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Chapter 1 A Concise History of German Anti-Semitism In 1942, in
a suburb of Berlin known as Wannsee, Reinhard Heydrich (head
of the infamous Nazi secret police, the Gestapo) finalized the
Nazi commitment to the
extermination of the Jews within the Third Reich’s sphere of
influence (Gilbert 281).
According to some historians, these announcements made at
Wannsee were the
culmination of step-by-step decisions that had brought about
what Adolf Hitler meant
when, in 1920, he announced the Nazi party’s position that “None
but members of the
Nation may be citizens of the State. None but those of German
blood, whatever their
creed, may be members of the Nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a
member of the
Nation” (qtd. in Gilbert 23).
Both ancient and contemporary European and German anti-Semitic
forces
were about to collide in Wannsee. That collision tragically
ignited one of history’s
most devastating and most documented genocidal
conflagrations—what today is
commonly called the “Holocaust.” Some historians suggest the
Holocaust was the
result of the Nazi targeting of Jews as scapegoats by suggesting
that world-Jewry
collectively had had something to do with the “stab in the back”
that brought the
World War I German war effort and World War I itself to a
turbulent end. Some
researchers suggest European Jewry was singled out for “special
treatment” because
they, the Jews, were somehow responsible for the unexpectedly
final battlefield-
failures, the consequent enormous war reparation payments, the
collapsing stock
markets and the subsequent spiraling inflation that financially
crippled the German
nation. Most historians, in fact, recognize that between 1918
and 1933 political and
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economic factors were two of the most obvious reasons for
Germany’s involvement
in yet another world war. Another significant cause of the
Holocaust, some critics
argue, was the increasingly popular “Nationalist” movements that
had become arisen
throughout Europe. In post-war Germany, the National Socialist
German Workers
Party (Nazi for short) had targeted Jews as a danger to German
well-being. National
purity was the central focus of much of Adolf Hitler’s writings
and speeches, most of
which included implicit and explicit threats against Jews in
both Germany and
Austria, as well as threats against Jews around the world.
Specifically, “[…] on 30
January 1939, the anniversary of his appointment as Reich
Chancellor, he [Hitler] had
made a chilling prophecy” (Noakes and Pridham 1049). While
noting the world
could not find peace until the Jewish question was resolved,
Hitler concluded:
[…] if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe
should
succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then
the result
will not be the Bolshivizing of the earth, and thus the victory
of Jewry, but the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. (qtd. in Noakes and
Pridham 1049)
For this reason, among many others, the Second World War itself
and the
anti-Semitic genocide that took place behind German battlefield
lines have become
inextricably linked. As the popularity of the Nazi party
increased, the years of Jews
being considered Germans were coming to a close. What was to be
announced at
Wannsee, horrifying as it was, was not, however, a wild,
previously inconceivable
leap into some unfathomably dark Nazi imagination. Instead, this
announcement
heralded, as historian Raul Hilberg suggests, but one more step
in the historically
ever-escalating efforts of nations and non-Jews to eliminate the
Jews from their midst
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(Shoah n.p.). So often had the Jews been targets of pogroms in
the countries in which
the Jews lived, anti-Semitism had become virtually ubiquitous
throughout all of
Western and Eastern Europe long before the Nazis came to power.
Historian, Franklin
Littell emphasizes this point by concisely noting, “The via
dolorosa of the Jews did
not begin with the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler and the genocide
of the Jews” (n.p.).
No doubt Littell would agree with Hilberg that Wannsee was but
one more step along
an already much traveled road that had been coursed even in the
pre-Christian world.
Step by step, anti-Semitic actions moved forward into what
became the 20th century’s
pathway to the Nazi genocidal assault against European Jewry.
This genocidal effort
took the lives of some 6,000,000 Jewish people, many of whom
wound up in the
crematory fires of concentration and death camp ovens. The term
Holocaust itself is
derived from the Greek holo-whole and caustus-burning or whole
burning, a direct
reference to the crematory ovens and pits that were used to
reduce these victims to
bone and ash that then could be dispersed, buried or otherwise
disposed of.
Raul Hilberg’s suggestion that the Holocaust was the next,
almost predictable,
step in the longstanding historical treatment of European Jewry
has some support.
Actions against the Jews had progressed from mandating that they
move from their
homes into ghettos, and later that Jews convert from Judaism to
Christianity or be
expelled from their homelands, and finally, that Jews were to be
annihilated. Hilberg
writes, “The second [conversion] appeared as an alternative to
the first
[ghettoization], and the third [annihilation] emerged as an
alternative to the second”
(7) [my brackets].
