For those who are aware of the sophisticated, highly educated and cultured society that Germany was, the question has simply remained, how could the nation of Beethoven, Holbein, Goethe, Hegel and Humboldt be led into the abyss of barbarity by a former Viennese vagrant, a postcard painter and a mere corporal? The answer no doubt lies in the unique vortex of circumstances that converged over Germany during the Great Depression, but also in the charisma and oratory of the ‘man and the myth’ generated around Hitler through the new and modern forms of media; radio, television and cinema, that were harnessed by the propaganda genius of Joseph Goebbels to an extent that the world had not previously witnessed.
Hitler also continues to occupy our imagination because of the nature of his, and Nazi Germany’s meteoric rise, followed by an equally meteoric descent into moral bankrupcy, unprecedented ruin and destruction. From 1933, when Germany lay bankrupt, destitute, weak and rife with internal division, when it was not her strength but her weakness that was feared, it took just seven years until she become one of the most powerful nations in the world and conquered Continental Europe, a time frame during which most modern politicans fail to achieve even the most modest of their election promises, let alone make any significant imprint on history. Following the Fall of France, Hitler entered an eerily empty Paris, on 23rd June 1940 to take in the sights and stroll among its empty streets, sketching the Arc de Triomphe and the Grand Opera House, collecting ideas for even grander designs he had in mind for his postwar capital, ‘Germania’.cciii
When Hitler’s train returned through Germany, in the vainglorious summer of 1940, he was mobbed by thousands of euphoric Germans at every station along the way. The Germans were relieved, incredulous and ecstatic — Hitler appeared to be Germany’s salvation — as far as they were concerned the war was over and Europe had been conquered. Britain had no means of either launching an invasion of Europe, or defeating the German army on land. Germany and Russia were at peace and America was neutral. Germany had become a great European power again, she also stood at the pinnacle of her success; only America and Russia could challenge her now, and that seemed a dim and distant prospect in the summer of 1940.
Hitler had unified Austria and Bohemia with the Reich, brought France to heel and rendered Great Britain virtually impotent on the Continent of Europe. Had Hitler died in 1940, with no invasion of the Soviet Union and no Holocaust, he would arguably have gone down as the greatest German in history. Instead, he led the world into the most catastrophic war, attempted to exterminate an entire human race, and dragged Germany from the pinnacle of world power to crushing defeat, utter ruin, occupation and dismemberment.
To have scaled the heights and viewed the world at his feet, Hitler began to believe that ‘providence’ had truly smiled upon him and Germany. At Berchtesgarten, his mountain retreat on the Austro-German border, close to Salzburg, he looked straight out at the Untersberg mountain, the mythical resting place of Emperor Barbarossa, the leader of the Third Crusade who, legend has it, lies asleep at the table of his knights, ready to awake at Germany’s hour of need. It was here, at the summit of German Europe, looking out across the magnificent scenery of the Alps, that Hitler made the decision that marked both his and Germany’s fall.
Operation Barbarossa — the invasion of Soviet Russia — began on 22nd June 1941. Speaking of the war in the East, Hitler said to Albert Speer, ‘If I succeed I’ll be remembered as one of the greatest men in history. If I fail I will be condemned, I’ll be damned and loathed.’(6) He was absolutely right. But not for unleashing another imperialistic European war, no matter how genocidal, but rather for his attempt to exterminate an entire human race; for putting Europe’s Jews, men, women and children, through the meat grinder of Nazi industrial extermination.
On 30th January 1933, the day he took office, Hitler had made a speech to the assembled parliamentarians of the Reichstag in which he had said, ‘Today I shall be a prophet once again. If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in thrusting the nations into war again, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, it will be the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’ This was simply perverted; Hitler’s fear of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, of Soviet Russia, and his desire to conquer a new empire at the Soviet Union’s expense led to war, not his paranoid delusions about a mythical worldwide Zionist conspiracy.
