The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (39 page)

At the same time, Hitler saw the Jews as both guileful and powerful. He characterized them as agents of a vast international conspiracy bent on world domination, sometimes working their will as a cabal of bankers and sometimes under the banner of Bolshevism—“the ‘gold’ and the ‘red’ internationals”—but always with the goal of overmastering and destroying Western civilization. “[W]e must recognize that there is no good or bad Jew,” insisted Hitler. “He is a Jew: he is driven only by one single thought: how do I raise my nation to become the dominating nation?”
³³

So the Nazis looked on the Jewish population of Germany—an accomplished and highly assimilated community—as both dangerous criminals and a source of contamination and disease. They were neither shy nor subtle in announcing their intention to punish the Jewish people for their imaginary crimes. “Without fear, we want to point the finger at the Jew as the inspirer, the author, and the beneficiary of this terrible catastrophe,” ranted Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) during a public address in 1937. “Look, this is the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the nations, the son of chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition, the visible demon of the decay of humanity.” In his private journal, Goebbels was even more explicit: “This Jewish pestilence must be eradicated,” he wrote. “Totally. None of it should remain.”
³⁴

The image of Jews as pests and parasites is yet another borrowing from the vocabulary of medieval anti-Semitism, but it took on an entirely new and wholly literal meaning in Nazi Germany. Zyklon B, the brand name for the pellets of prussic acid used to kill Jewish men, women, and children in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other death camps, was originally designed for use as an insecticide for delousing garments and disinfecting freight cars. Ironically, Zyklon B was invented by a Nobel Prize–winning Jewish industrial chemist who managed to escape from Germany in 1933 and did not live to see the use of his invention to murder his fellow Jews, including some of his own blood relations.

None of Adolf Hitler’s hateful ideas about Judaism were wholly new or unique. Christians had been forbidden to employ Jewish wet-nurses in the Middle Ages, as we have seen, and sexual contact between Jews and non-Jews was prosecuted under the medieval laws against bestiality. The Nazi iconography of the Jew—and even the specific words and phrases of the sputtering diatribe delivered by Goebbels in 1937—was borrowed from the cracked and yellowing tracts of medieval anti-Semites. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 can be traced all the way back to the Jewry Law of 1268: “The Jews are deprived of the protection of their natural rights and condemned to eternal misery for their sins.” But, as we shall see, the Nazi regime was capable of accomplishing what even the most visionary medieval anti-Semites could have only dreamed of doing.
³⁵

After the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the Nazi bureaucracy promptly turned itself to the task of identifying and marking Jews. Like the Spanish Inquisition, which issued certificates of blood purity to Old Christians and ascertained the degree of Jewish blood in the veins of
conversos,
the Gestapo studied baptismal records and other public archives to determine the racial purity of the German population. Here, too, the Nazis updated the old inquisitorial methods by setting up such pseudoscientific institutions as the Reich Office for Kinship Research and the Institute for Racial Science and Ethnology, and pressing anthropologists and geneticists into service in making the deadly distinctions between “full” Jews (
Volljuden
) and fractional Jews (
Mischlinge
). Any man, woman, or child with a single Jewish grandparent (known as “a
Mischlinge
of the second degree”) was at risk of arrest and execution, but “for most party members and officials,” writes Eric A. Johnson, “anyone with a drop of Jewish blood was a Jew.”
³⁶

Many of the
Mischlinge,
like the
conversos
of Spain, were professing Christians, either because of their own conversions or because they were descendants of converts. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (1876–1958), then serving as secretary of state in the Vatican and later to reign as Pope Pius XII, echoed the admonitions issued by the Church when the Spanish Inquisition started burning
conversos
who insisted that they were earnest converts to Christianity: “The Holy See takes this occasion to add a word on behalf of those German Catholics who themselves have gone over from Judaism to the Christian religion or who are descended in the first generation, or more remotely, from Jews who adopted the Catholic faith,” Pacelli wrote in a note to the German
chargé d’affaires
in Rome in 1933. Tragically, “a word” was all that the Vatican was able to muster, then or later, although some of the clergy were willing to risk their lives to shelter a few Jews in convents and monasteries during the worst years of the Holocaust. The Church itself made peace with Nazi Germany and turned a blind eye to the murder of both Jews and converted Christians of Jewish ancestry.
³⁷

Thanks to the assimilation and intermarriage of German and other European Jews that began in the nineteenth century, discerning a Jew from a non-Jew was even more difficult in Nazi Germany than it had been in medieval Europe, and so the “Jew badge” of medieval usage was revived in Nazi Germany in the form of a yellow Star of David with the word
Jude
(Jew) imprinted in black stylized lettering that was meant to suggest the Hebrew alphabet. Later, the same Jew badge was used throughout occupied Europe:
Jood
appeared on the badges used in Holland, for example, and
Juif
in France. By 1941, every Jewish man, woman, and child over the age of six in Nazi Germany was required by law to wear the Star of David, and it was a crime in itself to conceal the star with a handbag or a folded newspaper. Again, we are reminded of the Inquisition, which punished any convicted heretic who failed to prominently display the “heretic’s cross” and relied on its own network of informers to track down every offender.