The earliest of historically noted anti-Semitic events reaches
into the distant
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past and includes, for instance, the enslavement of Jews by
Nebuchadnezzar during
the Babylonian captivity of 586 B.C. E. (New Advent 1). Then,
according to historian
Yehuda Bauer, internal conflicts among the Jews led to the
destruction of the Temple
of Jerusalem in 67-70 C.E (18), the oppression of Jews under a
succession of Roman
procurators, which was then followed by the Bar-Kochba uprising
and massacre in
132-135 C.E. (19).
But the political disenfranchisement and the religious
subordination of the
Jews seems to have reached its zenith with Emperor Constantine’s
declaration of
Christianity as the official religion of Rome in the 4th century
A. D. This decision at
first appeared to totally alienate Roman Jewry. Yet, the
decision, according to Baur,
reflected only a temporary restraint of Jewish political and
economic influence (10).
Still, this period reflects a glimpse of what was to re-emerge
in its most virulent form
1500 years later. Except for Constantine’s legal sanctions
against Jews, conversion
during these pre- and early-Christian times does not seem to
have been a goal.
Along with the rise of Christianity, Christians, as mentioned
earlier, sought to
convert, then to expel, and finally, in the uniforms of Nazi
soldiers decorated with the
infamous death’s head insignia, to annihilate the Jews within
their reach.
As Christianity gained political influence and religious
domination of Europe,
the Church encouraged its followers to show Jews the error of
their ways “[…]
because of the conviction that it was the duty of true believers
to save unbelievers
from the doom of eternal hellfire” (Hilberg 5). But conversion
went neither easily
nor quickly. Some historians believed conversion did not go at
all well. By 1200
C.E., “[…] the Church had converted to Christianity virtually
all the inhabitants of
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Europe […] (Fabry 1). Yet, “The Jews were not convinced” that
conversion was the
best thing for them individually or as a people (6). Their
reluctance to convert may
be somewhat better understood in light of fact that many of
those Jews who had
converted had been received into the Christian fold with only
the deepest of
skepticism. By the 15th century, in response to accusations of
false conversions, these
early converts had been persecuted by denouncers. Those Jews who
were accused
were most frequently sentenced to torture and to their deaths at
the hands of Spanish
inquisitors such as Torquemada, for fear that these conversos
(Jews who had
converted Christianity) were actually witches, heretics, and, in
fact, never really
converted at all but had instead only heretically feigned to
have converted.
Denouncement of converses became accepted practice throughout
the 15th century
Spanish inquisition, including denouncements for such actions as
a person’s not
eating pork or “smiling at the mention of the Virgin Mary […]”
(Fbrey 5).
However, determining if any Jew’s conversion was real or whether
it was
merely a ruse to escape the occupational and social anti-Semitic
discriminations of
the times was so difficult that Spain began requiring certified
purity of faith. The
Spanish government and church officials began classifying and
certifying converts by
the degrees of “’half-new Christians,’ ‘quarter-new Christians,’
and so on” (Hilberg
6). (Ascertaining the degree of a Jew’s Christianization,
underscored the belief that
converted Jews were not full Christians and would always be to
some degree a Jew.
This anti-Semitic suspicion moved Jews one step closer to
Wannsee, where Reinhard
Heydrich, head of the Nazi secret police, established a similar
standard that would fix
the degree to which a German was a Jew based on the lineage of
one or both parents
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or even whether one acted like a Jew.
Conversion of the Jews in 15th Europe was not working. When this
became
apparent, expulsion became the second step in developing a
national anti-Jewish
policy (7). The move from conversion to national expulsion was
one more step closer
still to Wannsee. In essence the political policy had shifted:
from “Jews cannot live
among us as Jews to Jews cannot live among us. In 1492, for
instance, all Spanish
(Sephardic) Jews who refused to convert were expelled from
Spain. They made their
separate and collective ways into Northern and Eastern Europe
(Fabry 5). Indeed,
this northern and eastern migration had begun around 1209 as
other nations began
years of evangelization until in 1492, when Jews had been
expelled from England,
France, Austria, and Spain (Grobman 4). As indicated in the
tables appended to the
end of this chapter, the expulsions took on more forms than
physical expulsion from
Jews’ host countries. Even within their host countries, the
respective governments
had begun prohibiting of Jews from cohabiting with Christians,
excluding Jews from
professional employment and ejecting Jews from public schools,
practices that later
became all too familiar. In these ways, Jews were effectively
expelled from all social
and economic intercourse with their Christian or other
non-Jewish neighbors.
While some Jews struggled to assimilate into Central and Western
European
countries throughout the 11th to 15th centuries, other Jews,
such as Germanic Jews and
the Ashkenazim (Yiddish speaking Jews), had made their way to
the Rhine Valley as
early as the 9th Century.
