Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (57 page)

62. For a clear summary of German modernization and its impact, see Volker R. Berghahn,
Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century
(New York, 1987). For the
völkisch
reactions to this evolution, see Georges L. Mosse,
The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich
(New York, 1964); and Fritz Stern,
The Politics of Cultural Despair
(Berkeley, Calif., 1961).

63. The argument for the definition of this new anti-Semitic current as “revolutionary anti-Semitism” has been made in Paul Lawrence Rose,
Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner
(Princeton, N.J., 1990). See in particular Rose’s argument about Wagner, pp. 358ff., as well as in idem,
Wagner: Race and Revolution
(New Haven, Conn., 1992).

64. See Robert W. Gutman,
Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and His Music
(New York, 1968), mainly pp. 389–441; Hartmut Zelinsky,
Richard Wagner: Ein deutsches Thema 1876–1976
, 3rd ed. (Vienna, 1983); Rose,
Wagner
, mainly pp. 135–70.

65.
Richard Wagner’s Prose Works
, vol. 3 (London, 1894; reprint, New York, 1966), p. 100.

66. Cosima Wagner,
Die Tagebücher
, vol. 4 [1881–83], (Munich, 1982), p. 734.

67. Gustav Mahler remarked that Mime’s music parodied bodily characteristics that were supposedly Jewish. For a study of the anti-Jewish imagery in Wagner’s musical oeuvre, see Marc A. Weiner,
Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination
(Lincoln, Neb., 1995). For the Mahler remark, see ibid., p. 28.

68. Cosima Wagner,
Die Tagebücher
, p. 852.

69. Winfried Schüler,
Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der Wilhelminischen Ära
(Münster, 1971), p. 256.

70. Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
, vol. 1 (1st English ed., 1910; reprint, New York, 1968) p. 578.

71. Geoffrey Field,
Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain
(New York, 1981), p. 225.

72. Ibid., p. 326.

73. Ibid.

74. On Hitler’s visit to Chamberlain, see ibid., p. 436.

75. Some historians have emphasized the similarities of the reactions to the war all over Europe. See mainly Jay Winter,
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge, England, 1995); others have pointed to the differences: the rise of an antiwar sentiment in France, that of a genocidal mood in Germany. See Bartov,
Murder in Our Midst
, mainly chap. 2. But an immense literature recognizes the apocalyptic postwar mood as such.

76. Nesta H. Webster,
World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization
(London, 1921), p. 293.

77. Thomas Mann,
Tagebücher 1918–1921
, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), p. 223.

78. The details that follow are taken from Peter Nettl,
Rosa Luxemburg
, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1966), pp. 772ff.

79. Friedländer, “Political Transformations,” p. 159.

80. Among the twenty-seven members of the government of the Bavarian Republic of the Councils, eight of the most influential were of Jewish origin: Eugen Levine-Nissen, Towia Axelrod, Frida Rubiner (alias Friedjung), Ernst Toller, Erich Mühsam, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Niekisch, Arnold Wadler. Hans-Helmuth Knütter,
Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933
(Düsseldorf, 1971), p. 118.

81. Reginald H. Phelps, “‘Before Hitler Came’: Thule Society and Germanenorden,”
Journal of Modern History
35 (1963), pp. 253–54.

82. Jacques Benoist-Méchin,
Histoire de l’armée allemande
, vol. 2 (Paris, 1964), p. 216. Other Jewish left-wing politicians provoked no less negative reactions. On November 8, 1918, for instance, just after the break of relations between Germany and Russia, the Jewish Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Adolf Yoffe, about to leave Germany, transferred large sums of money to the Jewish Independent Socialist deputy Oskar Cohn, who had become undersecretary in the Ministry of Justice. The money was meant to further revolutionary propaganda and for the acquisition of weapons. The facts soon became known and were widely discussed in the press. For the details of this transaction and of the debate in the press see Knütter,
Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke
, p. 70. Possibly even more violent was the reaction of the nationalist camp to the fact that a Jewish member of the National Assembly, Georg Gothein, became chairman of the Investigation Committee on the causes of the war and, together with Oskar Cohn and Hugo Sinzheimer, was in charge of the investigation of Hindenburg and of Ludendorff. See Friedländer, “Political Transformations,” pp. 158–61, and mainly Barbara Suchy, “The Verein zum Abwehr des Antisemitismus (II): From the First World War to Its Dissolution in 1933,”
LBIY
30 (1985): 78–79.