In 1942, Hitler made three more speeches in which he railed against the Jews and talked of their impending destruction. In 1945, as the war he had initiated came crashing down on him and Germany, he stated, ‘The world will be eternally grateful that I have extinguished the Jews in Germany and Central Europe.’(7) When his attractive young Bavarian secretary, Traudl Junge, who had opted to stay with him in the bunker ‘to the end’ was asked to come to his study and take his political testament, she was shaking and nervous, expecting him to reveal the great secret behind what all the sacrifice had been for. She was disappointed when he dictated yet another of his tirades against the Jews, saying, ‘Above all I pledge the leadership of the nation and its followers to the scrupulous observation of the racial laws and to the implacable opposition against the universal poisoner of all people, international Jewry.’(8)
As military defeat loomed large, the extermination campaign went into overdrive. For Hitler, ‘defeat in the military war was less significant than victory in the racial war.’(9) Hitler stated, ‘The world will be eternally grateful.’ Instead the world condemned him and the nation in whose name these crimes against humanity were committed, for generations after his death. Hitler has remained front and centre, both in the history of Nazi Germany, and in man’s litany of his own inhumanity to his fellow man. Hitler has not been remembered for his triumphs, for a heroic struggle against impossible odds, or for the catastrophe into which he dragged his own people and the European Continent, but for his merciless and relentless pursuit of the extermination of a sophisticated and cultured human race.cciv
ANTI-SEMITISM: A HISTORY OF UNREMITTING PERSECUTION
The key question in the minds of anyone who has watched Shoah or Schindler’s List is how such evil and inhuman behaviour could have been carried out by a supposedly civilised society? The easy answer comes from historians who believe that the German Sonderweg (special path) set them apart from the rest of the civilised world. These historians argue that the Germans have been the ‘barbarians at the gate’ since the Roman Empire, and are essentially part of the long line of barbarians that come from the East: the Huns, Mongols, Tartars, Cossacks, Ottomans, Germans, and of course the Red Army. But anti-Semitism was not invented in Prussia, or Germany, nor does German Europe have a monopoly on the tortuous history of anti-Semitism.
Amos Elon has questioned the stoicism of Jews in persecution. One could conclude that stoicism is the only way to have endured an unremitting history of suffering. This suffering can be charted a long way back, from slavery and exile in ancient Egypt in 1200 BC, through the invasion of their kingdom by the Assyrians in 772 BC, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BC, and their subsequent enslavement again by the Babylonians. The Jews suffered occupation, persecution and near annihilation again in AD 70 when the Romans destroyed their Temple and banished them from entering Jerusalem. After the rebellion, Jews were carted off to Rome between AD 66 and AD 70, and it was Jewish slave labour that built the Coliseum.
After the Romans destroyed the kingdom of Israel, the diaspora was scattered to the wind. Jews often followed in the wake of the Roman legion’s new conquests, taking up roles of merchants and intermediaries between the conquerors and the conquered. The largest Jewish migrations were the Sephardim — or Sepharad Jews — who went into Iberia (what became Spain), and the Ashkenaz, who followed the Romans into what became Germany. The largest communities grew up along the Rhine, and in the main trading cities of the Rhine valley. A codex from the city of Cologne, which allowed Jews to be appointed to the papal court for the first time, s
urvives from AD 321, during the reign of Emperor Constantine.(1) One of the longest periods in which Jewish communities in Europe grew and prospered was in the twilight of the Roman era and through the period we still call the ‘Dark Ages’. In AD 797 Charlemagne, as King of the Franks, sent Isaak (the Jew) of Narbonne to lead a legation to meet the Caliph of Baghdad. Isaak returned years later to Aachen, one of the few survivors of the trip, bringing as a gift from the Caliph to the Emperor an elephant named ‘Abulabaz’. Charlemagne encouraged the settlement of Jews along the cities of the Rhine, where they were allowed to own property, trade free of tax restrictions and were not discriminated against at court.
