Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution

by Saul Friedlander

  129. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 1, p.13.

  Chapter 3 Redemptive Anti-Semitism

  1. Lamar Cecil, Albert Ballin: Business and Politics in Imperial Germany 1888–1918 (Princeton, N.J., 1967), p. 347. Cecil does not decide whether the overdose of sleeping pills was intentional or not. At the end of his novel A Princess in Berlin, Arthur R. G. Solmssen appends the (untitled) afterword: “On August 31, 1935, the Board of Directors of the Hamburg-Amerika Line announced that henceforth the SS Albert Ballin would carry the name SS Hansa.” Arthur R. G. Solmssen, A Princess in Berlin (Harmondsworth, England, 1980). I am grateful to Sue Llewellyn for this information.

  2. Werner T. Angress, “The German Army’s ‘Judenzählung’ of 1916: Genesis—Consequences—Significance,” LBIY 23 ([London] 1978): 117ff. See also Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 1969), pp. 528ff.

  3. Angress, “The German Army’s Judenzählung,” p. 117.

  4. Werner Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” in Werner E. Mosse, ed., Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution 1916–1923 (Tübingen, 1971), p. 421.

  5. Ibid., p. 423.

  6. Saul Friedländer, “Political Transformations During the War and their Effect on the Jewish Question,” in Herbert A. Strauss, ed., Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Anti-Semitism 1870–1933/39: Germany—Great Britain—France (Berlin, 1993), p. 152.

  7. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (London, 1974), p. 193.

  8. Friedländer, “Political Transformations,” p. 152.

  9. Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, p. 525.

  10. Ibid., in particular note 42.

  11. Chernow, The Warburgs, p. 172.

  12. Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” p. 427.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid., p. 426. Jochmann quotes the classic study by the Jewish statistician and demographer Franz Oppenheimer, Die Judenstatistik des Preussischen Kriegsministeriums (Munich, 1922).

  15. Ernst Simon, Unser Kriegserlebnis (1919), quoted in Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, p. 533.

  16. Rathenau to Schwaner, August 4, 1916, quoted in Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” p. 427.

  17. See especially Werner T. Angress, “The Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912 on the Jewish Question: A Synthesis,” LBIY 28 (1983):367ff.

  18. For the shift of the Jewish vote, its dynamics and political significance, see ibid., p. 373ff., as well as Marjorie Lamberti, Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: The Struggle for Civil Equality (New Haven, Conn., 1978), and Jacob Toury’s classic study, Die politischen Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland: Von Jena bis Weimar (Tübingen, 1966).

  19. Angress, “Impact of the Judenwahlen of 1912,” p. 381.

  20. Ibid., p. 390.

  21. Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus: Die Geschichte des deutsch-völkischen Schutz-und-Trutz-Bundes 1919–1923 (Hamburg, 1970), p. 30.

  22. Daniel Frymann, Das Kaiserbuch: Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten, 7th ed. (Leipzig, 1925), pp. 69ff.

  23. For the distinction between the traditional and the new trends in German nationalism after 1912, see Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich, 1992), pp. 606ff. For the Kaiser’s sometimes rabid anti-Jewish outbursts, see John C. G. Röhl’s “Das beste wäre Gas!” Die Zeit, Nov. 25, 1994.

  24. Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984), p. 287.

  25. Angress, “Impact of the Judenwhalen of 1912,” p. 396.

  26. In 1925 66.8 percent of all German Jews lived in the major cities, with Frankfurt and Berlin first and second in Jewish population. In 1871 36,326 Jews lived in the Greater Berlin area, accounting for 3.9 percent of a population of 931,984. In 1925 the official census for the same area indicated 172,672 Jews, or 4.3 percent of a general population of 4,024,165 (in Frankfurt that year, the Jewish population represented 6.3 percent). The number of Jews in Berlin was, in fact, probably higher than indicated by the official census, since many Jews did not register with Jewish communal organizations (the basis for the census), and a number of East European Jews were not registered anywhere at all. According to some estimates, as many as 200,000 Jews, or approximately 5 percent of the general population, were living in Greater Berlin in the immediate postwar period. Gabriel Alexander, “Die Entwicklung der jüdischen Bevölkerung in Berlin zwischen 1871 und 1945,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 20 (Tel Aviv, 1991), pp. 287ff., and particularly pp. 292ff. Such urban concentration was enhanced by the high visibility of East European Jews in the major German cities.

