Through indirect channels Brack’s office submitted Mayer’s memorandum to Bishop Berning and to the papal nuncio, Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo. On the Protestant side, it was submitted to Pastors Paul Braune and Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. It seems that no opposition was voiced by any of the German clerics—Catholic or Protestant—contacted by Hider’s Chancellery. The pope’s delegate, too, remained silent.122
*Carl von Ossietzky was a left-wing German journalist and passionate pacifist. He as awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935, while imprionsed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
CHAPTER 7
Paris, Warsaw, Berlin—and Vienna
I
As the storm gathered over Europe, throughout the Continent the Jews once again became objects of widespread debate, targets of suspicion and sometimes of outright hatred. The general ideological and political cleavages of the mid-thirties were the main source of change, but in countries other than Nazi Germany, a pervasive atmosphere of crisis prepared the ground for a new surge of anti-Jewish extremism.
The first signs of this radicalization had appeared at the beginning of the decade. Growing doubts about the validity of the existing order of things arose as a result of the economic crisis but also because of a more general discontent. By dint of an almost “natural” reaction, the Jews were identified—and not only on the extreme right—with one or another aspect of the apparent social and cultural disintegration, and were held responsible for some of its worst consequences. It was a time when the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, no fanatic as such, could glorify France’s arch-anti-Semite of the late nineteenth century, Edouard Drumont, the notorious editor of La Libre Parole and author of La France Juive, and lash out at the Jewish threat to Christian civilization.
In Bernanos’s 1931 book, La grandepeur des bien-pensants (The great fear of the right-thinking), the values threatened by what he perceived as an ever-increasing Jewish domination were those of Christian civilization and of the nation as a living organic entity. The new capitalist economy was controlled by the concentrated financial power of “les gros”—the mythical “two hundred families” that both Right and Left identified with the Jews.1In other words the Jewish threat was, in part at least, that of modernity. The Jews were the forerunners, the masters, and the avid preachers of the doctrine of progress. To their French disciples, wrote Bernanos, they were bringing “a new mystique, admirably suited to that of Progress…. In this engineers’ paradise, naked and smooth like a laboratory, the Jewish imagination is the only one able to produce these monstrous flowers.”2
La grande peur ends with the darkest forebodings. In its last lines the Jews are left unnamed, but the whole logic of the text links the apocalyptic conclusion to Drumont’s lost fight against Jewry. The society being created before the author’s eyes was a godless one in which he felt unable to live: “There is no air!” he exclaimed. “But they won’t get us…they won’t get us alive!”3
Bernanos’s anti-Semitism was passionate without necessarily being racist. It was part and parcel of an antimodernist and antiliberal trend that later would split into opposed camps with regard to Nazi Germany itself. It was the voice of suspicion, of contempt; it could demand exclusion. Such were among others, the anti-Jewish attitudes of a powerful group of European intellectuals steeped in Catholicism, either as believers or as men strongly influenced by their Catholic background: In France, such writers as Thierry Maulnier, Robert Brasillach, Maurice Bardèche, and a whole phalanx of Catholic and nationalist militants of the Action Française (the royalist movement founded by the ultranationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras at the beginning of he century) represented this trend; they either still belonged to Maurras’s movement or kept close ties to it. Paradoxically Maurras himself was not a believing Catholic, but he understood the importance of Catholicism for his “integral nationalism.” The church banned Action Française in 1926, yet many right-wing believers remained loyal to Maurras’s movement. In England such illustrious representatives of Catholicism as Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, and T. S. Eliot acknowledged their debt to Maurras, yet their anti-Jewish outbursts had a style and a force of their own. Catholic roots were explicitly recognized by Carl Schmitt, and their indirect influence on Heidegger is unquestionable. There was an apocalyptic tone in this militant right-wing Catholicism, a growing urge to engage in the final battle against the forces evoked by Bernanos, forces whose common denominator was usually the Jew.
