Hitler and his God

“The Jews are our Misfortune”

“A Jew remains a Jew, in Germany or any other country. We can never change this race, even by centuries of residence among other people”, says the Handbook of the Hitler Youth, published in 1937. 564 This statement, a point of doctrine for Hitler’s young, rash and ready heroes, is a logical absurdity when put within the framework of their own beliefs. Isn’t race a matter of blood, and isn’t blood always changed, for better or worse, by mixing with other kinds of blood? If such a change were not possible, how could the Germanic race be purified by a gradual upgrading of its blood, a process which Hitler and Himmler wanted to bring about? Or how could Germans “sin against the blood” through sexual intercourse with the depraved race of the Jews or with other subhumans?

Fichte was “the philosopher of the German war of national liberation against Napoleon”, in which quality we have met him before. His famous Addresses to the German Nation (1808) were delivered while French troops still occupied Berlin. In these addresses he said as one of the very first that, if Germany went down, the rest of the world would go down with it. “Called the father of German nationalism, Fichte has also been called the father of modern German anti-Semitism. His celebration of German nationalism was matched by his denigration of the Jews. In 1793 he had argued against German emancipation, characterizing the Jews as a state within a state that would undermine the German nation. Jewish ideas were as obnoxious as French ideas. The only way in which he could concede giving rights to the Jews, he said, would be ‘to cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea’.” 565

Lucy Dawidowicz sees the Jewish emancipation progressing from Napoleon onwards in cycles, closely connected with the heightening waves of nationalist feelings and German self-assertion. Every gain of freedom by the Jews was paralleled by a more intense and outspoken anti-Semitic reaction. “The stronger the longing for national unity, the more burning became the preoccupation with the Jewish question”, George Mosse too observes. One important focus of such a cycle was of course the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismarck in 1871. From that date onwards the open attacks on the Jews will no longer be felt to be a general matter of opinion or racial theory, but a necessary defence of the well-being of the nation. The seriousness of this defence was directly proportional to the seriousness of the Germans’ idea about their value as a Volk and the vocation of this Volk in the world. The Jewish “foreign body”, though a minority of one percent, was considered highly obnoxious to the health of the Volk – and came very convenient as a scapegoat for all the problems of a country which was deeply divided and under severe psychological stress.

Onto the Jews was projected everything reactionary Germany did not want to be, or pretended it did not want to be, or could not be, or actually was without wanting to be. The Jews were associated with a modern world in the making, while reactionary Germany persisted in looking inward, which was a good thing, but also backward, which was not. That it developed simultaneously into the foremost industrial nation in the world made it more schizophrenic, and the Jew still more guilty. And that the Jews were intelligent and some of them highly visible, did not help either.

A few quotes will have to do. They are intended to suggest the anti-Jewish atmosphere of a period in the German past when anti-Semitism became an organized movement in a structured, even if psychologically afflicted, society. Paul de Lagarde, a leading authority in Oriental studies who then became “the völkisch patron saint of the anti-Semitic movement”, published his German Essays in 1878. He had become convinced that the Jews of his own day “had lost all true connections with the ancient Hebrews; they were fossilized, a living example of the spirit run dry. Pharisaic fundamentalism was now the essence of Judaism, based as it was on the literal observance of the laws. Since such a sterile religious attitude was incompatible with a vital mysticism, it could never fuse with the living and developing Germanic religion. By the same token, the Jews could never be Germans … Lagarde attributed conspiratorial motives to contemporary Jewry. The lack of true religion meant a turning toward evil, a substitution of materialistic desires for inward faith.

“Lagarde seems to have believed that the Jews practised ritual murder and he even declared that the Talmud and its prescriptions rendered the Jews a powerful weapon in the unavoidable power struggle. The Jewish question was therefore not to be met with tolerance. Instead it was reducible to a mortal contest: either the Jewish or the ‘true’ German way of life must prevail in the end … The Jew became the incarnation of evil. Any humaneness Lagarde possibly possessed was eventually obscured by his call for the extermination of the Jews like bacilli” 566 – a simile which was to enjoy a long life. Be it once more remembered that these kinds of texts were published or quoted from not only by the Nazis, but also by all anti-Semitic organizations, and that pre-Nazi Germany was flooded with them.