These Germanic Jews seemed to fare no better than did their
Mediterranean
co-religionists. Anti-Semitism in the Germanic north was as
brutal as it later become
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in Spain in 1492. From out of this Bavarian territory arose the
anti-Semitic, Medieval
Crusades of 1096 A.D. Crusaders do not seem to have cared at all
about evangelizing
or converting Jews to Christianity; nor did these Crusaders
content themselves with
expelling Jews from their host countries. The First Crusade, for
instance, according to
Salo W. Baron, culminated in a “trail of blood and smoldering
ruins left behind in the
Jewish communities from France to Palestine” […], which […] “for
the first time
brought home to the Jewish people, its foes and friends, the
utter instability of the
Jewish position in the western world” (qtd. in Fischer 13). The
slaughter of Jewish
people did not occur in isolation in the Middle East, but ranged
from Germany,
through France and throughout the rest of Europe.
Yet, these crusaders had been admonished not to kill Jews, for
murder was a
violation of the Christian commandments. Indeed, not all
Crusaders joined Crusades
to slay the infidel, the Semite; some Crusaders went along
because participation
promised each Crusader a “plenary indulgence—that is, a full
remission of all
penalties either in purgatory or on earth previously due any
sinner” (Eban 155), and,
admonished or not, in 1098, at Worms, during two days of
apparent carnage, the local
[non-Jewish] population had killed 800 Jews (Rossel 61). The
Crusades recurred in
1147 and went on until 1149. Hunting down the infidel and
seeking indulgences had
become generational, and yet another Crusade began in 1189 and
continued through
1192. While the Crusades were initially begun to expel the
infidel from the Holy
lands, Palestine, Syria, and the Mediterranean in toto, the
historian Abba Eban notes,
“The Crusades had no single motive: a convergence of political,
economic social, and
religious factors produced this historical upheaval” (155). It
is impossible to
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determine, with any degree of certainty, whether the Crusaders’
desire to reclaim the
Holy land, or their desire to increase the Church’s land
holdings, or their desire for
private wealth and religious indulgences had led to the
expulsion of the Jews from
their homes and their homelands in the targeted areas. Much of
the Crusades, Eban
suggests, ultimately ended in the massacres of more local Jews
than Jews in the Holy
land. These more-local attacks resulted in 800 Jewish deaths at
Worms and another
5000 at Mainz (156). In Spain, in Germany and in Austria,
wherever the Jews settled,
anti-Semitism must have seemed endemic.
“By 1500,” according to Klaus P. Fischer, in his very thorough
history of anti-
Semitism, History of an Obsession, “all of Western Europe, with
the exception of a
few areas in Germany and Austria, was free of Jews” (37). Both
in and outside of
Germany, Jews continued to be the targets of Nationalist and
religious zealotry
because they were the outsiders; they were different.
According to historian Yehuda Bauer, the Jews also felt they
were different,
and as God’s chosen people, they had been “chosen to be
different” (17) in the most
meaningful of contexts. Speaking a foreign tongue (Yiddish),
living, for the most
part, in exclusively Jewish enclaves, practicing non-Christian
rituals and dressing
according to their own distinct customs, Jews appeared
“different.” This separateness
from their neighbors made Jews vulnerable to allegations that
included the Passover-
ritual child-murder known as the “blood libel.” Accusations of
this sort arose in
France in 1171 and in Spain in 1247 (Eban 166-67) and added to
the perception of
Jews as outsiders, religiously and ritualistically separate from
the communities in
which they resided. In Germany, as within most European
communities, when these
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accusations of ritualistic murder proved false, no announcements
of innocence were
publicly reported, and neither were those who had made such
false allegations nor
those who had committed such criminal and/or homicidal acts
against the Jews
punished. Not punishing non-Jewish perpetrators of crimes
against Jews served
socially, religiously and legally to further isolate the Jews.
This passive sanction of
such anti-Jewish acts led once again to expulsion, if not from
their homes, then from
the normal intercourse in the lives of their non-Jewish
neighbors.