  Jews from the East had long been present in Germany and Austria, arriving in particular after the late-eighteenth-century partitions of Poland and the annexations of Polish territory by both Prussia and Austria. A hundred years later, from 1881 on, a decisive change took place, with the beginning of a series of major pogroms against Jewish communities in the western provinces of czarist Russia. A mass exodus of Jews—most of them heading to the United States—from Russian-Polish territory began. Of the 2,750,000 Jews who left Eastern Europe for overseas between 1881 and 1914, a large proportion passed through Germany, mostly in the direction of the northern seaports Bremen and Hamburg, with a small number remaining in the country. For a detailed account see Shalom Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1880–1940 (Tübingen, 1959). At the same time a more substantial number of Galician and Romanian Jews settled in Austria, especially in Vienna.

  In 1900 7 percent of the Jews in Germany were Ostjuden, the percentage of East European Jews growing to 19.1 by 1925 and 19.8 by 1933. Ibid., p. 165. Moreover, their concentration in the large cities progressed at a rate faster than that of German Jewry’s overall urbanization. In 1925 Eastern Jews represented 25.4 percent of Berlin’s Jewish population, 27 percent of Munich’s, 60 percent of Dresden’s, and 80.7 percent of Leipzig’s. Ibid.

  27. See mainly Werner E. Mosse, “Die Juden in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,” in Werner E. Mosse, ed., Juden im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890–1914 (Tübingen, 1976), pp. 69ff., 75ff.

  28. Werner E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820–1935 (Oxford, 1987), p. 396.

  29. Ibid., pp. 398, 400.

  30. Ibid., pp. 323ff. (particularly p. 329).

  31. Moritz Goldstein, “Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass,” Kunstwart 25, no. 11 (Mar. 1912): 283.

  32. Ibid., pp. 291–92.

  33. Ibid., p. 293.

  34. Ibid., p. 294.

  35. Ferdinand Avenarius, “Aussprachen mit Juden,” Kunstwart 25, no. 22 (Aug. 1912): 225.

  36. These details and the quotations are taken from Ralph Max Engelman’s Ph. D. dissertation, “Dietrich Eckart and the Genesis of Nazism” (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1971), pp. 31–32.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Ibid., p.32.

  39. Maximilian Harden’s Die Zukunft was “Jewish,” and so was Siegfried Jacobsohn’s Schaubühne (later Weltbühne). Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne für modernes Leben, succeeded by the Neue Rundschau, was “Jewish,” as were the leading cultural critics of the major daily papers, Fritz Engel, Alfred Kehr, Max Osborn, and Oskar Bies. Engelman, ibid. Soon Kurt Tucholsky would become the most visible—and the most hated—journalist-author of Jewish origin of the Weimar years. Siegfried Breslauer would be associate editor of the Berliner Lokalanzeiger, Emil Faktor editor in chief of the Berliner Börsen-Courier, Norbert Falk cultural affairs editor of the B. Z. am Mittag, Joseph Wiener-Braunsberg editor of Ulk, the satirical supplement of the Berliner Tageblatt, and many more. Bernd Soesemann, “Liberaler Journalismus in der Kultur der Weimarer Republik,” in Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Juden als Träger bürgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland (Bonn, 1989), p. 245.

  40. Engelman, “Dietrich Eckart,” p. 33.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Bernard Michel, Banques et banquiers en Autriche au début du XXe Siècle (Paris, 1976), p. 312
.

  43. Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Josef (Oxford, 1989), p. 170. The extraordinary role of the Jews in Viennese culture at the turn of the century has been systematically documented in Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, England, 1989).

