{"id":64229,"date":"2015-02-24T14:22:13","date_gmt":"2015-02-24T22:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=64229"},"modified":"2016-02-10T13:06:32","modified_gmt":"2016-02-10T21:06:32","slug":"the-origins-of-the-holocaust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=64229","title":{"rendered":"The Origins Of The Holocaust"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in his classic book Modern Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia was the belief
\nthat Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed,
\nwas not the entire regime a Judenrepublik. There was very little basis
\nfor this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories
\nthat Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist
\nnetwork. The Jews, it is true, had been prominent in the first
\nCommunist movements. But in Russia they lost ground steadily once
\nthe Bolsheviks came to power, and by 1925 the regime was already
\nanti-Semitic. In Germany also the Jews, though instrumental in
\ncreating the Communist Party (kpd), were quickly weeded out once
\nit was organized as a mass party. By the 1932 elections, when it put
\nup 500 candidates, not one was Jewish. 29 Nor, at the other end of the
\nspectrum, were the Jews particularly important in German finance
\nand industry. The belief rested on the mysterious connection between
\nBismarck and his financial adviser, Gerson von Bleichroder, the Jew
\nwho organized the Rothschilds and other banking houses to provide
\nthe finance for Germany’s wars. 30 But in the 1920s Jews were rarely
\ninvolved in government finance. Jewish businessmen kept out of
\npolitics. Big business was represented by Alfred Hugenberg and the
\nGerman Nationalist People’s Party, which was anti-Semitic. Jews
\nwere very active at the foundation of Weimar, but after 1920 one of
\nthe few Jews to hold high office was Walther Rathenau and he was
\nmurdered two years later. <\/p>\n

In culture however it was a different matter. There is nothing more
\ngalling than a cultural tyranny, real or imaginary, and in Weimar
\nculture ‘they’ could plausibly be identified with the Jews. The most
\nhated of them, Tucholsky, was a Jew. So were other important critics
\nand opinion formers, like Maximilian Harden, Theodor Wolff,
\nTheodor Lessing, Ernst Bloch and Felix Salten. Nearly all the best
\nfilm-directors were Jewish, and about half the most successful
\nplaywrights, such as Sternheim and Schnitzler. The Jews were
\ndominant in light entertainment and still more in theatre criticism, a
\nvery sore point among the Easterners. There were many brilliant and
\nmuch publicized Jewish performers: Elizabeth Bergner, Erna Sack,
\nPeter Lorre, Richard Tauber, Conrad Veidt and Fritz Kortner, for
\ninstance. Jews owned important newspapers, such as Frankfurt’s
\nZeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Vossische Zeitung. They ran
\nthe most influential art galleries. They were particularly strong in
\npublishing, which (next to big city department stores) was probably
\nthe area of commerce in which Jews came closest to predominance.
\nThe best liberal publishers, such as Malik Verlag, Kurt Wolff, the
\nCassirers, Georg Bondi, Erich Reiss and S.Fischer, were owned or run
\nby Jews. There were a number of prominent and highly successful
\nJewish novelists: Hermann Broch, Alfred Doblin, Franz Werfel,
\nArnold Zweig, Vicki Baum, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank,
\nAlfred Neumann and Ernst Weiss, as well as Franz Kafka, whom the
\nintelligentsia rated alongside Proust and Joyce and who was an
\nobject of peculiar detestation among the Easterners. In every depart-
\nment of the arts, be it architecture, sculpture, painting or music,
\nwhere change had been most sudden and repugnant to conservative
\ntastes, Jews had been active in the transformation, though rarely in
\ncontrol. The one exception, perhaps, was music, where Schoenberg
\nwas accused of ‘assassinating’ the German tradition; but even here,
\nhis far more successful and innovatory pupil, Berg, was an Aryan
\nCatholic. However, it is undoubtedly true to say that Weimar culture
\nwould have been quite different, and infinitely poorer, without its
\nJewish element, and there was certainly enough evidence to make a
\ntheory of Jewish cultural conspiracy seem plausible. 31 <\/p>\n