These age-old and seldom substantiated accusations against the
Jews have
continued because of the belief that Jews who do such things are
irrational and,
therefore, not subject to rational consideration. Fischer,
noting an inherent
connection between history and psychology, argues this
irrational perpetuation of the
negative image of Jews was/is “delusional” (17). Fischer seems
to believe that there is
no separating the history of anti-Semitism from the
psycho-social phenomenon he
calls Judeophobia (3). Whatever the reason, Germanic Jews
throughout the Middle
Ages were expelled from political, economic and social
interaction and, later, were
even separated from their national identity altogether. More and
more these “others,”
these “outsiders,” simply became “the Jews.” In fact, Fischer
suggests that Western
Europeans had so used the Jews as scapegoats that European
culture as a whole
actually labored under several anti-Semitic “delusions” (3) such
as:
• The stubbornness of the Jews
[1800 years of refusal to convert to Christianity (30)]
• The Wandering Jew (Ahasuerus)
[A mythical Jew who mocked Christ at his crucifixion and was
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condemned to wander the earth (30)]
• The Jews were in league with the devil
[Jews represented as pigs with devil—see image above (31)]
• The Mephitic smell of the Jews
[Devil gave off a foul smell so Jews must smell foul (31)]
• Jewish carnality
[Jews considered overly sexual, evidenced by organ
discoloration
(32)]
• Blood libel and ritual child murder
[Jewish males believed to menstruate because of circumcision
and
consequently need blood of young children to become “potent”
(33)]
• Host desecration
[Torturing the transubstantiated body of Christ by profaning
host
wafers (33)]
• A Jewish world conspiracy
[World conspiracy of Jews to control the world—premise of the
Elders
of Zion text (33)]
• Well poisoning
[During plague years 1315, Jews are accused of poisoning or
having
well-water poisoned (34)]
• The unproductive Jewish parasite
[Accusation of Jews living off the profits of usury—taking a
profit and
not giving back (36)]
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In opposition to these false and negative stereotypes, as
Fischer goes on to
note, historically strong ties bound Jews and Germans together,
so closely together, in
fact, that the subsequent friction and explosion may have been
neither altogether
unexpected nor altogether inexplicable. For instance, Fischer
points out that while the
structures of German and Jewish beliefs were comfortably
similar, the content was all
opposition. He argues that both cultures were inclined to follow
instruction: the Jews
following their ancient religious traditions as they relocated
throughout Western and
then Eastern Europe, and the Germans, having long existed as an
aristocratically
dominated and territorially fragmented nation, were “habituated
to the strictest sense
of obedience [...]” (56). Also, both Jews and Germans were in
search of a national
identity: the Jews since their expulsion from Jerusalem and
captivity in Babylon in
586 B.C., and the Germans since Prussia, Bavaria and the other
provinces proved
unable “[…] to forge a common national identity” (56).
Fischer further asserts that both Jews and Germans believed that
adherence to
their native values was an expression of faith in their gods and
ways of life. While
these two peoples appear to have had much in common, their goals
were mutually
exclusive, in diametric and fatal opposition to one another
(56). For the Germans, the
move to nationalism was for God and country; for the Jews, the
move to Germany
was also for God and country. But, these were very different
gods and two very
different peoples with very different visions of their
respective roles in “their
country”: one native to the land, the Volk, and the other, the
foreigner, the “outsider”
(Rossel 57). Thus, as Yehuda Bauer argues, the Jews,
historically, had perhaps been
singled out because they were different–special–chosen (at least
in their own eyes)–in
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that they were perhaps– “chosen to be different”(17). But, for
many Germans, as for
many earlier Europeans, as Fischer points out, many non-Jews
interpreted this Jewish
sense of being different or chosen as an implied superiority,
regardless of Jewish
protestations that this had not been the case (22).
Subsequently, Jews have been seen
as a people among other peoples, a people with no national
homeland, and a people
with seemingly no other allegiances than those they held to each
other, Jew to Jew.
Fifteenth century German anti-Semitic
sentiments found expression in illustrations such
as the infamous “Frankfurt Jew.” The top image
is a representation of the bloodletting of a child
in a “blood libel” and is an intentional reference
to the continuing allegations that Jews used the
blood of Christian children for the ritualistic
baking of Passover bread (matzot). The child is
pinioned to an altar, and his blood is to be
siphoned off and then baked into the bread. The
lower image includes a coprophagous Jew (identifiable by the
rotella [the circle] on
his cloak) and another Jew suckling at the teat of the boar/pig.
Behind the animal is
also the horned Satan or the devil.
(Figure 1)
Another such German anti-Semitic image is that of a transfer of
authority
between Synagoga (the matron of the Old Testament—the Torah and
the Jews) and
Ecclesia (matron of the New Testament— Christian Bible and the
Christian church).
This image below can be read from right to left. At the left
hand of Christ is
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Synagoga; she holds a goat (a demonic symbol) with her left
hand; her staff is broken
at the top; her crown is falling to the ground; her eyes are
blindfolded and her
overturned chalice spills Christ’s blood. In apposition,
Ecclesia stands at the right
hand of Christ; she wears her crown; her staff is unbroken, her
chalice collects
Christ’s blood. The message is rather clear: Synagoga is out,
the defamed dame of
the church; she has
lost her way and is
being led away from
the church by an
incarnation of the
devil. Ecclesia, at
the Right hand has
replaced Synagoga
and is on Christ’s good
side. She is now the maiden of the Christian church.