The “Anti-Semitic League”, the first organization to bear an explicit anti-Semitic name, was launched in 1879. Eugen Dühring, philosopher and economist, published The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral and Cultural Question in 1880, claiming that he was the first in Germany to consider this “question” in racial terms. “Dühring looked upon the Jews as a ‘counter-race’ separated from all humanity, whom neither conversion nor assimilation could affect because their basic nature was evil and unchangeable. He shared the Wagnerian thesis that Christianity was a product of ‘Hebraic Orientalism’, and that those who clung to the ‘entire’ Christian tradition could not truly oppose Judaism or defend the ‘Nordic tradition’.” 567 “Only the Nordic gods could help the German people to victory, for only the Nordic religion was able to combat Jewish infiltration. According to Dühring the battle lines were drawn between the forces of Jewish materialism and Old Germanism. With their inherent racial strength the Germans would triumph over the alien intruders. In this manner, the formulations of the völkisch thought began to be used as weapons in a widespread German anti-Semitism.” 568

“1880 was a watershed year”, writes Dawidowicz, “the start of a torrent of anti-Semitism that did not abate for nearly twenty years. It was as if all the quiet streams of prejudice conjoined in a massive flow of anti-Semitic hate, inundating the whole country. It began at the end of 1879, when Heinrich von Treitschke, National Liberal and prestigious professor of history at the University of Berlin, started a series of articles on the Jewish question in the Preussische Jahrbücher, which he edited. ‘Even in circles of the most highly educated, among men who would reject with disgust any ideas of ecclesiastical intolerance or national arrogance, there resounds as if from one mouth: Die Juden sind unser Unglück! (the Jews are our misfortune) – the phrase was to ring down through the next German generations. Heinrich Class, a leading anti-Semite [and Chairman of the Pan-Germans] one generation later, wrote that ‘the phrase became a part of my body and soul when I was twenty years old; it essentially influenced my later political work’. Issued in pamphlet form, Treitschke’s articles gave reinforcement and professional authoritativeness to the anti-Semitic movement. Treitschke spoke, the anti-Semites said, ‘for thousands, perhaps millions of his countrymen’.” 569 Poliakov calls Treitschke le maître à penser of the German nationalist youth, which is how he became known to us in an earlier chapter.

It should in fairness be mentioned that Treitschke’s anti-Jewish writings caused a wave of disagreement. His foremost opponent in this was the great Latinist Theodor Mommsen, who warned that Treitschke had rendered anti-Semitism respectable and that it would lead to a conflict without mercy. “Till the end of his days Mommsen gave the best of his powers to a struggle against German chauvinism and racism, against ‘those nationalist idiots who want to replace the universal Adam with a German Adam, and bestow him with all the splendours of the human spirit’.” Directly or indirectly, these discussions became part of the common ideas and “anti-Semitism was integrated in the bourgeois way of life; anti-Semitic movements and parties multiplied; international conferences were called (Dresden 1882, Chemnitz 1883); numerous student organizations decided to exclude the Jews …” 570

Theodor Fritsch, who played an important part in our story as the founder of the Hammerbund and the Germanenorden, became “a linchpin in the anti-Semitic movement, holding it together as a political organizer, publisher and author from its early political stirrings in the 1880’s until Hitler’s accession to power”. (Fritsch died in 1933.) George Mosse writes about him: “The racial stereotype attributed so many grotesque qualities to the Jews that he was in essence dehumanized. Fritsch’s work again demonstrates this ominous development, for in his Fireballs (1881) he explicitly denied human status to the Jews. Here he claimed that God had created the Jew as a buffer between man and ape. The Nazis assimilated this thought in their own propaganda when, in 1931, one of their speakers asserted that non-Nordic man occupied an intermediary position between Nordic man and the animal world. The non-Nordic man was not a whole man, for he still shared traits with the apes.” 571

The Austrian Antisemitenbund was founded in 1889, in a country which was even more anti-Semitic than Germany, and where figures like Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger made a lasting impression on “Adi”. The next year saw the birth of the German Antisemitische Volkspartei, which received 48 000 votes, but three years later 260 000. “In fact, anti-Semitism became the chief vehicle of the diffusion of the völkisch movement. Those who were attracted primarily by anti-Semitism had no difficulty in accepting the basic völkisch ideas, and those already in the movement took readily to the precepts of anti-Semitic racism.” 572