Simultaneously, however, a growing cultural pessimism—whose political and religious roots were diffuse but that exuded a violent anti-Semitism of its own—was taking hold of various sectors of the European intellectual scene. Here, too, some of the most prominent French writers of the time took part: Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Paul Léautaud, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Maurice Blanchot, Marcel Jouhandeau, Jean Giraudoux, and Paul Morand. But it is not Céline’s 1937 Bagatelles pour un massacre itself, possibly the most vicious anti-Jewish tirade in modern Western literature (apart from outright Nazi productions), that was most revealing, but André Gide’s favorable review of it in the Nouvelle Revue Française, under the guise that what Céline wrote in the book was not meant to be taken seriously.4 And it was not Brasillach’s outspoken hatred of the Jews that was most indicative of the prevailing atmosphere, but the fact that Giraudoux, who had just launched a vitriolic attack against Jewish immigrants in Pleins pouvoirs, became minister of information during the last year of the Third Republic.5
Against the background of this religious-cultural-civilizational crisis and its anti-Jewish corollaries, other, less abstract factors appear as causes of the general exacerbation of anti-Jewish attitudes and anti-Semitic agitation in countries other than Nazi Germany.
The convergence of the worldwide economic crisis and its sequel, decade-long unemployment, with the growing pressure of Jewish immigration into Western countries on the one hand, and economic competition from a large Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe on the other, may have been the most immediate spur to hostility. But for millions of disgruntled Europeans and Americans the Jews were also believed to be among the beneficiaries of the situation, if not the manipulators of the dark and mysterious forces responsible for the crisis itself. Such constructs had penetrated all levels of society.
In countries such as France, England, and the United States, where some Jews had achieved prominence in journalism, in cultural life, and even in politics, prevailing European pacifism and American isolationism depicted Jewish protests against Nazi Germany as warmongering. The Jews were accused of serving their own interests rather than those of their countries. The French politician Gaston Bergery, a former Radical Socialist who became a collaborator during the German occupation, described in November 1938, in his periodical La Flèche (The arrow), how “the Jewish policy” of a war against Nazi Germany was perceived by the wider public: “A war—public opinion senses—less in order to defend France’s direct interests than to destroy the Hitler regime in Germany, that is, the death of millions of Frenchmen and [other] Europeans to avenge a few dead Jews and a few hundred thousand unfortunate Jews.”6
Another immediately apparent factor was—as it had been in the earlier part of the century—the visibility of Jews on the militant left. In both Eastern Europe and France, identification of the Jews with the Marxist peril was partly as phantasmic as it had been in the past, but also partly confirmed by significant left-wing activism by Jews. Such activism arose for the same sociopolitical reasons that had played a decisive role several decades earlier. But in the thirties there were Jews, mainly in Western Europe, who became supporters of the Left in order to find a political expression for their anti-Nazism (at the same time in the Soviet Union, many Jews were falling victim to Stalin’s purges). In general terms, however—as had also been the case at the beginning of the century (and has been ever since)—the majority of European Jews identified themselves, and could be identified, with liberalism or social democracy, and,
to a lesser extent, with traditional conservatism. At the same time, the crisis of the liberal system and the increasing discontent with democracy led to a growing hostility toward a group that, in addition to its partial identification with the Left, was regarded as the supporter and beneficiary of the liberal spirit both in the economy and in public life.
The spread of anti-Semitism on the European (and American) scene was one of the reasons for the growing difficulties placed in the way of Jewish emigration from Germany, then from Austria and the Sudetenland, and later from the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia. Traditional anti-Semitism was also one of the reasons that prompted the Polish government to take measures about the citizenship of nonresident Polish Jews that, as will be seen, gave the Nazis the necessary pretext for expelling thousands of Polish Jews residing in Germany. A few years later, this surge of anti-Jewish hostility was to have much more catastrophic results. The Jews themselves were only partly aware of the increasingly shaky ground on which they stood because, like so many others, they did not perceive the depth of liberal democracy’s crisis. The Jews in France believed in the strength of the Third Republic, and the Jews of East Central Europe believed in France. Few imagined that Nazi Germany could become a real threat beyond its own borders.