(Figure 2)
Too numerous to count, such images as these during the Middle
Ages were to
be found throughout Germany (Shreckenberg). However, not all
anti-Semitic
expressions were visual.
In 16th century Germany, other anti-Semitic comments are clearly
heard in the
vituperative exclamations of the popular critic of the Catholic
Church, Martin Luther,
who in 1543 suggests an eight-step solution to the “the Jewish
question.” In his
treatise “The Jews and their Lies,” Luther’s conflicted view of
Jews is quite evident.
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He writes:
First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does
not
burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no
one may ever be
able to see a cinder or stone of it. Secondly, their homes
should likewise be
broken down and destroyed … They ought to be put under one roof
or in a
stable, like gypsies…. Thirdly, they should be deprived of their
prayer books
and Talmuds…. Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under
threat of death
to teach any more.... If, however, we are afraid that they might
harm us
personally, then let us apply the same cleverness (expulsion) as
the other
nations, such as France, Spain, Bohemia, etc. and settle with
them for that
which they have extorted usuriously from us, and after having
divided it up
fairly let us drive them out of the country for all time. (qtd.
in Bauer 33)
Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be
abolished
completely for the Jews. For they have business in the
countryside, since they
are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let them stay
home […]. (qtd.
in Halsall 6)
Such images as the “Frankfurt Jew” and statements similar to
Martin Luther’s
sounded, and then were understood to be, clearly
anti-Jewish/anti-Semitic in the 14th,
15th and 16th centuries; they sound no less
anti-Jewish/anti-Semitic in the 19th, 20th
and 21st centuries (Almog 1).
From the Crusades to woodblock illustrations to Luther,
anti-Semitism
becomes almost ubiquitous in and synonymous with the Germanic
territories from the
11th centuries on. Why would such a terrorized people stay in
Germany, where during
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the 19th and 20th centuries, according to Ian Kershaw,
anti-Semitism was “so
commonplace as to go practically unnoticed”? (qtd. in Goldhagen
32). Klaus Fischer
answers, that for the hundred years prior to the rise of the
Nazi party and the
institutionalized anti-Semitism of the Third Reich, Jews in
Germany had slowly, but
rather constantly, gained significant promises of freedoms that
were denied Jews in
other countries (42). The years of expulsion had to come to an
end, finally, and at
long last--or so it seemed.
Once permitted, Jews were noticeably successful at assimilating
into 18th and
19th century German society, culture, economy and the
professions. For instance,
during the 18th century, Moses Mendelssohn, once simply
identified as a Jew, rose to
enough political prominence that it was he who emphasized to the
King of Prussia,
Frederick II, the value of an indigenous German culture.
Moreover, Doris Lessing
wrote plays about tolerance and social open-mindedness (Fischer
58). And, historian
Peter Pulzer points out that throughout the decade of 1887-1897,
of those who studied
in Prussian universities there were “33 Catholics, 58
Protestants, and 519 Jews” (12).
Rising populations, emancipation, and, Pulzer goes on to
suggest, Jewish talent
“blossomed”(13). But perhaps the most successful and
subsequently the most
suspicious and envied Jewish success story was that of the
Rothschild family whose
five male children became internationally famous multi-national,
“cosmopolitan,”
bankers; a Jewish father and five sons controlling banks in
Frankfurt, Paris, London,
Naples, and Vienna, respectively (43). Their success is still
legendary; however, in
the early 19th century, this success was just what anti-Semites
could point to as the
epitome of Jewish contrivance, exploitation and
internationalism. Soon, the anti-
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Semites had written proof that the Jews were out to control the
world.
Ironically, those freedoms that had led to such financial,
academic,
professional and political success, then fatally led to Hitler,
for, as Benjamin Segel
points out, “Antisemites [sic] were quick to relate the
prosperity of the Jews to their
emancipation [...]. It granted not mere equality but also the
power to dominate” (10).
In this regard, one such noted step toward Wannsee is Adolf
Hitler’s having
been made familiar with Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,
a text that is
disparagingly known as “one of the most important forgeries of
modern times” (3).
The Protocols, most historians agree, is essentially a total
reconstruction of a work
originally written by Maurice Joli some time around 1865. The
work was originally
titled the Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and
Monstesquieu and was intended
as a criticism of Napoleon through the polemicists who veritably
argue over the
inherent good and/or evil in man and the ruling of men. Some
time later, however, so
some critics argue, the work was renamed. In the introduction to
Benjamin Segel’s A
Lie and A Libel, Richard Levy, notes, that through rewriting and
re-focusing the
work, the Protocols became “[...] the most lurid description of
the Jewish world
conspiracy” and that “the Protocols contributed to the sacrifice
of the Jews” (qtd. in
Segel 10).