In 1890 Hermann Ahlwardt published The Desperate Struggle between the Aryan Peoples and Judaism. “Ahlwardt stated that a people who rid itself of Jews freed itself for the material development of the Volk, and thereby rose toward dominion over the world. For him, as for the romantic advocates of the Volk, Jewry was the Mephistopheles of world history. In dealing with the Jews, Christian mercy was decidedly out of place … Was this a plea for violence? Certainly! But, when it came to concrete proposals to effect such measures, he displayed an ambivalence which was, as yet, typical. When he drew up an actual programme, Ahlwardt could only advocate the imposition of stringent restrictions upon Jews, a decree proclaiming them foreigners on German soil and excluding them from all areas of German life and culture. He also proposed that eventually all Jews be deported from Europe and their surplus capital retained by the German nation. Curiously, this was almost exactly the same as the National Socialist programme for dealing with the Jews …

“Ahlwardts’s programme broadly foreshadowed that of the Nazis, for they also reflected an ambivalence. On the one hand, there were the fanatics who asserted that the ‘final solution’ must bring about a correct correspondence between ideology and action and that the deportation of the Jews to distant places only evaded the issue. On the other hand, there were those functionaries and leaders in the party who wanted to encourage Jewish emigration at all costs … The ultimate consequences of a glorification of merciless cruelty within völkisch ideology, and the Nazi extension of it, finally engulfed the minds of Germany’s leaders. Extermination became the literal fact, not just a rhetorical device to arouse human passions.” 573

These examples leave little doubt about the general thrust of anti-Semitism in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. The book that capped it all was the much admired “racist bible”, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Houston Chamberlain’s blockbuster, published in 1899. “Convinced that all great creations stemmed from Teutonic blood, he believed the only flaw of the ancient tribes was their failure to destroy all peoples within their reach. We must correct this error, he insisted, and also breed for superior human types, as dictated by Darwinism. However stern the measures necessary, Aryan blood must be purified, liberating its martial spirit and creative power.

“The Jew was the most powerful foe. Other races were merely inferior, but Jews, the unnatural result of accidental crossbreeding in the ancient Middle East, through millennia of inbreeding had created a uniquely evil racial force … The Jews knew Germany was the last obstacle; elsewhere they had subverted civilization through the intellectual Judaization of Enlightenment ideas, ideas denying the reality of race, preaching cosmopolitanism, and denying blood loyalties. If purged, however, the race of Luther could not fail in the struggle with the race of money changers. Chamberlain, darling of conservative intellectuals, envisioned the future as Hitler would do: a racial battle to the death against Jewry.” 574

In this context the racist extremism of most German university professors, secondary teachers and their students has to be mentioned. It explains, among other things, why whole batches of young men volunteered enthusiastically for the First World War, why the Nazis found such easy access to the universities, and why a “Germanic science” could be defined in opposition to a “Jewish science”. “There was nothing comparable in [other] Western nations. From 1890 to 1914 the generation that would support the Nazis found the superiority of Germanic racial stock a textbook cliché. Countless memoirs of German and Austrian Jews tell of harassment received from public school teachers, petty classroom tyrants enforcing the discipline of the barracks, spiritual warriors for the Germanic soul. Although millions of Germans supported liberalism and socialism, their ideas were not to be found in the schools. Jewish teachers might have contradicted stereotypes, but of some eight thousand teaching appointments from 1875 to 1895, about forty went to Jews. Prussia never had more than twelve secondary school teachers.” 575

Most of the Burschenschaften, the traditional student societies, introduced “the Aryan paragraph”, a clause in their charters which excluded Jews from membership. Consequently “the exclusive and famous duelling fraternities” too refused to admit Jews, as “they had no honour to defend”. The curious tradition of duelling among students was upheld to bear testimony to their virility. No student was truly a man without a scar in his face telling anyone in his later life of his courage in the face of possible death. (Duellists died only, and exceptionally, by accident.) “Brotherhoods such as the Apollo, each with its own Gasthaus or beer-cellar, distinctive coloured cap and ribbons and duelling matches against rival fraternities, were the focus of student social life; they were at the same time initiation into manhood. The duelling was not so much a test of skill as an ordeal to be withstood without flinching, the sewing up afterwards a trial of self-mastery. Beer was drunk in the same spirit until it leaked from every flushed pore while songs of ‘knights and giants, of chivalry and wine and honour’ were roared out.” 576