This was the principal reason why anti-Semitism made such
\nastonishing headway in Weimar Germany. Until the Republic,
\nanti-Semitism was not a disease to which Germany was thought to be
\nespecially prone. Russia was the land of the pogrom; Paris was the
\ncity of the anti-Semitic intelligentsia. Anti-Semitism seems to have
\nmade its appearance in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s, at a time
\nwhen the determinist type of social philosopher was using Darwin’s
\nprinciple of Natural Selection to evolve ‘laws’ to explain the colossal
\nchanges brought about by industrialism, the rise of megalopolis and
\nthe alienation of huge, rootless proletariats. Christianity was content
\nwith a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satan. But modern secular
\nfaiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The
\nenemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race. <\/p>\n

Marx’s invention of the ‘bourgeoisie’ was the most comprehensive
\nof these hate-theories and it has continued to provide a foundation
\nfor all paranoid revolutionary movements, whether fascist-
\nnationalist or Communist-internationalist. Modern theoretical anti-
\nSemitism was a derivative of Marxism, involving a selection (for
\nreasons of national, political or economic convenience) of a particu-
\nlar section of the bourgeoisie as the subject of attack. It was a more
\nobviously emotional matter than analysis purely by class, which is
\nwhy Lenin used the slogan that ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism
\nof fools’. But in terms of rationality there was little to choose
\nbetween the two. Lenin was saying, in effect, that it was the entire
\nbourgeoisie, not just Jewry, which was to blame for the ills of
\nmankind. And it is significant that all Marxist regimes, based as they
\nare on paranoid explanations of human behaviour, degenerate
\nsooner or later into anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semitism, in short,
\nwas part of the sinister drift away from the apportionment of
\nindividual responsibility towards the notion of collective guilt \u2014 the
\nrevival, in modern guise, of one of the most primitive and barbarous,
\neven bestial, of instincts. It is very curious that, when the new
\nanti-Semitism made its appearance in Germany, among those who
\nattacked it was Nietzsche, always on the lookout for secular,
\npseudo-rational substitutes for the genuine religious impulse. He
\ndenounced ‘these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites . . .
\nwho endeavour to stir up all the bovine elements of the nation by a
\nmisuse of that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude.’ 32 <\/p>\n

But if modern anti-Semitism was by no means a specifically German
\nphenomenon, there were powerful forces which favoured its growth
\nthere. The modern German nation was, in one sense, the creation of
\nPrussian militarism. In another, it was the national expression of the
\nGerman romantic movement, with its stress upon the Volk, its
\nmythology and its natural setting in the German landscape, especially
\nits dark, mysterious forests. The German Volk movement dated from
\nNapoleonic times and was burning ‘alien’ and ‘foreign’ books, which
\ncorrupted ‘ Volk culture’, as early as 1817. Indeed it was from the Volk
\nmovement that Marx took his concept of ‘alienation’ in industrial
\ncapitalism. A Volk had a soul, which was derived from its natural
\nhabitat. As the historical novelist Otto Gemlin put it, in an article in Die
\nTat, organ of the Vo\/^-romantic movement, ‘For each people and each
\nrace, the countryside becomes its own peculiar landscape’. 33 If the
\nlandscape was destroyed, or the Volk divorced from it, the soul dies.
\nThe Jews were not a Volk because they had lost their soul: they lacked
\n‘rootedness’. This contrast was worked out with great ingenuity by a
\nBavarian professor of antiquities, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, in a series of
\nvolumes called Land und Leute {Places and People), published in the
\n1850s and 1860s. 34 The true basis of the Volk was the peasant. There
\ncould of course be workers, but they had to be ‘artisans’, organized in
\nlocal guilds. The proletariat, on the other hand, was the creation of the
\nJews. Having no landscape of their own, they destroyed that of others,
\ncausing millions of people to be uprooted and herded into giant cities,
\nthe nearest they possessed to a ‘landscape’ of their own. ‘The
\ndominance of the big city’, wrote Riehl, ‘will be the equivalent to the
\ndominance of the proletariat’ ; moreover, the big cities would link hands
\nacross the world, forming a ‘world bourgeois’ and a ‘world proletariat’
\nconspiring to destroy everything that had a soul, was ‘natural’,
\nespecially the German landscape and its peasantry. 35 <\/p>\n

