Hitler and his God

War and Extermination

“Concerning the Jews, Hitler will never change”, wrote Ambassador François-Poncet in his memoirs. “He told me one day that, to his mind, the Jewish problem should be solved by putting all the Jews in the universe on an island, Madagascar for instance. Actually, the only satisfying solution according to him would be to exterminate all of them, for they are the enemies of the Aryan race, responsible for all the evil of which Germany and the world have to suffer. In fact, it is this hidden thought of total extermination which inspires his conduct and that of his Party.” 622 The British historian Ian Kershaw confirms the words of the French ambassador: “For Hitler, whatever the tactical considerations, the aim of destroying the Jews – his central political idea since 1919 – remained unaltered. He revealed his approach to a meeting of party District Leaders at the end of April 1937, in immediate juxtaposition to comments on the Jews: ‘I don’t straight away want violently to demand an opponent to fight. I don’t say “fight” because I want to fight. Instead I say: “I want to destroy you!” And now let skill help me to manoeuvre you so far into the corner that you can’t strike a blow. And then you get the stab into the heart’”. 623

There is unanimity among the students of Hitler’s life that his hatred of the Jews and his intention to do away with them remained unaltered from 1919 until his death. When the day before his suicide he went into a separate room with one of his secretaries, Traudl Junge, and announced that he was going to dictate his political testament, Junge expected to hear revelations nobody had heard before. “Now at last comes what we have been awaiting for days: the explanation of all what has happened, a confession, even a confession of guilt, or perhaps a justification. In this last document of the Reich of a Thousand Years should be written the truth, admitted by a man who had nothing to lose anymore. But my expectation remained unfulfilled. Detached, almost mechanically, the Führer utters declarations which I, the German people and the whole world know already.” 624 In the last sentence of this testament Hitler obliged the leadership of the nation, newly appointed by him, to “a strict implementation of the racial laws and to a merciless resistance against the poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry”.

In his letter to Adolf Gemlich on the subject of the Jews, and written at the request of Captain Mayr in 1919, twenty-five years earlier, Hitler had already insisted upon the necessity of “the removal of the Jews”. As we have seen in the first chapters of this book, Hitler’s hatred of the Jews seems to have been a phenomenon with a sudden origin in which his mentor Dietrich Eckart was involved and for which he was possibly responsible. It can hardly have been a coincidence that the Austrian corporal without a future contacted the German Workers’ Party, founded as an initiative of the Thule Society, in the days his military superior asked him respectfully to write a letter on the Jewish problem for the enlightenment of a fellow army propagandist.

The line of Hitler’s anti-Semitic development can clearly be followed in his daily tutoring by Eckart, “the spiritual godfather of Nazism” (Wistrich); in his study and memorization of the anti-Semitic literature, of which Fritsch’s Antisemiten-Katechismus alone provided him with 650 pages of quotations; in his conversations with Alfred Rosenberg, propagator of The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion and theorist of anti-Semitism. Less than a year after the Gemlich letter, Hitler delivered his speech “Why are we anti-Semites?” presenting his enthusiastically responding Munich audience with an outline of his anti-Semitism which will not be changed for the rest of his life – except that “the final solution” still remained unspoken, though probably not unimagined. The cosmic dimensions of the necessary confrontation between Aryans and Jews were present behind all he said or wrote on the subject, and they were formulated in Mein Kampf. “Should the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through the ether without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago. And so I believe today that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: in standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.” 625

As Chancellor of the Reich, Hitler knew how to talk peace and became known, in Germany and abroad, as “the Chancellor of Peace”, although he had been preparing for war from his first day in office. Likewise, he knew how to restrain his vituperations against the Jews, and even to keep silent about them for a while, when the political situation required him to do so during the chaotic period and the series of successive elections before his “legal” access to power. But no sooner had the goal been reached or he started executing his programme, beginning with point number one: his war against the Jews.

