by Dan McMillan
Shortly before World War I, leading nationalist Heinrich Class claimed that Jews controlled virtually all German newspapers. “Who has the courage to deny,” he exclaimed, “that our entire political life stands under Jewish influence?” The “masses,” according to Class, were “held by Jewry through its daily newspapers . . . by the reins.” There was of course no such thing as “Jewish influence,” because German Jews wrote and published as individuals, not as Jews, and did not coordinate their actions with Jews who lived in other European countries. Nonetheless, theories of a Jewish conspiracy had already begun to gain acceptance by the 1890s. Many such theories were centered on the accusation that Jews were the chief instigators of Marxist socialism, and expressed the hope that if “Jewish influence” were eliminated, the socialist parties would die out. The belief that Jews promoted Marxism led more directly to the Holocaust than did any other component of anti-Semitism, yet it had virtually no basis in reality.8
The faulty logic leading to this connection between Judaism and Marxism in the minds of so many Germans stemmed from several factors. First, Karl Marx, the chief intellectual father of socialism and communism, was of Jewish ancestry, which made it easier to blame Jews for the rise of these movements. It is also relevant that socialism and communism were both explicitly international movements. It was an article of faith in both movements that “the worker has no country,” that the working class of every nation owed its primary loyalty to other workers, no matter where they lived, and that wars were only opportunities for industrialists to make money and to divide the world’s workers against each other. In practice, Europe’s socialist workers were usually quite patriotic and loyal to the countries in which they lived. However, the socialists’ internationalist rhetoric contributed to the illusion that Jews were the instigators of socialism and communism, because the Jewish people were a truly international minority who lived in every European country.
Most German Jews, being middle class in economic status, had no use for socialism, and tended to support the more liberal of the middle-class parties. However, the socialist party took a public stance against anti-Semitism beginning in the 1890s, and unlike many other German parties, did not discriminate against Jews. Free to join, and rise, in the socialist party, some Jews became party leaders, which gave ammunition to right-wing politicians who blamed “Jewish influence” for the rise of socialism, and later for the threat of communism. In Russia as well, Jews played a visible role in socialism and communism and were overrepresented in the leadership of these parties. During the 1920s, Jews were likewise overrepresented in the ranks of the communist party and the Soviet government, although Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, later purged large numbers of them.9
Conservative elites in Germany and elsewhere had an additional reason to blame Jews for the rise of socialism and communism. Especially in countries like Russia and Germany that had undemocratic constitutions before World War I, the ruling class firmly rejected democracy and insisted that ordinary citizens were too stupid and irresponsible to govern themselves. Such elites also did not accept that industrial workers had reasonable economic and political grievances. Consequently, elites believed that the masses of ordinary citizens could have embraced socialism only if they had been manipulated by unscrupulous agitators. Who better to accuse of such agitation than Jewish journalists and intellectuals, who already qualified—in the eyes of conservative nationalists—as outsiders? The right-wing German nationalist Heinrich Class made this argument explicit in his popular tract, If I Were the Emperor. A great danger to Germany, Class wrote, stemmed from “yielding to mass instincts.” He contended that “Jewry is the representative and leader of these mass instincts, working with all methods and possibilities of influence.” In the socialist party, Class insisted, “Jews control the leadership and exploit the seduced masses for a battle against the whole established order.” Such views were common on the right wing of German politics on the eve of World War I. The powerful pressure group of large landowners, the Agrarian League, together with the main conservative party, promoted anti-Semitism. When the socialists became the largest party in the 1912 elections, the chief conservative newspaper labeled the balloting the “Jewish election” and complained of “Judah’s money power” in the socialist party.10
The most notorious theory of a Jewish conspiracy found expression in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated document usually attributed to the Imperial Russian secret police. The Protocols, still sold by anti-Semites in millions of copies today, may have been written in France at the end of the nineteenth century, but were largely unknown outside of Russia before World War I. This document purports to be the transcript of twenty-four meetings of the men who led the conspiracy, spelling out their plans.11
According to the Protocols, the Jewish conspirators wanted to destroy all religions and all established institutions. Having eliminated all national governments, they would impose a single Jewish world government ruled by an emperor descended from King David. Jews had brought about all earlier revolutions and political crises in history, fostered antagonisms between social classes, instigated all large-scale strikes, and were responsible for all political assassinations. According to this document, Jews promoted social crisis by driving up food prices, spreading infectious diseases, and encouraging workers to become alcoholics.
