The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  The Jews, not for the first time in history, became a scapegoat. Walther Rathenau, a leading Jewish industrialist and politician, wrote prophetically to a friend in 1916: ‘The more Jews are killed [in action] in this war, the more obstinately their enemies will prove that they all sat behind the front in order to deal in war speculation. The hatred will grow twice and threefold.’37

  The circumstances in which the First World War ended for Germany afforded anti-Semites more opportunities to blame the Jews. First, because in the wake of the armistice in November 1918 there was a socialist uprising. The Ruhr-Echo proclaimed that ‘The red flag must wave victoriously over the whole of Germany. Germany must become a republic of Soviets and, in union with Russia, the springboard for the coming victory of the World revolution and World Socialism.’38 In April 1919, revolutionaries proclaimed a ‘Soviet Republic’ in Bavaria. Communists, led by Eugen Leviné, tried to impose extreme socialist policies on Munich and took expensive apartments from their owners in order to house the poor. They also used violence to gain their ends – ten prisoners were murdered on 30 April. In May 1919, right-wing paramilitaries, the Freikorps, marched through Bavaria, entered Munich and defeated the Communists. They took bloody revenge on the revolutionaries and killed more than a thousand of them.

  A number of the key Communist revolutionaries had been Jewish. As a result young men like Fridolin von Spaun, who joined a Freikorps immediately after the First World War, found it easy to justify their anti-Semitism by making a crude link between the Jews and Communism. ‘The people sent to Bavaria to set up a [Soviet] councils’ regime were almost all Jewish,’ he says. ‘Naturally we also knew from Russia that the Jews there were in a very influential position. So that in Germany the impression gradually took hold that Bolshevism and Judaism are the same, near enough.’39

  The Jews were not just blamed for trying to instigate a Communist revolution in Germany. They were also blamed for the loss of the war; the destruction of the old political regime based on the Kaiser; agreeing to the terms of the hated Versailles peace treaty; and participating in the Weimar government which presided over the hyperinflation of the early 1920s.

  Anti-Semites pointed to alleged Jewish involvement in all of these contentious issues. For example, they noted that the Jewish lawyer Hugo Preuss had drafted the Weimar constitution; that the Jewish politician Hugo Haase was chairman of the Independent Social Democratic Party in 1917; that another Jewish statesman, Otto Landsberg, had travelled to Versailles as Minister of Justice and listened to the demands of the Allies at the peace conference after the war; and that the Jewish industrialist Walther Rathenau hadn’t just worked in the War Ministry during the conflict, but had later served as Foreign Minister in the Weimar government.

  All the above facts were true. But they did not represent the whole truth. Not only was it absurd to hold Jewish statesmen solely responsible for collective decisions in which they had only played a part, but also any attempt to ‘blame’ these people as individuals collapsed under examination. For instance, while it was true that Hugo Preuss had been involved in drafting the Weimar constitution, the final version was not his and contained clauses that he had not written. Equally, while Otto Landsberg heard the Allied demands at Versailles, the anti-Semites never mentioned that he was so opposed to the treaty that he resigned. As for Hugo Haase and Walther Rathenau, they were both assassinated shortly after the war – Haase in 1919 and Rathenau in 1922 – and so could hardly be held responsible for any subsequent political deficiencies in the Weimar state.

  But prejudice works only if some facts are ignored and others are exaggerated, and many Germans were in no mood to question their emotional response to the dire situation in which they now found themselves. Millions of them were short of food as a result of the Allied naval blockade of Germany – a blockade that was maintained until the summer of 1919 in order to pressurize the new government into signing peace terms. Germans also endured the effects of the 1918 flu pandemic, which caused immense suffering and a large number of deaths. Given all this – and the fear of imminent Communist revolution – many turned to anti-Semitism as a convenient way of explaining their misery. Theodor Eschenburg, for instance, was fourteen years old when the war ended, and remembers that his father suddenly ‘developed a racial anti-Semitism, which he didn’t have before. The world revolution, the world bankers, the world press – all full of Jews.’40

  It was against this background of a lost war and enormous discontent that a new political force would emerge in the south of Germany – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Or Nazis, for short.

