The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (46 page)

In the meantime the Nazi leader did not miss the opportunity to vent his fury on an individual Jew. On October 20, the
Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe
reported that a seventy-four-year-old Hamburg Jew, Markus Luftgas, had been condemned to two years in jail for black-marketeering in eggs. When Hitler read about it, he demanded that Luftgas be condemned to death. On October 23, the Justice Ministry informed the Reich Chancellery that Luftgas had been delivered to the Gestapo for execution.
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On October 25, Hitler reminded his guests, Himmler and Heydrich—as if they needed to be reminded—of his notorious “prophecy”: “I prophesied to Jewry: The Jew would disappear from Europe if the war could not be avoided. This race of criminals carries the guilt of the two millions of dead of the World War and now already that of hundreds of thousands. Nobody should come and tell me that one cannot drive them into the marshes in the East! Who thinks of our men? It is not bad, moreover, that public rumor attributes to us the intention of exterminating the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.”
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And, he added, in an unrelated statement: “The attempt to establish a Jewish State will fail.”
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The remark about “public rumor” could apply to the German population; more likely, it referred to rumors circulating abroad, particularly in the United States…. That same day the Nazi leader lectured Ciano about the influence of Jewish propaganda in Latin America. During the same conversation, the ironic foreign minister informed his host that “Jewish propaganda” was depicting the internal situation of Italy in the bleakest colors; of course, Ciano added, none of this was true.
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At the beginning of November, Hitler served another long historical-political tirade against the Jews to his dentist, SS Standartenführer Prof. Dr. Hugo Blaschke, and Blaschke’s assistant, one Dr. Richter. Once the Europeans discovered the nature of the Jew, Hitler told his guests, they would also understand the solidarity that tied them together. The Jew was the obstacle to this solidarity; he only survived because European solidarity did not exist: “Now he lives to destroy it.” At the outset of his disquisition Hitler had prophesized that the end of the war would witness the fall (
Himmelssturz
) of the Jews. They had no spiritual or artistic understanding, he went on; they were essentially inveterate liars and cheaters.
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The first of Hitler’s two major public anti-Jewish speeches of those weeks was the annual address to the party “Old Fighters” on November 8, 1941. The previous year, on the same occasion, the Jews had not been mentioned at all. This time the Nazi leader launched into a vicious and massive anti-Jewish tirade. Many of his themes were merely a repetition of his former rants, those of 1936 and 1937 in particular, but also of the outpourings of the previous three or four weeks. He knew, Hitler told his audience, that behind this war “one ultimately had to look for the ‘arsonist’ who had always lived off the trading of nations: the international Jew. I wouldn’t be a National Socialist anymore,” he yelled, “if I distanced myself from this finding.” The Nazi leader then recalled the saying of “a great Jew” [Disraeli] that “race was the key to world history.” Indeed the Jewish race was behind the present events, using straw men for its bloody deals. At this point, once again, Hitler exclaimed: “I have come to know these Jews as world arsonists” [
Ich habe diese Juden als die Weltbrandstifter kennengelernt
].
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This was only the prologue.

The Nazi leader went on to describe all the methods used by the Jews to poison the nations (press, radio, film, theater), and to push them into a war in which capitalists and democratic politicians would make money from their stocks in the armaments industries. This kind of coalition headed by the Jews had been eradicated from Germany; now the same enemy was standing on the outside, against the German
Volk
and the German Reich. After pushing a series of nations to the forefront of the battle, the Jew turned to his most trusted instrument: “What was more understandable,” Hitler exclaimed, “than the fact that one day the Power where the Jewish spirit is the most clearly in control, would move against us: the Soviet Union, now the greatest servant of Jewry [
Die Sowjetunion, die nun einmal der grösste Diener des Judentums ist
]. After describing the horrors of a regime in which the “organization of Jewish commissars”—in fact “slave-drivers”—ruled over subhuman masses, Hitler rejected the idea that a Russian nationalism could have taken over: “The carriers of such a [nationalist] trend do not exist anymore and the man who is for the time being the ruler of this state is nothing else but an instrument in the hands of this all powerful Jewry…. When Stalin is on scene, in front of the curtain, Kaganowitsch [Lazar Kaganowitsch was Stalin’s Jewish acolyte] stands behind him with all these Jews who…lead this huge empire.” Between these anti-Jewish insults and threats, the Nazi leader gave clear expression to the apocalyptic dimension of the ongoing struggle: “This struggle, my old party comrades, has really become not only a struggle for Germany, but for the whole of Europe, a struggle [that will decide] between existence and annihilation!”