Eastern Europe’s participation in the growing anti-Jewish agitation of the second half of the thirties took place within the context of its own traditions. The influence of Christian anti-Jewish themes was particularly strong among populations whose majority was still a devout peasantry. Social resentment on the part of budding nationalistic middle classes of the positions acquired by Jews in commerce and the trades, light industry, banking, and the press, as well as in the prototypical middle-class professions of medicine and the law, created another layer of hostility. The latest and possibly strongest ingredient was the fierce anti-Bolshevism of regimes already oriented toward fascism, regimes for which identification of the Jews with Bolshevism was a common slogan—for example in Hungary, where the memory of the Béla Kun government remained vivid. In Poland these diverse elements merged with an exacerbated nationalism that tried to limit the influence of any and all minority groups, be they Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews, or Germans. By a somewhat different process, the wounded nationalism of the Hungarians and the Slovaks, and the megalo-maniacal nationalist fantasies of the Romanian radical right dreaming of a greater Dacia,* led to the same anti-Semitic resentment. “Almost everywhere [in these countries],” writes Ezra Mendelsohn, “the Jewish question became a matter of paramount concern, and anti-Semitism a major political force.”7
The leaders of the East Central European countries (Miklós Horthy in Hungary, Jósef Beck in Poland after Jósef Pilsudski’s death, Ion Antonescu in Romania) were already close to fascism or at least to extreme authoritarianism. All had to contend with ultra-right-wing movements—such as the Endek in Poland, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, and the Arrow Cross in Hungary—that sometimes appeared to be allies and sometimes enemies. The right-wing governments, mainly in Romania and Hungary, attempted to take the “wind out of the sails” of the radical right by adopting anti-Semitic policies of their own. Thus, Romania adopted an official anti-Semitic program by the end of 1937, and Hungary in 1938. The results were soon evident. As the Italian journalist Virginio Gayda, a semiofficial representative of the fascist regime, noted at the beginning of 1938, anti-Semitism was the point of “national cohesion” of the political scene in the Danubian states.8
Anti-Semitism’s deepest roots in Poland were religious. In this profoundly Catholic country, the great majority of whose population still lived on the land or in small towns, the most basic Christian anti-Jewish themes remained a constant presence. In early 1937 Augustus Cardinal Hlond, the primate of Poland, distributed a pastoral letter that, among other things, addressed the Jewish issue. After pointing to the existence of a “Jewish problem” demanding “serious consideration,” the head of the Polish Church turned to its various aspects. “It is a fact,” Hlond declared, “that the Jews are struggling against the Catholic Church, that they are steeped in free thought, that they are the vanguard of godlessness, of the Bolshevik movement, and of subversive action. It is a fact that Jewish influence on morals is deplorable and that their publishing houses spread pornography. It is true that they are cheaters and carry on usury and white slave traffic. It is true that in the schools the influence of Jewish youth upon the Catholic is in general negative from the religious and moral point of view.” But in order to seem equitable, Cardinal Hlond then took a step back: “Not all the Jews are such as described. There are also faithful, righteous, honest, charitable and well-meaning Jews. In many Jewish families there is a wholesome and edifying family spirit. We know some people in the Jewish world who are morally prominent, noble and respectable.”
What attitudes did the cardinal therefore recommend to his flock? “I warn you against the moral attitude imported from abroad which is fundamentally and unconditionally anti-Jewish. This attitude is contrary to Catholic ethics. It is permissible to prefer one’s people; it is wrong to hate anyone. Not even Jews. In commercial relations it is right to favor one’s own people, to avoid Jewish shops and Jewish stalls on the market, but it is wrong to plunder Jewish shops, destroy Jewish goods, break windowpanes, throw bombs at their houses. It is necessary to find protection from the harmful moral influence of the Jews, to keep away from their anti-Christian culture, and in particular to boycott the Jewish press and demoralizing Jewish publications, but it is wrong to attack Jews, to beat, wound or libel them. Even in the Jew we must respect and love the man and neighbor, even though one may not be able to respect the inexpressible tragedy of this people which was the guardian of the Messianic idea and gave birth to our Savior. When God’s grace will enlighten the Jew and when he will sincerely join the fold of his and our Messiah, let us welcome him joyfully in the Christian ranks.
