The Ultimate Consequences of Antisemitism

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CHAPTER 8 The Ultimate Consequences of Antisemitism

Max Weinreich’s observation, made as early as 1946, that National Socialist Jewish research accompanied every ideological step of an increasingly rabid Jewish policy in the Third Reich,1 is confirmed particularly in regard to the Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage of the Reichsinstitute for History of the New Germany and its collaborators. No one there had a problem admitting openly that their scholarly investigation into the “Jewish question” served the purpose of legitimizing and underpinning the Jewish policy of the state. In the course of the practical application of the racial laws, the National Socialist Jewish researchers became aware that the solution to the “Jewish problem” would have severe consequences for the Jews. After the Nuremberg Laws, the pogrom night instigated by the Reich, the so-called Kristallnacht, meant a second quantum leap for the antisemitic policies of the NS state. This hitherto unknown outbreak of violence not only disregarded the rights and property of the Jews, but also their actual lives. It became the starting point of a quali- tatively new level of escalation, which was surpassed only later during the war. The world regarded Germany with great astonishment and asked itself how such an explosion of antisemitic hatred was possible in a modern, civilized country. In contrast, the prevailing view in German politics and in National Socialist Jewish research was that, with the murder of Ernst vom Rath, the international Jewry had sounded the attack. To emerge the victor in the loom- ing confrontation it was considered necessary to use all means possible. Analogous to the April boycott in 1933, the “countermeasures” taken by the government in November 1938 were declared to be a justified means of self- defense and essential for Germany’s survival. Relying on this reasoning as well, Gerhard Kittel had written in his expert opinion on Herschel Grynszpan that the shots fired at Ernst vom Rath in the legation in Paris were to be interpreted as beacon of the beginning Jewish war of aggression for which all forces were to be summoned in defense. As most wars are fought under the pretext of self-defense, so, too, it was of great importance from a psychological point of view that the war against Judaism appeared to be unavoidable, even as a matter of life and death. Without this rhetoric of a legitimate self-defense it would not be possible in most cases to convince the own population of the necessity to wage war.

1 Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, p. 239f.

Kittel declared Grynszpan’s “smoking gun” to be the ultimate proof that the Jews were in earnest and about to launch their decisive attack against Germany.2 Hitler’s speech to the representatives of the German press on November 10, 1938, expressed very clearly that the National Socialist leadership assumed the casus belli to be given and that now any rhetorical pretensions of peace would be replaced by active war propaganda. Hitler’s strategy of legality had served its purpose. In a situation of open warfare it was instead necessary to supplant it by aggressive mobilization propaganda. Given the experiences of the First World War, it could not be expected that in the next one the principles of law and morality or the lives of the enemy would have much value. Kittel’s martial, though hypothetical conjecture in the summer of 1933 that the Jews had to be murdered if no other solution to the “Jewish question” could be found, was no prediction in Hitler’s sense. But it contained the latent idea that ridding the world of the “Jewish problem” might require violent means in a pinch. Comparable rhetoric is found in statement of the German Emperor Wilhelm II (1859–1941), who had written in 1927 that it would be best to use gas to get rid of the Jews.3 At the beginning of the century, the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger (1844–1910), warned the Austrian Jews against any involvement with Social Democratic revolutionaries “like their fellow-believers in Russia.” “We in Vienna are antisemites but definitely not made for murder and man- slaughter. But if the Jews threaten our fatherland, we will show no mercy.”4 The readiness to consider under certain circumstances a violent solution to the “Jewish question” cannot be dismissed as a bad joke or an intellectual derail- ment given the fact of the numerous pogroms that had targeted Judaism until well into modern times. Statements of this kind in effect contain a latent potential for violence, which became reality often enough in the long history of antisemitism. But what follows, if the casus belli is regarded as a matter of fact?

2 The metaphor of the “smoking gun” was used in the second Iraq war referring to the so-called weapons of mass destruction. 3 “The press, the Jews and the mosquitos are a plague from which mankind has to liberate itself, in one way or another – I believe the best would be gas.” Thus Wilhelm II to his American friend Poultney Bigelow on August 15, 1927, quoted from John C. G. Röhl, Kaiser, Hof und Staat. Wilhelm II. und die deutsche Politik, Munich 1995, p. 220. Already in 1920 Wilhelm II had declared that the world would not come to rest until “all Jews are stroken dead or at least thrown out of the country.” John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II., vol. 3: Der Weg in den Abgrund 1900–1941, Munich 2008, p. 1291f. 4 Bürgermeister Dr. Lueger über die aktuellen Fragen, Volksblatt für Stadt und Land, Decem‑ ber 8, 1905, quoted in Peter Pulzer, Die Wiederkehr des alten Hasses, in: Michael A. Meyer, ed., Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, vol. 3, Munich 2000, p. 234.