps his male line pure. He poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own. The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is the Christian who marries a Jewess. The bastards, however, take after the Jewish side. Especially a part of the higher nobility degenerates completely. The Jew is perfectly aware of this, and, therefore, systematically carries on this mode of ‘disarming’ the intellectual leader-class of his racial adversaries. How close they see the approaching victory can be seen by the hideous aspect which their relations with the members of other peoples takes on.

In a crucial passage, he proceeded to indulge in one of those perverted sexual fantasies which recur in anti-Semitic propaganda:

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl 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. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a larger scale.

The moral for Hitler was clear: ‘[A] racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In the world he will forever be master over bastards and bastards alone.’ But that meant that the Jews’ efforts ‘systematically to lower the racial level by a continuous poisoning of individuals’ had to be resisted:

In heedlessly ignoring the question of the preservation of the racial foundations of our nation, the old Reich disregarded the sole right which gives life in this world. Peoples who bastardise themselves, or let themselves be bastardised, sin against the will of eternal Providence, and when their ruin is encompassed by a stronger enemy it is not an injustice done to them, but only the restoration of justice… The lost purity of the blood alone destroys
inner happiness forever, plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the consequences can never more be eliminated from body and spirit… [T]he question of preserving or not preserving the purity of the blood will endure as long as there are men. All really significant symptoms of decay of the pre-War period can in the last analysis be reduced to racial causes.

Despite this allusion to pre-war decay, Hitler’s anti-Semitism seems to have grown markedly during and after the war; it was only retrospectively that he denounced Vienna as ‘the incarnation of the desecration of the blood’ (
Blutschande
), ‘with its repulsive racial mix of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croatians’ and ‘Jews and more Jews’. Here and in later statements, Hitler struck a pseudo-moralistic tone of revulsion at Jewish sexuality, portraying the individual Aryan ‘victim’ of
Blutschande
as essentially passive in the absence of an aggressive ‘folk-community’. The relatively open Weimar debates on questions such as abortion, homosexuality, prostitution and venereal disease struck Hitler as further proof of the ‘total capitulation’ of ‘those who guide the nation and the state’ to the ‘Jewification of the spiritual life and mammonization of the mating instinct’. These would ‘sooner or later destroy all our descendants’ if no remedial action was taken.

The key point is that when Hitler accused the Jews of aiming to ‘pollute the blood’ of the Aryan race, he had in mind precisely the upsurge in mixed marriages that had characterized the 1920s. Nor was he alone in thinking this way. One of the best-selling books of the decade was Arthur Dinter’s
Sin Against the Blood
(1918), which tells the story of a young woman whose ‘blood’ has been fatally polluted because her father, a press baron with a sinister interest in women’s magazines, is a Jew. Her German fiancé Hermann Kämpfer comes to realize the indelible nature of this ‘curse’ when their unmistakably Jewish sons are born. (The first is described as a ‘dark-skinned…scarcely human something…[with] deep, dark eyes… under long dark eyelashes… [and] a squashed flat nose like an ape’s’.) When Hermann later marries a more authentically Nordic Frau, the same thing happens – simply because his new wife had once slept with a Jew! These experiences are Hermann’s punishment for ‘sinning against the holy blood of his race’. But they awaken him to a shocking truth:

The German
Volk
was being systematically corrupted and poisoned!… If the German
Volk
does not succeed in shaking off and rendering harmless the Jewish vampire that it is unwittingly allowing to batten on the blood of its heart… it will come to grief in the foreseeable future.

Within a year of publication, Dinter’s book had gone through twenty-eight printings and sold 120,000 copies. By 1929 a quarter of a million copies had been printed.

Dinter was only one of many post-war writers to write in these terms. Otto Kernholt’s
From the Ghetto to Power
(1921) warned at length about mixed marriages as a strategy aimed at enfeebling the German race. The same preoccupation manifested itself in the nationalist press. In the hope of incriminating Jewish students, anti-Semitic
agents provocateurs
at Frankfurt University were alleged to have scrawled on the walls such graffiti as: ‘Yesterday this horny Jew raped a little blonde girl’. Another frequent accusation, dating back to the 1890s and beyond, was that Jews were involved in the white slave trade. Everything – even the fall of the Hohenzollern monarchy – could be explained in terms of sexual relations between Jews and Gentiles. Debate raged as to the effects of intermarriage. Were such marriages more or less fruitful than endogamous marriages? What would be the effect on the ‘racial health’ of the German
Volk
if mixed marriages were not banned?

The attacks on mixed marriages need to be seen in the wider context of Weimar sexuality. Because of its identification with the campaign to relax the laws against homosexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science presented an obvious target for Nazi attacks on ‘Jewish morality’. As the newspaper
Völkische Beobachter
put it, ‘Jews are forever trying to propagandize sexual relations between siblings, men and animals, and men and men.’ It was also possible to draw tendentious political inferences from the crimes of
Lustmörder
(rapist-murderers) like Fritz Haarmann, Wilhelm Grossmann, Karl Denke and Peter Kürten, ‘the Düsseldorf vampire’. (It did not help matters that the serial killer in Fritz Lang’s
M
was played by a Jewish actor, Peter Lorre.) Interracial sex was in the news in the 1920s. There were bitter controversies about the role of
Ostjuden
as either pimps or prostitutes in what would now be called the sex industry. Following
the deployment in the French-occupied Rhineland of colonial troops from Senegal, Morocco and elsewhere, there was a vehement press campaign against the so-called Black Disgrace (
schwarze Schmach
). Semi-pornographic postcards and cartoons were published showing grotesque Negroes menacing half-dressed white women. ‘Shall we silently accept’, demanded one Dr Rosenberger in a typical contribution to the campaign, ‘that in future instead of the beautiful songs of white, pretty, well-formed, intellectually developed, lively, healthy Germans, we will hear the raucous noise of horrific, broad skulled, flat nosed, ungainly, half-human, syphilitic half-castes on the banks of the Rhine?’ The fact that there genuinely were around 500 ‘Rhineland bastards’ confirms that miscegenation was no imaginary construct. That the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior could recommend as early as 1927 that these children be sterilized also illustrates that the desire to circumscribe the rights of ‘racial aliens’ (
Volksfremde
) predated Hitler’s accession to power. Hitler too complained about ‘the Negroes [in] the Rhineland’ and the ‘necessarily resulting bastardization’, but characteristically represented this as merely an aspect of a wider Jewish conspiracy to ‘poison the blood’ of the German
Volk
.

