The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  The concept of the Volk would subsequently become of immense importance to Hitler and the Nazis. The Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, even commissioned an extraordinary film, released in 1936, entitled Ewiger Wald (Eternal Forest) which glorified the power and importance of the forest and the peasant farmer. ‘Our ancestors were a forest people,’ said the press release issued with the film, ‘their God lived in holy groves, their religion grew from the forests. No people can live without the forest, and people who are guilty of deforesting will sink into oblivion …’13 The final commentary line in the film reinforced this link between the Volk and the forest: ‘The people, like the forest, will stand for ever!’14

  Before the First World War the most popular youth movement in Germany was the Wandervogel, an organization that called for young men and women to journey into the countryside and recapture the connection between the German people and the soil. ‘It was a spiritual movement,’ says Fridolin von Spaun, who joined the Wandervogel as an adolescent. ‘It was a reaction against the Emperor Wilhelm era, which was all about industry and commerce.’15 Other young Germans joined groups like the German Gymnastics League and exercised in the open air. ‘The German Gymnastics League was the first time I ever came across the swastika,’ says Emil Klein, who was a member before the First World War. ‘The four F’s – frisch [fresh], fromm [pious], fröhlich [happy], frei [free] – formed a double swastika on the badge that you had, a bronze badge that you wore as an insignia.’16 The swastika was adopted by a number of völkisch groups. They believed that this ancient symbol, used by various cultures in the past, represented a link with their early ancestors, in part because similar markings had been found on German archaeological relics.

  All these new developments were a problem for German Jews, since they were excluded from the concept of the Volk. Most German Jews lived in cities and worked in jobs that were the antithesis of the völkisch ideal – the Jews were demonstrably not people who ‘came from the forest’. In Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), an enormously popular German novel published in 1855,17 the central Jewish character, the businessman Veitel Itzig, is portrayed as a loathsome individual, obsessed with money and cheating honest but naive Germans. Itzig is a parasite, living a life that could not be further away from the noble ideal of the peasant who tills the soil.

  While not every individual who subscribed to the idea of the Volk was necessarily an anti-Semite, the Jew nonetheless became a symbol for the völkisch movement as a whole of everything that was wrong with the new Germany. If you were a peasant farmer who found it hard to cope with the sudden growth of cities and the reality of the railway that now cut through your land – you could blame the Jew. If you were a shopkeeper who found that customers were deserting you for new department stores – you could blame the Jew. If you laboured in a workshop making hand-crafted products and now couldn’t sell them because of the presence in the market of mass-produced factory goods – you could blame the Jew.

  These arguments rested, of course, on prejudice. If German Jews were living in cities, if they were starting up department stores and factories, it was to a large extent because they had been excluded from working in völkisch ‘approved’ occupations for hundreds of years. In short, the Jews were now being blamed for not being attached to the soil after they had been forbidden from owning land. This developing antipathy towards German Jews was all the more remarkable because there were hardly any Jews living in Germany. Fewer than 1 per cent of Germans were Jewish. Many Germans never came into contact with Jews. But the absence of Jews is no bar to anti-Semitism.

  The old Christian-based prejudices against German Jews did not disappear as the völkisch movement grew, but were reinforced. Paul Lagarde, one of the most committed völkisch anti-Semites, ranted in terms that Martin Luther would have recognized. ‘We are anti-Semites,’ he wrote in Juden und Indogermanen (Jews and Indo-Germans), published in 1887, ‘because in 19th-century Germany the Jews living among us represent views, customs, and demands that go back to the times of the division into peoples shortly after the Flood … because in the midst of a Christian world the Jews are Asiatic heathens.’ The Jews were, according to Lagarde, ‘A people that has contributed nothing to history over thousands of years’.18

  The false perception that the Jews were both an alien force and the secret powerbrokers in the new Germany led Heinrich Class, the leader of the Pan-German League, to write Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’ (If I Were Kaiser). Class’s book, published in 1912, two years before the outbreak of the First World War, linked the need to ‘return to health in our national life’ with the demand that ‘Jewish influence’ be ‘completely expunged or screwed back to a bearable, innocuous level’.19 Class proposed a variety of restrictive measures against the Jews. He called for newspapers that were owned by Jews or employed Jewish writers to ‘make this fact known’ and for Jews to be excluded from serving in the army or navy and banned from professions like teaching or the law.

  In parallel to both völkisch and ‘traditional’ Christian-based anti-Semitism, another very different way of attacking the Jews was also growing. It was the idea behind Hitler’s call in his letter of September 1919 for ‘anti-Semitism based on reason’. ‘Modern’ anti-Semites, like Hitler, attempted to rely on pseudo-scientific reasons to justify their hatred of the Jews, arguing that the Jews should be despised not because of their religion, but because of their ‘race’.