Segel describes the discovery and effect of the work in the
following passage:
By pretending that the book was of Jewish authorship, an
“authentic”
[his quotes] document that had luckily fallen into the hands of
the intended
victims of Jewish plotting [. . .] . The Protocols appeared to
the public to be
the unguarded revelation of the secret leaders of Jewry, the
terrifying
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blueprint for world conquest, and the uncanny fulfillment of
ancient
prophecies. It was to be the wakeup call that would finally
persuade apathetic
readers of the Jewish peril. (11)
As a seemingly candid disclosure, the Protocols notes, “These
world-controlling Jews
at the top of affairs [...] are there by virtue of [...]
qualities which are inherent in their
Jewish natures” (Marsden 14). One can easily imagine how this
seemed to reinforce
the common notion that being “different” meant to the Jews that
Jews were superior.
The work goes on to declare that “the Protocols do not
contemplate the extermination
of the Gentiles, nor the making of this world a completely
Jewish populated world.
The Protocols contemplate a Gentile world ruled by Jews” (43).
The work also
declares that this new-world order will be achieved by “a
pretended effort to serve the
working classes and promote great economic principles, for which
an active
propaganda will be carried on through our economic theories”
[sic]. But, perhaps no
comment in the Protocols is as threatening as what is written in
“Protocol VI.” One
passage reads: “We must develop by every means the importance of
our super-
government, representing it as the protector and benefactor of
all who voluntarily
submit to us” (41).
The tone of the language is so matter-of-fact that a reader gets
the sense of
listening in at this secret meeting. Given the history of
anti-Semitism in general, and
German anti-Semitism in particular, there can be little doubt
that this work seemed to
confirm all those historic and current “delusions” (Fischer 24),
all those suspicions,
all those centuries of negative propaganda about Jews. After
all, there it was in The
Protocols, in writing, in black and white. That Hitler arrived
at similar conclusions
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seems clearly implied in Levy’s transcription of an excerpt from
a discussion between
Hitler and an unidentified confidant. In this discussion, Hitler
is recorded to have
said, “In those [early] days [of our movement] I read the
Protocols of the Elders of
Zion–I was really shocked [...]. The perilous stealth of the
enemy, and his
omnipresence! I saw at once that we would have to imitate
this–in our own way, of
course” (qtd. in Segel 29). Adolf Hitler’s coming into contact
with the Protocols was
one more step toward Wannsee.
Hitler seems to have found in the Protocols just what Karl
Lueger, the mayor,
sometimes referred to as “the King” of Vienna, and the Austrian
founder of The Anti-
Semitic League, loudly and constantly denounced the evil
influences of Jews on the
people around them and the societies in which Jews had
settled.
Anti-Semitism’s re-emergence in the early Middle Ages and its
genocidal
transformation in the early 20th century chronicle a long
Germanic history of
sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant anti-Jewish expressions.
With the exception
of the politically and economically disguised religious efforts
of the Crusades,
German anti-Semitism, as Raul Hilberg suggests, does seem to
follow a certain
progression. First, he explains, came the historically futile
efforts to convert Jews, as
evidenced in medieval Spain and in Luther’s exhortations. Then,
arose the more
successful efforts to expel the Jews from the social, cultural,
economic and national
life of the nations in Western Europe in which Jews had been
accommodated and into
which they had tried to assimilate. But, then, as finally as it
was fatal, the Nazis took
the next “’defensive’” (6) step.
And so it came, when on 20 January1942, in a small suburb of
Berlin known
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as Wannsee, Reinhard Heydrich announced the final “solution to
the Jewish
question.” There were to be no conversions, no more expulsions,
only annihilation.
Gassing. The total extermination of European Jewry.
The following lists include a chronology of German anti-Semitism
and a
comparison of pre-Nazi and Nazi anti-Semitic actions. These
lists illustrate that, as
Hilberg suggests, anti-Semitism was not new.
A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF ANTI-SEMITISM
“Anti-Semitism,” Keter Publishing House,
Jerusalem, 1974, ISBN 0 7065-1327 4
CHRONOLOGY
1012 A.D. Emperor Henry II of Germany expels Jews from Mainz,
the beginning
of persecutions against Jews in Germany.
1096-99 First Crusade. Crusaders massacre the Jews of the
Rhineland (1096).
1146 Anti-Jewish riots in Rhineland by the Crusaders of second
Crusade.
1215 Fourth Lateran Council introduces the Jewish Badge.
1235 Blood libel at Fulda, Germany.
1298-99 Massacre of thousands of Jews in 146 localities in
southern
and central Germany led by the German knight Rindfleisch.