83. Quoted in Nathaniel Katzburg,
Hungary and the Jews: Policy and Legislation 1920–1943
(Ramat-Gan, 1981), p. 35.

84. On the revolutionary events and on the leaders of the Hungarian revolution, see in particular Rudolf L. Tökés,
Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic
(New York, 1967).

85. Two French novelists, the brothers Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, chronicled the Béla Kun regime in Hungary. Their historical fantasy appeared in 1921 and was translated into English in 1924, from the 64th French edition. Almost all of Béla Kun’s revolutionary companions were Jews. Cf. Jérôme and Jean Tharaud,
When Israel Is King
(New York, 1924).

86. Isaac Deutscher,
The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays
(London, 1968).

87. Hamburger and Pulzer quote two sets of statistics about the Jewish vote in Weimar Germany: According to a contemporary observer, in 1924, 42 percent of the Jews cast their ballots for the SPD, 40 percent for the DDP, 8 percent for the KPD, 5 percent for the DVP, and 2 percent for the Wirtschaftspartei; according to Arnold Paucker’s inquiry of 1972, the division was the following: 64 percent DDP, 28 percent SPD, 4 percent DVP, 4 percent KPD. See Hamburger and Pulzer, “Jews as Voters in the Weimar Republic,” p. 48. The main point is that in both counts more than 80 percent of Jewish voters opted for progressive liberals or for the moderate left.

88. On Jewish participation in the political life of the German Republic in its early phase, see in particular Werner T. Angress, “Juden im politischen Leben der Revolutionszeit,” in Mosse,
Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution
; idem, “Revolution und Demokratie: Jüdische Politiker in Berlin 1918/19,” in Reinhard Rürup, ed.,
Jüdische Geschichte in Berlin: Essays und Studien
(Berlin, 1995). On Rathenau see Ernst Schulin,
Walter Rathenau: Repräsentant, Kritiker und Opfer seiner Zeit
(Göttingen, 1979).

89. Ibid., p. 137.

90. Rathenau’s assassins claimed further that by sponsoring the fulfillment policy demanded by the Allies the Jewish minister was intent on the perdition of Germany, that he aimed at the Bolshevization of the country, that he was married to the sister of the Jewish Bolshevik leader Karl Radek, and so on. The anti-Jewish motivation of Rathenau’s murderers is unquestionable. What remains unclear, though, is whether—beyond their hatred for the Jew Rathenau—his killers were instruments in the hands of ultra-right-wing groups that aimed to exploit his murder to destabilize the entire republican system. On this issue see Martin Sabrow,
Der Rathenaumord: Rekonstruktion einer Verschwörung gegen die Republik von Weimar
(Munich, 1994), mainly pp. 114ff.

91. For a detailed reconstruction of the origins and spreading of the
Protocols
see Norman Cohn,
Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
(London, 1967).

92. The anti-Napoleon III pamphlet was entitled “Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel,” and composed in Brussels in 1864 by a French liberal, Maurice Joly; the novel
Biarritz
, written in 1868 by the German Hermann Gödsche, alias John Ratcliff, described the secret meeting of the heads of the Tribes of Israel in a Prague cemetery to plot Jewish domination of the world.

93. See Cohn,
Warrant for Genocide
, p. 138. For new details and nuances regarding the historical context of the
Protocols
, see Richard S. Levy’s Introduction to Binjamin W. Segel,
A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, trans. and ed. Richard S. Levy (Lincoln, Neb., 1995). Segel’s study was originally pubished in Berlin in 1926.

94.
The Protocols and the World Revolution including a Translation and Analysis of the “Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdom”
(Boston, 1920), p. 144.

