by Ian Kershaw
For Hitler, a second war had to be fought to undo the calamity of the first, to reverse the course of history. And avenging the causes of that catastrophe that had ushered in the ‘Jewish’ republic of Weimar, a regime produced by the ‘criminals’ of November 1918 who had ruined Germany, meant the destruction of the Jews. ‘The removal of the Jews altogether’ had to be the ‘final aim’ of any national government in Germany, he had written in his first political statement, in September 1919.11 ‘The sacrifice of millions at the front’, he had declared in a terrible passage towards the end of Mein Kampf a few years later, need not have happened if ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas’ at the beginning of the war.12 It was not a blueprint for genocide. But the connection between war and the Jews, an idea that, once embedded in Hitler’s mind, never left it, had unmistakable genocidal connotations. And from 1933 the man with this idea ruled Germany.
The idea was not confined only to Hitler’s mind. In the direct aftermath of the Reichskristallnacht pogrom on 9–10 November 1938, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s chief paladin, spoke in inner Nazi circles of ‘a great showdown with the Jews’ in the event of another war.13 Two weeks later, on 24 November, the main SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, spoke of eradicating Jews as criminals ‘with fire and sword’, resulting in ‘the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its complete annihilation’. Such sentiments were by this time shared entirely or in good part by other leading Nazis. And, of crucial importance, they had become institutionalized in the most ideologically dynamic segment of the Nazi regime–the burgeoning empire that had come under the aegis of the SS-run Security Police. Here, careers could be made by developing an expertise on the ‘Jewish Question’. Adolf Eichmann, later the orchestrator of the ‘final solution’, was the paradigmatic example.14 But careerism and ideology went hand in hand. Those who earned their spurs by working ceaselessly to find ways of ‘solving’ the ‘Jewish problem’ were in the main true believers in the cause. They had long since imbibed the doctrine that the Jew was the root of evil, and that a strong, dominant Reich had to be one purged of ‘impure elements’, most especially of Jews.15
As supreme leader of the regime, Hitler embodied the basic belief that Germany’s salvation rested on the removal of the Jews. Others strived in different ways to implement this ideological imperative. In the Security Police, the ‘mission’ had taken institutional form. And it was incorporated in the wider aim of war and conquest. Hitler’s explicit linkage of the Jews and war had not only been able to play upon and exploit existing deep antisemitic prejudice. It had also given it a dynamic, messianic, purpose. By the time the war started, the Nazi leadership had been forged into a proto-genocidal elite.
Underpinning the genocidal mentality was a demonization of the Jew which had become the central figment of the Nazi imagination. This transcended practical considerations. Jews were a tiny minority of the German population–a mere 0.76 per cent in 1933–and self-evidently in no position to challenge for power in the state, make competing claims on territory or scarce resources or pose in any other than phantasmic fashion the sort of perceived threat which served as the pretext for a number of instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the twentieth century. The Nazi image of the Jew went way beyond conventional hatreds. It presupposed the Jew as nothing less than the supreme existential danger. Within Germany, Jews were seen as ‘poisoning’ German culture. The ‘true’ essence of what was supposedly German was set against the subversive currents of ‘Jewish’ materialism and corruption. But the danger was seen to go even further. Dominating, in Nazi imagery, both the capitalism behind the ‘plutocratic’ enemies, Great Britain and the United States, and the Bolshevism behind the Soviet enemy, the Jew posed the ultimate threat to Germany’s very existence. In fact, the Jew stood for a world which was totally anathema to Nazism, a set of moral values which had filtered through both Judaism and Christianity to form the foundations of the civilization that, as he repeatedly made plain, Hitler wanted to eradicate. In this sense, Nazism amounted to an apocalyptic vision of a renewed nation and society which would arise out of the destruction and eradication of the corrosive values epitomized by the Jew. It was no less than a fundamental attempt to change the course of history, to attain national redemption by eliminating not only all Jewish influence, but the Jews themselves.16
Resting upon such a premiss, the decision to kill the Jews of Europe, though it arose in quite specific circumstances in 1941, followed an inexorable, awful logic. In examining other fateful decisions made by political leaders in 1940 and 1941, we have considered what, if any, alternative choices were open to them, as they viewed the situation at the time. But in looking at the decision to kill the Jews, no such alternatives posed themselves; or, rather, they posed themselves only as alternative methods of destruction.
In another way, too, the decision to kill the Jews was unique among those we have examined. It was no conventional decision, such as to go to war or not, taken after confidential discussions with a small number of ministers, generals or other associates, but then proclaimed publicly. It was a state secret of the highest order, not to be talked about even by the initiated. The most incriminating orders were given orally. Camouflage language was used in discussions at the highest level. Hitler himself never spoke directly of the killing of the Jews, even in his innermost circle. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and responsible to Hitler alone for the implementation of the extermination programme, in contrast, did speak explicitly about the killing of the Jews. But this was at a late stage, in addressing SS men, then, subsequently, party leaders in early October 1943. With the prospect of defeat looming ever larger, it was the openness of a band of sworn conspirators, those who had burned their boats and were in it together. Himmler insisted that they had acted with a moral right and duty ‘to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us’. He described the ‘extermination of the Jewish people’ as a ‘glorious page in our history that has never been written and is never to be written’.17 His comments combined perverted pride in a fulfilment of a historic duty with the implicit sense that a crime of enormous proportions had been committed, one which had been necessary but could never be divulged.
