by Jack Cooper
Failure to provide for enforcement of the treaty led to similar denial of the rights of Jews in other countries supposedly covered by the treaty.3 It seems that, when it suited their purposes, countries were willing to make promises they had no intention of keeping.
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1. Abba Eban, My People: The Story of the Jews (New York: Behrman House, 1968), 344–48.
2. Ibid., 353.
3. Ibid., 352–53.
...selling a birthright could be a good thing
Aby and Max Warburg were the sons of a German-Jewish family of bankers. Aby, the eldest, was, at an early age, a “passionate bookworm.”1 When he was thirteen years old, Aby “sold” his birthright to his younger brother Max in return for the promise that Max would pay for all the books he might wish to own.2
When the time came, Max entered the family business, while Aby continued to pursue the interest that would make him a renowned art historian. By 1911, Fritz Saxl was engaged to organize the fifteen thousand volumes in Warburg’s collection.3 In 1921, Warburg’s library became “a research institute in cultural history.”4
Warburg died in 1929, but the institute continued to function in Germany until Hitler came to power. It was then that the institute was transferred to the University of London. It is now a “member-Institute of the University’s School of Advanced Study.”5
While Esau of the Bible came to rue the day he sold his birthright, it was probably the best decision of Aby Warburg’s life. Today his institute is a respected library, serving many scholars.
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1. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 127.
2. Ibid., 127.
3. Ibid., 130.
4. As described on the website of the Warburg Institute, http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/institute/institute_introduction.htm.
5. Ibid.
...Albert Einstein was a poor student
Albert Einstein’s early years did not show the promise he was to realize later in life. He was late to begin speaking, and his parents thought he might be learning impaired. His Greek teacher was so unimpressed with Einstein’s performance that he declared Einstein would never amount to anything.1
Einstein chafed under the rigidity of the rote learning system at the Gymnasium (high school). Irritated by Einstein’s attitude and by his precocious questions, his frustrated science teacher exclaimed, “your mere presence in class destroys [the other students’] respect for me.”2 Einstein promptly remedied this by dropping out of school.
When he was sixteen, his father told him to “forget his ‘philosophical nonsense’ and apply himself to the ‘sensible trade’ of electrical engineering.”3
His lack of a Gymnasium diploma precluded Einstein’s matriculation at most universities. He was, however, eligible to enter the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology without a diploma providing, of course, he would be able to pass the entrance examination.
Einstein failed the entrance test despite the fact that, at the age of sixteen, he had written a paper on “the relationship between electricity, magnetism, and the ether, the hypothetical nonmaterial entity which was presumed to fill all space and to transmit electromagnetic waves.”4 Perhaps he should have submitted the paper to someone other than his uncle.
In any event, Einstein spent another year getting ready for the test. This time he passed and was admitted to the institute. He ignored his father’s advice and continued his studies in physics.
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1. Maja Winteler-Einstein, “Albert Einstein: A Biographical Sketch,” in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein: The Early Years, 1879–1902 by Albert Einstein, translated by Anna Beck and Peter Havas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), xx.
2. Mark A. Runco and Steven R. Pritzker, Encyclopedia of Creativity, vol. 1 (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1999), 644.
3. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 41.
4. Ibid., 41.
...Albert Einstein used his fame to benefit the Berlin poor
While Albert Einstein jealously guarded his privacy, he frequently gave his name and his time to a worthy cause. In 1930, while en route to Pasadena, California, for a lecture series, he agreed to two radio broadcasts from aboard the ship. For each speech, he earned one thousand dollars, which he promptly remitted to a charitable fund for the poor people of Berlin. From those who sought his autograph, he charged one dollar. For autographs of memorabilia, he charged five dollars. All of the proceeds went to this charity.1
None of this could transcend the fact that Einstein was Jewish. Within a few short years, Einstein’s scientific work was relegated to the bonfire,2 and he himself had to escape Germany with a price on his head.3
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1. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Avon, 1984), 520–22.
2. Ibid., 571.
3. Ibid., 600.
...Albert Einstein was helped by other brilliant Jewish minds
Albert Einstein’s place in the world of science is certainly secure. However, like almost all scientists, Einstein did not work in isolation. His epic discoveries were aided by the work of other brilliant minds.
Tulio Levi-Civita (1873–1942) was an Italian mathematician whose work in absolute differential calculus provided the basis for Einstein’s relativity theory.1
Leopold Infield, a professor of mathematics at Toronto University, was a collaborator of Einstein’s and he contributed to his work on mathematical physics.2
Albert Abraham Michelson is credited with providing Einstein with direction to his famous relativity theory. This German-born Jew, residing in America, constructed a giant interferometer which proved extremely useful in the famous Michelson-Morley experiment.3
Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) was a teacher of Einstein. Minkowski postulated the Minkowski world, a four-dimensional space in which the fourth dimension is time and a single event is represented as a point.4 This fusion of time and space was, of course, crucial to Einstein’s work.
