Hitler and his God

Assimilation

When having read all this, it may come as a surprise how intimately the Jews felt integrated in Germany. Walter Rathenau, the epitome of the German Jew, declared: “I am a German of Jewish descent. My people is the German people, my fatherland is Germany, my religion that Germanic faith which is above all religions.” 585 Professor Heinz Moral committed suicide after being dismissed from his university post for racial reasons; in a letter to the dean of faculty he had written: “I am a Jew and have never made a secret of it, but my entire outlook is German, and I have always been proud to be a German whose religion is Jewish.” According to Günter Rohrmoser “an equally successful symbiosis was achieved in no other Western country as it was between the Jews and the Germans. It is one of the most incomprehensible and also really tragic occurrences that this Holocaust has happened precisely in the country in which such a close and fruitful intellectual and philosophical symbiosis was realized as between Jews and Germans.” 586 And Christian von Krockow writes: “In hardly any other country have the Jews felt themselves so national as in Germany, and nowhere have they provided such an important cultural contribution.” 587

Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of French literature, wrote in 1939 in his diary: “Until 1933 and for at least a good century before that, the German Jews were entirely German and nothing else. Proof: the thousands and thousands of half- and quarter-Jews etc. Jews and ‘persons of Jewish descent’, which is proof that Germans and Jews lived and worked together without friction in all spheres of German life. The anti-Semitism which was always present is not at all proof to the contrary, because the friction between Jews and ‘Aryans’ was not half so great as, for example, that between Protestants and Catholics, or between employers and employees, or between East Prussians, for example, and southern Bavarians, or Rhinelanders and Berliners. The German Jews were a part of the German nation, as the French Jews were part of the French nation, etc. They played their part within the life of Germany, by no means as a burden on the whole. Their role was rarely that of the worker, still less of the agricultural labourer. They were, and remain (even though now they no longer wish to remain so), Germans, in the main intellectuals and educated people.” 588

It is a fact that the Jews, “a highly diverse community”, were closely involved in the German life. The degree to which they were “assimilated” or “integrated” is corroborated by the difficulty of trying to extricate them again. Wagner, Hitler, Rosenberg and Heydrich were themselves suspected of having Jewish blood in their veins (Hitler’s case remains pending, probably forever); Emil Maurice, Albrecht Haushofer, Erhard Milch and other prominent people in Naziland were part Jewish. Emile Maurice, Hitler’s chauffeur, lover of his niece Geli Raubal, notorious street brawler in the SA and co-founder of the SS, had to be declared a “honorary Aryan” by his boss, the only member of the SS ever to enjoy the privilege. 589

Besides, what does it actually mean to be half, or a quarter, or an eight, or a sixteenth Jewish – or of any other race? Where is that fraction located in a person? It is only in recent years that scientists can try to find it in the genes, together with so many other traces of a physical inheritance which soon fades into the mists of the past. The Germanic tribes had on countless occasions mixed with other peoples, as was of course known to all anthropologists. The problem with the Jews was that they had kept their religious identity as a people and that their religion demanded a separate existence, while generally speaking people were not yet ready to mix with others on their home turf. The Nazis, Hitler in the first place, always contended that their racial cleansing was not a matter of religion but of purification “of the blood”; yet the proofs of a person belonging to the Jewish race were in most cases religious registers and other documents, also concerning the ancestry of Jews who had converted to Protestantism or Catholicism, or who had become a-religious.