Under the rule of Otto the Great in AD 965, Jews and other merchants were granted privileges to trade in all wares and to bring in goods from abroad, without having to pay tax. Before the Crusades, Jews and merchants had become synonymous; their close family networks of trusted coreligionists gave them a unique ability to operate cross-border trade in exotic and often luxurious goods, as well as offering the supply of credit. They shared a common system of adjudication and tort law, and rabbinical courts in Europe and the near East recognised and enforced one another’s judgments.(2) Great centres of Jewish culture, spirituality and scholarship arose out of the Ashkenazi Jews of Germany, in cities such as Worms, Speyer and Mainz, and in 1090, the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich IV extended their privileges and put Jews in the empire under his protection.
The first post-Roman major turning point for Jewish communities in Europe was a call by the Pope and the Catholic Church for crusades against the ‘Infidels’ in the Holy Land. Religious bigotry stirred up against non-Christians by the Church increasingly led to violence against Jews — if the Pope had sanctioned a fight against Infidels in the Holy Land, then why not at home? Jews were attacked across the empire in cities such as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Metz, Cologne, Xanten and Regensburg; over one hundred Jews were killed in these attacks. By 1215, the Lateran Church Council in Rome was delimiting relations between Christians and Jews, declaring that Jews had to be identifiable by the wearing of a yellow patch. Later in the same century, Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Jerusalem, reduced the status of the Jews within the empire to that of Kammerknechte; effectively they became no more than serfs, and the property of the Emperor.ccv (3) Eventually, all of Christendom became involved in a seemingly never-ending succession of Papal-inspired, bloody attacks on the Jews of Europe;ccvi a genocidal religiosity that continued for centuries and was not restricted to one or more nations in Europe, rather encompassing them all in wave after wave of attacks. In 1253, England’s King Henry III issued anti-Jewish decrees and forced them to wear a ‘badge of shame’, and in 1255, a blood libel in the city of Lincoln led to Jews being tortured and burned at the stake. In 1290, King Edward I (Longshanks, the hammer of the Scots) expelled all Jews from England, and in 1294, Simon de Montfort (the ruler of England) inspired the massacre of the Jews that remained in London. In 1305, King Philip IV of France seized all Jewish property and expelled Jews from France (in 1307 doing the same to the Knights Templar). The Jews were expelled from France twice more in the fourteenth century; in 1322 under the rule of King Charles IV, and again in 1394 under Charles VI.
The most advanced Jewish civilisation in Europe had flowered for centuries on the Iberian Peninsula; but the Sepharad Jews suffered the same fate as the Moorish Arabs and their descendants, the Moriscos, who had been genocidally wiped out during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the Spanish Reconquista. In 1391, 4,000 Jews were murdered in a single day in Seville. The Spaniards were as ruthless as they had been with the Arabs, they did not let a single Jew remain; even conversion could not save them, and by 1473, the Marranos — Jews who had converted to Christianity but who were labelled ‘secret Jews’ — were being hunted down and killed.(5) The Spanish Inquisition began in 1481 and targeted all those who were not loyal to the ‘true’ Roman faith. In 1492, under the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Jews that remained in Spain were expelled under appalling conditions that cost the lives of half of what remained of Spain’s Jewish community. Many of the Jews who survived headed for the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, knowing they had fared far better under the tolerance of Islam than the murderous onslaught of Christianity. En route some chose to remain in Venice, where the authorities then determined to lock the gates of their quarter at night. The word ‘ghetto’ derives its origins from here.
As the Protestant Reformation got under way, the focus of the persecution of the Jews moved back to the Holy Roman Empire. In 1543, Martin Luther published On Jews and Their Lies, which advocated an eight-point plan that would either bring about their conversion or force their expulsion. In 1670, the Jews were expelled from Vienna and in 1744 Empress Maria Theresa expelled them from Bohemia. It was not until the mid eighteenth century that the Jewish communities in the empire, while still attended by a multitude of restrictions and prejudice, were able to begin the second great flowering of Jewish Culture in Europe, centred on Berlin and Brandenburg-Prussia.