The mere promulgation of any theory, especially one as revolutionary as Einstein’s theory of relativity, does not always bring instant acceptance. It still remained for other scientists to investigate and verify its truth.
Karl Schwartzschild (1873–1916) was one of the foremost mathematicians and astronomers in Germany in his time. His research in space and gravitation helped prove Einstein to be correct.5
Another major proponent of Einstein’s work was L. Silberstein (1872–1948). He delivered a series of lectures at several universities and eventually published his course in a book entitled Theory of Relativity.6
Max Born of the University of Göttingen also issued a publication entitled Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, first in German and then in English.7 Each of these works by fellow Jews helped solidify the veracity of Einstein’s work.
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1. Dagobert D. Runes, ed., The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), 93.
2. Ibid., 97.
3. Ibid., 120.
4. “Hermann Minkowski,” Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1983.
5. Runes, The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization, 110.
6. Ibid., 124.
7. Ibid.
HOLOCAUST:
Perpetrators, Bystanders, Rescuers
...Jews became anti-Semites to prove they were Germans first
In the latter part of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century, there was a great passion among German Jews to be Germans first and Jews second. One of the easiest ways to make common cause with their German counterparts was to express their disdain for the Ostjuden, the Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe who were entering Germany as refugees from persecution.1
Another way for German Jews to bond with the German population was to help publicize th
e slanders about Jews including their alleged “corrosiveness,” “materialism,” and “hatred of tradition.”2 The newspapers running the anti-Semitic slanders were often Jewish owned or Jewish managed. Sometimes the writers themselves were Jewish.3 Nor were the expressions of anti-Semitism limited to the mass media. Even in personal relationships, the hatred surfaced. The famous music conductor Hermann Levi was not immune to the viciousness. His correspondence “often bore anti-Jewish barbs.”4
In spite of all this pandering to German society in an effort to be accepted as Germans, it was becoming evident to the Berlin Jews that the other Germans did not see them in the same way. “The Jew was the only citizen of Germany, it seemed, for whom religious conversion was not the road to acceptance but a cause for suspicion.”5 It was the tardy realization of the disconnect between how the Jews of Germany saw themselves and how they were viewed by the general population that caused so much disillusionment among German Jews.
When the Nazis came to power and began their ruthless persecution of the Jews, the Jews who perceived themselves as Germans first and Jews second received a shock that was often too much to bear. There were numerous suicides among the German-Jewish citizens of the Reich.
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1. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 187.
2. Ibid., 156.
3. Ibid., 155–56, 161.
4. Ibid., 201, 203, 208.
5. Ibid, 186.
...IBM helped Nazis find and keep track of Jews
In 1884, a German immigrant to the United States named Herman Hollerith, working for the US Census Bureau, invented a machine that could eliminate the tedious task of hand counting. The new invention could perform rapid tabulations using a system of punched cards fed into the machine. Punches in the card in certain places were answers to the forms filled out by people responding to the census.1 Hollerith’s system was adopted by the United States Census Bureau, and the machines were leased from Hollerith for the census. Soon many countries and businesses were leasing machines and buying punch cards from Hollerith.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Great Depression was at its zenith, and Hollerith’s company, now called International Business Machines,2 was being run by a man named Thomas Watson.
Hitler began rearming Germany in violation of the Treaty of Versailles obligation imposed on Germany not to rearm.3 Hitler’s wanton killing and persecution of Jews and establishment of concentration camps brought revulsion to much of the world, and boycotts against trading with Germany were put into force by many firms. Not so with IBM. IBM’s technology was useful to Hitler in efficiently tracking down Jews, and Watson was willing to oblige him. Watson’s company supplied the Nazis with genealogical search engines capable of tracking people with only one-sixteenth Jewish blood!4
Although many businesses were suffering due to the depression, IBM began to make a great deal of money by dealing with Nazi Germany. That Watson knew how his machines were being used, there can be no doubt. Finally feeling the pressure, Watson felt constrained to write a personal letter to Hitler entreating him to practice the “Golden Rule” in dealing with minority populations.5
While all this was going on, Watson was enjoying a close personal relationship with President Roosevelt. He was often called upon to advise the president, was an overnight guest in the White House, and was even offered a cabinet position.6
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1. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Company (New York: Crown, 2001), 24–26.