1336-39 Persecutions against Jews in Franconia and Alsace led by
lawless
German bands, the Armleder.
1348-50 Black Death Massacres which spread throughout Spain,
France,
Germany and Austria, as a result of accusations that the Jews
had
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caused the death of Christians by poisoning wells and other
water
sources.
1399 Blood libel in Poznan.
1421 Persecutions of Jews in Vienna and its environs,
confiscation of their
possessions, and conversion of Jewish children, 270 Jews burnt
at
stake, known as the Wiener Gesera (Vienna Edict). Expulsion of
Jews
from Austria.
1452-3 John of Capistrano, Italian Franciscan friar, incites
persecutions and
expulsions of Jews from cities in Germany [sic]
1510 Expulsion of Jews from Brandenburg (Germany).
1544 Martin Luther, German religious reformer, attacks the Jews
with
extreme virulence.
1551 Expulsion of Jews from Bavaria.
1614 Vincent Fettmilch, anti-Jewish guild leader in Frankfurt,
Germany,
attacks with his followers the Jews of the Town and forces them
to
leave the city.
1819 A series of anti-Jewish riots in Germany that spread to
several
neighboring countries (Denmark, Poland, Latvia, and Bohemia)
known
as Hep! Hep! Riots, from the derogatory rallying cry against the
Jews
in Germany .
1840 Blood libel in Damascus (The Damascus Affair)
1853 Blood libel in Saratov Russsia
1878 Adolf Stoecker, German anti-Semitic preacher and
politician, founds
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the Social Workers’ Party, which marks the beginning of the
political
anti-Semitic movement in Germany.
1879 Heinrich von Treitschke, German historian and politician,
justifies the
anti-Semitic campaigns in Germany, bringing anti-Semitism
into
learned circles.
1879 Wilhelm Marr, German agitator, coins the term
anti-Semitism.
1882 First International Anti-Jewish Congress convened at
Dresden,
Germany.
1884 Expulsion of about 10,000 Russian Jews, refugees of
1881-1885
pogroms, from Germany.
1891 Blood libel in Xantan, Germany.
1899 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, racist and anti-Semitic
author,
publishes his Die Grundlagen des 19 Jahrhunderts which became
a
basis of National-Socialist ideology.
1905 First Russian public edition of the Protocols of the
Elders
of Zion appears.
1917-21 Pogroms in the Ukraine and Poland. 1) Pogroms by
retreating Red
Army from the Ukraine (spring, 1918), before the German army.
2)
Pogroms by the retreating Ukrainian army under the command
of
Simon Petlyura, resulting in the deaths of over 8,000 Jews.
3)
Pogroms by the counter revolutionary “White Army” under the
command of General A.I. Denikin (fall, 1919) in which about
1,500
Jews were killed. 4) Pogroms by the “White Army” in Siberia
and
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Mongolia (1919). 5) Pogroms by anti-Soviet bands in the
Ukraine
(1920-21), in which thousands of Jews were killed.
1920 Adolf Hitler becomes Fuehrer, of the
National-Socialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei (NASDAP), later known as National Socialist
[party].
1920 Henry Ford I begins a series of anti-Semitic articles based
on the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the Dearborn
Independent.
1925-27 Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is published.
1933 Adolf Hitler appointed chancellor of Germany. Anti-Jewish
economic
boycott: first concentration camps (Dachau, Oranienburg,
Esterwegen,
Sachsenburg.
1935 Nuremberg Laws introduced.
1938 After Anschluss, pogroms in Vienna, anti-Jewish
legislation
introduced: deportations to camps in Austria andGermany.
1938 Kristallnacht, Nazi anti-Jewish outrage in Germany and
Austria (Nov.
9-10, 1938); Jewish businesses attacked, synagogues burnt, Jews
sent
to concentration camps.
1940 Formation of ghettos in Poland; mass shootings of Jews:
Auschwitz
camp, later an extermination camp is established; Western
European
Jews under Nazis.
1941 Belzec extermination camp is established.
1941 Germany invades Russia and the Baltic states. Majdanek
extermination camp established. Chelmno and Treblinka
extermination camps are established. Anti-Jewish laws in
Slovakia.
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Pogroms in Jassy, Rumania. Pogroms and massacres by the
Einsatzgruppen and native population in Baltic states and the
part of
Russia occupied by Germany. Expulsion of Jews from the
German
Reich to Poland. Beginning of deportation and murder of Jews
in
France.
1941 Severe riots against Jews in Iraq in consequence of Rashid
Ali al-
Jilani’s coup d’etat. Nazi Germany introduces gassing in
extermination camps.