Monarchist Russian emigrants, fleeing the communist revolution and civil war in their country from 1917 to 1922, seem to have brought the Protocols to Western Europe, where they were promptly translated into most of the world’s major languages, including Chinese and Japanese. German and British newspapers published them as a series. In the United States, automobile manufacturer Henry Ford sponsored their publication, and hundreds of thousands of copies were sold.12
Yet despite all the distinctive features of Europe’s Jewish populations, and despite the increasing use of anti-Semitism as a weapon against socialism, conspiracy theories had enjoyed little respectability before World War I. Jews in Western Europe had faced far less discrimination than, for example, African Americans did in the American South. World War I changed European anti-Semitism decisively, demonstrating yet again that without the war, the Holocaust would not have been possible. After the war, the conspiracy theories gained widespread acceptance. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are only the most obvious example of this sea change. Also crucially important was the new respectability of racist anti-Semitism. Classifying Jews as a race, as biologically distinct from the rest of humanity, made it possible to regard them as being less than human. This shift in perspective did much to make the Holocaust possible.13
Much of the new anti-Semitism came from using Jews as scapegoats for the war’s terrible cost and the dramatic political upheavals that came in its wake. Ten million young men died in combat. The ruling monarchies of four great powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey—fell from power. The Austro-Hungarian Empire broke apart into its constituent ethnic fragments, spawning a group of unstable and often mutually antagonistic successor states: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. The need for scapegoats was especially great in Germany, whose citizens suffered not only the loss of the war, but a peace treaty they considered grossly unfair, not to mention runaway inflation that destroyed the life savings of much of the middle class. Scapegoating of Jews for military setbacks began already in 1916, with baseless allegations that the Jews had unscrupulously profited from the war industries and shirked military duty. When it became apparent that the war was lost, right-wing nationalists became positively hysterical in their anti-Semitic tirades. The Pan-German League set up a “Jewish Committee” in September 1918, prompting Heinrich Class to echo the words of an earlier German nationalist: “Kill them; the world court is not asking you for your reasons!”14
World War I intensified European anti-Semitism in another, probably more important way as well: it made possible the communist revolution of 1917 in Russia. Going as far back as
the 1890s, opponents of socialism had consistently blamed the Jews for the rise of socialist labor unions and political parties. The Russian revolution dramatically intensified this source of anti-Semitism, because communism was so much more frightening than socialism: while socialists had used peaceful methods for achieving their goals, relying mainly on the democratic process, Russian communists imposed social revolution at the point of a gun, setting off four years of bloody civil war that claimed millions of lives. Ultimately, the Russian communists confiscated all businesses and farms and most personal property, directing the country’s entire economy from a central planning apparatus in Moscow. Thomas Mann, possibly Germany’s greatest living author at the time, recorded a conversation in his diary in May 1918: “We spoke of the type of Russian Jew, the leader of the world revolutionary movement, that explosive mixture of Jewish intellectual radicalism and Slavic Christian enthusiasm.” Mann added: “A world that still retains an instinct of self-preservation must act against such people with all the energy that can be mobilized and with the swiftness of martial law.”15
The ruling elites—and probably much of the middle class—of many European countries surely became more anti-Semitic after Russia’s communist revolution in 1917. It is unclear, however, whether Germans reacted more strongly than other nations, and whether the Holocaust originated in Germany, and not in France or Russia, because the Germans were more violently anti-Semitic. There has been almost no research systematically comparing anti-Semitism across national boundaries. Scholars have instead written only national histories, that is, separate studies of France, of Germany, of Poland, and so on. This was a fatal flaw in Daniel Goldhagen’s much-criticized 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: he created a sensation by arguing that most Germans had embraced a uniquely dangerous form of anti-Semitism long before Hitler took power, but he did not compare this allegedly unique German anti-Semitism to anti-Semitism in other countries. Even worse for Goldhagen’s argument, the history of anti-Semitism in other European countries makes one point quite obvious: anti-Semitism was far more widespread, intense, and violent in Eastern Europe and on the territory of the Soviet Union than it was in any Western European country, Germany included. If someone had asked well-informed Europeans in 1920 or 1930 which country was most likely to perpetrate large-scale massacres of Jews, Germany would probably not even have been mentioned. Poland, Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union would have seemed the most likely perpetrators of such a horrific deed.16