⁶⁵
In this same speech Hitler again reminded his audience that he had often been a prophet in his life. This time, however, the prophecy did not refer to the extermination of the Jews (implicit in his entire speech), but rather to a closely related theme: November 1918, when Germany was stabbed in the back, would never occur again. “Everything is imaginable,” he exclaimed, “except one thing, that Germany will ever capitulate!”
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On November 10, the Jews were mentioned, albeit briefly, in a letter Hitler addressed to Pétain. The Jewish theme had never before come up in an exchange between the Nazi leader and the head of the Vichy state. “If I had not decided at the last minute, on June 22, to move against the Bolshevist menace,” Hitler wrote, “then it could have happened only too easily that with the collapse of Germany the French Jews would have triumphed, but the French people would likewise have been plunged into a horrible catastrophe.”
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On November 12, Hitler again took up his anti-Jewish tirades at headquarters: By excluding the Jews from Prussia, King Friedrich II had opted for an “exemplary” policy.
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On the nineteenth the Nazi leader warned against compassion for the Jews “who had to emigrate”; according to him, these Jews had enough relatives throughout the world, whereas the Germans who had been forced to leave their country had nobody and were compelled to rely entirely on themselves.
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Hardly anybody in Hitler’s circle (or, for that matter, throughout Germany) did not know that the Jews were no longer emigrating but being deported to places where no relatives would help them to start a new life.

In
Das Reich
of November 16, under the title “The Jews Are Guilty!” Goebbels echoed his master’s voice. He reminded his readers of Hitler’s prophecy that the Jews would be exterminated in case of war: “We are now witnessing the fulfillment of this prophecy; the fate befalling the Jews is harsh, but more than deserved. Pity or regret is completely out of place in this case. In triggering this war,” the minister went on, “world Jewry completely miscalculated the forces it could muster. It is now gradually being engulfed by the same extermination process that it had intended for us and that it would have allowed to happen without any scruples, had it had the power to do so. But now it undergoes destruction according to its own law: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!’”
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On December 1, the minister brandished the same threats in a lecture at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, in front of a highly select audience. Thoughout his speech, the propaganda chief openly alluded to what could be understood only as a murderous solution of the “Jewish question.” Whether the ominous diatribe referred to an ongoing and systematic extermination of all the Jews of Europe is not clear, however.
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On November 21, Hitler was back in Berlin for the funeral of Luftwaffe hero Gen. Ernst Udet (who had committed suicide after being held responsible by Göring—and by Hitler—for the failure of the Battle of Britain). In a discussion with Goebbels, the Nazi leader expressed his intention to pursue an “energetic policy” in regard to the Jews but not one “that could create difficulties.” The Jews would be evacuated from the Reich city after city, but Hitler could not tell when Berlin’s turn would come. He demanded that his minister show restraint regarding mixed marriages, mainly in artists’ circles. In his opinion “these marriages would die out and one should not get any gray hair about it.”
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On November 27 the Nazi leader harangued the Finnish foreign minister, Rolf Witting: “One should be clear about the fact that the entire world Jewry stood on the side of Bolshevism. An objective political point of view was not possible in any country in which public opinion was controlled and molded by those forces which in the last analysis had brought about Bolshevism…. The entire national intelligentsia of England should be
against
the war, as even victory could not achieve anything for England. It was the Bolshevist and Jewish forces which kept the English from pursuing a reasonable policy.”