Anti-Semitism became especially murderous in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia from the late Middle Ages, even giving the world a new word in the lexicon of barbarism: ‘pogrom’. In 1563, when Russian Jews were given the option of converting to Orthodox Christianity or being put to death, some 300 refused to convert and were thrown into specially prepared ice holes in the river Dvina. From 1648–55, Ukrainian Cossacks annihilated 300 Jewish communities, massacring over 100,000 Jews and eliminating vast tracts of Eastern European Jewish life from Poland and Lithuania through to the Ukraine and Western Russia. Attempts to expel the remaining Jews from Russia and the Ukraine were made first by Tsarina Catherine the Great in 1727, and then again under Tsarina Elisabeth in 1742. Starting in Odessa, in the Crimea, from 1881–84, pogroms again scarred Russia and the Ukraine and led to the mass emigration of over 2 million Jews, many of whom left via German Jewish shipping companies based in Hamburg and Bremen, heading for a new life in the United States.
Following a murderous onslaught against Jews in Germany, France and Spain during the Black Death (which the Jews had nonsensically been blamed by anti-Semites for starting), Poland became the main refuge for Jews from all over Europe. King Casimir the Great offered them his protection, and many Jews settled in his capital, Krakow. For centuries, Poland remained a refuge for Europe’s persecuted Jews. Nevertheless, before its partition out of existence in the late eighteenth century, even Poland succumbed to anti-Semitism and spawned a paramilitary group called the ‘Haidamaks’, which set about murdering Jews in the 1730s. After partition, most of Poland’s territory fell under the control of Imperial Russia, so her Jewish communities were afflicted by the murderous pogroms that were unleashed there. As a result, an ever-increasing number of Jews emigrated west to Prussia and beyond.
Polish anti-Semitism increased during the 123 years from 1795–1918, when the country ceased to exist as a nation. Without a Polish state, Polishness needed to define itself, and it has been argued that this led to Poles identifying themselves in terms of what they were not. They were certainly not Russian, nor Prussian nor supranationally Austrian. Polish identity was deeply rooted in the love of the Polish language and culture, and Roman Catholicism. When the Polish nation re-emerged after the First World War, a fiery brand of nationalism spawned persecution of all of Poland’s substantial minorities; these included Ukrainian, German, Byelorussian and Ruthenian groups, but especially non-Christian Jews. Before their assembled congregations, priests lost no opportunity to label Jews as ‘Christ killers’. Attacks on Jews became commonplace, especially in the east of the country. Jews were barred from taking many jobs in government or the civil service. A raft of anti-Semitic legislation in a diverse range of areas discriminated against Jews, which ranged from forcing them to use separate benches in public parks to boycotting their shops and trade.(6)
After the United States, Prussia (and then Germany) became the second largest refuge for East
ern European Jews fleeing persecution. Most of Europe’s Jews spoke Yiddish, a language that any German can follow, since it is so heavily infused with German words. Europe’s Jews had also often adopted Germanised names such as Goldstein, Pearlman, Rothschild and Guggenheim, to name a few of the most familiar. The history of anti-Semitism had been long and tortuous. The Jews had become a people without a state of their own, seemingly destined to traverse the globe looking for safe havens. In each nation in which they set down roots and began to prosper, they became victims of prejudice, ignorance, intolerance, hatred and murderous pogroms. The twentieth century saw a new form of industrialised genocide that was inflicted on the Jewish people from a quarter that many would have least expected. As one historian remarked, prior to the First World War, ‘It would have taken a great leap of imagination to nominate Germany as the future perpetrator of genocide against the Jews.’(7) And Professor Sir Richard Evans has argued that if you had asked someone in 1914 which European nation would attempt to wipe out the entire Jewish race, they would most likely have looked to Russia, the nation with the worst track record in its treatment of Jews, where rabid anti-Semitism was rife. They would not have imagined that, ‘The acculturated Jewish community and its comparative lack of overt or violent political anti-Semitism in Germany’(8) would have become the centre for the most horrific outgrowth of anti-Semitism in history.
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