1942 Conference in Wannsee, Berlin, to carry out the “Final
Solution” (Jan.
20, 1942). Beginning of mass transports of Jews of Belgium
and
Holland toAuschwitz. Massacres in occupied Russia continue.
Death
camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka begin to function at
full
capacity: transports from ghettos to death camps. Sobibor
extermination camp established.
1943 Germany declared Judenrein. Transports of Jews from all
over Europe
to death camps. Final liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto (May,
16,
1943).
Obviously, as the twentieth century moved forward, so did German
anti-
Semitism, and while the Jews may have remained “different,”
their treatment at the
hands of the Nazis was not altogether different from what Jews
had been forced to
suffer at the hands of earlier persecutors.
There was, prior to the rise of Nazi party, as this chapter
points out, a long
history of anti-Semitism in Germany. What is to be learned here
is that there is
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nothing new about racial prejudice. What we learn from
anti-Semitism is that to avoid
being swept up in such expressions or outbursts or “upheavals”
(Eban 155) of such
prejudices, we must remain constantly vigilant to protect the
value of difference and
diversity, to practice inclusion rather than exclusion. Mankind
must make every effort
to protect the weakest among us, for they are the most
vulnerable to political, social,
economic and “delusional” demonizing, to the peril of the rest
of mankind.
From prohibition of sexual intercourse, to special taxes for
their care and safeguarding,
to the confiscation of Jewish property and even imprisonment,
German anti-Semitism
seems to have followed the trail of historical anti-Semitic
practices, until in 1942 when
the Nazi party broke with history and at Wannssee announced that
genocide was Nazi
party’s official Final Solution to the Jewish question. How did
so many people misread
these writings on the wall?
Suggested exercises
1. Have students identify a related historical event that is not
directly or thoroughly addressed in this writing. Students should
identify the event, provide the appropriate historical context of
the event, and discuss whether or not the event would have affected
his or her reading of this historical summary.
2. Have students identify a related image and discuss what the
image depicts and in what way(s) the image adds to or detracts from
what is addressed in this historical summary.
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Summary Notes
History of German Anti-Semitism
I. Significant People/Events
II. Outcomes of Events
III. Memorable Textual/Visual Expressions
IV. Language: Interesting/Foreign/Event-specific
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Works Consulted
Almog, Shmuel. “What’s in a Hyphen?” Center for the Study of
Antisemitism
(SICSA), 1989.
Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust. Revised ed. Danbury:
Franklin Watts
Publishers, 2001.
Eban, Abba. Heritage: Civilization and the Jews. New York:
Summit Books, 1984.
Fabry, Luana. The Concord of Messianic Fellowship. .
Fischer, Klaus, P. The History of an Obsession: German
Judeophobia and the
Holocaust. New York: Continuum Press, 1998.
Gidal, Nachum T. Jews in Germany: From Roman Times to the Weimar
Republic.
Koln: Konemann Verlagsgesellshaft mbH, 1998.
Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust. New York: Holt. 1986.
Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners. New York:
Knoff, 1998.
Grobman, Gary M. “A Brief History of the Jews.” Jewish
Lifestyle. Jewish
Federation of LasVegas 2001-2202 United Jewish Communities.
5 July 2002.
Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York:
Holmes &
Meier,1985.
Lewis, Bernard. Semites and Anti-Semites. New York: Norton,
1999.
Littell, Franklin, H. “Holocaust (Christian Theology); Holocaust
Jewish (1939-
1945)”Journal of Church & State. Autumn, 99.
Marsden, Victor E. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
Boring: CPA Book
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Publishers, 1934.
“Medieval Sourcebook: Martin Luther (1483-1546): The Jews and
Their Lies,
excerpts.” Medieval Source Book. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO
17 April
2002.
New Advent. “History of the Jews.” Catholic Encyclopedia. 1 July
2002.
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Noakes J. and G. Pridham eds. Naziism 1919-1945: A Documentary
Reader. Great
Britain: University of Exeter Press, 1988.
Pulzer, Peter. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in German and
Austria.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Segel, Benjamin. A Lie and A Libel: The History of the Protocols
of the Elders of
Zion. Trans. 1995. University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
Schreckenberg, Heinz. The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated
History. New York:
Continuum Publishing Co., 1996.
“WARNING: This is a Notorious Antisemitic Document.” On the Jews
and Their
Lies, 1543. Trans. Martin H. Bertram. (no publication date)
Academic Search
Premier. EBSCO. 17 April 2002.
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101
Illustrations 1. . “The Frankfurt Judensau.” From Heinz
Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art. New York: Continuum. 335.
2. ---. “Man of Sorrows with Ecclesia and Synagoga,” From Heinz
Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art. New York:
Continuum.60.