Other diarists were somewhat less pessimistic. Thus, Willy Cohn, the former high school teacher from Breslau, noted, on October 11, that all the special victory announcements of the previous day looked like “advance laurels” (Vorschusslorbeeren) and added: “After all, the whole world belongs to the others!”35 On October 20, Cohn mentioned the repeal of the “Neutrality Law” by Congress, and concluded, “This means, in the short as the long run, the entry of the United States in the war.”36 As for Sebastian, he noticed slight nuances in the German communiqués; after recording the news of victory in the East, as trumpeted by German and Romanian newspapers on October 10, he noted on the next day: “A slight, almost imperceptible lowering of the tone in today’s papers. ‘The Hour of Collapse Is Near,’ said one headline in Universal. Yesterday the collapse was already an established fact. But the fact is that fighting is still taking place.”37 Among Jews farther west, opinions may have been more starkly divided: “The events in Russia divide the Jews into two groups,” Biélinky noted on October 14. “There are those who consider Russia as already defeated and who hope for some generous gesture on the part of the victor. The others keep a robust faith in Russian resistance.”38
Strangely enough the misperception of the military situation on the German side went on, particularly at army headquarters, until early November. Halder, the cool planner, envisioned an advance of 200 kilometers east of Moscow, the conquest of Stalingrad, and the capture of the Maykop oil fields, no less. It was actually Hitler who brought his generals’ fantasies down to earth and back to the more modest goal of taking Moscow.39 On November 1, the Nazi leader ordered the resumption of the offensive against the Soviet capital.40 By then, however, stiffening Soviet resistance, lack of winter equipment, subzero temperatures, and sheer exhaustion of the troops brought the Wehrmacht to a halt. By the end of November the Red Army had recaptured Rostov-on-Don, which the Germans had occupied a few days earlier; it was the first major Soviet military success since the beginning of the campaign. On December 1, the German offensive was definitively halted. On December 4, fresh Soviet divisions transferred from the Far East counterattacked before Moscow: The first German retreat of the war started.
Goebbels’s diary reflected growing pessimism: “A detailed OKW report about the communications and food supply situation in the East reveals considerable difficulties,” he wrote on November 16. “The weather conditions compel us to take constantly new and unplanned measures. And, as the weather situation is so exceptionally unstable, the measures sometimes have to be changed from one day to the next. Our troops are confronted with unprecedented difficulties.”41
While the Wehrmacht faced a perilous situation on the Eastern Front, the United States further inched toward war. On October 17 a German submarine attacked the US destroyer Kearney, killing eleven sailors; an American merchant ship, the Lehigh, was torpedoed off the African coast a few days later; and on October 31, the destroyer Reuben James was sunk, and more than one hundred American sailors perished. In the midst of this undeclared naval war (in which, apparently, German submarines did not identify the nationality of the vessels in time),42 the American president announced, on October 27, that he was in possession of documents showing Hitler’s intention to abolish all religions, and of maps indicating German plans to divide Latin America into five Nazi-controlled states.43 Roosevelt’s allegations were false, but his intentions were clear enough. Congress—and public opinion—did not remain indifferent: On November 13, the Neutrality Act, which considerably hampered the delivery of American aid to Britain and the Soviet Union, was repealed. On November 16 Goebbels commented: “The political situation is essentially determined by the course of events in the United States. The American press makes no secret anymore of what Roosevelt’s aims are. He wants to join the war at the end of next year at the latest.”44
For Berlin, Roosevelt’s moves were of course the result of a Jewish plot. “Roosevelt’s speech [of October 27] made a big impression,” Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano noted in his diary on the twenty-ninth. “The Germans have firmly decided to do nothing that will accelerate or cause America’s entry into the war. Ribbentrop, during a long lunch, attacked Roosevelt. ‘I have given orders to the press to always write: “Roosevelt, the Jew”; I wish to make a prophecy: that man will be stoned in the Capitol by his own people.’ I personally believe that Roosevelt will die of old age, because experience teaches me not to give much credit to Ribbentrop’s prophecies.”45
Besides the pressure Hitler may have hoped to put on “the Jewish clique” around Roosevelt by deporting the Jews of Germany, the best chance of avoiding the American entry into the war rested on the success of the isolationist campaign. The antiwar agitation was led, at this stage, by the America First Committee and its star speaker, Charles A. Lindbergh, the world-famous pilot and tragic father of a kidnapped and murdered son.