“Let us beware of those who endeavor to bring about anti-Jewish excesses. They serve a bad cause. Do you know whose orders they are obeying in so doing? Do you know in whose interest such disorders are fomented? The good cause gains nothing from such inconsiderate acts. And the blood which sometimes flows on such occasions is Polish blood.”9
This is precisely the translation of Cardinal Hlond’s pastoral letter that was sent from Poland to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York on February 9, 1937. According to the sender, “The statements contained in the first part concerning the moral inferiority and crimes of the Jews have been surpassed in a pronouncement by the prince-bishop of Cracow, Sapieha. But both these pronouncements have been surpassed by the mischief-making public addresses and the recently published book by the prelate Trzeciak, which might compete with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”10
Traditional Polish Christian anti-Jewishness was fueled by a particularly difficult demographic and socioeconomic context. When the Polish state was reestablished in the wake of World War I, approximately 10 percent of its population was Jewish (3,113,933 in 1931, i.e., 9.8 percent of the general population). But about 30 percent of the urban population was Jewish (this average was valid for the largest cities such as Warsaw, Cracow, and Lodz, but the Jewish population was more than 40 percent in Grodno and reached 60 percent in Pinsk).11
The social stratification of Polish Jewry added to the difficulties created by sheer numbers and urban concentration: the majority, or more than two million, of the Jewish population belonged to the politically crucial petty bourgeoisie.12 Finally, contrary to the situation in Germany, France, Great Britain, and other Western countries, where the Jews aspired above all to be considered nationals of their respective countries—even though the majority insisted on keeping some form of Jewish identity—in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland, the self-definition of minorities was often that of a separate “nationality.” Thus, in the Polish census of 1921, 73.76 percent of the overall number of Jews by religion also declared themselves to be Jews by nationality, and in the 1931 census, 79.
9 percent declared that Yiddish was their mother tongue, while 7.8 percent (an implausibly high number, presumably influenced by Zionism) declared that Hebrew was their first language. That left only a small percentage of Polish Jews who declared Polish to be their mother tongue.”13
Thus the basically religious anti-Jewish feelings of the Polish population were reinforced by what was perceived as a Jewish hold on a few key professions and on entire sectors of lower-middle-class activities, mainly commerce and handicrafts. Moreover, the clear identification of the Jews as an ethnic minority within a state that comprised several other minority groups but aimed, of course, at Polish national supremacy, led the Polish nationalists to consider Jewish religious and national-cultural “separatism” and Jewish dominance in some sectors of the economy to be a compound threat to the new state. Finally the Poles’ exacerbated anti-Bolshevism, fed by new fears and an old, deep hatred of Russia, identified Jewish socialists and Bundists with their Communist brethren, thereby inserting the standard equation of anti-Bolshevism with anti-Semitism into a specifically Polish situation. This tendency became more pronounced in the mid—1930s, when the Polish “regime of the colonels” moved to what was in fact a semifascist position, not always very different in its nationalist-anti-Semitic stance from Roman Dmowski’s Endek (National Democratic) Party. The Endeks brandished the specters of a Folksfront (that is, a popular front like the one in France; for Poles, the spelling with an “F” signaled Yiddish and thus Jewish origin) and Zydokomuna (in the sense of Jewish communism) to identify the Jews and their political activities.14 They were for a massive transfer of Jews to Palestine and for a Jewish quota in universities, and their action squads found the smashing of Jewish shops particularly attractive.15 The trouble was that, despite official declarations, the government and the church were not loath on occasion to encourage similar policies and activities, albeit in an indirect way.16
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution Page 28