In Russia, anti-Semitic violence had a long history. A wave of anti-Jewish riots, or pogroms, swept through regions of Jewish settlement in 1881, most beginning after Easter, historically a time of tension between Christians and Jews. In that year alone, the authorities counted 224 such riots, which claimed 16 lives and extensively damaged property. More pogroms followed in 1882, including an upheaval in Balta, where 40 Jews were murdered or seriously wounded. A second wave of pogroms followed between 1903 and 1906, many sparked by the accusation that Jews had instigated the abortive 1905 revolution. All told, as many as 3,000 lost their lives. In 1930s Poland, new laws were established, forcing Jews out of several professions, and mass boycotts were organized against Jewish-owned shops. Jewish students had to be taught in separate lecture halls at universities, and the effort was made to strip Jews of their Polish nationality. Successive Polish governments advocated deporting some 1.5 million Polish Jews (half the Jewish population) to Palestine or to the inhospitable island of Madagascar. In the context of the bloody Russian Civil War, massive pogroms swept through Ukraine in 1918–1919, killing an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people, a full 10 percent of Ukrainian Jewry. Ferocious anti-Semitism on Soviet territory supplied the Germans with thousands of willing collaborators who helped them murder the Jewish population of the Soviet Union after the invasion of June 1941.17
Within Germany, physical violence toward Jews was relatively rare, and seldom lethal, during the decades before Hitler took power in 1933, although it did worsen significantly during the 1920s. When it happened, violence against Jews was condemned in the press, except by publications of the Nazi Party and other groups of the extreme Right. Legal discrimination was also absent during that time: Jews were fully equal with Gentiles before the law, even if informal discrimination continued in certain occupations, such as the military and higher civil service. Before Hitler became prime minister, Germany remained, by any standard, vastly less anti-Semitic than the nations of Eastern Europe and the territories of the Soviet Union. How Germany differed from Western European nations or the United States in this regard is less clear, owing to the lack of comparative research.18
In this discussion it is very important to distinguish Germany’s elite—a group of perhaps half a million men and a few thousand women—from the rest of the population. Most citizens left few written records of their feelings toward Jews, so any assessment of their anti-Semitism is little more than an educated guess. Some anti-Jewish prejudice was clearly widespread. A large number of civic organizations excluded Jews from membership. Very many Germans subscribed to one or another of certain negative beliefs about Jews: that the Jews were alien, somehow not German; that they had been disloyal during World War I; that they controlled the press and used it to their advantage; or that they had profited from the war and from Germany’s economic distress during the 1920s. That said, it seems reasonable to think that actual hatred or sympathy for German Jews was far less common than simply a vague feeling of unease about them. This negative emotion certainly did not translate into a desire to harm Jews, but may have defused objections that Germans might otherwise have had to the Nazis’ militant anti-Semitism.19