  2. Birth of the Nazis

  (1919–1923)

  The Nazi party was born out of a fundamental change in the German political environment. For German anti-Semites didn’t just hold the Jews responsible for even more problems now than before the war – their hatred gained an entire new dimension.

  In 1912 the leader of the Pan-Germans, Heinrich Class, had entitled his attack on the Jews ‘If I Were Kaiser’. Class thus imagined that the changes he called for could be made within the established political system of which the Kaiser was the head. But it was inconceivable in 1919 that a leading anti-Semite would call a new attack on the Jews ‘If I were President of the Weimar Republic’. That is because the government was no longer seen as the means by which a solution to the Jewish ‘problem’ could be sought – the government was seen as part of the Jewish ‘problem’.

  Amid all this discontent, anti-Semitic groups flourished. The most powerful was the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (German People’s Protection and Defiance League), founded in February 1919. By 1922 the League had 150,000 members; and every one of them had signed up to a constitution calling for the ‘removal’ of the ‘pernicious and destructive influence of Jewry’.1

  Bavaria, in particular, was a breeding ground for a whole host of radical anti-Semitic groups. In Munich, for instance, the Thule Society demanded that each prospective member swear that ‘no Jewish or coloured blood’ flowed ‘in his or his wife’s veins’.2 Once they had fulfilled these entrance requirements, members of the society were exposed to the rhetoric of the founder – Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff. His views became positively apocalyptic at the time of the defeat of the German Army in November 1918. He proclaimed that now ‘our mortal enemy rules: Judah. We don’t know yet what will arise from this chaos. We can guess. The time of fight will come, of bitter hardships, a time of danger! We, who are in this fight, are all in danger, for the enemy hates us with the infinite hatred of the Jewish race. It is now an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth … Now, brothers and sisters, it is no longer the time for contemplative speeches and meetings and feasts! Now it is time to fight, and I want to and will fight! Fight until the swastika [the symbol of the Thule Society] ascends triumphantly … Now we need to talk about the German Reich, now we need to say that the Jew is our mortal enemy …’3

  Another leading member of the Thule Society was an alcoholic playwright in his early fifties called Dietrich Eckart – a man who would have a very considerable influence on the thirty-year-old Adolf Hitler. Eckart was a convinced anti-Semite. He was most famous for his adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which he altered so as to make the trolls into caricature Jews.4 In another of his plays, Familienvater, Eckart told the story of a courageous journalist who tried to expose the corrupt power of the Jews in the media; the journalist wrote a play in order to warn the public about the danger of the Jews, but the Jews used their influence to make it fail. In a twist of events that would be comic were the underlying history not so bleak, when Eckart’s play about an unsuccessful playwright whose play failed because of the Jews was itself unsuccessful, Eckart blamed – predictably – the Jews.5 For Eckart, ‘the Jewish question’ was the ‘issue that actually contains every other issue. Nothing on earth would remain obscure if one could only shed light on its mystery.’6 Furthermore, he wrote, ‘No people in the world’ would let the Jew live if they understoo
d him: if they ‘suddenly saw through what he is and what he wants, screaming in horror they would strangle him the very next minute’.7

  Eckart was a supporter of a small political group in Munich called the German Workers’ Party, which was loosely associated with the Thule Society, and it was through this association that he and Hitler came to form a special bond. On 12 September 1919, a week before Hilter sent his letter outlining the reasons for his anti-Semitism, he attended a meeting of the party in a beer hall in Munich. The German Workers’ Party was one of many small Bavarian political groups on the far right. All of them followed the same essential script: German soldiers had lost the war because they had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by Jewish profiteers working behind the lines, and the Jews were the instigators of both Communist revolution and the hated Weimar democracy. At the meeting Hitler was talent-spotted by the chairman of the party, a railway mechanic called Anton Drexler. Recognizing Hitler’s ability to express himself in forceful terms, Drexler pressed him to join.