  The notion that human beings could be distinguished from each other by race, and that some ‘races’ were superior to others, had received quasi-intellectual backing with the publication in 1855 of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) by Arthur de Gobineau.20 Trained as a diplomat, not a scientist, Gobineau conjured up a world in which there were three races, ‘the black, the yellow, and the white’. Of these ‘the negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder.’ Yellow people were ‘clearly superior to the black’ but ‘no civilized society could be created by them; they could not supply its nerve force, or set in motion the springs of beauty and action.’ At the top of the racial hierarchy was the ‘white race’. They have ‘a remarkable, and even extreme, love of liberty’. Thus ‘the lesson of history’ was that ‘all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it …’ Gobineau also believed that all European ‘civilizations’ – including that of the ‘German races’ – had been created, ‘at least in part’, by a group called the ‘Aryans’ who had migrated to Europe from India.

  Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a writer born in England who later became a German citizen, introduced an anti-Semitic dimension to all of this in his Die Grundlagen des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), published in 1899. The book achieved a wide readership – and not just in Germany. In his effusive Introduction to the English edition, Lord Redesdale wrote that the book had been ‘speedily declared to be one of the masterpieces of the century’ and that the ‘full fruit’ of Chamberlain’s ‘learning and scholarship’ had now ‘ripened for the good of the world’.21 Chamberlain argued that while the Aryans represented the ultimate ideal, the Jew embodied precisely the reverse. Even though some Jews might be hard to tell apart from Aryans at first sight, the reality was that all Jews were an ‘alien Asiatic people’ who had ‘by the vilest means acquired immense wealth’.22 However, since only the Jews and the Germanic race had managed to keep themselves ‘pure’, it followed that these two ‘races’ – the Aryan and the Jew – were engaged in a mighty struggle for supremacy.

  Understandably, Chamberlain and Hitler had a great deal in common. When they met in 1923 Chamberlain said that as a result of the encounter ‘the condition of his soul’ had been transformed ‘at one fell swoop’.23 In return the Nazis adopted Chamberlain as one of their own. His seventieth birthday in September 1925 received huge coverage in th
e Nazi paper the Völkischer Beobachter, and Foundations of the Nineteenth Century became a revered text.

  Many people – especially those whom Chamberlain and de Gobineau said were ‘superior’ – were attracted by this racial theory. The idea that it was possible to assess the worth of an individual just by their physical appearance proved to be a seductive one. In the popular German novel Helmut Harringa (1910) a judge cannot accept that Harringa could be guilty, simply because he looks so pure.24 It’s a lesson that Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, seems to have taken to heart. On a visit to an SS unit in 1938, a soldier ‘caught’ his eye because of his ‘appearance’. Merely because of his looks the man was judged by Himmler to be a ‘capable, good-blooded German’. After investigating the soldier’s background, Himmler called for him to be promoted.25

  There is one further element to add to this toxic mix of ‘traditional’ anti-Semitism, völkisch anti-Semitism and ‘racial’ anti-Semitism – the emergence of the eugenics movement. The word ‘eugenics’ (literally ‘good race’ from the Greek) was coined by the English scientist Francis Galton. In 1869 in Hereditary Genius he argued that the key question that society had to address was simple – who was permitted to breed? He wrote that by ‘careful selection’ it would be possible ‘to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations’. Society had to recognize that ‘each generation has enormous power over the natural gifts of those that follow’ and thus owed a duty ‘to humanity to investigate the range of that power, and to exercise it in a way that, without being unwise towards ourselves, shall be most advantageous to future inhabitants of the earth’.26

  Galton never advocated trying to stop certain people from breeding by force, but others did. In 1895, Alfred Ploetz, a German supporter of eugenics, or ‘race hygiene’ as he called it, raised the possibility of doctors deciding whether babies should live or die based on their racial worth. He also said that ‘Advocates of racial hygiene will have little objection to war since they see in it one of the means whereby the nations carry on their struggle for existence.’ He even suggested that during a battle ‘inferior’ people could be used as ‘cannon fodder’ and placed in positions of particular danger.27

  Many of the pioneers in the eugenics movement were not anti-Semites – Ploetz, for instance, thought the Jews were ‘racial Aryans’ – but their teachings were of enormous use to those who were. The idea that ‘racial hygiene’ was central to the health of a nation, combined with Houston Chamberlain’s notion that the Jews were a racial threat to ‘Aryan’ people, added a potentially catastrophic element to the anti-Semitic brew. Traditional anti-Semitism had been based on religion. If the Jews converted to Christianity then they had a chance of escaping persecution. But the idea that ‘Jewishness’ was something inherent in an individual – that it was present, as the Nazis came to believe, in the blood – meant that there was no escape. Your ‘race’, over which you had no control, was your destiny. You could be the kindest, most generous person imaginable, but if your ‘race’ was assessed as inferior or dangerous then you were at risk of persecution.

  Hitler explicitly stated in his September 1919 letter that ‘the Jews are definitely a race and not a religious community.’ This was fundamental to his anti-Semitic belief. It meant, for him, that the question of what religion ‘Jews’ practised scarcely mattered, since ‘there is hardly a single race whose members belong exclusively to one particular religion.’