Given such secrecy even within the upper echelons of the regime, a yet further difference from the decisions explored so far is self-evident. The decision to kill the Jews can only be pieced together on the basis of circumstantial evidence. In fact, the question of precisely when and how the decision was taken cannot be answered with certainty. Indeed, to speak of a ‘decision’ may itself be misleading in its implication of one finite moment when a precise pronouncement was delivered. A series of authorizations, each building cumulatively upon the last, is probably a more appropriate way of imagining what took place. But even if that is what happened, the authorizations, taken together, amounted to a resolve that the Jews of Europe should cease to exist. That is, they added up to a decision–even if it was one made up of parts.
We have, in fact, already noted that there were at least two parts to the decision: first to kill the Jews of the Soviet Union, then to extend the killing–a second phase which might have necessitated more than a single further authorization. Hitler’s role in the making of the decision, or decisions, cannot be precisely reconstructed. No written order has been found. Almost certainly, none will be found. But Hitler’s fingerprints are all over the ‘final solution’. Jews would doubtless have suffered discrimination under any nationalist leader in Germany at the time. The transformation into all-out genocide nevertheless needed Hitler. When, in March 1942, Goebbels described Hitler as ‘the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’, he was stating the obvious.18 Without Hitler, the ‘final solution’ would have been unthinkable.
II
Antisemitism was virulent and endemic throughout most of Europe in the decades preceding the Nazi genocide. As the ‘final solution’ unfolded, long-standing hatreds
ensured that Nazi rulers in the countries they conquered never lacked willing helpers to carry out the deportations, then killing, of Jews. But the ‘final solution’ itself could not have arisen anywhere other than Germany. It had to be a German creation.19
Hatred of Jews had traditionally been at its most vicious in the Russian Empire and eastern Europe, where brutal pogroms–the word itself is Russian–and localized massacres of Jews had long been endemic. In the Habsburg Empire, too, antisemitism was rampant. Hitler himself had in his Vienna days been a youthful admirer of two outspoken antisemites, the Pan-German leader Georg Schönerer and the mayor of the city, Karl Lueger.20 Nor was deep prejudice about Jews lacking in western Europe. France had been rocked just before the turn of the twentieth century by the ‘Dreyfus affair’, when the trial and sentence to a penitentiary on cooked-up charges of treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, gave rise to a frenzy of antisemitic outpourings.21
Germany before the First World War was far from being Europe’s heartland of antisemitism. The small, mainly well-to-do Jewish community wanted to be assimilated. Archaic legal restrictions preventing this had by now been abolished. But the very fact that Jews were thriving in Imperial Germany caused resentment and animosity. Economic depression in the 1880s spawned an upsurge. A specifically antisemitic party was founded in the 1890s, and, though it lost most of its support within a decade or so, this had now mainly found its way into mainstream politics, most notably in the Conservative Party, and into the shrill nationalism of patriotic associations, pressure groups and student unions. There was certainly plenty of hatred of Jews in evidence. Even in Bismarck’s time more than five hundred antisemitic publications appeared.22 As the nineteenth century reached its close, published anti-Jewish rhetoric increased rather than lessened in quantity and became, if anything, even more vicious. Theodor Fritsch’s populist tract Handbuch der Judenfrage (Handbook of the Jewish Question), which Hitler later claimed to have ‘intensively studied’, chalked up its twenty-fifth edition within five years of publication in 1887. And the racist diatribe by the Germanized Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteeth Century), portraying the Jew as the embodiment of evil and ‘proving’ that Jesus Christ was an aryan, became a bestseller on its appearance in 1900.23
Antisemitism was, then, widespread throughout Germany, but for the most part discriminatory rather than given to major pogrom-like outrages as in eastern Europe (though small-scale, localized violence was no rarity). The rhetoric of the pernicious antisemitic literature in circulation was certainly frightening in its talk of Jews as poison, bacilli, parasites or vermin. The implications were obvious. But politics and rhetoric were far apart. None of this found its way into state-supported action. The Jewish experience in Imperial Germany was ambivalent. Alongside the discrimination ran distinct promise for a better future.24 An observer of the European scene on the eve of war in 1914 would, even with the greatest foresight, have found it hard to imagine that a generation or so later Germany would unleash a programme of mass extermination to wipe out the Jews of Europe.
