Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
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64 The remark was made by Robert Ley. See Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cit., p. 178.
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65 Bolshevik policy, in this respect surprisingly consistent, is well known and hardly needs further comment. Picasso, to take the most famous instance, is not liked in Russia even though he has become a Communist. It is possible that André Gide’s sudden reversal of attitude after seeing the Bolshevik reality in Soviet Russia (Retour de l’URSS) in 1936, definitely convinced Stalin of the uselessness of creative artists even as fellow-travelers. Nazi policy was distinguished from Bolshevik measures only insofar as it did not yet kill its first-rate talents.
It would be worthwhile to study in detail the careers of those comparatively few German scholars who went beyond mere co-operation and volunteered their services because they were convinced Nazis. (Weinreich, op. cit., the only available study, and misleading because he does not distinguish between professors who adopted the Nazi creed and those who owed their careers exclusively to the regime, omits the earlier careers of the concerned scholars and thus indiscriminately puts well-known men of great achievement into the same category as crackpots.) Most interesting is the example of the jurist Carl Schmitt, whose very ingenious theories about the end of democracy and legal government still make arresting reading; as early as the middle thirties, he was replaced by the Nazis’ own brand of political and legal theorists, such as Hans Frank, the later governor of Poland, Gottfried Neesse, and Reinhard Hoehn. The last to fall into disgrace was the historian Walter Frank, who had been a convinced antisemite and member of the Nazi party before it came to power, and who, in 1933, became director of the newly founded Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands with its famous Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage, and editor of the nine-volume Forschungen zur Judenfrage (1937–1944). In the early forties, Frank had to cede his position and influence to the notorious Alfred Rosenberg, whose Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts certainly shows no aspiration whatsoever to “scholarship.” Frank clearly was mistrusted for no other reason than that he was not a charlatan.
What neither the elite nor the mob that “embraced” National Socialism with such fervor could understand was that “one cannot embrace this Order ...by accident. Above and beyond the willingness to serve stands the unrelenting necessity of selection that knows neither extenuating circumstances nor clemency” (Der Weg der SS, issued by the SS Hauptamt-Schulungsamt, n.d., p. 4). In other words, concerning the selection of those who would belong to them the Nazis intended to make their own decisions, regardless of the “accident” of any opinions. The same appears to be true for the selection of Bolshevists for the secret police. F. Beck and W. Godin report in Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, 1951, p. 160, that the members of the NKVD are claimed from the ranks of party members without having the slightest opportunity to volunteer for this “career.”
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1 See, for instance, E. Kohn-Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police: The Technique of Control by Fear, London, 1945, p. 164 ff. The explanation is that “terror without propaganda would lose most of its psychological effect, whereas propaganda without terror does not contain its full punch” (p. 175). What is overlooked in these and similar statements, which mostly go around in circles, is the fact that not only political propaganda but the whole of modern mass publicity contains an element of threat; that terror, on the other hand, can be fully effective without propaganda, so long as it is only a question of conventional political terror of tyranny. Only when terror is intended to coerce not merely from without but, as it were, from within, when the political regime wants more than power, is terror in need of propaganda. In this sense the Nazi theorist, Eugen Hadamovsky, could say in Propaganda and nationale Macht, 1933: “Propaganda and violence are never contradictions. Use of violence can be part of the propaganda” (p. 22).
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2 “At that time, it was officially announced that unemployment was ‘liquidated’ in Soviet Russia. The result of the announcement was that all unemployment benefits were equally ‘liquidated’” (Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p. 109).
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3 The so-called “Operation Hay” began with a decree dated February 16, 1942, by Himmler “concerning [individuals] of German stock in Poland,” stipulating that their children should be sent to families “that are willing [to accept them] without reservations, out of love for the good blood in them” (Nuremberg Document R 135, photo-stated by the Centre de Documentation Juive, Paris). It seems that in June, 1944, the Ninth Army actually kidnapped 40,000 to 50,000 children and subsequently transported them to Germany. A report on this matter, sent to the General Staff of the Wehrmacht in Berlin by a man called Brandenburg, mentions similar plans for the Ukraine (Document PS 031, published by Léon Poliakov in Bréviaire de la Haine, p. 317). Himmler himself made several references to this plan. (See Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, U.S. Government, Washington, 1946, III, 640, which contains excerpts from Himmler’s speech at Cracow in March, 1942; see also the comments on Himmler’s speech at Bad Schachen in 1943 in Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cit., p. 244.) How the selection of these children was arrived at can be gathered from medical certificates made out by Medical Section II at Minsk on August 10, 1942: “The racial examination of Natalie Harpf, born August 14, 1922, showed a normally developed girl of predominantly East Baltic type with Nordic fèatures.”—“Examination of Arnold Cornies, born February 19, 1930, showed a normally developed boy, twelve years old, of predominantly Eastern type with Nordic features.” Signed: N. Wc. (Document in the archives of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, New York, No. Occ E 3a-17.)
For the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, which, in Hitler’s opinion, could be “wiped out without qualms,” see Poliakov, op. cit., p. 321, and Document NO 2472.