  However, despite a desperate search to identify a test for Jewish ‘blood’, the Nazis – not surprisingly – never managed to find a scientific way of telling whether or not an individual was a member of the Jewish ‘race’ or not. As a result, once the Nazis started to persecute and eventually exterminate Jews, they had to rely on a ‘Jewishness’ test that was religious. They assessed whether or not you were a Jew according to how many of your grandparents had practised the Jewish faith. Nonetheless, the Nazis still believed that the Jews were a ‘race’ not a ‘religion’. The primacy of ‘race’ in human history was so central to Hitler’s worldview that he would never let the small matter of science get in the way of his belief.

  It is at this point that a warning needs to be stated. Given this evidence of German anti-Semitic belief predating the emergence of Hitler and the Nazis as a political force, it would be easy to suppose that there is a straight line from the pre-First World War hatred of the Jews to the Third Reich and the Holocaust, that the horror that was to come was somehow inevitable. But such a view would be mistaken, for two important reasons. First, despite the vehemence of their views, the German anti-Semitic parties were not successful in convincing the rest of the country to support them. One calculation is that in the Reichstag of 1893 there were only sixteen elected representatives from anti-Semitic groups, plus about twelve more in other parties who supported their views.28 An overwhelming majority of German voters – 95 per cent – were not prepared to support overtly anti-Semitic parties at the ballot box.

  Of course, what these statistics don’t reveal is latent prejudice against the Jews. There would have been a good deal of that, given – as we have seen – that Christian-based anti-Semitism had existed for centuries in Germany. But then, at the time, many other countries in Europe exhibited elements of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the second reason that German anti-Semitism should not be overstated is that if you had lived at the start of the twentieth century and had been asked to predict which country would later pursue an exterminatory policy against the Jews, it’s highly unlikely that you would have chosen Germany. Most probably you would have picked Russia. The amount of anti-Semitic violence Russian Jews suffered before the First World War was truly horrific. In a pogrom (the word itself is Russian) against the Jews of Kishinev in April 1903, hundreds of houses and stores were destroyed and forty-nine Jews murdered. The Jews had been falsely, and ludicrously, accused of killing children in order to use their blood in the preparation of bread for Passover. Two years later in Odessa, in October 1905, around 1,600 Jewish homes were destroyed and several thousand Jews were killed or wounded.29 These are just two examples of murderous attacks on Jews in Russia during this period – there were many more. Altogether about 2 million Jews fled from Russia between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War – all seeking a better and safer life. Nothing like this happened in Germany during the same period. German Jews would have read about the murderous attacks taking place in Odessa and Kishinev and considered themselves lucky to live in a civilized country where such barbarities did not occur.

  What is harder to assess precisely is Hitler’s own attitude towards the Jews before the First World War. He lived in Vienna between 1908 and 1913 and admired the mayor, Karl Lueger – a committed anti-Semite - who once claimed that Jewish power over newspapers and capital amounted to ‘the direst terrorism’ and that he wanted to liberate Christian people from ‘Jewish domination’.30 He also believed that the Jews were the ‘greatest enemy of the German people’.31 But it is debatable whether Hitler ever voiced such views himself at the time. What is certain is that he was prepared to do business with Jewish dealers when selling his pictures in Vienna.32 Perhaps, as one leading scholar suggests, he was just being ‘pragmatic’ during his encounters with Jews and had nonetheless absorbed Viennese anti-Semitism.33 We simply don’t know for sure.

  There is no doubt, however, that Hitler wholeheartedly supported the German cause in the First World War and relished the opportunity to take part in the conflict. In August 1914 he petitioned to join a Bavarian regiment and so became a soldier in the German, not the Austrian, Army. Hitler was a committed pan-German, and even though he had been born an Austrian, he considered himself first and foremost a German. He was a brave soldier and won the Iron Cross first class. In the Second World War, he would wear that same Iron Cross on his jacket. What he didn’t mention was that it had been a Jewish officer, Hugo Gutmann, who had recommended that he receive it.34

  By 1916 the war was going badly for
the Germans. There was stalemate on the front line and shortage of food back at home. The idea of a swift victory – on which the plans of the German General Staff had been predicated – was now revealed as a fantasy. People looked for someone to blame for Germany’s difficulties; and many began to blame the Jews. The Prussian War Minister claimed that his ministry ‘continually’ received complaints from the ‘population at large’ that ‘large numbers of men of the Israelitic faith’ were shirking their duty to serve on the front line.35 As a result a census was conducted to determine how many Jews were actually taking part in the war. The results of that survey were never officially published. The suspicion was that after the German authorities had discovered that the data they had collected demonstrated that German Jews were bearing their fair share of the burden of war they concealed the results, rather than see Jews exonerated from the falseness of the charge.

  The fact was that German Jews enlisted in the army in the same proportion as non-Jews. Nonetheless, the lie persisted that they had somehow dodged their duty to the Fatherland. In the 1920s, for instance, the newspaper Der Schild ran a scurrilous story claiming that ‘a field hospital for Jews was established near the front lines, beautifully equipped with the latest medical gear and an all-Jewish staff. After waiting for eight weeks it treated its first patient who arrived shrieking with pain because a typewriter had fallen on his foot.’36