The Volk movement spawned a crop of anti-Semitic ‘peasant’
\nnovels, of which the most notorious was Herman Lons’s Der
\nWehrwolf (1910), set in the Thirty Years’ War, and showing the
\npeasants turning on their oppressors from the towns like wolves:
\n‘What meaning does civilization have? A thin veneer beneath which
\nnature courses, waiting until a crack appears and it can burst into the
\nopen.’ ‘Cities are the tomb of Germanism.’ ‘Berlin is the domain of
\nthe Jews.’ Jews functioned among the peasants as money-lenders,
\ncattle-dealers and middlemen, and the first organized political anti-
\nSemitism surfaced in the peasant parties and the Bund der Land-
\nwirte, or Farmers’ Union. Hitler was an avid reader of ‘peasant
\nnovels’, especially the works of Dieter Eckhart, who adapted Peer
\nGynt into German, and of Wilhelm von Polenz, who also identified
\nthe Jews with the cruelty and alienation of modern industrial society. <\/p>\n

German anti-Semitism, in fact, was to a large extent a ‘back to the
\ncountryside’ movement. There were special Volk schools, which
\nstressed open-air life. ‘Mountain theatres’, shaped from natural
\namphitheatres, were built in the Harz Mountains and elsewhere, for
\ndramatized ‘Volk rites’ and other spectacles, an activity the Nazis
\nlater adopted on a huge scale and with great panache. The first youth
\nmovements, especially the highly successful Wandervogel, strum-
\nming guitars and hiking through the countryside, took on an
\nanti-Semitic coloration, especially when they invaded the schools
\nand universities. The ‘garden city’ movement in Germany was led by
\na violent anti-Semite, Theodor Fritsch, who published the Antisem-
\nitic Catechism, which went through forty editions, 1887-1936, and
\nwho was referred to by the Nazis as Der Altmeister, the master-
\nteacher. Even the sunbathing movement, under the impulse of Aryan
\nand Nordic symbols, acquired an anti-Semitic flavour. 36 Indeed in
\n1920s Germany there were two distinct types of nudism: ‘Jewish’
\nnudism, symbolized by the black dancer Josephine Baker, which was
\nheterosexual, commercial, cosmopolitan, erotic and immoral; and
\nanti-Semitic nudism, which was German, Volkisch, Nordic, non-
\nsexual (sometimes homosexual), pure and virtuous. 37 <\/p>\n

It is, indeed, impossible to list all the varieties of ingredients which,
\nfrom the 1880s and 1890s onwards, were stirred into the poisonous
\nbrew of German anti-Semitism. Unlike Marxism, which was essen-
\ntially a quasi-religious movement, German anti-Semitism was a
\ncultural and artistic phenomenon, a form of romanticism. It was
\nEugen Diederichs, the publisher of Die Tat from 1912, who coined
\nthe phrase ‘the new romanticism’, the answer to Jewish Expression-
\nism. He published Der Wehrwolf, and at his house in Jena, sur-
\nrounded by intellectuals from the Youth Movement, he wore
\nzebra-striped trousers and a turban and launched the saying ‘Demo-
\ncracy is a civilization, while aristocracy equals culture.’ He also
\ncontrived to transform Nietzsche into an anti-Semitic hero. Other
\naudacious acts of literary theft were perpetrated. Tacitus’ Germania
\nwas turned into a seminal Volkisch text; Darwin’s works were
\ntortured into a ‘scientific’ justification for race ‘laws’, just as Marx
\nhad plundered them for class ‘laws’. But there were plenty of genuine
\nmentors too. Paul de Lagarde preached a Germanistic religion
\nstripped of Christianity because it had been Judaized by St Paul, ‘the
\nRabbi’. Julius Langbehn taught that assimilated Jews were ‘a pest
\nand a cholera’, who poisoned the artistic creativity of the Volk: they
\nshould be exterminated, or reduced to slavery along with other
\n‘lower’ races. 38 Both Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Eugen
\nDiihring stressed the necessary ‘barbarism’ or Gothic element in
\nGerman self-defence against Jewish decadence and the importance of
\nthe ‘purity’ and idealism of the Nordic pantheon. Chamberlain,
\nwhom Hitler was to visit on his deathbed to kiss his hands in 1927,
\nargued that God flourished in the German and the Devil in the
\nJewish race, the polarities of Good and Evil. The Teutons had
\ninherited Greek aristocratic ideals and Roman love of justice and
\nadded their own heroism and fortitude. Thus it was their role to fight
\nand destroy the only other race, the Jews, which had an equal purity
\nand will to power. So the Jew was not a figure of low comedy but a
\nmortal, implacable enemy: the Germans should wrest all the power
\nof modern technology and industry from the Jews, in order to
\ndestroy them totally. 39 Some of the German racial theorists were
\nMarxists, like Ludwig Woltmann, who transformed the Marxist
\nclass-struggle into a world race-struggle and advocated the arousal of
\nthe masses by oratory and propaganda to mobilize the Germans into
\nthe conquests needed to ensure their survival and proliferation as a
\nrace: ‘The German race has been selected to dominate the earth.’ <\/p>\n