  Over the next months, however, it was Dietrich Eckart who most influenced Hitler’s development. Paradoxically, the qualities in Hitler that Eckart valued were the very ones that had previously made him appear rather ‘peculiar’8 to his comrades during the First World War. Hitler’s intolerance, his social inadequacies, his inability to engage in normal conversation and his absolute certainty that he was right – these, to Eckart, were all now positive attributes. There was, Eckart no doubt believed, a great deal to be angry about in the wake of the German defeat, and Hitler was anger personified. That, combined with his extreme views about who was to blame for the current situation, was exactly what the confused masses in Munich needed to hear. Above all, Hitler’s service in the war as an ordinary soldier who had won an Iron Cross for his bravery marked him out from the old leadership elite who had so demonstrably failed the nation. ‘The rabble has to be scared shitless,’ said Eckart. ‘I can’t use an officer; the people no longer have any respect for them. Best of all would be a worker who’s got his mouth in the right place … He doesn’t need to be intelligent; politics is the stupidest business in the world.’9 All of which led Eckart to make this prophecy about Hitler: ‘This is the coming man of Germany, one day the world will speak of him.’10

  As for Hitler, his relationship with Eckart was one of the closest he ever had with another human being. He revered Eckart almost to the point of hero worship. He said that when he first met Eckart, ‘I was intellectually a child still on the bottle. But what comforted me was that, even with him, it hadn’t all sprouted of itself – that everything in his work was the result of a patient and intelligent effort.’11 Hitler felt that Eckart ‘shone in our eyes like the polar star’.12

  This odd couple – the bald, prematurely aged alcoholic and the socially awkward ex-soldier – had many adventures together before Eckart’s death in December 1923. Some alleged escapades attained an almost mythical status. Later accounts claimed, for example, that in March 1920 they flew in a light plane to Berlin in an attempt to make contact with right-wing revolutionaries who had just overthrown the government in the ‘Kapp Putsch’. After a journey battling through the elements, during which Hitler vomited over the side of the plane, they landed in Berlin. Eckart now posed as a businessman and Hitler pretended to be his assistant. In order to make the impersonation more effective, Hitler put on a fake beard. They made their way to the Hotel Adlon, the headquarters of Wolfgang Kapp, the leader of the short-lived Putsch, only to be told by his press officer that he wasn’t there. Eckart looked at the press officer and told Hitler they had to leave at once – because the press officer was clearly Jewish. Hitler subsequently said that he had realized that the Kapp Putsch would fail, because the ‘press chief of Kapp’s government … was a Jew’.13

  Three weeks before this alleged abortive trip to Berlin, the German Workers’ Party – now renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (colloquially, the Nazis) – had launched a twenty-five-point party programme at the Hofbräuhaus beer hall in Munich. Point four of the programme, which was composed largely by Hitler and Anton Drexler, read: ‘Only members of the nation may be citizens of the State … Accordingly, no Jew may be a member of the nation.’14 The penultimate point elaborated further on the anti-Semitic policy of the party by announcing that the Nazi party ‘combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us’.

  Over the next few months and years, Hitler preached his anti-Semitic beliefs at countless rallies and meetings of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. He said that ‘solving the Jewish question is the central question for National Socialists’ and that the Nazis could ‘solve’ it only by using ‘brute force’.15 He also claimed that ‘the Jew destroys and must destroy because he completely lacks the conception of an activity which builds up the life of the community’16 and that ‘no salvation is possible until the bearer of disunion, the Jew, has been rendered powerless to harm.’17 Hitler even attacked the Jews for bringing democracy to Germany – ‘Democracy is fundamentally not German: it is Jewish’18 – and repeated the traditional anti-Semitic fantasy that ‘the Jews are a people of robbers. He [the Jew] has never founded any civilization, though he has destroyed civilizations by the hundred. He possesses nothing of his own creation to which he can point.’19