How Germans’ vague unease about Jews compared to the typical attitude in France, Britain, or the United States is difficult to say. In fourteen polls conducted between 1938 and 1946, the Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) asked Americans: “Do you think Jews have too much power in the United States?” Those answering yes numbered 41 percent of respondents in 1938, rising steadily thereafter to 47 percent in February 1942, 56 percent in May 1944, and 58 percent in June 1945. In four other ORC surveys from the years 1939 to 1941, about a third of the American people agreed that “the Jews in this country would like to get the United States into the European war.” In the 1920s and 1930s, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton established quotas limiting the number of Jews who could study at their institutions, and they then maintained these quotas well into the postwar era. Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham recalled driving into Florida in 1940, where she saw an apartment house displaying a sign that read, “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.” However, one absolutely crucial difference separated the English-speaking world from France and Germany: anti-Semitism was an important political issue in France and Germany, whereas it played next to no role in party politics in Britain and the United States.20
In both France and Germany, anti-Semitism had been a hallmark of the political Right from the 1890s onward. In the depth of their anti-Semitism, the two countries seem to have been more similar to each other than different until World War I broke out in 1914. However, there are good reasons for thinking that after the war began, and especially after the war was lost, German elites became much more dangerously anti-Semitic than did their counterparts in other Western European countries. German elites should have been different because Germany lost the war and then suffered a relentless series of traumatic and disorienting misfortunes: a democratic revolution; a peace treaty they perceived as unfair and humiliating; violent uprisings and political assassinations; and runaway inflation that ruined millions financially.21
Of course, traumatic events do not automatically mean that a minority will be treated as scapegoats. But the entire political development of the German Right since 1890 had laid the groundwork for blaming Jews for the lost war and the calamities that followed: Jews were supposedly unpatriotic and responsible for the rise of socialism, itself an internationalist, allegedly unpatriotic movement. When elements of the socialist p
arty turned against the war, attacks on German Jews correspondingly mounted. Adolf Hitler spoke for countless Germans when he blamed Jewish socialists for Germany’s defeat, although his language was unusually violent: “If one had at the beginning and during the war held twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people under poison gas, as hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers from all walks of life had to endure, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”22
German elites had a second reason to become more anti-Semitic than did the elites of other European countries. Although Jews were everywhere blamed for socialism and then communism, Germany’s ruling class had more reason to fear both Marxist movements, and thus all the more reason to imagine a dangerous “Jewish threat.” Before World War I, the German socialist party was the largest socialist party in Europe. Unlike their counterparts in France, the German socialists demanded not only a change in economic relationships, but also a political revolution. France had been a democracy since 1871, and French socialists supported the democratic constitution, but German elites were fiercely defending an authoritarian political system all the way down to the revolution of 1918. Put another way, Germany’s ruling class had a lot more to lose before 1918 than the French elites did, because they could lose not only property, but also their monopoly on political power.
Although Russia’s communist revolution in 1917 unnerved the ruling class of every country, Germany’s elites had special reason to be frightened. Unlike France and Britain, Germany experienced a political revolution in 1918, and the socialist party took the leading role during the first crucial months thereafter. Socialists led the first government of the newly created Weimar Republic, and seven members of the cabinet were Jewish. Although the socialists pursued very moderate policies while in government, their leading role was terrifying for the country’s elite, which had feared socialism for decades. Moreover, if socialists could take over the government, conservatives had to ask themselves, could a communist revolution be that far behind? The entire political situation in Germany right after the war was far more unstable than it was in most of Western Europe. During those years, German political development was extraordinarily violent and unpredictable, and power seemed up for grabs. The possibility that the communists might triumph must have seemed much more real in Germany than it did in most other places. Consequently, anti-Semitism, driven by fear of communism, may have been especially rampant among the top layers of German society. This remains only an educated guess. However, anti-Semitism was extremely virulent at German universities in the 1920s, where the elites of the 1930s and 1940s were earning their professional credentials and forming their political views.23