By the 1920s, in brief, any political leader in Germany who wished
\nto make anti-Semitism an agent in his ‘will to power’ could assemble
\nhis campaign from an enormous selection of slogans, ideas and
\nfantasies, which had accumulated over more than half a century. The
\nVersailles Treaty itself gave the controversy new life by driving into
\nGermany a great wave of frightened Jews from Russia, Poland and
\nGermany’s surrendered territories. Thus it became an urgent ‘prob-
\nlem’, demanding ‘solutions’. They were not wanting either. There
\nwere proposals for double-taxation for Jews; isolation or apartheid;
\na return to the ghetto system; special laws, with hanging for Jews
\nwho broke them; an absolute prohibition of inter-marriage between
\nAryan Germans and Jews. A 1918 best-seller was Artur Dinter’s Die
\nSiinde wider das Blut {Sins Against the Blood), describing how rich
\nJews violated the racial purity of an Aryan woman. Calls for the
\nextermination of the Jews became frequent and popular, and anti-
\nSemitic pamphlets circulated in millions. There were many violent
\nincidents but when, in 1919, the Bavarian police asked for advice on
\nhow to cope with anti-Semitism, Berlin replied there was no remedy
\nsince ‘it has its roots in the difference of race which divides the
\nIsraelitic tribe from our Volk.<\/p>\n

The Jews tried everything to combat the poison. Some brought up
\ntheir children to be artisans or farmers. They enlisted in the army.
\nThey attempted ultra-assimilation. A Jewish poet, Ernst Lissauer,
\nwrote the notorious ‘Hate England’ hymn. They went to the other
\nextreme and tried Zionism. Or they formled militant Jewish organiza-
\ntions, student leagues, duelling clubs. But each policy raised more
\ndifficulties than it removed, for anti-Semitism was protean, hydra-
\nheaded and impervious to logic or evidence. As Jakob Wassermann
\nput it: ‘Vain to seek obscurity. They say: the coward, he is creeping
\ninto hiding, driven by his evil conscience. Vain to go among them
\nand offer them one’s hand. They say: why does he take such liberties
\nwith his Jewish pushfulness? Vain to keep faith with them as a
\ncomrade in arms or a fellow-citizen. They say: he is Proteus, he can
\nassume any shape or form. Vain to help them strip off the chains of
\nslavery. They say: no doubt he found it profitable. Vain to counter-
\nact the poison.’ 41 Mortitz Goldstein argued that it was useless to
\nexpose the baselessness of anti-Semitic ‘evidence’: ‘What would be
\ngained? The knowledge that their hatred is genuine. When all
\ncalumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false notions
\nabout us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable.’ 42 <\/p>\n

Germany’s defeat in 1918 was bound to unleash a quest for
\nscapegoats, alien treachery in the midst of the Volk. Even without
\ncollateral evidence, the Jews, the embodiment of Westernizing ‘civili-
\nzation’, were automatically cast for the role. But there was evidence
\nas well! The influx of Jews in the immediate post-war period was a
\nfresh dilution of the Volk, presaging a further assault on its martyred
\nculture. And Weimar itself, did it not provide daily proof, in
\nparliament, on the stage, in the new cinemas, in the bookshops, in
\nthe magazines and newspapers and art galleries, everywhere an
\nordinary, bewildered German turned, that this cosmopolitan, cor-
\nrupting and ubiquitous conspiracy was taking over the Reich? What
\npossible doubt could there be that a crisis was at hand, demanding
\nextreme solutions? <\/p>\n