On September 11, following Roosevelt’s “active defense” speech, Lindbergh delivered his most aggressive address yet, entitled “Who Are the War Agitators?” before some eight thousand Iowans packed into the Des Moines Coliseum. Lindbergh indicted the administration, the British, and the Jews.46 Regarding the Jews, he began by expressing compassion for and understanding of their plight and for their reasons to wish the overthrow of the regime in Germany. “But no person of honesty and vision,” he added, “can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.”
Lindbergh’s second point in no way mitigated the impact of the first: “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength.” After mentioning that a few Jews understood the threat that war could mean for them, Lindbergh continued: “But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government.” Probably without sensing it, Lindbergh had sunk at that stage to the level of a notorious American anti-Semitic rabble-rouser, the radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, or, for that matter, to the level of Goebbels’s arguments.
The third and final part regarding the Jews was, implicitly, the most provocative of all: “I am not attacking either the Jewish or British people,” he declared. “Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”47
“Lindbergh,” one of his biographers commented, “had bent over backward to be kind about the Jews; but in suggesting the American Jews were ‘other’ people and that their interests were ‘not American,’ he implied exclusion, thus undermining the very foundation of the United States.”48 The widespread outrage raised by his speech not only put an end to Lindbergh’s political activity but also demonstrated that, despite strong anti-Semitic feelings among segments of American society, the great majority would not admit any exclusionary talk, even if presented in “reasonable terms.” Goebbels missed neither the speech nor the reactions to it.
“During the day,” the minister recorded on September 14, “the original text of Colonel Lindbergh’s speech arrives. He has launched a sharp attack against the Jews but of course was caught as a result in a wasps’ nest. The New York press howls as if stung by a tarantula. One cannot but admire Lindbergh: relying just on himself he has dared to face this association of business manipulators, Jews, plutocrats and capitalists.”49
On December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On December 11, preempting the inevitable, the Nazi leader declared war on the United States.
III
Hitler’s prolonged low-key rhetorical stance regarding the Jews came to an abrupt end in the fall of 1941: The restraint of the previous months gave way to an explosion of the vilest anti-Jewish invectives and threats. This sharp reversal closely followed the decision to deport the Jews of Germany; it was inaugurated by what must have been the most bizarre “order of the day” in modern times.
On the eve of Typhoon, on October 2, addressing the millions of soldiers poised for what was to be “the last of the great decisive battles of the year…the last powerful blow that will shatter this enemy before the onset of the winter,” Hitler left no doubt about the true identity of the “horrendous, beast-like” foe that had been about to “annihilate not only Germany, but the whole of Europe.” Those who upheld the system in which Bolshevism was but the other face of the vilest capitalism, he proclaimed, were in both cases the same: “Jews and only Jews!” ( Juden und nur Juden!).50 The next day, in his Sportpalast speech to mark the opening of the annual Winter-Relief campaign, Hitler designated the Jews as “the world enemy.”51 From then on his anti-Jewish diatribes became torrential.