Along with most of his most senior henchmen, Hitler seems genuinely to have believed that Jews posed an insidious biological threat to the German
Volk
. Yet it is impossible to overlook an element of self-repression in much Nazi propaganda on this issue; those most publicly averse to the idea of interracial sex often gave the unintended impression that this was precisely the direction of their own private fantasies. As a young man, Goebbels became engaged to Else Janke, an elementary school teacher who was half-Jewish. She helped him to find a job at the Dresder Bank during the 1923 hyperinflation, but was reluctant to marry him, possibly because of his club foot. Shortly after she told him that her mother was Jewish, Goebbels noted that ‘the original magic was gone’. ‘The discussion recently about the race question kept ringing in my ears,’ she wrote to him after a quarrel. ‘I could not get it out of my mind, and almost saw the problem as an obstacle to our further life together. I am firmly convinced, you see, that in this respect your thinking goes decidedly too far.’ It was at this time that the future Propaganda Minister first read Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West
, where he found ‘the root of the Jewish question
… laid bare’. Goebbels’s first references in his diary to the Jews as ‘filthy pigs’, ‘traitors’ and ‘vampires’ date from the breakdown of his relationship with Janke. Even the young Heinrich Himmler could acknowledge the appeal of a Jewish woman. No one – not even Hitler – was more obsessed with the sexual aspects of race: in 1924, for example, he described in his diary his Nordic archetype’s ‘shining skin flushed with blood, blond hair, clear conquering eyes [and] the perfect movements of a perfect body’. This was ‘the ideal picture’ of racially pure womanhood ‘which we Germans dream of in youth and as men are prepared to die for’. But when he met a Jewish dancer named Inge Barco in a Munich café in July 1922, Himmler was evidently attracted, insisting she had ‘absolutely nothing of the Jew in her manner, at least so far as I can judge’. There are other examples too: for example, Ludwig Clauss, an expert on racial ‘psyches’ much in demand in the Third Reich, who had an affair with his Jewish assistant Margarethe Landé.

Once in power, the Nazis made miscegenation a recurrent theme of their propaganda. Press attacks on Jewish doctors were based on their allegedly lecherous ‘attitude’ towards ‘Germanwomen’. The theme that the Jews sought to ‘pollute’ Aryan blood through sexual contact recurs time and again in Nazi propaganda. It is there, for example, in Kurt Plischke’s
The Jew as Racial Polluter
, which called for the public naming and shaming of German women who ‘secretly or openly go with Jews’, and in Gerhard Kittel’s
Historical Preconditions of Jewish Racial Mixing
, which accused the Jews of having tried to turn Germany into a ‘racial mishmash’. The message was spelt out with a crudely pornographic undertone in a story entitled ‘What Happened to Inge at the Jewish Doctor’s’, published in Julius Streicher’s
Der Stürmer
:

Inge sits in the Jew doctor’s reception room. She has to wait a long time. She looks through the magazines on the table. But she is much too nervous even to read a few sentences. Again and again she remembers her talk with her mother. And again and again her mind dwells on the warnings of her BDM [League of German Girls] leader: ‘A German must not consult a Jew doctor! And particularly not a German
girl
! Many a girl who has gone to a Jew doctor to be cured has found disease and disgrace!’…

The door opens. Inge looks up. There stands the Jew. She screams. She’s
so frightened she drops the magazines. She jumps up in terror. Her eyes stare into the Jewish doctor’s face. His face is the face of a devil. In the middle of this devil’s face is a huge crooked nose. Behind the spectacles two criminal eyes. And the thick lips are grinning. A grin that says: ‘Now I’ve got you at last, little German girl!’

There are similar themes in the two historical films made in 1940 to coincide with the release of the anti-Semitic documentary
Der ewige Jude
(The Eternal Jew), a vicious caricature of East European Jews as insalubrious degenerates. In
Jud-Süss
, the ‘court Jew’ Süss-Oppenheimer rapes Dorothea Sturm (played by Kristine Söderbaum), who then commits suicide. Similarly, in
Die Rothschilds
, the Jewish banker Nathan Rothschild is portrayed as lusting after the heroine, the wife of Rothschild’s ‘Aryan’ rival Turner. In exhibitions, too, the sexual leitmotif was employed. The Frankfurt Anti-Jewish Exhibition of November 1940 illustrated ‘the rapacity, the uncontrolled sexuality, and the parasitic nature of the Jews’ with a newspaper cutting describing how the ‘Jew Klein from Vegesack near Bremen was seen to have sexual intercourse with [his] Aryan maidservant’. Another illuminating example is Friedrich Ekkehard’s novel
Sturmgeschlecht
[
Storm Generation
]:
Zweimal 9. November
(1941), which portrays a Freikorps troop falling into a trap laid for them by a ‘stunningly beautiful’ Jewish-Bolshevik
femme fatale
. Here, as in so much Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, the erotic if not pornographic undertone is unmistakable.