  Hitler emphasized to his audience that there could never be such a thing as a ‘good’ Jew. Individual actions and achievements counted for nothing. For Hitler ‘it is beside the point whether the individual Jew is ‘decent or not’. In himself he carries those characteristics which Nature has given him, and he cannot ever rid himself of those characteristics. And to us he is harmful.’20 For Hitler, the decision to emancipate the Jews was ‘the beginning of an attack of delirium’ because ‘equality’ had been given to a ‘people’ that was ‘clearly and definitely a race apart’.21 The official policy of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was for the German Jews to be stripped of their citizenship, but in an article in March 1921 for the Völkischer Beobachter – a newspaper bought for the Nazis with the assistance of Dietrich Eckart – Hitler went further, and suggested that Germany could also be protected by imprisoning Jews. ‘The Jewish undermining of our Volk must be prevented,’ he wrote, ‘if necessary through confining its instigators in concentration camps. Briefly, our Volk must be cleansed of all the poison at the top and the bottom.’ 22

  Hitler’s radical anti-Semitism was obvious, even at this early stage in the history of the Nazi party, but it did not necessarily follow that all of those who joined the party at this time did so because they also felt strongly about the Jews. Some, like Emil Klein, were motivated primarily by disillusionment about the lost war and fear of a Communist revolution. ‘We were a young war generation,’ he says. ‘We saw our fathers being called up. We saw them garlanded with flowers at the stations as they set off for war in France. We saw the weeping mothers they left behind.’23 Then, after his father returned, defeated, in 1919 ‘at the time of the Munich collapse, we suddenly saw the red flags. Because the Communists had entered and bombarded the whole city in their vans, distributing leaflets. And they advertised for their party and for the revolution with the slogan, “Workers of the world unite!” ’

  Emil Klein’s route to anti-Semitism came via the alleged link between Communism and Judaism: ‘I looked into it at the time and I discovered that the ones at the top [at the time of the Munich “Soviet republic”] were mainly literary Jews – well, a whole series of them. It did cause enormous offence in Bavaria that Jews were setting the tone. And that’s where the expression came from: “Jew republic”.’ Once exposed to the rhetoric of the Nazi party, Klein extended the scope of his anti-Semitism, and came to believe that the Jews were not just behind Communism, but responsible for the ills of capitalism as well. He thought that ‘the fight against Jewry’ contained within the Nazi party programme was ‘not against the Jews as such, but against international high finance, the financial power of Jewry … So, not against the
Jews as individuals, but against capitalism, which stems from Jewry, from Wall Street that is. Wall Street was always being mentioned.’

  Hitler did much more, however, than merely tell Nazi supporters that the Jews were to blame for Germany’s problems. He didn’t only preach a doctrine of hate – he also offered hope. He painted a vision of a new Germany in which class differences would disappear and all ‘Aryan’ Germans would bond themselves together in a national community. Emil Klein was attracted by the idea that the Nazi party ‘wanted to eradicate class differences, with the working class here, the bourgeoisie here and the middle classes here. These were deeply ingrained concepts that split the nation into two parts, and that was an important point for me, one that I liked … that the nation has to be united.’24

  Jutta Rüdiger, who would later become a senior figure in the Nazi organization Der Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, also wanted to see a united German community: ‘The fact that the family comes first, then the clan, then the community, then the nation and then Europe, [this was] not a nebulous concept but an idea based on the roots of the family … The concept was a real classless society without any differences, whereas previous youth movements, and that is partly true of the boy scouts, too, had consisted mostly of grammar school boys, with the working-class children kept mostly to themselves. We had united the young workers and the young people still at school into one entity. There was no difference between them and nobody would ask “what does your father do?” ’25