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Brief History of German Anti-Semitism

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Brief History of German Anti-Semitism Chapter 1 Writings on the Wall 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 74 Chapter 1 Writings on the Wall 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 75 Chapter 1 Writings on the Wall (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 76 Chapter 1 Writings on the Wall 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 77 Chapter 1 Writings on the Wall 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 78 Chapter 1 Writings on the Wall 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.
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