On October 13, the Nazi leader attributed the catastrophic state of U.S. economic policies to “Jewish thinking.”52 The next day he again attacked Jewish business thinking and practices.53 On the seventeenth the Jews came up twice in conversation, at noon and in the evening. During lunch Hitler discussed the situation of Romania and its notoriously corrupt officials: “The precondition [for change] is the elimination of the Jews; otherwise a state cannot be freed [of corruption].”54 After dinner, in the presence of Fritz Sauckel and Fritz Todt, the discussion turned to the future German settlement of Belorussia and the Ukraine: The “destructive Jews” would be gone, the Nazi leader promised.55 On the eighteenth Hitler’s anti-Jewish obsession turned to the Jews’ role in England’s path to war.56 On the nineteenth he brought up the Christian “pre-Bolshevik” mobilization of the slaves in the Roman Empire, manipulated by the Jews to destroy the structure of the state.57 Two days later, on October 21, Hitler unleashed a more extensive attack: Jesus was not a Jew; the Jew Paul falsified Jesus’ teaching in order to undermine the Roman Empire. The Jews’ aim was to destroy the nations by undermining their racial core. In Russia, the Nazi leader declared, the Jews deported hundreds of thousands of men in order to leave the abandoned women to males imported from other regions. They organized miscegenation on a grand scale. The Jews continued to torture people in the name of Bolshevism, just as Christianity, the offshoot of Judaism, had tortured its opponents in the Middle Ages. “Saul became Saint Paul; Mordechai became Karl Marx.” Then came the notorious finale: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.” 58 The most rabid themes of the early speeches, of the dialogue with Dietrich Eckart, and especially of Mein Kampf, were back, sometimes in almost identical words.
In the meantime the Nazi leader did not miss the opportunity to vent his fury on an individual Jew. On October 20, the Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe reported that a seventy-four-year-old Hamburg Jew, Markus Luftgas, had been condemned to two years in jail for black-marketeering in eggs. When Hitler read about it, he demanded that Luftgas be condemned to death. On October 23, the Justice Ministry informed the Reich Chancellery that Luftgas had been delivered to the Gestapo for execution.59
On October 25, Hitler reminded his guests, Himmler and Heydrich—as if they needed to be reminded—of his notorious “prophecy”: “I prophesied to Jewry: The Jew would disappear from Europe if the war could not be avoided. This race of criminals carries the guilt of the two millions of dead of the World War and now already that of hundreds of thousands. Nobody should come and tell me that one cannot drive them into the marshes in the East! Who thinks of our men? It is not bad, moreover, that public rumor attributes to us the intention of exterminating the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.”60 And, he added, in an unrelated statement: “The attempt to establish a Jewish State will fail.”61 The remark about “public rumor” could apply to the German population; more likely, it referred to rumors circulating abroad, particularly in the United States…. That same day the Nazi leader lectured Ciano about the influence of Jewish propaganda in Latin America. During the same conversation, the ironic foreign minister informed his host that “Jewish propaganda” was depicting the internal situation of Italy in the bleakest colors; of course, Ciano added, none of this was true.62
At the beginning of November, Hitler served another long historical-political tirade against the Jews to his dentist, SS Standartenführer Prof. Dr. Hugo Blaschke, and Blaschke’s assistant, one Dr. Richter. Once the Europeans discovered the nature of the Jew, Hitler told his guests, they would also understand the solidarity that tied them together. The Jew was the obstacle to this solidarity; he only survived because European solidarity did not exist: “Now he lives to destroy it.” At the outset of his disquisition Hitler had prophesized that the end of the war would witness the fall (Himmelssturz) of the Jews. They had no spiritual or artistic understanding, he went on; they were essentially inveterate liars and cheaters.63
The first of Hitler’s two major public anti-Jewish speeches of those weeks was the annual address to the party “Old Fighters” on November 8, 1941. The previous year, on the same occasion, the Jews had not been mentioned at all. This time the Nazi leader launched into a vicious and massive anti-Jewish tirade. Many of his themes were merely a repetition of his former rants, those of 1936 and 1937 in particular, but also of the outpourings of the previous three or four weeks. He knew, Hitler told his audience, that behind this war “one ultimately had to look for the ‘arsonist’ who had always lived off the trading of nations: the international Jew. I wouldn’t be a National Socialist anymore,” he yelled, “if I distanced myself from this finding.” The Nazi leader then recalled the saying of “a great Jew” [Disraeli] that “race was the key to world history.” Indeed the Jewish race was behind the present events, using straw men for its bloody deals. At this point, once again, Hitler exclaimed: “I have come to know these Jews as world arsonists” [Ich habe diese Juden als die Weltbrandstifter kennengelernt].64 This was only the prologue.