  44. For the historical background of emancipation, see Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation 1770–1870 (New York, 1978).

  45. Shulamit Volkov, “Die Verbürgerlichung der Juden in Deutschland als Paradigma,” in Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1990), pp. 112ff.

  46. See in particular George L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, N.H., 1985), pp. 1ff.

  47. Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany 1749–1824 (Detroit, 1967).

  48. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry 1780–1840 (New York, 1987).

  49. Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977), p. 461.

  50. Nipperdey, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie, p. 289.

  51. Ibid., p. 290.

  52. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; reprint, New York, 1973), pp. 11ff.

  53. For debates on these issues see in particular Israel Y. Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations,” Zion 58, no. 1 (1993): 33ff., and Zion 59, no. 2–3 (1994) (Hebrew).

  54. Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), pp. 96–98.

  55. Ibid., pp. 209–10.

  56. Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism 1700–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 319.

  57. Amos Funkenstein, “Anti-Jewish Propaganda: Pagan, Christian and Modern,” Jerusalem Quarterly 19 (1981): 67.

  58. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago, 1979), p. 29.

  59. Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe 1723–1939, (Cambridge, England, 1970), particularly pp. 148ff.

  60. Such distinctions have been implicit in some of the historical work published in the 1960s on the special course of German history during the nineteenth century; these theses have been recently reformulated and systematized by political sociologists. See in particular Pierre Birnbaum, “Nationalismes: Comparaison France-Allemagne,” in La France aux Français: Histoire des haines nationalistes (Paris, 1993), pp. 300ff.

  61. For the comparative part of the argument, see mainly Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur “Judenfrage” der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Göttingen, 1975), pp. 17–18.

  62. For a clear summary of German modernization and its impact, see Volker R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1987). For the völkisch reactions to this evolution, see Georges L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964); and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley, Calif., 1961).

  63. The argument for the definition of this new anti-Semitic current as “revolutionary anti-Semitism” has been made in Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, N.J., 1990). See in particular Rose’s argument about Wagner, pp. 358ff., as well as in idem, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 1992).

  64. See Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and His Music (New York, 1968), mainly pp. 389–441; Hartmut Zelinsky, Richard Wagner: Ein deutsches Thema 1876–1976, 3rd ed. (Vienna, 1983); Rose, Wagner, mainly pp. 135–70.

  65. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 3 (London, 1894; reprint, New York, 1966), p. 100.

  66. Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, vol. 4 [1881–83], (Munich, 1982), p. 734.

  67. Gustav Mahler remarked that Mime’s music parodied bodily characteristics that were supposedly Jewish. For a study of the anti-Jewish imagery in Wagner’s musical oeuvre, see Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, Neb., 1995). For the Mahler remark, see ibid., p. 28.

  68. Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, p. 852.

  69. Winfried Schüler, Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der Wilhelminischen Ära (Münster, 1971), p. 256.

  70. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (1st English ed., 1910; reprint, New York, 1968) p. 578.

  71. Geoffrey Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York, 1981), p. 225.

  72. Ibid., p. 326.

  73. Ibid.

  74. On Hitler’s visit to Chamberlain, see ibid., p. 436.

  75. Some historians have emphasized the similarities of the reactions to the war all over Europe. See mainly Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, England, 1995); others have pointed to the differences: the rise of an antiwar sentiment in France, that of a genocidal mood in Germany. See Bartov, Murder in Our Midst, mainly chap. 2. But an immense literature recognizes the apocalyptic postwar mood as such.

  76. Nesta H. Webster, World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization (London, 1921), p. 293.

  77. Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), p. 223.

  78. The details that follow are taken from Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1966), pp. 772ff.

  79. Friedländer, “Political Transformations,” p. 159.

  80. Among the twenty-seven members of the government of the Bavarian Republic of the Councils, eight of the most influential were of Jewish origin: Eugen Levine-Nissen, Towia Axelrod, Frida Rubiner (alias Friedjung), Ernst Toller, Erich Mühsam, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Niekisch, Arnold Wadler. Hans-Helmuth Knütter, Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933 (Düsseldorf, 1971), p. 118.