By this path, we arrive again at the powerful nationalist and anti-Semitic organizations, in part secret, which were the Pan-Germans, the Germanenorden and the more informal but very influential Bayreuth circle, three high roads to Hitler. From 1920 onwards The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion will exert their influence in the background; the traces of their poison are detectable on each and every occasion when anti-Semitism was involved. Their influence is made plain by the following entry in Joseph Goebbels’ diary, written as late as 13 May 1943: “I study once more in detail the Zionist Protocols. Until now I had always encountered the opinion that they were not useful for actual propaganda. Now I find, while reading them, that we can use them very well. The Zionist Protocols are today as modern as on the day they were published for the first time. At midday I talk with the Führer on this subject. The Führer is of the opinion that the Zionist Protocols can claim absolute authenticity.” 577

This rough outline of the intensifying anti-Semitism before the First World War would remain incomplete without drawing the attention to one of the most potent inductors of the anti-Jewish sentiment, Richard Wagner (1813-83). His influence as a composer was enormous, not only in Germany but everywhere in Europe, especially in France. But, as so often happens, the everyday personality of the artist did not always fit with the greatness of his creations. The exceptional quality of the best of Wagner’s visionary music remains beyond dispute. (Léon Poliakov calls him “that medium of the nineteenth century”.) His character, on the contrary, was often egotistical in the extreme, violent, vindictive, and on occasion plain nasty.

He succeeded single handed in giving life and colour to the German national myth by recreating the legend of the Nibelungs and evoking in soul-stirring music the world of the Nordic gods, their powers, and their ultimate Götterdämmerung. He also played a crucial role in the integration of the myths of Christianity into the vision which confirmed the German people in their role as carriers of the destiny of mankind. Parsifal, “the sacred masterpiece of Bayreuth”, upon which Wagner meditated for a quarter of a century and which would become his apotheosis, was generally recognized as a symbolic play of the purity of the blood, Germany’s Holy Grail. Wagner too turned Christ into a German superhero, and Bayreuth into “the national sanctuary of the völkisch revival movement” (Köhler).

This symbiosis of the Nordic and the Christian religions, so typical for the Germany of that time, is a most amazing feat of intellectual inconsistency, confusion or schizophrenia. “The supreme god of the Germans [Wotan] did not necessarily have to make way for the God of the Christians”, wrote Wagner, “he could even be perfectly identified with him. It was sufficient to strip him of the superficial attributes which the various peoples, in accordance with their character, land and climate, had ascribed to him … This primitive, unique and national god, from whom the races originated, was not in the least abandoned and forgotten; for in him was found, as it was in Christ, son of God, the decisive analogy that he too had died and been mourned and revenged, as we now are revenging Christ on the Jews. The faith and adherence were more easily transferred to Christ because in him people recognized the primitive god.” 578

“The Wagnerian heroes and the Wagnerian music have animated the German armies from 1914 till 1918, still more in their hours of misfortune and sacrifice than in their hours of triumph.” 579 This is even more true of the German armies in the Second World War, for they fought under the command of a Wagnerian, Adolf Hitler, who had seen to it that they grew up with Wagner’s music in their ears at every important public or political manifestation. Hitler had made Wagner into the official composer of the Third Reich; living composers, like Richard Strauss, only moved in Wagner’s shadow. The reason was that Wagner and his music had played such an important role in Hitler’s own life. From his years in Linz onwards, he had eaten and drunk Wagner, seen his operas an astonishing number of times and read every published word of him.

He knew Wagner’s music by heart, as is testified by many witnesses, and could whistle it faultlessly. A few measures of Wagner sufficed to calm him down in any circumstances and made him behave as if entranced. “This music affected him physically”, wrote Ernst Hanfstängl, “it had become part of Hitler’s being.” 580 And Hitler himself said one day: “When I hear Wagner, it is as if I hear the rhythms of the world in its beginnings.” 581 Hitler never hid what he owned to Wagner and he thanked him by taking Bayreuth and Wagner’s legacy under his special protection – as told by Brigitte Hamann in her Winifred Wagner, oder Hitlers Bayreuth.

Wagner’s art helped spreading his anti-Semitism, which intensified over the years to the point where he declared: “I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it. It is certain that it is running us Germans to the ground, and I am perhaps the last German who knows how to hold himself upright in the face of Judaism, which already rules everything.” 582 From him is also: “That the human race would perish, would not be a pity; but that it would perish because of the Jews would be an ignominy.” 583 Joachim Köhler puts it trenchantly: “Nobody will take from [Wagner] the merit of having been the first in German history to contribute with his writings to the advent of the ‘disappearance’ of the Jews.” 584