Jewish men, women, and children were subjected to increasingly brutal measures that were expressly designed to identify them as Jews and isolate them from ordinary Germans. Along with the wearing of the yellow star, all Jews were required to append the name Abraham or Sarah to their given names unless they were already known by names that the Nazi regime deemed to be recognizably Jewish, a list that included such rarely used biblical names as Absalom and Ahab. They were required to post signs that marked their businesses as Jewish-owned, and their passports and identity cards were stamped with the telltale letter
J.
As a practical matter, the new visibility exposed Jews to insults and assaults on the public streets, but the Nazi authorities actually discouraged such acts of impromptu violence because it only interfered with their ambitious plans to rid Germany of its Jewish population.
³⁸
“Violent mob anti-Semitism must be avoided,” one Nazi officer commented in a secret memo. “One does not fight rats with guns, but with poison and gas.”
³⁹

Just as Jewish
conversos
in Spain were banned by law from various institutions and occupations, Jews in Germany were now excluded from enrollment in public schools and universities, employment as civil servants, the practice of law or medicine, and ownership of farms. They were forbidden to work in the media or the entertainment industry, and later they were refused entry to cinemas, cabarets, circuses, concert halls, museums, libraries, swimming pools, bathhouses, and ice-skating rinks. They were still permitted to ride trains, but they could not enter dining cars or sleeping cars. Various streets and even whole districts were eventually declared off-limits to living Jews, and defunct Jews were denied burial in German cemeteries. The small and ever-diminishing remnant of Jews who survived in Germany after the commencement of Allied bombing during World War II was denied access to bomb shelters.

The Nazis repeatedly and intentionally followed the example of medieval anti-Semitism in general and the Inquisition in particular. Shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933, for example, ceremonial book-burnings were organized in Berlin and elsewhere around Germany; some twenty thousand volumes, many of them by Jewish authors ranging from Sholem Asch to Stefan Zweig, were tossed on the bonfires by torch-bearing Nazi youth in Berlin, and thousands more were burned in other cities. The notoriously pornographic Nazi newspaper
Der Stürmer
published a special issue in 1934 devoted to the age-old blood libel: “The Jewish Murder Plot Against Non-Jewish Humanity Is Uncovered.” A Nazi propaganda film released in 1941,
The Eternal Jew,
was a remake of the legend of the Wandering Jew. Ominously, the medieval ghetto was put back into use in twentieth-century Europe, although the walled-off Jewish districts in Lodz, Vilna, Warsaw, and elsewhere in German-occupied lands were only holding areas for Jewish men, women, and children awaiting transit to the death camps.
⁴⁰

Nazi Germany also learned a valuable lesson from the Inquisition when it came to turning persecution into a paying enterprise. Germany systematically looted its Jewish victims by compelling them to sell their land, businesses, artwork, jewelry, and stock at nominal prices, confiscating their homes when they were arrested and “deported,” and imposing collective fines to be paid by the Jewish population, as when the Jews were made to pay one billion marks for the replacement of window-glass smashed during the state-sponsored pogrom in 1938 known as
Kristallnacht
or Night of the Broken Glass. The Nazi regime charged its Jewish victims for conveying them in cattle cars to the death camps at the “standard rate for third-class travel,” that is, four
pfennigs
per kilometer with children traveling free of charge. Even the corpses of dead Jews were a source of revenue for Nazi Germany: gold dental work was pulled from the mouths of dead Jews, melted down into ingots, and sent to the Reichsbank in Berlin.
⁴¹

All the while, Nazi Germany also followed the example of the Inquisition by draping itself in the thin fabric of “legal justice” and thus rationalizing its worst crimes as the dutiful observance of law. Since the Nuremberg Laws had formally stripped the German Jews of the rights of citizenship, the stateless Jews—according to the reasoning of German jurists—could be arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered without offense to German law or legal procedure. “The Jews were placed outside of the German community because of the laws,” explained one Gestapo commander by way of defense at his war-crimes trial. “This was indeed wrong, as I now know, but at the time it was the law of the land.”
⁴²

At least one of the weapons used against Spanish Jewry during the Inquisition was considered but later rejected by Nazi Germany. The Nazis toyed with the idea of the mass expulsion of the Jewish population, a project assigned to the so-called Central Office for Jewish Emigration under Adolf Eichmann. Some Jewish families were allowed to leave Germany during the early years of the Nazi regime but only after they had been looted of their property and wealth.

The Nazis soon realized, however, that expulsion was an unsatisfactory answer to “the Jewish question.” After all, no country in the world was willing to accept Jewish refugees from Germany in significant numbers, and the Nazis opposed the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine because of their fear that it would serve as a sactuary and a base of operations for Jewish resistance. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939—the tripwire that finally triggered the outbreak of the Second World War—the rapid conquest of new territory in both eastern and western Europe meant that Jews who had managed to escape in the years before the war suddenly found themselves once again on German-occupied soil.
⁴³

So Nazi Germany decided that the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” required a still more radical approach: the murder of every Jewish man, woman, and child within its long reach. The resources that the Nazi regime had assembled to identify and mark the Jewish population—the index cards, the Jew badges, the passports stamped with the red letter
J
—now enabled the Nazi security apparatus to round up its victims with speed and efficiency. Like the Spanish inquisitors, the Nazis did not inquire whether people now forced to call themselves Abraham or Sarah were, in fact, practicing Jews; all that mattered in the end was whether he or she possessed at least one Jewish grandparent.
⁴⁴
“In extremis,
when the Inquisitors extend their torches or the Nazis tip the canisters of Zyklon B gas,” explains historian David Gitlitz, “this external definition is the one that counts.”
⁴⁵

Jews were not the only victims of the new inquisitors in Nazi Germany. Gypsies (as the Sinti and Roma people were called) and homosexuals, too, were regarded by the Nazis as suitable only for extermination. Communists and socialists, partisans and Christian resisters were also arrested, tortured, and killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. And the death toll included countless millions who died in the various countries that Germany oppressed during World War II, whether because they were punished for acts of resistance or selected for reprisal executions, or simply because of the privation, maltreatment, and bombardment that were the inevitable consequences of German occupation. Even a full-blooded German who suffered from a disease or a disability was subject to sterilization under the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, and the technology that would be used to kill Jews was first tested on German mental patients.