First there was the boycott of the Jewish shops, only a few weeks after the Machtergreifung, the acquisition of power; then, gradually, there was the smothering of the Jewish community within German society. Step by step the Jews became non-persons, outlaws, worse than pariahs, still allowed to stay alive, but barely. The Germans, who liked to joke that “the soup is never eaten as hot as it is served”, now found out that their Führer and his brown-shirts had meant what they said, but it was too late to protest. The Nuremberg Laws put the seal on what had been announced as the fate of the Jews from the birth of National-Socialism, and what was now being pushed inexorably towards its fulfilment.

On 30 January 1939, the solemnly commemorated anniversary of the Machtergreifung, Hitler pronounced the words against the Jews which Lucy Dawidowicz characterizes as “a declaration of war”, but which were actually a death sentence, the “war” against the Jews having been declared years earlier. By this time Hitler had decided to invade Western Europe, and he realized that military action was the ideal cover to solve the Jewish problem through physical extermination. “I have often been a prophet in my life”, he said, “and I was often laughed at. At the time of my struggle to obtain the power, it was in the first place the Jewish people which greeted with laughter my prophecies that, one day in Germany, I would assume the leadership of the state and simultaneously of the whole Volk, and that then I would, among other things, bring the Jewish problem to a solution. I think that the hilarious laughter of the Jews has meanwhile stuck in their throats. Today I will be a prophet once again: if the international finance-Jewry in and outside Europe would succeed in plunging the peoples into war once more, then the outcome will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and consequently the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

The acclamation greeting this direct threat, and preserved on film, was deafening. Who in that crowd at the Kroll Opera, or listening under the loudspeakers in the streets of towns and villages, or sitting at home near their Volksempfänger, the cheap popular radio set specially built to spread the Nazi propaganda – who thought of the mendacious distortions in these few sentences? True, thinking about fundamentals was no longer what one did in Germany, or what was even permitted. No Jews had taken the rise of National-Socialism as a laughing matter, even if they had kept hoping that things would turn out better than expected and reasoned the danger away; no Jews had wanted war; and Bolshevism was not identical with Judaism.

Hitler’s idea that the waging of war was to be combined with “the final solution” of the Jews has been pointed out by Lucy Dawidowicz, who found that time after time, when Hitler reminded his audiences of the threat enunciated on 30 January 1939, he mistakenly put it on 30 September 1939, the date of his invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War. The war was to serve as camouflage for the execution of the secret and humanely unthinkable plan. “Extermination” was a term habitually used by the Nazis and by many other Germans, but it was hardly ever taken seriously. The Jews were objects of suspicion, scorn, ridicule, and on occasion of physical attack, but the outspoken intention of murdering any of them, not to say all of them, seems not to have been around – which does not mean that “the ideology of death” in Germany has not considerably contributed to its becoming reality. “The Final Solution grew out of a matrix formed by traditional anti-Semitism, the paranoid delusions that seized Germany after the First World War, and the emergence of Hitler and the National Socialist movement. Without Hitler, the charismatic political leader who believed he had a mission to annihilate the Jews, the Final Solution would not have occurred. Without that assertive and enduring tradition of anti-Semitism by which the Germans sought self-definition, Hitler would not have had the fecund soil in which to grow his organization and to spread its propaganda …

“Anti-Semitism was the core of Hitler’s system of beliefs and the central motivation for his policies. He believed himself to be the saviour who would bring redemption to the German people through the annihilation of the Jews, that people who embodied, in his eyes, the Satanic hosts. When he spoke or wrote about his ‘holy mission’, he used words associated with chiliastic prophecy (not only in the millennial concept literally rendered as the ‘Thousand Year Reich’), like ‘consecration’, ‘salvation’, ‘redemption’, ‘resurrection’, ‘God’s will’. The murder of the Jews, in his fantasies, was commanded by divine providence, and he was the chosen instrument for that task.” 626