  81. Reginald H. Phelps, “‘Before Hitler Came’: Thule Society and Germanenorden,” Journal of Modern History 35 (1963), pp. 253–54.

  82. Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Histoire de l’armée allemande, vol. 2 (Paris, 1964), p. 216. Other Jewish left-wing politicians provoked no less negative reactions. On November 8, 1918, for instance, just after the break of relations between Germany and Russia, the Jewish Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Adolf Yoffe, about to leave Germany, transferred large sums of money to the Jewish Independent Socialist deputy Oskar Cohn, who had become undersecretary in the Ministry of Justice. The money was meant to further revolutionary propaganda and for the acquisition of weapons. The facts soon became known and were widely discussed in the press. For the details of this transaction and of the debate in the press see Knütter, Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke, p. 70. Possibly even more violent was the reaction of the nationalist camp to the fact that a Jewish member of the National Assembly, Georg Gothein, became chairman of the Investigation Committee on the causes of the war and, together with Oskar Cohn and Hugo Sinzheimer, was in charge of the investigation of Hindenburg and of Ludendorff. See Friedländer, “Political Transformations,” pp. 158–61, and mainly Barbara Suchy, “The Verein zum Abwehr des Antisemitismus (II): From the First World War to Its Dissolution in 1933,” LBIY 30 (1985): 78–79.

  83. Quoted in Nathaniel Katzburg, Hungary and the Jews: Policy and Legislation 1920–1943 (Ramat-Gan, 1981), p. 35.

  84. On the revolutionary events and on the leaders of the Hungarian revolution, see in particular Rudolf L. Tökés, Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic (New York, 1967).

  85. Two French novelists, the brothers Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, chronicled the Béla Kun regime in Hungary. Their historical fantasy appeared in 1921 and was translated into English in 1924, from the 64th French edition. Almost all of Béla Kun’s revolution
ary companions were Jews. Cf. Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, When Israel Is King (New York, 1924).

  86. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London, 1968).

  87. Hamburger and Pulzer quote two sets of statistics about the Jewish vote in Weimar Germany: According to a contemporary observer, in 1924, 42 percent of the Jews cast their ballots for the SPD, 40 percent for the DDP, 8 percent for the KPD, 5 percent for the DVP, and 2 percent for the Wirtschaftspartei; according to Arnold Paucker’s inquiry of 1972, the division was the following: 64 percent DDP, 28 percent SPD, 4 percent DVP, 4 percent KPD. See Hamburger and Pulzer, “Jews as Voters in the Weimar Republic,” p. 48. The main point is that in both counts more than 80 percent of Jewish voters opted for progressive liberals or for the moderate left.

  88. On Jewish participation in the political life of the German Republic in its early phase, see in particular Werner T. Angress, “Juden im politischen Leben der Revolutionszeit,” in Mosse, Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution; idem, “Revolution und Demokratie: Jüdische Politiker in Berlin 1918/19,” in Reinhard Rürup, ed., Jüdische Geschichte in Berlin: Essays und Studien (Berlin, 1995). On Rathenau see Ernst Schulin, Walter Rathenau: Repräsentant, Kritiker und Opfer seiner Zeit (Göttingen, 1979).

  89. Ibid., p. 137.

  90. Rathenau’s assassins claimed further that by sponsoring the fulfillment policy demanded by the Allies the Jewish minister was intent on the perdition of Germany, that he aimed at the Bolshevization of the country, that he was married to the sister of the Jewish Bolshevik leader Karl Radek, and so on. The anti-Jewish motivation of Rathenau’s murderers is unquestionable. What remains unclear, though, is whether—beyond their hatred for the Jew Rathenau—his killers were instruments in the hands of ultra-right-wing groups that aimed to exploit his murder to destabilize the entire republican system. On this issue see Martin Sabrow, Der Rathenaumord: Rekonstruktion einer Verschwörung gegen die Republik von Weimar (Munich, 1994), mainly pp. 114ff.