It was at this point that the notion of a violent resolution of the
\nconflict between culture and civilization began to take a real grip on
\nthe minds of some Germans. Here, once again, the fatal act of Lenin,
\nin beginning the cycle of political violence in 1917, made its morbid
\ncontribution. Anti-Semitism had always presented itself as defensive.
\nNow, its proposals to use violence, even on a gigantic scale, could be
\njustified as defensive. For it was generally believed, not only in
\nGermany but throughout Central and Western Europe, that Bolshevism was
\nJewish-inspired and led, and that Jews were in control of
\nCommunist Parties, and directed Red revolutions and risings wherever
\nthey occurred. Trotsky, the most ferocious of the Bolsheviks, who
\nactually commanded the Petrograd putsch, was undoubtedly a Jew; so
\nwere a few other Russian leaders. Jews had been prominent in the
\nSpartacist rising in Berlin, in the Munich Soviet government, and in the
\nabortive risings in other German cities. Imagination rushed in where
\nfacts were hard to get. Thus, Lenin’s real name was Issachar
\nZederblum. The Hungarian Red Revolution was directed not by Bela
\nKun but by a Jew called Cohn. Lenin’s Red Terror was a priceless gift to
\nthe anti-Semitic extremists, particularly since most of its countless
\nvictims were peasants and the most rabid and outspoken of the Cheka
\nterrorizers was the Latvian Jew Latsis. Munich now became the
\nanti-Semitic capital of Germany, because it had endured the Bolshevist-
\nJewish terror of Kurt Eisner and his gang. The Munchener Beobachter,
\nfrom which the Nazi Volkische Beobachter later evolved, specialized in
\nRed atrocity stories, such as Kun or Cohn’s crucifixion of priests, his use
\nof a ‘mobile guillotine’ and so on. And many of the news items reported
\nfrom Russia were, of course, perfectly true. They formed a solid plinth
\non which a flaming monument of fantasy could be set up. Hitler was
\nsoon to make highly effective use of the Red Terror fear, insisting, time
\nand again, that the Communists had already killed 30 million people.
\nThe fact that he had added a nought in no way removed the reality of
\nthose first, terrible digits. He presented his National Socialist militancy
\nas a protective response and a preemptive strike. It was ‘prepared to
\noppose all terrorism on the part of the Marxists with tenfold greater
\nterrorism’. 43 And in that ‘greater terrorism’ the Jews would be hunted
\ndown not as innocent victims but as actual or potential terrorists
\nthemselves. <\/p>\n

The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary
\nstage in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German
\nbody politic. The German state was a huge creature with a small and
\nlimited brain. The Easterners, following the example of Bismarck,
\ngrafted onto the Prussian military state a welfare state which provided
\nworkers with social insurance and health-care as of right and by law. As
\nagainst the Western liberal notion of freedom of choice and private
\nprovision based on high wages, it imposed the paternalistic alternative
\nof compulsory and universal security. The state was nursemaid as well
\nas sergeant-major. It was a towering shadow over the lives of ordinary
\npeople and their relationship towards it was one of dependence and
\ndocility. The German industrialists strongly approved of this notion of
\nthe state as guardian, watching over with firm but benevolent solicitude
\nthe lives of its citizens. 44 The philosophy was Platonic; the result
\ncorporatist. The German Social Democrats did nothing to arrest this
\ntotalitarian drift when they came briefly to power in 1918; quite the
\ncontrary. They reinforced it. The Weimar Republic opened windows
\nbut it did not encourage the citizen to venture outside the penumbra
\nof state custody. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in his classic book Modern Times: Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia was the belief that Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed, was not the entire regime a Judenrepublik. There was very little … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holocaust"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64229"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87544,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64229\/revisions\/87544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}