2. Ibid., 40–41.
3. Ibid., 68.
4. Ibid., 108.
5. Ibid., 147.
6. Ibid., 71.
...fifteen thousand Jews couldn’t be right
The German occupation of Poland during World War I proved to be rather benign. It appeared as though the German army was going out of its way to show friendship toward the Jews. General Ludendorff summarily repealed the czar’s anti-Jewish statutes, and even dedicated synagogues, saying things in Yiddish like “Meine liebe Yidden in Poilen (my dear Jews in Poland).”1
When the Germans came again to Poland in World War II, the shtetl (small town) of Eishyshok saw some fifteen thousand refugees stream through their town as they fled eastward before the advancing German army. The stories they told of atrocities committed against Jews stunned those who remembered fondly the German soldiers occupying their town during World War I and generously sharing their candy with the children of the villages. Many dismissed these horror stories. They could not believe that the sons of the soldiers of the previous occupation could be guilty of such monstrous behavior.2
Most of the townspeople chose not to flee and were soon systematically murdered by the sons of those Germans who befriended them almost thirty years before! What a tragic tale of failure to recognize living proof that times had changed!
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1. Howard M. Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 348.
2. Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was a World: A Nine-Hundred Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 59.
...France had concentration camps before Hitler came to power
Between 1918 and 1930 France experienced a large influx of foreigners. Having lost 1.4 million men in World War I and experiencing a low birth rate, France was suffering from a shortage of workers and began to attract guest workers and immigrants. The humanitarian approach by the government made France a haven for refugees, mainly from Eastern Europe but also from Germany.
With the onset of the depression, production took a precipitous plunge and unemployment rose sharply. As competition for jobs increased, resentment toward foreigners began to rise. Among the foreigners were substantial numbers of Jews. Soon anti-Semitic diatribes began to fill the newspapers. Jews were job stealers, a population not able to be assimilated into French society, and at the same time, polluters of French bloodlines. As the rhetoric heated up, longtime Jewish-French citizens began to be grouped with the immigrants.
Soon there began a discussion of a “Jewish problem,” and there was talk of a special statute for Jews. Jews were also being depicted as warmongers complicating French efforts to get along with the Germans. The French writer Céline wrote, “If you really want to get rid of the Jews, then...racism! That’s the only thing the Jews are afraid of: racism! And not a little bit, with the fingertips, but all the way! Totally! Inexorably! Like complete Pasteur sterilization.”1
Finally, the French took the last step and established concentration camps for further sorting and disposition of the refugees. When the German army defeated the French forces in the summer of 1940 and established the Vichy2 government in southern France, the infrastructure and the mindset for persecution and terror were already in place. By the end of 1940, 70 percent of the unrepatriated concentration camp residents were Jews, and many more were on the way.3
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1. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 42.
2. The Vichy French government was a puppet government dominated by Nazi Germany. Their army fought the Americans and the British in North Africa.
3. Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, chapter 2.
...the United States War College taught Nazism before Hitler
When the United States Army War College conducted classes for ranking officers, their purpose went far beyond what one might expect in an army war college. For some reason, the war college was deeply involved in political indoctrination, including undisguised racism. The army lecturers posited the thesis that war is an inevitable clash between “higher-order” human beings against “lower-order” humans. At stake was control of limited resources, in an ever more populated world.
Like the Nazis, the war college’s curriculum claimed the superiority
of the “Nordic race” over all others. This group is comprised of people from Scandinavia, Germany, and the British Isles. The undesirables are classified as the Southern and Eastern Europeans, especially Russians and Russian Jews. Like the Nazis, the war college presented “Orientals” and “Negroes” as inferior to the whites. Like the Nazis, the war college used cranial shapes as a racial identifying criterion. Like the Nazis, the war college warned of the dangers presented to the race by mixing with people of “substandard” races.
Singled out for special consideration by the war college were the Jews. They were cited as capitalistic oppressors of the poor, while at the same time being Socialists and Bolsheviks attempting to upset the existing order of economic activity. Jews were heavily censured for their unwillingness to assimilate into the larger culture of the countries in which they lived. At the same time, they represented a threat to the purity of the Nordic race, and by extension, the American way of life.
The war college continued to preach the threat posed by international Jewry to take over the world as set forth in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, even after the publication had been unmasked as a scurrilous fraud given wide currency by auto manufacturer Henry Ford.1
The war college’s dogmatic teachings contributed to the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, in which the bulk of the immigration slots were allocated to the so-called Nordic race at the expense of the less desirable Southern and Eastern European peoples. This played a major role in the failure of the Americans and the other Allies to mount any sort of rescue effort and/or relaxation of the restrictive immigration quotas during the Holocaust.2