Hatred of Jews would, by itself, not have produced the ‘final solution’. It was, of course, an indispensable component. But more was needed. Hitler himself saw in 1919 that hot-headed antisemitic outbursts, leading to pogroms, had to be converted into more systematic ‘rational’ persecution if the ultimate ‘removal’ of Jews (by which, at the time, he almost certainly meant expulsion from Germany) was to be attained.25
To turn commonplace antisemitic prejudice and hatred, however appalling, into a programme for genocide they had first to be harnessed to the more widely appealing goal of national renewal. This had to be popularized through a party which could gain state power. The state power then had to be utilized to make the removal of Jews the central focus of policy within the framework of utopian plans for national salvation. The aim of removal of the Jews had to be institutionalized by organs of the state capable of systematic planning and ruthless implementation. Finally, the immensely brutalized conditions of a total war portrayed as a struggle for national survival were required to produce the accelerated drive to complete eradication of the perceived fundamental enemy. Precisely this, of course, happened under Nazism. It is hard to see how it could have happened anywhere else. There was nothing inevitable about Nazism’s triumph, no one-way street from German antisemitism to the death camps. But once Hitler had total power in the state, the odds against a genocidal outcome narrowed sharply–even if no one at the time could conceivably imagine the full scale of the eventual horror.
Without the First World War this would, in any case, have been unthinkable. As the high hopes of 1914 turned to the immense disillusionment and bitterness that accompanied the mounting losses and dreadful material hardships of the later war years, the search for scapegoats did not have to look far. It became easy to stir up animosity towards Jews. Hysterical antisemitism was built into the agitation of the pro-war lobby. Opposition to the war was decried as Jewish-fomented defeatism. Once the Bolshevik Revolution had taken place, Jews were, in addition, seen as the agents of world revolution. And when catastrophic defeat was accompanied by socialist revolution in Germany, subversion by Jews became a centrepiece of explanations of the trauma.
Hitler believed passionately that the Jews had caused Germany’s disaster. But he was far from alone in the burning hatred that festered within him from this time. His early successes in the Munich beerhalls came from the way he could tap such sentiments. Most of those who were to become the provincial leaders of his party, the Gauleiter, his indispensable regional viceroys, came from the same generation and felt much as he did about the baleful influence of the Jews. The roughnecks in his paramilitary organization, the SA (Sturmabteilung, the stormtrooper section), were also for the most part vicious antisemites–or became such once they had joined. But both paramilitary activity, embracing vitriolic antisemitism, and the radical ethnic-nationalist (völkisch) ideas of Hitler and the infant Nazi movement, had a far wider currency.
Many in intellectual circles and in the broader, well-read sectors of the middle classes, far removed from the vicious paramilitary thugs, dreamed of national unity and regeneration to overcome the rancour, divisions and perceived cultural and moral decline of the new socialist-run democracy. Removal of what was seen as corrosive Jewish influence fitted into ideas of national resurgence, the rebuilding of the Reich by a future great leader. That Germany’s ‘redemption’ could only come about by ‘removing’ the Jews had been one strand of political culture stretching back to Richard Wagner–though neither the great composer nor practically anyone else imagined this to mean physical extirpation.26 Amid widespread conservative-reactionary cultural pessimism framed by a lost war, the end of the monarchy, socialist revolution and a hated democratic system, antisemitism found a fertile breeding-ground. The antidote was a new millenarianism, a national rebirth. Among the well-educated young Germans attending universities in the early 1920s were those who would qualify with doctorates in law, taking in and digesting ideas about the inner renewal of the German people by removing ‘harmful influences’, just as detoxification revitalizes the human body. The most pernicious ‘harmful influence’ that had to be removed, they learned, was that of the Jew. Some of those swallowing these ideas as students would later join the Security Police, become the planners of genocide and lead the murderous Einsatzgruppen in Russia.27
Between 1916 and 1923, then, antisemitism had established itself as a central component of right-wing thinking in Germany, and was now taken up in the politics of mass movements, among them of course the still small Nazi Party. The calmer middle years of the Weimar Republic from 1924 to 1929 flattered to deceive. The antisemitic fundamentalists had been temporarily forced out of the limelight. But they had not disappeared. And even in a pluralist democracy Jews, outside their own organizations and some liberal and left-wing circles, found few friends or defenders. Once that democracy crumbled
and collapsed from 1930 onwards, opening up the path for Hitler’s rise to power, increasing numbers of Germans were exposed to the full antisemitic armoury as they became drawn into the ever-expanding Nazi movement.
Antisemitism was seldom the main attraction of Nazism. But once in the party and its affiliations, there was no escaping it. By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he had behind him an enormous mass movement of some 850,000 members and around a half a million stormtroopers, all of them wedded to political aims that left no place for Jews in Germany. Beyond the party faithful, more than thirteen million Germans now backed Hitler. They were not all committed antisemites. But they all voted for Hitler in the full knowledge that he and his party favoured measures to ensure the total exclusion of Jews from German society.
The years of the Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1933 were certainly uneasy ones for Jews. They were subjected to unending agitation, frequent discrimination and sporadic violence. Even so, it was possible for a Jew to feel ‘at home’ in Germany in those years.28 That altered abruptly on 30 January 1933, when Hitler took power.