Hitler and his God

“Cargo”

The literature about Nazism is abundant with instances of such absurdity – if “absurdity” is the right word. For instance, Anna Maria Sigmund, in her biographies of prominent Nazi women, quotes the father of Gerda Bormann as saying: “The Jew is not a human being. He is an element of decay. Just as the fission fungus chooses rotten wood to settle and destroys its tissue, just so the Jew has found the occasion to insinuate himself into the German Volk and do his mischief when, weakened by the loss of blood in the Thirty Years’ War, it began to degenerate.” Walter Buch, the father in question and chairman of the NSDAP committee of inquiry into internal Party irregularities, “never tired of preaching this to his children”. Another example provided by the same author: medical doctors at the Dachau concentration camp performed a series of experiments testing the reactions of human beings to rapid changes in air pressure at high altitudes. “For a short time experiments with animals had been carried out. But these were in contravention of the National-Socialist laws for the protection of animals and had to be stopped on the personal intervention of Reich Marshall Göring, the ‘Supreme Master of the Hunt’. This opened the way for experiments with human beings.” 534

Hitler, another animal lover, said in one of his monologues when expressing his aversion to hunting: “I can swear that never in my life I hurt a little hare.” And Himmler boasted in one of his speeches to his black Captains of Death that the Germans were “the only people in the world who had a decent attitude towards animals”. They would therefore also adopt a decent attitude towards the Russian “human animals”, about whom he had just said: “If during the construction of an anti-tank ditch ten thousand Russian women do or don’t collapse from exhaustion, it only interests me in so far as the ditch is got ready for Germany … That other peoples live in prosperity or perish with hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture, otherwise it does not interest me.” 535

Eugen Fischer, a Nazi doctor who worked mainly with children, wrote in 1939: “If a people wants, somehow or other, to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien racial elements, and when these have already insinuated themselves, it must suppress them and eliminate them. The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defence. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. But I reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to safeguard the hereditary endowment of my people.” When Fritz Klein, another Nazi doctor, involved in the euthanasia programme, was asked how he had been able to reconcile his doctor’s oath with his activities in Auschwitz, he answered: “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.” 536

“The Jew too is a human being, nobody has ever doubted this”, said a sarcastic Joseph Goebbels. “But the flea is also an animal, though not a pleasant one. And as the flea is not a pleasant animal, we don’t have the duty to ourselves and to our conscience to care for it and to protect it, and to make it prosper in order to let it sting and torture us, but to make it harmless.” 537 And Heinrich Himmler, again, reminded his troops in 1942: “From a biological standpoint [the Jew] seems completely normal. He has hands and feet and a sort of brain. He has eyes and a mouth. But, in fact, he is a completely different creature, a horror. He only looks human, with a face similar to a human face, but his mind, his soul is lower than that of an animal. A terrible chaos runs rampant in this creature, an awful urge of destruction, primitive desires and unparalleled evil. He is a sub-human and nothing else.” 538

Along with the shaping of the Jewish stereotype the old vicious rumours were revived about the stealing of consecrated hosts, the poisoning of wells and springs, and the abduction and murder of Christian children. “In Germany, France and the Austrian Empire the ritual-murder legend was far from dead. It was revived periodically, especially encouraged by intellectuals, and grew to a popular clamour that took on the proportions of a movement. In the Austrian Empire alone there were no less than twelve trials for ritual murder between 1867 and 1914. … To the public at large, the trials and the sensationalism that surrounded them demonstrated the Jewish conspiracy against the Gentiles.” 539 These hateful notions of the Jews were so vivid in the memory of the German people that in Munich, “Athens on the Isar”, Rudolf von Sebottendorff could threaten the Commissioner of Police that he might unleash a pogrom by grabbing a Jew and dragging him through the streets on the accusation of having stolen a consecrated host. 540

The Jew was ugly, dirty, stank with the foetor judaicus (which, some said, disappeared the moment he was baptized), and was a sexual pervert. The fear that the pure Aryan race would be contaminated by the Jews through sexual intercourse became an obsession. Lanz von Liebenfels had published pictures of buxom naked women, pure-blooded but weak and lustful, who were being sexually assaulted by ape-like monsters. Hitler had written in Mein Kampf about the black-haired Jewish young man who lay in wait for hours to disgrace the unsuspecting Aryan girl with his blood and steal her from her Volk; and in his early speeches he kept hammering on this theme, and spoke of the pimps, “merchants of young girls”, who were all Jews, without exception. The Jew was presented as a threat to German “decency” and to the effort at restoring the purity of the race. Race was a matter of breeding; breeding meant sexual contact; sex awakened basic instincts, often as base as basic. Der Stürmer, the widely read magazine launched by whip-flaunting Julius Streicher bears testimony to this. But Hitler appreciated its pseudo-pornographic contents and supported Streicher, the Nazi chief of Nuremberg, as long as possible. There is little doubt that this dark sexual component of Nazism, directed against the Jews, enforced the cruelty of the way in which they were treated.

One of the chief traits of the Jewish stereotype, current to this day, is its relation to money. The Jew as a banker, pawnbroker, usurer and miser has become proverbial in several European languages. “The stock exchange jobber, the corpulent banker, these were the stereotypes of the Jew that were widely accepted and disseminated through popular literature. The stock exchange in particular became the symbol of the nightmarish capitalism that had been foisted upon the Germans by the Jews. It came to represent the hub of their control system, and it was there, early völkisch thinkers proclaimed, that the world revolution to oust the alien money lords would emanate … But popular anti-Semitic propaganda was to go one better: it fused the images of Jewish hunger for money with the lust for Aryan women. The resulting image widely used as propaganda pictured a fat Jewish banker caressing a blond woman on his knee.” 541

In his Histoire de l’antisémitisme, Léon Poliakov shows how the handling of money became, in the course of European history, the only occupation left to the Jews, and their lifeline. This was why their attitude towards money grew into “a sacral attitude, source of all life. Little by little each step and each action in the daily life of the Jew were subject to the payment of a tax: he had to pay taxes for coming and going, for buying and selling, for having the right of communal prayer, for marrying, for the child that is born, even for the dead who were taken to the cemetery. Without money the Jewish collective was inevitably doomed to disappear … It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that it may seem to a superficial observer that the Jews have been the prime agents of the ‘capitalist mentality’.” Poliakov also remarks that, far from being Rothschilds all of them, “the great majority of the Jews were small money lenders or dealers in second hand cloth, who earned their bread as circumstances permitted and lived in insecurity and misery without end”. 542