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4 See Hitlers Tischgespräche. In the summer of 1942, he still talks about “[kicking] even the last Jew out of Europe” (p. 113) and resettling the Jews in Siberia or Africa (p. 311), or Madagascar, while in reality he had already decided on the “final solution” prior to the Russian invasion, probably in 1940, and ordered the gas ovens to be set up in the fall of 1941 (see Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, II, pp. 265 ff.; III, pp. 783 ff. Document PS 1104; V. pp. 322 ff. Document PS 2605). Himmler already knew in the spring of 1941 that “the Jews [must be] exterminated to the last man by the end of the war. This is the unequivocal desire and command of the Fuehrer” (Dossier Kersten in the Centre de Documentation Juive).
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5 In this connection there is a very interesting report, dated July 16, 1940, on a discussion at the Fuehrer’s headquarters, in the presence of Rosenberg, Lammers and Keitel, which Hitler began by stating the following “basic principles”: “It was now essential not to parade our ultimate goal before the entire world;...Hence it must not be obvious that [the decrees for maintaining peace and order in the occupied territories] point to a final settlement. All necessary measures—executions, resettlements—can, and will be, carried out in spite of this.” This is followed by a discussion which makes no reference whatever to Hitler’s words and in which Hitler no longer participates. He quite obviously had not been “understood” (Document L 221 in the Centre de Documentation Juive).
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6 For Stalin’s confidence that Hitler would not attack Russia, see Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: a Political Biography, New York and London, 1949, pp. 454 ff., and especially the footnote on p. 458: “It was only in 1948 that the Chief of the State Planning Commission, Vice-Premier N. Voznesensky, disclosed that the economic plans for the third quarter of 1941 had been based on the assumption of peace and that a new plan, suited for war, had been drafted only after the outbreak of hostilities.” Deutscher’s estimate h
as now been solidly confirmed by Khrushchev’s report on Stalin’s reaction to the German attack on the Soviet Union. See his “Speech on Stalin” at the Twentieth Congress as released by the State Department, New York Times, June 5, 1956.
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7 “Education [in the concentration camps] consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis, for the prisoners have for the most part slave-like souls” (Heinrich Himmler, Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff.).
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8 Eugen Hadamovsky, op. cit., is outstanding in the literature on totalitarian propaganda. Without explicitly stating it, Hadamovsky offers an intelligent and revealing pro-Nazi interpretation of Hitler’s own exposition on the subject in “Propaganda and Organization,” in Book II, chapter xi of Mein Kampf (2 vols., 1st German edition, 1925 and 1927 respectively. Unexpurgated translation, New York, 1939).—See also F. A. Six, Die politische Propaganda der NSDAP im Kampf um die Macht, 1936, pp. 21 ff
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9 Hitler’s analysis of “War Propaganda” (Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter vi) stresses the business angle of propaganda and uses the example of publicity for soap. Its importance has been generally overestimated, while his later positive ideas on “Propaganda and Organization” were neglected.
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10 See Martin Bormann’s important memorandum on the “Relationship of National Socialism and Christianity” in Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 1036 ff. Similar formulations can be found time and again in the pamphlet literature issued by the SS for the “ideological indoctrination” of its cadets. “The laws of nature are subject to an unchangeable will that cannot be influenced. Hence it is necessary to recognize these laws” (“SS-Mann und Blutsfrage,” Schriftenreihe für die weltanscluudiche Schulung der Ordnungspolizei, 1942). All these are nothing but variations of certain phrases taken from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, of which the following is quoted as the motto for the pamphlet just mentioned: “While man attempts to struggle against the iron logic of nature, he comes into conflict with the basic principles to which alone he owes his very existence as man.”
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11 J. Stalin, Leninism (1933), Vol. II, chapter iii.
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12 Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Scientism,” in Social Research, December, 1948.
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13 See F. A. v. Hayek, “The Counter-Revolution of Science,” in Economica, Vol. VIII (February, May, August, 1941), p. 13.
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14 Ibid., p. 137. The quotation is from the Saint-Simonist magazine Producteur, I, 399.
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15 Voegelin, op. cit.
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16 William Ebenstein, The Nazi Slate, New York, 1943, in discussing the “Permanent War Economy” of the Nazi state is almost the only critic who has realized that “the endless discussion ...as to the socialist or capitalist nature of the German economy under the Nazi regime is largely artificial...[because it] tends to overlook the vital fact that capitalism and socialism are categories which relate to Western welfare economics” (p. 239).
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17 The testimony of Karl Brandt, one of the physicians charged by Hitler with carrying out the program of euthanasia, is characteristic in this context (Medical Trial. US against Karl Brandt et al. Hearing of May 14, 1947). Brandt vehemently protested against the suspicion that the project was initiated to eliminate superfluous food consumers; he emphasized that party members who brought up such arguments in the discussion had always been sharply rebuked. In his opinion, the measures were dictated solely by “ethical considerations.” The same is, of course, true for the deportations. The files are filled with desperate memoranda written by the military complaining that the deportations of millions of Jews and Poles completely disregarded all “military and economic necessities.” See Poliakov, op. cit., p. 321, as well as the documentary material published there.