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Hitler received the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on the following day. The Palestinian Arab leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had fled to the German capital after the collapse of Rashid ’Ali al-Gaylani’s anti-British government in Iraq. Hitler made clear to his Arab visitor that Germany’s struggle against the Jews was “uncompromising” and that it included the Jewish settlement in Palestine. “Germany was determined to demand, systematically, from one European nation after another, to solve the Jewish problem; in due time, it would also address the same call to nations outside of Europe.”
⁷⁴
That same day, the Nazi leader could not abstain from a further anti-Jewish tirade in his conversation with the Romanian vice–prime minister, Mihai Antonescu; this time, however, a new theme appeared: “Speaking at length,” the official record stated, “the Führer gave a survey of the current situation. World Jewry in combination with the Slavs and unfortunately also the Anglo-Saxons was carrying on the fight with embitterment. Germany and her allies confronted real colossi in terms of space, which possessed all raw materials and fertile land in copious measure. In addition, Jews had a certain destructive tendency, which found expression in the fight of Bolshevism and Pan-Slavism.”
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Pan-Slavism was unexpected. It surfaced briefly following the “discovery” first by the Belgian and then the German press, of the “will of Czar Peter the Great,” urging the Russia’s expansion to the West. Hitler, soon informed that the testament was a forgery, ordered its use nonetheless, as if it were authentic. “[The Führer] ordered the widest possible discussion in the German press with the theme: the imperialist policy of Czar Peter the Great had been the guideline of Russian prewar policy and of the policy of Stalin. Bolshevist world hegemony and Slav imperialism have joined hands in the policy of Stalin…. It didn’t matter what some professor or other had discovered with regard to this Testament of Peter the Great. What mattered rather was that history had demonstrated that Russian policy was conducted according to these principles as they were laid down in the testament of Peter the Great.” The press thereupon “took up the subject in a big way and treated it to the satisfaction of the Führer.”
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In his circle of intimates, Hitler briefly returned to his favorite topic on the evening of November 30, as he reminisced about a fight with Jews at the Nuremberg railway station during the early days of the party.
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More was said on the night of December 1. Prodded about the issue of racial instinct, Hitler declared that some Jews did not necessarily intend to harm Germany, but even so they would never distance themselves from the long-term interests of their own race. Why were Jews destroying other nations? The Nazi leader admitted that he did not know the fundamental natural-historical laws of this phenomenon. But, as a result of their destructive activity, the Jews created the necessary defense mechanisms among the nations. Hitler added that Dietrich Eckart had once mentioned that he knew of one single upright Jew, Otto Weininger, who took his own life after he discovered the destructive nature of his race. Strangely, Hitler concluded, second- or third-generation Jewish mixed breeds would often come together again with Jews. But, he added, ultimately nature eliminated the destructive elements: In the seventh, eighth, or ninth generation the Jewish part would be “out-Mendeled” (
ausgemendelt
—a pun on the name of the Czech monk, Gregor Mendel, who discovered the laws of heredity) and “racial purity, reestablished.”
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On December 11, four days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler announced to the Reichstag that Germany was declaring war on the United States. From the outset the messianic theme was present: “If Providence wanted that the German people not be spared this struggle, then I am grateful to it [Providence] for having entrusted me with the leadership of this historical confrontation, a confrontation that will decisively mold not only the history of our Germany but that of Europe, actually that of the entire world for the next 500 or 1,000 years.”
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A first overview of the coming confrontation followed, which, after mention of the attack that the Soviet Union had been preparing against “Europe,” led to historical comparisons: The Romans and the Germans had saved Western civilization from the Huns; now as then Germany was not fighting just for its own sake but for the defense of the whole continent.
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