The Nazi leader went on to describe all the methods used by the Jews to poison the nations (press, radio, film, theater), and to push them into a war in which capitalists and democratic politicians would make money from their stocks in the armaments industries. This kind of coalition headed by the Jews had been eradicated from Germany; now the same enemy was standing on the outside, against the German Volk and the German Reich. After pushing a series of nations to the forefront of the battle, the Jew turned to his most trusted instrument: “What was more understandable,” Hitler exclaimed, “than the fact that one day the Power where the Jewish spirit is the most clearly in control, would move against us: the Soviet Union, now the greatest servant of Jewry [Die Sowjetunion, die nun einmal der grösste Diener des Judentums ist]. After describing the horrors of a regime in which the “organization of Jewish commissars”—in fact “slave-drivers”—ruled over subhuman masses, Hitler rejected the idea that a Russian nationalism could have taken over: “The carriers of such a [nationalist] trend do not exist anymore and the man who is for the time being the ruler of this state is nothing else but an instrument in the hands of this all powerful Jewry…. When Stalin is on scene, in front of the curtain, Kaganowitsch [Lazar Kaganowitsch was Stalin’s Jewish acolyte] stands behind him with all these Jews who…lead this huge empire.” Between these anti-Jewish insults and threats, the Nazi leader gave clear expression to the apocalyptic dimension of the ongoing struggle: “This struggle, my old party comrades, has really become not only a struggle for Germany, but for the whole of Europe, a struggle [that will decide] between existence and annihilation!”65 In this same speech Hitler again reminded his audience that he had often been a prophet in his life. This time, however, the prophecy did not refer to the extermination of the Jews (implicit in his entire speech), but rather to a clo
sely related theme: November 1918, when Germany was stabbed in the back, would never occur again. “Everything is imaginable,” he exclaimed, “except one thing, that Germany will ever capitulate!”66
On November 10, the Jews were mentioned, albeit briefly, in a letter Hitler addressed to Pétain. The Jewish theme had never before come up in an exchange between the Nazi leader and the head of the Vichy state. “If I had not decided at the last minute, on June 22, to move against the Bolshevist menace,” Hitler wrote, “then it could have happened only too easily that with the collapse of Germany the French Jews would have triumphed, but the French people would likewise have been plunged into a horrible catastrophe.”67
On November 12, Hitler again took up his anti-Jewish tirades at headquarters: By excluding the Jews from Prussia, King Friedrich II had opted for an “exemplary” policy.68 On the nineteenth the Nazi leader warned against compassion for the Jews “who had to emigrate”; according to him, these Jews had enough relatives throughout the world, whereas the Germans who had been forced to leave their country had nobody and were compelled to rely entirely on themselves.69 Hardly anybody in Hitler’s circle (or, for that matter, throughout Germany) did not know that the Jews were no longer emigrating but being deported to places where no relatives would help them to start a new life.
In Das Reich of November 16, under the title “The Jews Are Guilty!” Goebbels echoed his master’s voice. He reminded his readers of Hitler’s prophecy that the Jews would be exterminated in case of war: “We are now witnessing the fulfillment of this prophecy; the fate befalling the Jews is harsh, but more than deserved. Pity or regret is completely out of place in this case. In triggering this war,” the minister went on, “world Jewry completely miscalculated the forces it could muster. It is now gradually being engulfed by the same extermination process that it had intended for us and that it would have allowed to happen without any scruples, had it had the power to do so. But now it undergoes destruction according to its own law: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!’”70 On December 1, the minister brandished the same threats in a lecture at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, in front of a highly select audience. Thoughout his speech, the propaganda chief openly alluded to what could be understood only as a murderous solution of the “Jewish question.” Whether the ominous diatribe referred to an ongoing and systematic extermination of all the Jews of Europe is not clear, however.71
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