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18 The decisive decree starting all subsequent mass murders was signed by Hitler on September 1, 1939—the day the war broke out—and referred not merely to the insane (as is often erroneously assumed) but to all those who were “incurably sick.” The insane were only the first to go.
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19 See Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, Tagebuth eines Verzweifelten, Stuttgart, 1947, p. 190.
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20 Hitler based the superiority of ideological movements over political parties on the fact that ideologies (Weltanschauungen) always “proclaim their infallibility” (Mein Kampf, Book II, chapter v, “Weltanschauung and Organization”).—The first pages of the official handbook for the Hitler Youth, The Nazi Primer, New York, 1938, consequently emphasize that all questions of Weltanschauung, formerly deemed “unrealistic” and “ununderstandable,” “have become so clear, simple and definite [my italics] that every comrade can understand them and co-operate in their solution.”
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21 The first among the “pledges of the Party member,” as enumerated in the Organisationsbuch der NSDAP, reads: “The Führer is always right.” Edition published in 1936, p. 8. But the Dienstvorschrift für die P.O. der NSDAP, 1932, p. 38, puts it this way: “Hitler’s decision is final!” Note the remarkable difference in phraseology.
“Their claim to be infallible, [that] neither of them has ever sincerely admitted an error” is in this respect the decisive difference between Stalin and Trotsky on one hand, and Lenin on the other. See Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, New York, 1939, p. 583.
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22 That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretation of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler’s victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.
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23 Quoted from Goebbels: The Goebbels Diaries (1942–1943), ed. by Louis Lochner, New York, 1948, p. 148.
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24 Stalin, op. cit., loc. tit.
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25 In a speech he made in September, 1942, when the extermination of the Jews was in full swing, Hitler explicitly referred to his speech of January 30, 1939 (published as a booklet titled Der Führer vor dem ersten Reichstag Grossdeutschlands, 1939), and to the Reichstag session of September 1, 1939, when he had announced that “if Jewry should instigate an international world war to exterminate the Aryan peoples of Europe, not the Aryan peoples but Jewry will [rest of sentence drowned by applause]” (see Der Führer zum Kriegswinterhilfswerk, Schriften NSV, No. 14, p. 33).
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26 In the speech of January 30, 1939, p. 19, as quoted above.
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27 Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, Boston, 1944, underlines Hitler’s “phenomenal untruthfulness,” “the lack of demonstrable reality in nearly all his utterances,” his “indifference to facts which he does not regard as vitally important” (pp. 368, 374).—In almost identical terms, Khrushchev describes “Stalin’s reluctance to consider life’s realities” and his indifference to “the real state of affairs,” op. cit. Stalin’s opinion of the importance of facts is best expressed in his periodic revisions of Russian history.
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28 Nazi Primer.
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29 It is interesting to note that the Bolsheviks during the Stalin era somehow accumulated conspiracies, that the discovery of a new one did
not mean they would discard the former. The Trotskyite conspiracy started around 1930, the 300 families were added during the Popular Front period, from 1935 onward, British imperialism became an actual conspiracy during the Stalin-Hitler alliance, the “American Secret Service” followed soon after the close of the war; the last, Jewish cosmopolitanism, had an obvious and disquieting resemblance to Nazi propaganda.
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30 See Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography, Trial and Error, New York, 1949, p. 185.
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31 See, for instance, Otto Bonhard, Jüdische Geld- and Weltherrschaft?, 1926, p. 57.
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32 Hitler used this picture for the first time in 1922: “Moses Kohn on the one side encourages his association to refuse the workers’ demands, while his brother Isaac in the factory invites the masses...” to strike. (Hitler’s Speeches: 1922–1939, ed. Baynes, London, 1942, p. 29.) It is noteworthy that no complete collection of Hitler’s speeches was ever published in Nazi Germany, so that one is forced to resort to the English edition. That this was no accident can be seen from a bibliography compiled by Philipp Bouhler, Die Reden des Führer’s nach der Machtübernahme, 1940: only the public speeches were printed verbatim in the Völkischer Beobachter; as for speeches to the Fuehrerkorps and other party units, they were merely “referred to” in that newspaper. They were not at any time meant for publication.
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33 Feder’s 25 points contain only standard measures demanded by all antisemitic groups: expulsion of naturalized Jews, and treatment of native Jews as aliens. Nazi antisemitic oratory was always much more radical than its program.
Waldemar Gurian, “Antisemitism in Modern Germany,” in Essays on Antisemitism, ed. by Koppel S. Pinson, New York, 1946, p. 243, stresses the lack of originality in Nazi antisemitism: “All these demands and views were not remarkable for their originality—they were self-evident in all nationalistic circles; wha wa remarkable was the demagogic and oratorical skill with which they were presented.”
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34 A typical example of mere nationalistic antisemitism within the Nazi movement itself is Rohm who writes: “And here again, my opinion differs from that of the national philistine. Not: the Jew is to be blamed for everything! We are to be blamed for the fact that the Jew can rule today” (Ernst Rohm, Die Geschichte eines Hochverräters, 1933, Volksausgabe, p. 284).