95. Ibid., pp. 144–48 (the passage quoted is on pp. 147–48).

96. Quoted in Georg Franz-Willing,
Die Hitler-Bewegung
, vol. 1,
Der Ursprung 1919–1922
(Hamburg, 1962), p. 150.

97. Anything relating to the psychological, intellectual, and ideological development of “Hitler before Hitler” and, therefore, to the origins of his anti-Semitic obsession is entirely hypothetical. Were the ministrations—and particularly his morphine injections during the terminal illness of Hitler’s mother—of the Jewish physician Eduard Bloch at the source of the future dictator’s identification of the Jew with mortal penetration of the motherly body of the nation and the race? Did the theories of the pan-German history teacher, Leopold Pötsch, at the Realschule in Linz have any intellectual impact? Undoubtedly, early elements of Hitler’s worldview stem from his sojourn in Vienna from 1908 to 1913; there he must have been influenced by Georg von Schönerer’s and Karl Lüger’s political campaigns. But how much further can we rely on his own declarations about this period or on the so-called recollections of his companions at the time, August Kubizek and Reinhold Hanisch?
For excellent accounts of Hitler’s life before 1918 see in particular Alan Bullock,
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny
(London, 1952); Joachim C. Fest,
Hitler
(New York, 1974); as well as useful corrections regarding this period in Anton Joachimsthaler,
Korrektur einer Biographie: Adolf Hitler, 1908–1920
(Munich, 1989). For a systematic correlation between any indices of Hitler’s early anti-Semitism and his later anti-Jewish worldview and policies, see Gerald Fleming,
Hitler and the “Final Solution”
(Berkeley, Calif., 1984).

98. Adolf Hitler,
Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen
, ed. Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 128.

99. For the first complete publication of the text of the speech, with a detailed critical commentary, see Reginald H. Phelps, “Hitlers ‘Grundlegende’ Rede über den Antisemitismus,”
VfZ
16, no. 4 (1968): 390ff.

100. Hitler,
Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen
, p. 199.

101. Ibid., p. 202.

102. Eberhard Jäckel,
Hitler’s Worldview: A Blueprint for Power
(Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 52ff.

103. Adolf Hitler,
Hitler’s Secret Conversations 1941–1944
, ed. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper (New York, 1972), p. 178.

104. Shaul Esh, “Eine neue literarische Quelle Hitlers? Eine methodologische Überlegung,”
Geschichte und Unterricht
, 15 (1964), pp. 487ff.; Margarete Plewnia,
Auf dem Weg zu Hitler: Der “völkische” Publizist Dietrich Eckart
(Bremen, 1970), pp. 108–9.

105. Ernst Nolte, “Eine frühe Quelle zu Hitlers Antisemitismus,”
Historische Zeitschrift
192 (1961), particularly 604ff.

106. Esh, “Eine neue literarische Quelle Hitlers?”

107. Engelman, “Dietrich Eckart,” p. 236.

108. Dietrich Eckart,
Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin. Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir
(Munich, n.d. [1924]), p. 49.

109. Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, p. 65.

110. Ibid., p. 679.

111. The most thorough presentation of Hitler’s ideology as a coherent intellectual system is to be found in Jäckel,
Hitler’s Worldview
, for the direct relation between the worldview and Nazi policy see in particular Eberhard Jäckel,
Hitler in History
(Hanover, N. H., 1984). This (“intentionalist”) position stands in opposition to the “functionalist” approach, which dismisses the systematic aspect of Hitler’s ideology and marginalizes or completely negates any direct causal relation between Hitler’s ideology and the policies of the Nazi regime. The most consistent exponent of the extreme functionalist position has been Hans Mommsen. With regard to Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies, see in particular Hans Mommsen, “The Realization of the Unthinkable.” For an excellent evaluation of these different approaches see Ian Kershaw,
The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation
, 3rd ed. (London, 1993), mainly chaps. 4 and 5); specifically with regard to anti-Jewish policies see an evaluation of both positions in Friedländer, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination.”

112. Among the many attempts to explain Hitler’s personality and particularly his anti-Jewish obsession in terms of psychopathology, mainly by using psychoanalytic concepts, see in particular Rudolph Binion,
Hitler Among the Germans
(New York, 1976); Robert G. L. Waite,
The Psychopathic God: A Biography of Adolf Hitler
(New York, 1977). See also the wartime analysis published some thirty years later: Walter C. Langer,
The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report
(New York, 1972). The problems raised by psychobiographical inquiries have been debated at length; for an evaluation of some of the issues see Saul Friedländer,
History and Psychoanalysis: An Inquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory
(New York, 1978).